4 The global, the local, the

contemporary, the collaborative

Ghari/Ghar Pe/At Home, Dharavi,
Mumbai, 2012
Atreyee Gupta

On February 25, 2012, far from the institutional ambits of the contemporary art
world, an extraordinary art installation opened in a hall in the Shree Ganesh Vidya
Mandir High School in Dharavi, a slum in Mumbai that is now home to more than a
million people who subsist at the margins of public civic services. Positioned towards
the end of a narrow meandering lane off 90 Feet Road, a road pragmatically named
after its alleged width, this was an atypical location for an art installation. The hall
itself had been painted a luminous monastral turquoise, an equally peculiar choice for
a space meant for the display of art. In Dharavi, however, this very color served to ren-
der the space familiar to its local viewers and participants who associated the color to
the interiors of the many makeshift homes that jostle against each other in the slum’s
narrow alleys.1 Mimicking domestic interiors, objects displayed in the hall – steel ves-
sels, a gas stove, cupboards, a television, and recycled roller-shutters that often serve
as entrances to many makeshift one-room homes in Dharavi – invoked the domestic
in deliberately explicit terms (Figure 4.1). This resonated well with the installation’s
title, Ghari/Ghar Pe/At Home. Organized by the Society for Nutrition Education
and Health Action, a Mumbai-based non-profit focusing on women’s health in the
city’s numerous low-income urban sprawls, and sponsored by the Wellcome Trust, a
London-based institution for research in public health, the exhibition marked the cul-
mination of a yearlong dialog on art and health involving nineteen participants from
the communities of Dharavi and Santa Cruz, Mumbai, and three international artists.
Using Ghari/Ghar Pe/At Home as a case study, this chapter proposes a rethink-
ing of contemporary art through an analysis of the recent emergence of multiple,
and often competing, exhibitionary networks in South Asia. These constellations have
engendered new networks of knowledge-production, new forms of praxis, and new
strategies of display. Enmeshed within community-based civil society network mod-
els due to the involvement of non-governmental organizations with pedagogic and
emancipatory aims, such collaborative projects not only demarcate an emergent civic
imagination but also intersect with larger histories of the struggle for equitable public
policy, social justice, citizenship, and democratic representation in India. This chapter
will be attentive to these intersections and alert to the questions that entanglements
among art, civic activism, and civil society organizations present for the broader criti-
cal frameworks of contemporary collaborative art projects. Simultaneously, mapping
out the processes through which Ghar Pe evolved, the chapter will foreground the
modes through which certain kinds of knowledge about contemporary art seep into
contexts marginal to its normative cultural networks and are, in turn, elaborated
through subtle displacements that ultimately transgress the limits of the very field of

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 Ghari/Ghar Pe/At Home, Dharavi, Mumbai 79

Figure 4.1 Installation view, Ghari/Ghar Pe/At Home, Shree Ganesh Vidya Mandir High
School, Dharavi, Mumbai, February 25–March 9, 2012.
Source: Photograph by Neville Sukhia, courtesy SNEHA, Society for Nutrition, Education and Health
Action Mumbai.

contemporary art. My aim will be to probe the ways in which projects such as Ghar
Pe bring to the surface fissures within recent conceptualizations of the contemporary
while disrupting the discursive hold of artistic autonomy in current critical engage-
ments with community-based collaborative art projects.
At the first glance, however, Ghar Pe appears to fit well within the paradigms of
community-based art practices that have emerged globally in the recent past. Like
most community-based art projects, the aesthetics and politics of Ghar Pe, too, was
molded by the desires, commitments, and aspirations of the three primary groups
involved in the project – the non-profit under whose aegis the project was organized,
the artists, and the volunteers from Dharavi and Santa Cruz. If the artists Nandita
Kumar, Suzie Vickery, and Sudharak Olwe perceived their involvement in Ghar Pe as
a principled extension of prior transnational collaborations with non-governmental
organizations and a concomitant investment in community-based art, the non-profit
hoped to mobilize the project to access existing non-formal networks and traditional
health practices in the city. The non-profit’s aim was to engender sustainable local
civic activism around questions of health, sanitation, and nutrition.
The overwhelming participation of local women volunteers, however, redirected
the conversation towards the complex psychic and social dynamics that constitute the
nature of women’s labor in the slum.2 In their traditional role as caregivers, the women
from Dharavi and Santa Cruz certainly brought a nuanced perspective to questions of

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 80 Atreyee Gupta
urban health. But their concerns finally coalesced around the forms of labor through
which their sociocultural identities are constructed and the impact of these construc-
tions on domestic health. These concerns informed the works that the women pro-
duced in collaboration with the participating artists. Ghar Pe’s re-creation of the
domestic as an immersive environment was thus organic rather than premeditated,
signaling a procedural open-endedness that collaborative art ventures often necessi-
tate. Equally significantly, the involvement of international artists and deterritorialized
funding networks brought into sharp focus irrevocable and allegedly post-national
entanglements between local and global conversations on contemporary collaborative
art and development discourses. Indeed, an increasing number of artists have turned
towards transnational collaborative and community-based modes of art production in
the recent past. Broadly, the aim of many of these projects has been to identify specific
social issues within a particular community and work towards affective change in the
shape of sustainable development.
To the extent that contemporary art addresses the political, aesthetic, and cultural
conditions of a globalized world, art scholarship too presents a remarkable range
of engagements with the question of radical democracy and plurality with which
any conceptualization of an ethical global citizenship must contend. For instance,
the collaborative nature of today’s art, Grant Kester notes, not only reveals ‘much
about both the current political moment and the broad history of modern art’ but
also ‘complicate[s] conventional notions of aesthetic autonomy.’3 Kester, on his part,
addresses the rapid proliferation of community-based projects globally through an
analytical approach that simultaneously problematizes the authorial status of the art-
ist and foregrounds conciliatory and non-custodial artistic strategies that often gov-
ern such ventures. For Kester, the embodied practices of collaboration destabilize the
triangulation of art, aesthetic autonomy, and the authorial status of the artist that
shaped modernist practices of the postwar decades. This analytical maneuver is cer-
tainly productive and raises a number crucial questions regarding collaborative art in
particular and contemporary art more broadly.
But this anxiety over autonomy is also symptomatic of a continued critical commit-
ment to a particular imagination of the contemporary, one that attempts to rethink the
global exegeses of contemporary art through theoretical frames drawn from a specific
kind of hermeneutics and a particular ontology of art. One that bears the weight of
the mythologies of autonomy internal to postwar art in Europe and North America.
This, in turn, has made the autonomy of the artist, artistic labor, and the ontological
status of contemporary art a focus of critical enquiry. Think, for instance, of Claire
Bishop, who positions participatory art as premised on invoking a relational antago-
nism between the artist and art’s constituencies.4 Bishop categorically presents aes-
thetic effect as a core component of participatory art. Exposing that which has been
repressed, participatory art actively involves the audience. In doing so, participatory
art practices stages, for Bishop, a sense of awkwardness on part of the viewer. Rather
than reproducing modernist fictions of wholeness, this strategy disrupts stable notions
of identity on the part of the participants. Paradoxically, in Bishop’s critical ekphrasis,
the contemporary aesthetics of antagonism appears to take on a startling equivalence
with the provocative strategies of the twentieth-century avant-garde. Thus, even as
scholars like Bishop and Kester constructively re-engage earlier (Western) modernist
alignments of the avant-garde artist, authorial agency, and art’s audience to address
the nature of artistic labor and autonomy in today’s globalized political and cultural

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 Ghari/Ghar Pe/At Home, Dharavi, Mumbai 81
economy, the history of modernism in India, as well as in most locations beyond
Europe and North America, does not elicit artistic autonomy as either a privileged or
even a discursive site of art practice. Indeed, in Bishop’s text, figures such as the French
Surrealist André Breton anticipate the emergence of contemporary participatory art.5
Having defined the stakes of collaborative art in such a particular way, we seem
to have already committed ourselves to a certain definition of the artist, a categori-
cal boundary of art, and a very precise delineation of its political domain. Yet, in the
antinomies of vastly differentiated geo-political cultures – cultures that Geeta Kapur
and Okwui Enwezor describe as arising out of dispersed conditions of postcolonial-
ity – a variegated matrix of dissonant artistic practices operate beyond both the for-
mal infrastructures of art institutions and the hegemonic apertures of Westernism.6
What kind of traction, for instance, does the act of collaboration hold in Dharavi, a
sprawling slum in the heart of India’s cosmopolitan financial capital? How might we
resituate collaboration from a postcolonial perceptive and how might this positioning
inflect our understanding of the contemporary? What are its social, intellectual, and
artistic genealogies? Over the subsequent sections of this chapter, I will attempt to
address each one of these questions in the order in which they are posed here.

At home in the women’s house

The centrality of the home, the ghar, in Ghar Pe offers a felicitous passage to broach
the nuances of collaboration in Mumbai’s Dharavi slum. Mumbai, of course, is a city
of ‘spectral housing,’ to use Arjun Appadurai’s phrase, a city where intense housing
deficit has transformed the home into a chimerical site of fantasy and desire.7 Ghar
Pe, too, unfolded at a time when the local participant’s rights to habitation had been
brought into question through a series of evictions, demolitions, and dubious prom-
ises of resettlement made in 2011 and 2012 by the government as part of the Dharavi
Redevelopment Project. Indeed, ever since the inception of the controversial Project in
2004, multinational corporations, state agencies, non-profit organizations, and civil
society groups have been engaged in what Camillo Boano, Melissa Garcia Lamarca,
and William Hunter describe as a ‘contested urbanism, where the struggle for bottom-
up, inclusive development processes push against political and market pressures.’8 As
a result, for Dharavi’s inhabitants, the right to collaborate, and as an extension, the
right to the city, the right to be at home (ghar pe) in Dharavi, has emerged as the locus
of struggle. In the backdrop of this socialscape, Ghar Pe’s organizers and participating
artists abandoned prevailing strategies of public art that posit the figure of the artist
as the interlocutor between disenfranchised subjects and the urban art sphere. Instead,
the participants from Dharavi and Santa Cruz cast themselves as the primary authors
of the works on display. During the exhibition, the local women participants intro-
duced their works, directly engaging the audience in dialog to negotiate a consensus
for change.
Each work created for the exhibition foregrounded complex intersectionalities of
artistic and domestic labor, social and aesthetic arrangements (Figure 4.2). Conceived
by Santa Cruz resident-participant Sunita D’Souza in collaboration with Nandita
Kumar, a participating artist whose interests center on ecology, technology, and devel-
opment, an ensemble consisting of two steel vessels placed on top of a gas stove sus-
tained these intersectionalities in visually compelling and socially provocative terms.
The work drew on D’Souza’s experience as a twenty-five-year-old mother of two,

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 82 Atreyee Gupta

Figure 4.2 Installation view, Ghari/Ghar Pe/At Home, Shree Ganesh Vidya Mandir High
School, Dharavi, Mumbai, February 25–March 9, 2012.
Source: Photograph by Neville Sukhia, courtesy SNEHA, Society for Nutrition, Education and Health
Action Mumbai.

whose life is lived out through a cycle of repetitive motions associated with cooking
and cleaning, cooking and cleaning again. This rhythm, however, is interrupted by
spurts of domestic violence, which she and her daughters often face at the hands of
her husband. On the days her husband abuses her physically, she does not cook or
clean. Even as her refusal to perform her domestic duties does not dislodge the gender
hierarchy that structures her home, she nevertheless disrupts it by withholding her
own labor. This disruption, made tangible though D’Souza’s refusal to play out her
designated role as a nurturer and a caregiver, becomes a mark of her resistance. Cov-
ered with patterns made out of black bindi and thread, one side of the kitchen-stove
registers her defiance. Placed on top of the gas burner, the unadorned aluminum vessel
is filled with burnt photographs of spoilt food. The other side of the stove, one that
is layered with brightly colored bindi and thread, represents days of bliss and marital
accord. On these days, D’Souza makes sumptuous meals for her family, photographs
of which can be seen inside an embellished vessel placed on the gas burner.
D’Souza’s work not only bears testimony to the processual nature of pedagogy and
collaboration spread over the twelve months leading up to Ghar Pe but also makes
obvious crisscrossed trajectories of local and global conversations that shaped the
project. Her association with the project, for instance, began with a photography
workshop led by the Mumbai-based documentary photographer Sudharak Olwe. In
certain ways, Olwe’s involvement in the Dharavi project was a logical expansion of his

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 Ghari/Ghar Pe/At Home, Dharavi, Mumbai 83
earlier work with marginal urban settlements, sanitation workers, and sex trafficking
in Mumbai. Equally significantly, the format of the workshops drew on the photogra-
pher’s project with youth in Los Angeles during his residency at the Getty Museum in
2010. As part of Community Photoworks, a program initiated by the Getty Museum
in association with the Los Angeles-based non-profit 826LA and local colleges, Olwe
had conducted a series of workshops with high school and college students where
the participants examined the urban ecology of Los Angeles through the medium of
documentary photography. In principle and format, Olwe’s workshops in Dharavi
bore significant homology with his work with youth in Los Angeles. Introducing par-
ticipants like D’Souza, who had never held a camera, to the techniques and strategies
of documentary photography, Olwe conducted the workshops through a series of
assignments that incrementally built on the participant’s skills. The photographs that
would be eventually incorporated in D’Souza’s installation were part of an assignment
on food and nutrition.
Over subsequent months, the conceptual apparatus that governed D’Souza’s mul-
timedia ensemble gradually emerged out of loosely structured consciousness raising
sessions facilitated by Nandita Kumar, who lives and works between New Zealand
and India, and the British artist Susie Vickery, whose work in textile raises critical
questions regarding gender and labor. The adoption of consciousness-raising sessions,
a strategy devised during the second wave feminist movement in America, may indeed
seem dated. In praxis, however, the act of sharing and analyzing personal narratives
realigned the terrains of private experience with the collective and the political in a
context where the question of survival often supersedes any explicit articulation of
a feminist agenda in the local. I will revisit the slippage between feminist theory and
feminist praxis in India later in this section, where I will situate the Dharavi art project
within a broader history of popular women’s movements to signal towards collabora-
tion’s particularized genealogy in India. For the duration of the Dharavi project, the
consciousness-raising sessions, served as an informal intimate space where women
gathered to exchange stories and gradually metamorphosed into localized networks of
solidarity based on collective experiences of marginality and depravation. A nascent
feminist politics was thus articulated and ultimately inflected the works displayed in
Ghar Pe.
It must be reiterated, however, that the local crisscrossed the global in a very fun-
damental way. Even as Ghar Pe was spectacularly rooted in the local, the project
simultaneously intersected with global conversations on art and activism when the
participating artists involved in the project turned to the seminal 1972 second wave
feminist installation Womanhouse, produced and displayed in an abandoned house in
Los Angeles by Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, and a group of women students of
the new Feminist Art Program of the California Institute of the Arts.9 Certainly, the
involvement of Kumar, a recent graduate of the Cal Arts, in the Dharavi project may
have been instrumental in this decision. But the artists could just as easily have turned
to more recent third wave feminist artistic interventions that have taken the domestic
as a discursive site of art making. While third wave feminism does make space for
more nuanced interrogations of gender, race, and sexuality, the use of Womanhouse as
a model recognized that Ghar Pe’s women participants continue to negotiate essential-
izing constructions of femininity and domesticity that are both socially prescribed and
culturally specific. In contexts of extreme material depravation, this often obfuscates
otherwise empowering assertions of self-fulfillment.

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 84 Atreyee Gupta
Indeed, Ghar Pe sustained a number of similarities with Womanhouse. Of course,
while the Feminist Art Program in Los Angeles had sought to carve out a separate-
but-equal space for women artists, Ghar Pe had no such intentions. But apart from
this obvious distinction, the points of similarity between the two projects were numer-
ous. Both projects provided the participants with the resources required to complete
the installation. Similarly, consciousness-raising sessions were central to both Wom-
anhouse and Ghar Pe. In both instances, a range of ideas emerged through these
sessions. Symbols that best expressed these ideas visually were then sought out col-
lectively, the concluding step being the actual mobilization of the symbol in a work
of art. For instance, in the Womanhouse project, consciousness-raising sessions led
to ‘the association of women with the kitchen and with the idea of giving food,’ as
Judy Chicago has noted.10 The resultant work was Vicki Hodgetts, Susan Frazier, and
Robin Weltsch’s Nurturant Kitchen. Similarly, it was through a collective process that
broader questions of nutrition, nurture, and consumption converged around private
experiences of everyday violence in D’Souza’s ensemble in Dharavi.
The differences, however, were equally vast. Feminist aesthetics as iterated by the
Womanhouse was most emphatically articulated around the female body. This becomes
explicit in the Nurturant Kitchen, where all perceptible surfaces of the kitchen, includ-
ing the floor, walls, cabinets, and appliances, were covered with pink paint. Pink plas-
tic eggs metamorphosed into fantastic breasts and cascaded down from the ceiling,
evoking a fascinating hybridity that was at once poignant and monstrous. To use Jane
Blocker’s words, ‘as though the realization of some science fiction plot, the house has
become a body, and the female body has become a house.’11 One does not find such an
engagement with the gendered body in Ghar Pe. In D’Souza’s gas stove the physicality
of her own body is absent even as her experience of domestic violence is foregrounded,
abstracted as it is from the body on which marital violence is enacted. Bindis – multi-
colored dots with which women traditionally adorned themselves as markers of mar-
riage – embellish the gas stove, referencing D’Souza’s body only tangentially.
Even in instances where the female body is cited directly, the body itself is repre-
sented through a network of familial relationships (Figure 4.3). Take, for instance, the
bed in Ghar Pe, which becomes the canvas upon which the various stages in a wom-
an’s life are played out. Conceptualized by Mridula and executed in collaboration
with the participating artist Kumar, the surface of the bed is layered with a collage of
photographs, each image carefully culled out from Mridula’s family photo albums. In
a certain way, the collage functions as Mridula’s biography, a narrative self-portrait of
sorts. In the far left of the collage, we encounter Mridula as a child with her younger
male sibling, a photograph that all too quickly morphs into an image of Mridula as
a young woman, holding in her arms her own infant daughter. In the far right, an
unidentifiable skeletal body can be seen lying on a bed similar to the one that frames
the collage. Even as the collage appear to very synoptically map out Mridula’s life –
childhood, childbirth, future death – with what can be best described as an extreme
economy of imagery, there is simultaneously a certain overflow of forms. For the
background of the collage is covered with smaller portraits of Mridula’s family. Tied
in tight clusters, bulging stuffed fabric dolls pinned onto the surface of the collage
completes the mise-en-scène, the color pink marking out the body of the artist herself.
The surplus of faces and bodies in Mridula’s self-portrait refers us back to the col-
lective process through which the work was conceived. The work was conceptualized
during a consciousness-raising session that explored the women’s relationship with

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 Ghari/Ghar Pe/At Home, Dharavi, Mumbai 85

Figure 4.3 Installation view, Ghari/Ghar Pe/At Home, Shree Ganesh Vidya Mandir High
School, Dharavi, Mumbai, February 25–March 9, 2012.
Source: Photograph by Neville Sukhia, courtesy SNEHA, Society for Nutrition, Education and Health
Action Mumbai.

domestic artifacts. When asked what the bed represents, sixteen-year-old participant
Afreen had reportedly observed: a bed is an object upon which one sleeps with many.
In childhood, the bed is shared with siblings and parents. In adulthood, the bed is
shared with husband and progeny, occupied solitarily only after the body has degener-
ated and death is impending.12 It is this idea that receives material form in Mridula’s
work. The bulging dolls further foreground the politics of the bed in Dharavi. Thus,
even as the work is conceived as a self-portrait, the portrait is filled with faces that are
not the Mridula’s own. The work then metaphorically exceeds the very definition of
a self-portrait.
This metaphoric excess is markedly present in a number of other works as well,
including a collection of small red and white perforated clay pots made by Parvati
Harjichitroda and placed at the foot of Mridula’s slightly tilted bed. Made during Har-
jichitroda’s participation in pottery workshops conducted by the craft activist Anjani
Khanna, this ensemble of vessels operated at multiple levels. At its most obvious, the
form of the earthen vessels referred to garbhis, earthen pots traditionally used for the
celebration of fertility during the harvesting season. There was, at the same time, a
play on the term garbhi, the etymology of which lies in the word garbha or fetus. For
Harjichitroda, the vessels functioned as a metaphor for the womb, the color red sym-
bolizing menstrual blood. As many as one hundred such vessels were strewn across the
exhibition space, marking one hundred days in Harjichitroda’s life. Collectively, the

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 86 Atreyee Gupta
vessels indicated that a woman menstruates for twenty days out of one hundred, the
days of menstruation marked out by the number of red vessels.
While Harjichitroda’s work shared an affinity with Judy Chicago’s Menstruation
Bathroom in the Womanhouse, especially in terms of the juxtaposition of red and
white as symbols of purity and bodily pollution, there was an additional aspect to
the Dharavi artist’s installation that exceeded the dialogic play between visibility and
invisibility so central to the Menstruation Bathroom. In Dharavi, the question of
purity took on an added valence. According to Brahmanical conventions and Hindu
belief systems, bodily discharges are considered a source of ritual impurity or ashau-
cha, and menstrual blood especially so. Ritual observances and social conscriptions
vary depending on women’s class and caste affiliations. But by and large, women
were traditionally prohibited from participating in collective social activities including
cooking and other forms of creative labor, since menstruating women were perceived
to be ritually impure and thus achyuta or untouchable. The touch of the untouchable
could, in theory, pollute that which had been touched. The traditional Kumbharwada
potters of Dharavi to which Harjichitroda belongs, for instance, believe that if a men-
struating woman touches clay, the vessel will lack strength and break easily. In a cer-
tain way, this ritualized enactment of patriarchal control over the female body may
well be read as a systematic ceasure of menstruating women’s labor.
It is this ceasure of labor that concerns Harjichitroda, the first woman in the Kumb-
harwada community to take up pottery after her husband was rendered disabled. As
the mother of five children and the primary wage earner in her family, the injunction
against productive labor during menstruation was inimical to Harjichitroda’s mechan-
ics of survival. For out of every one hundred days, she had to cease work for twenty
days. Thus, for women like Harjichitroda, the question of gender, labor, and men-
strual pollution is also irrevocably tied to the economics of survival for herself and
her family, whom she supports through her labor, and therefore must be negotiated
through the vocabulary of survival as such. What is then foregrounded in Harjichitro-
da’s work and in the work of the other participating women from Dharavi and Santa
Cruz is the reality of the women’s lack of control over resources in contexts of mate-
rial deprivation. Thus, when the artists involved in Ghar Pe recast the women from
Dharavi and Santa Cruz as the primary authors of the project, the feminist subject that
emerged through the collaborative artistic partnership revealed itself as one that was
not fully comprehensible within the Womanhouse’s Western liberal feminist paradigm
of embodied emancipation. Even as Ghar Pe resembled the Womanhouse, what tran-
spired, I want to suggest, was a series of subtle displacements that ultimately served to
centralize a politics of locality in Dharavi, a feminist politics of place.
The discursive operation of domesticity, gender, and labor that Ghar Pe presented
is not dissimilar to a number of popular women’s movements that have taken place
in India in similarly disempowered contexts. Take, for instance, the anti-arrack move-
ment that was initiated in 1992 in remote villages in the Nellore district of Andhra
Pradesh by the poorest segments of rural women to protest against the state-supported
sale of arrack at a time when country liquor was one of the highest revenue generat-
ing sectors in the state.13 Aided by a number of non-profit organizations, the women
organized themselves into committees to pressure men to pledge in the village temples
to stop consuming arrack. Violation of this pledge could lead to a range of conse-
quences including heavy fines, attacks by organized groups of women armed with red
chili powder and brooms, withholding of food when the men were intoxicated, and,

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 Ghari/Ghar Pe/At Home, Dharavi, Mumbai 87
ultimately, exile from the village for the entire family. For the women participants of
the anti-arrack movement, familial needs became the pivot around which their pro-
tests were organized, the rationale being that ‘if men stopped throwing away their
earnings on arrack, their families would not have to face economic hardship.’14
Writing about the centrality of the family in the anti-arrack protests, Ipshita Chanda
notes that this phenomenon reveals an inevitable fracture within feminist theory and
praxis, especially in postcolonial locations:

In theory, the politics of power within and outside the family, the gendered divi-
sion of labour, and the symbolic representation of women in the public and the
private are to be questioned. In practice, among the weakest and the most deprived
sections of women, the question of a livelihood, or a job, is a survival issue; and
in order to secure these, they are ready to question and actively subvert existing
hierarchies of gender and economic power. It seems that practice, in these cases, is
driven by the desire for better material conditions of living – at the most, the idea
of self-emancipation is something that may be achieved in the process of attaining
a material goal. In some cases, women appear to have no quarrel with some parts
of their traditionally defined roles. But those parts that prevent them from ensur-
ing better material conditions for themselves and their families, especially their
children, are those that they challenge. This makes the nature of their engage-
ments different, and this difference will be variously played out in various ‘post’
colonial locations with varied gender organizations and ideologies.15

This difference is also played out in the works displayed in Ghar Pe, where the very
concept of familiality and kinship structured the women’s engagement with both the
home and with Dharavi.
Like Ghar Pe, the anti-arrack movement also enunciated a certain politics of local-
ity. Even as the familial impulse behind the anti-arrack women’s militancy was very
quickly appropriated by various political fractions, the movement remained ‘a signifi-
cant elaboration of the politics of everyday life’ for the women themselves.16 When
they got rid of arrack, the women claimed they began to eat twice a day; the village
streets stayed clean; there was significant improvements in health; and there was peace
of mind, freedom from abuse, and relative solvency. However, although the women
claimed arrack as ‘their’ issue, their agitation was not directed against the men per
se but against alcoholism as it affected their own lives. Thus, the women refused
to take up initiatives beyond their own villages. As one woman reportedly stated:
‘Are the women of the other villages dead? Why should we go there to fight against
sara [arrack]?’17 By strategically limiting their politics to the specificities of their own
local and ‘demarcating a domain over which they can exercise control, the anti-arrack
movement seemed to be envisaging, and engaging in, a politics of the possible’ for
their own locality, Susie Tharu and Tejaswini Niranjana point out.18
It is precisely through such a working out of a politics of the possible that the
domestic and the civic are also brought together in Ghar Pe (Figure 4.4). A pic-
ture window made collaboratively by Ashwin and Mamta Solanki, Daksha Nitesh
Waghela, Parvati Harjichitroda, and Lakshmi Solanki makes this explicit. In the work,
we encounter two distinct compartments with the two sides of the windowpanes pre-
senting two diametrically opposite pictures. One side stands in for the Dharavi that
the participants routinely see as they look out of their kitchen windows. The other

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 Figure 4.4 Installation view, Ghari/Ghar Pe/At Home, Shree Ganesh Vidya Mandir High
School, Dharavi, Mumbai, February 25–March 9, 2012.
Source: Photograph by Neville Sukhia, courtesy SNEHA, Society for Nutrition, Education and Health
Action Mumbai.

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 Ghari/Ghar Pe/At Home, Dharavi, Mumbai 89
side depicts the Dharavi that they desire to see. On the one side, a tiny window carved
into turquoise green walls open onto a desolate landscape starved of greenery, where
beer bottles seem to rain from the sky. On the other side, a large window opens onto
a courtyard with a park and a well, an oblique reference to the water scarcity and the
daily struggle to secure clean water that is a part of Dharavi’s everyday reality. Paved
roads and covered sewerage systems are carefully marked out, yet another reference
to Dharavi’s numerous unpaved roads and open sewers, which offer mosquitoes with
an ideal breeding ground.
During the exhibition, as the participants from Dharavi introduced their works,
they also engaged the audience in dialog. By this act, they attempted to non-coercively
rearrange desires through a negotiation of consensus for change in the local. Standing
within the space of Dharavi, their address would have been immediate and sensory,
transforming the home, the ghar, into a site for public civic intervention. In essence,
what was presented in Ghar Pe was a certain vision for redevelopment, an image of a
new Dharavi consonant with the desires, aspirations, and needs of its residents. The
reciprocal relationship that was thus set up among the body of the work, the body of
the women, and Dharavi itself demands that we take seriously the politics of place.
For it is this place-specific politics that reveals the limits of our current conceptualiza-
tion of the globality of contemporary art.

The place of collaboration

Can our conceptual lexicon for collaborative art practices transcend the finitude of its
intellectual home? Or do places leave their imprint on purportedly universal concepts
in a way that calls into question purely abstract categories?19 Certainly, when seen
through the lens of a place-specific politics, projects such as Ghar Pe take on a dif-
ferent consistency, one that is neither engaged in the hermeneutics of modernism nor
committed to the vocabulary of artistic autonomy. Instead, what we have is a certain
civic imagination that is also a claim to democracy, specifically iterated in relation
to a named geo-political terrain. How might we delineate its social, intellectual, and
artistic genealogies?
Deliberately entrenched within the local, projects such as Ghar Pe are symptomatic
of art projects that posit a serious challenge to the liminal globality of contemporary
art. Provisionally, it seems to me that the formation of the Safdar Hashmi Memorial
Trust (Sahmat) in 1989, an anti-sectarian platform for visual and performing artists
instituted shortly after the prominent street-theatre artist and political activist Safdar
Hashmi succumbed to fatal injuries at the hands of attackers belonging to the then rul-
ing party in India, offers a possible entry point for scripting a situated history of col-
laborative art in the region. As scholars have noted, Hashmi’s death in 1989 generated
an unprecedented momentum, bringing together intellectuals and cultural workers
under the banner of Sahmat, a term that also translates as ‘solidarity.’20 At the point of
its institution, Sahmat’s primary stakes lay in activating public consciousness around
questions of the freedom of speech, belief, and expression as a fundamental right.
Given that India’s welfare economy had presented the progressive state as the primary
patron, supporter, and sponsor for the visual arts, Sahmat too continued to operate
alongside the state, intervening in and thereby encroaching on its cultural politics.
In this sense, Sahmat functioned as a civil society group, a non-government organi-
zation with pedagogic and emancipatory aims, and likewise had recourse to the

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 90 Atreyee Gupta
funding structures of the state. Nevertheless, the organization’s cultural critique tar-
geted the deficiencies in the state’s democratic apparatus. A new art praxis was thus
incited, which came to be practiced entirely outside the institutional structures of the
contemporary art world, and involved alliances with a range of other community-
based organizations with similar agendas.
Sahmat’s 1990 Janotsav (People’s Festival), a community-based initiative involving
artists and local residents from the Mangolpuri slum in New Delhi, holds a certain
homology with Ghar Pe organized by the Society for Nutrition Education and Health
Action over a decade later. Conducted through theatre and painting workshops that
took place between October 8 and November 11, Janotsav involved over one hundred
artists, students from New Delhi’s National School of Drama, and residents from the
Mangolpuri community. The hope was to generate ‘a popular and participatory cul-
tural movement.’ To this end, ‘after Hashmi’s death, Sahmat developed the concept of
Janotsav through discussions and workshops, with an aim to help build an inclusive
culture by promoting interactions and encounters among the residents of Mangolpuri
and practitioners of various art forms.’21
Here, it is worth pausing to note the hermeneutic function of the word ‘partici-
patory.’ In contrast to Claire Bishop’s understanding of participation as a mode of
rupture and antagonism, Sahmat’s conception of participation was institutive and
formative, rather than disjunctive. For Sahmat, the act of participation – of artists,
students, adults, and children from Mangolpuri – performed a specific kind of dialogic
function. By bringing together elite avant-garde practitioners with non-elite partici-
pants and audiences who may not have access to such cultural forms, Sahmat’s inten-
tion was to collaboratively produce a common conceptual frame.
Indeed, such a maneuver may have been perceived as imperative in 1990. Defying
legal injunctions, Lal Krishna Advani, then the president of the ultra-conservative
Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, had set off on a Toyota embellished to look
like a divine chariot for a month long journey across the nation to the town of Ayo-
dhya in Uttar Pradesh on September 25, days before Sahmat’s Janotsav. Advani was
accompanied by a large cadre of supporters, all of whom were armed with lethal shas-
tras (divine weapons) and vessels symbolically filled with blood. The Bharatiya Janata
Party’s explicit agenda was to build a temple where a mosque had been placed in the
sixteenth century. The site was, the Bharatiya Janata Party claimed, the precise spot
where the Hindu god Rama had been born. At the core of this event was a ‘breakdown
of domestic civility,’ to use Sunil Khilani’s phrase, and to disaggregate existing groups
to recode civil society in a way that benefits India’s Hindu majority.22 In face of such
attempts at reordering, Sahmat unequivocally sought to reclaim cultural space in a
way that could potentially open up horizons for new civic imaginations and solidari-
ties beyond those that were already legislated by political pressures.
Sahmat’s conception of the civic, of course, inevitably produced it as a category that
belonged wholly to the national. The affective political space that the organization
sought to occupy in the 1990s was also national. Yet, the 1990s was a decade that
also heralded processual liberalization and the concomitant easing of the protection-
ism that had marked India’s post-Independence economic policies. The processes of
neo-liberalization resulted in an explosion of a range of cultural infrastructure, com-
mercial galleries, and the creation of a number of privately funded art museums, all
of which led to a new global visibility of modern Indian art. In some senses, funded
by the London-based Wellcome Trust, the Society for Nutrition Education and Health
Action’s Ghar Pe was also a product of this new economy.

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 Ghari/Ghar Pe/At Home, Dharavi, Mumbai 91
The Society for Nutrition Education and Health Action’s Ghar Pe took place at
a time when Sahmat’s initial momentum had largely dissipated. Faced by a new art
culture marked by the transnational traffic of global exhibitions, increased mobility
of artists, and the rise of deterritorialized institutional networks, Sahmat appeared
to have exhausted its efficacy. Arguably, the new transnational institutional politics
that emerged in the 2000s was hardly in keeping with Sahmat’s claims to the national
public sphere. For ‘[a]s art gains ever-higher visibility through globalization, the poli-
tics of place – community, country, region, nation, even the margin or exile – tends to
lose the privilege of direct address,’ to use Geeta Kapur’s words.23 In turn, the space
vacated by Sahmat appears now to be in process of being appropriated by civil society
organizations such as the Society for Nutrition Education and Health Action. If we are
to imagine an equitable cartography for contemporary art, it is then imperative that
we respond to and contend with this new phenomenon as we readdress questions of
artistic labor and the ontological status of art in collaborative practices. Reintroduc-
ing the politics of place from within the frameworks of contemporary globalization,
projects such as Ghar Pe demand that we reconnect practice to place – not to recover
an imagined rootedness, the fabled local, but to think of a new ethics for transforma-
tional art practices that are emerging through the politics of locality in the margins.
Perhaps then an entangled landscape of the global, the local, the contemporary, and
the collaborative will erupt onto our conceptual lexicon for collaborative art, demar-
cating an intellectual horizon where multiple spatialities, temporalities, and power
relations can combine. To use Henri Lefebvre’s words, ‘space as a locus of production,
as itself product and production, is both the weapon and the sign of . . . struggle.’24

Notes
1 Typically, houses in Dharavi vary between 100 and 200 square feet and are often shared by
multiple families. Usually, these homes are built incrementally over time using a variety of
recycled materials.
2 The project included nineteen women and only three young men from Dharavi and Santa
Cruz.
3 Grant H. Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global
Context (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 1–10.
4 Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (2004): 51–79; Kes-
ter, The One and the Many, 1–10.
5 Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London:
Verso Books, 2012).
6 See Geeta Kapur, “A Cultural Conjunction in India: Art Into Documentary” and Okwui
Enwezor, “The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Tran-
sition,” in Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity,
ed. Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor, and Nancy Condee (Durham: Duke University Press,
2008), 30–59, 207–234.
7 Arjun Appadurai, “Spectral Housing and Urban Cleansing: Notes on Millennial Mumbai,”
Public Culture 12, no. 3 (2000): 627–651.
8 Camillo Boano, Melissa Garcia Lamarca, and William Hunter, “The Frontlines of Con-
tested Urbanism: Mega-Projects and Mega-Resistances in Dharavi,” Journal of Developing
Societies 27, no. 3–4 (2011): 295–326, 294.
9 See Paula Harper, “The First Feminist Art Program: A View from the 1980s,” Signs 10,
no. 4 (1985): 762–781.
10 Judy Chicago, Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist (New York: Doubleday
and Company, 1975), 113.
11 Jane Blocker, “Woman-House: Architecture, Gender and Hybridity in What’s Eating Gilbert
Grape?” Camera Obscura 13, no. 39 (1996): 126–150, 130.

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 92 Atreyee Gupta
12 Interview with Nandita Kumar, May 12, 2012.
13 Sudha Sundararaman, “Literacy Campaigns: Lessons for Women’s Movement,” Economic
and Political Weekly 31, no. 20 (1996): 1193–1197.
14 Ipshita Chanda, “Feminist Theory in Perspective,” in A Companion to Postcolonial Stud-
ies, ed. Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000), 486–507,
501.
15 Ibid.
16 Susie Tharu and Tejaswini Niranjana, “Problems for a Contemporary Theory of Gender,”
Social Scientist 22, no. 3–4 (1994): 93–117, 112.
17 Cited in Ibid., 114.
18 Ibid., 114.
19 Here I rephrase questions posed by Dipesh Chakrabarty. Chakrabarty writes, “Can thought
transcend places of origin? Or do places leave their imprint on thought in such a way as
to call into question the idea of purely abstract categories?” Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provin-
cializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1997), xiii.
20 As Arindam Dutta notes, “Sahmat’s emergence in 1989 resulted in, numerically speak-
ing, extraordinary participation by the entire breadth of India’s artists, from academy-style
painter to classical singer, from alternative filmmaker to community theatre enthusiast,
from Communist Party griot to small-town photo-journalist.” Arindam Dutta, “Sahmat,
1989–2004 Liberal Art Practice Against the Liberalized Public Sphere,” Cultural Dynamics
17, no. 2 (2005): 193–226, 199.
21 Jessica Moss and Ram Rahman, The Sahmat Collective: Art and Activism in India Since
1989 (Chicago, IL: Smart Museum of Art, 2013), 54.
22 Sunil Khilnani, “The Development of Civil Society” in Civil Society: History and Possi-
bilities, ed. Sudipta Kaviraj and Sunil Khilnani (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001), 11–32, 27.
23 Geeta Kapur, “Sub Terrain: Artworks in the Cityfold,” Third Text 21, no. 3 (2007): 277–
296, 277.
24 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1991), 109.

Works cited
Appadurai, Arjun. “Spectral Housing and Urban Cleansing: Notes on Millennial Mumbai.”
Public Culture 12, no. 3 (2000): 627–651.
Bishop, Claire. “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.” October 110 (2004): 51–79.
Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London:
Verso Books, 2012.
Blocker, Jane. “Woman-House: Architecture, Gender and Hybridity in What’s Eating Gilbert
Grape?” Camera Obscura 13, no. 39 (1996): 126–150.
Boano, Camillo, Melissa Garcia Lamarca, and William Hunter. “The Frontlines of Contested
Urbanism: Mega-Projects and Mega-Resistances in Dharavi.” Journal of Developing Socie-
ties 27, no. 3–4 (2011): 295–326.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference.
New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Chicago, Judy. Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist. New York: Doubleday
and Company, 1975.
Dutta, Arindam. “Sahmat, 1989–2004 Liberal Art Practice Against the Liberalized Public
Sphere.” Cultural Dynamics 17, no. 2 (2005): 193–226.
Harper, Paula. “The First Feminist Art Program: A View from the 1980s.” Signs 10, no. 4
(1985): 762–781.
Kapur, Geeta. “Sub Terrain: Artworks in the Cityfold.” Third Text 21, no. 3 (2007): 277–296.
Kaviraj, Sudipta, and Sunil Khilnani, eds. Civil Society: History and Possibilities. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001.

15031-0199-1pass-r04.indd 92 07-07-2016 15:45:13

 Ghari/Ghar Pe/At Home, Dharavi, Mumbai 93
Kester, Grant H. The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1991.
Moss, Jessica, and Ram Rahman, The Sahmat Collective: Art and Activism in India Since 1989.
Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, 2013.
Schwarz, Henry, and Sangeeta Ray, eds. A Companion to Postcolonial Studies. Malden, MA:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2000.
Smith, Terry, Okwui Enwezor, and Nancy Condee, eds. Antinomies of Art and Culture: Moder-
nity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
Sundararaman, Sudha. “Literacy Campaigns: Lessons for Women’s Movement.” Economic and
Political Weekly 31, no. 20 (1996): 1193–1197.
Tharu, Susie, and Tejaswini Niranjana. “Problems for a Contemporary Theory of Gender.”
Social Scientist 22, no. 3–4 (1994): 93–117.

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