The 1990s will be remembered in India as the decade of the liberalisation, when the Indian society and economy were opened to the world after fifty years of political non-alignment and economic protectionism. For Indian art, the 1990s were a period of self-criticism and reassessment, during which many Indian artists, especially the younger and more globally aware among them, realised that their peculiar inheritance of nationalist sentiment and Modernist aspiration had limited their practice in fundamental ways. As images and information poured across the now-opened borders, from the global metropolitan centres, the biennales and triennales, and from other post-colonial societies, Indian artists, critics and curators began to subject their work to closer scrutiny in the light of these parallel histories and alternative lines of development.

At the same time, they had to deal with the threat of the Hindu Right, which had consolidated itself in reaction to the perceived cultural and political challenge of globalisation, in addition to its long-term aim of securing India as a Hindu nation rather than a multi-religious formation. This political resurgence manifested itself through demands for censorship, the violation of artistic freedom by right-wing activists, and a general claim, by the Right, to monopolistic privileges of articulation in the public sphere.

Indian artists soon realised that the history of their practice had not prepared them to confront such provocations. The first generation of post-colonial Indian artists, active between the late 1940s and early 1990s, had espoused a Modernist aesthetic, and worked within a gallery system that they perceived as the space of recognition. Who could have guessed, in that first, optimistic phase, that the gallery system, which liberated Indian artists from the constraints of individual patronage, would eventually compromise their freedom to interact with the wider public sphere? In the last decade, especially, as the demands of the political have become pressingly urgent, it has become clear that »the artists of the white cube« are inadequate to the task of formulating aesthetic positions that engage the public sphere. As such, quietism, rather than activism, has been the leitmotif of Indian art; and (with some exceptions) the activism that some artists in India have displayed appears to rely on outmoded strategies of protest, weak in the face of the ideological and technological challenge of a Hindu Right that is at home in the world of global communication and urban warfare. What explains this disjunction between the aesthetic and the political? Why has the pursuit for an artistic style led to a muted response to their ambient lifeworld, on the part of many Indian artists?

[b]Post-colonial Modernism[/b]

The first generation of post-colonial Indian artists - including major figures like F N Souza, M F Husain and S H Raza - showed no interest in the temporary but provocative, perishable but site-and-audience specific, mutable but memorable art-work that was process-oriented rather than market-terminated. These artists also suffered from the romantic legacy of the artist-as-genius: in the early post-independence period, they embraced this self-image because they urgently needed to abdicate the social roles of the artist as portraitist, society painter or national mouthpiece; most importantly, these Indian Modernists wished to escape the lingering image of the artist as folk artisan. They asserted their autonomy by aspiring to a universal internationalist style (which was not, in fact, internationalist, but West-centric).

In hindsight, we realise that certain key themes and impulses of Indian culture were not expressible in the languages of Modernism that became available to Indian artists from the Western metropolitan centres during this period. The logic of these Modernisms - whether that of the School of Paris, Abstract Expressionism or Soviet-period abstraction - was essentially transcendentalist and universalist. Having adopted Modernist conventions, Indian artists were not able to express aspects of their experiential reality and expressive culture, such as: the figure set playfully between the icon and body, the performative and the decorative, the heightened body-consciousness experiences of time as duration and time as trance, and the sensorium of the everyday. Significantly, since the Modernist aesthetic privileged the individuality of the artistic self, it precluded the formation of communicative relationships between the studio artist and other cultural agents of the public sphere. Therefore (with the exception of the Santiniketan school, which evolved a local modernism precisely from such crossovers between classical and folk, metropolitan and tribal culture, in the 1920s and 1930s), synaesthetic and participatory experiences like the festival had no place in the aesthetic of Indian Modernism.

These exclusions were not redressed until the 1990s, not even by the post-modernist practitioners who emerged during the late 1960s and early 1970s (see Ranjit Hoskote, »In the Public Eye«, Art India, Vol. 5, No. 4, 2000). The Indian postmodernists emphasised the form of the little narratives, as against the universal iconographies of Modernism, using personal as well as political realities as material, and engaging with elements of popular culture. Even though artists of this generation displayed close interaction with local subjects, so that the content of painting became more dynamic, their artistic form still remained largely stagnant. There was little play with unusual materials and display methods outside gallery spaces.

To borrow a formulation of the art historian Ranjit Hoskote, Indian artists in the 1960s and 1970s still produced »well-behaved« artworks. Also, since they were fighting for a place in the gallery system, they could not rebel against the very art institutions that stifled creativity. It was only in the 1980s that the Radical Group, a set of painters and sculptors, brought sculpture down from the pedestal and began to explore the possibilities of environments and installations. This marks the beginning of the move, in contemporary Indian art, from the isolated individual self to the artistic self expressed through notions of community, sharing and collaboration.

[b]Performance and Video[/b]

The forms of performance-based video art and video installations, which developed in India during the late 1990s, helped to retrieve all those aspects of expressive and performative culture that had remained excluded from contemporary Indian art. These new genres allowed for a greater play of subjectivity: they generated an interplay between the illusionism of painting and the immediacy of performance, they problematised the iconic, set avatars and morphs in motion, and generally had the effect of politicising the private and attempting to create solidarities and environments conducive to redefining the role of art in society.

I will provide two examples of video and performance art that address the gap which the Modernist aesthetic placed between art and society at large. While much generic video art lends itself easily to self-cathexis and navel-gazing, the works of Subodh Gupta and Sonia Khurana prove that privacy as a mode of representation need not be defined as an escape from the public domain; instead, privacy becomes a politicised space. This helps us reflect on the collision between the secret or intimate self and the presence of the other, even if implied rather than direct. These works also push up against the envelope of the gallery, disturbing the expectations of conventional viewers, with their provocative outrageousness.

Subodh Gupta, who employs video and photography to document his self-dramatisations, proves this point. Gupta is from Bihar, a northern Indian state notorious for its extreme poverty and violent caste politics. Conscious of rural reality and with a background in regional theatre, Gupta designs the mise en scene of his performances with informal materials like earth, cotton, coloured powder and cowdung. In his mixed-media works and performances, he playfully questions the regional stereotype of a Bihari, a label synonymous in metropolitan India with ignorance, illiteracy and cheap labour.

In his recent video performance, titled Pure (1998), cowdung - which is used as fuel as well as a sacred material for purifying ritual spaces in rural areas - becomes the artist's second skin in an urban setting. Gupta appears before us, in a shower. The video runs in reverse and streams of cowdung slap up onto Gupta's body: in an eerie sequence, he is completely covered over with cowdung - and the urban Indian viewer is filled with disgust and fear at this. Outside its rural setting, cowdung is no more than a pile of dirt, »matter out of place” as the anthropologist Mary Douglas put it. And in urban societies, the term »dirt« is not just limited to inanimate objects, but also to disprivileged people. This leads to the question of what is »pure« about the video performance. I would read Gupta's exit from the bathroom and entry into the elevator, smeared with cowdung, as a strategy used by the artist to provoke the worst nightmare of the urban viewer, that of an epidemic - the rural invading the urban.

Sonia Khurana's naked encounter with her own body in the video performance Bird (1999) plays on questions related to gender in an insensitive patriarchal society. At the outset, Bird is about the failed attempts of a woman who is trying to fly, to take off from a room without doors. But Khurana's performance breaks the spell of lyrical beauty that is associated with such themes. She turns this performance into a tragicomic play. While some of her movements border on the slapstick, the rolling of her body on the ground and the quick abstract montage of body parts turns the artist's body into a weapon against the beauty-contest economy. Her performance, a private act of the self set in friction with the social physicality of the body, interrogates the myth of the slim female body propagated by the nexus of transnational cosmetic industries and the beauty pageant business. For Khurana, her body's nakedness is, paradoxically, her body's shield.

I would include Baiju Parthan in this constellation of artists working with body morphs and avatars: his preferred form is that of the artist working through cyber-aliases. Educated as an engineer and a painter, Parthan makes sophisticated use of Net-based technologies. In A Diary of the Inner Cyborg (2000), Parthan experiments with the literary genre of cyberpunk while dealing with philosophical questions of the self, the »I« distributed in a fragmentary manner over discourses ranging from the painter's everyday urban life to the mythic inner world of the cybernaut. Parthan addresses the identity crisis played out in the hiatus between »meat« space (cyber slang for the human body) and »metal« space (likewise cyber slang for the cybernetic environment). The artist takes on different avatars in his Net-based works, making the human and machine impulses inextricable from each other. One of his prominent cyber-aliases is the figure of Orpheus: his singing head functions as an ode to immortality in meat space; in metal space, it bears the anti-Cartesian connotation of the world compressed into the mind. Parthan's works are modelled on the concept of disruption - understood as an interruption of flow or a seizure of control, a break in a relentless logic, a space for conscious reflection.

Parthan is, however, an exception to the rule that, when conventionally trained fine artists experiment with new media, they carry their old attitudes with them and are not able to interface well with the new-media world. Unfortunately, these trained artists still tend to see the world as readymade subject matter. Instead of expecting conventionally trained visual artists to reinvent themselves, we need to extend the frame of art - and include, in our critical purview, new agents and new sites of art-making. We need to look at new media works in hybrid and intermedia art practices. Otherwise, as art critics, we would acquiesce in the self-serving career moves of conventional visual artists, who take up new-media instruments to participate in the making of generic »international« art - it helps that many of them have, also, belatedly discovered the political. (In this context, I have to say that very few of the younger, conventionally trained Indian artists have undergone genuine politicisation experiences, as through Left or anarchist affiliations, or involvement with street theatre or alternative pedagogy. For at least some younger artists, engagement with the political and collaboration with activists is more a strategy dictated by the expediencies of global art funding, than the outcome of real conviction.)

Therefore, conventionally trained visual artists would gain a great deal by working with new-media practitioners, not only in terms of gaining a new vocabulary and technology of art-making, but also in terms of evolving a more nuanced outlook on their lifeworld, its pressures and its politics. It is possible that telematics-based art venues may produce a new democratisation. They could nurture new online and offline communities of users, viewers and players: Net art will find its artists and audiences, not among the traditional community of academy-trained fine artists and art-gallery viewers, but among computer nerds, animators, architects, designers, cultural theorists and political activists.

Some questions persist. Can cyberspace be made truly democratic? Can it become a virtual venue for artistic and political activism? This is where artists can, in the future, work as ethical and political agents of change by setting up counter-republics in virtual space, dynamising the dispersed cyber-community of the present into a coherent public force. So that speed does not result in an implosion of space, these republics should aspire to being truly res publica, »things of the people«. Artists will have to explode the one-way lanes of image-consumption and articulate broader political and social needs through artistic strategies that enter the public debates laterally. They would have to set up multiple interfaces, getting out of the stilted interface between gallery and street which fascinates many artists today: already, it has become played out, an aestheticised act without political edge.

I would single out for attention, a group of new-media practitioners who have revolutionised art from the outside of mainstream practices: the Raqs Media Collective (Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi and Shuddhabrata Sengupta) They combine a passion for technology with a strong social sensitivity. Politically conscious of the scarcity of resources and infrastructure in a developing country, they strongly believe in the creation of a »digital commons«, characterised by a free exchange of software, code, information and cultural products.

[b]Media-activism[/b]

The example of the Raqs Media Collective is important, because it offers a model of practice to the conventionally trained fine artists who may feel social responsibility but are unable to express it in an artistic form that is both aesthetically and politically viable. During the 1990s, many Indian artists have presented themselves as activist citizens: this is surely a response to the hardening of State control over the public sphere and interference from reactionary political forces. The greatest challenge for Indian artists today is to counter the Hindu Right's claim over the symbolic reality of India, a claim which runs counter to the Nehruvian national imaginary which was based on secular and broadly progressive ideals. Since the Hindu nationalist claim is premised on a narrow and politicised version of Hinduism, it excludes millions of Indians - all those belonging to the religious minorities, as well as liberal and heterodox Hindus, and members of subaltern Hindu castes. What we see here is the dangerous process of disenfranchisement, in which the political, cultural and spiritual freedoms of Indian citizens are being threatened. At the material level, Hindu Right's mobilisation is sustained through a pervasive network of grassroots political organisations, schools, and volunteer »self-help« groups; also, through the dissemination of pamphlets, broadsheets, television serials, cheap audio-and video- cassettes, and now, the Internet - in the form of Hindu nationalist websites, chat groups, and mailing lists.

Against this backdrop, artists across disciplines whether in painting, theatre, music or dance and with different political backgrounds, have found themselves in an embattled situation where freedom of expression is threatened by censorship and violence. Artists have worked with one another and in collaboration with activists and NGOs, to resist these repressive forces. For instance, SAHMAT (Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust), an organisation of artists, activists and intellectuals which was formed after the death of the Communist theatre activist Safdar Hashmi who was murdered in 1989, has emerged as a significant voice against Hindu Right communalism. It has set up encounters with different kinds of publics by holding outdoor exhibitions, poetry readings, seminars, dance and music programmes etc.

Unfortunately, their programme has tended to be event-based and also constantly phrased as reactions to Rightwing outrages: this is limited, as it does not conduce to long term dialogue, mass outreach and an autonomously evolving project of defining a secular imaginary. SAHMAT tries to grapple with several problems: it tries to sensitise artists to political reality and political activists to art, and also to sensitise artists, activists and the general public to the misuse of the sacred by politicised religion. But in its desire to achieve a tactical solidarity (which is a laudable aim), it opts for a reductionist approach, glossing over problems of interpretation and translation between the sacred and the secular.

Due to the mandate of the event-as-spectacle, the usual hierarchies infect SAHMAT's professedly democratic activities, an example of which was the Muktnaad (Free sound) festival held in Ayodhya in August 1993 as a reaction to the demolition of the Babri Mosque by right-wing goons in that city the previous year. Despite the best intentions, »Muktnaad« became a celebrity endorsement of secularism. Rustom Bharucha explains in his book, In the Name of the Secular, that on the one hand, there were classical music and dance programmes with strong religious content and on the other, there were theatre groups who wished to put up anti-communalist performances in the agit-prop mode. While the classical performers were given an hour and more, the smaller contemporary groups were given twenty-minute slots. The two sets of people were not given enough space and time to dialogue with each other so that they could debate their different ways of looking at religion, art and politics; this project thus became counter-productive to the aim of spreading religious tolerance and promoting heterodox communication between performers and with the public.

More recently, the artists' initiative, Open Circle (founded in 2000), has replicated the tried-and-tested strategies of confrontation and resistance employed by Left, environmentalist and feminist groups. While Open Circle has served as a forum for the enthusiasm of young artists, and has added its energy to the cause of ecological refugees, among others, its effort has not yielded much beyond empty rhetoric and propagandist performances. This group of artists must realise that new situations demand new strategies, and that their methods must politicise the aesthetic and aestheticise the political in the same act of transformation; one without the other would be a vain gesture.

We find that Indian artists have reduced their imaginative ability to deal with political situations to a simple reactive attitude, critical but devoid of affirmative content. This is, moreover, a cellular imagination confined to individuals and small groups who are not able to make effective interventions in larger public life. A pertinent question arises: Are artists engaged in showing fashionable solidarity with politically correct causes, or are they seeking genuine ways of connecting with the larger public?

[b]Postscript[/b]

We have just concluded that art should not be reduced to politics nor politics to art. This cautionary tale applies to both local and global situations. It would be useful to look at the works of the Indian participants at the recently concluded Documenta 11 exhibition curated by Okwui Enwezor. Despite Enwezor's best intentions to represent cultural production that reflects aspects of the contemporary glocal crisis - such as poverty, unequal labour flows, exported ecological disasters, conflicting territorial claims, urban dystopias, mass migrations, genocides, and State surveillance - the viewer is more often overwhelmed by tedium or a touch-and-go First World guilt, depending on which part of the globe s/he represents. Unfortunately, the exhibition spaces seem, by and large, to affect the look of a global school playground. Didacticism in the making and curation of art can lead to dangerous blind spots.

I would suggest that such a blind spot is produced, when the political processes of archiving and documentation are reified to the status of art. Although the Documenta 11 artists are presented as cultural interventionists, we see less of formal intervention in their works and more of the unmediated photographic archive, magazine illustration or television documentary, masquerading as the expression of a concept. When art duplicates political rhetoric, it only becomes another propaganda device, and all the sophisticated word-peddling vis a vis the »local« is visually reduced to good old ethnography.

Take the example of the Delhi-based photographer Ravi Agarwal's photographs on the Hindu procession, beggars and bandwallahs. This neo-Orientalist choice of images unplugged from their context resembles the People of India and Occupation series beloved of British colonial ethnography. In a double irony, Agarwal's context is activism, not the gallery circuit: he seems to have fallen between stools here, attempting an »artistic« depiction while maintaining a connection with NGO-type imagery. It is unfortunate that many post-colonial artists as well as some First-World artists included in Documenta 11 present the »Third World« through the prism of an NGO aesthetic - an aesthetic funded for the purposes of demonstrating lack.

Delhi-based filmmaker Amar Kanwar's A Season Outside (1997) may not have stood image-making vocabulary on its head, but this film on the territorial conflict between India and Pakistan was impressive. However, it suffers from a long didactic commentary on questions related to peace and violence.

To return to the broad issues related to Documenta 11 - despite its rhetoric about including the »Other«, it is evident that the exhibition gives more space and emphasis to canonical works by First World artists. Perhaps ironically proving wrong those critics who feel that New York- based Enwezor's »Third World« origins would automatically guarantee an unproblematic inclusion of the »Other«; after all Enwezor has a sophisticated understanding of the dominant history of Western modernism and postmodernism into and against which he has made his interventions.

Another disadvantage of being post-colonial is that the curatorial balance of power is not in our favour. Yet again, our specific art histories tend to get bypassed in favour of art that approximates, in this case, to an archival resource whose parameters are drawn up by First-World curators. Fortunately, »Third World« artists can resist and subvert this imperative too, as demonstrated by the Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective (Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi and Shuddhabrata Sengupta) through their intermedia installation, 28'28» N / 77'15” E : : 2001/02, an assemblage of video, text, sound, print and signage. The cartographic notation in the title represents the geographical position of Delhi. The work invites the viewer to interface with a wide range of narratives related to the ownership and use of urban spaces. The debate between legality and illegality, migrant and native, the out-of-date juridical and the out-of-place real is first enacted through a narrative of stickers pasted on garbage bins, in underpasses and other spaces of public transit and consumption in Kassel.

Raqs has deliberately printed these stickers in German, Hindi, English and Turkish, to underline the fact that the condition of lack is not unique to the »Third World« and that the »Other« can be within. Thus the viewer would realise that the »Third World« is not a geographical given, but a condition of marginality that can be found in any society, including seemingly advanced nations like Germany. We encounter these themes in the penumbral space in the Documentahalle, where Raqs has established its installation. And while the world's metropolitan centres are being divided into guarded, gated or cordoned enclaves, Raqs looks elsewhere in its search for an unbounded space for interaction, discussion and resolution: a digital commons, a multi-authorial online space, in the shape of the OPUS project. A move pointing towards the future, it shows a way ahead for contemporary Indian art; a way that may not find favour with conventional artists, but which opens the activity of image-making to people and spaces beyond the gallery.

 

 

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