Chairperson’s address for session II of the public forum on November 18, 2001
In this session two of India’s closest neighbours, China and Bangladesh are represented. I am delighted to welcome Ye Yong King, anskrit g artist who also teaches at the Szezuan Fine Art Institute, He is accompanied by Prof. Sun Min a scholar of contemporary art based in Canton. Our other distinguished speakers are Prof. Abul Mansur of the Fine Arts Department, Chittagong University and Professor Gulammohammed Sheikh, who was Professor of Painting at MS University Baroda, and is an eminent anskrit g artist.
This is a significant conclave. The speakers here represent more than a third of humanity and are meeting possibly for the first time under the shared commitment to contemporary art.
I want to examine three aspects of the relationship quite briefly, the ancient, which is the bedrock of our relationship, the relations of the colonial Orientalist period and the modern.
Ancient Indian and Chinese contacts as we know were motivated by politics religion and trade. Early contacts were rich. The Kushanas sent an embassy to the Chinese court in AD 230. There is the well-documented life of the Buddhist scholar Kumarajiva who went to China in 383 AD. And lived there for 30 years till 412 AD, interpreted Mahayana philosophy and translated more than 100 Sanskrit texts. It is believed that Kumarajiva achieved this feat because he had the support of the largest ever known team of state sponsored translators. Chinese emperors for the next 5 or 6 hundred years would set up boards of translators of Sanskrit texts which included all aspects of religion, science and medicine. Between India and China there was a free flow of Buddhist monks who went back and forth just as there was an exchange of embassies and monks between China and Ceylon. Fa Hien left extensive accounts of the travels, which include drawings of images he saw at Tamralipti perhaps among the first recorded artistic exchanges between China and India. There was also of course the massive commissioning of Buddhist monastries sculptures and translated scriptures. Chinese penetration in the subcontinent was quite deep. During the Chola period, an embassy was sent to the court of the Song dynasty. The Pallava king Parameswara II who built the Kailashnatha temple at Kanchi and the shore temple at Mahabalipuram dedicated a temple to the Chinese emperor in the 8th century. From roughly the 4th century onwards this relationship of intimate contact between India and China flourished, until it abruptly terminated in the 11t h century.
Perhaps references to the past are relevant only because they presage the expectations of the 20th century. Such exchanges influenced the ethics and philosophies and the visual culture and aesthetics of our countries. But if the first view of India as a spiritual fount had been exhausted by the 11th century, a second more contentious relationship grew under the colonial period and the full flowering of Orientalism. Asian views of each other’s cultures now came with western filters. Edward Said has said that the four elements of 18th century Orientalism were expansion, historical confrontation, sympathy and classification, If we look at one or two instances of this sympathy and classification, and how they reflected on intra Asian relations. He writes of how the west viewed itself as upholding ideals of democracy justice fair play in contrast to the Orient which was perceived as exotic, lying, hierarchical, treacherous and so on, prejudices which were passed on through the Macaulayan system of education.
Said writes that 19th century orientalists made the distinction between the good Orient and the bad Orient. I quote “the good Orient was invariably a classical period somewhere in a long gone India, whereas the bad Orient lingered in present day Asia, parts of North Africa, and Islam everywhere.” The Orientalist saw himself as saving the Orient from the obscurantism of the past and restoring him to the present. It was this present of course which by the beginning of the 20th century becomes highly contentious. India of the Shakuntala and the Upanishads was acceptable, but not its assertions for modernity.
Asian contact meanwhile grew a little, Chinese brocade in Gujarat and Chinese glass paintings of Indian themes were imported and hugely popular in the 18th century. Then Swami Vivekananda and in the area of the arts Abanindranath Tagore committed themselves to an Asian ideal. Abanindranath had worked closely with the Japanese artist Okakura who believed that Japanese culture was the outcome of Indian spirituality and Chinese learning. Abanindranath who looked to the east for materials and sources wrote in the publication Bharati “we need to discuss Asiatic art. In other words, it is essential to conduct a comprehensive study of the traditions stretching from Turkey to Japan, from the Northern Tartar kingdoms of China at one end to the southern ocean on the other.”
These elements enter Indian art with the Bengal school and then are taken nearly 40 years later by Zainul Abedin to Bangladesh where Abedin founds the Government Institute of Art. It is now known as the Institute of fine art, and becomes the fountain head of the contemporary art movement in Bangladesh.
But in the present context it is true that the contentious period of the last fifty years have made artistic contact a casualty. Artists from our countries are more likely to meet in the Asia Pacific Triennale, in New York or Fukuoka than in each others countries. Official contact has been very thin.
As you know, art exchange in India is mediated through the Dept of Culture and its nodal agency the National Gallery of Modem Art. Of all the exhibitions sent abroad by the NGMA from 1995 to 2001, one went to Dhaka for the Festival of India in Bangladesh and one went to Beijing and three more to other Asian countries. If we consider the incoming exhibitions from 1989, of the 76 incoming exhibitions, again only one each from Bangladesh and China, and 5 from Korea and Japan again fuelled by the active interest of the Japan Foundation. So in a 12-year period, art received at the official level from Asian countries is less than 10%. If we look at the larger picture of SAARC, according to a source in the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, due to the political instability in the region 80% is postponed and 50% is cancelled.
Of course question arise. If we are neighbours do we automatically engage in artistic and cultural exchange? Because of a history of regional strife, are we witnessing cultural resistance? In seeking western markets for art practice area we are laying to rest the contestations of 18th & 19th century colonization, but delaying engaging with the hegemonies of 20th century conflict in our neighbourhood? In short are we an old new world given to resting on, the links of the past and looking to the west as the positive ‘other’.
I think it is important now to emphasize points of commonality, which are several. The artists of our countries bring together many kinds of art practice of the traditional and the contemporary. Artists work with new media as easily as Chinese fine brush painting as Kalighat pats. We have developed our own kinds of modernisms, like the Political Pop and Cynical Realism of China, as well as the abstraction and analytical realism of Bangladesh, which may have parallels with other in the Asian region.
As developing countries our artists have common areas of interest reflect on the destruction and the building of Beijing as much as Bombay or Dacca.They also seek recognition and support from their governments who may support Kathakali and Chinese opera, but will not create pavilions for Chinese or Indian or Bangladeshi art at the Venice biennale. With a large community of Diaspora artists and galleries, they also face the question of authentic aft practice, like the question of banana Chinese artist who showed at Venice in 1999. The question being asked was that as Diaspora artists are they Chinese on the outside but white inside, or else not sufficiently authentic for the western world.
Finally even in the post modern the mass media has a broadly orientalist point of view and given us innumerable, images of Indian cult leaders and taxi drivers, Chinese kung fu fighters and Bangladeshi cooks which only serve to affirm the stereotype.
These are issues we share and perhaps contest.
GAYATRI SINHA
(Gayatri Sinha is an independent art critic and curator based in New Delhi.)
Reference:
Said Edward Orientalism, New York, Pantheon Books, 1978.
The World of Budd m ed. by Heinz Bechert and Richard Gombrich Thames and Hudson, 1984