SITES OF ART: OTHER SITES, OTHER LOCATIONS

Scores of women draw auspicious alpanas, rangolis or kolams on their doorsteps or courtyards with wet or dry pigments on festive occasions. A Tamilian housewife may draw it every morning throughout the year, often with rice powder trickled through gaps of her fist in dual or triple lines whether she is in a village or an apartment in a city. The magical motifs get effaced during the day, the bits of rice carried home by an army of ants to make room for a new pattern to emerge the next day. White motifs on earth red cow dung clay ground: the bold mandanas and okalis in Rajasthan and Gujarat respectively cover floors and walls, often flowing over village centres. The massive floral forms as in the case of the okali are often accompanied by images of parrots and peacocks, fantasy tigers, Radha and Krishna punctuated by bicycles, aeroplanes and alarm clocks in calligraphic strokes made by full hand or elbow movements. Elsewhere, on the border regions of Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, a sacred enclosure of equestrian lord Pithoro in procession painted with rudimentary brushes and stencils collectively by men is a tribal cosmograph that transforms the drab tribal hut into a shimmering site. Till recently, a newlywed couple would consummate marriage in a painted kohbar (bridal chamber) in Mithila. Images are made to accompany the living from birth to death. Making marks or scribbling notations on every available surface is a sub continental pleasure and pastime. A bride entering her new home may print her hands on the entrance.

Door jambs of many a middle class home carry calligraphic invocations- labh/shubh, aum 786 and ‘welcome’. Graffiti alongside posters figure on every conceivable surface- public toilets or city walls. Empty space is inauspicious: scribbles, marks or images secure the invisible presence of spirits once erased and are invoked over and over again. Ephemeral like toys designed to be broken in play fro a remaking, the inscribed images last anywhere between a few hours to a year to be re-inscribed as per a seasonal cycle or ritual calendar. The physicality of the object is secondary to the process of making: the image remains alive in a regenerative continuum, in an improvisatory renewal. Like the idols of Durga and Ganesh or floats of Taziya are immersed in lakes or rivers or effigies of Ravana and his companions consigned to flames at the end of the festival of Dussera, the painted scrolls of Pabuji and Devnarayan are ritually submerged in water once worn out. Repainting of murals and restoration of shrines (jimmoddhar) is a traditional practice and continues at some of the pilgrimage sites on a regular basis.

As the sacred savours the worldly, the worldly appropriates the sacred in its own schemes with élan. Seething with unbridled, often carnal sensuality the sites of the bazaar infect the unguarded viewer-voyeur with contagious fantasies. Think of the brazen erotica of the plaster and plastic effigies: the sumptuously modelled and draped fetishes of desire on the pavements and in vending stalls. Consider the boon-granting deities and saints printed in blazing hues erupting from street corner sites, or the repeated coats of garish enamel paint on medieval monuments. The going tenor of the image and the surrounding construct of these sites is highly pitched, rhythm pulsating and effect usually volatile- where all powers of visual [play are brought into action. In this theatre of the street there is a constant commerce between the sacred and the profane, especially during festivals. Theatrical devices, often high-tech tricks, acrobatics of a circus, enactments of gory violence and tear-jerking sentiments of current potboilers may shock and entertain simultaneously. Cloned visages of forts and palaces and ‘foreign’ tourist spots with son et lumiere and music to match, the most incongruous and absurd may be made palatable to its audience at gala receptions and parties. During the days of the famed blockbuster ‘Sholay’, arch-villain Gabbar’s blood-curdling monologue was enjoyed at wedding feasts! The most extraordinary of these are the Durga Puja and Ganesh Chaturthi pandals, which include massive audio-visual installations of currently sensational items complete with models of the Skylab, the Titanic or the depictions of the Kargil war. It is more than likely that the next set of pandals will include the WTC towers and Osama Bin Laden.

The question that arises out of this brief survey is: who are the –makers and users of these images? Pupul Jayakar spoke of the artisan community of the subcontinent being larger than the population of Australia. This estimate was restricted mainly to the rural-tribal sectors: the urban sector being too complex fro a demographic estimate. She also talked about the domestic craft embellishments solely conducted by women in a mother-daughter tradition. The mandanas, okalis, embroideries and appliqués, with their varieties and versions prevalent in most parts of the subcontinent are basically self consumptive- the makers and users being the same or within the same group. These could be euphemistically described as scripts of unlettered women. Traditionally, the artisan community, generally male dominated was drawn from the working class fold of the shudra vama. Being outside the circuit of dominant social groups, women in that sense belong to the same common space. Self trained or trained through guilds and workshops as apprentices or through family and caste trade traditions, the artisans and crafts persons comprising of professionals and apprentices make an enormous army of workers that may run into millions. They remain generally anonymous and invisible except to those who commission them. They are viewed hardly differently from other workers: in the village, their work is regarded as part of the upkeep of the environment they belong to like carpentry, smithy or tailoring. This may apply to the maker of a Taziya, a plaster Ganesh or a mega hoarding or else to a painter of a signboard on a shanty shop, name of the owner on an umbrella or the number plate of an auto rickshaw. These professions are peopled by trade communities who specialize in particular techniques but often work across regional and religious divides. The makers of dussera effigies and kites are known to be Muslim crafts persons from Uttar Pradesh.

The kite makers go to Gujarat prior to Makar Sankranti where there is a huge demand for their skills.

Compared to the un-organised sectors, the urban modem site of art functions in a different cultural territory. With an organized system of communication, commerce and values, it has assumed the decisive role of defining roles of other sites   within its own paradigms. Each within their own space, the sites operate at different frequencies. In the absence of a channel of translation, their respective concerns often remain unintelligible or unimportant to the other. Working within a radius of twenty kilometres, an artist working in the Garhi studios, (established by the national academy of art), a hoarding painter in Chandni Chowk and a women making sanjhi on the outskirts of Delhi may seem to function on different planets, so to say.

The self designated site of modern art is primarily a product of an organized system of formal education with a self conscious cultivation of ethics and aesthetics, basically geared to creating lasting forms to be conserved and displayed in private and public collections. Born of comparable circumstances, the conflict of cultures triggered by the consolidation of colonial power during the middle of the nineteenth century, it shared with the emergent culture of the English language (which eventually formed it basic vocabulary and core audience), legacies of a liberal, rational, ‘secular’/non sectarian outlook and ‘westernised’ orientation. The early art schools were established to introduce an institutionalised form of education to replace the region or community base system of individualized apprenticeship in guild or a workshop. This system rooted in language constructs remained prevalent in a slightly different way in music and dance in the form of guru-shisyha parampara. Considering art as an aspect of technology (i.e. as the development of replicable skills) brought in a standardized form of education, like textbooks in liberal arts, designed to be reproduced on a pan-Indian scale.

The territorial boundaries of the various sites of visual culture remained somewhat intact from nineteenth century through the years of independence. The art school continued to carry the old agenda of an a-political, non-sectarian orientation and outlook; albeit reconfiguring as per the changing moulds of cultural policies during the Nehru and Indira Gandhi eras. Whereas life outside its precincts was getting intensely politicised, and consumerism and the communal divide were gathering momentum especially during the seventies and eighties. Under modernist compulsions language of art remained a supreme criterion. Little of what was going on outside influenced the categories and criteria of painting or sculpture. The trauma of partition passed by without much response. Modernism would deem themes of religious nature retrogressive. There was little accommodation of the regional in the scheme. The community of art school artists lived a life of split orientation. Life and art often remained somewhat isolated: an art student, or artist learnt constantly if somewhat imperceptibly and perhaps unconsciously, to shift cultural gears all the time, transacting but rarely translating the meaning of one to make sense of it in the other. For him or her, religious practice in the family, of politics on the street (as also the visual cultures of the village or town he or she belonged to) remained territories to be closed on entering the art school citadel. Even if inspirational, the visual culture of the village or town an artist came from had to be worked into modernist conventions. Linguistic divides thus kept this site of art further isolated from other sites of visual culture. In the middle class perception ‘modem art’ remained an amusing aberration with an incomprehensible visual (and verbal) language. Carrying associations of the culture of English language it is still often resented.

Till the eighties, for the urban modem artist however, this has mattered little. Issues, if any that caused concern were of moral rather than of religious or political nature. But for the expulsion of F. N. Souza from the art school for painting a nude self-portrait or litigation about obscenity in the case of a painting by Akbar Padamsee in the late fifties, controversies and conflicts if any, hardly affected public psyche. In fact, the existence of this site of art mattered little to the general populace or media. The community of artists as a tiny minority had little or no impact in the larger public spheres. Far more explicit portrayals of transgressive erotica than Souza and Padamsee’s came to be displayed in private and public galleries and failed to arouse moral indignation or public protest until the beginning of the eighties. But the situation has changed rapidly in the subsequent decades. The policy of economic liberalization initiated by the Government of India in the eighties has brought about an unusual buoyancy of the domestic market for modern art followed by the entry of international auction houses. These aroused media interest and a middle class curiosity about ‘modern art’ and the new phenomenon of a higher price structure. The period also witnessed the rise of fundamentalist forces and majoritarianism in the political arena.

For the emergent fundamentalist forces, the perception of the sacrilege has served to be an effective weapon for political mileage. While the sense of the sacred may arouse concern, what is seen as its opposite may invite curse, wrath and even doom. Until recently, communities seemed to guard the invisible boundaries between their respective religious practices with an undefined yet clear sense of the sacred; or what could otherwise be understood as sacrilege. The political scenario of the eighties seemed to have unleashed its destructive potential, which culminated in the demolition of the sixteenth century Babri Masjid in 1992. Until then, to conduct oneself in front of the sacred, no matter to which community or culture it belonged was part of civic behaviour. One knew that a book was scripture, a sculpture a deity, a site a shrine, from textbooks and street ethics. The potential for violation discovered in the notion of sacrilege affected popular psyche and bred invisible fears. The community of artists grown up on the symbolic secularism of the Nehru era was rudely shaken by the turn of events in the last two decades.

It would not be exaggeration to say that no other Indian artist has invited and risked a direct dialogue with the majority middle class culture as has M F Husain: from portrayals of Indira Gandhi as goddess Durga during the years of Emergency and besotted paeans celebrating film star Madhuri Dixit. He has also drawn from religious themes from various traditions, chiefly from the Hindu pantheon. His upfront media hyped image has given him the status of a star. It is practically through him that the middle class recognises the presence of modem art. Husain’s example shows the perils of carrying the freedom of transgressive exercises of modem art into the tricky terrain of the majoritarian sites of culture. His public performance of painting and effacing images of goddesses – invoking the ritual immersion of effigies mentioned earlier invited criticism even from amongst his fellow artists. They seemed to question whether he would repeat the performance using scared images of the religion to which he belonged. The broadly ‘secular’ community of artists was shocked to witness the artist being identified by his religion for the first time. Later, assaults came in the form of an allegation of his having painted goddess Saraswati in the nude (albeit in a drawing made twenty years ago) and subsequent burning of his pictures in an exhibition in Ahmedabad, litigations of blasphemy and worse, for inciting communal violence. There was a general outcry against licentious use of the freedom of expression. Two more events have marked the new code of moral censorship in modern urban art. The closing down of rooms containing erotic paintings by Bhupen Khakhar from an exhibition of Dutch and Indian artists and removal of an allegedly controversial depiction of a ‘national emblem’ (Asokan column) in the painting of Surendran Nair. These instances bring to the fore an urgency to inquiry about the interpretations of the traditions and cultures of collective heritage being considered a proprietary right of a community or the state.

This points not only to the polarization of the sites of art and of culture of the bazaar but also to the politics of the nationalism, and the interface of the ‘secular’ and ‘communal’. It also focuses upon issues of the limits of transgression. More importantly and dangerously it also seems to hold a trigger to clash between minority and majority cultures arising from a majoritarian rhetoric. That trangressions are a staple ingestion of these can turn a benign Ganesha or a benevolent Rama into fiery warriors a la Rambo or Braveheart. Articulated in the language of the majority, these transgressions acquire a legitimacy: the rest must learn to conform or quit. Never has the urban modern site of art encountered a more challenging adversary to its concerns than it faces today. The challenges hold portents and promises of unpredictable nature.

(Abridged)

GULAMMOHAMED SHEIKH, INDIA