Intersections of ContemporaryArt, Anthropology, and Art History in South Asia: Decoding Visual Worlds

Edited by Sasanka Perera and Dev Nath Pathak
INTERSECTIONS
OF CONTEMPORARY
ART , ANTHROPOLOGY
AND ART HISTORY IN
SOUTH ASIA
Decoding Visual Worlds
Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology
and Art History in South Asia
“Contemporary art is a complicated terrain. Artists everywhere are motivated by a

critical impulse to engage with the ‘here and now,’ and they work like under-cover
anthropologists, sociologists, archaeologists, political scientists, etc. In a scenario
like this, contemporary art demands to be examined, and engaged with protocols
that are beyond art history, art theory and aesthetics. As Sasanka Perera and Dev
Nath Pathak convincingly argue here, if the nuanced nature of contemporary
works of art is to be mapped and the organizational apparatus that makes it possi-
ble in the contemporary world is analyzed, then it must be placed in a wider canvas
of critical engagement informed by disciplines such as sociology and cultural
anthropology, and further, such an approach will transform contemporary art as a
necessary focus of those disciplines. This is a volume that can induce a covert intel-
lectual and political intervention in to the workings of individual eccentricities and
curatorial, institutional and community politics that govern the art world today.”
—Jagath Weerasinghe, Artist and Founding Chair,
Theertha International Artists’ Collective, Sri Lanka
“This is an unusual and vivid account of art and art history where its parameters
are broadened to map its intersections with anthropology, sociology and history.
Art and its crossovers are mapped with a view to enhance its horizon and making
it more nuanced and complex. One of the first of its kind, the volume of essays by
well-known art historians, art practitioners and sociologists, covers the wide arc of
South Asian art from countries, apart from India, like Pakistan and Bangladesh as
well as Sri Lanka and Nepal. The honing of artistic practices to disciplines like
anthropology and sociology makes a valuable contribution to the existing frame-
work of art history.”
—Yashodhara Dalmia, Art Historian and Independent Curator, India
“Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia:

Decoding Visual Worlds attempts to understand the necessary dialogues between
artists and sociologists in the postmodern world. It brings to us contemporary
debates, which interlink art history, sociology, social anthropology and the think-
ing of practitioners. The contributors construct a map of South Asia as one, which
beckons towards intellectual liberation.”
—Susan Vishvanathan, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India
“This is a unique book that brings together scholars from sociology, anthropology,
art history and art practice who critically discuss and debate contemporary art
practices in South Asia. The essays in the book are rich, textured and evocative and
they point to what the editors refer to as the ‘polyphonic intersections’ between art
practice, art history and anthropology/sociology in South Asia. This book will be
of tremendous value to not only students and scholars interested in visual culture,
but also to anyone interested in contemporary art practices in South Asia.”
—Janaki Abraham, Delhi University, India
Sasanka Perera • Dev Nath Pathak
Editors
Intersections
of Contemporary Art,
Anthropology and Art
History in South Asia
Decoding Visual Worlds
Editors
Sasanka Perera Dev Nath Pathak
South Asian University South Asian University
New Delhi, India New Delhi, India
ISBN 978-3-030-05851-7 ISBN 978-3-030-05852-4 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05852-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019931025
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019

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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
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The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
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institutional affiliations.
Cover painting © Dream 3 (detail) by Anoli Perera (2017; 12in x 12in, acrylic, ink, water
color, and printed image on canvas)
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Preface and Acknowledgements
Coming from a formal background in academic sociology and saddled

with a personal and scholarly interest in art, we have often wondered why
our discipline has been so obviously disinterested in contemporary art.
Much of our concerns and the politics of undertaking a book of this kind
have been mapped out in detail in our Introduction. This absence and our
anxiety over it together constitute the point of departure for this book. It
was very clear to us that mainstream sociology in South Asia was unlikely
to undertake such a venture given its almost collective and pervasive per-
ception of art as a ‘soft’ resource devoid of value in terms of data or infor-
mation in narrow sociological terms. In this situation, the question was
how to bring into a mutually sensible and intellectually benefitting conver-
sation a group of sociologists, art historians, and artists focused on the
broad theme, ‘how art might make sense in sociology in reading society
and its politics.’ It appeared to us, in institutional terms, this kind of exer-
cise would only be tolerated in a relatively new academic department such
as ours. That is, though this venture was not a departmental activity as
such, the Sociology Department’s and South Asian University’s lack of an
established conventional approach to knowledge offered the necessary
intellectual space for us to ‘dabble’ in the unconventional.
What we have attempted in the book is to locate contemporary art in
South Asia in the intersections of sociology, social anthropology, history,
biography, and memory in the study of society, politics, and culture.
Obviously, this implies an engagement with works of contemporary art
informed by various disciplinary sources and approaches. We believe the
intersections we have facilitated to emerge in the constituent chapters of
v
vi PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
the book provide a more nuanced intellectual forum to discuss art prac-
tices, works of art, life-worlds of artists, institutional interventions, curato-
rial politics, and the ways in which these issues are embedded in the
evolving politics of the place we call South Asia. In this conversation, our
attempt was not to ‘convert’ our colleagues from diverse disciplines to the
mainstream thinking in sociology to talk about contemporary art. Instead,
we have brought their own perspectives—both disciplinary and political—
to bear upon a broad-based sociological understanding of South Asia.
All this is easier said than done. One of the main hurdles we had to
deal with is the variety of approaches to and styles in writing and explo-
ration this exercise has necessarily allowed to flow into its discursive
space. The way sociologists or anthropologists would look at the world
and write about what they see compared to how an artist or an art his-
torian might do the same thing is significantly different. We have not
attempted to impose a singular narrative approach in how to be a scribe
of society’s travails and politics. We have instead taken these varieties of
seeing and writing as a given, as long as they allow us to travel across the
political and social landscape of South Asia in such a way that would
provide us the space for an informed gaze upon the region’s politics
through contemporary art.
It was not so easy to convince colleagues in the practice of art history
of the significance of the polyphonic intersections that this book envis-
aged unearthing. In the recent past, we had heard many exclamatory
remarks from art historians about sociologists’ ‘interest’ in art. This may
be due to the sacralized disciplinary silos, which do not allow an art his-
torian and an anthropologist to engage with each other’s objects of
enquiry. We would duly thank, in the midst of such challenges, some of
the colleagues who allowed a dialogue, irrespective of the existing regimes
of boundary policing. We have duly acknowledged our interactions with
Iftikhar Dadi and Parul Dave Mukherji in the Introduction as well. And
in the same breath, we would express our gratitude to Roma Chatterji, a
fellow anthropologist who looks at art with adequate seriousness. Her
work has deeply inspired us.
In the difficult task of ensuring the successful completion of this book,
we would like to thank all the writers who have readily contributed chap-
ters as well as the artists and other colleagues who have very enthusiasti-
cally allowed us to use their works of art and materials from their archival
collections. These include Ruby Chishti, Vibha Galhotra, Bandu
Manamperi, Pushpamala, N., Ayisha Abraham and the extensive archives
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii
of the Theertha International Artists’ Collective in Colombo. Binit

Gurung photographed the artworks referred to in his chapter himself as he
traversed through the streets of Kathmandu.
We are thankful to Anoli Perera for giving us permission to reproduce
her work, ‘Dream 3’ from her 2017 exhibition, The City, Janus-Face, in
New Delhi. Finally, we are grateful to Mary Al-Sayed at Palgrave,
New York, for her interest in this book and for ensuring its publication
with a very reasonable period of time. We also acknowledge the profes-
sional help from Poppy Hull, Kyra Saniewski, and other colleagues at
Palgrave at different times in the overall production process.
Finally, let us place on record our gratitude to the two anonymous
reviewers of the manuscript commissioned by Palgrave. The words of
appreciation as well as the critical suggestions of these colleagues helped
considerably in tightening the manuscript.
New Delhi, India Sasanka Perera

1 January 2019
Dev Nath Pathak
Contents
1 Intersections and Implications: When Anthropology, Art

Practice, and Art History Converge 1
Sasanka Perera and Dev Nath Pathak
Section I Contours of Quest: Arts at Crossroad 47
2 Mimicking Anthropologists: Re-Membering a Photo

Archive via Pata Paintings, Performative Mimesis, and
Photo Performance 49
Parul Dave Mukherji
3 Reframing the Contexts for Pakistani Contemporary Art 73

Salima Hashmi and Farida Batool
4 ‘Art’ of Ethnography: Feminist Ethnography and Women

Artists in South Asia 93
Pooja Kalita
ix
x Contents
Section II Political and Aesthetic: Explorations of

Intersections 115
5 Globalisation and Local Anxieties in the Art of

Bangladesh: The Interface of History and the
Contemporary117
Lala Rukh Selim
6 Between Anthropology and History: The Entangled Lives

of Jangarh Singh Shyam and Jagdish Swaminathan139
Sandip K. Luis
7 Toward Blurring the Boundaries in Anthropology:

Reading Jamini Roy Today181
Jyoti
8 Imposed, Interrupted and Other Identities: Rupture as

Opportunity in the Art History of Pakistan205
Niilofur Farrukh
Section III Art for Public: Individual, Institutions, and Issues 221
9 Transcending and Subverting Boundaries: Understanding

the Dynamics of Street Art Scene in Nepal223
Binit Gurung
10 Ruptures of Rasheed Araeen in the Politics of Visual Art:

Toward a New Art Discourse in Pakistan251
Amra Ali
11 Collectivism in the Contemporary Sri Lankan Art: The

History of an Unusual Case of Artists271
Anoli Perera
Index297
Notes on Contributors
Amra Ali is an independent art critic and curator based in Karachi,

Pakistan. She has been contributing reviews and issue-based writings for
newspapers and other publications in Pakistan and internationally since
1990. She was a co-founder and senior editor of NuktaArt, the first inter-
national bi-annual art publication from Pakistan. Her publications include
Homecoming, Rasheed Araeen (2014, VM Gallery, Karachi), and she
curated a retrospective exhibition of Rasheed Araeen’s works by the same
name in 2014–2015 at the VM Gallery.
Farida Batool is an independent artist who explores Pakistan’s political
upheavals and tumultuous history. Her research interests are new media,
masculinity, visual cultural theory, and city and public spaces. She is cur-
rently teaching and heading the Department of Cultural Studies at National
College of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan, and is the author of the book Figure: The
Popular and the Political in Pakistan (2004, ASR Publications, Lahore).
She is an active member of Awami Art Collective, which works in public
spaces.
Parul Dave Mukherji is Professor of Visual Studies and Art History at the
School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi,
India. She holds a PhD from Oxford University and has a parallel research
interest in pre-modern Indian aesthetics and modern/contemporary Indian/
Asian Art. Among her recent articles on aesthetics is ‘Who Is Afraid of
Mimesis? Contesting the Common Sense of Indian Aesthetics Through the
Theory of “Mimesis” or Anukarana Vada’ (in, Arindam Chakrabarti, ed.,
Indian Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, London: Bloomsbury, 2016).
xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Niilofur Farrukh is a Karachi-based art interventionist, whose initiatives

have expanded the space for art publication, curation, and public art. She
co-founded NuktaArt and served as its founder editor for the ten years it
was in publication (2004–2014). Her book Pioneering Perspectives (1998)
focused on pioneer women artists in Pakistan was aimed at countering the
anti-women narrative of the 1980s in her country. She co-curated four
ASNA Clay Triennials to reclaim the craft-art continuum. In 2017, along
with a group of colleagues, she established the Karachi Biennale to intru-
mentalize art to connect a fractured city to itself and the world. Her co-
edited book with John MacCarry and Amin Gulgee The 70s Pakistan’s
Radioactive Decade: An Informal Cultural History of Pakistan is sched-
uled to be published in 2019. At present, she is researching the undocu-
mented art history of Karachi.
Binit Gurung teaches Sociology at Thames International College,
Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, Nepal. He received his MA degree
in Sociology from South Asian University, New Delhi, in 2017.
Salima Hashmi is an artist, curator, and contemporary art historian. She
taught at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan, for 31 years
and was also the Principal of the college for 4 years. She was also the
founding Dean of the School of Art and Design at the Beaconhouse
National University, Lahore, and is at present Professor Emeritus. She has
written extensively on the arts. Her book Unveiling the Visible: Lives and
Works of Women Artists of Pakistan was published in 2002. With Yashodhara
Dalmia, he co-authored Memories, Myths, Mutations: Contemporary Art of
India and Pakistan (2006, Oxford University Press, New Delhi). She
edited The Eye Still Seeks: Contemporary Art of Pakistan (2014, Penguin,
New Delhi). The Government of Pakistan awarded her the President’s
Medal for Pride of Performance for Art Education in 1999. The Australian
Council of Art and Design Schools (ACUADS) nominated her as Inaugural
International Fellow for distinguished service to art and design education
in 2011. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by her alma mater,
Bath Spa University, UK.
Jyoti received her PhD in Sociology from the Department of Sociology,
Delhi School of Economics, and has an interest in visual arts. At p
resent,
she is Assistant Professor in Sociology at Bharati College, University of
Delhi, India.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii
Pooja Kalita is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology, South

Asian University, New Delhi. She broadly works in the area of feminism in
South Asia, politics of visuals in sociology/social anthropology, soci-
ology of food, urban studies, and Assamese modernity.
Sandip K. Luis is an independent researcher and freelance artist based in
Delhi and Kochi, India. He recently submitted his PhD in Visual Studies,
to School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. He has
taught Art History and Aesthetics at various institutions in India and
has published articles on modern and contemporary art.
Dev Nath Pathak teaches Sociology at South Asian University, New
Delhi, and is editor of Society and Culture in South Asia, co-published bi-
annually by Sage India and South Asian University. Among his recent pub-
lications are Living and Dying: Meanings in Maithili Folklore (Primus,
New Delhi, 2018), Culture and Politics in South Asia: Performative
Communication (co-edited with Sasanka Perera, Routledge, 2017),
Another South Asia! (Primus, 2018), and Sociology and Social Anthropology
in South Asia: Histories and Practices (co-edited with Ravi Kumar and
Sasanka Perera, Orient BlackSwan, 2018).
Anoli Perera is an artist, art writer, and curator based in Colombo, Sri
Lanka, and New Delhi, India. Her work mostly focuses on themes of
memory, female identity, and urban space. At present, she concentrates on
installations, photo performances, and collage as her preferred means
of expression. She is a Founding Director of Theertha International
Artists’ Collective, Colombo, Sri Lanka, and is its General Secretary.
Sasanka Perera is Professor of Sociology and Vice President at South
Asian University, New Delhi. He is editor in chief of Society and Culture
in South Asia, co-published bi-annually by Sage India and South Asian
University. Among his recent publications are Artists Remember; Artists
Narrate: Memory and Representation in Contemporary Sri Lankan Visual
Arts (Colombo Institute, Colombo, 2011), Violence and the Burden of
Memory: Remembrance and Erasure in Sinhala Consciousness (Orient
BlackSwan, New Delhi, 2015), and Warzone Tourism in Sri Lanka:
Tales from Darker Places in Paradise (Sage, New Delhi, 2016).
Lala Rukh Selim is a sculptor and Professor of Sculpture at the University
of Dhaka, Bangladesh. She was editor of ‘Art and Crafts’ of the Cultural
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Survey of Bangladesh Series (Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, Dhaka, 2007)

and Art: A Quarterly Journal (Dhaka, 1994 to 2004), and a lead partner
for the Dhaka University in the seven-year-long (2010–2017) education
exchange program between the Slade School of Fine Art, University
College London, UK, and the Faculty of Fine Art, Dhaka University.
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 Barrel Installation by Chandraguptha Thenuwara, Colombo,

Sri Lanka. (Photograph courtesy of Theertha International
Artists’ Collective Archives) 20
Fig. 1.2 I Dreamt a Space Without Me by Ruby Chisti, Gadani,
Pakistan. (Photograph courtesy of Ruby Chisti) 20
Fig. 1.3 Breath by Breath. Photo-performance by Vibha Galhotra, New
Delhi, India. (Photograph courtesy of Vibha Galhotra) 21
Fig. 1.4 Dead Fish. Performance by Bandu Manamperi, Colombo, Sri
Lanka. (Photograph courtesy of Theertha International Artists’
Collective Archives) 21
Fig. 2.1 Ayisha Abraham and Pushpamala seeing a scroll on the local
goddess Manasa, in the company of Dukhshyam Chitrakar on
the left, Naya Village, Midnapore, 1985. (Photo courtesy of
Parul Dave Mukherji) 51
Fig. 2.2 Pushpamala and Parul Dave Mukherji sipping coconut water
in front of a vegetable shop in Naya Village, Midnapore, 1985.
(Photo Courtesy of Ayisha Abraham) 51
Fig. 2.3 Pushpamala and Parul Dave Mukherji seeing a scroll sitting in
front of a thatched hut with two children from the patua
community, Naya Village, Midnapore, West Bengal, India,
1985. (Photo Courtesy of Ayisha Abraham) 58
Fig. 2.4 Pushpamala and Parul Dave Mukherji sitting in front of a
thatched hut with Dukhshyam and his extended family of scroll
painters, Naya Village, Midnapore, West Bengal, India, 1985.
(Photo Courtesy of Ayisha Abraham) 59
xv
xvi List of Figures
Fig. 2.5 The documentation scroll painted by Dukhshyam in 2015.

The opening frame showing Pushpamala holding the camera,
Ayisha Abraham, and Parul Dave Mukherji in Gulam Sheikh’s
Studio in the Painting Department, Baroda, taking his leave to
embark upon the Train Journey to Naya Village, Midnapore,
West Bengal, India, 1985. (Photo courtesy of Parul Dave
Mukherji)62
Fig. 2.6 Dukhshyam Chitrakar, The documentation scroll. Our arrival
in Calcutta and our negotiations with the city traffic to catch a
bus to visit the Naya Village, Midnapore, West Bengal, India,
1985. (Photo courtesy of Parul Dave Mukherji) 63
Fig. 2.7 Dukhshyam Chitrakar, The documentation scroll. Our arrival
in Calcutta and our negotiations with the city traffic to catch a
bus to visit the Naya Village, Midnapore, West Bengal, India,
1985. (Photo courtesy of Parul Dave Mukherji) 64
Fig. 2.8 Dukhshyam Chitrakar, The documentation scroll. Parul Dave
Mukherji taking a class on the story of a painted scroll or Pata
Katha at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru
University, New Delhi. (Photo courtesy of Parul Dave
Mukherji)65
Fig. 2.9 Dukhshyam Chitrakar, The documentation scroll. The closing
frame showing Parul Dave Mukherji, Pushpamala, and Ayisha
Abraham, showing the photos of the documentation trip to
Gulam Sheikh in his studio in the Painting Department,
Baroda, in 1985. (Photo courtesy of Parul Dave Mukherji) 66
Fig. 2.10 N. Pushpamala, The Ethnographic Series, Native Women of
South India, Photo-Performance, 2004. (Photo courtesy of
N. Pushpamala)70
Fig. 2.11 A detail of Pushpamala in front of a thatched hut with
Dukhshyam and his extended family of scroll painters, Naya
Village, Midnapore, West Bengal, India, 1985. (Photo
courtesy of N. Pushpamala) 71
Fig. 4.1 Dinner for Six: Inside Out by Anoli Perera. (Photograph
courtesy of Anoli Perera) 102
Fig. 4.2 I Let My Hair Loose: Protest Series (2010–2011) by Anoli
Perera. (Photo courtesy of Anoli Perera) 107
Fig. 9.1 Mural by Rupesh Raj Sunuwar. (Photography by Binit Gurung) 233
Fig. 9.2 Mural by Dibyeshwor Gurung. (Photography by Binit Gurung) 238
Fig. 9.3 Mural by Julien de Casabianca. (Photography by Binit Gurung) 241
Fig. 9.4 Mural by Artlab. (Photography by Binit Gurung) 243
List of Figures xvii
Fig. 11.1 Dinner Table, 2004. Installation by Sanath Kalubadana, an

artist who worked with Theertha. (Photograph courtesy of
Theertha Archives) 277
Fig. 11.2 History of Histories, 2004. Installation by R. Vasanthini,
K.S. Kumutha, K. Tamilini, S. Kannan and T. Shanaathanan
in collaboration with people from Jaffna at Aham-Puram
exhibition sponsored by Theertha in Jaffna, Northern Sri
Lanka. (Photograph courtesy of Theertha Archives) 278
Fig. 11.3 The Barrel Man, 2004. Performance by Theertha artist, Bandu
Manamperi. (Photograph courtesy of Theertha Archives) 279
Fig. 11.4 Snakes and Mikes, 2007. Painting by Theertha artist, Jagath
Weerasinghe. (Photograph courtesy of Theertha Archives) 280
CHAPTER 1
Intersections and Implications: When

Anthropology, Art Practice, and Art
History Converge
Sasanka Perera and Dev Nath Pathak
Many insightful reflections from history and philosophy of art could be

stitched together to engender an anxious train of thinking not only about
art as a process and cultural product but also about its relevance in reading
society and politics. Among numerous articulations on the commonsense
of art, we often hear that there cannot be a formulaic vantage point to
judge art, that art is essentially about a mode of experiential expression or
an expression of blissful imagination and therefore is embedded in a field
of subjectivism. Within this popular commonsense, a sociologist might
deem these relationships and conditions too messy to decipher in a way
that would make sociological sense. Such a pronounced absence of art in
sociology and anthropology and anxieties about art’s reliability in reading
society and its politics are the foundation of this book.
At times, oscillating between the sublime and the ridiculous, the bones
of dead and living ideologies and utopias begin to fall from studio
S. Perera (*) • D. N. Pathak

South Asian University, New Delhi, India
e-mail: sasankaperera@soc.sau.ac.in; dev@soc.sau.ac.in
© The Author(s) 2019 1

S. Perera, D. N. Pathak (eds.), Intersections of Contemporary Art,
Anthropology and Art History in South Asia,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05852-4_1
2 S. PERERA AND D. N. PATHAK
c upboards; regimes of exhibitionism and commerce of culture too join in

the list, and the tales of art and art practices, become more telling than one
can anticipate. And in this wake, it becomes self-evident how some social
science disciplines have successfully and adamantly remained distant from
intellectually engaging with art in general and contemporary art in par-
ticular. Sociology, social anthropology, political science, international rela-
tions, and history stand testimony to this situation globally, barring a
handful of exceptions. In this scheme of things, monopolizing disciplinary
interest in contemporary art has become the preserve of art history and
curatorial practices. As a result of this discursive void, art, and the politics,
it generates stand in the gulf between class and mass, art and craft, studio
and gallery, street and art fare. And in that gulf, what art can say and what
art becomes in social and political terms beyond their aesthetics have
become inaudible. It is in this kind of void that the anxious but simple
questions posed on art and politics by Das provide an initial signpost
towards what direction we should travel in our own thoughts. He won-
ders, “when we wedge ourselves between politics and aesthetics, bravely
imaging that we have an enabling concept in such an art, what indeed do
we want art to achieve?” (Das 2010: 11). Indeed, does art end with a
sense of aesthetic and satisfaction and commercial success? Or, should it
travel to the realms of cultural production and discursive practices such as
sociology? Or, as Das further wonders, “if politics is about constraining
the choices of others, what is art?” (Ibid.: 11). Indeed, art can be stifling
too. But it is also enabling in reading society if one is adequately percep-
tive to work out how and when to situate contemporary art in reading the
politics of contemporary social processes. It is in such a context of engage-
ment with art and politics that Turner and Webb have attempted to make
a case for art’s implication in discourses of human rights (Turner and
Webb 2016: 15). Their argument is, whether artists opt to directly engage
with evolving political crises or maintain a distance from such turmoil,
they remain a part of a cultural system, “and in presenting a particular set
of images and attitudes, will necessarily reflect something about the lived
world” in which they are a part (Turner and Webb 2016: 15).
Contemporary art of the kind we focus on in this book needs to be
understood as fundamentally a secular discourse (Zitzewitz 2014: 15).
But within discourse, the complexity of artists’ practice acquires different
meanings in their dealings with various artistic, religious, and political sub-
jectivities which in turn are also linked to their individual social identities
as well as historical experiences (Zitzewitz 2014: 15).
INTERSECTIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: WHEN ANTHROPOLOGY, ART… 3
Seen in this sense, art can open up discursive possibilities beyond the
delimiting aesthetics and commerce of art, which are of interest to us.
Paradoxically, it is in the art world that a perpetual mutuality of class and
mass unfolds in spite of curatorial politics of inclusion and exclusion. Then,
why most dominant practices of social sciences shy away from the abun-
dance of clues, data, narratives, hypotheses, and research questions that
surface in the art world. This stands tall as an intriguing question worth
dealing with. It is perhaps of the perceived “‘impurity’ of art” or due to the
‘excesses’ and or the possible ‘false movement’ of images that undervalue
their truth and capacity to enhance experience” (Das 2010: 11). When we
attempt to address this absence, we would mostly do so within our own
disciplinary domains of sociology and social anthropology.
It is a somewhat baffling question why the extended domain of con-
temporary painting, sculpture, performance art, and installation has not
become an area of consistent interest for those who formally practice social
anthropology and sociology. This is particularly the case in South Asia
even though the situation beyond the region is only marginally different.1
One may wonder whether the reason for this absence is due to method-
ological or theoretical limitations that are inherent in the dominant
approaches of anthropology and sociology.2 But a self-reflective explora-
tion would suggest that any methodological limitation is the result of the
self-induced fear of the visual rather than any inherent limitations as such
in either sociology or social anthropology.3 With anthropology, the prob-
lem historically has been its evolution into what Margaret Mead has called
1
A sense of this divide exists in other parts of the world too. At times one hopes about a
possible bridge across this divide that might lead to a hybrid field of art practice. See
Schneider and Wright (2013).
2
We dwell upon a collective exploration on the limits and possibilities in sociology and
social anthropology in South Asia in Ravi Kumar, Dev Nath Pathak, and Sasanka Perera eds.,
Sociology and Social Anthropology in South Asia: Histories and Practices (Orient Blackswan,
New Delhi, 2018).
3
In our perception, the situation in academic sociology is no different. In fact, we do not
find it useful to maintain the spurious division between sociology and social anthropology in
the present project as well as in the way we see the world around us. The unison of sociology
and social anthropology in postcolonial South Asia appears in some of our other pursuits,
such as op cit Kumar et al. We have dealt with the anxieties of the visual in social sciences with
a focus on visual, performance, and other cultural expressions more clearly in Pathak and
Perera eds., Culture and Politics in South Asia: Performative Communication (Routledge,
London, 2017).
a “discipline” or “science of words” (Mead 1995: 3, 5). Even though her

ideas were mostly articulated in the context of film, what she outlines in
her essay, ‘Visual Anthropology in a Discipline of Words’ (1995) resonates
with the broader context of visuality’s location in anthropology as well.
Her critique had to do with what she perceived as the discipline’s resis-
tance to visual approaches because it clung “to verbal descriptions when so
many better ways of recording aspects of culture have become available”
(Mead 1995: 5). The obvious limitation in Mead’s argument is that she
saw visuality, and in her case photography and film, merely in a simple
utilitarian manner as technical devices for data gathering, instead of seeing
visuality as a possible central focus of research or a broader kind of dis-
course. Banks notes, though “social researchers encounter images con-
stantly”, it is not an exaggeration that in social sciences in general and
sociology and anthropology in particular, “there is no room for pictures,
except as supporting characters” (Banks 2001: 1–2). In other words,
images have become mere decorative icons or at best supportive secondary
signs to what the written text alludes to. This emanates from the reality
that visuality, as a matter of method, research, or discourse, has not been
contemplated seriously enough in sociology and anthropology.
What Mead and Banks have noted with regard to anthropology’s deal-
ings with visuality reflects similarly upon sociology as well though sociol-
ogy’s encounter with visuality is far more marginal. Anthropology at least
had a longer encounter with imagery from the colonial period onwards,
particularly with regard to film and photography and the discipline’s inter-
est in ‘primitive’ forms of art in the larger scheme of ethnography. This
kind of affinity with imagery or art is much less pronounced when it comes
to sociology. Schnettler, writing with particular reference to sociology’s
encounter with photography, notes that the discipline did not clearly
“develop an intimate relationship with photography” (Schnettler 2013: 42).
In the same sense, sociology’s relationship with other forms of visuality
more generally is also less pronounced compared to earlier phases of social
anthropology. It is in this kind of context that any interests in the visual in
both sociology and social anthropology have been expelled to the sub-
disciplinary domains of visual anthropology and visual sociology. In effect,
this expulsion and voluntary exile on the part of those interested in visual-
ity within the two disciplines have kept the mainstreams of both sociology
and anthropology ‘cleansed’ of possible pollutants from the ‘subjectivities’
visuality might have engendered in the course of research.
It is in this kind of context, we learn from informal accounts of sociolo-

gists and anthropologists in the region about the dismissive gatekeepers
ridiculing research proposals on thematic issues on art, cultural politics,
performance, folklore, literature, and so on based on the somewhat liminal,
reductionist, and unimaginative argument that these are not adequately
“sociological” or “anthropological”. Particularly in the conventional aca-
demic landscape in South Asia, how many young sociologists and social
anthropologists are encouraged to undertake research on cultural expres-
sions, art practices, regimes of visuals, and visuality? In general experience,
in the biographies of scholars, there comes a moment of realization of a
clear existence of a not-so-discrete hierarchy of research areas and interests
and resultant modes of scholarship in the mainstream of anthropology and
sociology. Political sociology and studies on social stratification, issues of
caste, class, ethnicity, violence, and gender, or for that matter other the-
matic areas popularized by national-international funding agencies that
vary from conflict resolution to conflict transformation, ride roughshod
over other areas such as culture in general and visual arts in particular
despite a longstanding argument in social sciences on the integral relation
of culture and politics.
This predetermined and ill-debated understanding of what sociology
and social anthropology ought to be has negatively impacted numerous
possibilities for intellectual development in these disciplines in South Asia.4
That is, this inherent intellectual conservatism of the disciplines has
stunted many potentially creative avenues of research. It is in this context
we can understand why a more robust and a theoretically nuanced sociol-
ogy of contemporary art and visual culture has not yet emerged in any
degree of seriousness within contemporary sociology. And this state of
affairs supports the seeming fear of the visual, coupled with a method-
ological uncertainty—on how to deal with the uncertainty or seeming
instability of the visual and visuality in the relatively certainty-obsessed
sociology and social anthropology. This is unfortunate since there has also
been a realization through heated debates that sociology as well as anthro-
pology entails poetics, particularly in the ways ethnography is crafted. In
fact, as the ‘writing culture’ debate in the 1980s and its aftermath have
indicated, anthropologists became “more self-conscious than ever before
that they are writers” (Marcus 1986: 162). Here, being writers also meant
4
See Kumar et al. (2018).
carrying a certain self-conscious expression of imagination and creativity

in writing within anthropology. In these general circumstances, the
‘literariness’ of what was published in the name of anthropology became
much more important than the processes of research itself including field-
work, which enabled this discursive result. To be more precise, this situa-
tion in social anthropology came about due to two interconnected reasons.
That is, the clear interest in literary approaches seen generally across
human sciences on one hand, and the pronounced interest in literary the-
ory and practice evident in the work of a number of important anthro-
pologists such as Claude Levi-Strauss, Victor Turner, Clifford Geertz,
Mary Douglas, and others (Clifford 1986: 3). In their own characteristic
ways, they have “blurred the boundary separating art from science”
(Clifford 1986: 3). But this sense of creativity, imagination, and ‘art’ with
regard to writing clearly did not extend to the realm of visuals in
anthropology.
When it comes to South Asia, even this realization of sociological or
ethnographic texts as carriers of a sense of imagination and creativity exists
only in the margins of the mainstream disciplines. It is in the context of
this methodological, thematic, and theoretical conservatism of sociology
and anthropology in South Asia Perera had wondered, “can’t we re-visit
our overdependence on Marx and Foucault as well as an almost pathologi-
cal obsession with caste, class and now gender in sociology and social
anthropology? Is it impossible to find new objects to interrogate which
might allow us to rethink our theory as well as the nature of research and
knowledge themselves?” (Perera 2014: xxii–xxiii). This conventional
background provides us the reasons for “why visual culture and particu-
larly painting, sculpture and installation in our region have not moved
beyond art history into areas such as international relations, political sci-
ence and sociology” (Perera 2014: xx). But this is not an absence peculiar
to South Asia alone. It is also global, and is based on the subjectivities art
and cultural products in general are supposed to be infected with. Speaking
at Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs in Paris in 1980, Pierre
Bourdieu as an established sociologist noted, “sociology and art do not
make good bedfellows” (Bourdieu 1995: 139). His explanation for this
apparent lack of cohesion between art and sociology suggests that it was
“the fault of art and artists” “because the universe of art is a universe of
belief, belief in gifts, in the uniqueness of the uncreated creator, and the
intrusion of the sociologist, who seeks to understand, explain, account for
what he finds, is a source of scandal” (Bourdieu 1995: 139). In other
words, in the field of apparent subjectivities and plains of imagination

within which art supposedly operated, it was not possible for art to be
reduced to reliable sociological facts. This was the ‘fault’ of art, which
made it unreliable for sociology. This is why, in Bourdieu’s opinion, soci-
ologists were affectively keen on expelling artists from the history of art if
they were to deal with art (Bourdieu 1995: 139). That is, to remove the
sources of seeming instability in analysis.
But Bourdieu also explains this state of affairs as a lapse on the part of
sociology as well. One of the most crucial aspects of his explanations sug-
gests, “sociology and its favored instrument, statistics – belittle and
crushes, flattens and trivializes artistic creation” (Bourdieu 1995: 139).
Though he was speaking with regard to sociology in particular, the way in
which art is viewed by social sciences in general is not that different. Even
though that perception may not only come from the reductionist analysis
offered by statistics, it does come from a narrow understanding of ‘sci-
ence’ or what might be called scientism.
However, without concerning ourselves too much about the vexed
margin and the overestimated strength of the core, we operate with the
conviction of exploring manifold intersections in this book, in order to
develop an understanding in the intellectual twilight where sources do not
become sacred or taboo. In short, we do not ask about the sources of an
understanding vis-à-vis disciplinary orthodoxy. Instead, we ask how vari-
ous disciplines come together to aid in developing an understanding.
It is in this contesting backdrop that this book attempts to stitch
together discussions from scholars in sociology, anthropology, art history,
and art practice to explore the politics and poetics, structures of interpre-
tative possibilities, and discursive implications of contemporary art in
South Asia. By doing so, the book locates artworks and art practices in the
intersections of sociology, anthropology, history, biography, and memory
in the study of society, politics, and culture. This implies an engagement
with works of contemporary art and the multiple contexts of their produc-
tion, consumption, and their embedded memories informed by various
disciplinary sources. The book envisages these intersections to provide a
more nuanced premise for discussions on art practices, works of art, life
worlds of artists, institutional interventions, curatorial politics and so on.
In the scheme of these intersections, as it were, each chapter in the book
emphasizes, while deliberating specifics (cases, mediums, artworks, artists,
and interpretative messages), the imperative of conversations beyond dis-
ciplinary boundaries. Each chapter, in this scheme, is thus in tangential yet
vivid dialogue with others, enriching the understanding of contemporary

art as well as the politics of the social formations within which they emerge.
The relevance of this endeavor arises from manifold issues. One, as
briefly mentioned above, is about a critical revisiting and reformulating of
the disciplinary framework of sociology and social anthropology. This is a
much-felt intellectual necessity of our times, but has so far manifested only
in terms of exceptions, which are few and far between.5 Though there is
acknowledgement of the imperatives for pushing disciplinary boundaries
to engage with art, artists, art-networks, and artistic practices, there is lit-
tle evidence of this being executed in any concrete sense in the sociology
and anthropology of South Asia.
Triggers on the Terrain of Thought

A clear realization of the need to make conscious efforts in this direction
arose via two occasions of intersecting intellectual interests, crisscrossing
disciplines at South Asian University. The first trigger was a talk at the
South Asian University in 2013 on ‘Art and the Visual Public Sphere in
Pakistan’6 by art historian and artist, Iftikhar Dadi. Dadi took the audience
and interlocutors on a fascinating visual tour of Pakistan’s public visual
landscape via the on-site street paintings by artist Naiza Khan7 in Karachi,
and the proliferation of popular works in the form of posters and postcards
carrying the image of deposed Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein.8 The theme
and the talk stimulated the anthropologists in the audience to formulate
5
In the present scenario, Christopher Pinney and Roma Chatterji are among the excep-
tional few approaching visuals of aesthetic significance within an anthropological sensibility,
among others, who have shown the relevance of arts as areas of investigation transgressing
the works of art themselves and venturing into domains of social sciences. These others
include Tapati Guha Thakurta, Sumathi Ramaswamy, Geeta Kapoor, Jagath Weerasinghe,
Iftikhar Dadi, and Salima Hashmi. Interestingly, prior to ‘filed work’ becoming an anthropo-
logical fetish, one of the pioneers of Indian sociology/anthropology, Radhakamal Mukherjee
wrote the interesting text, The Culture and Art of India (Mushiram Manoharlal Publisher)
in the broader South Asian context. But Mukherjee’s interests have not been followed-up in
the practices of post-independent anthropology and sociology in South Asia.
6
Lecture organized by the Department of Sociology, South Asian University as part of the
‘Reading South Asia Lecture Series 2013’ on 26 August 2013.
7
For more information on the work of Naiza Khan, please visit http://naizakhan.com/
(accessed 19 August 2018).
8
For more information on the discussion on Naiza Khan’s artwork in public space and the
Sadam Hussein poster phenomenon, see Dadi (2009).
some questions bridging what appeared to be disciplinary gaps between

art history and anthropology. These questions were: why Naiza Khan had
opted to venture into the turbulent streets of Karachi away from the safety
and comfort of her studio, and how a figure such as Saddam Hussein,
historically relatively unknown in Pakistan, had suddenly become so popu-
lar, and why his image was at times depicted in a religious context when
Hussein was not known to be religiously oriented within the stream of
politics he engendered as part of the political agenda of the Ba’ath Party,
which he headed? Dadi had pushed open the windows on these questions
for which the anthropologists in the audience sought comprehensive
answers. In our mind, this seemed to offer the possibilities for a more
complete, engaged and nuanced narrative about these artworks, the pro-
cesses that enabled them as well as the broader contexts of their produc-
tion and consumption and finally their narrative potential in terms of
evolving local politics. The question that emerged in our mind sought to
see art more clearly in conjunction with politics, culture, and other social
complexities, to say the least, expecting a series of disciplinary departures.
Prior to this encounter, in the context of the exhibition titled, Lines of
Control, Dadi and Nasar (2012) has reflected on the intersecting biogra-
phy of the artist, in this case Dadi himself and his works of art. With refer-
ence to his two works9 in the exhibition, which Dadi co-curated with
Hammad Nasar, he underlines the ‘tangled legacies’ of the artists’, “undis-
ciplined practice that refuse to be contained by institutional or disciplinary
protocols and therefore able to provide new insights into our predica-
ments” (Dadi and Nasar 2012: 20). Some of these issues figure promi-
nently in the discussions in the chapters in this book.
What Dadi and Nasar has described as a thematic in Lines of Control
(2012) is evident in reflections on contemporary visual arts in Sri Lanka too.
The complex interplay of personal biographies and social and political his-
tory, individual and collective memories, cultural and political stimulus
comes to the surface in discussions on contemporary visual art in Sri Lanka.10
It is in this context that Weerasinghe, with reference to ‘the art of the 90s’
9
The works are titled Muslims are meat-eaters, they prefer food containing salt. Hindus on
the other hand prefer a sweet taste and I at least, have never seen or heard of such wonderful
people. For more details, see the essay by Iftikhar Dadi and Hammad Nasar, in the catalog,
Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space. New York: Cornell University Herbert
F. Johnson Museum of Art, 2012.
10
For more details on this, see Weerasinghe (2005) and Perera (2016).
identifies two important thematic preoccupations. These are, “works that

investigates the self, and the sense of being of individuals who have been
victimized and frustrated as a consequence of organized violence” on one
hand and “works that investigates the allure as well as the frustrations of the
city as an artistic expression” on the other (Weerasinghe 2005: 15–40). One
can argue, both these trends are biographical because these themes visually
express personal experiences of artists as individuals in society as well as their
more general collective experiences as a particular generation (Perera 2016:
212). Art of the 1990s are impregnated with politics, which goes much
beyond their aesthetics and materiality with regard to meaning-making.
Besides, most of these artists considered themselves ‘political artists’ due to
the somewhat obvious political and interventionist agenda of their work
(Weerasinghe 2005; Perera 2016). It is this self-conscious engagement with
politics that offer a specific identity to the artists of this period, which also
marks this genre of art from earlier forms of art-making (Perera 2016: 212).
Weerasinghe perceives these individuals as a “new generation of artists
equipped with a range of new ideas and concepts of art, themes for artistic
investigation and, especially, with an understanding of the idea of the artist
as a political individual” (Weerasinghe 2005: 183).
In a somewhat different way, the biographies as well as the artworks of
women artists in Pakistan as described by Salima Hashmi (2002) further
elaborate the narrative possibilities in the broader reading of politics in
Pakistan. The history of women who received a training in art in the 1940s
would indicate that this training was expected to “enhance the natural
proclivities of women” that would make them better ‘home decorators’
and “nurture the finer sensibilities expected of mothers, wives and daugh-
ters” (Hashmi 2002: 7). It was in this context that the Department of Fine
Arts at Punjab University was exclusively reserved for women. They were
not expected to be independent and professional artists in this situation,
but art teachers at best. And it took a considerable time for what was
begun as safe educational conduit for women to transform into a “vehicle
for communication and expression in the public domain, and paved the
way for personal and cultural insurrections” (Hashmi 2002: 7). In other
words, a biographical exploration of women in art in the 1940s and 1950s
would clearly place in context the realities of gender relations in Pakistan
as well as women’s position in these relationships. But between the late
1970s and late 1980s, women had not only become fully-fledged artists,
but their work also creatively took on the challenges put up by martial law
as evident in their personal biographies and work produced (Hashmi
2002: 91–144).
The focus on biography of artists as well as art’s relationships with the

broader world is crucial if art is to inform sociology. But it is also necessary
to broaden this focus as well. As Bourdieu has noted, “the sociology of
cultural products must take as its object the whole set of relationships
(objective ones and also those effected in the form of interaction) between
the artist and other artists, and beyond them, the whole set of agents
engaged in the production of work, or, at least, of the social value of the
work (critics, gallery directors, patrons etc)”11 (Bourdieu 1995: 141). For
him, sociology of works of art needs to take the entire field of cultural
production into account as well as the relationship between this field and
the field of consumers. In other words, art would make sense in sociology
if it can weave a narrative that would span beyond the limited frame of an
artwork and embrace larger political and social situations within which
they are created. This is what he means when he notes, “the social deter-
minism of which the work of art bears the traces, are exerted partly
through the producer’s habitus” (Bourdieu 1995: 141). Habitus, in this
sense, extends from the artists’ personal circumstances to their location in
society at a specific temporal moment. So despite Bourdieu’s suspicion of
art as sociological facts in the way they are generally considered, what he
outlines as ‘sociology of works of art’ (as outlined above) is an invitation
to ensure that art becomes more legible and more reliable in sociological
terms. That is, instead of looking at art and sociology in the conventional
sense, which does not allow for a dialogue, he hints at a path, which might
usher in art to the centrality of sociological readings of society, politics,
and culture.
But contemporary art everywhere, and as evident in South Asia as well,
throws up a number of hurdles in communication and representation,
which can be challenging to the discourse of meaning they are supposed
to generate. As Ali has noted with regard to contemporary Pakistani art,
visiting a gallery itself could be intimidating to a normal person, while
“new media art forms like assemblage, performance, video and installa-
tion” could add to the complexity of viewing and comprehending (Ali
2011). Unlike much of pre-abstract modernist art or even pre-modern
forms of art in South Asia like religious art, contemporary works such as
installations can be “ephemeral, site-specific arrangements of objects that
you can walk around, into and through to experience their message” Ali
2011: 7). But precisely due to the complexity of arrangement and their
Emphasis in the original.

11
vast deviation from what is considered art generally, the meanings embed-
ded in these could easily be lost. This becomes a significant issue if this
kind of art is meant to go beyond aesthetics and the market into the realms
of politics and social transformation. In other words, they can alienate
viewers (Ali 2011: 7). Though Ali has described this seeming disconnect
between contemporary art and ordinary people with regard to Pakistan,
the situation is much the same in India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka with
regard to the same kind of work. How does one deal with this rupture in
representation when art at one level is not only supposed to make meaning
but also transmit such meanings?
If contemporary art is to inform the craft of sociology, then, in addition
to taking into consideration the broader contexts of its production and
consumption as suggested by Bourdieu, it will also be necessary to take
into account the meanings embedded in a given artwork. And these mean-
ings must be able to create a discourse; they cannot be imprisoned within
an artwork, which would always need the mediation of its creator to deci-
pher its meanings. This is why the biography and the habitus of an artist
as well as the larger context in which it is located are of significant impor-
tance. Such a broad canvass would allow much more nuanced space for
these meanings to manifest. Of course, one can argue, this is what art
history already does to some extent. But if sociology or anthropology
looks at art in this manner, the canvass that might unfold becomes much
larger, and its analytic possibilities get further entrenched as social and
political analysis inherent in these disciplines naturally flows into art. This
kind of privileging of art and their creators however is not a matter of
equalizing the agency of artists with regard to their work and their loca-
tion in society and within discourse. It is in such a context that Preziosi
and Farago argue for the re-consideration of the transformative power of
artists when they suggest, “the agency assigned to the artist could vary
according to who is speaking, to whom and to what purpose” (2012: 28).
That is, the political power available to the artists considered in the reflec-
tions by Dadi, Weerasinghe, and Hashmi in Pakistan and Sri Lanka would
be very different to yet others whose voices are less audible and their work
less visible. However, it is conceivable that art as well as other forms of
culture and forms of formal knowledge “has a crucial role to play in the
realm of politics, in the domain of discourse and within the vistas of our
conscience” (Perera 2014: xx). If so, they also can have a legitimate pres-
ence in the discourses of social sciences beyond art history. In this sense,
what Dadi and Hashmi have described for Pakistan and Weerasinghe for
Sri Lanka are clear examples of the discursive potential of contemporary

art in the region, which ideally should be of interest to sociology and
anthropology in their intellectual pursuits in reading society.
The second trigger is a conversation with art historian Parul Dave
Mukherji (one of the contributors to this book) on the intersections of
sociology, art, and art history. One of the themes that emerged quite
clearly in this conversation was the manner in which some contemporary
visual artists have resorted to what has been termed an ‘ethnographic turn’
in art practice.12 As initially outlined in his important essay, ‘The Artist as
Ethnographer?’ (1995), what Hal Foster referred to by the term ‘ethno-
graphic turn’ in contemporary art were the intriguing similarities with
anthropology in general and ethnographic research more specifically that
was evident in selected post-1990s art practices. That is, such similarities
manifested in the way artists as well as curators utilized research and theo-
rization and the ways in which they dealt with cultural differences and
politics of representation in their artistic endeavors.
More specifically, as Rutten et al. have pointed out, Lan Tuazon, Nikki
S. Lee, Bill Viola, Francesco Clemente, Jimmy Durham, Susan Hiller, and
other such artists share with anthropologists a concerted interest in the
‘politics of representation’ (Rutten et al. 2013: 459). Similarly, the main
aim of the 2003 conference titled ‘Fieldworks’ organized at the Tate
Modern was to provide a space for artists and anthropologists to reflect
“on their respective uses of fieldwork and to explore possible convergen-
ces” (Rutten et al. 2013: 459). In the same vein, in 2012, two exhibitions
held in Paris brought the convergences between art and anthropology,
enhancing the artists’ focus (Rutten et al. 2013: 459). The exhibition,
‘Masters of Chaos’ dealt specifically with “anthropological artefacts” in
the context of new artworks (Rutten et al. 2013: 460). Comparatively, the
exhibition, ‘La Triennale’ was based on the theme, “intense proximity”
and attempted to “unlearn the notion that ethnography is necessarily
‘bad’” (Rutten et al. 2013: 459).
What became apparent to us was that the more dominant of these con-
versations had taken place within contemporary art, and to a much lesser
extent in anthropology or sociology. In South Asia, these conversations had
not touched sociology and anthropology at all, while a number of artists
12
See Pathak (2016). In the larger context, there has been a realization about the ethno-
graphic turn in art practice and sharedness of what is typically called fieldwork in anthropol-
ogy; see Schneider and Wright (2010).
were actively engaging in these kinds of convergences in their art-making

without necessarily being aware of these debates. Their work seemed more
an accident than the result of a self-conscious ‘ethnographic turn’. But how
could anthropology itself reflect upon this specific trend? Can art inform
the practice of anthropology or sociology in the same way other social facts
such as caste, class, or politics do? That is, is it not possible to think of a
‘visual arts turn’ in sociology or anthropology? This is in addition to shared
thematic issues between the art world and social sciences in general that
could summon specific sharedness of enquiries even though such efforts
are at present clearly absent on the ground. But these are questions that
have not yet been posed in South Asian sociology.
What this conversation made us realize more clearly is the nature of the
deafening silence with regard to these issues in mainstream sociology and
anthropology in the region. We suggest that part of the problem is that
the region’s social sciences in general have not clearly understood the nar-
rative and research potential of contemporary art because they have failed
to understand the discursive nature of this art in the first place. Arts and
aesthetics have been kept out of the domain of research and reflection in
social sciences; contemporary South Asian social sciences have hardly ven-
tured into thinking of what art actually looks like in contemporary con-
texts (Perera 2014: xxiv). In this situation, one can argue that the title of
Donald Preziosi’s and Claire Farago’s book, Art is Not What You Think It
Is (2012), can be an ideal provocation to South Asian social sciences to
reinvent themselves from their conventional persona and critically reassess
the less explored research objects at their disposal (Perera 2014: xxiv).
Further, as suggested by Preziosi and Farago, the kind of art that is likely
to emerge in the future ought to be ideally imagined as an “embodied
knowledge practice that is flexible and susceptible to further re-articulation
and redefinition” (2012: 160). In other words, this kind of art has a nar-
rative life that can be reborn beyond the artwork themselves and beyond
art history, in the realms of other discourses such as of sociology, anthro-
pology, and so on. Such art, offering possibilities of re-articulation and
redefinition or‘re-reading’ is already in our midst as art trends in post-
1990s South Asia very clearly indicate. The problem is not the absence of
such art, but the inability of region’s social sciences to recognize their
potential. On a more pragmatic plain, Preziosi and Farago caution us that
“articulating art-making practices as embodied forms of cognition will not
in itself solve the dilemmas of the current commodified art system. But
such a re-conceptualization of what art does and what that doing itself does,
offers a responsible way forward on many fronts” (Preziosi and Farago

2012: 160–161). If this suggestion is taken as a signpost that indicates
possible new directions, South Asian social scientists can traverse across a
relatively uncharted intellectual terrain, if they opt to engage with art
more systematically within their disciplines (Perera 2011: xxiv).
All of the above suggest, if we are to seek answers to specific questions,
particularly those that implicate culture and politics, it necessitates the
shifting of methodological gears and intellectual orientations in various
disciplinary domains. In short, it solicits engaging with works of art, art-
ists, and practices while being mindful of the intersecting forces of politics,
culture, and society. Observations from Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh,
India, and Nepal allude to similar possibilities of interpretative under-
standing while we assume there might be space for the same in Bhutanese,
Maldivian, and Afghan arts as well. Given such a gamut, the essays in this
book are presented within a regional framework, though without reduc-
ing the idea of South Asia into a countable number of nations or a sum
total of disparate cartographic territoriality. This is quite literally ‘another’
South Asia that is operationalized through shared ideas, socio-cultural
networks, and fluidity of intellectual-emotional resources. This book, in
continuation with our previous attempts, maintains this distinction when
we employ the term, South Asia.13 And hence, the structure of the book
avoids in presenting South Asia as eight countable modern national
territories—as does SAARC14—despite the presence of cases from specific
geopolitical contexts such as Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal, India, and
Bangladesh. In spite of these geopolitical contexts assuming significance
for the cases under discussion, there is a tendency in each chapter to cross
borders and connect with cases from one sovereign territorial entity (in
the geo-physical sense) with another, cultivating a trope of discussion that
is more regional than national. In short, as one of the subtexts, this book
chalks out the possibility of thinking of ‘another’ South Asia with the
coordinates of art history, anthropology, art practices, and curatorial poli-
tics in reading the region.15
13
For more along this line, see Pathak (2018).
14
SAARC or South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation was established with seven
nation states that make up South Asia in 1985 as a regional collective for cooperation in
trade, culture, security, and regional cooperation. Afghanistan joined the group in 2007.
Today, SAARC remains as a classic example of an ineffective regional grouping.
15
An effort of similar kind was accomplished in Perera (2018) and Rajendran (2018).
Why Convergence?
While we make these observations, there is a constant reminder of the
prevalent intellectual gap due to un-reconciled methodological approaches
of the two broader disciplinary perspectives, sociology and anthropology
on one hand and art history on the other. These methodological differ-
ences, inclined to explore different facets of ‘truth’, prevent anthropology
and art history to join in a shared debate. That is, what do we prefer to see
due to our disciplinary orientation and for the same reason, what do we
‘not’ see? It is in this gap that anthropology of contemporary art must
necessarily anchor itself and begin its explorations. It is by no means a mat-
ter of merely critiquing art history, but a process of attempting to use the
methodological and theoretical approaches of sociology and anthropology
to offer a wider reading and contextualization of society, politics, and cul-
ture while engaging with contemporary practices of art. And in attempt-
ing to do so, it is our conviction that cross-disciplinary conversations must
necessarily take place among anthropology, art history, cultural studies,
and so on, which would enhance anthropology’s ability to read society
and its politics through art.16
This is particularly the case in a situation where borders of contempo-
rary art have been so fundamentally transformed in recent times, as the
practice of art has gone much further surpassing the parameters initially
marked by both pre-modern and modern art.17 As a result, specific con-
temporary manifestations of South Asian art—such as installations and
performance art—are flippantly called postmodern art. And often, in the
words of conventionalists, such categorizations carry negative nuances
such as ‘rootless’, ‘placeless’, ‘unaesthetic’, and so on. When it comes to
culture in general and art in particular, postmodernity as a “strenuous new
form of capitalist social organization” is expected to blur or destroy
“distinctions between established cultural hierarchies”, which takes place
as the result of “introducing themes and images from mass/popular/con-
sumer culture into the prestige forms of high culture” that includes litera-
ture and fine arts (Wheale 1995: 10, 34). Clearly, certain manifestations of
South Asian art show these tendencies as in the installations of Subodh
16
To reiterate, we have made an intervention along this line in Pathak and Perera (2018)
unearthing the possible intersections of performance studies, art, cultural studies, anthropol-
ogy, and communication studies.
17
For a glimpse of the transformations in art and its practices along the lines of social
changes, see Turner (2005).
Gupta18 (India), Rashid Rana’s19 (Pakistan) prints and installations, and

Anoli Perera’s20 (Sri Lanka) installations with their feminist inclinations.
However despite these thematic and material crisscrossings, whether con-
temporary South Asian art is in a clearly defined postmodern phase or not
is not an issue for our consideration in the present context though it is
certainly worthy of theoretical reflection. Suffice to say, some manifesta-
tions of art in the region are based on pre-modern considerations as in
religious art, while others are still comfortably immersed in modernist
practices. Yet others are more freely traversing across thematic, material
and expressive boundaries, and comfortably combine pre-modern styles
with contemporary themes and material.21
In this context, an issue worth scrutiny is that methods and materiality
of art have significantly changed in recent times bringing ‘everyday’ and
‘politics’, which were once considered somewhat banal themes in modern-
ist art practice, into the conceptualization and practice of art in the main-
stream. At the same time, every artwork executed in a specific temporal
moment does not have to reflect the politics or the social complexities of
that moment. As such, simply because social or political calamities exist at
a particular time and place, that fact itself does not necessarily ensure the
visual inscribing of these times on the art of these times (Perera 2011: 7).
The kind of political upheavals most countries in South Asia have experi-
enced and the absence of safety in such situations could well mean some
expressions of art would become self-consciously neutral or even
aesthetically sedate, while others might be politically more expressive

(Perera 2011: 7). The art of the 1990s in particular in India, Bangladesh,
Pakistan, and Sri Lanka22 clearly shows this engagement with politics as
18
For more information and visuals on Subodh Gupta’s work, please visit https://www.
saatchigallery.com/artists/subodh_gupta.htm (accessed 19 August 2018).
19
For more information and visuals on Rashid Rana’s work, please visit https://www.
saatchigallery.com/artists/rashid_rana.htm (accessed 19 August 2018).
20
For more information and visuals on Anoli Perera’s work, please visit http://anoliper-
era.com/ (accessed 19 August 2018).
21
An unusual and path-breaking work in anthropology along this line is Roma Chatterji’s
work on the transformation in folk art of Bengal. See Chatterji (2012). Besides, similar issues
have been dealt with in the collection of essays edited by Ramaswamy (2003) suggesting a
change in the technologically mediated regime of seeing and seen.
22
See Perera’s 2011 book, Artists Remember; Artists Narrate: Memory and Representation
in Contemporary Sri Lankan Visual Arts for a discussion of art and politics with a focus on
Sri Lanka (Colombo: Colombo Institute for the Advanced Study of Society and Culture and
Theertha International Artists’ Collective).
well as disengagement. As Landauer has suggested, the mere fact that

cultural and political ferment is pervasive in a society does not simultane-
ously lead to the creation of artworks “affectively addressing that ferment”
(2006: 1). It is in this context she points to the non-emergence of politi-
cally engaged art within the avant-garde art circles in New York in the
1960s despite the fact that numerous socio-political crises were evident
throughout the United States as well as in the world more generally
(Landauer 2006: 1). It is their non-interventionist response to the Vietnam
War that Susan Sontag referred to as an “aesthetic of silence” (quoted in
Landauer 2006: 1).
However, the only way to signify ‘politics’ as a process is not only by
inscribing them through direct codification in the body of the artworks
themselves. Politics can be entangled in arts in many other ways. As Sinha
has noted with regard to Indian art, “building of modern art practices
reflects many of the internal conflicts of the Indian polity” (Sinha 2009: 8).
Similarly, art’s encounter with technologies such as mechanisms of mass-
reproduction not only allowed transformations in the way art was pro-
duced, but also in the way social relations were conducted in the wider
society. For instance, the expansion of photography in India was not only a
matter of expanding the visual field in technological and aesthetic terms. It
also bridged the “fissures of caste and community, and created an alterna-
tive base for the interplay of mythology, capital goods, and the nationalist
message” (Sinha 2009: 8). With regard to photography, this played out in
the way an elite taste such as photography rapidly became a more widely
spread practice as well as in the way studios became transitory spaces where
the social hierarchies in the wider society were momentarily erased. So the
very act of studying art itself as a set of practices and as a matter changing
approaches also allows for the study of society itself. For us, art’s engage-
ment with politics, its reflection of politics, as well as its distancing from
these phenomena necessarily makes art an important methodological
vehicle to enter into a discourse on politics and social relations and ruptures
of a particular moment and time.
These kinds of themes are perhaps more squarely located within the
routine academic purview of disciplines such as anthropology.23 It is in
such a context that Nikos Papastergiadis has noted that the “contempo-
rary art scene is not just being crisscrossed by different people with their
23
Dadi notes, in the context of arts in Muslim South Asia, “the exploration of the ‘popu-
lar’, or the ‘everyday’ (which) still awaits detailed study” (2010: 218).
distinctive cultural symbols, but also presenting viewers with the challenge
of acknowledging the multiplicity of perspectives for seeing the world”
(Papastergiadis 2006: 14). That is, art is no longer a matter only for the
artists who create the ‘symbols’ Papastergiadis refers to. But the ‘viewers’
in his formulation who obviously have considerable power over the differ-
ent ways of seeing the world through works of arts and their interpreta-
tions of these works also include sociologists, anthropologists, and other
social scientists. More specifically, Papastergiadis notes, when art is pre-
sented away from galleries in everyday locations and is crafted by using
everyday material that may not be typically thought of as art material, it
“has created the need for new critical tools to determine its aesthetic value
and social meaning” (Papastergiadis 2006: 16). Sri Lankan artist
Chandraguptha Thenuwara’s barrel installations using used asphalt and
chemical barrels (1990s; Fig. 1.1), often meant for outdoor display,
become powerful critiques of the country’s civil war when juxtaposed with
the fact that barrels had become an obvious instrument of war (Perera
2011: 65–68). Similarly, I Dreamt a Space Without Me24 (2001: Fig. 1.2),
the arresting installation by Pakistani artist, Ruby Chishti, made out of
black plastic garbage bags is specifically meant for the outdoors and public
interaction (Hashmi 2002: 6). It was installed at Gadani Beach in Pakistan.
The installation consists of garbage bags filled with straw and stitched to
look like crows perched upon elevated towers of garbage bags. As the art-
ist herself explains, “the work was about the mounted garbage heaps from
which human as well as crows find their food and livelihood”.25 Indian
artist Vibha Galhotra’s environment-related performances and photo-
performances (2016–2017; Fig. 1.3) are meant to instill a strong sense of
anxiety, discomfort, and concern over issues of pollution and the
degradation of the environment in India’s capital, New Delhi, and other
urban centers. Sri Lankan performance artist Bandu Manamperi’s grue-
some performance, Dead Fish (Fig. 1.4), in the streets of Colombo in
2016 was narrative “about facing death while being alive”.26 The artist’s
argument was that in the multiple chaos embedded in Sri Lankan social
and political realities, death itself does not end the cycle of suffering. As he
notes, “we all are ‘dead’ in this society, and it is the dead that die in society,
In Hashmi’s book (2002), Chishti’s work has been identified as Gadani.
24
Text message by Ruby Chishti via Messenger, 15 August 2018.

25
26
http://theerthaperformanceplatform.com/index.php/performances/dead-fish-bandu-
manamperi/
Fig. 1.1 Barrel Installation by Chandraguptha Thenuwara, Colombo, Sri Lanka.

(Photograph courtesy of Theertha International Artists’ Collective Archives)
Fig. 1.2 I Dreamt a Space Without Me by Ruby Chisti, Gadani, Pakistan.

(Photograph courtesy of Ruby Chisti)
Fig. 1.3 Breath by Breath. Photo-performance by Vibha Galhotra, New Delhi,

India. (Photograph courtesy of Vibha Galhotra)
Fig. 1.4 Dead Fish. Performance by Bandu Manamperi, Colombo, Sri Lanka.
(Photograph courtesy of Theertha International Artists’ Collective Archives)
and the dead that get subjected to violence and torture. From a small
exploration of death, we can learn a lot about life”.27
In all of these works, materiality in creating art had changed from
routine art material to everyday objects and was meant for public view-
ing away from galleries. It is when reading the social meanings and
nuances of such artworks as well as when locating them within the
broader contexts of their production and consumption that anthropol-
ogy and sociology become useful as a specific discursive practice dealing
with human interactions and the work of culture. But this does not mean
that people engaged in such a reading need to be formally trained
anthropologists as such. But they have to traverse the landscape anthro-
pologists usually do, and explore why a specific artwork is produced,
what are the conditions that give it meaning, what are the politics of
representation embedded in it, what kind of political transformations do
they envisage, whether such works can be located in a discourse of social
justice, social change, political critique and so on.
Moreover, as we have already noted, art history is not the only legiti-
mate discourse that can socially and politically situate art. In fact, some of
the initial discussions on the social contexts of art were imprisoned within
narrow empirical models of causality (Papastergiadis 2006: 16). Art his-
tory, as in the case of history itself, displays an inbuilt institutional ner-
vousness in dealing with the present. Given the disciplinary purview of
history in general, such nervousness is not surprising and is well within the
mandate of the discipline as conventionally understood. On the other
hand, art history has also been hesitant to enter in any serious manner the
physical spaces of art production and the messy world of politics that
extends beyond an artwork. This has conventionally been the purview of
disciplines such as sociology and anthropology.
These two institutionalized hesitations decontextualizes the overall
narrative that an artwork might be narrating and thereby destabilizes its
social meaning, if not aesthetic sensibility, if art history remains the only
scribe of the social and political contexts of art and its narratives. It is with
reference to this specific context that Janet Wolff has critiqued art history
as a disciplinary practice that reifies the context and mystifies the process
of art (quoted in Papastergiadis 2006: 14). And to return to our initial
27
http://theerthaperformanceplatform.com/index.php/performances/dead-fish-
bandu-manamperi/
reflections on anthropology’s fear of the visual and its hesitation to criti-

cally engage with contemporary art, one hopes that anthropology could
more creatively respond to Michael Taussig’s (1993) proposition that
images might become engines of concepts. This may suffice to serve the
challenges of alterity in the domains of the socio-cultural and the political
that sociologists and anthropologists frequent. And thus, a qualitatively
updated trajectory of sense could come to picture in anthropological pur-
suits of images.28
It is then within the general considerations outlined above that the
book aims towards a holistic framework of contemporary art in South
Asia. In sum total of implication, there is polyphony of intersections that
characterize the book.
Polyphonic Intersections and Bearings of the Book

‘Intersections’ is an intellectual device that unfolds debates, propositions,
arguments, and possibilities. The disciplinary intersections of art history
and anthropology are one such instance. Centrally underpinning this
book, such disciplinary intersections underline the complicity of historians
and sociologists, as well as ethnographers and artists. Furthermore, these
intersections resurface at other levels too. Politics and art, the global and
the local, contextual and universal, modern and traditional and so on
come together on the anvil of analyses in the essays in this book. The idea
of ‘local’ underpinning art practices and artworks is central in the scheme
of intersections. Various synonyms of local surface for attention, primarily
alluding to ‘roots’. Curiously enough, the quest for ‘roots’ in South Asia
as elsewhere acquires a cognate in ‘routes’, giving birth to both intersec-
tions and politics.29 Be it in postcolonial India, post-partition Pakistan,
post-liberation Bangladesh, and ethnic clash torn (post-War) Sri Lanka,
we witness the dialectics of roots and routes, authenticity and inventions,
folk and mediation in the ways artists have opted to work. In the wake of
such dialectics, it makes sense to recapitulate what the book posits as dis-
ciplinary intersections. Needless to say, disciplinary intersection is bur-
dened with apprehensions of the disciplinary limitations, be it in art history
or in anthropology and sociology. And as a way forward, each articulation
For more along this line, see Taussig (1993).

28
On the dynamics of local, see Pathak (2017) and Pathak and Perera (2018).
29
of apprehension points out the inherent tendencies in all three disciplines

to engage with the artifacts by addressing shared interests as points of
departure.
More on a positive note, setting the temperament of the book is, Parul
Dave Mukherji’s essay, ‘Crossovers between Art History and Visual
Anthropology: A Visual Archive of a Patua Family Revisited’ which
emphasizes the idea of ‘performative mimesis’ among artists and artistic
practices. Unlike the formally trained anthropologists, artists tend to
become ‘visiting anthropologists’, in general. And Mukherji supports this
implication by presenting the elaborate artistic practices of India-based
performance artist, N. Pushpmala. Moreover, Mukherji, a historian of art
by training and practice, becomes one of the visiting anthropologists she
herself alludes to. Though informed by classical anthropological discus-
sions, visiting anthropologists understood in this sense also tend to add
distinct nuances to the ethnographic spectrum by bringing in the experi-
ences of artists in ways conventional sociologists and anthropologist would
not. That is, artists, natives, and ‘visiting’ anthropologists unfold on one
plane of reasoning. A conventional anthropologist might get an intellec-
tual shock of sort at such performative mimesis vis-à-vis the practices of
artists and art historians. For example, it may be slightly difficult for
anthropologists to digest that artists do something called ‘participant
observation’ in the way typified by Bronislaw Malinowski, one of the clas-
sical anthropologists who had to stay longer in the field due to the out-
break of World War I. And many believers in anthropological orthodoxy
deem an instance of fieldwork of dubious merit if it was not for a span of
a year or more. An artist with performative mimesis might deliver a
thought-provoking rupture in the monolith of anthropological methodol-
ogy. But our position is, the kind of ‘shock’ this kind of encounter might
engender, should be internalized and routinized in the practice of anthro-
pology of the present rather than expelling it for its alleged disjuncture
with prevailing anthropological orthodoxy. This line of advancement is a
crucial component in the epistemological and discursive undercurrent of
this book. And it serves the mainstay of proposition, echoed in Parul Dave
Mukherji’s stimulating act wondering: “In terms of disciplinary rethink-
ing, art history had learnt many of its lessons about politics of representa-
tion from anthropology and redressed its own disciplinary blind spots. But
can art history also offer tools to anthropology and enable it to get over its
anxiety of the visual?” (pp. 54–55)
This question haunts three young sociologists, namely, Pooja Kalita,

Jyoti, and Binit Gurung, in the latter part of the book, seeking to over-
come the disciplinary fear of visuals and objects of art anthropology and
sociology suffer from. Classical anthropology and in some ways even clas-
sical sociology were not so much averse to visuals within limits. Hence
Levi-Strauss promulgated a detailed position on primitive art, and
Durkheimian totemic effervescence was a quasi-performative construction
even though Durkheim himself did not locate his discussion in a specific
performative context, as we understand the term today. Or for that matter,
some rare sociologists such as Robert Nisbet in the United States and
Radhakamal Mukerjee in India were keen to turn to art as a socially
embedded reality. This line of thinking is picked up in the latter part of this
introduction.
Suffice to say, carrying forward from above, such a mode of doing art,
documenting art practices, and being an anthropologist subsumed within
the art scene in postcolonial South Asia at variant scales and manifestations
offers countless possibilities. Gulam Sheikh’s elaborate and insightful plan
to venture into the folk and primitive worlds of art, of which Pushpmala
and Parul Dave Mukherji were participants, also had another very enor-
mous steward, Jagdish Swaminathan. Sandip Luis’s essay in this collection,
‘Between History and Anthropology: The Entangled Lives of Jagdish
Swaminathan and Jangarh Singh Shyam’, adds to the disciplinary anxieties
in history as well as anthropology. A historian, an art practitioner, and an
anthropologically informed thinker, Swaminathan embodied insights from
a variety of sources. Equipped with a Gandhian orientation towards the
rural, informed by structural anthropology, and particularly by Levi-
Strauss’s readings of the primitive in the renowned classic, The Savage
Mind, dialogues with the poet and Mexican ambassador to India, Octavio
Paz, a particular variety of indigenism (akin to Latin American) ruled
Swaminathan’s pursuits. A clear blend of history and anthropology, politi-
cal awareness and art practice, constitute the frame in which Swaminathan
became more than a mentor for his discovery, Jangarh Singh Shyam. While
Shyam adds to the discursive framework with his artworks, subsuming his-
tory and anthropology, Swaminathan is one of the engines in the processes
of reinvention of the local, the folk, the rural, the traditional, the primi-
tive, the indigenous and so on.
Disciplines in social sciences can benefit from the discussion that Sandip
Luis eloquently presents in this essay. Further back in history of art,
another episode of anthropological significance unfolds with the centrality
of primitive myth in modern Indian art. Jyoti’s essay, ‘Towards Blurring

the Boundaries in Anthropology: Reading Jamini Roy Today’, turns the
anthropological gaze across the classics in modern Indian art, with a con-
certed focus on Jamini Roy’s works and methods. It amounts to a case of
an anthropologist reading the works of art, while feeding on resources,
from art history to anthropology, to rethink the idea of primitivism.
In the same breath, it is befitting to read Salima Hashmi’s and Farida
Batool’s contribution, ‘Reframing Contexts for Pakistani Art’. In their
multiple capacities as artists, art historians, and teachers, the author duo
underline the truncated and skewed art history in Pakistan, stating “the
discursive formations of art history were further arrested by the state’s idea
of modernizing the nation soon after its inception and that dream could
only be fulfilled if one was connected with the ‘linear’ history and develop-
ment of the west” (p. 75). The intrusion of marginalized women artists
into the mainstream of Pakistani contemporary art practice offers new
possibilities for both art history and art practices, and the consequent new
manifestations in the works of art themselves. This also indicates the pos-
sibilities for a nuanced anthropological gaze and interpretation offered by
an emphasis on women’s involvement in art and art practice in Pakistan
since the 1940s. The essay underlines the imperative of answering the
anxiety expressed by the renowned novelist, Qurratulain Hyder in Aag Ka
Darya (River of Fire), a historical account of the Indian subcontinent.
Hyder speaks through her protagonist Kamal and asks “how to write the
history of this land where people did not give much weight to the names
of the artists and writers?” (p. 74)
Hashmi and Batool aid in understanding that women artists of contem-
porary Pakistan are bringing about a much-needed fusion of the public
and the private. Hashmi and Batool hint at the turn to anthropological
public, composed of communities, people with identities, and the local
qua contextual pp. 73–92. In order to steer clear of the bias towards the
alternatives to hegemonic models of art discourse, all across South Asia, it
is imperative to add stimulus to the question, “do the academics engaged
in the history of art making in Pakistan over several decades really under-
stand the dynamics of public art?” (p. 90)
If art history is a field of apprehension, so is sociology and social anthro-
pology for reasons spelled out by young sociologists, Binit Gurung and
Pooja Kalita respectively. In ‘Aesthetics and Politics of Street Art in Nepal:
Artivism and Subversion’, Gurung chalks out a novel possibility for disci-
plinary intersections as well as domains of enquiry for sociology and social
anthropology. Using sociological insights from classics such as C. W. Mills,
John Dewey, Pierre Bourdieu, Janet Wolff, Howard Becker among others
in his essay on contemporary Nepali street art, Gurung underlines the
imperative of a new sociology of art in South Asia, with a specific focus on
Nepal. This sociology of art is envisaged to be sensitive to aesthetics and
politics, of artworks and practices, the relation of the personal with the
public, and biography and history. Pooja Kalita, in her essay, ‘The ‘Art’ of
Ethnography: Why Feminist Ethnographers of South Asia Need to Look
at ‘Feminist Art’ from the Region?’ factors in a feminist perspective in
making sense of the potential interface of anthropology and art practices
vis-à-vis ethnography as a method of engagement and articulation. In this
wake, Kalita enables us to wonder: if artworks of a select number of women
artists from South Asia express concerns and interests which can be
deemed ‘feminist’, why shall sociology and social anthropology not ben-
efit from the texts embedded in the artworks as well as in the biographies
of these women artists? (pp. 93–114) And likewise, Jyoti’s chapter,
‘Questions from History of Art: Revisiting with Jamini Roy’, emphasizes
the greater role of anthropology of art in cultivating a local lexigraphy of
artworks, suggesting “anthropological works also inspired art historians
and art critics to question the western centric categories of art. Hence,
anthropology has been very much a part of the art worlds defining the
categories of art that have been applied globally” (p. 183).
The second level of polyphonic intersections echoes the issues of local,
global, cultural, and political and, more importantly, an interjection on
curatorial politics prevalent in the domain of art practices. Elsewhere,
covertly engaging with intersections, Gita Kapur (2007) promulgated a
theory of modernism, emphasizing disjuncture in modern art. The theory
holds true in the post-globalization context of art in South Asia too.
Making the theoretical position simpler, Kapur noted in a conversation,
I have argued (in my book When Was Modernism) that disjuncture as a

concept-in-use allows me to interpret how Indian artists read, understand
and participate in calibrating the language(s) of international modernism.
That it makes me see the processes of alignment and disalignment ─ not as
passively received contingencies but as strategies that are tangential and even
possibly tendentious. They are disruptive of assumed selves, prescribed iden-
tities, and given (art) histories. So when you ask what is the valance of the
term disjuncture now ─ in our increasingly globalized world ─ I will refer to

what I quoted above: if context can be read as conjuncture, then surely dis-
juncture is its symmetrical counterpoint. The twin terms signal the time of
now: context fractured by the volatility of historical forces.30
Though speaking very clearly as an art historian, the overall context

described by Kapur is also very much a terrain of inquiry for sociology,
which may vary from social change to political conflict. The point is issues
such as conjuncture and disjuncture as deployed by Kapur are openings for
sociological and anthropological readings of society despite the twin disci-
plines’ general resistance to such methodological departures up to now.
Intriguingly, between conjuncture and disjuncture, a curious case of
intersections unfolds that diminishes the usefulness of strict disciplinary
vantage points, among other implications. The crisscrossing of art and
politics, aesthetics and history, and biography and ideology, emerges
sharply in most essays. The project of unearthing the roots, local idioms,
what is thought of as traditional and authentic and so on and so forth are
central to this crisscrossing. It manifests vividly in Parul Dave Mukherji’s
depiction of the artist and art historian photographing themselves as ‘visit-
ing anthropologists’ to document the art and life of folk scroll (patua)
painter named, Dukhshyam Chitrakar (pp. 50–54). It was in the mid-
1980s which nearly marked the climax of the quest for roots that began in
Nehruvian India, with a hallmark of national authenticity in the form of
Mulk Raj Anand’s Marg (1946) in the background. The post-liberaliza-
tion (qua cultural globalization) unfolds a dramatic situation in 2015, and
an impoverished and aged Dukhshyam Chitrakar seeks a commission to
make a scroll painting (p. 52). The character of art, art practices, and a
visiting anthropologist’s mode of enquiry undergo transformation in the
encounter with the historical-material and politico-cultural realities. This
is even more emphatic with due tenor of critical analysis in Jyoti’s reading
of the classics in modern art in India when she reads Jamani Roy’s work as
a “gamut of practices, influenced by primitivism, but at the same time
resulted from the particular cultural and political history of the region and
the country” (p. 183).
30
For more in this conversation, see http://www.artmargins.com/index.php/interviews-
sp-837925570/756-to-be-partisan-unsettled-and-alert-conversation-with-geeta-kapur-
#ftn_artnotes1_7 (accessed on 31 July 2018).
Looking at the Bengal School of Art in the light of nationalistic dis-

courses, it divulges the artistic reinvention of innocent, rural, primitive,
and ideal imagination of India. And giving more informative vigor to the
idea of the reinvented, Sandip Luis elucidates the tragic travail of another
significant signature, Jangarh Singh Shyam, a Gond artist, in the encoun-
ter with modernity’s quest for roots vis-à-vis primitivism and indigenism.
An artist and a historian, Jagdish Swaminathan, the mentor of Shyam,
operated with a clear sense of ‘civil war’ in India, a ‘discursive deadlock’,
which gave birth to not only the reinvention of the concepts of primitiv-
ism and indigenism, underpinning the museum Roopankar, but also a
mindset to perceive art, artists, and art practices in a more nuanced and
inclusive manner (p. 150).
Such crisscrossing of political and cultural in the artistic spheres is not
typical of India alone. The surveys of art practices in Pakistan from various
standpoints reveal a similar tendency. The story from inception to the
formation of a postcolonial vantage, the modern art in Pakistan brings
about various and very visible episodes of crisscrossing. A synoptic survey
by Niilofur Farrukh in her essay ‘Imposed, Interrupted and Identities: A
Survey of the Pakistan Art Scene’ presents a systematic testimonial, paving
the way for two significant realizations. One is the radical art politics of
Rasheed Araeen criticizing “Sadequain’s narcissim, Chugtai’s orientalism
and pictorialism of modernity”. Similarly, Amra Ali in her essay, ‘Ruptures
of Rasheed Araeen in the politics of Visual Art: For a New Discourse in
Pakistan’, presents a thorough analysis of this kind of art politics, which
also amounts to a significant critique of curatorial politics. Speaking of an
appeal to universality in Araeen’s Shamiyaana, Ali notes, “his insistence on
decommodifying aesthetics becomes a critique on the power politics and
insularity of contemporary narratives in art. It insists on locating art
outside of the production of commodities for Western art markets, or
new global markets elsewhere” (p. 262). Elsewhere, Gita Kapur31
acknowledged the emergence of a third-world framework of aesthetic
regime with Rasheed Araeen’s intervention. While Rasheed Araeen is
hailed for ‘curatorial subversion’ entirely ignored by dominant art crit-
ics, Salima Hashmi and Farida Batool bring into focus another crucial
turn in the art scene in Pakistan. It was during the savage military
31
See https://criticalcollective.in/ArtistInner2.aspx?Aid=0&Eid=207 (accessed on 31
July 2018).
dictatorship of General Zia-ul-Haq in the 1980s that the women’s move-

ment took off with support from women poets, writers, lawyers, journal-
ists, and more importantly visual artists (p. 77). These encounters with the
politico-historical milieu and the momentum generated by the interac-
tions with civil society enabled a self-critical soul-searching among artists,
resulting in a confession on the failures of institutions committed to an
allegedly flawed question of ‘local’ in Pakistani art. Women artists made
the idea of local more nuanced with their works being mounted not only
in private spaces of galleries but also in public domains. Overcoming the
divide of high and low art, stagnation of art history and art educators, and
rigidity of state narratives inter alia, the women artists unearthed, a “lim-
inal space between politics and art” (p. 82).
In his essay, ‘Globalization and Local Anxieties in the Art of Bangladesh’,
surveying the art scene in Bangladesh, Lala Rukh Selim offers insightful
propositions about numerous artistic encounters crisscrossing between art
and politics, and in the process challenges the conventional modes of art
practice and curatorial politics. Emerging from the cauldron of cultural
and language politics, Bangladesh witnessed the arrival of very specific art
practices before the partition of the Indian subcontinent as well as its
Liberation War of 1971, with Zainul Abedin as the prime mover. The
motif of ‘folk’ assumed centrality since the beginning, returning to the
discourse with a dilemma, whether art in Bangladesh should be interna-
tional or indigenous in character, nature, and scope (p. 120). Akin to the
historical moment in Pakistan, Bangladesh scene also seems to get a water-
shed moment in the decade of 1980s. A prominent divide between a
‘national art establishment’ of the older generation, committed to the idea
of an essentially Bangladeshi identity, and ‘contemporary art’ of relatively
younger artists who defy the conventions in styles, materials, and connec-
tions mark the trajectory. Against the odds of limited support and patron-
age, artists inclined towards more self-reflective contemporary art with an
experimental sense of materiality and modes of presentation find possibili-
ties away from the singular supporting agency, Shilpakala Academy (the
state run institution for the promotion of art), as far as exhibiting the
works were concerned (p. 124). In a sense, what Lala Rukh Selim describes
is not merely the changes in the art scene of Bangladesh, but also the
broader dynamics of social transformation taking place in the society in
general as they were reflected in the artworks of the time and in the
dynamics of the community of artists.
Held in Dhaka, the Asian Art Biennale in 1981, South Asia’s first bien-
nale, created a forum to exhibit artworks from across Asia along with the
works of contemporary artists from Bangladesh. An international approach
corresponded with the clear emergence of transnational networks of art-
ists, an aspect that applies to the contemporary women artists in Pakistan
too. By the 1990s and the beginning of the present millennium, these
networks assumed a clear regional character, across South Asia, with the
exemplary formation of the South Asia Network for the Arts. In a sense,
these networks and the travel of artists within South Asia and beyond
made possible the emergence of a very specific South Asian sensibility
among many of the region’s artists who are now established. These net-
works and their associated events helped perceive the region as themati-
cally and experientially connected.32
As a formal and funded network, South Asian Network for the Arts was
in operation from 2004 to 2010. More informally however, other related
conversations and activities had progressed from the late 1990s onwards.
Before the formal inauguration of the network, Pooja Sood offered the
following thoughts on such a network of which the main concern was:
“developing deeper connections between art practitioners in the region”
(Sood 2009: 36): Moreover, as she noted further, “the premise for success
in any intercultural work is one of underlying mutual respect and trust
between the partners and I would like to believe that the trust and respect
is in place” (Sood 2009: 36). Different nationally located organizations
came together to make the network functional by paying significant atten-
tion to this basic concern of mutuality and equality. The network consisted
of Khoj International Artists’ Association in New Delhi, Britto Arts Trust
in Dhaka, Theertha International Artists’ Collective in Colombo, Vasl
Artists’ Collective in Karachi, and Sutra Artists’ Association in Kathmandu.
Unlike the others, the latter did not last. In effect, the collaborative work,
travel, and conversations of this network and its subbasement afterlives
facilitated and ensured the emergence of a more responsive and connected
South Asia in terms of ideas, experiences, and activities despite the more
disconnected cartographic reality augmented by militarized borders of
South Asian nation states the network’s partners had to work within. The
32
For more information on these networks and their politics, see Sasanka Perera,
‘Re-imagining and Re-narrating South Asia: Artists’ Travel and the Practice of Visual Art as
a New Experiential Cartography’ pp. 251–274. In, Dev Nath Pathak ed., Another South
Asia! (Delhi: Primus, 2018).
book returns to the phenomenon of various artists’ collectives coming in

contact in the last essay of the book authored by Anoli Perera.
A critical proposition to ponder upon unfolds with these historically
grounded developments post liberalization in various parts of the region.
Selim however, becomes skeptical as he looks at the now routinely held
Asian Art Biennale, and wonders whether it “lacks in the tools of curat-
ing, marketing, theoretical discourse, and other associated necessities”
(p. 129). Indeed this is much more than the celebration of festive rup-
ture, noted elsewhere in the discussion of Gita Kapur.33 No doubt, the
transnational networks and opening of myriad possibilities have democ-
ratized the space of exchange of ideas, exhibiting, and selling, which also
challenged the conventional curatorial politics, and changed the charac-
ter of the commerce of art. But one joins in with Selim to wonder
whether the spectacular shows presented today are more for the specta-
cles conducive for the sake of marketing gimmicks, rather than, for the
conceptual depth, advancement in art history, resurgence of the experi-
mental temperament and intellectual growth in both art and its potential
encounters with other discourses such as sociology and anthropology
and art history.
Binit Gurung, however, in his contribution manages to uphold an opti-
mistic reading, through understanding the limits of art coming to the
streets or artists turning to community (pp. 223–250). Once again, the
decisive decade is the 1990s that ushered in novel forms and mediums
such as installation, performance art, video art, and so on in the art scene
in Nepal. The encounter with economic liberalization, reinstatement of
democracy, and surfacing of what now appears to be unbridgeable schisms
in Nepal paved the way for a disturbance of the taken for granted in the
conventional art practices. Departing from the familiar and institutional-
ized ways of producing artworks and exhibiting, some groups of young
artists took to street corners, in a mode of quasi-revolution, and subverted
the known ways of doing art and communicating with the masses, with
the messages that could not have been possible to ponder in the erstwhile
monarchic regime in Nepal (p. 234).
Sri Lanka’s ‘flag project’ of 1998 spearheaded by a group of artists who
organized themselves under a loose and informal collective called ‘Artists
33
Ibid.
Against War’ resonates with the kind of artworks Gurung has described
from the streets of Kathmandu. Suspicious of the lack of political agency
of gallery-based art, the Artists Against War wanted to literally take art
into the streets of Colombo and later throughout the country carrying a
specific political message (Perera 2011: 87–89). With the involvement of
a number of artists, the paper-based work initially executed by the artists
were printed on cloth specifically meant for outdoor display. If the work in
the streets of Kathmandu were on city walls and therefore site-bound, the
ones in Colombo were mobile and were effectively designed as flags that
could be displayed anywhere (Perera 2011: 87). The first public display of
these works was outside the Railway Station in Colombo Fort on 13, 14,
and 15 September 1998 (Perera 2011: 87). This location is known as a
place for expressing political disagreement in public. As a result, the first
edition of the flag project in this venue “had an air of opposition and pro-
test directed at the political status quo and the consequences of war”
(Perera 2011: 87). This oppositional sensibility of the display was recre-
ated in other parts of Sri Lanka where it traveled afterward as well. On the
other hand, though the theme of this artistic intervention was very clear,
it was not a routine protest. Nor was it a routine exhibition. More specifi-
cally, it was “an attempt to change the direction and politics of art in order
to bring a particular type of art into public space from the more restricted
space of the conventional art gallery, and thereby transform art into
political objects” (Perera 2011: 87–88). This was a self-conscious political
art with the aim of social transformation.
The final contribution in this collection is Anoli Perera’s essay,
‘Collectivism in Cotemporary Sri Lankan Art: History of an Usual Case of
Artists.’ It is a survey of a very different kind when compared to the sur-
veys of the art scenes in Bangladesh and Pakistan presented in this collec-
tion. Instead of looking at a country situation or a thematic survey by
focusing on a number of artists, Perera zeroes in on the collective dynamics
and interventions of a singular organization, the Theertha International
Artists’ Collective in Sri Lanka (pp. 271–296). Taking as her point of
departure the post-1990s transformations seen across the art world in
South Asia in which Sri Lankan art was also implicated, Perera docu-
ments the way in which collective politics impacts not only the art-mak-
ing in a specific country but also in the larger realms of politics. Moreover,
this aids in understanding the transformations in art practices, artists’
roles, and emergence of a qualitatively different trope of art radicalism.
Needless to say, the newfound radicalism in art subverts the curatorial
schemes that prevent new stakeholders from emerging while it might also
distance people from art. One of the more interesting aspects of Sri Lanka’s
contemporary art situation is the attempt a number of artists have made to
answer the kind of question that Timms has raised with regard to art in
Australia (Timms 2005). And that is, “what is wrong with contemporary
art?” (Timms 2005). Much of what Perera describes revolves around the
politics that the artists and the organization she focuses on have done to
deal with issues in the art world in their own circumstances. Again, a ques-
tion raised by Timms in the Australian context provides an avenue to fur-
ther explore what Perera describes. With a sense of angst, Timms asks,
“why is contemporary art so in thrall to spruikers and promoters, for
example and why do their lofty claims so rarely match the reality?” (Timms
2005: 10). It is as if in response to such a question that Theertha and
individual artists linked to it have undertaken their self-conscious politics
ranging from curatorial practices to exhibition dynamics in addition to
experimentation with the form and materiality of art itself. While attempt-
ing to answer this kind of question, these individuals have blurred the lines
of separation between artists, curators, and gallery owners to some extent.
Clearly, the polyphonic intersections embedded in these kinds of artis-
tic interventions summon a certain kind of intellectual courage and pas-
sion to call for a disciplinary promiscuity, particularly with reference to art
history and sociology and social anthropology. Each essay thus seems to
be in tacit conversation allowing a reader to connect threads and fathom
an intricate integration of art across the region, thematic proximity in
society and polity that shape up artists’ historical subjectivity. The intel-
lectual promises and fulfillment, of the book as a whole, indeed rests in the
modes of conversation among narrators and reencounters from various
parts of South Asia.
Consequence of Conversation
As we have attempted to briefly articulate above, the book becomes a con-
sequence of and an invitation to conversation allowing us to revisit the
idea of intersection, flagged at the outset of this introductory essay, and to
envisage an antidote to the mutual exclusion of art practice, art history,
sociology, and social anthropology. The mutuality of interest is an abiding
feature of the contemporary discourses in sociology and art history.
However, the debilitating exclusion of each other’s ways of seeing the
world, an equally significant reality, pertains to well-established epistemo-

logical divides, a fallout of the fortification of science against arts. This is
as old as the days when social scientists imagined the arrival of a proverbial
Newton to render social science disciplines more ‘scientific’ than perhaps
they could be or should be. The emergence and subsequent bolstering of
scientific epistemology rendered the seemingly ‘scientific as the only legiti-
mate form of knowing’. Many philosophers and historians of science have
debated against the phenomenon of scientism, a blind faith in science det-
rimental to multiple other equally legitimate ways of knowing.34 It is
debatable whether it could make any difference in the prevailing funda-
mental attitudes, and hence there is an imperative to pronounce the ques-
tion, of the relation between art and social sciences, again and again. The
question holds significance at a time when the sub-discipline, ‘Sociology
of Art’, is turning a new leaf and aspiring to become a ‘New Sociology of
Art’ with novel promises and departures from erstwhile preoccupations.35
But the problem of a sub-discipline overtly dedicated to art means that all
considerations of art in sociology and anthropology would be effectively
exiled to this sub-disciplinary hinterland—away from the mainstream.
This is precisely what has happened with regard to sociology’s and anthro-
pology’s expelling of the visual more generally to the sub-disciplines of
visual sociology and visual anthropology. In fact, it is in this epistemologi-
cal rupture we can at least partly understand the continuing fear of the
visual in the mainstreams of both disciplines.
More importantly, the question that could ideally be explored in con-
temporary sociological scholarship in the region is: how is art in the inter-
est of sociology? And perhaps the seeming innocence of this question
could reveal the state of sociology, if not in universal at least in a particular
sense. The state of sociology that derecognizes artworks, or puts them on
disciplinary margins as a field of enquiry, is unfortunately oblivious of the
history of the discipline in the region. The sociological problem with art
also hinges on an epistemological problem, a contestation over the role of
‘experience’ in the domain of science. There have been sincere attempts to
34
Along this line, pondering upon the disciplinary silos on the ways of seeing and knowing,
and possible redemptions, see Dhar et al. (2018).
35
This important aspect is given a detailed deliberation in the latter part of this introduc-
tion. The mainstay of the idea behind New Sociology of Art comes from Eduardo de la
Fuente’s (2007) detailed perusal of the developments in sociology and art history.
contest this problem, at macro as well as micro levels of the disciplinary

history. The contestation, and its epistemological implications, began to
appear ever since the advent of the ‘positivistic dispute’36 in sociology. The
latter aimed at puncturing ‘hypostatized configuration of science’ and
thereby overcoming the delimiting impact of scientism. In short, it opened
up the possibility of including ‘experience’ as an important category in the
pursuit of knowledge. This assumed more radical articulation with the
advocacy of ‘methodological pluralism’,37 as a kind of intellectual anarchy
in social sciences.
Experience, the most basic category in the debates on science and arts,
was the muse for philosophers ever since the so-called beginning of scien-
tific epistemology.38 However, a systematic and consistent separation of art
and science, experience and aesthetics, emerges with John Dewey’s
emphasis on the significance of ‘art as experience’ (Dewey 1934), and its
indispensable location in the scientific (read rational and progressive)
framework. Way back in 1934, Dewey critically noted, “art is remitted to
a separate realm, where it is cut off from the association with the materials
and aims of every other form of human effort, undergoing, and achieve-
ment…Mountain peaks do not float unsupported; they do not even just
rest upon the earth. They are the earth in one of its manifest operations”
(1934: 3).
Dewey helped us fathom the problems of the so-called ‘expert knowl-
edge on art’ by suggesting that any theory or philosophy of art is sterilized
unless it makes us aware of the function of art in relation to other modes
of experience. In this scheme, ‘aesthetic experience’ is not an esoteric real-
ization. Instead, it belongs to everyday life of ordinary folks as well as art-
ists. To deliver a blow to the arrogance of the art-experts (qua art
historians!), Dewey argues, “it is mere ignorance that leads then to the
supposition that connection of art and esthetic perception with experience
signifies a lowering of their significance and dignity” (Ibid.: 19). In impli-
cation, Dewey underlined the necessity of engaging with artworks, arti-
36
For more on this dispute, particularly in the context of German Sociology, which runs
the agenda of puncturing ‘hypostatized configuration of science’ and aids in overcoming the
delimiting impact of scientism, see Adorno et al. (1981).
37
See Feyerabend (2010).
38
Bertrand Russell eloquently places a radically subjective notion of experience in the
inception of scientific epistemology starting with Rene Descartes’s meditations. See Russell
(2013).
facts of cultural experiences in general, without succumbing to a sense of

disciplinary arrogance. The very nature of aesthetic experience solicits an
interdisciplinary approach, an inevitable need in understanding art and
aesthetics as well as their location more broadly in society and culture.
This is the insight, which enables a sociologist to ask critically as to why
“prior to 1970s, most sociologists who dealt with the arts were ‘viewed as
intellectuals in broad sense or as radicals, but not really proper sociolo-
gists’” (de la Fuente 2007: 410).
However, from among those few radical sociologists with a broader
disciplinary vision, there emanated a nuanced approach to the category of
art too. In this regard, it is relevant to recall the propositions of Robert
Nisbet, made at the time identified broadly as the ‘crisis in Western
sociology’.39 Bolstering a case for ‘Sociology as an Art Form’, Nisbet
suggests,
how alike are the sociologist’s and artist’s efforts to endow subject matter
with what Herbert Read, the art historian and critic, has called “the illusion
of motion.” No mean esthetic skill is involved in Marx’s depiction of capital-
ism as a structure in motion, in Tocqueville’s rendering of equality as a
dynamic process, or Weber’s of rationalization… We can not take away from
Tocqueville, Marx, Weber and the other sociologists the visions for which
they are famous…but we live in ignorance if we do not see clearly these same
visions, albeit stated differently, in the earlier writings of such minds as
Burke, Blake, Carlyle, Balzac. (1976: 7–8)
There is an essential unity of art and science, no matter how eclipsed it

may seem in the wake of intellectual politics separating the two. Presenting
a prophylaxis against scientism, rather than science, to emphasize the unity
of science and art, Nisbet suggests, “when Kepler wrote, ‘the roads by
which men arrive at their insights into celestial matters seem to me almost
as worthy of wonder as those matters themselves’, it would never have
occurred to him that there was any significant difference between what he,
the theologian, the philosopher, and the artist were engaged in” (Nisbet
1976: 4–5). Nisbet enlists a few common thematic ideas in social sciences
39
This thought-provoking work of Gouldner underlined a crisis in the prevalent ways of
doing (teaching, researching, and writing) sociology and advocated an imperative for a
‘new’, more reflexive, sociology, which could steer clear of the dominant ways. See Gouldner
(1970).
in the nineteenth century, such as community, masses, power, develop-

ment, progress, conflict, egalitarianism, anomie, alienation, and disorgani-
zation. In this context, he suggests that there are identical themes in the
world of art—painting, literature, even music. Social scientists have bene-
fitted from their engagement with works of art and in comprehending
thematic realities they might refer to. To make it more explicit, Nisbet
surmises, “scientists Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Simmel were without
question. But they were also artists, and had they not been artists, had
they contented themselves with demonstrating solely what had been
arrived at through aseptic problem design, through meticulous verifica-
tion, and through constructions of theory which pass muster in a graduate
course in methodology of sociology today, the entire world of thought
would be much poorer” (Nisbet 1976: 7).
Turning geopolitically inward, the sociological inclination towards art
was not absent in the practice of sociology in South Asia. To be more
microscopic, and look at the Indian context for mere heuristic conve-
nience, there were sociologists in India reasoning with the relation of art
and society in the early phase of disciplinary development. It is relevant to
briefly allude to the extensive deliberation of Radhakamal Mukerjee,40 one
of the pioneering thinkers setting the temperament of sociology in India.
It is curious to note that Mukerjee, mostly noted for presenting a socio-
logical challenge to the predominance of positivism of economics, wrote a
number of important essays on the issue of art and its relation with society,
civilization, religion, and polity. One of the essays titled, ‘The Meaning
and Evolution of Art in Society’ (1945), was published in the American
Sociological Review with an unusual editorial note, which read: “The
Editors think that American sociologists will be interested in the contem-
porary thinking of an eminent Indian sociologist in the eventful year of
1945” (1945: 496). It was evident that the world at large was ‘distantly’
curious about an Indian sociologist’s venture into the domain of art
though they themselves preferred to keep their positivist hands clean.
Indeed, it was only a couple of decades after this encounter that the ‘crisis
in western sociology’, as mentioned above, was pronounced. However,
before it was pronounced, Mukerjee in India had articulated, “art is at
once a social product and an established means of social control…Modern
40
There have been a few noticeable attempts to systematically understand the contribution
of Mukerjee to sociology in Indian context. See, for example, Thakur (2015).
sociologists should now vindicate the importance of this fertile field – the
study of art forms as the unchecked efflorescence and clarified utterance of
culture, as its principal measure, directive force as well as means of con-
trol” (Mukerjee 1945: 496–497).
Let us take a heuristic jump cut, and ask—then what happened? Did
sociology in India or elsewhere in South Asia persist with its engagement
with arts as suggested by Mukerjee? Perhaps, it is needless to answer such
discomforting questions with detail within the limited space of this intro-
ductory essay. But the short answer is that opportunity was lost in India,
in South Asia, and in the rest of the world simply because Mukerjee’s pas-
sionate plea was ill-understood then as it is now. It would be interesting
however to briefly revisit a curious development in the contemporary dis-
cursive trope in India. Many years after Gouldner’s announcement of the
crisis in Western sociology, some sociologists in India began to pronounce
their own ‘crises’.41 This notion of crises was mostly characterized by the
motif of ‘lament’ on the allegedly deplorable condition of teaching,
researching, and writing in sociology in India. This was more succinctly
underlined in Vasavi’s proposition that sociology in India is “fragmented
and diluted, unable to forge an identity of its own, respond to changing
times, and generate new schools of theory, methods and perspectives”
(2011: 402). Did this announcement of crises in sociology in India lead to
any call for a ‘new sociology’, as was done by Gouldner? Or, does it augur
to any other optimistic consequence of the realization of the crises?
Perhaps, the answer lies in the course of time. But then, there is a curious
observation to share, which unfortunately speak of an ongoing and con-
tinuing separation of art and sociology in India and in the rest of South
Asia. Take for example, some of the attempts by sociologists to recount
the stories of the pioneer sociologists. Madan called it, while resurrecting
an ‘edited’ version of the memories of Radhakamal Mukerjee, an attempt
to rescue the pioneers from ‘disciplinary amnesia.’42 Curiously enough,
this effort hardly takes note of Mukerjee’s sustained engagement with the
artifacts of cultural articulations. Does it mean that there has been a strat-
egy behind recounting the contributions of the pioneers, but do so by
keeping arts and other civilizational entities away from the sociological
41
See, for example, Das (1993) and Deshpande (1994). We have dealt with these crises in
the broader ambit of South Asia in Kumar et al. (2018).
42
See Madan (2003).
framework? It appears at least in the case of Mukerjee that the interest in

rescuing him from ‘disciplinary amnesia’ simultaneously meant perpetuat-
ing another amnesia, which has to do with his simultaneous engagement
with art and sociology.
In the broader scheme briefly presented above, we hope our argument
for a candid conversation between sociology, anthropology, art, and art
history becomes more tangible. Indeed, this is a modest beginning which
solicits due perpetuity of bold ruminations and unhindered conversations
among scholars from at least the two disciplines, sociology and art history.
This beginning is also pertinent at this juncture as art history is stretch-
ing out for a novel realization: art interacts with society! Papastergiadis’s
(2006) emphasis on artists’ social interactions and complex patterns of
cultural exchange in the backdrop of their artworks is expressive of this
new realization among art historians. Artists too are in the fold of every-
day life, and hence they are not in a social vacuum. This realization too is
located in a discursive trope. A systematic thesis on the interaction of social
and aesthetic and therefore imperative of dialogue between sociologists
and art historians appeared with the publication of Becker’s Art Worlds.43
Becker tilled the ground for mutual disciplinary interest by critically
departing from the conventional dominant approaches in art history and
art philosophy, arguing “the dominant tradition takes the artists and art
work, rather than the network of cooperation, as central to the analysis of
art as a social phenomenon”.44 Subsequently, the few sociologists inter-
ested in art also began to self-critically recognize the limitations of sociolo-
gists’ interest in ‘unmasking’ art. All the indicators of connections between
art and society, such as class, gender, dominant ideology, capital interest,
market, and so on, were handy tools in tearing apart what an art historian
could have dubbed as stylized presentation of aesthetics. Nevertheless,
there have been significant endeavors ever since to unravel a debate lead-
ing to an interesting realization. This has been summed up as a compelling
message for both, sociologists and art historians: an object of art is both,
social and aesthetic, at once. This emphatically underscores the indispens-
ability of conversations between art historians and sociologists, appearing
in a tangible form in a volume titled, Art from Start to Finish edited by
43
Many name Howard Becker’s Art Worlds and Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction, both pub-
lished in the 1980s (1982 and 1984, respectively), as two significant works underlining the
common ground for art history, sociology, and cultural studies.
44
Becker quoted in Eduardo de la Fuente’s (2007: 411).
Becker et al. (2006). This supports what de la Fuente has dubbed the New
Sociology of Art and its confidence “to begin dialogue with other disci-
plines, such as art history and cultural studies, if and when these discourses
share the assumption that art is a social construct, and its production and
consumption are thoroughly social in character” (2007: 423). This propo-
sition is also resonant with Jeremy Tanner’s (2003) endeavor to forge a
relationship between sociologists and other scholars interested in art. And,
importantly enough, this relationship, a kind of intellectual kinship, does
not exist in a theoretical vacuum. Akin to Nisbet’s revisiting mentioned
above, Tanner revisits from the classical to the contemporary, theoretical
tropes in sociology, re-reading Durkheim, Marx, Weber, Simmel,
Mannheim, Parsons, Elias, and Habermas. This enables him to propose
that the best art history is, implicitly at least, sociologically informed, and
the best sociology of art places questions of artistic agency and aesthetic
form at the core of its research (Tanner 2003).
What has preceded is our brief outline of the discursive context, moot-
ing issues of shared concerns, which underlines the significance of the
conversation between sociologists, anthropologists, and art historians.
The book, a consequence of conversation, which invites additional possi-
bilities of future conversations, flags the issues of shared interest and a
pronounced possibility of continuity of conversation. It may reveal that at
least some scholars in sociology and social anthropology are keen to
unravel the phenomenon of art-making without being restricted to issues
of style and material. This particular tribe of viewers and consumers of
artworks tends to probe further into the constitution of meanings, going
beyond the surface-value of style and materials. In a nutshell, the more we
converse, the better we understand how sociologists and art historians are
co-travelers on the same path.
Finally, let us conclude our thoughts with reference to two sets of
thoughts presented by Miguel Angel Corzo and Roy Perry on one hand
and Angel Rama on the other. With reference to how artwork of the twen-
tieth century might be remembered in the future, Corzo wonders, “if we
accept the notion that art reflects history, then contemporary art is, in
some way, a monument to contemporary civilization. It is the cultural
heritage of our time” (Corzo 1999: XV). It is also in this sense of contem-
porary art’s burden as repertories of memories of our time, and therefore
social and political products worthy of discourse that we have also sug-
gested art be brought to the centrality of intellectual reckoning in sociol-
ogy and anthropology. Similarly, when talking about the preservation of
contemporary art held in the Tate Gallery, Perry noted, “if we do not
preserve the art of today for tomorrow’s audience, their knowledge and
experience of our culture will be, sadly, impoverished” (Perry 1999: 44).
Indeed, what would sociology and anthropology be without a sustained
interaction and engagement with art and culture when seen from the near
as well as the distant future?
Literary critic Angel Rama’s ideas expressed with regard to hierarchies of
literatures and their legitimacy become important to us in a different way
that has to do with our focus on South Asia. He noted, “European writers
could address their audiences without worrying about the marginal readers
outside Europe” even though writers from other parts of the world con-
tinue to “yearn for European readers and regard their readings as the true
and authorizing one” (quoted in Cubitt 2002: 1). But this is not merely
about legitimacy from Europe but from North America, and now also the
affluent countries in East Asia. As we know, as a matter of quotidian prac-
tice, this situation applies quite well to South Asian artists, curators, and
scholars of sociology and anthropology as well. That is, barring a few
exceptions, their legitimacy is gauged by themselves and others on the basis
of their ‘acceptance’ and ‘currency’ beyond the region in global centers of
capital in Europe, North America, and East Asia. This is a reality of our
time in the region. But we operate with a different scheme of logic. For us,
in our intellectual pursuits, South Asia is of central importance. That is
where we live and work, by choice. Much of our recent intellectual practice
has begun by reflecting on the idea of South Asia, or we have returned to
it after necessary detours. This is why, in this book, we have focused our
attention on this region’s art and its sociology and anthropology as well as
their lapses and where they might go. We continue to read and be inspired
by ideas and writings that come to us from all over the world, and some-
times make them our own. But the legitimacy of our writings, our thinking
or our postulations will not come from what gatekeepers elsewhere in the
world think of our work. Instead, our work will only be legitimized if they
make sense to us in our own contexts and if our intellectual cohorts find
them worthy of discourse. But if these far flung ‘others’ fail to read what we
write as we do theirs, their understandings of the world in which all of us
live, will be sadly impoverished as suggested by Perry.
In this scheme of things, the mutual interdisciplinary conversations we
have suggested and have attempted to put together in this book are aimed
to work as an exemplar towards halting this sense of impoverishment in
the knowledge of our times, in our region, and in the world.
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SECTION I
Contours of Quest: Arts at Crossroad

CHAPTER 2
Mimicking Anthropologists: Re-Membering

a Photo Archive via Pata Paintings,
Performative Mimesis, and Photo
Performance
Parul Dave Mukherji
In 1985, N. Pushpamala, Ayisha Abraham, and I visited Naya Village in

Midnapore district of West Bengal, India, as MA students of the Faculty of
Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. The objective of the
visit was to document the art and life of Dukhshyam Chitrakar, a folk
scroll painter or a patua1 who lived in this village, located some 80 miles
away from Kolkata. This documentation project was mentored by Professor
Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, head of the painting department in India’s
1
A patua is a village scroll (pata) painter who paints on pasted sheets of paper backed by a
cloth and performs by singing the story composed by him. The stories are usually based on
Puranic mythologies, usually Mahabharata, Ramayana and often-local myths involving the
snake goddess, Manasa. More recently, a new genre called the Babu scrolls have emerged.
They are based on colonial times, which include stories of martyrdom of nationalist heroes
who fought against the British Raj.
P. Dave Mukherji (*)
School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05852-4_2
50 P. DAVE MUKHERJI
first postcolonial art school. Its aim was to address the wide gulf that
existed between folk artists and art school-trained artists and art histori-
ans. While the textual and photo documentation were submitted to the
painting department on return, the photographs got immersed in archival
oblivion, as subsequently all three of us got dispersed pursuing our own
career paths. Only recently did they get ‘excavated’ by Pushpamala when
she chanced upon these old negatives in her collection and developed
them. Once rediscovered, they elicited such an effect on us not only for
taking us back in time to our younger selves but also for posing a shocking
contrast between the (native) artist and his extended family on the one
hand, and us, the anthropologists-like trio.2
The visual difference prompted Pushpamala to scribble on the back of
one of the photographs—‘Visiting Anthropologists!’ This is a parody that
I turn into a heuristic device to stage a conversation between ‘real anthro-
pologists’ and us ‘brown anthropologists’. These photos also triggered a
reflexive moment in us to see a possible connection between our ethno-
graphic experience and our respective practices in the field of art history
and art practice.3 How does one revisit this past moment through memory
and visual trace and engage with the questions of difference across various
registers like the urban and rural divide, folk artist/urban artist-art histo-
rian divide, among other differences? What does it mean to document folk
art across different types of unevenness and also consider the impact that
this encounter had on Pushpamala’s later project on Native Women of
India and my interest in performative mimesis? (Parul Dave Mukherji 2006).
Can this remembered encounter be considered as an event to stage a larger
question about the nature of encounter between art history, contempo-
rary art practice, and anthropology? (Figs. 2.1 and 2.2).
The chapter consists of three broad parts. The first section attempts to
set up a conversation between art history and visual anthropology via a
specific genre of group photography that every anthropologist’s fieldwork
photography would entail. This genre is further narrowed to group pho-
tos in which the anthropologist is also present posing with the ‘natives’.
Using the lens of visual anthropology and art history, my focus is on a
2
On the back of one of the photographs, N. Pushpamala has scribbled ‘Visiting
Anthropologists!’ as a witty comment which has inspired the title of this paper. The three of
us in turn took most of the photographs.
3
Decades later, when I joined the department of art history and aesthetics as faculty, I was
part of the shift to New Art History which took the shape of a national conference and a
publication: Towards a New Art History: Studies in Indian Art, 2002. Anthropology
impacted us via Cultural Studies and opened up the vector of politics of representation.
Fig. 2.1 Ayisha Abraham and Pushpamala seeing a scroll on the local goddess
Manasa, in the company of Dukhshyam Chitrakar on the left, Naya Village,
Midnapore, 1985. (Photo courtesy of Parul Dave Mukherji)
Fig. 2.2 Pushpamala and Parul Dave Mukherji sipping coconut water in front of
a vegetable shop in Naya Village, Midnapore, 1985. (Photo Courtesy of Ayisha
Abraham)
52 P. DAVE MUKHERJI
close formalistic analysis of the group photographs to understand asym-

metries between ‘them’ and ‘us’—something that we were not aware of at
the time the photographs were taken. Only when we encountered them as
recovered images after a time lapse of three decades, the image of an
anthropologist haunted my effort to grapple with the effect that these
photos had on us, and a set of visual differences that they posed before us.
The second section deals with the more recent moment in 2015 when
Dukhshyam Chitrakar, by now an impoverished and aged folk artist, con-
tacted me in need of a commission to make a scroll painting. On learning
about the resurfaced photos of our 1985 visit, he decided to paint a scroll
on this very moment. This eventually turned out to be an occasion for him
to turn his gaze on us and depict the kind of urban life he imagined us to
be a part of, and in the process offered a subtle critique of the urban art
world and its market for its marginalization of folk art.
The third part relates these photographs with Pushpamala’s emerging
art practice and her foray into photo performance. It was around the late
1990s that she moved towards this medium and produced her now famous
Native Women Series in which she refashions her own appearance after a
tribal Toda woman. How does her exploration of the colonial archives in
which she places herself as the native compare with these photos and relate
broadly with the ethnographic turn in contemporary art in India?
Finally, I sum up by offering a critique of a particular strand of postcolo-
nial discourse that disallows full visibility to the internal other, a problem that
continues to haunt even the most politically engaged art discourse on India.
Seeing the Genre of a Group Photo Anthropologically

two uses of photographic archives: to provide ‘a record as complete as it can
be made…of the present state of the world’ and to provide ‘valuable docu-
ments’ for the future. (Wright 1991: 43)
Taking Pushpamala’s humorous scribble on the back of one of the pho-

tos referring to both of us as ‘Visiting Anthropologists’ as a point of entry,4
let me ask the following question: what were the conditions of that
4
I draw from Elizabeth Edwards’ definition of a photograph as a material object that has
a front and a back through which the scribble on the back is part of its contextual reality.
Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Material Beings: Objecthood and Ethnographic Photographs’, Visual
Studies, Vol. 17, No. 1, 2002, 67.
MIMICKING ANTHROPOLOGISTS: RE-MEMBERING A PHOTO ARCHIVE… 53
hotographic moment that prompted her to use this label? The folk art
p
documentation project that we were a part of was funded by the Cultural
Ministry of the Indian government and it was mentored by Gulam Sheikh,
an eminent artist and art teacher, to address immense disparity between
the life-world and art that was practiced in the modern art school at the
Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda and that of the traditional folk artists prac-
ticed in their native villages. The project was conceptualized in two stages.
In stage one, the folk artists were invited for a residency to the art school
and in the next stage, students from this art school were to travel to the
native village of these artists to live with them, observe them at work in
their ‘native’ environment and explore a possibility of a dialogue; quite in
line with what anthropologists like Malinowski would call a ‘participant
observation’ in field research.
Compared to countries in Latin America where anthropology had a
different status being enlisted in the nation-building activity (Lomnitz
2005), in India, cultural nationalism preferred to invoke its Indic-/
Sanskrit-based tradition that presided over the early phase of nationalism
during the first quarter of the twentieth century.5 Folk and tribal art did
play a crucial role in early nationalist art, as in the paintings by Jamini Roy,
for instance, but quite often, it worked as a source of appropriation of a
visual vocabulary by male urban artists as a way to indigenize western
modernism. Seldom did the figure of the folk or tribal artist per se emerge
as a legitimate maker of modern art; much like the way women artists
remained confined to the margins of art history whereas they had a promi-
nent presence in the symbolic realm such as the allegorical figure of Bharat
Mata or India-as-a-Mother (Ramaswamy 2010).
It was largely during the 1980s when folk and tribal art began to gain
recognition, and turn into objects of scholarly publications, a belated
acknowledgment from the state since Independence (Jayakar 1981; Shah
1985). At a time India was attracting international attention through its
cultural intervention in the form of the festivals of India across the West,
folk and tribal art best captured its Indianness and became the hallmarks
of national authenticity. In fact, with the establishment of Marg in 1946,
India’s first art magazine by the writer and poet, Mulk Raj Anand—who
had a strong socialist leanings—folk and tribal art enjoyed as much visibil-
ity as the classical art. But the tension between these two categories, that
5
For instance, the first national anthem of India, ‘Vande Mataram’, was composed in
1937 in Sanskrit; it was originally a poem composed by the Bengali writer, Bankim Chandra
Chatterjee, in the 1870s, which was turned into a song by the poet Rabindranath Tagore.
54 P. DAVE MUKHERJI
is, folk/tribal and Indic/classical, manifested in the opposing terms like

the margi and the desi, first used by Coomaraswamy in a modern sense
(Coomaraswamy 1957). The pedigree of these two terms has a long his-
tory in music and the arts traceable to twelfth century CE when the dis-
tinction was more along stylistic grounds than that of the social and
cultural hierarchies underpinning them. From 1982, desi entered an insti-
tutional frame with J. Swaminathan’s setting up of the Bharat Bhavan in
Bhopal—an art institute envisaged to bridge the gap between the urban,
metropolitan art and the folk and tribal art in the heart of the country. So
when Pushpamala and I got involved in the project in 1985, it was an
extension of the desi project, so to speak, funded by the Cultural Ministry,
and under its patronage, Gulam Sheikh encouraged students to experience
and address the hierarchy between the urban and the rural.
After the lapse of three decades, when I revisited the documentation
project through these photographs, a set of differences between ‘us’ and
‘them’ as encapsulated by the label of ‘Visiting Anthropologists’ did pro-
duce an effect that warranted a close visual study. The lens of ‘Visiting
Anthropologists’ also allowed me to closely examine these distinctions
between ‘us’ and ‘them’ not in terms of skin color so much as our urban
clothing (urban chic), our stance and tourist-like activity (like posing while
drinking the coconut water in our tokas or local hats).
Again, the parody of ‘Visiting Anthropologists’ led me to compare these
photographs with those taken by the ‘real’ anthropologists. Comparing the
Midnapore photographs of ours in which we posed with the patua families
with the ones taken by the ‘real’ or field anthropologists with their ‘sub-
jects’ led me to think of this special genre of photographs that would pre-
sumably be part of every anthropologist’s collection of fieldwork albums.
How does one analyze the composition using the standard art historical
tools of formal analysis? The field photographs taken by Malinowski, who
pioneered participant observation, was an obvious starting point.6
It is at this point that it may be possible to stage a dialogue between
anthropology and art history and move into visual anthropology by remain-
ing within the vectors of the latter. In terms of disciplinary rethinking, art
history had learned many of its lessons about the politics of representation
6
Malinowski applied his reflexive way of grasping the power relationship between an
anthropologist and his subjects to photography, being particularly attentive to the eye level
of the camera vis-a-vis the group facing the photographer. He rejected both the high and low
angles in favor of eye-level shots to undermine a possible objectification of the natives.
from anthropology and redressed its own disciplinary blind spots. But can
art history also offer tools to anthropology to deepen reflexivity about self-
representation of the anthropologist and enable it to get over its anxiety of
the visual?
Taking genre7 as a way to understand the fashioning of a group photo-
graph, I intend to visually read the photographs both in their specific
‘photographic moment’ (Pink 2007: 7) and in terms of their present
reception by Pushpamala and me to make sense of their effect on us but
also to closely examine its visual order. Our ‘anthropological’ photographs
presented here were taken by Ayisha Abraham, an artist who is now well
known for using photographs, especially family albums in her own practice
as a contemporary artist. Given this fact, any rigid distinction between
creative and realist photography (Edwards 2002: 57, quoted in Pink
2007) does not apply in this case.
Let us look at the visual genre of a group photograph that anthropolo-
gists take of themselves with the natives in the photograph, taking as my
point of departure the well-known photograph entitled ‘Malinowski with
Trobriand Islanders, 1918.8 I will read this photo against the grain of the
current anthropological reading of Malinowski’s photographs that swerves
towards political correctness and ascribes the reflexivity of his participant
observation methodology to his photographs.9 In this photo, despite its
horizontal format, a format preferred by Malinowski for its non-hegemonic
implications, the anthropologist is centrally located, much like the figure
of Christ in Leonardo da Vinci’s celebrated painting, Last Supper. The
natives sit on either side on a table-like seat and dangle their feet mimick-
ing the posture of the anthropologist. The sharp contrast between
Malinowski’s white skin is accentuated by his white shirt and the contrast
7
I take genre less to connote and classify, but more as a link between the genesis and the
production of the group photographs. In Remembering the Present, anthropologist Johannes
Fabian extensively engages with the category of ‘genre’ tracing its emergence to eighteenth-
century Europe, especially to Holland and its visual practices which, in a sense, anticipated
the invention of photography.
8
The image is available at the following link: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsehistory/2017/
06/13/bronislaw-malinowski-lse-pioneer-of-social-anthropology/
9
For example, see the following observation by Michael Young: “The height of the camera
was commensurate with the height of the subject. Malinowski crouched when photograph-
ing children. He neither looked up or down at his subjects. The effect is one of directness…
Vertical framing was foreign to Malinowski’s style, and horizontal framing massively pre-
dominates in the collection”. Michael. W. Young, Malinowski’s Kiriwina: Fieldwork
Photography 1915–1918 (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1998); p. 17.
56 P. DAVE MUKHERJI
formed by the native bodies flanking him. His baldhead stands out amidst
the dense black hair of the native heads. They are all men with their bare
torsos. A further sign of difference between them is signaled by white
shoes worn by the anthropologist as opposed to bare feet held at an angle
to form a staccato of black dangling legs.
Within the genre of group photograph that included the anthropolo-
gist is the sub-genre of anthropologists posing with native children. For
instance, we can take as an example the well-known 1918 photograph in
which Malinowski is photographed with native children in the Trobriand
Islands.10 How different is this from the preceding one? The group forma-
tion in this photo follows a different logic where the bodies of children are
gathered in one mass in the center flanked by the figure of Malinowski
crouching down on one side and a native adult on the other. Much has
been written about the anthropologist’s crouching on the ground to meet
the eye level of the children and his preference for the horizontal format
as a way to neutralize obvious differences in height and age. Curiously, in
this photo, this posture of Malinowski further enhances his role as an
anthropologist studiously observing the children who are instructed to
pose as playing a game. Does the presence of children create condition for
greater intimacy and proximity between the two? Even if he crouches to
reduce the distance between him and the children, the posture accentuates
the staged aspect of this photograph rather than highlight his being a par-
ticipant observer.
Quite strikingly different is his contemporary Brazilian anthropologist,
Edgard Roquette-Pinto, in another part of the world, but also posing with
native children.11 Here ‘native’ has a different resonance than in the con-
text of Malinowski. As a scientist connected to the National Museum of
Rio de Janeiro between 1905 and 1935, Pinto was involved in research on
anthropology and ethnography of Brazil, to describe the formative racial
characteristics of the country within the context of Brazilian nationalist
activism. Pinto faces the camera held by his friend, Antonio Pyreneus de
Souza, while holding the children in intimate and choreographed embrace:
his arms go around in an ‘S’ shape forming two circles around the children
on either side. Pinto shrinks the distance we noticed in Malinowski’s photo
10
Image is available at the following link: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:Bronis%C5%82aw_Malinowski_among_Trobriand_tribe_2.jpg
11
The photograph is available at the following link: https://alchetron.com/Edgar-
Roquette-Pinto
by holding the children close to him, but he is still at the center acting as
a pivot. What is striking is the manner in which the children are instructed
to demurely cover their private parts.
Closer home, and a couple of decades later, Verrier Elwin,12 an English,
self-trained anthropologist, presents another set of examples. He, too,
partakes of this sub-genre and gets himself photographed posing with the
Gond and Pardhan children, belonging to tribes of Central India. Rather
than crouching on the ground to reduce his height to be closer to the
children, Elwin chooses to sit on a chair instead and surrounds himself
with children. The two photos are remarkably similar in format with some
variations: in the first, Elwin’s averted face meets the eyes of a little girl,
and in the second, a smiling boy takes her place as he holds the youngest
one in the group on his lap—the only among the group who looks out
curiously at the photographer. In this case, the crouching position is taken
up by one of the children in the front gazing up at the anthropologist and
thereby closing the semi-circle around Elwin (Fig. 2.3).
Let us compare these photos by the real anthropologists with our
Midnapore documentation album.13 In this photo taken by Ayisha
Abraham, where Pushpamala and I pose with the patua children, the gen-
der dimension of the ‘brown anthropologists’ obviously enters the frame.
12
Verrier Elwin (1902–1964) was an ethnologist and tribal activist, who began his career
in India as a Christian missionary. He is best known for his early work with the Baigas and
Gonds of Central India. Inspired by Gandhi, he allied himself with the nationalist movement,
and later Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru would continually seek his expertise for tribal and
rural development.
13
All the photographs of the documentation trip referred to in this chapter were turned
into artworks by Pushpamala and were on display at a show entitled India Re-Worlded:
Seventy Years of Investigating a Nation curated by Arshiya Lokhandwala at Gallery Lakeeren
in Mumbai that started from September 2017. This fact explains the black strips on the eyes
of Dukhshyam and his extended family as part of the ethical use of photographs in the
absence of written permission from them. Riddhi Doshi and Rachel Lopez write on them in
Hindustan Times: “Artist Pushpamala N revisits old, found images from her 1985 trip to
Naya village in West Bengal to reflect upon how she experiences the photographs now. Those
casually clicked pictures now take on a different meaning and context. …‘The visual differ-
ence in the pictures between us and the villagers mimicked records of old European colonial
anthropological expeditions, and yet the photographs possessed the familiarities that we
could have as insiders’, says Pushpamala. The difference between the lifestyle of the artist
students and villagers is stark. It almost looks like they are from different worlds, but the ease
of the body language suggests the connect of being and experiencing the same nation”,
observe Doshi and Lopez. https://www.hindustantimes.com/.../story-nTCgmKsnOuW-
je2tL2QMBFP.htm
58 P. DAVE MUKHERJI
Fig. 2.3 Pushpamala and Parul Dave Mukherji seeing a scroll sitting in front of a
thatched hut with two children from the patua community, Naya Village, Midnapore,
West Bengal, India, 1985. (Photo Courtesy of Ayisha Abraham)
Squatting on the floor and resting our backs against a mud-thatched hut,
Pushpamala and I examine the scroll held open by her. While Pushpamala
obviously strikes a pose while intently gazing at the scroll, I glance at it
while holding the attention of a child on my lap with a camera cap. The
awkward posture of the bystander child on one side appears to be more of
a happy coincidence captured by Ayisha’s camera, rather than a deliberate
pose. My hand accidentally covers the seated child’s lower part of the body
and so it is hard to tell if he had any covering but the standing boy gets
captured as naked. It is this easy inclusion of the naked infant that led me
to pay attention to careful orchestration of the little hands of children in
the Pinto photograph that betrays an anxiety over this issue. The sight of
naked village children causes neither discomfort nor embarrassment, being
part of what one expects to see in an Indian village (Fig. 2.4).
In this group photograph, the two genres combine. Here the ‘mimick-
ing anthropologists’ quite easily blend with Dukhshyam and his extended
family. Even in this frame, naked infants abound, but it is largely men who
choose to pose holding their children. Notably, the artist Dukhshyam
who poses standing in a white shirt has his son Rohin propped up on his
Fig. 2.4 Pushpamala and Parul Dave Mukherji sitting in front of a thatched hut
with Dukhshyam and his extended family of scroll painters, Naya Village, Midnapore,
West Bengal, India, 1985. (Photo Courtesy of Ayisha Abraham)
waist. So while men proudly pose with their children, the women stand
unencumbered but have their heads covered in a sari, a feature that will
inform Pushpamala’s self-fashioning as a native woman a decade and a half
later. Pushpamala and I are sitting on a raised platform on one side and are
joined by one of the boys while the rest of the group either stands or
squats on the mud floor. The eldest among the extended family are two
patuas or scroll painters near in the foreground, one of whom holds a
scroll in his hands and a couple of books that rests on an aluminum pot in
which the songs are written down. As Ayisha took this photo, it is likely
that we followed her instructions, which certainly did not aim at segregat-
ing Pushpamala and me from them. Rather, the group takes the shape of
a triangle echoing the shape of the roofs of the huts, adding an aesthetic
dimension to the photo.
What creates a sharp distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ are the black
strips covering the eyes of the family members, whereas Pushpamala and
I gaze back at the camera. How does one define the gaze of brown eth-
nographers? Does our gender make it possible to conceive of a category
60 P. DAVE MUKHERJI
of a soft gaze? Verrier Elwin too softens his gaze turning to children with
tenderness. Are the women who stand with their hair covered impacting
Pushpamala’s gaze, and will they reappear in her Native Women Series
when she refashions her body to mimic them?
II
In this second section, we will jump cut to the present and focus on a
recent scroll painting made by Dukhshyam based on what he could recall
of our 1985 visit to his village, besides being driven by his need for making
ends meet. Although he continues to live in his village known to be home
of many patua families, he and many of his fellow painters are now finding
it difficult to solely survive on their traditional practice of scroll painting.
Lack of state patronage and ill health prevents him from traveling to nearby
villages to earn his living. In 2015, he called me from his village asking me
if I wanted to buy a scroll from him. On being informed about the redis-
covered photographs of our 1985 visit to his village, he astutely came up
with the suggestion of basing his commissioned scroll on our 1985 docu-
mentation visit to Naya Village. His proposition appealed to me. After
three months, he completed the scroll and sent it by post to me along with
a DVD recording of himself performing the scroll in his village.
Unlike the traditional scroll paintings that drew the subject matter from
old mythological stories about Hindu gods and goddesses, this scroll dealt
with an unusual theme of narrating the travels of three women ‘ethnogra-
phers’ who had visited his village some three decades ago. While r emaining
within the ambit of his traditional visual language, he found ways to tele-
scope the past with the present. He not only depicted the moment we set
out to travel to his village but also our current professional activity. The
other remarkable feature of this scroll is his engagement with photography
and its function in mechanical reproduction. In other words, the camera is
inserted in the story both as an object and a form of representation. The
best way I could make sense of this aspect of his depiction was through the
idea of performative mimesis. It is performative also in a real sense as each
scroll is meant to be performed before an audience, accompanied as it is
by a song that is narrated by the folk artist while unwinding the scroll. The
best way I could make sense of this aspect of his depiction is through the
idea of performative mimesis, a concept that I have been engaging with for
some time now. This notion also makes possible a critique of the standard
notion of representation that is founded on a neat separation of the sub-

ject and object of representation.14 Here are some frames from this scroll
for a visual analysis.
The opening frame (Fig. 2.5) depicts the three of us, Pushpamala,
Ayisha, and me getting ready to leave Baroda for his village in two sub-
frames. On the left, we stand behind Professor Gulam Sheikh who is
shown with his characteristic beard and mustache, seated on the floor,
busy painting, and glancing up at us while we take his leave; incidentally,
one of us holds a camera, a recording device for our documentation proj-
ect which looks more like a video recorder, a familiar sight in his native
village in recent times. On the right, three of us, clad in trousers and shoes
ready to leave by train to our destination across the country from Western
India to Bengal.
In the next set of couple of frames (Figs. 2.6 and 2.7), the three of us
are shown navigating the city with its high-rise buildings, taxis and buses,
and an aeroplane passing overhead.
In Fig. 2.8, Dukhshyam singles me out to depict me as a professor in
JNU taking a class before a blackboard, and all the students are shown to
be women! Was I singled out among us three having commissioned this
scroll? But a close look at my activity as a teacher directed me to the black-
board that has two words written on it: Pater Katha or the Story of a
Scroll written in larger-sized letters in English and a Hindi version in
smaller font below. This was a remarkable insertion as it served two ends:
By making Pata painting the main topic of my class, he was not only exer-
cising his agency as a folk artist, but he also interwove his subtle critique
of the mainstream art world’s neglect of his genre of painting. Is this what
he thought the objective of our 1985 documentation trip was? Is this his
way of framing a critique of marginalization of his folk art practice in the
urban art discourse?
The final frame (Fig. 2.11) shows our return to Baroda, to Gulam
Sheikh’s very classroom from where our trip had started bringing the nar-
rative to a full circle. Sheikh now witnesses our photo documentation,
which is shown vertically much like a Pata painting itself, except now each
frame repeats the same figure within it. It is here performative mimesis
helps to explain how a scroll can comment on a photograph. Here, mime-
sis does not function as a one-to-one correspondence between an object
14
Performative mimesis builds on Derrida’s notion of mimesis, which he derived from the
French Symbolist poet, Stéphane Mallarmé. See Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory
and Criticism After Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982).
62 P. DAVE MUKHERJI
Fig. 2.5 The documentation scroll painted by Dukhshyam in 2015. The open-
ing frame showing Pushpamala holding the camera, Ayisha Abraham, and Parul
Dave Mukherji in Gulam Sheikh’s Studio in the Painting Department, Baroda, tak-
ing his leave to embark upon the Train Journey to Naya Village, Midnapore, West
Bengal, India, 1985. (Photo courtesy of Parul Dave Mukherji)
and its copy but rather captures the indexical repetition of a photographic
image. In other words, his repetition of the same figure in five frames sig-
nifies photographic reproduction. Adding his own feminist touches,
Dukhshyam shows the main gate of the Faculty of Fine Arts to be flanked
by women guards, as his closing comment on a narrative, which remains
largely woman centered.
Fig. 2.6 Dukhshyam Chitrakar, The documentation scroll. Our arrival in

Calcutta and our negotiations with the city traffic to catch a bus to visit the Naya
Village, Midnapore, West Bengal, India, 1985. (Photo courtesy of Parul Dave
Mukherji)
The return of this folk artist’s gaze back at us in manner in which he

depicted the differences that he perceived him and us may be at first be
read less a question of his empowerment and more his desperate and cre-
ative effort ‘to be in the contemporary’. His mode of expression remains
traditional, and yet he adapts the style to accommodate a radically differ-
ent theme of an art school students’ documentation visit to his village. In
64 P. DAVE MUKHERJI
Fig. 2.7 Dukhshyam Chitrakar, The documentation scroll. Our arrival in

Calcutta and our negotiations with the city traffic to catch a bus to visit the Naya
Village, Midnapore, West Bengal, India, 1985. (Photo courtesy of Parul Dave
Mukherji)
case of the university lecture room, a classroom in his village school appears
to have worked well as a model. To what extent, does this reversal of the
gaze turn him into an ethnographer of urban and city life? Or is the rever-
sal of gaze an impossible position to occupy given Dukhshyam’s status as
a disempowered village artist? (Fig. 2.9).
Sonal Khullar has been the first art historian to draw attention to this
encounter of us with the Bengali folk artists in the context of Indian mod-
ern’s worldly and regional affiliations. However, she refers to this moment
as an example of a “translation between local and regional cultures that
was a hallmark of modernism in India” (Khullar 2015: 226–227).
Dukhshyam who had acquired a certain visibility in the Baroda art world
during the 1980s being on a residency program now languishes in obliv-
ion and is struggling to find buyers for his scrolls. The desi artist, once a
symbol or token of postcolonial democratic cultural politics, is now pushed
to the fringes of the contemporary art world.
Fig. 2.8 Dukhshyam Chitrakar, The documentation scroll. Parul Dave Mukherji
taking a class on the story of a painted scroll or Pata Katha at the School of Arts and
Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. (Photo courtesy of Parul Dave
Mukherji)
When Pushpamala discovered the old photographs of our 1984 field

trip and sent them to me, what seemed like a simple documentation
pushed into the corners of our memory took another sense. Gulam Sheikh
wanted us to live with patua painters and their families to connect their life
with their work. What then appeared like an organic community in a vil-
lage today appears like a community left behind. Dukhshyam’s subtle cri-
tique also alludes to the failed promise made to the rural artists not only
by the state but also the very documentation project that we were once a
part of. Despite immense research done on patua painting and institution-
alization of museums such as Gurusaday Museum in Kolkata, cities and
urban institutional sites hold the key to their visibility in the art world. It
is during Durga Puja that some of them make it to the city and find patron-
age. Their relationship to the city is unidirectional, and so in that respect,
our presence in their village was such a spectacle.
66 P. DAVE MUKHERJI
Fig. 2.9 Dukhshyam Chitrakar, The documentation scroll. The closing frame
showing Parul Dave Mukherji, Pushpamala, and Ayisha Abraham, showing the pho-
tos of the documentation trip to Gulam Sheikh in his studio in the Painting
Department, Baroda, in 1985. (Photo courtesy of Parul Dave Mukherji)
III
Pushpamala and the Ethnographic Turn in Contemporary Art

in India: Fashioning Herself as a Native South Indian Woman
via Photo Performance
“I remember that morning in Bastar vividly. I had woken up in a green
haze. Shantibai had collected the intoxicating mahua flowers that had fallen
on the ground and was laying them out to dry at the Dialogue Center. We
had planned a trip to Chitrakoot Falls. Before motoring down to the Falls,
we had walked through the clearing of gorgeous Sal trees, the air ringing
suddenly with the laughter of children jumping up to cradle themselves in
a tangle of vines” (Adajania 2016: 273).15 A decade and a half lapsed before
N. Pushpamala was going to reinvent her practice as a photo performance
artist around 2000 and launch into her Native Women Series.
In this section, I want to explore a possible connection between the
1984 moment and Pushpamala’s Native Women Series, which I take to be
aligned with the ethnographic turn in contemporary art in India. It was
the Bombay-based artist, Navjot Altaf, who had pioneered a move in this
direction by the late 1990s when she had “surprised many of her contem-
poraries in the Indian art world by walking away from a successful career
in Bombay and retreating to Bastar, in the tribal heartland of Central
India” (Adajania 2016: 11).
Until the 1990s, the discourse on modern Indian art was largely driven
by the continual pull and push between tradition and modernity. Geeta
Kapur captures the dynamics of the Indian modern through the lens of
Nehruvian modernity by creating a quadripartite equation among nation-
alism, secularism, tradition, and modernity: “nationalism in our experi-
ence is at the very least a foil to the universal modern. It helps resist
imperial hegemony up to a point; it serves as environmental testing ground
for unheeding modernism. Just as modernism, a cultural and specifically
modern category, interrogates through its formalist means, through its
negative dialectic and valourized transgressions, the dangerously totaliz-
ing ideology of nationalism” (Kapur 1991: 2805).
The temporality implied in When was Modernism exploded around the
1990s just as a construct of postcolonial discourse that pitted the Indian
modern against the West began to sound increasingly elitist. This con-
struct left little room to address the internal colonization that was under
way following Independence in 1947. After half a century of the postco-
lonial era, the terrain of contemporary Indian art grew far more complex
with the impact of globalization on the one hand and the rise of commu-
nal/caste/gender politics on the other; the internal others found voices
through the cracks that had set in the Nehruvian model. While art histo-
rians and critics were still reeling under the impact of these complicated
developments, artists experimented boldly with new medium and materi-
ality, which served to not only upturn the standard notions of time and
space but even the very question of representation was put at stake: repre-
sentation took on dual meaning as aesthetic and political at the same time.
15
This excerpt from the Epilogue best matches the ethnographic turn in art writing that
we first had witnessed in art practice. It is reminiscent of field notes maintained by
anthropologists.
68 P. DAVE MUKHERJI
The pedagogic vision of Gulam Sheikh was as if applied to contempo-

rary art practice by both Altaf and Pushpamala in different ways.
Intertwined with the self-fashioning of the artist as an ethnographer was a
disenchantment with the idea of history as progress, throwing open the
question of archive and a creative anachronism in dealing with the past. If
Pushpamala revisited the colonial photo archives that had objectified the
tribal bodies, Altaf moved her studio to Bastar and aspired for a collabora-
tion with the tribal artists.16 Therefore, ethnography and archive emerged
as two key axes that undergirded the shift in contemporary art practice.
Pushpamala’s Native Women Series combined both these concerns: of art-
ist as an ethnographer and history as archive. I would locate Pushpamala’s
foray into photo performance within these two conceptual markers.17
How does her exploration of the colonial archives in which she places her-
self as the native compare with these photos taken in 1985 in the midst of
native men and women of a West Bengal village? At a time when postcolonial
discourse was at its peak, Pushpamala revisited the colonial photo archives and
found their representation of the native women a suitable subject of her fierce
critique. Perhaps, the term that best encapsulates her careful move to photo
performance is performative mimesis. This entailed a different mode of repre-
sentation in which the artist literally stepped into the ‘shoes’ of a native woman
and prepared her body and persona to represent this other. Here mimicry
shades into masquerade. From being a mimicking anthropologist to an imper-
sonator of a native woman (but with a qualification of a South Indian native),
she drew her new mode of representation via the postmodern citationality
from an already existing formal lexicon of colonial photography (Tharu
2007). However, unlike the casual snap shot of the earlier photographic
moment, her Ethnographic Series are the result of a carefully orchestrated mis-
en-scene.18 Moving beyond the formal differences, I want to engage with the
political implications of this self-fashioning invoking Hal Foster’s formulation
16
Adajania voices Altaf’s concerns that seem to resonate with Sheikh’s radical pedagogy:
“Can individuals belonging to different ethnic class and backgrounds communicate, work
together, create a political solidarity, and produce shared cultural meanings?” (Adajania
2016: 11).
17
Apart from N. Pushpamala, there are many other contemporary artists in India who have
shown deep concern with ethnography and the archive; Navjot Altaf being a pioneer, joined
by artists like Nikhil Chopra, Naveen Mathews, Sharmila Sawant, and many others, despite
their very diverse modes of art making.
18
Maybe this explains why in India anthropology was not enlisted in the nation making
project because of the painful reminder of colonial photography and its objectification of the
native body.
of “artist as an ethnographer”: “art thus passed into the expanded field of

culture that anthropology is thought to survey” (Foster 1996: 306).
Having witnessed the expansion of the field of contemporary art in
India in the post-1990s, there was no simple, celebratory return to the
earlier photographic moment of 1985. Artist/art historian as an ethnog-
rapher19 has a longer history in India than the Euro-American world,
given its diverse demography and the colonial interlude. In fact, the very
career of the terms we alluded to early in this essay desi and margi captures
deep social and cultural disparities across class as well as caste. Hence,
Foster’s tracing of the ethnographic turn in the 1960s by displacing the
Marxist, class-based model of avant garde practice with the activism of
postmodern artists revolving around the cultural/racial alterity of the
postcolonial subaltern is not applicable to the Indian context.
However, there are two warnings sounded by Hal Foster that help in
developing a critique of Indian artists’ engagement with ethnography:
Does the project of ‘ethnographic self-fashioning’ fall into the trap of
“promote[ing] a presumption of ethnographic authority as much as a
questioning of it?” (Foster 1996: 306). It is a possibility that Pushpamala’s
mode of photo performance work invites as does our retrospective glanc-
ing at the earlier moment. Perhaps, it is by showing Pushpamala as the
artist in the making and by foregrounding the characters who would sub-
sequently enter her repertoire that this critique can be preempted; as, for
example, the ‘native woman’ clad in her sari with her head covered is
among the photographed, potentially an object of Pushpamala’s future
gaze but at the moment she is part of her own environment, gazing back
at the photographer (Fig. 2.10). Pushpamala is not yet “gazing for her”.
If narcissism is a possible trap that Pushpamala potentially faces, Altaf
faces the danger of ideological patronage of the tribal/adivasi artists that she
collaborates with. Take, as, for instance, Nancy Adajania’s otherwise bril-
liant book on Navjot Altaf that is entitled Navjot Altaf: The Thirteenth Place.
Despite its evocative subtitle, the book ultimately succumbs to the logic of
a monograph—inevitable fallout when the book project is commissioned by
a private gallery. A monograph tends to place the author in a position of
ideological patronage which defeats the aim of an artist like Altaf to commit
herself to solidarity with the worker or tribal in her material practice.
19
Retrospectively speaking, today it is possible to understand Ananda Kentish
Coomaraswamy’s very entry into art history through the prism of cultural anthropology if
we trace it to his first seminal work entitled Medieval Sinhalese Art (Broad Campden 1907).
Jawaharlal Nehru’s The Discovery of India, 1946, is another such example of salience of the
ethnographic lens.
70 P. DAVE MUKHERJI
Fig. 2.10 N. Pushpamala, The Ethnographic Series, Native Women of South India,
Photo-Performance, 2004. (Photo courtesy of N. Pushpamala)
When we juxtapose the careers of Dukhshyam on the one hand and those
of Pushpamala and Altaf on the other, it dramatizes a very sharp divide
between the folk artists and contemporary artists in India—a matter that had
deeply concerned Gulam Sheikh in the mid-1980s. At best, the bold moves
by these urban artists to reach out to their social and cultural others affirm
their political radicalism. While these artists have successfully reinvented their
practice through the ethnographic turn, it is the postcolonial theory that also
needs a reinvention which rather than foregrounding the East-West encoun-
ters needs to be more responsive to the history of internal colonization.
Despite the radicality and the politics of inclusion that underpins
Pushpamala’s turning this photographic moment into a contemporary art-
work, the neoliberal ideology seeps in through the copyright rules in photog-
raphy that disallows showing the face of the photographed ‘natives’ without
permission. The black strips covering the eyes of ‘them’ may fulfill photogra-
phy’s ‘ethical’ code, but visually they further enhance the asymmetry of our
Fig. 2.11 A detail of Pushpamala in front of a thatched hut with Dukhshyam and
his extended family of scroll painters, Naya Village, Midnapore, West Bengal, India,
1985. (Photo courtesy of N. Pushpamala)
positions, between them, almost anonymous members of a community, and

us—an urban elite artist and an art historian.
But despite the unevenness of our relationship with Dukhshyam it is in
his scroll rather than in the photograph that he returns the gaze—with his
clever inscription of Pata Katha on the blackboard, written not in Bengali
but in English and Hindi, languages more audible in the corridors of the
art world and maybe in a potential market. Thereby he also inscribes his
desire to be in the contemporary. The scroll that I have commissioned
ultimately became a site of a new pedagogic responsibility in the way
Dukhshyam threw the ball back into my court, so to speak, by inscribing
“Pata Katha” on the blackboard. What sort of anthropology of art to fash-
ion that will make this impertinence from a folk artist legible? (Fig. 2.11).
72 P. DAVE MUKHERJI
References
Adajania, Nancy. 2016. Navjot Altaf: The Thirteenth Place. Mumbai: Guild.
Coomaraswamy, A.K. 1956 (or 1957??). The Nature of “Folklore” and “Popular
Art”. In Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art, 130–143. New York: Dover
Publications.
Dave Mukherji, Parul. 2006. Towards Performance Mimesis. Theatre India –
National School of Drama Theatre Journal 13: 178–192.
Edwards, Elizabeth. 2002. Material Beings: Objecthood and Ethnographic
Photographs. Visual Studies 17 (1): 67.
Fabian, Johannes. 1996. Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History
in Zaire. Chicago: University of California Press.
Foster, Hal. 1996. The Artist as Ethnographer? In The Return of the Real.
Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Jayakar, Pupul. 1981. The Earthen Drum: An Introduction to the Ritual Arts of
Rural India. New Delhi: National Museum.
Kapur, Geeta. 1991. Place of the Modern in Indian Cultural Politics. Economic
and Political Weekly 26 (49): 2803–2806.
Khullar, Sonal. 2015. Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity, and
Modernism in India, 1930–1990. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lomnitz, Claudio. 2005. Bordering on Anthropology Dialectics of a National
Tradition in Mexico. In Empires, Nations and Natives: Anthropology and State-
Making, ed. Benoit De L’Estoile, Federico Neiburg, and Lygia Sigaud,
167–196. Durban/London: Duke University Press.
Pink, Sarah. 2007. Ethnographic Photography and Printed Text. In Doing Visual
Ethnography. London: Sage Publications.
Ramaswamy, Sumathi. 2010. The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India.
London: Duke University Press.
Shah, Haku. 1985. Votive Terracottas of Gujarat. Ed. Carmen Kegal. Ahmedabad:
Mapin Publishers.
Tharu, Susie. 2007. Notes for a Grammar of the Visual Vernacular. In Native
Women of India: Manners and Customs (a project by Pushpamala N. and Claire
Arni), ed. N. Pushpamala. Delhi: Nature Morte Gallery.
Wright, Terence. 1991. Fieldwork Photographs of Jenness and Malinowski and
the Beginnings of Modern Anthropology. Journal of Anthropology Society of
Oxford 22 (1): 41–58.
CHAPTER 3
Reframing the Contexts for Pakistani

Contemporary Art
Salima Hashmi and Farida Batool
Some decades ago, art historian Griselda Pollock addressed the question
of why it was important for “feminists to intervene in so marginal an area
as art history” (Pollock as cited Bird 1996: 68). She argued that its def-
initions of art and artist reinforced bourgeois ideology, creating myths
of individual genius unfettered by social obstacles and sheltered from
analysis or socio-political contextualisation within the ‘magical sphere’ of
art. These ‘ideologies of art history’ are then systematically perpetuated
through TV documentaries, biographies, and popular art books. Pollock
reasoned that art historical discourse portrays the artist as a central, ide-
alised figure which supports the “bourgeois myths of a universal, classless
Man” (Pollock as cited Bird 1996: 68).
The novelist, Qurratulain Hyder, also speculated on this idea of univer-
salization and the genius of the individual artists in 1959, a few years after
the creation of Pakistan. In her seminal literary work on the history of the
Indian sub-continent, Aag Ka Darya (River of Fire), Kamal, a traveller
S. Hashmi (*) • F. Batool

Lahore, Pakistan

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05852-4_3
74 S. HASHMI AND F. BATOOL
historian during the times of Bhagat Kabir,1 is roaming around Ayodhya

to document the history of India through the reading of 2000-year-old
manuscripts (Hyder 2000). On one of his adventurous days out in the
field, he notices a cluster of ancient temples and asks the old pundit 2 the
name of the creator of the oldest one. The pundit looks at him with a
strange expression and replies that this land had seen many an image
maker, sculptor, and writer since and before the times of Chandragupta
Maurya, but nobody knew their names as names were long since gone but
humans were immortal. Kamal is flustered. He does not know how to
write the history of this land where people did not give much weight to
the names of the artists and writers (Hyder 2000).
Art, in our present understanding of the term, is always born out of the
desire to respond, articulate, and negotiate within religious and ritualistic
practices, and is an extension of daily life. The overall aesthetics was dictated
by the essence of the region, and the need to be connected to the Greater
Being through creativity. Embracing and celebrating the ‘universal’ artist
was a phenomenon that arrived in western art history much later, in the
fifteenth century, and the European practices of art-making, especially, ‘art
for art’s sake’, are a colonial construct and permeated the aesthetics of the
region within the void created by the disconnect with its past.
The greater need of the larger community for creative expression within
the framework of religious or cultural practices stimulated the creation of
the frescoes on Mughal architecture or their miniature tradition, the wall
paintings of Ajanta Caves, the folk painting traditions of Warli3 and
Madhubani4, the Dhokra5 metal sculptures, and the taazia6 of Lucknow
and Hyderabad. Identifying what is ‘art’ and what is not has a history, and
the colonial disconnect which was not aligned with reality has affected the
course of art history in Pakistan, depriving it of an agency. It is the same
1
Bhagat Kabir was a sixteenth-century Indian mystic poet. For more information on his
life and works, see http://www.sikh-history.com/sikhhist/events/kabir.html
2
A pundit is a priest in the Hindu tradition or a ‘knowledgeable one’.
3
For more information on the Warli tradition of painting, please visit https://www.crafts-
villa.com/blog/warli-art-history-maharashtra/
4
For more information on the Madhubani tradition of painting, please visit https://www.
culturalindia.net/indian-art/paintings/madhubani.html
5
For more information on Dhokra sculptures and figurines, please visit https://www.
craftsvilla.com/blog/dhokra-art-metal-casting-technique-from-west-bengal/
6
Taazias are replicas of the shrine of Imam Hussain, taken out in a procession to mourn
the tragedy of Karbala in the month of Muharram.
REFRAMING THE CONTEXTS FOR PAKISTANI CONTEMPORARY ART 75
strangeness with which the pundit evaluates Kamal’s question and tries to
tell him of the distinct nature of the creative forces surrounding the
region’s rich artistic and cultural heritage.
The question posed by Qurratulain Hyder should have taken root in the
restructuring of art history and the formulation of new methodologies after
the Partition.7 The absence of such attempts led artists at the time to search
for identity, which was as confusing and blurred as any attempts to articulate
the aftermath of the bloodiest migration on earth that resulted from the
Partition.8 The educational institution, Mayo School of Arts, was a colonial
venture furthering the division of artist from the craftsperson by introduc-
ing curricula and methodological approaches alien to local students.
The discursive formations of art history were further arrested by the
state’s idea of modernising the nation soon after its inception and that
dream could only be fulfilled if one was connected with the ‘linear’ history
and development of the west. The questions that should have been part of
the discourse remain unanswered even today in the face of much stronger
and powerful art practices that have evolved over the last seven decades.
The visually and materially innovative imagery continued to serve as defi-
ance of the mainstream. The rich repository of the images became the
documents of the time, recording what people did not dare to speak in
public under many oppressive regimes.
Even without the use of an indigenous methodological framework,
reading and articulation of all these visual cultures will continue to produce
knowledge if, as Foucault contends, objects of knowledge are formed from
discourses (Foucault 1980). This raises a basic question: under which con-
ditions are these discourses of art history produced? And what is the pur-
pose of these discourses? Whose interests do they serve? Are they an attempt
to transform the art institutions into mega economic corporations while
marginalising and excluding other forces, which do not conform to the
‘Romantic Individualism’ of the western hegemonic model of art history?
Within a politically unstable and dysfunctional national framework,
contemporary art practices in Pakistan jostle for attention and patronage.
The tumultuous economic, political, and social pressures notwithstand-
7
The ‘Partition’ refers to the division of undivided India into India and Pakistan in 1947
by the British colonial administration with the participation of the political elite in what
became post-colonial India and Pakistan.
8
For more information on the Partition, visit http://www.1947partitionarchive.org
ing, the environment continues to be intellectually and artistically fertile.

Multiple legacies—visual, literary, and oral—find voice in academic stu-
dios, in artists’ backrooms, computer labs, garrets, courtyards, or simply in
the artists’ imaginations and unending conversations. The opportunity to
talk to audiences and find forums, however momentary and transient, are
eagerly seized upon and utilised.
Contemporary art practices continue to evade a comprehensive schol-
arly study or even discursive articulation. Studies provide only a cursory
investigative structure for a systematic sifting of creative output. A satisfac-
tory inquiry to clarify dynamic, diverse, and proliferating art production
has yet to emerge.
Seventy years as a nation state has not established a specific or identifi-
able Pakistani cultural identity although there have been both determined
and desultory attempts by the Pakistani state to do so. Assembling the
different regions, provinces, and ethnic groups into a homogenous, com-
pliant, cultural entity has not been a successful endeavour except in a
clearly ‘constructed’ manner. Iftikhar Dadi notes in his book, Modernism
and the Art of Muslim South Asia, that “the establishment of Pakistan
introduced urgent new questions regarding the need for cultural forums
specific to the new-nation state” (Dadi 2010: 123). The failure of this
envisioned cultural enterprise might suggest that the questions with which
it began were flawed from the very inception of the experiment.
Today, those early contentious debates circulating around modernism,
pan-Islamism, and national ideologies have faded into an irrelevant back-
drop for practitioners, barely acknowledged or assimilated in the creative
output of artists across the country. Having made the statement ‘across
the country’, it is ironical that their artistic journey only begins on arrival
in either Lahore or Karachi and, more recently, in Islamabad/Rawalpindi,
or at the newly established art departments in universities in Faisalabad,
Gujarat, Multan, and Bahawalpur. Older art departments in Peshawar and
Jamshoro have yet to instigate serious artistic inquiry or energy.
By contextualising the socio-political manifestation of art practices and
history in Pakistan, this essay attempts to provide a brief survey of contem-
porary art and how it challenges the established traditional hegemonic
model of art institutions. Furthermore, the creative ways, contexts, and
approaches are reflectively re-framed in order to make more nuanced
understanding of the aesthetic and political sensibilities of contemporary
Pakistani art.
Women Amidst Local and Trans-local

So where did this innovative of transnational yet thoroughly local expan-
sion originate? For want of scholarly research, one turns to empirical
sources. The steady growth in art school admissions at the National
College of Arts (NCA), from a single fine art graduate in 1971 to 40 plus
in recent years, is part of the evidence. The mushrooming of art schools
and departments in different cities, many of them employing professional
artists as faculty, is another factor.
The attempts at revamping the syllabi, primarily in studio teaching,
commenced in the 1970s but proceeded in a critically different direction
in the 1980s. Against the backdrop of the savage military dictatorship of
General Zia-ul-Haq, the women’s movement took off, with great support
from women poets, writers, journalists, lawyers, activists, and, most sig-
nificantly, visual artists. The drafting and signing of a Women Artists of
Pakistan Manifesto in 1983, although a secret document at the time,
altered the focus of women’s art practices. By happy coincidence many of
them were art educators, who transferred their socio-political interests
into their classrooms.
But this specific moment remained silent within the art history and
theory departments in art institutions who were still figuring out method-
ological approaches to position art historical debates in Pakistan. The mas-
sive energetic movements had emerged from the desire to counter the
political oppression of the military regime. The failure to include them in
evolving discussions helped to further the vacuum within the art history
field of study in Pakistan which continued to look into western canons of
appreciating art, creating a wide gap between the practice of art and the
location of its theoretical framework.
Notwithstanding the powerful subversive nature of the women’s move-
ment, the efforts to redefine the framework of the art history discourse
were often maligned and limited to gender issues. The compartmentalis-
ing of such artists and their works acted as a catalyst to arrest the power of
the forthcoming robust generation of artists. The terms ‘feminism’ and
‘social and politically motivated art’ located within the oppressive
conditions witnessed by many, and the dismissal of such categorisation by
mainstream art critics, was only a reaffirmation of the patriarchal hege-
monic discursive formations. The intentions of such artists and their works
were questioned, whereas the males conforming to the bourgeois ideals of
practising ‘art for art’s sake’ continued to be celebrated. The inability of
mainstream art historians to understand the political spaces that control

and condition the practitioners is evident through the many whimsical
narratives known best for compartmentalising art and artists.
Image-making, in a country where drawing was abolished as a subject
in public schools since the oppressive regime of Zia-ul-Haq in the 1980s,
is only possible when the discourse of patriarchy and imperialism is elimi-
nated. Art historians failed to see image-makers as political agents of defi-
ance. It was the collective times of rebellion, when cinema, print media,
and graffiti chalking in the public space found new creative idioms to chal-
lenge the state. It is through the keen eye of the women artists and their
demystification of western art historical canons that the gap between the
local and mass practices was articulated. The public space, a harbinger of
complex visual cultural expressions, kept on transforming as if in direct
response to the changing and emerging issues.
The impact of the practices and teaching of women artist activists in art
institutions influenced the next generations to actively document, follow,
and incorporate the visual narratives of the public space into their own art
practices. The public space provided a canvas for liberal political resistance
to counteract extremist agents. The cityscape crammed with advertise-
ments about male sexual diseases, and the remedies to restore virility, is a
complex social phenomenon, which objectifies the female body for male
gratification, while simultaneously questioning masculinity and its power.
That was the time when the first attempt was made to connect art history
with the social and political realities faced by the practitioners. It really
started the discourse where all the storytellers, narrators, and image-
makers were considered significant in creating a social fabric appealing to
everyone in this society.
The major shift, which evolved out of the coincidental role played by
women art educators, was the abandoning of materials, mediums, tech-
niques, and scale associated with the Eurocentric art canons of the twenti-
eth century. The probing of ‘domestic’ crafts and materials signalled a
move towards informal methodologies of storytelling, autobiographical
content, and multimedia collaborative works. It is important to note that
despite this major shift in art practices, the terms and discourse which were
articulated within Pakistani art history were again the binary of art and
craft and the idea of community art as a minor practice. The struggle of
those artists, who followed in the footsteps of women artists of the 1980s,
continued for more than a decade before finally establishing themselves as
serious art practitioners with alternate methodologies.
Coming out from under the shadow of 11 years of military rule in 1988
provided the opportunity to rethink classroom strategies and curricula,
most of which were leftovers from British art school rituals. The National
College of Arts (NCA) led the change. Later, the Indus Valley School of
Art and Architecture in Karachi followed, set up as a private initiative. The
earlier decade had instilled an interest in gender issues concurrent with
socio-political concerns alongside a rediscovery of traditional visual
resources, long overlooked. The most serious, and eventually the most
prolific and productive, was the genre of miniature painting. These artistic
inquiries (led originally by Zahoorul Akhlaq) had been initiated in the
early 1960s to introduce fine art students at NCA to the skills still within
reach, since the old Ustad 9 such as Haji Sharif (from the princely state of
Patiala in Punjab) and Sheikh Shujaullah (from the State of Alvar in
Rajasthan) were still available on campus to demonstrate techniques and
the use of materials they had learnt from their respective family traditions.
Young art students evinced little interest in this, being sold on the polem-
ics of modernism. The enthusiasm for the genre of miniature painting
dawned almost three decades later, as Shahzia Sikander, Imran Qureshi,
Nusra Latif Qureshi, Aisha Khalid and a host of other artists probed fresh,
unexpected connections with their own disquietude and passion.
The geographical location of Pakistan and its role in the Afghan War
(which continues to this day in new avatars) brought a flood of refugees
into Pakistan seeking shelter across the border, the Hazara community
among them.10 Many of Pakistan’s prominent miniature artists have come
from this community. Miniature painting embraced some of the thematic
precepts already present in the work of mainstream artists. The sense of
irony which imbues art practices in Pakistani art is often remarked upon by
critics and the artists themselves. As Virginia Whiles states, “a sense of
irony in the face of everyday chaos is undoubtedly the chief characteristic
of the Pakistani people” (Whiles 2010: 33). As she further notes, “a tone
of weary ambivalence haunts this generation, made despondent by a con-
stantly deferred democracy. Their antidote is satire, as demonstrated in the
intellectual reaction to the nationalist reclamation of another social activ-
ity: kite flying” (Whiles 2010: 34). Whiles’ observations were made in
9
An Ustad is an expert or a trained person, especially with regard to music or more gener-
ally in the arts.
10
The Hazaras are an ethnic community mostly from the Hazarajat region in central
Afghanistan.
2010, and the kite flying festival, known as basant, is yet to be allowed.
Yet, every year, secretly, kites are made and flown by brave schoolboys who
are chased across rooftops by hapless policemen attempting to enforce the
ban.11 This desire to thwart authority indirectly, rather than through overt
dissent or defiance, has encouraged nuanced outcomes in art-making.
Metaphors in poetry follow similar pathways, allowing audiences to inter-
pret and uncover multiple meanings over time.
The female body has been central to so many visual deliberations over
three decades. Zia-ul-Haq’s government regularly issued decrees about
required dress codes in public life. Female parliamentarians, television
newscasters, celebrities, and even actors were required to cover their heads.
All female government employees were required to do the same. Female
students from age 12 upwards were to wear chadors. The sari was frowned
upon, and letters were circulated in government offices addressed to
women employees and to public servants for compliance by their wives at
official events. These dictates which emanated periodically from various
ministries drew the ire of women from all walks of life, at all levels. The
response of women artists, poets, and writers was sarcastic, ironical, and
rebellious. Feminist poets in particular employed the symbol of the chador
as an instrument of silencing and suppression as did visual artists. Zia’s
disappearance from the scene did nothing to lessen this obscurantist trend.
Years later, poet Kishwar in her poem ‘Woh jo bachiyun se bhi darr gaye’
(They who are afraid of little girls) referenced this patriarchal animosity to
the female child. The poem came to be associated with the attack on the
child activist Malala Yousafzai (Naheed 1998, 2008: 88–90).
The popular and informal treatment of the female form in public spaces
is in contrast to the representation of the female in high art. The fact that
the state attempts to control and arrest the narrative constructed by the
artists is only reflective of the efficacy of the image and its reception in the
upper classes, whereas the popular practice continued to pander to male
gratification in its representation of the female body and its objectification.
In order to encapsulate the above-mentioned political debates in the con-
temporary art of Pakistan, we may refer to Gramsci’s hegemonic model as
11
The kite flying festival initially was banned in 2006 upon reports of several kite flying-
related deaths by the sharpened string enforced with metal and glass powder. The govern-
ment attempted to lift the ban a few times in the past many years, but incidents of deaths
continued, resulting in permanently banning a very old festival tradition of Lahore.
another methodical approach for a complex and nuanced understanding

of the ‘high’ and ‘low’ art practices and their political ramifications
(Gramsci as cited in Barker 2002: 55). The popular practices that include
performances, visual, and material expressions, such as embroidery, popu-
lar cinema hoardings, graffiti, and so on, are considered ‘low’ in status, as
these practitioners belong either to the domestic sphere, as in the case of
women embroiderers, or the popular public sphere catering to popular
consumption, as is evident in the case of rickshaw and truck art painters.
The social status and location of these practitioners remain outside the
four walls of the white cube, the established institution of ‘high’ art.
In the Gramscian model of hegemony, the state takes the uppermost
position from where it controls art and culture to construct its own ideol-
ogy (Gramsci as cited in Barker 2002: 55). The artists recognised as the
thinking and imaginative creative actors were the ‘high’ artist class tar-
geted by the state during oppressive military regimes, by controlling the
art education institutions, commissioning certain kinds of art, or some-
times through a direct attack on the exhibitions of those artists who did
not conform to the state ideology. Within the hegemony of creative prac-
tices, the popular vernacular cultural expressions are relegated to the low-
est level, and thus are not considered significant enough by the state to be
controlled directly. That enabled the popular expression to continue its
visibility in the public sphere during those tumultuous times where it
withstood the oppression of the state. Hence, the state used the strategy
of exercising control over artists, and society, as an attempt to curb the
production of counter-narratives. In this attempt, women were initially
targeted during the military rule of Zia-ul-Haq, since women were always
regarded as the conduit of national sentiment and nationalist ideology.
The state devised successful means of controlling the marginal, introduc-
ing laws, which aimed to regulate and restrict women’s involvement in the
public sphere by reducing them to a sexualised object.
With the introduction of the popular slogan, chador and chaar diwari
(veil and the four walls of a house), several attacks on artists who portrayed
women took place, and most importantly, the prohibition on using figure
drawing in art institutions was also imposed. These were some of the strat-
egies utilised by the state to control free expression. In contrast, the
women represented in the popular domain, including popular cinema,
continued to be portrayed in lascivious postures, for the fulfilment of male
desire, embodying the absolute ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’, as argued by Laura
Mulvey (Mulvey 1999: 833–844).
It is yet to be articulated extensively within the hegemonic methodol-

ogy that the sexuality discourse around the female body was generated
primarily to control the women of the elite classes. It is within this frame-
work that one needs to articulate the defiance of the state narrative by
women artists which connected itself with the popular and traditional
practitioners of Pakistan’s visual culture, otherwise considered ‘low’ in
mainstream art history discourse of Pakistan.
Intruding Art History: From the Liminal

to the Mainstream
The reluctance of the art history discourse to recognise women artists’

movement in alignment with the popular cultural expression, an act of defi-
ance in its own capacity, requires a review of the times of oppression
through the above-mentioned model of Gramsci. It is important to take
into account the production and consumption dynamics, the cultural
spaces, the audience, and the contexts of display to understand which
methods and systems of oppression were being questioned by women art-
ists and, also, what strategies were being employed by popular practitioners
which spared them the state’s wrath. The liminal space between politics
and art was first recognised by women artists/educators, who aptly used it
to write their own narrative and the new history of art-making.
The mainstream art history discourse within the Pakistani context not
only failed to provide alternate approaches, but also vehemently ques-
tioned the agency of the high art practitioners. The elite male artist’s rela-
tionship with the serenity of the landscape, whether rural or urban, is
never probed, although it is a space outside his body. In contrast, the
‘intentions’ of artists engaged in issues of social and political nature are
questioned, and they are required to justify their ‘sincerity’ towards the
issues and subjects they deal with.
The hegemonic institutions in the art world reduce the struggle of
these artists by mythologising the historically gendered subject and escape
the issue of institutional power. It is these same institutional powers that
compel historian Akbar Naqvi to question the work of Salima Hashmi,
one of the women artists active in dismantling the patriarchal approaches.
“The crises that Salima Hashmi has painted did not happen within herself,
but outside her paintings”, writes Naqvi (Batool 2004: 67). The rebellion
and challenge these women artists posed eventually gave them space in the
art history books to establish an edge over male artists. But the labelling
of these artists as feminists refused them their connection with the
centuries-old historical struggle against oppression of the religious and
political indoctrination and socio-economic structures, which nonetheless
were formed and articulated actively through the means of poetry, craft,
and other performative practices.
As a young artist fresh out of the miniature studio, Aisha Khalid12 dwelt
on the spaces a woman had to contend with, within the burqa that
drowned her body, and the claustrophobic domestic space. References to
textile coverings in her paintings metamorphosed into repetitive geomet-
ric patterns juxtaposed with embroidery and delicate tracings. Yet there is
an edge of menace in even the most celebratory of her installations. As
Nafisa Rizvi notes, “in fact these pretty flowers denote bullet holes and
blood splatters, making the work dark and ominously disquieting” (Rizvi
2015: 99). In Khalid’s work, the tension of the spiritual beauty that is
embedded in the notion of the illuminated manuscript or the Islamic
architectural legacy is constantly subverted by a counter-narrative which
embraces decorative and richly worked surfaces carrying traces of turmoil
and intimidation.
Imran Qureshi’s13 recent works are dramatic examples of gilded resplen-
dent surfaces, both large and diminutive, sprayed with sinister, free flow-
ing marks of deep crimson (called kaleji or the colour of the human liver
in Urdu; in Urdu poetry, the liver is the seat of deepest emotion, not the
heart!). These appear aloof from the visual strategies employed in the first
part of Qureshi’s career. His early imagery was often autobiographical,
laced with sardonic takes on militarisation, neo-colonial rituals, and
cartography, rendered with the impeccable craftsmanship present in tradi-
tion, and then augmented by gestural, free flowing marks and showers.
Imran Qureshi has consistently chosen to title his works with lines from
Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poetry, which refer to people’s struggle in the face of
oppression.
The controversial laws enacted during General Zia-ul-Haq’s time were
partially responsible for the containment of the female in the public space.
Four decades later, they remain on the books, but, parallel to that, today
12
For more on Khalid’s work, please visit http://www.naturemorte.com/artists/
aishakhalid/
13
For more on Qureshi’s work, please visit https://www.artsy.net/artist/imran-qureshi
there are attempts by the civilian government to put women and child-
friendly legislation in place. Most recently, laws governing sexual harass-
ment in the workplace, domestic violence, and child sexual abuse have
been passed by the Parliament. Over these years, a more diverse approach
to the female body has also been noticeable. New concerns have emerged—
the denial of inheritance, emphasis on traditional canons of beauty, the
‘feudal frame’ which determines status demarcations, sexual preference,
popular culture, and much more. This probing and scrutiny needs to be
looked at in conjunction with the prodigious rise in sectarian conflict, ter-
rorists’ attacks, ethnic discord, and military operations in Pakistan.
The fact that violence from diverse ‘players’ in the country has become
endemic means that the artist’s imagination is challenged by the only too
real threat to life and limb. Patriotism and canons of faith have to be gently
analysed, nuanced visual negotiations carried out, and poetic outcomes
opted for. The diversity of art practices in Pakistan reveals a strong move-
ment, which does not demonstrate homogeneity or a distinctly ‘Pakistani’
identity or direction. It is marked instead by a rich assortment of discrete
forms, materials, and processes.
The women’s movement produced its own distinct trajectory, espe-
cially with younger artists who explored the incorporation of domestic
materials and craft practices. For some, the analogies they discovered reso-
nated deeply with their lived experience. This is what Jones refers to in
another context: “For just as a metaphor of spinning, weaving or embroi-
dery can be used to illumine literary tasks so it now recognised, many
women have inserted in textile the text of their lives” (Jones 1997: 87).
For Ruby Chishti, an emotional kinship with fabric evolved from looking
after a paralysed mother. Trained as a conventional sculptor, she searched
for a material “which would bring out the truth within” (Hashmi 2005b:
151). The doll-like figures she constructed from old fabrics accentuated
the tradition of recycling which is deeply embedded in tradition, where
nothing is discarded, not the materials nor its relationships with the maker.
Not quite at a tangent to this unfolded the ‘high art, low art debate’ in
the 1990s referred to earlier. The context was the exponential growth of
urban centres, most specifically Karachi. Semi-skilled and unskilled labour
brought with them, among other things, artisanal networks, which sought
and found new forms and functions in the metropolis. The export of
labour to the Middle East, Europe, North America, and West Africa
brought in revenue accompanied by hitherto unfamiliar gadgets, washing
machines, deep freezers, TVs, and, eventually, computers. At one time,

these luxuries were displayed in rural homes which had no electricity! The
influx of consumer goods in markets across the rapidly urbanising centres
injected new images into the public consciousness. Even rural populations
became accustomed to plastic, vinyl, and neon lights. The assembling of
these materials to ‘decorate’ homes and public spaces was slowly trans-
forming urban aesthetics, with a new visual vocabulary.
The urban intelligentsia and initially the artist were oblivious to this
sea change in their surroundings. These visual sub-cultures were apparent
in trucks, tractors, rickshaws, donkey carts, street stalls, cinemas, bill-
boards, posters, and greeting cards—a profusion of pictorial assemblages,
which appropriated symbols, motifs, and processes in a freewheeling,
almost spontaneous manner. Surprisingly, text was woven into these tap-
estries of colour and textures. ‘Surprisingly’, because a large number of
the recipients were illiterate, yet the text employed quotations from Sufi
poetry, invocations to the saints and to Allah, interspersed with homilies
and local proverbs, as well as witty political insights. As noted by Hashmi,
“on closer examination, the text/image repertoire illustrates beliefs and
needs which cut across a wide cross-section of the population. A tele-
phone is painted alongside a lion, the Dome of the Rock is juxtaposed
with an F-16 jet fighter, the sufi saint Baba Farid decorates a mobile
phone and Prime Minister Bhutto mounts a galloping white steed”
(Hashmi 2005a, b: 172).
While the scenes on trucks and buses are known for being reflections of
the concerns of the time, rickshaws are at the moment going through a
design evolution in Pakistan. The traditional rexine material used to make
motifs such as fish, stars, and other geometric decorative shapes, is now being
replaced with more figurative sticker material forms that adorn the back of
the rickshaws. While travelling behind such rickshaws, one experiences the
mindset/ideology or fantasies of the rickshaw driver or its owner. This new
popular visual imagery in its formative stage is also subversive in nature. For
instance, the government of Punjab has placed a ban on the use of shisha14
smoking in cafés. After the ban, quite a few shisha smoking images appeared
on the roads. Images of a boy smoking a shisha and blowing several circular
14
Smoking a shisha, also known as narghile, hookah, or ‘hubble bubble smoking’, involves
the smoking of tobacco (sometimes flavoured) or opium, whose smoke is passed through a
bowl of water.
clouds of smoke out of his mouth are frequently seen on stickers pasted on
the back of rickshaws in Lahore. Some more daring drivers and owners of
rickshaws have placed on their rickshaws images of dancing couples in tradi-
tional Pakistani clothes as well as in westernised attire. Some have images of
a young couple hugging or holding each other while the female figure’s hand
slips inside the back pocket of the male figure, indicating intimacy between
the couple.
At a time when the nation is aggressively debating a Women’s Protection
Bill,15 and a powerful political minority as well as religio-political groups
are proposing restrictions on the women’s movement in the public
domain, the presence of these images on rickshaws is a sign of resistance
to orthodoxy at the popular level. The populace do not feel the need to
come out on the streets to protest in a predictable manner. Instead, they
take advantage of their connections to the visual tradition of art and craft
to make a statement against oppressive structures.
Studio artists, becoming aware of the vitality of these peripatetic cir-
cuits, which spoke directly to many urban publics, began their first col-
laboration with urban artisans in the mid-1990s in Karachi. Thus began
the Karachi Pop Movement. The artists that pioneered it with their stu-
dents, Iftikhar and Elizabeth Dadi, David Alesworth and Durriya Kazi,
have mostly moved on, leaving networks in place, transfigured by Adeela
Suleman who maintains a full-fledged collaborative artisan-studio.
In Conclusion: Networks, Collectives,

and Individuality
Today, artists working all over Pakistan are evolving at a fast pace in terms
of their creative approaches, and are using a variety of materials aided by
advanced technologies, and using innovative applications with a markedly
‘local’ sensibility. Circuitous arguments pertaining to the ‘local’ and the
‘global’ have been heard, but are largely ignored in Pakistan. This might
be a reflection of the confidence generated by the number of practitioners,
together with the involvement of the international art world, which spo-
radically lobbies for a particular individual to be celebrated and recognised
by the community.
15
For the complete text of the Women’s Protection Bill, please visit https://www.doc-
droid.net/y4j1wB8/download-women-protection-bill-in-pakistan-pdf-employeespkcom.
pdf
Apart from the names already mentioned, other dominant artists who
have helped reframe the contexts of contemporary Pakistani art include
Rashid Rana, Huma Mulji, Faiza Butt, Ayaz Jokhio, Naiza Khan,
Mohammad Ali Talpur, Bani Abidi, Anwar Saeed, Lalarukh, Risham Syed,
Ruby Chishti, Roohi Ahmed, and a host of others. An active younger gen-
eration is hard on their heels. It must be acknowledged at this juncture that
the early pioneers of modernism paved the way for the generations above.
Their role as educators, especially Zahoorul Akhlaq and his mentor Shakir
Ali, was critical to providing the robust forum they emerged from.
Numerous cross-currents fed into the rise of modernism which have been
articulated by Iftikhar Dadi and Simone Wille, but it was mainly Shakir
Ali’s association with the National College of Art which strengthened its
affinity with international movements. Thus, there are unbroken networks
of artists, practitioners, and their students who in turn stood on the shoul-
ders of the generations before. As Dadi observes, “Shakir Ali’s trajectory of
modernism, which advocated first discovering materials and processes and
then exploring the turbulent inner self and finally seeking a more overt
relationship with society, although not necessarily unfolding in stagist fash-
ion, was prognostic for subsequent developments” (Dadi 2010: 131).
The transition from the purely sculptural into installations which
embraced more than one medium began to materialise in the 1990s as the
country attempted to cope with the aftermath of General Zia-ul-Haq’s
regime. The word ‘installation’ was yet to appear in the lexicon, but
Nilofer Akmut’s sprawling works based on studious research into materials
and history filtered into view. Zahoorul Akhlaq had paved the way in the
1970s, encapsulating street furniture and ready-mades16 on a large scale,
reminiscent of Louise Bourgeois’ work. These and other works in a group
show at the Lahore Museum in 1974 came under fire, and were removed
from view by the Museum Director, citing reasons both of ‘taste and polit-
ical content’. All the artists threatened to take down the complete exhibi-
tion and the museum relented. This was perhaps the first example of
collective action by artists in a museum in Pakistan.
The first formal artist collective however did not emerge until 2001.
The Vasl Artists’ Association17 is based in Karachi, although it has been
16
‘Ready-mades’ is a term used to describe artworks employing already manufactured
everyday objects.
17
Vasl Artists’ Association functions as a platform for nurturing creativity and encouraging
freedom to create experimental work. For more details on their activities, see http://vaslart.
org
sporadically emulated in Lahore and Islamabad together with other resi-

dencies and collections, which continue to appear from time to time. Vasl
connected to the Triangle Networks, maintains a vibrant presence and
brings artists from the region and other parts of the world for intense
exchange, research opportunities, and art-making. It is now an important
catalyst for young artists’ development outside the art school confines, and
has instigated intervention in public spaces in Karachi. Mushroom groups
have evolved from Vasl initiatives, supporting an increasing awareness of
the artists’ role beyond their individual practices. The critical debates,
which were part of the Vasl objectives, have fuelled these questionings and
the imperatives for outreach into marginal areas in the metropolis. Adeela
Suleman, the artist-educator, has pinpointed the need for artists to connect
to the city and its infrastructures within the work programme of Vasl:
Our workshops and residencies are catalysts not products, where ideas are
activated for a stronger visual dialogue and for a more diverse field of visual art
production in this country. While there is a strong emphasis on production
during residencies and workshops, we are aware of the importance of distrib-
uting the positive outcomes of these activities through public programmes,
outreach initiatives, research documents, and the creation of networks.18
The forays into the city by Naiza Khan predated the Vasl public inter-
ventions, but her association with Vasl in those years was informed by its
stated objectives. Her series, ‘Henna Hands’, employed traditional henna
paste, used for ornamenting the female body, as a drawing material, fil-
tered through plastic patterned stencils, also used for the same purpose.
With her team of young students, Khan chose her sites with care. The
intervention took place at dawn before traffic built up or when they were
less likely to be observed, interrupted, or intercepted. The henna stencils
and paste were deployed to print images of female silhouettes onto city
walls amidst graffiti, posters and calligraphic political messages, and adver-
tisements. The appearance of the female, however symbolic in form, was a
transgression in that it inserted the female into a space well-understood to
be out of bounds for Khan. The artist was aware of the fact that the local-
ity chosen was a mixed community of Muslims, Christians, Parsees, and
Hindus, but all were equally inimical to this incursion into a gendered
18
Herman Bashiron Mendolicchio, in an interview with Adeela Suleman: https://culture360.
asef.org/magazine/interview-adeela-suleman-vasl-artists-collective-karachi-pakistan
space. The installation of this presence, although stripped of its usual phys-
ical attributes of allure and eroticism, still resonated. More than a decade
later, the concerns of ‘silence and repression, domestication and confine-
ment’ remain the focus of women practitioners. Khan had dipped into
craft practices for this work, which was a fleeting component in the visual
life of the neighbourhood, but its ramifications still linger on.
The emergence of several collectives to create a discourse in the public
realm has offered an alternative to the singular artists’ hegemony by com-
ing together under the umbrella of addressing larger issues rather than the
personal. These collectives have also provided a forum to ask the pertinent
questions: what does the term ‘public’ mean when we view public art dis-
course; what are our realities; and how do we alter the gap between the
perceived reality and the immediate environment, both social and cul-
tural? The collectives in public space are moved by their desire to use the
means and resources accessible to the larger masses and to speak the com-
mon language. The paradigmatic shift in our understanding of time, aes-
thetics, and space is a new vocabulary not familiar to everyone.
In a discussion with the Awami Art Collective,19 a group of 14 such
artists/activists/academics, Mariam Zulfiqar emphasises the importance
of reviewing our conventional methodologies: “As new models for the
production and presentation of contemporary art in the public sphere
announce their arrival across South Asia in the form of Biennales and art
that is exhibited in the public domain, the need for a more comprehensive
understanding of the public sphere within this context has gained
importance”.20 As she further notes,
with a growth in the number of artists, writers, curators and those involved
in the production and presentation of contemporary art engaging with
South Asia, it is vital that new methodologies and modes of representation
are developed. If an accurate and meaningful engagement, reflective of the
region, its historic trajectory, its contemporary reality and the diversity of its
communities and cultures is to be achieved, it is crucial that the implementa-
tion and relevance of pre-existing frameworks in this context is critiqued and
alternative congruous approaches are developed.21
19
A group of artists and activists who consider it important to intervene in the public space
for the cause of peaceful co-existence and celebration of diversity. See for more details on their
works and activities https://web.facebook.com/pg/awamiart/about/?ref=page_internal
20
Excerpt of interview by Mariam Zulfiqar with Awami Art Collective via Skype, May 2017.
21
Excerpt of interview by Mariam Zulfiqar with Awami Art Collective via Skype, May 2017.
The inability of newly formed art institutions to fully comprehend the

notion of the public and public spaces was clearly evident in the recently
much celebrated and long-awaited Lahore Biennale 01. The reluctance of
the masses to enter gallery spaces urged the Biennale to take the artworks
to the people for wider interaction. The removal of the four walls of the
white cube to bring artworks into the public arena democratised art for
the masses. The extent to which artworks are able to intervene in the pub-
lic space, without succumbing to the lure of the ‘spectacle’ aspect and
actually engaging with the public by making a strong statement, raised
questions about the actual understanding of the term ‘public’ in the con-
temporary context of such acclaimed art institutions.
The unpredictability of engaging with art in a public space, where it can
capture the imagination and evoke emotive responses, is both feared and
controlled. So art institutions continue to support the state by further sti-
fling the voice of such projects within corporate-funded public art affairs.
The reduction to a marginalised position in the Biennale for many interna-
tionally acclaimed artists, with patrons from major art institutes of the
world, calls for a review of an alternative methodology for such collectives
in order to reclaim the artists’ autonomy and counter all forms of compro-
mised and controlled narratives in the contemporary art discourse.
The continuous bias of the art academics/academies towards artists/
artists groups’ approach for creative expressions as an alternative to hege-
monic models of art discourse in the much larger public space gives rise to
a number of questions: Do the academics engaged in the history of art-
making in Pakistan over several decades really understand the dynamics of
public art? Is the framing of a collective force within the old doctrines of
art history a technical mistake in addressing contemporary discourse?
In a recent workshop hosted by an international museum and Habib
University in Karachi, the Tentative Collective, another Karachi-based art-
ists’ group, was asked to justify their practices and consider whether they
actually ‘needed’ the international audience for their work which was
based in Karachi. The Collective employs various research methods of
archiving, interviewing, and intervention in the public sphere to create
artworks that offer a nuanced reading of urbanity and the crises of rapidly
growing cities. The issue of ‘international audience’ was raised by art his-
torians to question the legitimisation of their work ethics because the
Collective chose to exhibit their recent project for an international audi-
ence in the Pompidou Centre in Paris. The concern primarily arose due to
the innate desire of art historians to eliminate all ‘other’ forms of art pro-
duction to engage with the mainstream institutions and their audiences.

This reminds us to connect with the old bias of the major art critics
towards women artists a few decades ago, for representing and feeling an
issue which took place outside their bodies and thus did not have
‘legitimacy’.
The hegemonic patriarchal structures of existing art history continue to
witness radical changes, as times have moved on, but traces of prejudices
still remain. Until these are eradicated, the task of developing new meth-
odologies will remain within the auspices of practitioners. It is imperative
to include visual anthropology with a focus on material and object study
in relation to transforming societies, in both urban and fast-changing rural
lives of Pakistan. All this, while creating a space that allows inclusion of
articulation and translation of new context, defining new terms of writing,
researching, and producing an alternative art history specific to this region.
As with the bold and free spirit of the rickshaw painters who continue to
reform, reconstruct, and reinvent new designs, the new art history needs
to be similarly radical, open, and expansive to equal the efforts of its
counterpart.
References
Barker, Chris. 2002. Making Sense of Cultural Studies: Central Problems and
Critical Debates. London: Sage.
Batool, Farida. 2004. Figure: The Popular and the Political in Pakistan. Lahore:
ASR.
Bird, Jon. 1996. Art History and Hegemony. In The Block Reader in Visual
Culture. New York: Routledge.
Dadi, Iftikhar. 2010. Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia. Chapel Hill:
Faiz, Ahmed Faiz. 2009. Pabajaulan. Trans. S. Hashmi. In A Song for This Day.
Lahore: Sang-e-Meel.
Foucault, Michel. 1980. Selected Interviews and Other Writings. Ed. Colin Gordan
and Trans. Colin Gordan, Leo Marshall, John Mephan, and Kate Soper.
New York: Vintage Books.
Hashmi, Salima. 2005a. Tracing the Image – Contemporary Art in Pakistan. In
Art & Social Change: Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacific, ed. Caroline
Turner, 164–179. Canberra: Pandanus Books.
———. 2005b. Unveiling the Visible: Women Artists of Pakistan. Lahore:
Sang-e-Meel.
Hyder, Qurratulain. 2000. River of Fire. New York: New Directions Books.
Jones, Dorothy. 1997. The Floating Web. In Craft & Contemporary Theory, ed.
Sue Rowley, 87. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin.
Mendolicchio, Herman Bashiron. 2018. Interview with Adeela Suleman, January.
https://culture360.asef.org/magazine/interview-adeela-suleman-vasl-artists-
collective-karachi-pakistan
Mulvey, Laura. 1999. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In Film Theory and
Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen,
833–844. New York: Oxford University Press.
Naheed, Kishwar. 1998. I Was a Night When Last Born. Lahore: Sang-e-Meel.
———. 2008. Malala. Lahore: Sang-e-Meel.
Rizvi, Nafisa. 2015. The Feminine Construct. In The Eye Still Seeks: Pakistani
Contemporary Art, ed. Salima Hashmi. New Delhi: Penguin Books.
Whiles, Virginia. 2010. Art and Polemic in Pakistan: Cultural Politics and
Tradition in Contemporary Miniature Painting. London: I.B. Tauris & Co.
CHAPTER 4
‘Art’ of Ethnography: Feminist Ethnography

and Women Artists in South Asia
Pooja Kalita
In the light of omnipresent scepticisms, apprehensions and at the same

time enthusiasm for doing feminist ethnography in South Asia, this chapter
makes an initial attempt to consider art by women in the region as a signifi-
cant ethnographic material. Especially in a region like South Asia, there can
be no one definition of feminism, and yet, the common thread of gender
discrimination and exploitation binds women, feminists and women artists
of the region alike. Thus, art by women in various genres, which are often
overlooked and ignored in the domains of sociology/social anthropology,
can serve as an important material for feminist ethnographers. This chapter
sheds light on the possibilities of such camaraderie between feminist eth-
nography and art by women in South Asia concurring with the ideas of
intersections highlighted in the editorial introduction.
An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the South Asia Conference:
Cultural Productions from a Gendered Perspective, Colombo, Sri Lanka,
November 2017. I am extremely indebted to Prof. Sasanka Perera for being a
constant source of inspiration and providing his invaluable guidance throughout
every stage of this chapter.
P. Kalita (*)
Department of Sociology, South Asian University, New Delhi, India

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05852-4_4
94 P. KALITA
Tracing the Path: An Initial Attempt

Feminist ethnography, in spite of being a popular methodology, especially
in the disciplines of sociology and social anthropology has never been
devoid of questions, concerns and at times scepticism and cynicism regard-
ing its very nature. Even though it has been around for quite a while now,
the why’s and how’s of such a methodology still do not fail to evoke new
answers and often shoot out further questions. From Judith Stacey’s 1988
popular article, ‘Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?’ to Lila Abu-
Lughod’s 1990 article with the same title, feminist ethnographers have
been constantly dealing with and attempting to answer the unresolved or
at best partially resolved questions of feminist ethnography. As noted by
Schrock, “these dilemmas weighed heavily in the minds of feminist eth-
nographers a quarter of a century ago, and the difficulties of navigating
their fault lines still haunt us today” (Schrock 2013: 48).
What is the conceptualization of South Asia in the backdrop of this
chapter? It is one way to take the region comprising of eight countries,
that is, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan
and Sri Lanka, and divided by concrete as well as imagined borders.
However, it is a relatively reductionist and statist approach. Equally valid
are our shared histories, pasts, presents and futures within the region. The
failure of introspection of these commonalities has been the result of an
overly bureaucratized imagination of the region based on a nation-state
model. On the other hand, the disciplines of sociology and social anthro-
pology have also been guilty of the same lack of imagination in dealing
with the region. In an unusual attempt to rethink the region, it has been
acknowledged “Sociology and Social Anthropology across the region
exhibit grotesque indifference to the idea of South Asia…There has been
nearly no inkling of doing Sociology and Social Anthropology in the
regional framework, even though a few social scientists have echoed this
aspiration” (Pathak 2018: 3).
While sociology and social anthropology need to work out self-
reflectively what South Asia means in cultural and intellectual terms, it is
pertinent to think of feminism in South Asia as one ideology that has been
shared, especially by the women in the region, owing to their shared expe-
rience of subordination, discrimination and fight against all forms of
patriarchal oppressions. Hence as noted by Murthy, “Southasia, with its
long and interwoven histories of colonialism, national movements, and
women’s struggles, as well as contemporary mobilization around com-
‘ART’ OF ETHNOGRAPHY: FEMINIST ETHNOGRAPHY AND WOMEN ARTISTS… 95
mon concerns such as religious fundamentalism, sexuality, migration,

exploitation of labour, globalization, and neo-imperialism, has immense
potential to evolve feminist theorizing and activism at the regional level”
(Murthy 2018: 137). In other words, Murthy is not simply thinking of
feminism as such, but of a feminism that is tempered with the political and
socio-cultural experiences of the region. As she further notes, “it is through
such linkages that the hitherto impregnable fortresses of impunity-at the
family, community and state level- can be breached and ultimately broken
down” (Murthy 2018: 137).
Feminist activists, scholars and women artists in South Asia have per-
petually tried to argue that feminism in this region is not merely a by-
product of Western feminist movements and theorization. As Mohanty
writes, “a homogenous notion of the oppression of women as a group is
assumed, which, in turn, produces the image of an ‘average third world
woman’” (Mohanty 1984: 337). And as she further points out, “this aver-
age third world woman leads an essentially truncated life based on her
feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and being “third world”
(read: ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-
oriented, victimized, et cetera)” (Mohanty 1984: 337). Jayawardena
(1986) while elaborating on feminism in what can be referred as the ‘non-
west’ or the third world, puts forward the fact that feminism was not
simply an alien category to South Asia, imported from the west. It has an
existence beyond the shadow of Western Feminism and the image of the
‘passive female victim of the Third World’. Feminism in this part of the
world is rather complex, diverse and plural with ever-evolving challenges
and questions. Both art and feminist scholarship in South Asia thus have
been challenging over a considerable period of time, the universal cate-
gory of ‘women’ as standpoint theorists such as Nancy Hartsock, Dorothy
Smith and Sandra Harding have conceptualized.1
Coming back to sociology/social anthropology, there has always been
an uncomfortable relation with visual art within these disciplines, and thus
it has not been able to bring forth the usefulness of the medium of art by
women under its domain of inquiry, and consequently in the domain of
feminist ethnography to be specific. In terms of ethnographic practice, it
1
For more details on Feminist standpoint theory and its criticisms, please refer to Heckman,
S. (1997). ‘Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited’ Signs Vol. 22 (2):
341–365.
96 P. KALITA
is almost common sense knowledge today that ethnography is an integral

part of sociological/social anthropological research as these disciplines are
understood in South Asia. But, what exactly is ethnography? Brewer notes
that “ethnography is not one particular method of data collection but a
style of research that is distinguished by its objectives, which are to under-
stand the social meanings and activities of people in a given ‘field’ or set-
ting, and its approach, which involves close association with, and often
participation in, this setting” (Brewer 2000: 11). Moreover, ethnography
understood in this fashion, “is premised on the view that the central aim
of the social sciences is to understand people’s actions and their experi-
ences of the world, and the ways in which their motivated actions arise
from and reflect back on these experiences” (Brewer 2000: 11).
Ethnography as a method of research received immense popularity with
classic stints of anthropological fieldwork, such as Malinowski’s work
amongst the Trobriand Islanders. Later, Clifford Geertz’s conceptualiza-
tion of ‘thick description’ (1973) and his text Works and Lives: The
Anthropologist as Author (1988) brought to light questions on the author-
ity of the ethnographer, the critical nuances of conducting and writing
ethnography and understanding the contexts of actions while doing so.
The ‘writing culture’ debate posed further questions on what it means to
‘do’ and ‘write’ ethnographic accounts of cultures (Clifford and Marcus
1986). But if the central aim of ethnography is to understand people and
their actions, then can art be ignored from its purview? Which has always
been a product of life in societies with diverse socio-political-economical-
cultural connotations? It does constitute immense ethnographic value.
However, before delving on this issue further, I would like to point out
here that it is not the intention of this chapter to argue for the replacement
of artworks as the primary ethnographic material at the cost of other medi-
ums and sources. Instead, it argues that artworks when carefully selected
are as equally important and have considerable narrative potential as all
other materials, mediums and methods that ethnographers usually and
conventionally look at. It is in this broader scheme of concerns, questions,
answers and reflections that this chapter would present selected works of
art by women in South Asia as a significant body of feminist ethnographic
materials. Visual art by Anoli Perera from Sri Lanka, Tayeba Begum Lipi
from Bangladesh and Naiza Khan from Pakistan have been mostly
highlighted in this chapter. Though this list is not exhaustive, a focus on
their work and approaches certainly aids in building up the central propo-
sition in this chapter.
Navigation Beyond Highs and Lows

To reiterate the earlier stated point on feminist ethnography, the pertinent
question that still remains is ‘can there be a feminist ethnography?’ (Stacey
1988; Abu-Lughod 1990; Schrock 2013). This question has been a per-
petual concern for ethnographers claiming to undertake feminist ethnog-
raphy. The quest has been to answer questions such as the following: How
do we conduct feminist ethnography? What are the materials we should
look into? How to look into them? Hence, if we analyse the relation
between art by women in South Asia and feminist ethnography in the
region, two issues demand our immediate attention. The first one being
that of the disciplinary practice of sociology and social anthropology in the
region and the second issue would concern the feminist art practices of
women artists in South Asia.
In regard to the first issue, Pathak and Perera note, “by and large, it
seems to us that Sociology in South Asia and in many other parts of the
world has become a somewhat sedate comfort zone for received wisdom,
for ruminations on what is known…new domains of possible research
such as visual art, music, photography and certain kinds of performance
have been expelled to the margins of intellectual activity” (Pathak and
Perera 2018: 23). In this general context wherein sociology and anthro-
pology have not seriously engaged with art as a matter of ethnographic
relevance, Roma Chatterji’s book, Speaking with Pictures: Folk Art and the
Narrative Tradition in India (2012), for instance, is an exception in the
context of South Asia where she takes folk paintings as a point of depar-
ture to work out complexities in contemporary social formations.
Nonetheless, barring such few exceptions, Perera (2012) argues that “aca-
demic tracts that do explore these issues, by the very nature of academic
exercises, tend to make such narratives clinical and generally aloof and
detached from the popular domain (Perera 2012: 15–16)”. There seems
to be a perpetual reluctance or rather an aloofness and detachment in our
disciplines to consider art in ethnographic endeavours. This has further
resulted in immobility from the sedate disciplinary comfort zones. Pathak
(2016) attributes this disciplinary aloofness and detachment as a matter of
ignorance towards the history of our disciplinary practice in the region
that makes some ‘de-recognize’ artworks or puts them into the category
of ‘softer’ practices (Pathak 2016: 16).2 While evoking Dewey and Nisbet
2
Further, Parul Dave Mukherji in her conversation with Sasanka Perera while aptly recog-
nizing the disciplines of sociology and art history as ‘natural allies’ elicits examples such as
98 P. KALITA
from the Western context and Radhakamal Mukerjee—one of the pio-

neers in Indian Sociology—Pathak (2016) makes a case for a conversation
with art in sociology. Sociology and social anthropology need to go
beyond the temptation of comfort-seeking disciplinary practices, includ-
ing art in ethnography. Therefore, it makes sense to take such art into
account in feminist ethnographic efforts. But how does one do this?
Art has never been produced in a vacuum, especially the kind of art I
refer to in this chapter. Turner (2005) has depicted the linkage between
art and the socio-political changes in Asia and the Pacific region. Both
sociology and art in many instances respond to socio-political changes
encompassing economic and cultural dimensions. This convergence can
be thought of as a point of departure to work out a meaningful ethno-
graphic intervention involving art. Therefore, those who still believe that
art is an elite practice meant only for a certain audience, isolated from
socio-political contexts, need to rethink their position. For example, it
seems to me, even at a superficial level, artworks such as Three Girls (1935),
Bride’s Toilet (1937) and Woman on Charpai (1938) by the late Indian
artist, Amrita Sher-Gil, provide us with excellent ethnographic material to
historically reflect and understand the lives of Indian women, especially
from a feminist ethnographic lens.
Therefore, in terms of feminist ethnography, there have been various
attempts to respond to its questions and concerns which never cease to
emerge and re-emerge, giving rise to newer questions, demanding newer
answers. Visweswaran, while reflecting on the diverse issues related to
feminist ethnography remarks that, although feminist ethnography has an
alliance with the writing culture critique of anthropological representa-
tion, yet there still needs to be more nuanced analysis of what is ‘feminist’
in a particular genre of ethnography (Visweswaran 1997: 591). But as
Schrock (2013) puts forward, “feminist ethnography does not have a sin-
gle, coherent definition and is caught between struggles over the definition
and goals of feminism and the multiple practices known collectively as
ethnography” (Schrock 2013: 48). However, what binds feminist ethnog-
raphers and women artists alike in South Asia together is in their attempt
feminist art historian Griselda Pollock and her reflections on the canons of her discipline to
Susie Tharu’s essay on N. Pushpamala’s photo essays, which serve as a reminder about the
interdisciplinarity of these disciplines that can come together to enrich each other (Pathak
2016: 37–45).
to decode and challenge what Murthy (2018) terms as the ‘impregnable

fortresses of impunity’ which are the family, community and state (Murthy
2018: 137). This common thread that binds feminist ethnographers in the
region brings us to the second issue which deals with the art practices of
women here. The crucial factor that needs to be asserted is that besides
ethnographers and artists, what brings us together at this point is we are
also part of the larger community of feminists in the first place, dedicated
to the women’s movement in South Asia and beyond.
However, I will make no attempt in this chapter to detail the numerous
bodies of art produced by women in the region. Rather, my attempt is to
elaborate on their ethnographic potential for feminist ethnographers in
South Asia. The women artists I refer to in this chapter also work with
similar concerns and frameworks that move beyond representing women
as victims of the patriarchal societies of South Asia. In relation to women
artists and their artworks informed by feminist concerns, Sinha writes:
“Looking back at the late ’80s and ’90s, women’s practices compel us to
believe that just as nations on the periphery are now accepted as represent-
ing other modernisms, women artists of the South or the third world, may
represent ‘other feminisms’” (Sinha 2016: 29). Equally as crucially, “other
than issues of gender and sexuality, issues of religious and class conflict
filter through and colour their work” (Sinha 2016: 29).
By looking at feminist interventions in art and art history in South Asia,
we do get a clear sense of our broader aim of liberation from all sorts of
patriarchal domination. Pollock (1987),3 much like Linda Nochlin’s 1971
famous essay on the question: ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women
Artists?’ in ARTnews, argues for a paradigm shift in art history when it
comes to locating art by women. This paradigm shift is much required as
the disciplinary criteria by which greatness is defined in art history is male-
chauvinistic (Pollock 1987: 5). Zemel (1990) while reviewing Pollock’s
work comments, “the task for feminist art and art history is to destabilize
the fixed visual categories of difference, to reinscribe women’s sexuality
where it has been erased, and to visualize signifying systems of sexual agency
and relationship in that eroticized field. Pollock’s essays organize the
project with theoretical frameworks, analytic models, and usable strategies”
3
Pollock, G. 1987. ‘Feminist Interventions in Art’s Histories,’ pp. 4–14 in Vision and
Difference: Feminism, Femininity and Histories of Art. https://journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.
de/index.php/kb/article/viewFile/10930/4793 [last accessed on 25 September 2018].
100 P. KALITA
(Zemel 1990: 341). Pollock adds that, “In writing Old Mistresses, Women,
Art and Ideology (1981) Rozsika Parker and I formulated the issue thus: To
discover the history of women and art is in part to account for the way art
history is written. To expose its underlying values, its assumptions, its
silences and its prejudices is also to understand that the way women artists
are recorded is crucial to the definition of art and artist in our society”
(Pollock 1987: 11). The concerns raised by Pollock, Parker and Nochlin still
echoed in the art by women in South Asia.
In the specific context of our region and Pakistan in particular, Hashmi’s
(2003) work on women artists in Pakistan has eloquently brought to light
the much-needed feminist intervention in art history of the region. Hashmi
(2015) in an alternate version to Nochlin’s famous question brings forth
her apprehension in the contemporary art scenario as: “What, or where, is
feminist art in 2015?” This question, she says, although might sound naive
at the first instance today, however, is still relevant. Since “While feminist
art historians and critics altered the course of art disciplines for all times to
come, the label is constrained by its own branding. A circuitous route has
to be adopted to re-open the discussion on the torturous space inhabited
by women. Their lives may have marginally altered, their aspirations
matured and grown stronger, but is it enough? Each day brings news of
greater violence, discrimination, and state negligence”.4
Perera (2008) in one of her essays sheds light on the importance of
bringing the issues related to ‘women’s burden’ as the core concerns of
artistic endeavours. Although her essay is set in the context of Sri Lanka,
nonetheless is well relevant for our entire region. She argues that works of
female artists express their concerns regarding the ‘main’ issues of the
country “while in their life worlds” (Perera 2008: 74). These artists, rather
than being victims of the discriminatory patriarchal structures of our soci-
eties are acting as agents for their liberation from these very structures.
This is something, which also echoes the agenda of feminist ethnographers
working on the region. She further narrates her experience of curating an
exhibition which displayed artworks exclusively by women. She narrates a
conversation with one of her artist friends who raised a concern about put-
ting herself and other ‘hobby’ and ‘sundry’ artists at the same level playing
field. However, for her bringing in all of these women artists under one
4
Hashmi, S. 2015. Guerrilla Girls: Feminist Art, Then and Now: http://www.artnow-
pakistan.com/guerrilla-girls-feminist-art-then-and-now/ [last accessed on 25 September
2018].
common umbrella of ‘artists’ was much more of the feminist intervention

in practices of art. She states that: “To understand the strength and logic
of the exhibition, it has to be viewed as a starting point to look at the art
practice of women artists and to systematically study the social and cultural
conditioning that defined their ways of art-making and their participation
and non-participation in the larger discourse of art” (Perera 2008: 58).
Art by women as such is not devoid of the socio-political-cultural-
economic formations that make up our societies.
Likewise, the practice of quilt-making by women in Bangladesh, which
they design themselves, is not merely a mundane practice for survival.
Engulfed within the patriarchal gender roles, norms and duties of the
Bangladeshi society, they use it as a means of resistance to the discrimina-
tion and domination they face in their lives, in addition to being a means
of survival as well. Parker (2010) argues that, “the art of embroidery has
been the means of educating women into the feminine ideal, and of pro-
viding that they have attained it, but it has also provided a weapon of
resistance to the constraints of femininity” (Parker 2010: ix). This form of
art, which acts as a means of subversion to patriarchy also acts as a medium
to challenge the elitist notion of art that considers such works by women
as ‘low’ art or craft. This division can be attributed to the renaissance
thinkers such as Immanuel Kant who made the distinction between high
and low art on the basis of utilitarian value of art, wherein ‘high’ art is
produced for its aesthetic value and ‘low’ art or craft has a direct interest
or purpose beyond aesthetics (Ługowska 2014: 286). Nonetheless, this
distinction and the marginalization of craft from the category of high art
is a political one. According to Ługowska (2014), this categorization has
played an important role in the marginalization of art by women. “This
new body of knowledge about women’s exclusion from high culture was
extended to the analysis of craft/art relations and women’s place in this
discourse. The marginalization of craft to art gave rise to other marginal-
izations, namely these between the genius artist vs. an anonymous maker,
the uniqueness of an individually made object vs. the collective produc-
tion, intellectual vs. nonintellectual, non-utilitarian vs. Decoration”
(Ługowska 2014: 293). However, as this issue came under the purview of
the feminist art movement of the 1970s, artworks by women have made
explicit attempts to oppose and expose the artificiality of this binary
between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art. In South Asia, the blurring of this line has
been quite beautifully depicted by contemporary women visual artists who
have been making their presence felt beyond the boundaries of their
102 P. KALITA
nations to move into a more shared regional space. Anoli Perera is among
the prominent women artists to have done that. Weerasinghe (2008)
while referring to Anoli Perera’s work comments, “in the contemporary
art scene of Sri Lanka, it is Anoli Perera who has contributed most, unbri-
dled for the past 12 years to formulate the idea of a ‘woman artist’, who is
consciously engaged in the construction of an artistic personality/identity
by way of themes, materials, techniques and issues that are embedded in
the discourse of ‘the feminine’, ‘the beautiful’ and ‘the family’”.5 The
installation, Dinner for Six: Inside Out (Fig. 4.1), is a testimony of this
fact. Stitching, embroidery and making doilies which have been usually
left out from the canon of high art are being given its due respect and
place as an artistic expression by a woman within a patriarchal set up as
clearly evident in her work. The first reaction this artwork by Anoli Perera
invoked in me was “it’s stunning”. Yet on a closer look, it gives the viewer
Fig. 4.1 Dinner for Six: Inside Out by Anoli Perera. (Photograph courtesy of
Anoli Perera)
5
http://anoliperera.blogspot.in/ [last accessed on 9 July 2018].
a feeling of unease, of getting entangled in a mess of emotions, roles and

materiality of a women’s existence not only in Sri Lankan society but all
over South Asia. She draws out from her own personal experiences of
viewing women in and around her while dwelling in a patriarchal, often
constrained and yet negotiated, space. Her extraordinary talent lies in her
ability to connect the personal with the political while bringing out the
most mundane experiences of women such as cooking, dusting, making
doilies and so on. Her skill thus lies in bringing forth the memories,
desires, wishes, anxieties and myriad of other emotions experienced by
women in a ‘stunning’ fashion with even the most ordinary materials of
everyday existence.
Dinner for Six: Inside Out (see Fig. 4.1) shows a beautifully laid out
table with six chairs placed perfectly for a family of six members to have
dinner together. Having food together by a family is a ritual symbolizing
strong family bonds and the value of togetherness. However, this work
also brings to light the ‘burden’ that is frequently termed as the responsi-
bility of the women in the family to act towards this togetherness. She is
trapped in repeating the daily rituals for this performance on togetherness.
The use of the dinner setting and the use of corseted doilies as cobwebs
should make any ethnographer especially a feminist one question the
why’s and how’s of it. These materials and the setting are simply not used
for aesthetic appeal alone, but rather are placed in a context that is oppres-
sive to women, and as such Anoli Perera tries to recover these oppressed
voices.
Hashmi (2005) elaborates on the way Pakistani artists, which include a
host of women artists, have attempted to cross the fuzzy boundary of
‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of art; “they also hang on to the dream of being the
interpreters of the ‘people’s voice’, a role traditionally reserved for poetry
and music” (Hashmi 2005). An artist from the Pakistani context who has
moved beyond the gallery space is Naiza Khan. In relation to one of her
provocative series of works, Henna Hands (2003), Hashmi (2005) writes:
“Irony is a major ingredient of art-making, together with an inclination
towards ‘low-tech’ materials to serve as content of the work” (Hashmi
2005: 173). As Hashmi further notes, combining both irony and low
tech, “Naiza Khan’s Henna Hands are done directly on the walls of the
city of Karachi. Stencilled figures in henna paste, they stemmed from a
desire to move away from the pristine gallery space into the strife-ridden
neighbourhoods of Karachi…The figure has always been central to Khan’s
work, and in Henna Hands the women walk in majestic procession. In a
104 P. KALITA
milieu in which depicting the nude, male or female, is generally unaccept-

able, Khan probes the way the body serves as a site for many contradictory
messages of identity, submissiveness, desire, constraints and freedoms”
(Hashmi 2005: 173).
Naiza Khan has been a powerful voice both in the streets of Karachi and
in the national and international gallery spaces. I would like to shed some
light on her work which was exhibited during her first solo exhibition in
Europe, The Skin She Wears (2008). The exhibition which had the use of
metal as the primary highlight showcased the existence of the female form
delving within the ideals of fragility, protection, strength and seduction.
The armour-like garments that she created were a by-product of the vio-
lence embedded in Pakistani society and politics, from where she originally
hails. The use of metal in her work invoked an unsettling gaze and often
an uncomfortable sight of the female body. It was unsettling as on one
hand, it is the female body that the viewer sees, and yet does not see. On
the other hand, the entrapment of the female body, which is perceived as
delicate, gives a feeling of being trapped in the corsets of the society she is
part of. Dadi (2010) also refers to Khan’s art within in what he terms the
art of ‘Muslim South Asia’. According to him, Khan with her use of varied
sensibilities, materiality and style has put the figure of the female in a dis-
cursive landscape (Dadi 2010). Her depiction of issues related to gender
and particularly women, is highlighted through the intractability of the
female body through the use of metal-wear.
While unearthing her sensibility, materiality and the context in which
her works are situated, one can decipher that Khan is also part of the leg-
acy of female artists who have raised their concerns not only about women,
but many other aspects of particularly Pakistani society and politics by
focusing on the body of women. From raising concerns against Islamic
fundamentalist dictatorship to discriminatory laws against women, the
body of feminist art that Khan’s work can be identified with has dealt with
women’s vulnerability, sensuality and agency in the broader sphere of
Pakistani society and politics.
Tayeba Begum Lipi from Bangladesh has been another provocative
contemporary visual artist who has produced her work with an u napologetic
feminist sensibility. She is also the co-founder of Britto Arts Trust in 2002.
It is an artist-run non-profit network in Dhaka. In one of her latest works,
she has produced a series of sculptures with razor blades as her primary
material.6 The sculptures of bikinis are the most prominent among them.
At one level, the bikini that for most people would simply be perceived as
an item of fashion, offers much deeper meaning for her. In her perception,
the bikini is a sign of how unsaid, implicit rules of the patriarchal society
shape and dictate women’s lives. The bikini installations indicates her
desire as well her anxiety over wearing a bikini during her visits to Cox’s
Bazaar in Bangladesh, which is the longest natural sea beach in the world.
The disapproval of this thought was implicit, yet there was always an
acknowledgement of it.
One of her sculptures in this series is captioned, I Do Not Wear This
(2015). It comprises a set of three life-size bikinis. However, instead of
using the usual delicate material for women’s lingerie, she uses fabricated
stainless razor blades. This particular sculpture demonstrates the feminist
sensibility of her work that indicates patriarchal rules, whether implicitly or
explicitly stated, seeping into every aspect of a woman’s life in our society
including dressing. A bikini as she views it has been an unapproved form
of dressing by women, particularly in Bangladesh. Moreover, as far as
using razor blades as her material is concerned, she attributes the reason
to her childhood memory where such blades would be used during deliv-
ery to detach the baby from the mother. The razor blade, as she sees it,
serves both as a masculine object and a symbol of women’s entrapment in
a society like that of Bangladesh’s, and at the same time, perhaps they
might serve as a shield. She has made many such provocative artworks that
defy patriarchy as well as the stereotypical notions about women’s lives in
South Asian societies. In Love Bed (2012), Comfy Bikinis (2013) and so
on, she uses objects from the daily lives of women.7
N. Pushpamala from India, a Bangalore-based visual artist, has moved
from sculpture to photography and performance art. She interweaves the
dynamics of gender, race and the dimension of ‘the gaze’ in much of her
work. The medium of her art which she refers to as ‘photo-romances’ has
6
These details about her work have been taken from her interview available at https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1pS5j_6EiQ [last accessed on 9 July 2018] and https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzgjM8KeoIc [last accessed on 9 July 2018]. More details can
be found at https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/tayeba-begum-lipi [last accessed
on 9 July 2018].
7
For more details about her work, please refer to http://www.piartworks.com/english/
sanatcilar_det1.php?recordID=Tayeba%20Begum%20LIPI [last accessed on 24 September
2018].
106 P. KALITA
traversed subjects from the colonial ethnographic obsession of ‘native

women’ to The Phantom Lady, where she was photographed as a fearless
female gangster and an adventurer. In 2004, Pushpamala’s ‘Native Women
of South India’ challenged the colonial stereotype of ‘native’ women. She
herself enacts as the subject and object of her ‘photo-romances’. The
issues she deals with have been diverse. Indian colonial history, contempo-
rary politics, culture and religion are the most apparent among them. Yet,
a similar kind of sensibility throughout her work can be seen in the context
of which she uses her own body as a medium to express her concerns.8
Some of her well-known works are Golden Dreams or Sunhere Sapne
(1998), The Anguished Heart or Dard-e-Dil (2002) and Paris Autumn
(2005).
Anoli Perera’s photo performance series, I Let My Hair Loose: Protest
Series (2010–2011; Fig. 4.2), throws a hurdle against the relentless male
gaze on women’s lives, thereby disrupting it. She depicts how a sense of
bourgeoisie femininity is imposed on women and the everyday expecta-
tions from women in Sri Lankan society. This kind of feminist conscious-
ness has been quite prominent in many other works by women belonging
to different locations within South Asia. Thus, they bring in a unique
angle to the experiences of women in their work and have overcome a
male-dominated perspective on art. There are many such works that are
reminders of the social, political, cultural and economic tussles that women
have to deal with in patriarchal South Asia. Even though such works might
not lead to liberation from the multiple bondages women routinely expe-
rience, they are nevertheless powerful vehicles through which such desires
can be expressed. Perhaps, until the time real liberation from patriarchal
structure of our societies is achieved, these works by women serve as sig-
nificant material to understand and unearth the voices, which are often
muted. This desire for liberation serves as the crucial base for feminist
ethnography as well. The ‘everyday’ that has been the muse of sociologists
and anthropologists has been very effectively appropriated by these women
artists as something that is much more than the trivialities of the mundane
world. Therefore, shouldn’t we be convinced to use art by women for
8
For more details about her work, please refer to http://naturemorte.com/artists/
pushpamalan/ [last accessed on 9 July 2018] and https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=4z1Hos6dU_g [last accessed on 9 July 2018] and https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=sNvAqktHl_I [last accessed on 9 July 2018].
Fig. 4.2 I Let My Hair Loose: Protest Series (2010–2011) by Anoli Perera. (Photo
courtesy of Anoli Perera)
feminist ethnography in South Asia, which might offer a more nuanced,

and filler picture of social realities and politics in the region? In that sense
don’t we need to re-define the very canons of comfort-seeking conven-
tional ethnographic endeavours in the region then?
In the next section, I would reflect upon how to go about such an
interaction.
108 P. KALITA
How to Traverse This Path? Moving

Beyond the ‘Fear’
Schneider (2008) with reference to art and anthropology has noted that
“Discussing work usually classified as belonging to different historical
periods and genres of contemporary art and anthropology bears a certain
risk, and at the same time offers the potential for exploration, precisely
because it allows us to challenge previous borders and categorizations
across the two disciplines” (Schneider 2008: 171). He further attributes
the reluctance on the part of anthropology to include visuals in its disci-
plinary domain as indicative of a general reluctance that exists within
anthropology when it comes to dealing with visuality. In addition to
anthropology, this reluctance or rather the ‘fear’ of the visual has also
plagued sociology in South Asia, as already mentioned.
While Foster’s (1999) concern about artists not following the appropri-
ate methodological canons of ethnography is a valid one, nonetheless, it
should not discourage the collaboration between the two disciplines.
Methodological constraints are nothing novel or unique to ethnographic
endeavours. Including or excluding visuals do not make it any more or less
‘safe’ from these constraints. What is required are ethical reflexivity, mutual
respect and learning from criticisms. When viewing artworks, ethnogra-
phers need to accept that ethnography today is a practice not exclusive to
the disciplines of social anthropology and sociology. Artists too engage in
ethnographic introspection and are integral to artistic practices. Desai
(2002) has aptly articulated: “Situating the move to ethnography in art
requires at the very least a momentary glance back to the 1970s and
1980s; a time when critical theory was linked to art” (Desai 2002: 308).
That is, the ethnographic turn in art has come via an engagement with
critical theory and the space for reflection on both theoretical and meth-
odological issues it allowed. As Desai further adds, “this turn to critical
theory in art was fuelled by the social movements of feminism, civil rights,
and gay liberation, which encouraged artists to confront the hegemony of
art institutions” in the context of which “the artist no longer worked in
isolation but moved into parks, hospitals, prisons, community organiza-
tions, streets and neighbourhoods to produce artworks in collaboration
with people in these various communities. Art became a forum that
opened public dialogue on issues of concern to people” (Desai 2002:
308–309). What Desai is attempting to articulate is the move of art into
everyday spaces in which it came to be associated with some of the same
issues that sociologists and anthropologists were also interested in. Then
partly at least, this ethnographic turn in art also empowered and reconfig-
ured public and collective art as well.
In spite of this partial reconfiguration of disciplinary boundaries
between art and anthropology, art by women has hardly become primary
ethnographic material. At best, even if they do, they are just referred to as
secondary or supportive texts to the main ethnographic writing. On the
other hand, Desai (2002) elaborates on the ways artists have taken recourse
to the ethnographic methods for their own work, which should further
probe ethnographers to look into art. According to her, “the ethnographic
process has certainly gained currency in art education. In recent decades,
there has been an increase in reflective and critical inquiries on the part of
art educators on the ethical and political responsibilities of doing ethnog-
raphy, the issues of power involved in the written representation of cul-
ture, collaboration, the complex relationship between insider and
outsider…photographs, drawings, and video as tools in qualitative
research, art educators have broadened the boundaries of ethnography to
include the visual as primary data” (Desai 2002: 307).
Some of the artists already mentioned have acted as ethnographers at
various points in their production process. For instance, Naiza Khan
describes her experience of creating the artwork which was part of her solo
exhibition, The Skin She Wears (2008), as a by-product of the realization
that violence and disturbing political events either elicit a feeling of it
being usual, bringing them under the umbrella of ordinary happenings of
the everyday or a distant emotion of extreme discomfort and anxiety about
life in Pakistan, from where she hails (Qureshi and Khan 2011: 82–83).
Her creation of metal vests for the exhibition transformed such realiza-
tions on her part to imply sensuality, seduction, hardness and protection at
the same time (Qureshi and Khan 2011: 82–83).
She further elaborates on the production of this feminist artwork as she
dealt with male artisans while producing her work as a women artist. Khan
herself narrates her experience and the way she dealt with her male artisan
partners. These male artisans had a ‘traditional’ worldview unlike her ‘femi-
nist’ worldview. She describes the process in which the rigid fluidity of the
metal-worked sculpture mirrored the unlikely, boundary-crossing yet
boundary-maintaining collaboration between the female artist and the male
artisan, which the artwork both prompts and remains a lasting record of
(Qureshi and Khan 2011: 88). Thus, as Desai (2002) indicates, artists have
started to become aware about ethnography as an effective methodology
110 P. KALITA
not only in academics but also in their artistic endeavours. Nonetheless, a

similar realization on the part of ethnographers has not occurred.
The ‘writing culture’ debate of the 1980s has already shown that the
norm of ethnographic writing has never been about presenting some
absolute truth. In this context however, visuals have not been seriously
included in the critical debate (Wolbert 2000: 321). Hence, the important
issue that should be reflected upon is that visuals too are potent enough to
be considered in the same way written texts representing partial truths
have already been taken into account. Schneider (2008) remarks that
David MacDougall, coming from a visual anthropology background, was
perhaps most sensitive to art and believed in visual anthropology becom-
ing an alternate to written anthropology (Schneider 2008: 172). Just like
written texts, it should be realized that the authority of the ethnographer
and the representation of her subjects could be challenged on the basis of
the fact that images or any kind of visual material, including art can be
subjected to varied interpretations and cannot represent an entire truth.
Such a gap in anthropological and sociological endeavours in dealing with
art is thus a consequence of the earlier anxieties regarding the ambiguity
of dealing with visuals. Sociologists and social anthropologists have to
learn to see artworks not as mere visuals, but also read them as primary
texts. Uncertainty is an integral part of the very nature of ethnography. In
this atmosphere of anthropological and sociological reluctance lies the
anxiety of feminist ethnographers to use art by women as a major material
in their work.
Feminist ethnography as a methodology for most part of its existence
has been perpetually dealing with concerns related to representation. The
issues of representation and power-dynamics between the ethnographer
and her participants have been omnipresent since the inception of feminist
ethnography. However, the effective way to address these issues is by
being aware of one’s limitations in representing the ‘truth’ while conduct-
ing a research based on ethnographic methods. Reflexivity, that is, being
aware of one’s subjective and mostly privileged position as an ethnogra-
pher, the relevance of the context in which the ethnographic process takes
place and an ethnographer’s awareness of her limited ability to represent
the ‘truth’ constitute the key to dealing with these criticisms. Rather than
debunking a particular approach in research, we need to engage with it
while being critically reflexive. As opined by feminist ethnographers,
Mohanty and Ong, it is rather preferable to have ‘partial truths’ rather
than all-encompassing theories, which become hegemonic and thus do
not leave any scope for any alternate perspectives (Schrock 2013: 50). In
this framework, feminist ethnography on one hand suffers from the same
limitations typical of ethnography more generally while on the other hand
has the same potential to present ‘partial truths’ as does mainstream eth-
nography. In this sense, there are no reasons to doubt the veracity of either
feminist ethnography or its potential to use artwork by women artists
within its narrative possibilities.
Pink (2010) offers some thoughts on the possibilities of more seriously
dealing with imagery in anthropological practice: “As we have moved into
the twenty-first century, at least three factors – the crisis of representation of
the writing culture debate and insistence on subjectivity and reflexivity that
go with it, a new willingness to engage with both the visual and new types
of anthropological narrative, and new technological developments – have
given the visual an increasingly prominent place in anthropological research
and representation” (Pink 2010: 191). Pink’s (2010) hopeful remark should
definitely inspire us to use art in the process of ethnography.
Reflections on an Inconclusive Conclusion

There can be no denial that any ethnographic endeavour has its own limi-
tations. One cannot clinically remove ethnographers’ subjective positions,
especially when working from a feminist lens in South Asia or elsewhere.
The issues of subjective sensibilities and specificities of locations do arise
while taking in art by women in South Asia for a feminist ethnography. As
feminist ethnographers and women artists share similar concerns of chal-
lenging homogeneity, and passivity of women in the region, by not look-
ing into the possibility of camaraderie between these two similar groups, a
rich source of discourse is at the risk of getting ignored and lost forever.
The academic disciplines of sociology and social anthropology have to
include artists and their works from the region as mainstream ethno-
graphic material rather than just making them exclusive to the sub-
discipline of visual anthropology or art history.
Moreover, Fine (1993) while commenting broadly on the limitations
of ethnographic methodology argues that, “my argument is not that we
can avoid these choices because occupational truth is unattainable and
perhaps not even entirely virtuous” (Fine 1993: 268). At the end of the
day, human beings do succumb to their own subjectivity. He further
asserts that, “though I do not call for us to abjure all methodological or
textual practices that lead to these dilemmas, I do believe that it is crucial
112 P. KALITA
for us to be cognizant of the choices that we make and to share these

choices with readers” (Fine 1993: 268). Hence, as Peshkin (1988) asserts,
while subjectivity is an inevitable part of research, the researcher should
systematically seek out their subjectivity, not retrospectively when the data
have been collected and the analysis is complete, but while their research
is actively in progress (Peshkin 1988: 17). This is a crucial point to be
adhered to by feminist ethnographers as well. Hence, if the question aris-
ing at the moment is Can there be a feminist ethnography which considers
art by women in South Asia as the primary ethnographic material?, the
answer should be invariably an affirmative one.
Nonetheless, in the present scenario of the rigid and conservative disci-
plinary practices of sociology and social anthropology, such an endeavour
has not been conceptualized in a fruitful manner. Feminist ethnography
also cannot claim to be inclusive if art by women produced in the region
is not given its due position within its practice.
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SECTION II
Political and Aesthetic: Explorations

of Intersections
CHAPTER 5
Globalisation and Local Anxieties in the Art

of Bangladesh: The Interface of History
and the Contemporary
Lala Rukh Selim
This essay attempts to view the effects of globalisation on the contempo-

rary art practices of Bangladesh. It will traverse areas where the local and
global seem to converge, and yet contain an element of tension, and exam-
ine whether this tension is reflected in the works of contemporary artists.
Questions of ‘identity’ and ‘tradition’, which seem to interfere with the
seamless coming together of the global and local, will be discussed within
the broader framework of the history of Bangladesh. In the process, the
essay will sift through the history of fragmentation and transformation
that led to the birth of Bangladesh that may have influenced the contem-
porary trends of Bangladeshi art.
Bangladesh has gone through many phases in its history where diverse
peoples have come to play a part in its complex aesthetic heritage.
‘Globalisation’ has a long history and has an epochal development over
thousands of years including regional and continental patterns of migra-
tion, trade, conquest and cultural borrowings (Harris 2011: 2). It has
L. R. Selim (*)
University of Dhaka, Dhaka, Bangladesh

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05852-4_5
118 L. R. SELIM
been an important element of the culture of Bangladesh. Conquest,

migration, trade and commerce, particularly of textiles and the wondrous
muslin of the region, have a long history of export, all of which have
resulted in the exchange of culture. Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, Islam
and Christianity have been practised in Bengal in the last two millennia. It
has gone through a long process of political struggles leading to fragmen-
tation and massive migrations, not to mention the shift in the focus of
what should be the common unifying element of the people who are con-
tained within the boundary of Bangladesh. The boundary itself has shifted.
Bangladesh was once part of the united state of Bengal, which is now
divided into the sovereign state of Bangladesh, with a Muslim majority
and the state of West Bengal in India with a Hindu majority. In 1947, with
the independence of the subcontinent from British rule, two separate
states, namely, India and Pakistan, came into being on the basis of the Two
Nation Theory. The present-day Bangladesh then became a part of
Pakistan as East Pakistan together with West Pakistan, separated by many
hundreds of miles to constitute a separate homeland for Muslims.
Bangladesh finally gained independence from Pakistan after the War of
Liberation in 1971. The four fundamental principles of state policy of the
first constitution of Bangladesh adopted in 1972 were nationalism, social-
ism, democracy and secularism. With time and changing political contexts,
these too have been revised.
As a colonised nation, modern art evolved around the discourses of ‘tra-
dition’ and ‘identity’ in the subcontinent. ‘Tradition’ has been used as an
oppositional force in the struggles of nineteenth-century nationalism in the
process of decolonisation. During the phase of Bangladesh’s history as part
of Pakistan, debates ensued among the proponents of abstraction and those
who opposed its facile adaptation. Considered an imported element, a sec-
tion of artists refused to embrace it as a universal form. Islam has suggested
that painters took up abstraction not only because it represented their artis-
tic, emotional and intellectual understanding of art, but also social compul-
sion provided an additional incentive as abstraction seemed to be consistent
with the Islamic aversion to figuration (Islam 1999: 20–21). Nonetheless,
‘identity’ and the ‘traditions’ which created that identity, were again put
into play by Bangladeshis against the hegemony of West Pakistan, as an
oppositional force of resistance during the movement for autonomy and
finally, independence. It was a strong weapon as Bangladesh had little in
common with West Pakistan from which it was separated by a vast geo-
graphical distance, culture and, most importantly, language. The Language
Movement sparked off almost as soon as Pakistan was born and Urdu was
GLOBALISATION AND LOCAL ANXIETIES IN THE ART OF BANGLADESH… 119
proclaimed the only state language of Pakistan. The movement peaked in

1952 when lives were lost in the struggle to establish Bengali as a national
language of Pakistan. A common secular culture was imagined by Bengalis
struggling for their language and cultural autonomy, which led to concep-
tualising the nation state. This brought about the long struggle that finally
led to the independence of Bangladesh in 1971.
As Bangladesh emerged as an independent nation, ‘identity’ and ‘tradi-
tion’ have lost their significance as weapons against a colonising force. But
because art has been so concerned with these notions in the past, the dis-
courses of ‘identity’ and the adaptation or appropriation of ideas and
forms from the ‘Western’ or globalised world are still perhaps not free
from dilemmas for the Bangladeshi artists navigating in a space thick with
unsettled ideas of the indigenous and the imported. Concerns of homoge-
neity and loss of ‘identity’ plague the art world divided into the senior
generation of artists who work within what may be termed as a national art
establishment, wary of the notion of ‘contemporary art’, and the mostly
younger generation of artists treading the global platform. Born decades
after the violent and blood-smeared liberation war, in tune with the tech-
nological and economic realities that has turned the world global, the
global and local being no longer polarised but interwoven, they seem
more comfortable surfing the global wave.
Contested notions of ‘identity’ and ‘tradition’ have played an impor-
tant role in defining the art of Bangladesh. The politics of identity formed
through a process of selection and manipulation of ‘tradition’ is notable in
its art. At present, ‘globalisation’ and ‘contemporary art’ are terms that
feature strongly at least in a section of the art world of Bangladesh as it
moves to carve out a space on the global platform which is more accessible
than ever before. Within the global platform, the question of identity is
challenging. International and local political, economic, environmental
and social concerns are common throughout the globalised world, and
these concerns come to feature in the work of Bangladeshi artists.
‘Traditions’ are often brought into use as markers of ‘identity’ rather than
politically charged symbols. They are offered to the global art world eager
to promote diversity and plurality.
Dilemmas and Inheritance of Art-Politics

Why do we deal with dilemmas when we discuss the art of a postcolonial
nation, which Bangladesh is? Art has been strongly associated with politics
in Bangladesh and has rarely in the past been disengaged from the national
120 L. R. SELIM
context. As mentioned above, modernism in art has been debated and

contested with artists researching ways of integrating it with ‘tradition’.
The root of the debate can be traced to the British colonial period when
art education institutions were established by the British in the subconti-
nent to train drawing masters, draftsmen and modellers, surveyors and
engravers, to provide a new kind of vocational training. In Kolkata, an art
school was founded in 1854 with this goal. Though the art institutions
were established to teach ‘applied art’ and not ‘fine art’, the confusion in
Britain itself about art education, particularly in the policy for India as well
as the taste for academic art which had grown in the subcontinent, the art
schools were transformed into academies (Mitter 1994: 29–60). The rise
of nationalism in Bengal saw the growth of the Bengal School under the
guidance of Abanindranath Tagore. The ‘Indian style’ paintings produced
bore the romantic and idealistic values that the orientalists recognised as
the essence of ancient Indian art (Guha-Thakurta 2007: 155). Certain
elements from the art of the past were selectively deployed to make art
that would challenge Western mimesis, which had become vastly popular.
Thus the politicisation of identity and the appropriation of ‘tradition’ were
at play here to differentiate it from the art that was promoted through the
colonial institutions. The debates that ensued about the Bengal School
paintings and its eschewing of naturalism, the challenging of its ‘Indian-
ness’ by Indian nationalists at that time and the vociferous support of it by
orientalists have been chronicled and analysed by Tapati Guha-Thakurta
(1992). Thus what is considered to be the beginning of modern art in the
subcontinent itself was not free from dilemmas.
Zainul Abedin who is the pioneer of modern art in Bangladesh was
active and acclaimed in undivided India. He was a teacher at the Calcutta
Art School and gained immense stature in the subcontinent through his
Famine series on the Bengal famine of 1943. With the partition of India,
he and a number of other Bengali Muslim teachers of the Calcutta Art
School opted to move to East Pakistan. It was their intention to found
an art education institution in East Pakistan. By that time the Bengal
School had lost the limelight. Rabindranath Tagore’s ideas of assimila-
tion and exchange had begun to affect the art world since the founding
of the Kala-Bhavana of Visva-Bharati in 1919. Artists had begun to travel
to different parts of the world and were exposed to different ideas and
practices in art and art education. At the end of the 1930s, the art schools
were showing signs of change and the influence of modern European art
movements was being felt. Global eclecticism was a predominant feature
of these movements in their early phase and many Indian artists who had
gone to Europe came back with a new enthusiasm for local arts
(Subramanyan 1987: 29–30). Undeniably ‘the flexible revolutionary
syntax of Cubism became synonymous with the global avant-garde’
(Mitter 2007: 8). Zainul Abedin, Safiuddin Ahmed, Quamrul Hassan,
S.M. Sultan and other pioneers of the art movement in Bangladesh, who
had studied in the Kolkata Art School during and after the 1930s, were
removed from the ideas that governed it at the founding, or the ideals of
the Bengal School. Nonetheless, all of these diverse streams of ideas con-
tinued to play a part in shaping the form of the art that they produced as
well as their ideas on art education.
After Partition in 1947, Abedin and the other artist-teachers who had
opted to move to Pakistan focused on the founding of an art education
institution in Dhaka, the capital of East Pakistan. The subject of the first
exhibition, to inspire the Pakistani rulers to establish an art school in
Dhaka, was strategically chosen, a series of posters portraying the conquest
of India by Muslims to the birth of Pakistan. Here, the intention for select-
ing this particular subject was highlighting a common Pakistani ‘identity’
based on religion. In 1948, an art school was established in Dhaka. There
were many dissenting ideas about the identity of the Bengali Muslim prior
to the Partition (Anisuzzaman 1993: 91–96). But with the Language
Movement, the common identity of religion was put to the test. The lan-
guage and cultural heritage of Bengal became the elements unifying the
people of this land and the realisation that religion could not supplant
culture (Umar 1967: 1–12). This directly affected the art movement of
the region, which has been carefully secular. This was possibly because the
birth of Bangladesh as the result of religious affinity had not worked as a
cementing factor for Pakistan and had to be challenged to create an inde-
pendent Bangladesh. Abedin’s work had always dealt with the rural life
and people of Bengal. The art school in Dhaka was deeply influenced by
the ideas of art that Abedin and his colleagues held. According to Jahedi,
they ‘try to instil into the hearts of their students a sense of pride and love
for the traditional artistry of the people, particularly the folk tradition’
(Jahedi 1961: 7). It must be added that the art school founded in Dhaka
still held at its core the fundamental principles of the Calcutta Art School
with its stress on skills training and mimesis with theoretical courses being
included after 1963 (Khabir 2007: 16).
In 1951, Abedin went to the Slade School of Fine Art in the UK and
visited galleries and museums in Europe. After returning in 1952, he
122 L. R. SELIM
turned to ‘folk art’ for inspiration. Both global eclecticism and the
Language Movement with its associated ‘indigenism’ had a part to play in
this. He began experimenting with various ‘folk’ elements in his painting.
This was probably an attempt to hearken back to a remote past before
religions had taken their present form and presented an undivided Bengali
identity. Not only did he himself pursue experiments with folk forms, he
also exhorted Quamrul Hassan to do so in the 1950s (Huq 2007: 313).
Safiuddin Ahmed, another pioneer of the art movement, also showed a
transformation after the Language Movement, and the people and nature
of Bangladesh became the subject of his work. S.M. Sultan, who entered
the art scene rather late, was completely committed to excluding all per-
ceived foreign elements in his paintings.
A difference is seen between the four pioneers of the art movement
when compared with the generation of artists who were the early students
of the art institution in Dhaka. This was perhaps due to the fact that quite
a number of the latter artists went to Europe and the United States to
study, and this became a turning point for them and for the art of
Bangladesh. They were exposed to various art movements of the West not
as mature artists already established in their own fields as were Abedin or
Safiuddin. Instead, they went as students and were eager to experiment
with the formalism of modernism. Most of them returned to East Pakistan
at the end of the 1950s. Cubism, abstract expressionism and other move-
ments in art transformed their work. They show a greater desire to become
part of the international art world they had been exposed to, rather than
to bridge the international and local as had been the case with the earlier
artists at work. They were less concerned about contextualising modern-
ism in the sense that they were more comfortable with borrowing ele-
ments from the Western art world without having to look for local forms
for parallels or inspiration. According to Mansur, concerns about indigen-
ism were washed away in the powerful tide of internationalism (Mansur
2007: 40–41). However, their work also reflected local subjects and a
number of them continued the efforts of Abedin to unite modernism with
folk art. Abedin himself was not beyond problematising the new kind of
art practice as he spoke in an interview in 1974. He said that a phase of his
art practice had, possibly subconsciously, been influenced by the struggle
for Bengali language and culture and was a rebellion where he had had to
uphold the folk art of the Bengalis, had to be free from the influence of the
West and to deny the supremacy of West Pakistan. But later, in the past
decade when he felt that Bengali culture could not be repressed, he felt
free to paint some abstract expressionistic paintings like those of the

younger generation. He went on to say that these artists were young and
impressionable when they went to the West and painted in the trends that
they saw there, which he said were good paintings too. But as they became
more mature, they would return to their own environment and express it
in their work because true art had to be based on life and real experience
(Islam 1994: 105–106). The art world was not without debates and dis-
courses on what the course of art should be and whether art was becoming
a facile imitation of the Western world or if it connected to viewers. This
plaguing doubt has been voiced by a number of authors who have tried to
analyse the phenomenon and put it into perspective (Azim 2000: 100–101;
Islam 1999: 20–21; Jahangir 1974: 2–3; Mansur 2007: 51).
With the War of Liberation in 1971 an independent Bangladesh was
born and with it the hope of a secular, democratic, socialist country where
Bengali culture would flourish. As an independent nation, it began to
build its institutions and new relations in art, education and culture. Artists
had greater opportunities to travel, participate in international exhibi-
tions, and view the art of foreign nations. Art students travelled to foreign
nations to study. Contacts grew with the Western art capitals and also with
India, Japan and China. The positive spirit of the early 1970s evaporated
with the political and economic crises that engulfed the new nation. The
killing of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman1 in 1975 was followed by a prolonged
military dictatorship; religion again came to play a part in politics. Major
General Ziaur Rahman,2 the founder of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party
1
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman is the visionary founder of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh.
He was the driving force of the Liberation Movement and the War of Liberation of
Bangladesh in 1971. He is popularly known by the title Bangabandhu (“Friend of Bengal”).
He was an important figure of the Awami League founded in 1949, later becoming its leader.
He served as the first President of Bangladesh and later as the Prime Minister until his assas-
sination in August 1975.
2
Ziaur Rahman, then a major in the Pakistan army, was a sector commander of the
Bangladesh Liberation War. He came into prominence after a military coup in 1975 in which
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was killed. Followed by several shifts in power in the army, he finally
became the Chief Martial Law Administrator in 1976 and later the President of Bangladesh
in 1977. In 1978, he formed the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). He reinstated reli-
gious politics and rehabilitated anti-liberation elements and passed the Indemnity Ordinance
which gave immunity from legal action to the persons involved in the assassination of Sheikh
Mujibur Rahman, coups, and other political events between 1975 and 1979. In 1981, he was
assassinated by a group of army officers.
124 L. R. SELIM
(BNP), assumed power in 1976 and made constitutional amendments

that facilitated the political rehabilitation of elements that had collabo-
rated with the Pakistani forces and committed crimes against humanity
during the War of Liberation, namely, the Jama’at-e-Islami. In 1988
Ershad’s3 pseudo military government declared Islam the state religion of
Bangladesh raising furore from the intelligentsia, further promoting ‘com-
munal politics’. Ershad was forced from power in 1990 in a huge move-
ment for democracy. In the elections of 1991, the BNP came to power
and Jama’at leaders became ministers in the two BNP-led governments of
1991 and 2001. The government elected in 2008 led by the Bangladesh
Awami League, set up an International Crimes Tribunal which has tried
and convicted Jama’at leaders of crimes against humanity during the War
of Liberation. The two major parties that have taken turns at the helm of
the government since the fall of Ershad are the Bangladesh Awami League,
the party that headed the Liberation War under the leadership of Sheikh
Hasina, daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and the BNP which has
been responsible for making changes in the constitution to reinstate reli-
gion in politics, founded by Ziaur Rahman and now headed by his wife
Khaleda Zia. Through all of these turbulences, artists were active partici-
pants in political movements as part of the intelligentsia, producing visual
material for the movements.
At present, Bangladesh has gained self-sufficiency in food and is advanc-
ing on different economic and human development indexes. Export from
the garment industry and remittance are major contributors to the econ-
omy. Generally speaking, times have changed. Both major political parties
follow neoliberal economic policies. It is now becoming a lower middle-
income country from a lower income country. Bangladesh is not the ‘bot-
tomless basket’ anymore and the character of the art world is keeping pace
with this. Till the 1980s the only exhibitions that were held in Bangladesh
were organised by the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, the government
institution for the promotion of the arts. There were no private galleries
or big investors in art. But an important event that helped transform the
art world of Bangladesh was the Asian Art Biennale, which was organised
3
Lieutenant General Hussain Muhammad Ershad came to power through a military coup
in 1982 and served as President of Bangladesh from 1983 to 1990. He founded the Jatiya
Party in 1986. Ershad resigned in 1990 in the face of national protest and international
pressure.
for the first time in Dhaka in 1981, bringing part of the international art
world to Dhaka. It brought in art from different parts of Asia for
Bangladeshi artists and art viewers. Perhaps the most important was the
kind of art the Japanese artists exhibited in the Biennale of 1983, intro-
ducing art trends that had transformed the art world of Japan in the 1970s.
This was in response to the trends of minimal art and conceptual art in the
United States and Europe from the end of the 1960s to the beginning of
the 1970s (Yasunaga 1983). The subsequent Asian Biennales continued to
exhibit Japanese installations and these were appreciated and awarded by
the jury. Bangladeshi artists did not immediately respond to this by mak-
ing similar work. With the growth of information technology and public
media, artists were exposed to the variety of art being practised around the
globe. The influence of conceptual art such as installations, performances,
videos, photography became evident in the 1990s. By then a number of
private art galleries had started to operate. The scattered efforts of the
1990s became more concerted in the twenty-first century. Increased for-
eign travel and the facility of networking with foreign organisations facili-
tated the trend and brought foreign and local artists together in residencies
and workshops. This was also a result of the Western world’s attempt to be
pluralistic and polycentric. According to Clarke, the mid-1990s saw a
growth of interest in contemporary Asian art by Europe and North
America through curators, not as in the past, through the engagement of
artists in premodern Asian art and the aesthetic and metaphysical frames
within which the art developed. This interest is reflected in Asian art
exhibited in contemporary art exhibitions. Western master narratives of
modern art have been discredited, but even today it is hard to find
European or American artists who feel they have anything to learn from
contemporary Asian art. The asymmetry of knowledge of the past contin-
ues to exist. An Asian artist working today is more likely to have a detailed
understanding of Western modern and contemporary art than their
European or American counterparts have of modern or contemporary
Asian art. Though it may seem that in the ‘postmodern’ era that the ‘old
boundaries are crumbling’ with its lack of mainstream or belief in artistic
progress, Asian art is still being reclaimed within a Western-centristic
vision. It is placed as a ‘further temporary novelty for western palates’ or
being viewed as proof that the non-Western world is becoming more like
the West (Clarke 2011: 245–246).
126 L. R. SELIM
Networked Art Practices: Invitations and Impacts

Since the 1990s Dhaka has developed an art market and galleries with the
associated circuit of curators, critics, collectors and artists. The state-run
Shilpakala Academy has gradually come to play a minor role as an institu-
tion as the free market economy has gained ascendency. Private entrepre-
neurs, industry owners and multinationals are seen to become more
important in the art world. The state funds their activity through partner-
ships with the Ministry of Culture directly or through the Bangladesh
Shilpakala Academy or the Bangladesh National Museum which are both
under the Ministry of Culture. Whereas in the 1990s it was almost solely
through the Shilpakala Academy that artists could participate in interna-
tional exhibitions, the Bengal Foundation, a private foundation, began to
play a major role in promoting artists in the beginning of the twenty-first
century. The focus of Bengal was then more on modern art rather than the
‘contemporary’.
The Britto Arts Trust set up in 2002, part of the Triangle Art Network,
was one of the first artist-led initiatives which began to promote contem-
porary art with the support of international agencies, most importantly
the Triangle Arts Trust, UK, and Khoj of India. Khoj itself was founded
with the support of the Triangle Arts Trust in 1997. It sought to address
the lack of dialogue within the subcontinental neighbours as well as seek
‘a non-Euro-American tilt within cultural discourse, more connected
with contemporary art practices/practitioners in Africa, the Asia Pacific,
Latin America, China, Australia, etc.’ (Sood 1998: 8). Guided by the
Triangle Arts Trust based in London, the international workshops
brought together artists from different regions and backgrounds includ-
ing Euro-Americans. ‘Its direction is towards an empowerment of third
world artists and their multicultural bonding outside a white bias, for an
exchange and flow of information along other lines’ (Sood 1998: 9).
Established in 1982 in the UK, by the collector Robert Loder and the
sculptor Anthony Caro, the aim of the Triangle Arts Trust was to build
an international artists network promoting exchange of ideas and innova-
tion within the contemporary visual arts (khoj.workshop.org). It can be
asserted that Britto Arts Trust took off with the mission to promote and
popularise ‘contemporary’ art practices ‘outside a white bias’. Ironically,
the initiative was launched through the support of an organisation in the
UK. The first workshop of the Triangle Arts Trust held in 1982 had art-
ists from Canada, the United States and England, hence the Triangle
(author’s conversation with Robert Loder: 2003). Also it must be noted

that the activities did not exclude artists from Europe or North America.
They have been present in all the international workshops and other
activities providing interaction with local artists. Recalling orientalism as
it emptied itself of colonial content and created an anti-colonial pro-
Indian image to exercise its greatest power ‘in the authority it com-
manded over representation itself – in its ability to shape, define and fix
the image of Indian art in both the Western imagination and nationalist
perceptions’ (Guha-Thakurta 1992: 148). Was it a new way of interven-
ing, trying to give direction to the art of the non-Western by seemingly
pushing them to turn their gaze to ‘themselves’ and to take up ‘contem-
porary art’ while supplying them with models and structures to follow?
During the era of modernism, the orientalists told the ‘others’ to look at
their own ‘tradition’. While modern artists of the subcontinent did appro-
priate and assimilate elements of Western art, this was ‘influence’ in the
disapproving view of Western art history, a term which cut both ways. If
the work was too close to the original, it reflected ‘slavish mentality’, and
if it was an imperfect imitation, it represented failure. While borrowings
by European artists from non-Western sources were approved either as
affinities or dismissed as inconsequential (Mitter 2007: 7–8).
Though interest in contemporary expressions in art were gradually
growing among some artists in Bangladesh, Britto gave it a strong push
and a kind of legitimacy through its dynamic activities that literally con-
nected to the globe, not to mention the impressive international network
of organisations that supported it. No doubt the growth of such art prac-
tices was evolving and inevitable, but their evolution may have been differ-
ent without the intervention of the Triangle through the agency of Britto.
Contemporary art has been, for a large part, subsumed by social issues
raised by Western media and the heated issues of local development activi-
ties undertaken by donor agencies (Khabir 2007: 264). Additionally,
Britto Arts Trust has introduced and organised an impressive number and
variety of activities. The issues they have dealt with go beyond, while
including, the preoccupations mentioned earlier (http://www.brittoart-
strust.org/). Some of these activities may show the ‘artist as ethnogra-
pher’ according to Hal Foster where artists have taken to the field of the
other, the postcolonial, the subaltern or the sub-cultural (Foster 1995:
302–309). Making the claim of broadening the exhibition spaces beyond
the walls of the galleries and museums, Britto artists sometimes conduct
performances on the streets of Dhaka or in the Bangladeshi countryside
128 L. R. SELIM
(Chowdhury 2008). Britto claims that it has taken on the responsibility of

promoting alternative modes of art production of Bangladesh to the globe
(Lipi 2008). But the following discussion may show that what is pro-
moted as alternative is now, and has been for some time, the mainstream.
The anti-establishment radical rhetoric is hardly supported by the fact that
it has espoused a new establishment in favour of the old. Contemporary
art has been consciously promoted by Britto, the Samdani Art Trust and
Drik4 in the recent past as they have collaborated in various ways to further
its cause.
2011 seems to be a significant year for Bangladesh as initiatives to enter
the global arena of ‘contemporary art’ appear to become a priority.
Bangladeshi artists have been participating in the Venice Biennales since
2011 and in 2017 for the first time in the documenta 14. Curators from
important global institutions have been coming to Bangladesh since 2011.
The Samdani Art Foundation (SAF) was founded in 2011 in Dhaka. It is
a private arts trust which aims at supporting the contemporary artists and
architects of Bangladesh and ‘seeks to expand the audience engaging with
contemporary art across Bangladesh and increase international exposure
for the country’s artists and architects’ (Samdani Art Foundation website).
The Dhaka Art Summit (a SAF initiative) has drawn curators from many
important international institutions in 2012, 2014 and 2016. Though the
first Summit did not have an international participation, the second one
featured artists from South Asian countries and the third one held a global
flavour with renowned artists participating under curators from presti-
gious institutions. The usual somewhat slapdash display in the gallery that
Bangladeshi viewers are used to seeing, show restraint and a global chic
in the Summits. A critical view of such curated exhibitions may be that
they may compel artists to make a certain kind of art to exhibit and present
to the same set of curators operating across the world (Harris 2011: 2).
Noël Carroll implies that contemporary art has developed its preferred
idiom and transnational exhibitions show a dominance of video, film,
photography, installation, conceptual art, performance art and digital art
with painting and sculpture losing ground. Many of the art forms are
4
Drik Picture Library was founded in 1989; in 1998 it set up Pathshala, the South Asian
Institute of Photography and Chobi Mela in 2000, the largest photography event in Asia and
a regular biennale. Considerable numbers of Pathshala students are currently participating in
art events and exhibitions.
constructed on the technologies ‘transforming the wide world into a small

world’ suggesting film, video and photography are the mechanically and
electronically reproducible media that make them possible to be every-
where at once. Thus the overcoming of space by these media instils con-
viction that globalisation is upon us. Thus these media are emblematic of
the emerging cosmopolitan art world as they are themselves cosmopolitan
(Carroll 2013: 138–139). It may also be said that the use of these media
themselves simulate the notion that the artist is in the global flow. Also as
Clarke says, recirculation of known Asian artists rather than introducing
new ones is a common phenomenon as relatively few curators have detailed
knowledge of more than one part of Asia, if any at all. Therefore they are
not equipped to find emerging talents. He points to the familiar role of
informants needed to shortlist potential artists and necessary information
for such jet-setting curators lacking contextual knowledge (Clarke 2011:
247). The recent wave of heavyweight curators from highly reputed for-
eign institutions coming into Bangladesh is sniffing out the work that will
‘work’ within the taste, preoccupations and framework of the ‘global’
institutions. It is very unlikely that they have a great sense of the history or
context of the particular nation that is Bangladesh. Thus artists who make
an effort to make their work palatable for the global platform perhaps have
to keep in mind a particular formula for success.
The Samdani Art Foundation is at present the portal through which
young, aspiring artists get the opportunity to reach the global space.
Connecting with organisations in the Western world, they provide oppor-
tunities to jump-start artistic careers through participation in prestigious
international exhibitions, residencies, fellowships and production grants.
Not to be outdone, the Bengal Foundation has also revised their policy
and in the last few years and have begun to engage in the promotion of
contemporary art. For the Bangladeshi art world with very limited access
to modern or contemporary art, the Summit has created a window into
the global. The Summit is not a biennial. It is ‘the world’s largest non-
commercial art festival dedicated to South Asian Art’ (Samdani 2014), or
‘the world’s largest non-commercial research and exhibition platform for
South Asian Art’ (Samdani 2016). The Asian Art Biennale, now being
held routinely, lacks the tools of curating, marketing, theoretical discourse
and other associated necessities, without which it has lost much of its sig-
nificance as an institution in the global world. The Summit, as an art fair,
is focused on promotion. ‘Success’ is a matter of sales for an artist as well
as critical acclaim, as some artists may sell work but never have them
130 L. R. SELIM
bought by museums. Institutions, particularly some international net-

works of institutions, are far more important than others as ‘gatekeepers’
in the contemporary art world (Harris 2011: 19). The Summit plays a role
in connecting to this circuit without which ‘success’ as critical acclaim is
unattainable. As Geeta Kapur notes, the biennale is not beyond playing
into vested interests, being a mixture of state spectacle, cultural hegemony,
market interests and tourist commerce. They also create professional chan-
nels of communication where they are held, erect bridges between state
and private finance, between the public and elite spaces, and artists and
other practitioners (Kapur 2013: 182). According to Peter R. Kalb, the
twenty-first century has seen the biennale, the art fair and auction circuits
being interconnected. Works of artists shown in biennales are later sold in
auctions and fairs. Galleries paying equal attention to emerging economies
are opening strategic branches far from their traditional European bases
and selectively importing artists. The London auction house, BRIC5 sales
in 2010 and 2011 ‘has reinvented the capital/periphery model, bringing
the cultural products of far-flung and culturally diverse economic powers
to a single venue for exhibition and evaluation’ (Kalb 2013: 17). The art
market, like artists and art historians, has established its own network of
interests unhindered by the earlier art world cartography, but not
indifferent to it (Kalb 2013: 17).
Noël Carroll suggests that the transnational contemporary art circuit is
held together by a set of shared artistic and critical discourses. Artists,
presenters, critics and connoisseurs share certain conceptions and herme-
neutical strategies that foster transnational understanding. The artist can
presume, with regard to certain types of work, featuring a certain kind of
iconography, that the viewer will be able to explore the work in the light
of certain concerns, ideas and preoccupations. ‘Often, these hermeneuti-
cal posits are articles of progressive politics, such as postcolonialism, femi-
nism, gay liberation, globalization and global inequality, the suppression
of free expression and other human rights, identity politics, and the p olitics
of representation, as well as a generic anti-establishmentarianism’ (Carroll
2013: 140). The related political concerns grow perhaps because artists
find themselves in many of the same contexts in the urban centres around
the world which include capitalism in particular and modernisation in gen-
eral. These concerns are fostered and circulated perhaps through critical
5
‘BRIC’ is a term used by economists and investors to designate the four emergent mar-
kets of Brazil, Russia, India, and China.
discourse and highlighted by international art world events through inter-

disciplinary lectures and conferences. Since these assumptions that create
meaning are so widely circulated, it is possible to have a transnational
‘conversation’ between ‘artistic senders and receivers who speak different
languages’ (Carroll 2013: 140). James Meyer notes that now it is the cura-
tor who is most connected to and well-informed about practice and has
the greatest impact on it. This is why criticism is so feeble because, for
now, critical debate has shifted from discourse to curation. The curator is
now the best informed and most able to articulate what is important in art
practice (Carroll 2013: 138). It may be added here that the curator is also
thus authorised to circulate the preoccupations and language or iconogra-
phy of transnational contemporary art through the constant exchange of
information with artists. Umberto Eco holds that this historical epoch is
dominated by repetition and iteration dominating the world of artistic
creativity in which it is difficult to distinguish between the repetition of
the media and the repetition of the so-called major arts (Eco 2005: 363).
Geeta Kapur notes that with the scale of twenty-first-century globalisa-
tion, the curatorial project entails a mandatory inclusiveness of difference
and a decentralisation of cultural power in discourse and practice after the
dissolution of the first, second and third world in 1989 and the rise of the
new Empire. The interdependence of regions and nations and the overlap-
ping of ‘local’ cultures within global capitalism, the deterritorialisation of
peoples and cultures through mass migrations, and electronic communica-
tions have brought into play transnational transculturalism. Transculturalism
is not a matter of free choice but a condition of global exchange. Within this
transnational public sphere, a large part of the world population lives out-
side of communities and nations where citizenship includes the experience
of exile. The aesthetic and ethical impact of this is statistically a huge increase
of third world artists in international exhibitions. Translation then becomes
a key point for transcultural aesthetic (Kapur 2013: 182–183) and ‘cultural
criticism appoints the diasporic artist as a trope and a norm – the one who
constructs both the grammar and the discourse of global contemporaneity,
and conducts the process of negotiation/confrontation to this purpose’
(Kapur 2013: 183).
There is the presence of Bangladeshi diaspora artists in the various
global spheres on which Bangladesh is operating. This may simultaneously
read that many local artists are still not empowered with the grasp of the
globalised idiom of contemporary art to be able to operate within it, as it
may be that the Bangladeshi diaspora benefits from the stamp that the
132 L. R. SELIM
Bangladeshi identity gives them and provides them entry into transcul-
tural spaces which would elude them bereft of that identity. As Araeen
observes, young postcolonial artists of African or Asian origin are part of
Western society and not separated from their white/European contempo-
raries. They are active within the same globalised space and are legitimated
by the same institutions. Yet, though equal, the white/European artists
are not obliged to the multicultural society and require no recognisable
identity sign for their work (Araeen 2011: 372–373), ‘the “other” artists
must carry the burden of the culture from which they originated, and they
must indicate this in their artworks before they can be recognized and
legitimated. Their works must carry identity cards with African or Asian
signs on them’ (2011: 373). Thus it may work both ways for the diasporic
artist, the artist though denied a space if the identity card is not used in
their work, can use the card to gain entry into the strongholds of the glo-
balised art world. Jonathan Harris notes that art produced ‘in’ Asia analo-
gises the fate of art produced anywhere outside Europe and North
America. The international markets for contemporary art have been cre-
ated and are dominated by Western institutions. This global art world
power nexus needs art to come ‘from’ somewhere ‘outside’ and show
signs of ‘authentic difference’ to brand it in the international market. This
ideological projection is organised by the players in the market (2013:
440–441). ‘And sometimes, to complicate matters further, the players
themselves actually believe in the ideology. This suggests that the idea of
authenticity, at the very point of its invention or coinage, was actually
ideological tout court’ (Harris 2013: 441).
Conclusion Amidst Anxieties

The ‘local’ artists, bound to the nation, have enormous anxiety. They are
not part of Western society and have little access to a different structure of
education; their language skills in English, the world’s ‘business language’
(and also the language of most academic discourse), are limited; most
importantly they do not have the ‘taste’ or know the idioms and aesthet-
ics of the transnational transcultural sphere of the globalised world. Ulf
Hannerz comments on the elitist nature of contemporary cosmopolitan
culture which offers specific authority to those who travel from the periph-
eries to the metropolises. Those who do not are considered passive agents
of the peripheries. The influence and exchange between the peripheral to
the metropolitan is not equal and tends to turn the former to receivers
rather than managers of meaning (Seppä 2010). Raising the anxiety that
contemporary art will enter the local in a similar fashion as modernism,
without the artists being able to claim authorship over representation as
they are not ‘managers of meaning’. For just as in the past, the establish-
ments that validate and promote art are still entrenched in the West. And
the sobering thought that globalisation that is indispensible to the mak-
ing of contemporary art is a term which names forces that have shaped
the globe but have originated in the West and have achieved dominance
beyond Europe and the United States through the prolonged history of
colonialism and conquest (Harris 2011: 1).
The art education institutions of Bangladesh are still clinging to the
objectives of the art schools founded during the colonial era where the
focus is skill development and mimesis. All the art education institutions
in Bangladesh roughly follow the basic structure of the first institution
founded in Dhaka by Zainul Abedin. Thus art education may still be con-
sidered, in many cases, as vocational training. The visual language or
grammar of art is not the focus and critical theoretical discourse is almost
nonexistent in the current framework of art education institutions. The
syllabi of most art institutions focus on Western art history and theory
while the regional is peripheral. Media art is not encouraged and mimetic
skill is considered the most desired of all attributes of an art student.
Articulation and critical awareness are not expected. This environ hardly
prepares the art student for a globalised art world where communication
skills are absolutely necessary. Thus they are not equipped with the skills
and sophistication that is necessary in the contemporary art world. In
many ways this leaves them seriously on the back foot in the complexities
of the contemporary art world where the artist must be able to situate
work politically and in the idiom demanded by ‘global’ taste which is still
very much determined by the institutions of the West. In Bangladesh
today practitioners outside the art school background are often better
equipped than art school graduates as they are not educated within a skill-
based system, they are students of some other disciplines and take up
visual media which yields interdisciplinary results. They can communicate
their ideas and have a wider worldview than what is imparted within the
narrow confines of an art school focusing on making skills and out-of-sync
art history courses which have little relevance in the world today where the
image can be mediated and circulated with a very different set of skills and
concepts.
134 L. R. SELIM
The greatest fear of all for artists in Bangladesh is the fear of being out-
of-sync, of being left behind. Geeta Kapur notes, ‘despite incomplete
modernization a unitary logic of advancement, as this was conceived of in
nineteenth-century Europe, continues to be imposed so that someone or
the other among the peoples of the world is always seen to be out of step’
(Kapur 2001: 276). Taking authority over representation in art has to be
accompanied by textual support and there is much ground to be covered
in this field. The lack of texts has led to borrowing the support of texts
that have developed in some other context and needs to be trimmed and
fitted to Bangladesh. This translation of theoretical referents to local con-
text can be highly frustrating and often unsuccessful. Clarke notes that
though the sense of confidence of the Asian diaspora is encouraging, dia-
sporic writing is unable to speak adequately for places of origin that are
changing rapidly and have as much cultural hybridity as the ‘third spaces’
of Western metropolises. These localities and the art made there need
deeper study and explanation to the international audience by those who
live there, or stay long enough to become more than observers but partici-
pants to expand possibilities (Clarke 2011: 250). Kapur also speaks about
the radical discourse of the expatriate intelligentsia which tends to be the
privileged voice of the diaspora. The diaspora voice is the mode of speech
suitable to address the white world. Thus this proxy rhetoric forecloses
‘praxis on site, where it may matter most’ (Kapur 2013: 281). In
Bangladesh, as the feebleness of art criticism and theoretical discourse is
bemoaned, already the role may seem redundant as it has been superfi-
cially appropriated by the curator. Now the need for local ‘insider’ curators
is felt to present the ‘true’ picture.
Though ‘identity’ and ‘tradition’ have played central roles in the mak-
ing of modern art in Bangladesh as an oppositional force against colonial
hegemony, how does the identity marker stand in the present global art
world and in contemporary art? Harris notes, ‘If globalization implies the
creation of a single system within the world, one that erodes pre-existing
though still active localized systems, then the same must be true of the
contemporary art world if it has become a part of this system’ (Harris
2011: 9). Following this logic, how do artists navigate their course
through the intricacies of entering the global space? Do they retain the
identity card or do away with it? Here we see dual currents in motion. The
contemporary art of Bangladesh shows artists using identity in their work
because it gives them entry into the global art world which makes greater
effort to accommodate plurality and difference. Identity itself has become
a passport to enter the global art space. In fact, as mentioned earlier,

Araeen suggests that it is a must for non-white diaspora artists. It is almost
as much a must for all artists outside Europe and North America. There
are artists who are doing away with the ‘identity’ sign and blending in with
the tide of global culture. Carrying no flagpoles, they take up the disin-
fected politically correct stand. This is made possible by the common
idiom of contemporary art. Even when the identity card is used, it has to
be modulated to be ‘legible’ for the transnational sphere. Identity that was
used by nationalism against colonialism or against local dictatorial regimes
had turned to tradition, the nature of Bangladesh, rural or working people
as subjects and mostly folk art for formal inspiration and carefully selected
a secular path because of the reason for the existence of Bangladesh.
According to Geeta Kapur, ‘Rather than distancing alternative civilizations
into objects to be processed by western subjectivity, the nationalist intel-
ligentsia makes some genuinely anxious, and responsible appropriations
within their own societies’ (Kapur 2001: 278). Although we speak about
globalisation, the world is far from being homogenous with strong local
cultures within geographic regions and the associated history, politics, aes-
thetic taste and manifold issues forming the priorities of artist. The world
now is interconnected through economic, political, cultural and biological
factors as never before, but there are pitfalls in thinking that this makes the
world homogenous. To the Bangladeshi artist, the local provides much of
the subject matter for art and, in a sense, such subjects play into global
preoccupations such as the environment, exploitation of labour, feminism,
fundamentalism and so forth. These preoccupations and most promi-
nently the War of Liberation and the genocide and other crimes against
humanity during it continue to play a prominent part in the discourse of
artists. In fact, sometimes artists seize upon tragedy for subject matter and
human tragedy or natural disaster can become another signifier that iden-
tifies Bangladesh. As Dipesh Chakrabarty posits (Chakrabarty 2008: xii):
No country… is a model to another country, though the discussion of

modernity that thinks in terms of “catching up” precisely posits such models.
There is nothing like the “cunning of reason” to ensure that we all converge
at the same terminal point in history in spite of our apparent historical differ-
ences. Our historical differences actually make a difference. This happens
because no human society is tabula rasa. The universal concepts of political
modernity encounter pre-existing concepts, categories, institutions, and
practices through which they get translated and configured differently.
136 L. R. SELIM
Contemporary art, it may be argued, seeks to find interesting forms of

quotidian objects and popular art to make images which almost seem to
exoticise the local. The hybrid results of synthesising contemporary idioms
with local aesthetic heritage can and does yield fruit. The responsibility
and consciousness (or unconsciousness) in borrowing from the local so as
not to distance it, but to let it appear as it seeps into the consciousness or
subconscious as part of the lived environment (be it a jumble of interjec-
tions of the local-global hybrid space artists inhabit), and not to colour the
artwork to simulate contemporariness is perhaps the greatest challenge.
Guasch speaks of the political responsibility in the aftermath of colonial
modernity and how it opens up questions of how to be literally and meta-
phorically cosmopolitan in one’s own place of origin and analyse the vari-
ous relationships between the ‘global’ and the ‘local’ without one
dominating the other (Guasch). Geeta Kapur exhorts Indian artists,
‘rather than allowing ourselves to be theorized into political homogeneity,
we must engage in a dialectic that takes into account the material factors
within our own histories’ (Kapur 2001: 282). This dialectical engagement
is also necessary for artists in Bangladesh and building true alternative
institutions may be one way of counteracting ‘political homogeneity’. This
is easier said than done with the pressure of globalisation upon us. In the
context of Bangladesh, contemporary art is perhaps one of the most criti-
cal issues to deal with. Globalisation, which is still unfolding, is taking a
particular form and significance for Bangladesh. Contemporary art is still
a nebulous term, yet to be analysed, verbalised, criticised and understood
in terms of the complexities of the local and also its imbrications with the
global. Only perhaps with the passage of time and distance from the pres-
ent will it be possible to put it into any perspective.
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CHAPTER 6
Between Anthropology and History:

The Entangled Lives of Jangarh Singh Shyam
and Jagdish Swaminathan
Sandip K. Luis
Introduction
The exceptional relationship between Jagdish Swaminathan (1928–1994)
and Jangarh Singh Shyam (early-1960s to 2001) remains understudied in
Indian art history; though there are a few separate writings on them indi-
vidually.1 One of the reasons behind this relative omission could be the
extreme difficulties in bringing together two personalities as divergent and
idiosyncratic as Swaminathan and Shyam, despite their more than a
decade-old collegial career at the government art institution, Bharat
1
There are still confusions regarding Jangarh Singh Shyam’s actual year of birth, which is
roughly calculated as being between 1960 and 1964. For a discussion of this problem, see
Das (2017: 36).
S. K. Luis (*)
Delhi, India
Kochi, India

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05852-4_6
140 S. K. LUIS
Bhavan, Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh).2 To get a sense of this impasse, it will

be sufficient to note that Swaminathan, a Tamil Brahmin by birth, was a
highly influential modernist artist, writer, and the founding director of
Bharat Bhavan; whereas Shyam, the originator of the ‘Pardhan-Gond
painting’, was an Adivasi artist who is often said to have been ‘discovered’
by the former.3 Furthermore, both personalities appear to be equally enig-
matic in their art and life alike. For example, whereas Swaminathan had
the unique public persona of a “mystic-maverick” (Kapur 2012: 18) and
“anarchist-hero” (Kapur 1995: 61)—because of his bohemian lifestyle
and elusive use of language driven by a self-contradicting spirituality—
Shyam is often said to have been an “introvert” (Akhilesh 2001: 106,
translation mine). Yet, he never stopped surprising, if also shocking, the
world of art—first with his original and sublime iconography of Gond dei-
ties and, finally, if we go by the existing records, by killing himself in a land
as distant as Japan, for still mysterious reasons.
To make the relation between these extremely different characters
thinkable, I introduce a historiographical distinction between primitiv-
ism and indigenism here, by taking the collapse of ‘the Nehruvian
regime’ in general (mid-1960s to mid-1970s) and the declaration of the
Emergency (1975–1977) in particular, as the historical marker.4 I see
primitivism as a cultural fantasy characteristic to the colonial powers,5 as
opposed to indigenism as a political project shaped by the national intel-
ligentsia for addressing the alienation of subaltern communities.6 But
2
Contrary to the conventional preference for the first name ‘Jangarh’ in mentioning
Jangarh Singh Shyam, I am using his last name throughout here.
3
The term ‘Adivasi’ literally means ‘autochthon’, referring to India’s tribal communities.
Pardhan is a clan (gotra) of the Gond tribe, India’s second largest Adivasi community.
4
The phrase ‘Nehruvian regime’ refers not only to the tenure of India’s first Prime Minister
Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) but also to the continuation of his top-down centre-left poli-
cies by subsequent leaders, especially his daughter Indira Gandhi (1917–1984). Though the
period clearly starts with India’s national independence in 1947, there are three major inter-
pretations about when it ends: first, with Nehru’s death in 1964; second, with the brief but
crucial electoral setback faced by the ruling Congress between 1977 and 1980 following the
Emergency; and finally, with the liberalisation of the Indian economy in 1991. This chapter
follows the second periodisation.
5
For a psychoanalytical account of primitivism as a fantasy unique to the colonial powers,
see Foster (1993).
6
A useful survey of the idea in the context of the Latin American nationalism is given in
Tarica (2016).
BETWEEN ANTHROPOLOGY AND HISTORY: THE ENTANGLED LIVES… 141
what complicates such a neat division in our discussion is the importance

of primitivism in the discourses of the national intelligentsia and the
process of nation-building (where the nation itself is the ‘new colo-
niser’), and with their failure, the late origin of indigenism as a new
technique of governmentality.7 Since the key issue here is the relation-
ship between Swaminathan and Shyam as the subjects of the post-Neh-
ruvian cultural politics, we will focus more on the latter part of this story,
where indigenism provides the central thematic. My arguments start
with a discussion of Swaminathan and Shyam in the first and second sec-
tions of the chapter respectively. The concluding part will provide, along
with a brief critique of existing scholarship, a few conceptual linkages to
grasp the complicated relationship between these two artists.
Two disclaimers: A study of completely dissimilar personalities like
Swaminathan and Shyam—that too by placing them against a historical
background as extreme as the Emergency—cannot be undertaken without
making a few radical speculations and hyperbolic conclusions. As the title
of my chapter suggests, and for the reasons which will be evident soon,
these arguments are made in an interstitial space suspended between the
discourses of history and anthropology. If anything, these are philosophical
reflections (hence the importance of speculations and hyperboles), ema-
nating from a concrete, if also bleak, understanding of the present; of
which Shyam’s painful departure provides the immediate context and
provocation.
The second disclaimer is about my unconventional representation of
Swaminathan and Shyam, especially in the concluding section. Though I
rely on a few existing anecdotes about these artists’ lives for making cer-
tain generalisations, let me make it clear that, in the final analysis, these
personalities appear not as individuals but as configurations of two mutu-
ally opposed, yet largely overlapping, historical subjectivities operating in a
much larger discursive domain. Thereby, any attempt to extend my con-
cluding arguments to the individual lives of these artists should be taken
with great caution and care.
7
The belatedness of indigenism in India is understood in comparison to the Latin American
political history where indigenismo has been the binding force as early as the Mexican
Revolution of 1911, and an official policy of many of the newly independent countries. I will
explain this difference in historical time below.
142 S. K. LUIS
From Primitivism to Indigenism, and the ‘Civil War’

Time is denuded of its progressional ballast: it goes haywire. (J. Swaminathan
1987: 28)
If the metropolitan experience of ‘exile’ had been the defining problem-

atic of different modernisms in the west, then what we find in India and
other third-world countries is its diametrically opposed counterpart, often
identified as ‘indigenist’.8 Yet, this centrality accorded to the concept made
it into academic common-sense and even a perennial cultural value of the
national-modern, receiving little historicisation or critique thereby. The
price we have paid for this critical lack of alertness is the eventual oblitera-
tion of differences between the two discursive configurations as different
as ‘primitivism’ and ‘indigenism’—the considerations of the subaltern as a
primordial population and a contemporary individual respectively.9
Thereby, as a preliminary attempt to compensate this lack, I will offer a
brief account of Swaminathan’s career, in which one can see how these
two different notions provide the basic dialectics behind much of his inter-
ventions and ideas.
It is intriguing to note that in the discussions on indigenism in Indian art,
arguments always oscillate between the intellectual and institutional contri-
butions made by Swaminathan and K. G. Subramanyan (1924–2016)—
another Tamil Brahmin artist and a state functionary, enjoying more visibility
than the other.10 Whereas Subramanyan, a staunch Gandhian and an artist
8
The dialectical connection between the two is based on a larger modernist imaginary of
exile, outside which indigenism has no aesthetic or political relevance. However, it should
also be noted that the experience of exile is much more profound and political in the post-
colonial countries, than it had been in the west (where exile is primarily a side-effect of eco-
nomic advancement). In the Indian context, Geeta Kapur has grappled with these issues from
her earliest publications onward: for example, see her (1971–72) In Quest of Identity: Art &
Indigenism in Post-Colonial Culture with Special Reference to Contemporary Indian Painting.
9
For instance, otherwise rich in its documentation of the pre-1947 South Asian art, art
historian Partha Mitter provides a confusing narrative of primitivism, indigenism, and ‘reviv-
alism’ (the project to retrieve elite cultural pasts), in his book, The Triumph of Modernism:
India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde 1922–1947 (2007).
10
For example, the two book-length surveys of Indian modernism, Kapur’s When Was
Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practices in India (2000) and Sonal Khullar’s
Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity, and Modernism in India 1930–1990
(2015), dedicate one chapter to Subramanyan, whereas Swaminathan is reduced to a few
occasional observations and footnotes. Yet, none of these writers juxtapose one against the
other, or seem to consider Swaminathan as an unimportant figure (in fact, wherever he is
mentioned, Swaminathan’s charisma and appeal is duly acknowledged).
trained by the stalwarts of the Santiniketan School,11 found inspiration in

folk traditions and village cultures, Swaminathan took an extreme and more
politicised position. Following a long political career as a member of differ-
ent leftist and communist organisations, Swaminathan came to the Indian
art-scene as a critic in the late 1950s (by when Subramanyan had already
established himself as an important artist and pedagogue based in Baroda,
Gujarat).12 Unlike Subramanyan’s Gandhian valorisation of rural cultures
which has been criticised as ‘feudal’ and ‘paternalistic’,13 Swaminathan, as
we will see, was more drawn to primordial pasts and their contemporary
remnants, with an extraordinarily ‘egalitarian’ outlook.
As an artist and writer, Swaminathan’s fascination for the primordial
cultures began as early as the 1960s, by when he had already relinquished
his Communist Party membership and had become a fierce critic of the
Marxist ideology.14 In 1967, he was awarded the Nehru Fellowship for the
research topic ‘The Significance of Traditional Numen in Contemporary
Art’, to study the pastoral and tribal communities in Kinnaur (Himachal
Pradesh), Bastar (Madhya Pradesh), and Kutch (Gujarat).15 However, it is
11
As Mitter notes (2007: 78, 90), a primitivist project (“environmental primitivism” to be
more precise) centred on the Santali-Adivasi culture of Birbhum was one of the most intrigu-
ing hallmarks of Santiniketan artists, based in the Visva-Bharati University founded by
Rabindranath Tagore in 1921. As an alumnus of this institution, Subramanian’s ideas appear
to be more primitivist than indigenist in the final analysis.
12
Swaminathan was part of the Congress Socialist Party till Indian independence, after
which he joined the Communist Party of India (CPI), which declared national independence
as inefficient and considered the leading Congress party as their prime enemy (this position
was reversed in 1951).
13
This was the principal allegation made by the Indian Radical Painters’ and Sculptors’
Association, a highly influential but short-lived Marxist collective which originated in Baroda
(in 1987) and was majorly composed of Malayali artists. See their manifesto-like catalogue
essay written by the collective’s only woman and non-Malayali member, Anita Dube (1987).
14
By the mid-1950s, at a time when the Soviet Union was widely criticised for its mishan-
dling of the Eastern European political crises, Swaminathan started distancing himself from
the communist ideology (he had already relinquished his party membership in 1953). The
disagreement that he had with official Marxism, as it is explained in later writings
(Swaminathan 1990), is regarding its stifling conception of historical progress. However, this
did not stop him from appreciating and citing the ideas of Marxist intellectuals like Ernst
Fischer and Herbert Marcuse.
15
‘Numen’ is a mystical idea, originally formulated by the British artist and curator, Philip
S. Rawson, which provides the linchpin of Swaminathan’s entire philosophy.
144 S. K. LUIS
also worth remembering that his first encounter with India’s tribal com-
munities happened in 1955, during his honeymoon days at Betul,
Maharashtra.16 As Swaminathan recollects it in his autobiography:
At Betul I began to draw tentatively again […]. One day Bhaiyyaji Kulkarni,
an old trade union hand, and I were roaming in the forest when we hap-
pened upon a Korku tribal village. A young boy had been bitten by a snake
and the witch doctor was reviving the boy by continuous chant and throw-
ing pot-full of water on him. We watched in rapt fascination and soon
enough the boy recovered […]. This early encounter with tribal life was to
have a deep impact on my later life as an artist. (Swaminathan 1995: 9)
It is compulsive to read this excitement of the young Swaminathan as a

proof of certain primitivist fascination for the ‘irrational’ and the ‘unex-
plainable’ (if we thus interpret the above-described shamanism), which
would cast a long shadow in his later career. Yet, what we see in him is an
attempt to explain and rationalise this apparently absurd event, by looking
into the deeper logic of the ‘savage mind’—an idea that he would later
borrow from the French structural anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss
(1908–2009). The latter plays an important role in the idealistic argu-
ments of ‘The Significance of Traditional Numen’, because of the anthro-
pologist’s interest in symbolism and language, which significantly differs
from the materiality of practice emphasised by someone like Mary Douglas
(another structural anthropologist, but leaning more on the Anglophone
functionalist school, and occasionally mentioned in Swaminathan’s later
writings). In fact, more than an explicator and demystifier of primitive life,
Levi-Strauss also appears in Swaminathan as a theoretician of modernism.
For example, Swaminathan affirmatively quotes a footnote from Levi-
Strauss’ Savage Mind to argue that non-representational art, be it of mod-
ernism or primitive culture, are “realistic imitations of non-existent
models”, with “style as [their] subject” (Swaminathan 1980: 10). This
helps Swaminathan to make the self-consciously paradoxical point that
nothing escapes reason and representation in the final estimation. This is
because, for him, everything denotes, in one way or the other, the pres-
ence of an Absolute Idea or Knowledge which needs to be intuitively, if
16
Swaminathan married Bhawani Pande, the sister of a fellow cadre, in 1955. Disowned by
their respective families, the couple approached the CPI leader S. A. Dange, and it is he who
arranged their trip to Betul, where the party was engaged in trade-union activism.
not conceptually, grasped (creating further confusion and even embarrass-

ment, he goes on to equate this ideal with the Vedantic or Upanishadic
notion of Brahma) (ibid.: 11).
Aside from such obscure and self-fulfilling ideas—of which function, if
not meaning, we will discuss at the end—the research on Indian tribals
made Swaminathan arrive at certain politically relevant conclusions. In the
note titled ‘The Cost of Progress’ and written as an afterword to his
research in 1969, Swaminathan says:
What is the price that civilization extracts from the so-called backward com-
munities for the dubious benefits it forces upon them? Everywhere, except-
ing for pockets where they have been able to offer organised resistance through
achieving a degree of self-consciousness in their culture, the tribal and pastoral
communities in India have been subjected to the most ruthless exploitation
by the onward march of money economy. Free and democratic India has not
been able to defend and safeguard the lives and cultures of these children of
nature. (Swaminathan 2012: 110)17
Arguing that it is in these communities that one can still find “all the
colour, the uninhabited laughter, [and] the sheer childlike joy” that has
been snatched away from the urban working class; Swaminathan goes on
to discuss how the members of these communities, including children, are
economically and sexually exploited by the privileged classes and “caste
Hindus” (his term).
Undercutting these words of sympathy and affection is the presence of
certain familiar primitivist tropes—like “children of nature” or “childlike
joy”—with the very effect of infantilising and depoliticising the subaltern
subject. But before discussing this crucial problem in detail, a final note on
early-Swaminathan’s intellectual formation will be helpful to get a sense of
the larger political picture of the time.
It is important to note that Swaminathan greatly admitted the ideas and
friendship of the renowned poet Octavio Paz, who was the Mexican ambas-
sador to India between 1962 and 1968. And it was during this period that
Paz published his book-length critical introduction to Levi-Strauss’ anthro-
pology (albeit in Spanish). Though direct references to Paz’s writings,
including Labyrinths of Solitude ([1950] 1961), a poignant reflection on
Emphasis added.
17
146 S. K. LUIS
Mexican indigenismo,18 is largely absent in the early-Swaminathan; Paz was

often mentioned by the artist as his mentor and intellectual ally.19 In fact,
one may even assume that it was through Paz that Swaminathan realised
the importance of Latin American indigenism as well as the French intel-
lectual discourse (as Paz was actively involved in the French Surrealist cir-
cles before coming to India). The familiarity with the latter leads the young
artist to positively consider contemporary figures like Levi-Strauss, the
doyen of French Structuralism, despite the lifelong aversion to ‘isms’
(including even ‘indigenism’) that Swaminathan shared with Paz.
Now, let me come to the central problem of locating the discursive shift
to indigenism proper, as different from the existing primitivist ideology, in
the cultural and political history of post-independent India. It should be
admitted that despite their common political interests shaped by the Cold
War conjecture, the Indian state hardly had a well-articulated indigenist
programme like that of its Latin American counterparts, to which Paz was
essentially responding. But as I have already suggested, this situation radi-
cally changed as the Nehruvian regime fell into severe political and ideo-
logical crisis by the mid-1960s and completely collapsed within a decade;
thanks to its aggressive modernisation and other top-to-down policies by
overlooking subaltern populations (Kaviraj 1988). As the marginalised
were gradually mobilising themselves into a new political and even militant
subjectivity—remember different calls of ‘revolution’ in the late 1960s and
early 1970s, given in the Naxalite and J. P. movements, for instance,20 one
18
Paz’s take on indigenism in general and Mexico’s state-sponsored indigenismo project is
rather critical, recognising the problems of intra-colonialism and cultural stereotyping. Yet,
its empathetic reflections on the antinomies of Mexican identity provided a helpful point of
departure for many post-colonial intellectuals of the time, including Kapur.
19
Paz wrote the catalogue essay for the exhibition ‘Group 1890’, an art collective venture
organised by Swaminathan in 1963, and contributed to as well as co-edited a polemical little
magazine called Contra’66, briefly ran by the latter between 1966 and 1967. Swaminathan’s
intellectual indebtedness to Paz is clearly mentioned in the former’s autobiographical essay
‘The Cygan’ (Swaminathan 1995: 7–14).
20
The left-extremist Naxalite movement originated in the armed peasant and tribal upris-
ings in the Naxalbari village (1967, W. Bengal), and was organisationally connected with
similar contemporary developments in Srikakulam (Andhra Pradesh). With the formation of
the CPI (Marxist-Leninist) in 1969, the movement spread all over India by the mid-1970s.
Though the J. P. movement—also known as the ‘Bihar movement’—was originally initiated
by the students of Bihar in 1974; it came to the centre stage of the North Indian politics with
the leadership of the veteran Gandhian socialist, Jayaprakash Narayan (1902–1979) and his
call for “Total Revolution” against the Indira Gandhi government. Both the Naxalite and
J. P. movements were severely repressed during the Emergency, and only the former survives
today, albeit in a highly fragmented and marginalised form.
might postulate that the sudden return to indigenism by the state and its
intelligentsia during this period was very much a strategy of containment.
Three points could be noted here in support of this hypothesis.
Though the history of modern Indian art has often been read through
the lens of indigenism, especially after the art critic Geeta Kapur’s inter-
vention in the early 1970s, historians often overlook the fact that it was
only from the 1960s that indigenism became a central issue. Artist and
poet Gieve Patel calls the issue of “‘indigenism’ the great issue of the
1960s”, and explains, here I quote the Rebecca M. Brown’s summary of
his observation, “[t]hat the debate is not about painting villagers at a well
or about looking to one’s immediate backyard for subject matter. […]
Indigenism is important because it frees artists to work in different idioms,
and Patel’s realization in his essay is that India’s chaotic diversity can either
be brought together through unity or represented in multiplicity” (Brown
2009: 151).21 It is not difficult to see which historical juncture is marked
by the adjective “chaotic”.
Though Patel is clearly biased to the figurative painters who sought
inspiration from different narrative traditions, one should remember that
the actual representatives of indigenism during the 1960s and the 1970s,
enjoying state support and promotion, were from the opposing camp made
of those loosely described as “Neo-Tantric” painters (censured by Kapur,
in her Vrishchik essay, as mere “revivalists”).22 As Tantric cultures had more
often than not developed from the heterodox subaltern Hindu traditions—
as suggested in the paintings of K. C. S. Paniker and G. R. Santhosh—23they
also inspired Swaminathan and Paz to find a spirituality which could be
21
Emphasis added.
22
It is helpful to remember that the centrality that indigenism acquired during this time
was first and foremost a reaction against modernism internationalism in Indian art, with its
centres in Paris, New York, and even Mexico (represented by the artists like Biren De, S. H.
Raza, and Satish Gujral respectively). The earliest expression of this discontent was the
Group 1980 exhibition in 1963, publicly supported by Paz and Jawaharlal Nehru. The
group lost its unity as many of the artists later split into Neo-Tantric and Narrative styles of
painting, with their mutually challenging stakes in the ideal of indigenism.
23
In the case of Paniker and his Madras School of painting, their references to Tantric and
other forms of subaltern spirituality—however weak they soon proved to be in resisting the
larger dynamic of ‘Sanskritisation’—also became inspirational for a highly militant and sub-
versive poetic expression, as it is later acknowledged by the celebrated Malayali poet and
communist activist, Kadammanitta Ramakrishnan (1935–2008). His one particular poem,
Kurathi (Tribal Danseuse, 1977–1978), was extraordinarily popular among Kerala’s ultra-
leftist cultural circles.
148 S. K. LUIS
both indigenous and subversive.24 But in the case of early-Swaminathan,

this typical indigenist quest for native spirituality and one’s own racial roots
took a more extreme and polemical edge, as he started to endorse and glo-
rify India’s allegedly ‘Aryan’ past.25 And as we will see soon, the radical
revision of this highly problematical position, through a detailed study of
anthropological and archaeological evidences of the time, is the most inter-
esting chapter in Swaminathan’s later intellectual development.
Secondly, though the government institutions like the National
Academy for Fine Arts (Kendra Lalit Kala Academy) initiated a quasi-
ethnographic survey of folk craft traditions as early as 1956 (under the
leadership of the Marxist art critic and poet, Bishnu Dey); it was only by
the mid-1960s that the already well-developed painting traditions of
Mithila (Bihar) and Warli (Maharashtra) started to receive some state sup-
port and recognition. In 1966, during a severe drought in Bihar, the
Handicraft Board under the directorship of Pupul Jayakar sent the artist
and researcher Bhaskar Kulkarni, to encourage local rural women who
drew murals on their walls to transfer their paintings onto paper for mar-
keting and earning financial stability.26 And in the mid-1970s, the ritualistic
mural tradition of the Warli tribe, a community which was already fighting
against the Nehruvian regime (Parulekar 1975), also entered the national
art discourse, again through the similar efforts made by Kulkarni.27
Individual members from both the communities started receiving awards
and grants from the central and state governments, especially after the
fourth Five-Year Plan (started in 1969) which had a policy-based pro-
gramme to systematically survey and integrate craft traditions. For exam-
ple, in 1975, the Indira Gandhi government honoured Sita Devi (Mithila)
24
Paz’s fascination for the metaphors of spiritual-sexual union (Paz 1997), a central theme
of Tantric mysticism, is widely noted by the critics. Swaminathan’s experiments with Neo-
Tantric art in 1963 lasted only for a year, as he moved to more abstract and lyrical forms of
expression.
25
“[The] new art cannot be a departure. It has to be a beginning. […] It requires, above
all, that the artist stands in front of the canvas as the early Aryan stood facing the morning
sun” (Swaminathan 1995: 23).
26
It should be noted that Sita Devi (1914–2005), one of the first recognised artists of the
Mithila painting tradition, belonged to the Mahapatra Brahmin caste. Because of the com-
munity’s association with funeral rituals, Mahapatras are considered to be the lowest caste of
Mithila Brahmins.
27
The art world entry of Warli ritual painting, traditionally a female practice, was also made
possible by the exceptional and transgressive life of Jivya Soma Mashe (1934–2018), the first
male artist from the community.
with the National Award for the Master Craftsperson, and gave the same
to Jivya Soma Mashe (Warli) the following year. The subaltern started to
be recognised as an individual and citizen, not as an extension of a primor-
dial and unruly population.
This overlapping shift in the art world discourses and the tactics of gov-
ernmentality, read against the larger political crisis of the time, may be seen
a mere coincidence. However, the concluding passage of Swaminathan’s
‘The Cost of Progress’—an “impassioned plea to Indira Gandhi’s govern-
ment”, as it is later put by his son S. Kalidas (quoted in Hacker 2014:
208)—clearly suggests an underlying connection, by providing our third
and final argument:
From the Nagas in the North-East to the Bhils in Madhya Pradesh, and
parts of Maharashtra, we have an almost continuous tribal belt […].
Naxalbari and Srikakulam are early warnings of what could develop into a
raging forest fire if our ‘socialistically’ oriented government does not take
heed. The tribal and pastoral communities in India are too numerous to be
liquidated in the “natural” process of economic evolution. If a rigorous
policy of protection […] accompanied with genuine aid and consonant with
their cultures is not pursued, these people may well become the spearhead of a
prolonged and bloody civil-war. (Swaminathan 2012: 111)28
We have seen from the previously quoted passage from the same writ-
ing as to how Swaminathan juxtaposes the figure of primitive innocence
and vulnerability against that of a “self-conscious” subaltern agency capa-
ble of “organised resistance”. As we reach the end of the writing, it gets
clear that the particular figure which Swaminathan is defending here is first
and foremost a cultural and economic category, whose immediate political
manifestations as they are seen in Naxalbari and Srikakulam are an excess
that has to be contained on an urgent basis.
In 1975, when the country was reeling under the Internal Emergency
declared by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to curb the same civil war that
Swaminathan is talking about in the above passage29; two ambitious projects
28
Emphasis added.
29
Though numerous factors are cited for the implementation as well as the withdrawal of
the Emergency (varying from India’s economic and structural crises to the characteristic
traits of Indira Gandhi), I take the civil war led by the Adivasis (along with the Naxalites) to
be the threshold point, given the centrality of indigenism in India’s political and cultural
fabric.
150 S. K. LUIS
were pursued under the impetus of Jayakar (who was also an advisor to the
Nehru-Gandhi family)—the launching of the multi-arts complex Bharat
Bhavan in Bhopal and the reinvigoration of the National Crafts Museum in
Delhi (Garimella 2013: 75). In addition to it, in 1977, an anthropological
museum began functioning in Bhopal, which would later be converted to
the Indira Gandhi National Museum of Mankind (or simply, the Museum
of Man). With the return of Indira Gandhi in 1981 after a brief electoral
setback, Bharat Bhavan was finally opened in 1982, with Swaminathan as its
founding director, who also later served as the chairman of the Museum of
Man. It is from his experiences with these institutions—among which the
establishment of the Roopankar museum of ‘contemporary folk, tribal, and
urban arts’ at Bharat Bhavan in particular—that the philosophy of the later-
Swaminathan develops.
To enter the idiosyncratic thoughts and institutional practices of later-
Swaminathan, as they culminate in the 1987 book, The Perceiving Fingers:
Catalogue of Roopankar Collection of Folk and Adivasi Art from Madhya
Pradesh, India, it is important to closely understand the discursive dead-
lock within which he is operating. We have already seen how his note,
‘The Cost of Progress’, concludes with a plea to economically empower
the tribals for ameliorating their cultural and political alienation.
Symptomatic here is Swaminathan’s enthusiasm for tribal cultures and art
with certain indifference, or even apprehension, towards their political
agency (which had its contemporary examples in the Naxalbari and
Srikakulam movements). In her article, ‘Culture/Politics: The Irresoluble
Double-Bind of the Indian Adivasi’, historian Prathama Banerjee (2006a)
elucidates this tension in great clarity. There she traces the emergence of
the Indian Adivasi through the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries as
a political figure (freeing itself from the derogatory designations of ‘primi-
tive’ and ‘tribal’), and the parallel and reactionary attempts ‘from above’
to gloss over the same as a purely cultural entity. The demand and asser-
tion of ‘autonomy’, the distinctive feature of Adivasi politics, is reduced
here into an aesthetical ideal, waiting to be materialised through different
institutions of art and culture.
What makes Swaminathan’s indigenism in general and his Roopankar
project in particular unique is the following feature. Unlike other stake-
holders in the discourse like Subramanyan or Kapur, it is only in him that
we see Indian indigenism revealing its true meaning and purpose, with all
its internal contradictions—thanks to Swaminathan’s readiness to take the
project to its extreme limits by directly engaging with India’s aboriginal
populations. We can also see that in doing so, that too as a state represen-
tative, he reproduces what Banerjee accuses as the “culturalisation of
Indian tribes”. Yet, such a reading has to be qualified by at least two fur-
ther observations.
Firstly, in the catalogue of essays written for The Perceiving Fingers,
Swaminathan vociferously rejected appellations like ‘primitive’ and ‘tribal’
because of their connotations of underdevelopment.30 Instead, being a
true indigenist, he consciously promoted “the Hindi term ‘Adivasi’” for
its literal meaning of “autochthon” (Swaminathan 1987: 9). We can see
that whereas ‘primitive’ and ‘tribal’ were the ossified categories of histori-
cist and anthropological discourses respectively, the term ‘Adivasi’ has
been vibrantly political from its moment of inception. It was first used in
a political context in the Jharkhand region of eastern India, with the for-
mation of the Adivasi Mahasabha in 1938; and one does not have to
reiterate its contemporary political connotations.31 Though Swaminathan
does not refer to this particular political genealogy of the term, let alone
its contemporary resonances, he presents it as a critical category from a
different direction.
Swaminathan does acknowledge that the tribe-caste distinction is his-
torically porous and never sociologically static. Yet, he asks us to “identify
[Adivasis] as those who have not been inducted, horizontally or vertically,
into the Varna/Caste system, and who through a process of atavism, have
remained or been rendered into the limbo of the ‘Uncivilized’”
(Swaminathan 1987: 22). Swaminathan gives this consciously counterfac-
tual argument through two other related assertions. On the one hand, he
30
“The problems attendant on any approach to Adivasi art are varied and complex. Apart
from the pejorative echoes which the term ‘tribal’ evokes when applied to certain communi-
ties and peoples, it also seems to contaminate their art with notions of being ‘archaic’ and
‘primitive’. In fact, the term primitive has often been used for the art of peoples living at a
certain level of ‘arrested’ technological development considered to be backward in compari-
son to those with ‘advanced’ technologies” (Swaminathan 1987: 13).
31
The Adivasi Mahasabha, originated from its discontent with the Indian National
Congress, alleged that such a nationalist party was representative of ‘outsider’ (diku) inter-
ests. This line of criticism would later become the defining idea behind the formation of the
Jharkhand Party in 1950. Coming to the contemporary context, D. J. Rycroft and Sangeeta
Dasgupta note how the term ‘Adivasi’ is used in such a way that it resonates with the “trans-
national Indigenous movement, which situates tribal specificity and local autochthony in
directly political relationships to statehood, globalization, sub-nationalism, etc” (Rycroft and
Dasgupta 2011: 2).
152 S. K. LUIS
tries to foreground the Adivasi as an autonomous or self-governing sub-

ject; whose power of emancipation he counter-intuitively finds to be alle-
gorised in the origin myth of the Gonds—India’s largest Adivasi
community.32 On the other hand, by radically deviating from his earlier
indigenist fascination for Aryan and Vedic pasts, he now contends that the
meaning and purpose of indigenism cannot be looked for in any bygone
past, be it Aryan or Dravidian. In the context of discussing linguistic and
racial categorisations of tribal communities—only to reject them later for
being too rigid and limited—Swaminathan says: “it is not material whether
the Indo-Aryans were indigenous or not. What matters is the relationship
which developed between various ethnic groups, resulting an hierarchical
system […] and others left out of its pale” (ibid. 12). And he concludes
this argument by noting: “We cannot by any device of mental gymnastics
relegate our Adivasi communities to the past. Their artistic expressions
cannot be treated as curio objects, things of interest only because of their
‘primitive’ character. They are living expressions of living peoples and if at
all we are to be enrapport with them, we cannot but treat them as contem-
porary expressions” (ibid. 13).
This is the second, and the most significant, feature that complicates
Swaminathan’s ‘culturalisation of tribes’: an assertion of contemporaneity
between the primordial and the modern. Elsewhere, in a manifesto-like
passage, he defines the concept as follows: “We will, therefore, try to
define contemporaneity as a simultaneous validity of co-existing cultures, as
is the validity of the simultaneity of events on a matrix of infinity. We are
therefore treating adivasi art as contemporary art, whatever be the motiva-
tions behind it” (ibid. 30).
The relevance of this position, of which antecedents Swaminathan finds
in Paz’s Labyrinths of Solitude,33 can be explained by taking a cue from
32
Confronted with the two alternative accounts of the myth as they are recorded by the
anthropologist Christoph Von Furer-Haimendorf and the missionary Rev. Hislop,
Swaminathan says: “Whatever reservations sociologists may have regarding these two ver-
sions, whatever be the allegations regarding the Hindu influence on them, it cannot be
denied that both the versions deal with the liberation of the Gonds in unequivocal terms. In
these versions, the Gonds do not emerge as another addition to the caste system or as being
absorbed into it. On the other hand, they reemerge from captivity as free people”
(Swaminathan 1987: 25).
33
The Labyrinth of Solitude contains an important passage about the philosophy of time,
which Swaminathan also quotes in detail: “there was a time when time was not succession
and transition, but rather the perpetual source of a fixed present in which all times, past and
future, were contained. When man was exiled from that eternity in which all times were one,
Prathama Banerjee. She has noted that the strategies of exclusion to which
Adivasis have historically been subjected to are ultimately shaped by cer-
tain techniques of time and temporality—designed to contain or displace
the ‘threatening contemporaneity’ of the subaltern. In her words: “‘Tribal’
culture, and therefore ‘tribes’ themselves, are almost always invoked as a
noncontemporary, almost lost, moment – and therefore, in need for
recording, conservation and special display. The Adivasi, it seems then,
needs to be treated, even in her contemporary form, in the historian’s car-
ing and classifying ‘archival’ mode” (Banerjee 2006a, b: 116).
Despite the conceptualisation of Roopankar as a ‘museum’ with sepa-
rate sections for ‘tribal, folk and urban arts’, and Swaminathan’s erudite
knowledge of anthropological and historical texts, he repeatedly empha-
sises that the real driving motto behind his curation is neither historical
nor anthropological—let alone ‘archival’. In Swaminathan’s words:
If we take recourse to ethnological or anthropological methods, or if we

refer to archaeology and history, our aim and intention should never be lost
sight of – to emphasise the numinous function of art, neither to replace nor
to subordinate it. […] Our purpose here is not to contest the vast store-
house of knowledge and understanding, but an attempt to de-mystify the
mind so that it is in communion with the limitless world of wonder.
(Swaminathan 1987: 18)
Based on such a deliberately obscure and ahistorical conception of art as

“numinous” and a symbol of “the infinite” (another favourite notion of
Swaminathan), the Roopankar sought to provide a platform where “a
symbiotic approach to art as related to anthropology” will be formulated,
and no community, be it modern or primitive, would be treated as a closed
or static system (ibid. 37). For Swaminathan, Roopankar was a unique
space where simultaneity and juxtaposition would reign, with a purpose of
creating a new humanity and submerging the existing “archipelagos” that
divide each of us. Arguing thus, Swaminathan arrives at the most startling
he entered chronometric time and became a prisoner of the clock and the calendar. As soon
as time was divided up into yesterday, today and tomorrow, into hours, minutes and seconds,
man ceased to be one with time, ceased to coincide with the flow of reality. When one says,
‘at this moment’, the moment has already passed. These spatial measurements of time – sepa-
rate man from reality – which is a continuous present – and turn all the presences in which
reality manifests itself, as [Henri] Bergson said, into Phantasms” (Swaminathan 1987: 28,
emphasis in original).
154 S. K. LUIS
passage of The Perceiving Fingers where a fundamental equality is declared

as the precondition of universal fraternity and freedom:
[I]n their [Adivasis’] freedom lies our freedom, […] in their self-respect lies
our self-respect, […] in their self-identity lies our self-identity, that perhaps
we have to learn much from them than they have to learn from us […] A
symbiotic approach which could possibly be the catalyst for both the so-
called tribal communities and us to emerge into a new world of freedom.
(ibid. 9)
The ambitious and daunting work of The Perceiving Fingers testifies to

the zenith of Swaminathan’s indigenist investigations as well as Bharat
Bhavan’s institutional history. Just as the arguments of The Perceiving
Fingers dealt with different topics of discussion—varying from Octavio
Paz’s majestic contemplations on time and infinity to the prosaic govern-
mental records of tribal demography—Bharat Bhavan demonstrated an
impressive record with multiple exhibitions and workshops, subverting
the existing canons of art and culture. Yet, in 1990, Swaminathan resigned
from his post of directorship in protest, as the newly elected right-wing
government under the Bharatiya Janatha Party (BJP) reduced the auton-
omy of Bharat Bhavan and changed its administrative structure by alleging
‘elitism’ (Hacker 2014: 208). He passed away in 1994, while serving as
the chairman of the Museum of Man (Kalidas 2012: 152).
Let me conclude this section of my chapter with a few remarks. One
will definitely find many loopholes and problematic features in an extremely
eclectic and elusive thinker like Swaminathan. His lifelong fascination for
Vedantic spirituality, in spite of his critical understanding of Vedic and
post-Vedic cultures, is one among them.34 Also important is to what extent
his indigenist project is freed from primitivist fantasies. Swaminathan’s
positive and frequent references to the widely criticised exhibition
Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern—
curated by William Rubin at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA),
New York in 1981—can make most of the radical claims of The Perceiving
34
One could see these continuing references to Upanishadic mysticism, that too in the
context of discussing Adivasi art, as a personal testimony of the “symbiotic” life that
Swaminathan was looking for. For example, a passage from the Perceiving Fingers states: “the
sense of unity with all nature that the so-called tribal achieves through anthropomorphic
transformations at a ‘physical’ level, Upanishadic thought achieves the same at a spiritual or
philosophical plane” (Swaminathan 1987: 8).
Fingers incongruous.35 The same is the case with his indigenist take on
Adivasi creativity, based on an unwarranted presumption about its distinc-
tive ‘organic’ and ‘sensuous’ unity with nature that have to be intuitively,
rather than conceptually, discovered and appreciated by modern civilisa-
tion. In this sense, Swaminathan reproduces many of the early primitivist
fantasies of the anti-colonial national bourgeoisie (cf. Banerjee 2006a, b).
Yet, as we have seen, what makes Swaminathan impervious to any easy
critical dismissal is his radical idea of contemporaneity (very much in the
fashion of the anthropologist Johannes Fabian’s [1983] famous notion of
‘coevalness’). Moreover, grounded on a quintessentially egalitarian pre-
sumption to programmatically neutralise the historically constituted differ-
ences between the modern and its other, the ‘aesthetic regime’ of
Swaminathan’s modernism resonates with many of Jacques Rancière’s later
ideas (among them, the latter’s anarchic ideas of ‘contemporaneity as
anachronism’ and ‘presupposition of equality’ in particular [Rancière
2017]). As ‘the contemporary’ is now globally valorised to be an all-inclusive
art historical marker (Belting and Buddensieg 2013), Swaminathan’s vision-
ary takes on the idea, however elusive and cryptic they are, have become
more relevant than ever.
But it is from these conclusions, laudatory as they sound to be, that my
investigations actually take their critical departure. I have already sug-
gested that there could be a structural connection between the dark days
of the Emergency when the ‘subaltern question’ took its most extreme
and subversive form, and the Indian state’s indigenist project which was
extended and legitimised by its national intelligentsia (including
Swaminathan, irrespective of the artist’s ‘anarchist’ persona). Even though
it will be highly simplistic to assume that indigenism was a solution designed
to address the national crisis of the time, its appearance as a new problem-
atic, that too with state support, gives a case for serious introspection.
After all, the actual persistence of power lies in creating and legitimising
new problems, rather than solving, let alone repressing, the old ones. If
this is the case, then one has to test the scope and purchase of Swaminathan’s
ideals against their real addressee itself—the Adivasi artist-subject. With
this purpose in mind, let us look at the fascinating, if also ultimately dis-
quieting, career of Jangarh Singh Shyam—a young Pardhan-Gond Adivasi
who was an intrinsic part of Bharat Bhavan from its opening in 1982, until
his untimely death in 2001.
For a critical review of the exhibition, see Foster (1985).

35
156 S. K. LUIS
From Forst to the Capital, and a Campfire

I want to draw the figures of my desires, and I want to infuse them with my
desires. (Jangarh Singh Shyam [quoted in Das 2017: 126])
Jangarh Singh Shyam was born into a Pardhan-Gond family in the for-
ested village of Patangarh, located in the Eastern Madhya Pradesh. His
first name ‘Jangarh’ originally meant ‘census’ (jana-ganana) in the native
Adivasi language, as he was born on the very day when the government
census officials visited the village. As a member of the Pardhan family, he
was supposed to be a bard—to memorise and sing the Gond history.
However, the extreme poverty typical to his community made Shyam quit
his school education to do random menial jobs from his early childhood
itself. At the age of 16, he married Nankusia from a nearby village (who
would later become a fellow artist).
Ahead of Bharat Bhavan’s opening, Swaminathan sent a few groups of
young artists and students to explore the interiors of Madhya Pradesh for
its barely recognised folk and Adivasi art. With the assignment of c ollecting
and documenting these art practices, and if possible, also to invite these
Adivasi and folk artists to be part of Bharat Bhavan’s Roopankar project,
one of the talent scouts reached Shyam’s Patangarh village in October
1981. It is now assumed that Swaminathan deliberately sent his assistant
and artist, Vivek Tembey, to lead this group, as there was information
about a villager who made clay sculptures (Vajpeyi and Vivek 2008: 81).
Swaminathan got this knowledge from the wife of Shamrao Hivale
(1903–1984), a Gandhian activist and anthropology enthusiast. It is
important to remember that Hivale was the long-term associate of Verrier
Elwin (1902–1964)—a British missionary later turned anthropologist,
Gandhian, and an advisor to the Indian government on tribal affairs.
Elwin, interestingly, was also a distant relative of Shyam. Arriving in India
in 1927, Elwin, along with Hivale, established an ashram in Patangarh
and settled there by the late 1930s. Elwin consecutively married two Gond
women, among whom the latter, Lila, was Shyam’s cousin (in addition,
Shyam’s father was Elwin’s house cook, and had the village headship as
Elwin’s brother-in-law).36
36
Like Swaminathan, Elwin also considered the Hindu caste system as highly detrimental
to tribals, and eventually distanced himself from Gandhian ideas. But unlike the former, he
recommended an isolationist and protectionist approach towards the tribals (even to the
Nankusia Shyam later recounted the story of Shyam being ‘discovered’

by Swaminathan’s team as follows:
[Shyam] used to do mitti ka kam [terracotta reliefs] on the walls, as well as

make statues out of clay. He was also very fond of playing the flute and other
instruments […]. Seeing one of his paintings on the wall […] they [Vivek
Tembey and his team] asked the villagers about who had done it. Jangarh
was out at work somewhere, so they left a canvas and paints and said that
they’d come back in fifteen days and that meanwhile he should paint some-
thing. [F]ifteen days later – when they came back – they told my mother-in-
law: ‘Give this boy to us’. (Quoted in Bowles 2009: 22)
John H. Bowles, to whom Nankusia Shyam narrates this story, offers cer-
tain corrections however. According to him, only Shyam’s paintings were
taken to Bharat Bhavan for its inaugural exhibition. But impressed by his
individual genius, as the Pardhan community did not have a tradition of
painting other than that of drawing abstract ritual diagrams, Swaminathan
personally went to Patangarh within three months of the exhibition, to
invite Shyam to Bhopal to work as an artist at Bharat Bhavan. Although
the 21–22-year-old Shyam had never left his homeland before—let alone
visit a big city like Bhopal, the capital of Madhya Pradesh—he immediately
accepted the invitation and hopped into Swaminathan’s jeep. As the anec-
dote goes, when Swaminathan urged him to inform his family about his
departure, Shyam found it as unnecessary and insisted that they could just
leave (ibid. 23).
Along with another boy Tirath Singh Merawi, Shyam set off to Bhopal
for pursuing his fortunes in art. (Marawi, however, soon returned to his
village because of homesickness and the cultural shock of migration.) At
Bhopal, Swaminathan arranged a job for Shyam at Bharat Bhavan’s graphic
arts department, and accommodation at his own home in the Professors
ridiculous extent of proposing ‘National Parks’ for them). Elwin published The Tribal Art of
Middle India: A Personal Record (1951), roughly a decade before Shyam was born. It may
also be noted that at the time of publishing Elwin’s book, the appellation ‘art’ was still
uncommon in discussing tribal and folk art practices. As if giving a disclaimer, Elwin hints at
this problem in the introduction: “I do not know how this book will appeal to artists. I offer
it to them with real humility. They will not find here discussions on the philosophy or criti-
cism of art, which I am ill-qualified to give. I hope that they will be content to accept the
book for what it is, as part of the record, as an infinitesimal moment in the history of man”
(Elwin 1951: 8).
158 S. K. LUIS
Colony. Eventually, Shyam and his family shifted to a modest place of their
own, in the back alley, right behind Swaminathan’s house.
Winning much critical applause—though not without the allegations of
making an indigenous culture ‘inauthentic’ and ‘impure’37—Swaminathan
had already introduced Shyam’s sample paintings at Bharat Bhavan’s inau-
gural exhibition, and presented his works as the manifestation of an origi-
nal and individual mind. Shyam was encouraged there to use modern
pigments and other latest art materials, along with finding new imageries
and ways of representation foreign to his culture. After merely five years of
being ‘discovered’ (a word Swaminathan always uses under quotes),
Shyam was conferred the Shikhar Samman (the Summit Award), the high-
est civilian award bestowed by the Government of Madhya Pradesh. He
was subsequently commissioned to do the exterior murals for the new
Legislative House (Vidhan Sabha) building in Bhopal, a modernist
architecture designed by Charles Correa. And in 1988, Shyam showed his
artworks in London and Japan, as part of the Bharat Mahotsav exhibition.
Among all these works, the murals he had done in the Vidhan Sabha, with
their images of a zoomorphic aeroplane and a majestic leaping tiger,
achieved the greatest deal of critical attention (more on them later.)
However, the real breakthrough in Shyam’s career came with his par-
ticipation in the French international exhibition, Magiciens de la Terre
(Magicians of the Earth), curated by Jean-Hubert Martin in 1989. (As
one of Martin’s consultants in India was Swaminathan, the Indian repre-
sentation included both tribal/folk art and Neo-Tantric painting.38) This
exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou—conceived in its time as the
French response to Rubin’s ‘“Primitivism”’ exhibition at the MOMA—is
now appreciated as an original yet controversial moment in the post-1989
western, and later global, art history.39 And recognising the importance of
37
Swaminathan addresses these criticisms, calling them “purist’s prejudices”, in his essays,
‘Art and Adivasi’ (1992) and ‘Pre-naturalistic Art and Postnaturalistic Vision’ (1990).
38
The other three artists who participated with Shyam were Bowa Devi, Raju Babu
Sharma, and Acharya Vykul (except Devi, a Mithila artist, the other two were Neo-Tantric
painters). There were two more Indian artists whom Martin could not include due to logisti-
cal and technical difficulties: Jiva Soma Mashe and Jogen Chowdhury. (Mashe was men-
tioned in Martin’s first curatorial note—in fact, the only artist mentioned by name—as well
as the final exhibition catalogue.)
39
It should be noted that almost all of Martin’s ideas—be it a universal spiritual function
of art verging on mysticism and magic, an ethic of all-inclusive contemporaneity, or the
the event and giving his full artistic power thereby, Shyam stunned his
international viewers with the majestic murals of his tribal pantheon as
well as the flora and fauna of his land. In the exhibition catalogue, Martin
quotes Shyam saying:
I passed my childhood in the company of mountains, forests dense with

trees, birds, animals, insects and terrifying deities. […] I was so frightened
of these deities that I thought I should try and represent them in forms that
would be personal to me. I was trying to crystallise fear in the form of
beauty. […] My ancestors painted in squares of black and white in our
courtyards. Me, I use colours. […] For me, art and life are unceasing
silences. […] I remember the forests. That memory makes me paint what I
paint. (quoted in Das 2017: 126)
After Magiciens de la Terre, Shyam had four solo exhibitions in India, of

which three were in Delhi and Mumbai; and he could participate in three
group exhibitions abroad (one in Paris again). He was represented in
many group shows in India, among which the exhibitions held at the
National Gallery of Modern Art (New Delhi, 1990), Jehangir Art Gallery
(Mumbai, 1990), and National Crafts Museum (New Delhi, 1998) are
noteworthy.
But from sources close to Shyam, it is now reported that he was becom-
ing increasingly disturbed and reclusive by this time (and Swaminathan, his
mentor and supporter, was already dead in 1994). Akhilesh, a friend and
colleague of Shyam, says that as too many people from his community
would now stay with him as assistants and trainees; he became financially
vulnerable.40 This led Shyam to succumb to the pressures of the art market
by making more commitments beyond his capacity, that too for relatively
profitless returns. In addition, he was tormented by his chronic backache
and asthma, as well as a few other deeply personal issues—all leading him
to take medications for depression and anxiety (Bowles 2009: 24–5). It was
importance of individuality and nationality even in the most communitarian or archaic forms
of expression—can already be found in Swaminathan and his Roopankar project. This sug-
gests that when Shyam successfully made his inroad from Swaminathan’s fundamentally
‘national-modern’ framework to that of Martin’s ‘global-contemporary’, the basic assump-
tions behind him being ‘discovered’ were more or less the same.
40
Akhilesh, an urban artist, prefers to be known only by his first name. According to Das
(2017: 38), this was a trend prevalent in Bharat Bhavan in the 1980s.
160 S. K. LUIS
during such a difficult and desperate situation that, in 1999, Shyam

accepted the residency programme offered by the Mithila Museum in
Japan for the meagre remuneration of 12,000 rupees per month. His three-
month-long stay at the museum left serious psychological effects on him,
since it was located in a remote village and there was hardly anyone capable
of communicating in Shyam’s language. However, he accepted the same
offer when the museum authorities again approached him in 2001. While
being there and when the residency programme was almost over, Shyam
sent a letter to his wife, desperately informing her that his visa had now
been extended for another three months (Shyam had already communi-
cated with her that he had been cheated and made to work 18 hours a day).
However, before Nankusia could receive the letter, a fax from Japan arrived
at Bharat Bhavan, informing them about Shyam’s death. It was later
reported that he was found hanging in his kitchen. Despite the lack of
veracity of this information, it is now widely concluded that Shyam com-
mitted suicide out of depression and anxiety.41 Deviating from the Gond
tradition of entombing untimely deaths and other related rituals; Shyam’s
body was cremated in Bhopal, and his ashes were buried in Patangarh.
The only available intimate and detailed accounts about Shyam’s life
and death were from Akhilesh. His elegiac writing ‘Pardhan ki Mautein’
provides an important observation that no matter if Shyam’s death was
an act of suicide or not, his life as an artist was a series of deaths, many
of them wilfully enacted by Shyam himself (Akhilesh 2001, translated
by Das 2014). According to Akhilesh, by leaving the traditional occupa-
tion of the Pardhan community, Shyam first died as a musician, but only
to emerge as an artist. With a likely exaggeration, Akhilesh says that “In
this Pardhan family of musicians, no Pardhan had ever been a visual art-
ist before Jangarh, and no Pardhan was ever a musician after Jangarh”
(quoted in Das 2017: 77). Akhilesh coined the term ‘Jangarh Kalam’ to
address the latter group of Pardhan artists who followed the pathway
41
However, an opposite assertion is made by Nankusia and Shyam’s friend, Ashish Swami.
They believe that an extraordinarily brave and pragmatic person like Shyam would never take
such an extreme step, and his untimely death could very well be a case of homicide, for which
the first culprits should be the museum authorities in Japan (Nankusia in personal communi-
cation with the author, 23 August 2017, Bhopal). These allegations are almost ruled out by
both Akhilesh (in personal communication with the author, 22 August 2017, Bhopal) and
Bowles (2009: 25, 101).
opened up by Shyam (kalam literally means pen, but it metaphorically

suggests ‘school of art’).42
Interestingly, Shyam had his second death as a Pardhan, that too by
identifying himself as an Adivasi—a knowledge that he acquired, accord-
ing to Akhilesh, only after moving to Bhopal. Though one could question
this argument for its fraught opposition between Pardhan and Adivasi
identities (as if one is natural and the other artificial); we should remember
that the term ‘Adivasi’, unlike ‘Pardhan’, is relatively a political and mod-
ern category.43 In fact, it may even be assumed that the need to supple-
ment oneself with such designation comes only when the existing identity
is proven to be insufficient (or even dead).
Thirdly, Shyam had already died as an artist, long before his actual
physical death. Akhilesh notes a certain decline in Shyam’s style, both at
the level of content and form. The sublime and raw presence of tribal dei-
ties in the early-Shyam was later replaced by kitschy images of flora and
fauna, designed for easy reproduction and urban consumption.44 The bold
colourist in him gave way for painstaking draughtsmanship, which, how-
ever intricate and original it initially was, gradually deteriorated to mere
doodling and surface decoration. As Shyam started taking more assign-
ments beyond his individual capacity, he began to share the workload
among his assistants and trainees, ending up only doing finishing touches
and signing the paintings. And whenever Shyam made original composi-
tions in his later life, Akhilesh writes, they were suggestive of violence and
death: “Now, snakes, mongoose, eagles, fish, spiders and birds were the
chief inhabitants of the world that had survived. These creatures prowled
around the world of [Shyam’s] imagination, waiting to ambush or to be
ambushed” (Das 2014: n.p.).
42
After quoting Swaminathan’s doubt in using the appellation ‘Gond or Pardhan art’ for
referring to a practice as individualistic and original as Shyam’s, Akhilesh says (in Das’ transla-
tion): “In reality, was Jangarh still a Pardhan? His music and song had as good as died. The
subject matter of his paintings had moved far away from Gond deities. His paintings had
essentially begun to be regarded as an elaboration of Jangarh’s own talent. Many who met
him were not even aware of his roots as a musician. Possibly, Jangarh himself no longer felt
that his Pardhan identity was important. […] As a Pardhan, he was dying a slow death. In the
environment of an unknown city, he was instead emerging as an adivasi, but we would soon
observe that he would also begin to lose his ‘tribal-ness’” (Das 2014: n.p.).
43
Different from ‘Adivasi’, the name ‘Pardhan’ is much more primordial and culturally
grounded, as the undated folklores and origin-myths of the community suggests.
44
Also see Akhilesh quoted in Bowles (2009: 24).
162 S. K. LUIS
Akhilesh’s problematic phrases like “excessive consciousness” and

“burden of consciousness” (in Das’ translation) for referring to the dete-
rioration in Shyam’s ‘natural’ talents demand a closer scrutiny. In addi-
tion, his grim reading of Shyam’s career cannot be seen as something that
he independently and retrospectively arrives at; as if provoked only by the
intimate and original knowledge that Akhilesh has regarding Shyam’s life
and death. In order to have a comprehensive account, one needs to see
that even the most intimate forms of experience and knowledge such as
these—be it Shyam’s suicide or its reflections by Akhilesh—exist only
within a larger and impersonal discursive framework. To illustrate this
argument, let me turn to the most scholarly and detailed appreciation of
Shyam’s art ever producing during his lifetime, published only three years
before his death: Gulammohammed Sheikh’s catalogue essay for the 1998
exhibition, Other Masters: Five Contemporary Folk and Tribal Artists of
India, curated by the anthropologist and art historian, Jyotindra Jain, for
the National Crafts Museum, Delhi.
Sheikh’s unique interpretation of the internal complexities in Shyam’s
art is shaped by the former’s experiences as artist and pedagogue at the
Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda (which undertook quasi-ethnographic field
trips into interior places as part of its art curriculum). He presents Shyam’s
oeuvre as a testimony to the assumption—which Jain also affirmatively
quotes in his introductory essay—that “not only it is possible for an unself-
conscious mind to survive in an alien, if conducive, environment, but to
grow as well; differently, but creatively nonetheless” (Sheikh 1998: 20).45
As an extension of this view, Sheikh finds the following question to be
most crucial in understanding Shyam’s art. Referring to the artist’s early
Patangarh murals, Sheikh asks: “How does an ‘unselfconscious’ mind
reared on free-flowing forms on village walls – not thought of as art –
respond when faced with challenges of the consciously created art of
framed pictures?” (ibid. 18).
Before unpacking these observations, it should be kept in mind that
Sheikh, like his long-time friend Swaminathan, is very aware of the risks in
constructing ossified and puritan oppositions. For example, considering
the infamous ‘pure/corrupt’ binary in “relative rather than absolute
terms”, he suggests that there is “the dialectics of a willed interaction that
Jangarh has entered into – where the very fact of extracting a ‘pure’ image
Original emphasis.
45
from its genetic locale is an act of transgression from its norms – hence
subject to ‘pollution’ or ‘corruption’” (ibid. 21). The examples that
Sheikh discusses here are Shyam’s zoomorphic ‘Aeroplane’—an appar-
ently ‘corrupt’ imaginary depicted in a ‘pure’ form of expression—and the
famous ‘Leaping Tiger’—both are painted on the walls of the Madhya
Pradesh Vidhan Sabha (Legislative Assembly) building. Whereas the for-
mer explicitly illustrates the dialectical reversibility of oppositions that
Sheikh has in mind, the latter mural provokes a much more subtle and
interesting interpretation. Arguing that the “‘leaping’ tiger” embodies
“the complex tensions of empowerment and vulnerability in Jangarh’s
journey from Patangarh to Bhopal”, Sheikh notes:
The diagonal thrust with an upturned head and even light and dark patterns
on the body of the beast indicate […] naturalistic persuasions. The ‘fish-scale’
patterning of the body […] is in immediate contrast to an obviously natural-
istic prototype used for the head. The non-naturalistic patterning works
simultaneously to accelerate and contain the movement of downward thrust,
whereas the head seems to blandly perform a ferocious act like a mask: its
stereotypical visage of wildness serve in fact to counter body animation and
ironically halt the assault of the tiger. And that brings us close to the persona
of the beast. (ibid. 27)
Bringing the reader’s attention to the mutually opposed ways—the “natu-

ralistic” and the “non-naturalistic” stylistic means—by which Shyam visu-
alised the head and the body of the represented image, Sheikh then
provocatively puts forward the following question: “Does not the grand,
leaping posture of the tiger disguise the hidden suggestion of a sprawled-
out skin and the ‘life-like’ head as a trophy of a hunt? Perhaps it suggests
both simultaneously. And then, could one ask the question: is it the self-
image of the persona of a tamed savage?” (ibid.).
There is no reason to assume that Sheikh uses the primitivist metaphors
of ‘beast’ and ‘savage’ without knowing their troublesome history. After
all, the emphasis here is just on “the persona of a tamed savage”, not the
‘savage’ as such, the infamous trope of primitivist imagination. In addi-
tion, Sheikh’s appreciation of the possibility of the artist presenting his
“self-image” itself is a radical step; since it does away with the dominant
tendencies to see such art practices only as intuitive and expressive, never
as self-reflective. Yet, we can see that this presence of consciousness and its
figuration (the “self-image” and its ‘beast-head’ respectively) do not
164 S. K. LUIS
appear as an affirmation of life, rather the opposite. The artist in Shyam

becomes ‘self-conscious’ only by demobilising and decapitating himself, at
a moment of losing his very consciousness; and his modern identity is
nothing but a lifeless death mask, however ferocious and attractive it is.
And it is by keeping this grim equation between self-consciousness and the
destruction of oneself—or, to put it more bluntly, art and suicide (cf.
Blanchot 2010) – that we have to counter-intuitively understand Sheikh’s
earlier statement that, “not only it is possible for an unselfconscious mind
to survive in an alien, if conducive, environment, but to grow as well”. It
is no surprise that Shyam’s growing self-consciousness as an artist came at
the cost of his own survival—first in art, and then in life.
One may wonder as to why Shyam’s oeuvre has to be read only through
the analogies of loss and death—where an alternative paradigm of a ffirming
creative powers of art and life is also available.46 Though such an approach
remains attractive, two reasons can be cited against its immediate possibil-
ity. First, by all likelihood, this non-dialectical and affirmative reading
would be insufficient to explain the reported evidences of ‘negativity’ in
Shyam’s art and life—varying from the artist’s periodic depression to the
ultimate act of self-killing (if we go by the existing consensus). Second,
such an approach has the danger of glossing over the most crucial problem
at stake here: the unique historical regime within which these particular
discourses and subjectivities are emerging and operating.
Shyam’s tragic career has occasionally been compared with the similar
story of Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890)—the Dutch painter was fond of
rural themes and committed suicide at the zenith of his career. Whereas
Akhilesh, in his ‘Pardhan ki Mautein’, had noted numerous parallels
between the two artists—varying from their success as brilliant colourists
to introversion and depression—the literary critic Rashmi Varma (2013)
has recently brought to fore the larger ideological context within which
46
The celebrated examples of such an affirmative philosophy are Gilles Deleuze and Michel
Foucault. However, even they come under the rubric of nihilism that we are addressing here,
perhaps in a much more profound and unsettling manner (for it is not just coincidental that
Deleuze committed suicide and Foucault tried the same numerous times, a point which I will
discuss below). An equally important alternative approach, but with the aforementioned risk
of negativity, is by understanding how life and death are articulated in Shyam’s own culture,
and how he negotiates with them. However, due to space constraints, and the importance
given to the artist’s departure from his indigenous identity, I cannot address this crucial ques-
tion here.
they work. Trying to address the most embarrassing feature of the art of
later-Shyam and his ‘school of art’—that is, their penchant for sleek and
decorative images of rural and wild lives—Varma cites the following pas-
sage from Fredric Jameson’s reading of van Gogh: “[Paintings like these
are] to be seen as a Utopian gesture: as an act of compensation which ends
up producing a whole new Utopian realm of the senses […] which it now
reconstitutes for us as a semi-autonomous space in its own right — […]
some new fragmentation of the emergent sensorium which […] seeks in
precisely such fragmentation a desperate Utopian compensation for them”
(Jameson 1984: 59).47
Commentators on artistic modernity, varying from Renato Poggioli
(1997) and Al Alvarez (1990) to Alain Badiou (2007), have repeatedly
showed that how this ‘desperation for Utopia’—a self-obsessed “culture of
negation” (Poggioli 1997: 107) in search of artistic and political autonomy—
had become a nihilistic project by ultimately engulfing the very lives of its
advocates themselves. One should note that in the anecdotes of Indian art
history, Swaminathan himself appears as a “self-destructive” personality—as
it is later recalled by Kalidas (2012: 124) with reference to his father’s bohe-
mianism and alcoholism—and a “cultural bastard”—to use Swaminathan’s
own self-description (quoted in Tully 1991: 270). From the time of his 1967
thesis onwards, Swaminathan started his philosophy of art with a moribund
equation between consciousness, language, and death—“the self as word as
death” as he (1980: 29) cryptically put it—juxtaposed against the mystical, if
also impossible, prospect of a completely free and autonomous image (called
“the Numinous”).48 Moreover, Swaminathan’s 1963 manifesto written for
the Group 1980 exhibition, in which Sheikh was also a member, could be
seen as a prelude to this philosophy—bluntly negating all the existing artistic
languages in search of a mysterious “image proper”, that which will be
“unique and sufficient unto itself ” (Kalidas 2012: 70). As Swaminathan had
47
Emphasis added.
48
Swaminathan’s obsession with the theme of mortality is explicit in the following unusu-
ally long string of questions: “What happens when a sparrow dies? What happens when a
colony of ants is buried and crushed underground by a landslide? What happens when a yel-
low steak of power in the jungle ends the life of an antelope in the jaws of a tiger? What
happens when a star dies? How many stars are there? How many dead, how many dying at
this very moment? How many yet to die? What happens when a man dies? How many have
died since man was? […] What happens when death comes? What is death and where is it?”
(Swaminathan 1980: 6).
166 S. K. LUIS
never disowned these fundamental ideas, it is no surprise that ‘the figure of

Adivasi’ —with its radically different yet ultimately elusive originality and
autonomy—later came as a place-holder as well as the last resort of his high
modernist imaginations.
Interestingly, it is not only modernism which is centred on the ideal of
autonomy, but Adivasi politics as well. The notion of autonomy appears,
especially in the latter, as a demand for ‘self-governance’ (auto-nomos)
with inevitably fraught definitions of ‘the self’ as opposed to an equally
evasive understanding of ‘the other’ (or diku, a term popularised during
the Jharkhand movement). And just like how modernism grappled with
the ideal of autonomy in a self-defeating and ultimately nihilistic way, indi-
genist movements also meet the same fate, as their political notion of
autonomy and identity are aestheticised by different modern and national
institutions. As Prathama Banerjee notes with reference to Elizabeth
A. Povinelli’s (1998) studies on the Australian indigenous communities:
“the culturalist reduction of the autonomy question, which founds mod-
ern liberal governmentality, […] demands an impossible authenticity from
the indigene and in so doing inhibits claims of political transformation”
(Banerjee 2016: 10).49 Even though Swaminathan had a radicalised under-
standing of indigeneity and authenticity as opposed to the purist ideas
maintained by his forerunners like Elwin, it is important to note that he
never disowned them either. If anything, his obscurantist interpretations
only elevated them into a much more metaphysical plane, inevitably mak-
ing their any real-world materialisation, be it in art or life, perpetually
incomplete and unsatisfactory. For the privileged artist this may provide an
impetus for perennial self-renewal and creative expression; but for an
Adivasi artist like Shyam, this is nothing but a frustrating affair, especially
when it comes with the price of halting his political transformation. Two
anecdotes would substantiate this argument.
49
To quote Povinelli (1998: 588): “Aboriginal traditions [in Australia] had no legal stand-
ing; they were allowed to exist only as nostalgic traces of a past, fully authentic Aboriginal
tradition. As traces, neither fully forgotten by law or public, nor ever fully present to them,
these prohibited practices continue to haunt all contemporary representations of Aboriginal
tradition, casting an aura of inauthenticity over present-day Aboriginal performances of their
culture. […] Aboriginal Australians express at their own risk their engagement with the
democratic form of capital and governance within which they live; the memorial forms of
their own histories; and their ambivalences towards these traditions, identities, and identifica-
tions”. Also see Errington (1994).
In his introduction to the exhibition catalogue of Other Masters, the

curator, Jyotindra Jain, recounts a conversation he had with Shyam as
follows:
He [Shyam] was in Delhi and I requested him to pose for a photograph

which I wanted to include in this book. In a matter-of-fact manner he asked
me whether he should shed his T-shirt, pullover and trousers in favour of his
tribal loincloth. Seeing me astonished by his offer, he clarified that a few
days before an art gallery in Delhi had held an exhibition of his paintings
and for a blurb photo he was made to pose as bare-bodied tribal wearing a
mere loin-cloth, hence his offer to bare himself. (Jain 1998: 8)
Jain goes on to detail how artists like Shyam are mistreated by the art
world elites, a highly important issue no doubt, yet there is little about the
artist’s ‘matter-of-fact’ attitude and apparent callousness towards the
humiliation he was subjected to. Was it an example of Shyam’s innocence,
or his internalisation of the larger structural violence around him? But
through posing this problem, are not we actually eschewing his agency in
a patronising gesture? Perhaps a more important question might be this:
Was Shyam thinking that, as a ‘matter-of-fact’, he remains a ‘tribal-in-
loincloths’ in his real self, and there is nothing to be ashamed about it?
When the politics of identity is increasingly deferred for the sake of a never
satiable aesthetics of the same, the subaltern may even desperately resort
to the clichés of identity, just to escape from its culturalist mystifications.
(In such a context, the central question is no longer about the true defini-
tion of an authentic self—let alone that of a hybrid self—but the pragmatic
ways in which a particular identity is performed, with a subversive value
that can only be retrospectively evaluated.)
The second anecdote reveals what is missing in the first: Shyam’s vio-
lent reaction to this frustrating double-bind of identity. Akhilesh, in his
recent article on Shyam, remembers a particular incident which happened
just after Shyam came back from Paris, after participating in the Magiciens
de la Terre exhibition:
To save himself from the cold climate of Paris, he [Shyam] had bought a
costly and fashionable jacket. After he came back, I arranged a get-together
[…]. As it was a December-night, all of us were sitting around a campfire
and talking random subjects. Meanwhile, Swaminathan cracked a joke:
“Now you also have become a shahari [city-dweller], Jangarh.” The sen-
tence was not finished. He [Shyam] quickly got up from his seat and threw
168 S. K. LUIS
his jacket into fire. As it was made of aadhunik [modern] synthetic material,
the jacket succumbed to flames in no time. He came back to his seat and
continued conversing, as if nothing happened. (Akhilesh 2017: 35, transla-
tion mine)
It is reported that in his later life, Shyam was being increasingly “anxious
about ‘losing’ his indigeneity” (Das 2016: 29). The strange destructive-
ness mentioned in the above anecdote may be cited as a further testimony
of this observation (as Akhilesh himself later notes in the same writing).
Yet, it is important to note that being modern is not a process, where one
would still find remaining traces of indigeneity within him. Rather, it is a
decision and declaration, an event after which nothing remains the same
(including the very individual who effects and undertakes this change).
Therefore, Shyam’s very sense of “losing ‘indigeneity’” itself marks the art-
ist’s existence as a modern subject, and hence, his frustrating experience of
an indigeneity already lost. In other words, it is not the indigenous subject
who is here trying to save the remains of authenticity within him (which
would be tautological), but the modern subject—therefore, the extreme
desperation and urgency in his actions. And what makes this subject a
tragic figure of history is that in his heroic desire to be ‘authentic’—as we
see Shyam burning his foreign-made jacket—the artist undertakes a self-
purifying ritual, eventually ending up in immolating himself at the altar of
history. “The destruction of semblance [in search of authenticity]”, says
Badiou (2007: 64), “is identified with destruction pure and simple”;
because “at the end of this purification, the real, as total absence of reality,
is the nothing”.
But to the ultimate question as to why such a self-devouring negativity
typical of high modernism should engulf a radically different subject as
contemporary and political as Shyam, I can provide only a highly con-
densed and speculative answer—a provocation with which I conclude this
section. I have already suggested that being the children of modernity and
finding ‘autonomy’ as their supreme ideal, modernist aesthetics and
Adivasi politics exhibit an intriguing correlation. In his lectures on
Immanuel Kant’s essay, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, Michel Foucault (1997:
73) admits that his definition of autonomy, the “art of governing one-
self ”, also suggests, in its extremes, the anarchist idea of the “art of not
being governed at all”. If one approaches indigenist history through such
a fundamentally Foucauldian understanding—as it is done by James
C. Scott (2009) and Bhangya Bhukya (2016) in their respective studies on

Upland Southeast Asian tribes and the Gond Adivasis—then the following
conclusion appears to be inescapable.
One of the most embarrassing and controversial aspects in Foucault’s
interventions is that, despite all his affirmation of life, he greatly admired
the idea of suicide and the individual’s “readiness to die” (he even tried to
kill himself numerous times).50 For Foucault, death provides the privileged
moment of escaping power’s hold over life, and even guarantees a way of
“discovering the original moment in which I make myself world” (quoted
in Miller 1993: 351). In fact, the “aesthetics of the self ” that Foucault was
advocating at the end of his career was a high modernist practice, where
one contemplates and even realises his or her death. If this is the case, then
the ultimate micro-political meaning of the ‘art of not being governed’
needs to be found in the suicidal practices of the subject themselves.51
Following this logic, we can see that the narrative of Shyam’s gradual
death as an artist and Adivasi is just one end of this deeply nihilistic politics
and aesthetics. Its other end, needless to say, lies in what could be called
“the path of nihilistic terrorism” (Badiou 2007: 64)—the ferocious and
almost self-destructive civil war that the Adivasis populations have hero-
ically been waging against the Indian state—the daunting problem from
which Swaminathan’s indigenist project took its legitimacy and point of
departure.
In Conclusion: The Sovereign and the Subaltern

The maze, however, is so convoluted that unless like Theseus we keep hold
of the unwinding thread to point the way out of it and unless we know that
there is a Minotaur – the Minotaur of historical time – to be killed in the
centre of the maze, we will not be able to re-emerge and will only meet the
fate of an Abhimanyu. (J. Swaminathan 1987: 17)
50
Foucault is reported to have said: “I am committed to a veritable cultural combat to
remind people that there is no more beautiful form of conduct which, as a result, merits
reflection with such great attention, than suicide. It would be a case of working on one’s
suicide for all of one’s life” (quoted in Osborne 2005: 284).
51
For a post-Foucauldian theorisation of politics as the power of death over life, see
Mbembe (2003).
170 S. K. LUIS
In discussing Shyam’s death, I deliberately stayed away from the existing

discourses on ‘aboriginal suicides’, for their relative disregard for the his-
torical and philosophical problems surrounding the topic.52 Contextualising
Shyam’s death within the discipline of art history, and treating his creative
career with the same conceptual categories by which one would approach
Swaminathan’s art and aesthetics, I tried to extend the latter’s egalitarian
assumption, but only to reveal the larger nihilistic philosophy lurking
behind. The connection between autonomy and nihilism as noted above—
the destructive search for what the idea of the ‘self’ means in the ideal of
‘self-governance’—is a problem as much of the last century as it is of the
present, for the simple reason that it is a foundational aporia of modernity.53
In other words, there is nothing particularly ‘modernist’ in the issues we
have discussed so far, other than in the heroic determination of these his-
torical actors to look straight into the real face of our epoch, resulting in
their immediate mortification. Yet, it will be simply ridiculous to assume
that in their determination to address this fatal question of modernity,
Swaminathan and Shyam were equally exposed to the danger of self-
destruction. In fact, in presenting the lives of both the artists as equally
determined by an essentially nihilistic philosophy, my intention has been
to unravel a much more profound and sinister operation of power.
Recognising this final point will prove that the idea of egalitarianism as we
have been discussing here is not as egalitarian as it sounds and the problem
of nihilism is much more deep-rooted than what we have seen so far.
The French anthropologist, Denis Vidal (2011), has recently offered a
periodisation of the Pardhan-Gond art, which is intriguing for a certain
historical leap it explicitly advocates, in direct conflict with what I have
proposed here. Dividing primitivism in Indian art history into two, and
placing Shyam and his followers in the latter, Vidal suggests a “primitiv-
ist” period in Indian painting from the 1920s to the 1950s—driven by
the quest for national culture—and a “post-primitivist” period from the
1980s onwards—with new individual artists enjoying “trans-cultural”
exposures (“artists with name and passport”, as it is pithily put by Jean-
Hubert Martin). Interestingly, regarding the threshold decades caught
52
For example, see Al Evans (2004) for the suicide of the Canadian Ojibwa artist, Benjamin
Chee Chee (1944–1977), and Elwin (1943) for a pioneering study on aboriginal suicide in
India.
53
A critique of modernity in this direction is provided by Mcloughlin (2009).
between his periodisation, Vidal simply says: “It is not necessary here to
deal, for this topic, with the sixties and seventies, when it became pro-
gressively clear that modern Indian artists and their sponsors would never
reject completely one form or another of cultural nationalism” (Vidal
2011: 652).
On the contrary, my argument has been that if there is any “post-
primitivist” moment as it is suggested by Vidal, it has to be located exactly
in the interim period which he overlooks. One of the purposes of this sug-
gestion was to historically confront the Emergency—the ultimate crisis-
moment of national sovereignty and the real historical marker of the 1960s
and 1970s—so that it will not pass ‘again’ as a ‘non-event’ without provok-
ing any epistemic break or ethical question.54 Thereby, naming this “post-
primitivist” shift in the 1960s and 1970s as ‘indigenism’, my argument has
been simply the following. Indigenism is a strategic response envisaged by
the national intelligentsia in order to address the deepening sovereign-
crisis—the crisis that the state faces from other contesting forms of sover-
eignty within—among which, Adivasi sovereignty in particular.55 Moreover,
54
Vidal is not alone in offering such hyperopic narratives, as his omission is a symptomatic
feature of much of the Indian art historical scholarship. Let me give a quick and condensed
overview. Commentators on Indian modernism have often discussed a peculiar ‘paradox’
that makes its history a textbook case study of post-colonial dilemma—it is modernism’s
contradictory drives to be internationalist and indigenist at the same time. For example,
whereas Rebecca M. Brown (2009: 1–11) foregrounds this problem through her somewhat
clumsy expression “modern/Indian art” or “modern Indian paradox” (suggesting the inher-
ent internationalist and indigenist tendencies of the ‘modern’ and the ‘Indian’ respectively);
Geeta Kapur (2000: Ch. 10) has identified similar problems, but in less paradoxical terms, as
that of a troubled national ‘sovereignty’ during the times of cold war internationalism and
contemporary globalisation (where indigenism would provide a repository of critical tools in
the national intelligentsia’s fight against imperialism). However, what is more telling is not
what these writers discuss from their different but ultimately complementary perspectives,
but what they choose not to discuss at all. The centrality that the heuristic notions of ‘sover-
eignty’ (of the nation) and ‘paradox’ (of indigenous modernism) enjoy in Kapur and Brown
is based on their shared interest to conceal the real paradox of sovereignty that haunts the
nation from within—a paradox for which the Emergency provides the ultimate historical
expression. Hence, Brown’s discussion of a paradoxical indigeneity without raising the ques-
tion of sovereignty at all and Kapur’s presentation of a national sovereignty as if it is an
indigenous development—all leading to hyperopic narratives about the western baggage of
international modernism or the neo-colonial onslaughts on the nation, with the effect of
externalising the real questions that haunt our collective history from within.
55
Considering Adivasis as political sovereigns is the most important challenge in disman-
tling the primitivist representations of them as ‘pre-political’ communities, especially in a
172 S. K. LUIS
it is from this threshold period of crisis and its subsequent state of excep-
tion that the historical subjectivities of Shyam and Swaminathan have taken
their shape, and remain so even in their posthumous representations.
Both the artists, through their extraordinary relationship, together
embody what has been called the “paradox of sovereignty” (Agamben
1998: Ch. 1). Let me explain this concept as follows, starting with
Swaminathan as the exemplary and sovereign subject of the national-
modern art history.56 The immediate reasons for this consideration can be
given as the artist’s privileged caste and class identity, not to mention his
long professional career as a charismatic ‘statesman’. However, keeping in
mind Swaminathan’s idiosyncratic yet universalistic ideas (such as “the
Numinous”), we need to see that the “anarchist-mystic” attains this exem-
plary power ‘within’ the national-modern only by paradoxically ‘exclud-
ing’ himself from its every normative and everyday manifestation (which
he goes on to criticise as Hindu casteist and developmentalist). Rather
than remaining bewildered by the self-mystifying elusiveness and obscu-
rantism in Swaminathan’s otherwise assertive and forceful language, and
instead of unproductively looking for its real meaning or intention, we
should see what its real function is: to enforce one’s presence as a sovereign,
the subject capable of deciding when everything is left undecidable.
Shyam, in contrast, and in a much more complex way because of his
subaltern origins, appears to be an exceptional case. For example, in an
article published soon after his death, historian Kavita Singh notes, “All
this [the personal qualities and fortunes Shyam had] propelled a young
untutored tribal boy to an important position in the art world, a position
both inside and outside of the usual ‘reserved’ category for folk and tribal
artists” (Singh 2001: 62).57 Swaminathan, in his The Perceiving Fingers,
makes this observation much more explicit by saying that “there is no
doubt that he [Shyam] is an exception and herein lies our point”
(Swaminathan 1987: 48). Whereas Singh notes this exceptionality as an
effect of Shyam’s possession of a name—in her words, he “had become
known not as a representative of a group or tribe, but as an individual,
context where their demands and assertions are explained in non-political (read “culturalist”)
terms.
56
The figure of the ‘sovereign-subject’ is central to the historical narratives that Kapur
offers in her When Was Modernism (2000). For an attempt to critique Kapur in this respect,
with a few misleading arguments, see Dhareshwar (1995).
57
My emphasis.
name” (Singh 2001: 62)58—Swaminathan finds its reasons in the

Pardhan-Gond community having no traditions of icon-making or figura-
tive painting. But a more pertinent question in our context is whether this
outsider status with respect to his original community automatically
becomes a reason for considering Shyam as an insider of the Indian art
community. To answer this, let us consider how his death was understood
by the art world. In almost all the accounts of his alleged suicide—includ-
ing Singh’s and even Akhilesh’s—he appears as a ‘victim’ of psychological
depression and economic pressures, and hence, deprived of any agency or
capacity to resist. Even if one assumes this to be the case, it is important to
see that this is an understanding which is in stark contrast with the way
another similar incident, the suicide of K. P. Krishnakumar (1958–1989),
is recorded in Indian art history.59 Interpreted as the ‘heroic’ and ‘tragic’
gesture of a free rebellious subject, his suicide easily attained an exemplary
status in the later narrativisations of Indian modernism and the periodisa-
tion of the post-modern contemporary art in India (Kapur 2000: 394,
343; Dube 2014).60 This begs the question of what it is that prevents
these writers from considering Shyam’s so-called suicide in similar terms.61
Banerjee has convincingly noted that the historicisation of the Adivasi
has to be unsuccessful as long as the historical discipline is governed by
its chronological and enumerative apparatus (often known as histori-
cism), within which the subaltern appears only as an aberration or a case
of ex-centricity. This outsider status with respect to the historical para-
digm seems to suggest that the proper disciplinary location of the Adivasi
could only be anthropological. Yet, due to the subject’s extreme proximity
58
Original emphasis.
59
Krishnakumar was the founding member and the main organiser of the short-lived but
historic art collective, Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors Association (1987–1989).
Mainly composed of Keralite artists working in Baroda (Gujarat), the Marxist collective
vociferously rejected the burgeoning art market and sought to introduce an alternative
method of art making and sharing.
60
For a periodisation of the global contemporary in the Indian context by taking
Krishnakumar’s death as the point of departure, see Parul Dave Mukherji (2012).
61
The argument is not that there is no representation of Shyam as a ‘heroic’ or ‘legendary’
figure. For the most recent example in this respect, see Dutta (2018). Rather, the question is
for whom Shyam appears to be heroic: the contemporary art world or the Pardhan commu-
nity? This is an important issue when we note that ‘the age of heroes’ are said to be over in
the narratives of the former (if not the latter)—“love the pixel, not the hero”, says Hito
Steyerl (2012: 57).
174 S. K. LUIS
influencing the everyday affairs of our modernity, the Adivasi produces a

serious “primitive within” problem (Banerjee 2006a, b: 8–11), by desta-
bilising the very basic principles of anthropological enquiry (an original
weakness of the discipline which the western anthropology has only
started to recognise). However, for the reasons just given, this unfitting
position of the Adivasi within the anthropological paradigm does not
constitute her as a historical subject either.
Shyam’s art and life further complicates Banerjee’s critique of histori-
cism, which is more relevant in the context of the primitivism of the early
nationalist bourgeoisie (as in Tagore’s Santiniketan project [Mitter 2007:
78–81]). We have seen that in the post-Nehruvian era where the charm of
nationalism and nation-building had completely withered away, power
operates in much more individuating and intimate ways. Shyam’s life
began with the enumerative discourse of an originally colonial anthropol-
ogy—as his first name ‘Jangarh’ (census) itself suggests. Yet, this mere life
as a numerical index of a population was soon left behind, as the new
nominative apparatus—which we identified as ‘indigenism’—took the
centre stage for interpolating the subaltern in his name (as we see in
Swaminathan’s Roopankar project). Yet, this privilege of having a name
did not automatically convert the subaltern into a historical subject, as the
conditions of its emergence were already defined by the very suspension of
historical time itself (“the Minotaur of historical time” in Swaminathan’s
words). And for the reasons already given by Singh and Banerjee, this
subaltern cannot be seen as an anthropological subject either.
This is the paradox of subalternity, a symmetrical counterpart to that of
sovereignty—as both the figures operate in an ambiguous zone inside and
outside of history and the science of man. In such a ‘zone of indistinction’,
where one can enter only by suspending normal forms and norms of
knowledge, the subjectivities of Swaminathan and Shyam appear to be
radically indistinguishable from each other. For a liberal and even anarchic
mind, this will be a profoundly egalitarian affair, as it was presented by
Swaminathan himself. But taking into account the actual historical dynam-
ics behind the formation of this extraordinary relationship—the Adivasi
civil war and the subsequent Emergency declared to restore India’s liberal
sovereignty—one has to expose the real inequality lurking behind.62 If we
62
In the final estimation, Swaminathan’s unconventional usage of the term ‘civil war’
instead of “revolution”—a widely used word while he writes ‘The Cost of Progress’—itself
suggests a subtle but more far reaching operation of power, casting a long shadow over our
do not do that, then any assumption of equality between the two, with its
necessary suspension of existing disciplinary norms, will only point to our
own identification with the existing sovereign power.
I have already suggested how remote the chances of Shyam being con-
sidered as a proper historical subject are; an issue that someone like
Swaminathan would never face.63 These persisting forms of inequality are
not simply an issue of continuing disciplinary prejudices that, in the case of
presenting Shyam as a historical subject, can be easily be overridden by
giving the subaltern a name and a place. ‘Abandoned’ by the historical
disciplines and the sciences of man in a profound sense,64 and living in an
exceptional state as a Tiger or a Minotaur that needs be decapitated (meta-
phors used by Sheikh and Swaminathan), the beastly subaltern is now
‘humanised’, ‘included’, and even ‘contemporised’, only through the
‘exclusive’ power of the sovereign; at the latter’s mercy and through the
forms of indebtedness created thereof. In the zones of indistinction such as
this, the lives of the two get entangled only by making the subaltern ever
more vulnerable and perishable (unless and until there is a complete inver-
sion in the logic of sovereignty). In being exposed to power in its extreme
immediacy, that too in a zone away from the normal modes of under-
standing and governance, the subaltern becomes an exceptional death-
bound subject, in his art as well as life.65
reflections themselves. For a discussion of these two terms with reference to Hannah Arendt,
see Agamben (2015: 2–4).
63
In fact, in the case of Swaminathan, the difficulty lies in the exact opposite, and thereby,
privileged sense: the impossibility of presenting him as a subject of anthropological, rather
than historical, discourse.
64
Understanding exception as “the originary structure in which law refers to life and
includes it in itself by suspending it”, Agamben says: “we shall give the name ban […] to this
potentiality […] of the law to maintain itself in its own privation, to apply in no longer apply-
ing. The relation of exception is a relation of ban. He who has been banned is not, in fact,
simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is,
exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become
indistinguishable” (Agamben 1998: 28).
65
However, let me repeat, the figuration of death in discussing Shyam’s art and life need
not be seen as something that exists only as a result of the arbitrary decisions made by the
sovereign-interpreter (including this author). Rather, as it is in the case of any other modern
subject, this sense of death could also be seen as the sign of the artist’s increasing awareness
of his own unique situation. For in modernity, it is not only that everyone is a potential sub-
altern (though its actualisation varies in degree), but also a potential sovereign, at least in
their moment of death.
176 S. K. LUIS
By this time the Jupiter Royal cocktail had made Jangarh talkative too. He
turned to Iyer [an artist known just by his caste name] and said, ‘Don’t
mind if I tell you, but I think you are wrong. I think it’s your fate and what
you do with your own strength which makes you a success or a failure. I’ve
told Swami [Swaminathan] to his face that I’ll stand on my own two feet
and whether I eat chicken and eggs or only dal is my fate, not in your hands
or the government’s.” ‘Come on,’ said Iyer. ‘You know you owe everything
to Swami.’ ‘That may be so, but I can look after myself. […] I know nobody
really cares about the poor, although the poor are polite. Everybody goes
and pays attention to the rich, although the rich are rude. As for these gov-
ernment officials who are meant to do good to the poor, well, I’ll tell you
my experience of them – they are just blood-suckers’. (Tully 1991: 282)
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CHAPTER 7
Toward Blurring the Boundaries

in Anthropology: Reading Jamini Roy Today
Jyoti
Introduction
Social Anthropology employs ethnography as its primary methodological
tool to study a society or culture where the emphasis is given upon par-
ticularities of experiences (Desai 2002). While studying artists or artworks,
it is these specific experiences that help us derive meanings from relevant
art processes. However, we are faced with a methodological challenge
when we have subjects of interest that are no longer ‘live’. How do we
then study these subjects? Perhaps we get our answer in what Bradford
R. Collins once wrote: “History, we understand, is the living past, that is,
the past in the present tense” (Collins 1991: 59). I suggest here that we
take help of biographies, autobiographies, and historical accounts of art-
works and artists. Hence, this chapter presents itself as an effort to read
anthropologically the already existing historical accounts on the artist
Jamini Roy and his artworks. I am interested in two aspects related to
anthropology of art. First, areas of anthropological concern that can
inform art history in having a more nuanced understanding of its subjects,
Jyoti (*)
Bharati College, University of Delhi, Delhi, India

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05852-4_7
182 JYOTI
and second, questioning the very language and position acquired and
practiced by the anthropology of art.
Art history focuses on the objects (majorly defined as ‘art’) for their
‘more than utilitarian’ or esthetic qualities. It employs visual (subject mat-
ter and style) and contextual analysis to study its objects. On the one hand,
visual analysis tends to overlook the relationship between the visual and its
spectator; on the other hand, contextual analysis functions as a ‘humanis-
tic inquiry’ based on one’s subjective interpretation (Collins 1991). Is art
history then about visual representation and individual appreciation by
those who practice it? While art history recognizes the importance of rela-
tionship between art and various aspects of social sphere, it is very much
concerned about how art interrelates with its period of production, leav-
ing less attention to the web of social relations. Anthropology of art,
according to Alfred Gell (1998), “is the ‘way of seeing’ of a cultural sys-
tem, rather than a historical period”; it “focuses on the social context of
art production, circulation, and reception” (Gell 1998: 2–3). Commenting
on esthetics that is the dominant determining factor celebrated in art his-
tory, Gell maintains that esthetic judgments in art are ‘interior mental
acts’, while the production and circulation of art objects is to be sustained
by certain social processes which are further connected to other social
processes like politics, religion, kinship, exchange, and so on (ibid.). A
critical analysis of reception of art works also tells us why certain ‘social
agents’ responded in a particular way to specific art works in given condi-
tions. Response to a given artwork depends upon one’s capacity and
understanding to appreciate it. This takes us to the second point I want to
make about the practice and positioning of anthropology.
During much of its disciplinary history, anthropology of art (as originated
in the West like art history) has been complementing Western art institu-
tions. It employed (and continues to employ) the vocabulary and concepts of
‘art’ in order to understand and explain its subject matter. George E. Marcus
and Fred R. Myers (1995) in their work on Western art worlds suggest us to
look for a new relationship between anthropology and study of art while
recognizing the historical boundaries and affinities between the two.
According to them, “anthropology itself is implicated with the very subject
matter that it wants to make its object of study: art worlds” (Marcus and
Myers 1995: 1). Traditional anthropology of art, which considered art tradi-
tions and esthetics cross-culturally, itself developed within the Western art
worlds. At the same time, anthropological works also inspired art historians
and art critics to question the Western-centric categories of art. Hence,
TOWARD BLURRING THE BOUNDARIES IN ANTHROPOLOGY… 183
anthropology has been very much a part of the art worlds defining the cate-
gories of art that have been applied globally.
The above description invites us to be self-conscious of the concepts of
art as has been taken from the West and applied to other non-Western
countries. While taking the example of India and discussing the artistic
journey of Jamini Roy, I plan to reflect on the concepts like ‘primitivism’,
‘individualism’, ‘myth’, ‘tradition’, ‘authenticity’, and ‘universalism’.
Primitivism that is said to have shaped much of Roy’s artistic journey was
initially seen as an example of ‘cultural appropriation’ by art historians.
However, I propose what existed in India and specially in the case of Roy
was a gamut of practices (parallel to primitivism), influenced by primitiv-
ism but at the same time resulted from the particular cultural and political
history of the region and the country.
Vocabulary of Art
Western art movements have instilled their practices as well as vocabulary
in non-Western world. I shall take the example of primitivism because of
its influence on Jamini Roy’s artistic practices as well as its connection with
the very origin of the discipline of anthropology. The relations of power,
hierarchy, and hegemony have long history in both theory and practices in
art history as well as anthropology. In the West, primitivism1 emerged in
opposition to the trends of life and thoughts developed by the
Enlightenment and coming of industrialization. Artists inspired by the
primitive ideal focused on certain attributes of the artworks of ‘simple’
societies. This tendency toward primitivism can be seen in the works of
Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Pablo Picasso in the West during
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Primitivism is the valorization of certain esthetic values in artworks such
as the flat rendering of color and non-illusionistic representation. It
emerges from an endeavor to locate what is most basic in human nature,
1
As the term itself indicates, ‘primitive’ means something that is not derived from some-
thing else (primary or basic). Primitivism celebrates the attributes of primitive art, for exam-
ple, flatness in color and form, simplicity, and symbolic representation. Here, in the case of
the Indian art, it has been seen as a movement to find the universality of Indian art through
indigenous people and their culture. Artists have picked up particular characteristics of the
so-called primitive art suitable to their quest, for example, Jamini Roy focused primarily on
‘purity’ and ‘simplicity’.
184 JYOTI
that which is universal to the human race, in simple, less developed societ-
ies. Richard L. Anderson (1979) has talked about the debate concerning
the use of the word ‘primitive’. It is based on a perspective that assumes a
linear and progressive time line from simple to complex. Primitive societ-
ies are seen as naïve, simple, and undeveloped. Anthropologists like Franz
Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown have argued that
primitive societies are also based on complex and sophisticated structures
of living (Anderson 1979: 27). Shelly Errington (1998) says that ‘primi-
tive’ art is not a ‘timeless’ category but a ‘constructed’ one. It should,
therefore, be noted that the category ‘primitive’ is a construct based on a
simplistic notion of otherness. The art of primitive societies is actually the
art of these ‘other societies’ that became an area of attraction for the
‘Western art world’.
However, anthropological understanding of complex primitive societies
did not inform art practices and art history because of their overemphasis
on the material quality of art work that also had to do with its ‘untainted’
or ‘authentic’ elements. Marcus and Myers (1995) inform us that anthro-
pology was challenged for its detailed ethnographic accounts in order to
understand human activity and products on the grounds of avant-gardist
emphasis on ‘unmediated’ experiences, that is, the thing itself had the
potential to bring in the ‘shock of the new’ (Marcus and Myers 1995: 4–5).
This ‘shock of the new’ or ‘discovery’ element was the basis of avant-garde
movement. Christopher B. Steiner (1995) in his work on African art mar-
ket gives us a detailed account of how value and authenticity in art were
created through processes of presentation, description, and alteration of
these objects. Very interestingly, Steiner mentions that “the more difficult
the search the more authentic the find” (Steiner 1995: 152–153). This
‘illusion of discovery’ not only guided the African art practices and market
functioning but also other countries like India in different capacities. And
in the West, primitivism continued to influence other art movements
through the elements of autonomy, representation, and symbolism.
William Rubin (1984) in the introduction to the catalogue of an
influential exhibition titled ‘Primitivism in 20th Century Art—Affinity
of the Tribal and the Modern’ notes that “modernist primitivism ulti-
mately depends on the autonomous force of objects, and especially on
the capacity of tribal art to transcend the intentions and conditions that
first shaped it” (Rubin 1984: x). On the one hand, it is the power of the
art objects to go beyond their cultural boundaries and, on the other, the
ability of a culture to reformulate its existing art forms by learning from
other cultures. Tribal art here is seen and described in relation to mod-
ern art; it is so basic and raw that it can be easily replaced and built upon.
Artists from different art movements like Surrealism, Cubism,
Impressionism, Post-impressionism, and Fauvism were inspired by primi-
tive artworks and borrowed some of their attributes. Paul Gauguin
(1848–1903), for example, shifted from the ‘perceptual’ to ‘conceptual’
representation. He borrowed his flat decorative effect and stylized form
from Egyptian, Medieval, French, and Peruvian folk paintings and from
the Cambodian, Javanese, and Polynesian sculpture. Pablo Picasso’s
(1881–1973) African carvings were also less realistic and ‘unfinished’ as he
liked to see the traces of the ‘hand’ of the sculptor on the work (Rubin
1984). John Berger noted that for Picasso, “Painting is the art which
reminds us that time and the visible come into being together, as a pair.
The place of their coming into being is the human mind which can coor-
dinate events into a time sequence and appearances into a world seen.
While this coming into being of time and the visible, a dialogue between
presence and absence begins. We all live this dialogue” (Berger 1993: xvi).
His sheet-metal guitar was inspired by the Grebo (Ivory Coast) masks of
Africa as he used a hollow cylinder to project the hole in the plane of the
guitar. The ‘faces’ in Grebo masks, according to Picasso, did not ‘illus-
trate’ but ‘represent’ the face. The cylinders and parallel horizontal bars in
these masks did not resemble human eyes and mouth but represent them
‘ideographically’ (Rubin 1984). Hence, there was a clear shift from ‘real-
ism’ to ‘symbolism’. This is an example of change in focus while determin-
ing art in the Western art world.
Western Art, Local Politics, and the Idea

of Nationhood
Discourses around art and art production circulate through art world and
its institutions. Western conceptions of modernity and modern art came
to India through the British Empire. Art schools, museums, and other
‘Western’ art institutions became the vehicles for the dissemination of
Western art. However, such institutions also gave Indian artists the knowl-
edge needed to critique it and to reflect on their own traditions. They
acquired a language which, according to Mitter (2007), gave them a
medium to start their anti-colonial resistance. Since Jamini Roy came from
Bengal, I specifically discuss Bengal School of Art in the light of national-
istic discourse. Also, the region has become a space for critical reflection
186 JYOTI
on nationhood in the light of “a specific conjecture of language, politics,

and culture” (Chatterji 2016: 377).
Western academic styles and techniques were taught in Government art
schools but at the end of the nineteenth century, E.B. Havell, who was the
principal of the Calcutta School of Art, made some radical changes and
chose to focus on the spiritual and esthetic dimensions of Indian art. He
said that “the Hindu artist believes that the highest types of beauty must
be sought after not in the imitation or selection of human or natural forms,
but in the endeavor to suggest something finer and more subtle than ordi-
nary physical beauty”. Indian artists “must use traditional themes, express
traditional sentiments, [and] employ traditional styles. They must, in other
words, understand Indian art and more especially its spiritual and ethical
purpose” (quoted in Joshi 1985: 41, 92). However, he was opposed by
the students and their parents as they felt that he was denying them the
requisite tools necessary to become professional artists.
In my view, apart from his position as an art historian, we cannot simply
see this proposal by E.B. Havell an impact of primitivism. Instead, his
focus on the spiritual and ethical purpose of art is very much in Indian art
tradition. As noted by Radhakamal Mukerjee (1959), “[t]he art of India,
like her philosophy and religion, is mythical and metaphysical rather than
representational; generic and social rather than individual” (Mukerjee
1959: 20). According to Mukerjee, Indian art cannot be understood with-
out understanding the history of the country; it is to be studied in the
social, religious, spiritual, and political lives of its people. However, less
has been done in this context both by artists and scholars writing on art.
During the time of nationalist struggle in the country, Indian artists
started using ‘art’ for depicting nationalist thoughts. There was an effort
to create an ‘Indian art’ and artists were in search of new media as well as
themes of expression. Also, the search for a primeval source of inspiration
led modern artists to explore ‘primitive’ and ‘folk’2 art. Rabindranath
Tagore portrayed the Indian village as the antitheses of the colonial city—
hence his art school (Kala Bhavan) at Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan,
fostered cultural critiques of imperialism. It was later joined by Nandalal
Bose, Benode Behari Mukherjee, and Ramkinkar Baij (Mitter 2007).
At Santiniketan, “primitivism as the repudiation of urban colonial cul-
ture permeated all levels of education. It drew upon Tagore’s environmen-
talism, Gandhi’s critique of Western capitalism, the elite valorization of
2
Here ‘folk’ art refers to indigenous Indian art forms.
village India, and finally the nationalist myth of the ‘innocent’ adibasis
(aboriginals)” (ibid., 79). The ideas conceived by the Bengal School were
seen as a kind of revivalism because of its search for the forgotten cultural
heritage of the country. Revivalist art was deeply influenced by the idea of
a glorious past—epics, philosophy, and art such as the murals at Ajanta and
Mughal Rajput miniature paintings that were supposed to be a part of
India’s heritage. However, it is not as if the teachers at Kala Bhavan repu-
diated all Western ideas and techniques.
The purposes of art production during the nationalist struggle varied
and it presents us a complex picture of an artist. The artists had learnt and
were employing many Western art concepts and techniques; they were
opposing the colonial culture and hence Western art practices; they were,
therefore, searching for art expressions suiting their nationalist ideology;
however, they still possessed Western individualistic values and style and
were seeking to be a part of the global art world. Hence, Indian art prac-
tices cannot be simply seen as following ‘primitivism’ as defined in art
history. Each artist presents a different trajectory and his artworks should
be seen in the light of their purpose and understanding of art. However,
nationalism and political struggle can be seen as one common thread
amongst them all.
Nandalal Bose, who played a major role in shaping the ideology of the
Bengal School, believed that ‘nature’ should not be represented mimetically
but in communion with its myriad forms. Although, he was a part of the
nationalist rebellion against academic art, Bose still maintained a respect for
the basic art techniques, geometrical principles, and scientific anatomy prac-
ticed by colonial artists. He studied Kalighat pat paintings but did not wish
to return to traditional art as he believed that ‘originality’ and ‘progress’
were colonial concepts. Also, according to Bose, patuas3 were ‘backward’
and their conventional work could only be improved with ‘scientific’ art
education (Dutt 1990: 82). Modern Indian artists moved to ‘folk’ art
because of their form, the imagination they embodied, and the employment
of flat panels of color and bold expression. Mukherjee and Baij also explored
indigenous art forms but what distinguishes their approaches from that of
Jamini Roy was the latter’s emphasis on collective myths. Whereas Roy
focused on traditional organization of work and local traditional stories to
3
Patuas are traditional painters from rural Bengal who do scroll paintings based on tradi-
tional legends and chant ballads related to the subject of the painting (Dutt 1990: 48).
188 JYOTI
cater to the definition of collective myths, Radhakamal Mukerjee’s (1959)

explanation of India’s transience of life is apt to consider here.
According to Mukerjee, all the people of India, irrespective of their
migration history fall into “the all-pervasiveness of her moral law of
Karma and transmigration, the belief in an organic and spiritual hierarchy
of society, the sacredness of family life and obligations, the ideal of human
brotherhood and compassion to fellow creatures, and the aesthetic atti-
tude towards life, with its emotions (rasas) and sentiments treated
abstractly, and hence concentratedly” (Mukerjee 1959: 24). This descrip-
tion becomes the base of what we may call ‘collective myths’ explained in
the form of stories and narratives. The essence of life is important to be
considered here which contributed to the idea of authenticity for Roy dur-
ing his artistic journey.
It is worth mentioning here that modern Indian art did not focus on
primitivism per se but in, what Partha Mitter (2007) calls, ‘ruralism’, that
is, the traditional art and craft forms and indigenous art techniques found
and employed in villages. Jamini Roy tried to preserve not the artworks in
particular but the ‘collective myth’ from which they emerged by adopting
traditional art techniques. He in fact moved a step forward and tried to do
what Andy Warhol and other avant-garde artists were trying to achieve
through their adoption of the ‘ready-made’ and ‘found object’; he was
trying to close the gap between art and artifacts.
Roy, unlike Bose, believed in the supremacy of the traditional art of the
patuas. He focused on the universality of myths and searched for purity
and authenticity. He combined both the virtues of simplicity and primi-
tiveness in his paintings. Roy not only adopted their traditional art tech-
niques but also focused on the traditional organization of work. This is
why he was considered to be one of the most creative modern artists of his
time. Various essays written on Jamini Roy during the first half of the
twentieth century, both by Indian and foreign scholars such as Stella
Kramrisch (as noted in Mitter 2007: 244), John Irwin, and Bishnu Dey
(1944), focus on formalism,4 folk tradition, nationalism, realism,
timelessness,5 creativity, and so on. I shall also discuss these ideas in rela-
tion to style and the art world through which they circulate.
4
Formalism is the concept in arts that believes that the artistic value of any artwork is
determined by its form. The focus here is given to its shape, color, texture, and so on.
5
The idea of timelessness is attached to primitive artworks. Since these societies do not
have written historical records on the artworks they produce, these artworks are seen as cir-
culating myths without any time dimension attached to them.
Roy and Academic Realism

A Picture is what it is: Man creates it. And whatever man creates reflects his
character, his daily life, his inmost thoughts, indeed everything. – Jamini Roy
(quoted in Mookerjee 1956: 49)
Jamini Roy was born in the year 1887 in a village called Beliatore in
Bankura District of West Bengal in a land-owning family. At the age of
16, he went to the Government School of Arts and Crafts, Calcutta, to
get an education that was typical of the Western art tradition based on
Victorian academic ‘realism’. After completing his studies, Roy worked as
a professional painter. He painted portraits and landscapes, and copied
photographs to make a living. Krishna Chaitanya (1994) says that, even
when Roy was painting in the Western tradition, his portraits reflected
the simplicity which became the hallmark of his mature style. He gave
special emphasis on space, texture, and light. Separate brush strokes were
easy to notice in his works and there were no human figures in his land-
scapes, even in the street scenes. Bold outlines, diffuse light, and tonal
gradations were some of the characteristic features of his works. Unlike
some other revivalists, such as Abanindranath Tagore, Roy presented folk
culture and tribal women instead of elite culture and famous people
(Chaitanya 1994: 176).
Nevertheless, he realized that he could not continue with the European
tradition and felt a need for ‘freedom’.6 Experimentation, according to
him, was not possible for an artist unless he shared something of the social
consciousness of the tradition in which he was painting. By the 1930s, he
had completely changed his style. It is believed that the national spirit of
the time contributed to his attitudinal change (Irwin and Dey 1944;
Chaitanya 1994; Mitter 2007). His criticism of revivalism was based on the
problem of defining a national art for India, in terms of historical and mys-
tical themes, on the one hand, and aristocratic traditions such as Mughal
and Pahari Schools, on the other. Jamini Roy believed that it was impossi-
ble to understand the real significance of an art form without being a part
of ‘that’ art tradition. As Partha Mitter notes “[for] one may learn a lan-
guage that is not one’s own but one cannot enter its inner thoughts”
6
Modern artists like Vlaminck, Picasso, Matisse, and others discovered African sculptures
and went to ‘primitive art’ for visual freedom. They preferred ‘symbolic’ instead of ‘natural’
representation (Fraser 1962; Rubin 1984).
190 JYOTI
(Mitter 2007: 104; Sinha 2003: 81). Although, like other artists of the
Bengal School, Roy was also concerned with artistic authenticity.
The idea of purity was central to his ‘discovery’ of Indian art. Sunayani
Devi7 who was a self-taught artist and was influenced by Kalighat pat
painting suggested that Roy learn local techniques from these artists.
Jamini Roy was dissatisfied with the idea of artistic individualism and was
espoused with the collective expression of art. In the quest for a collective
and communitarian approach to art, he moved first to Kalighat and was
fascinated by the bold sweeping and curvilinear lines used in Kalighat pats.
However, he was not satisfied with the overall painting ‘style’ employed in
these pats. Consequently, he decided to move to his village in order to
learn from traditional Bengali patuas. On the one hand, Roy was in favor
of rural collectivism as against urban individualism, and on the other hand,
his rejection for academic realism and the emergence of a distinct personal
style of painting was an indication of the modernist aspiration for individu-
ality (Sinha 2003: 81). I shall discuss this point in detail later in relation to
the issue of anonymity. Here, I discuss the attributes of both the Kalighat
and traditional pat painting of Bengal.
Roy and Bengali Traditional Art

We need to be conscious of the fact that the terms employed by modern-
ism like ‘primitive’, ‘rural’, ‘tribal’, and ‘folk’ are not absolute categories.
They have been invented and used in the modernist discourse to oppose
certain attributes in the civilized, urban world. They may all have similar
characteristics associated to their definition, but their origin and use is
subjective and contextual. The category of ‘folk’, for example, is rooted
in the romantic Indian nationalism and has been employed to represent
various ethnic groups during regional movements in the country. It has
played primary role in the cultural politics in the colonial India. Folk that
was seen to be regional, religious, and vernacular acted as a new esthetic
alternative as against the Western Art. Recently, the term ‘folk’ has come
to present subaltern subjects with the help of ‘expressive’ genres like
dance and graphic novels (Chatterji 2016). Roma Chatterji suggests the
7
Sunayani Devi belonged to the Tagore family and started painting at the age of 30. Her
paintings were inspired by Bengali pat paintings, which drew their subjects from Indian
mythology.
transformation of the category of ‘folk’ in Bengal from that of a subject

of domination to the one having a rich repository of subaltern history
looking at the region as a political space in a particular historical juncture
(Chatterji 2016). However, in the light of the fact that the term ‘folk’ is
used differently in different discourses and disciplines, I am not using the
term ‘folk art’8 for Bengali pat paintings and prefer to call it a ‘traditional
art form’, because it follows a conventional style of painting that is
embedded in a local storytelling tradition.
Partha Mitter tried to answer the question—why did Roy focus on tra-
ditional Bengali pats—in relation to the ideology of the painter and also in
terms of the political situation of the country at that time. When artists
were trying to define nationalism in their own way, Roy focused on indig-
enous Bengali art which he thought was untainted by colonial culture in
the time where almost every art was losing its ‘essential form’ to the
‘deception’ of illusionism9 (Mitter 2007). Hence, Roy’s search for an
untainted art was not a result of his quest for primitive or authentic in the
real sense but a result of nationalist ideology.
Jamini Roy first turned to the Kalighat style but soon he realized that it
had lost its ‘purity’ in order to serve the urban masses. While talking about
the Kalighat style, Roy said that it ceased to be “strictly patua” because the
form as well as the content of art had changed due to its contact with
urban life (Centenary Volume 1987). After Roy moved to traditional
patua art and learned the techniques of painting from rural artisans, he
started calling himself a ‘patua’. Mitter (2007) calls this move a political
act done in order to demonstrate his anti-colonial stance. To this extent,
Roy’s endeavors were part of the search for a nationalist ‘grand narrative’
of Indian art.
What did Roy mean by ‘pure’ patua art? Why did he move from the
Kalighat style? Did it have anything to do with the origin, the context, or
8
Scholars like Fraser equated ‘folk’ with the popular. But others like Jain and Banerjee
distinguish the two. According to Fraser, folk or popular art is usually a ‘provincial’ style of
a minority or peasant group. Jain on the other hand sees Kalighat style as the outcome of
transformation of folk into popular genre. Banerjee also traces the similarity between the two
in terms of a common contact between audience and performer and says that popular art is
individualized art, ‘the art of known performer’ (Fraser 1962: 13–14; Sinha 2003: 9;
Banerjee 1998: 2).
9
Illusionism is a technique of using pictorial methods in order to deceive the eye.
192 JYOTI
the themes employed? To address these questions, a brief discussion of this

genre of painting is in order. According to Jyotindra Jain (1999), the
Kalighat style of painting started at the beginning of the nineteenth cen-
tury (1820 approximately) when Bengali patua artists10 moved from vil-
lages to the city of Calcutta near the Kali temple at Kalighat.
According to W.G. Archer (1953), it was mainly British influence that
led to the birth of Kalighat style of art, whereas B.N. Mukherjee, as noted
by Jain (1999), criticizes Archer and says that indigenous techniques and
styles, the socio-economic conditions of artists, and market demand
shaped the Kalighat style. It has also been noticed that the subjects,
themes, and techniques of painting were different at the beginning of the
twentieth century from the time when it originated. Calcutta was chang-
ing and so were the art forms that were practiced there (Archer 1953; Jain
1999). The period of Kalighat painting is also a period when technologies
of mechanical reproduction became available in Calcutta, which in turn
affected techniques employed by the Kalighat painters.
Some of the factors that shaped the Kalighat style of painting are tradi-
tional rural style and techniques of painting, religious iconography, intro-
duction of proscenium theater, coming of photography, introduction of
water color and mill-made paper, changing socio-economic condition of
the artists, British policies regarding trade, education, and so on (Sinha
2003: 9; Banerjee 1998; Guha-Thakurta 1992: 11–17). All these forces
coalesced in the city of Calcutta which became a fertile space for criticism
of Western modernity, imitation of the Western styles, and the techniques
of painting.
Although there is no dated ‘pat’ that could help us to clearly determine
the age of traditional scroll paintings, Jyotindra Jain (1999) traces the ances-
try of Kalighat painting to the scroll paintings and pottery of Bengal.
According to him, there has been ‘give and take’ of styles between scroll
painting and pottery. Painters who migrated to Kalighat used to make and
paint clay dolls and transferred the technique to paper in the form of shading
to suggest volume. According to Jain, the Kalighat genre is the outcome of
the transformation of Bengali ‘folk’ art into a ‘popular’ art form (Jain 1999).
10
Jyotindra Jain (1999) says that some of the paintings in this style were painted by kum-
har and sutradhar artists. Kumhar is a sub-caste in traditional Hindu social system. They are
primarily dependent on pottery as a source of livelihood. Similarly, Sutradhar is another
Hindu sub-caste involved in carpentry.
Studies done by various scholars, for example, Benoy Bhattacharya,

R.N. Ganguli, and Prabhat Kumar Das, indicate that there was a strong
link between the creation and painting of clay figures and scroll paintings
(Sinha 2003: 12). However, none of these can be dated before the birth
of the Kalighat style. Thus, both Bengali scroll paintings and Kalighat pat
paintings were developing side by side and we cannot say that the former
came before the latter. Moreover, the technique of shading was also used
in some Bengali scroll paintings. Was this due to the impact of the Kalighat
style? Did village artists adopt any of the Kalighat techniques? There are
no clear answers to these questions.
Drawings in the Kalighat style depicted Hindu gods, goddesses, heroes
of Indian legends, mythology, Islamic subjects, and other secular motifs,
which were said to be the ways of ridiculing the British way of life and a
comment on the societal changes taking place in nineteenth-century
Calcutta. Secular subjects included important events, for example, the
well-known Tarakeshwar affair11 or the depiction of Laxmi Bai,12 scenes of
daily life, portraits of babus and bibis,13 European way of life, sacred
Islamic subjects, Indian flora and fauna, and pictures based on Bengali
proverbs or sayings—at times portrayed through animals—or originating
from epic stories14 (Knizkova 197515; Rossi 1998: 58).
The Kalighat style followed a particular mode of depiction using bold
lines and brush strokes, a sense of volume and light through the use of
shading, and ideal figures of man and woman shown with attributes spe-
cific to the particular character depicted in the painting. These figures
11
These paintings depict a murder that took place on May 27, 1873. A young Brahmin,
Nabin Chandra Banerji murdered his wife Elokeshi because she had an illicit relation with the
priest of a temple. Kalighat genre contains a series of paintings based on the causes and con-
sequences of this event (Knizkova 1975; Guha-Thakurta 1992: 0–7).
12
Laxmi Bai was the Queen of Jhansi, situated in North India. Kalighat paintings selected
her among some of the heroic characters of India. She is often depicted well clad in her tra-
ditional attire, holding up high an uncovered sword in her hand, while sitting on the horse.
13
Babu is a term used in Hindi in place of the suffix Mr. specifically used for bureaucrats or
people in power. Similarly Bibi is a term used in place of Ms./Mrs.
14
For example, a cat shown eating rat or lobster is a symbol of a tapasvi (saint) who was
pseudo-ascetic and hypocrite, taken from a legend in Mahabharata (Knizkova 1975).
15
Hana Knizkova’s book, The Drawings of the Kalighat Style: Secular Themes (1975), is the
revised version of the PhD theses submitted by Knizkova on the ‘subjects’ of Kalighat paint-
ings in 1968 on the basis of Kalighat patas found at a number of selected museums around
the world.
194 JYOTI
were not realistically drawn but every single detail that was considered
important was painted and at the same time details of secondary signifi-
cance were suppressed. These paintings represented very basic and typical
‘forms’ unlike traditional Bengali paintings that preferred to communicate
through formal symbolism and decorative rhythm16; they employed cer-
tain conventional features such as level surfaces, central focus, and flatten-
ing out of design-in-depth (Centenary Volume 1987).
The Kalighat style was born in the bazaar and developed to serve a
primary purpose, that is, of sale in the market. Due to the construction of
the railways in Calcutta, there was an increase in the number of tourists
visiting Kalighat, which led to the demand for Kalighat paintings. However,
the emergence of Battala wood block prints posed competition for Kalighat
painting. The development of lithography destroyed the Kalighat tradi-
tion and painting spaces got converted into places akin to industrial pro-
duction (Sinha 2003; Jain 1999; Rossi 1998).
The Kalighat pats portrayed stories in a piecemeal fashion; there was no
background in these paintings, only figures,17 whereas traditional patuas
used to sing or recite stories and myths while unfolding the painted scroll.
Roy gave special importance to patua art because, according to him, this
was similar to primitive art,18 on the one hand, but more developed like
the former, on the other—because it was embedded in a tradition of myth.
According to Roy, the primitive art of other countries do not have any
developed cosmologies that could relate people in coherent worlds
(Centenary Exhibition 1987).
In contrast, Kalighat style was a mirror of what was happening in
Bengali society. It imbibed influences from the wider social milieu. Its
16
Rhythm is a continuance, a flow, or a feeling of movement achieved by the repetition or
regulated visual units.
17
According to Jain (1999), the reason for the absence of any background in Kalighat
paintings was their relationship with clay modeling and impact of miniature paintings, where
minimal signs were used for depiction (e.g., a green line on the base and blue line on the
upper side of the painting were used to show exterior). Knizkova looks at it as the part of
their project of ignoring any secondary information.
18
Primitive art does not have a historical frame of reference. Therefore, it becomes dif-
ficult to compare one piece of primitive art with another. The feature of timelessness was
also an inspiration for many primitivists. Errington labeled primitive art according to its
purpose of creation (i.e., not made for market) and explains that it is viewed as an ‘other’,
opposed to modern, civilized forms of art in today’s culture (Fraser 1962: 12; Errington
1998: 137, 147).
subjects and themes, their depiction, ideas of color, beauty, and form were
all an outcome of interaction with the clientele. It reflected the shifting
realities of the city and was not anchored in a coherent universe of myth.
Kalighat painters, according to Roy, had to modify their art due to market
demands. Therefore, “it ceased to be strictly patua”. “The form and con-
tent ceased to cohere and the art lost its ideal” (Centenary Exhibition
1987: 12). Roy’s idea of authenticity is inspired by the Western concepts
of ‘authentic’ ‘primitive’ ‘art’. For Rubin, as noted by Errington (1998),
“an authentic object is one created by an artist for his own people and
used for traditional purposes. Thus, works made by African or Oceanic
artists for sale to outsiders such as sailors, colonials, or ethnologists would
be defined as inauthentic” (Errington 1998: 172). On the same lines, Roy
considered Kalighat paintings to be inauthentic as it was affected by the
Western art tradition.
Brian Spooner talks about the notion of authenticity that a consumer
has before buying an artifact. The fact that the artifact is made by a par-
ticular individual, from special raw materials “in particular social, cultural
and environmental conditions with motifs and designs learned from earlier
generations” gives it authenticity (Bundgaard 1999: 60). Therefore, in
both the definitions of authenticity, the emphasis is on the overall produc-
tion of artworks—the artist who produces it, the motive behind its pro-
duction, the raw material that is used, the process of its making, the themes
employed, and so on. In short, the collective organization of its produc-
tion is given importance. And it is the circulation of myths and legends in
a society that binds these works to society. Perhaps, this was the reason
why Roy focused on each and every aspect mentioned above in relation to
the patua art of Bengal.
Another important feature of Kalighat paintings was that the depiction
of gods and goddesses was not very different from that of common Bengali
men and women. Images of Sita, Parvati, and Annapurna were like cour-
tesans if their crowns, halos, specific emblems, and vehicles are substituted
for English chairs, pipes, and more seductive gazes and stances. For exam-
ple, in one of the Kalighat paintings made on Lord Shiva with wife Parvati
and son Ganesh, Shiva is shown as a common man carrying his son and
trying to please him by playing his damru (Pellet Drum), whereas Parvati
looks like any other Bengali bride following her husband and clapping her
hands in order to play with the child. The scene looks like a family on an
outdoor trip (Sinha 2003: 16).
196 JYOTI
Coomaraswamy (1974) has talked about the various indigenous tradi-

tions differentiating between the highway (marga) and byway (local or
desi), in music, visual art, and so on. He noted that in Sukranitisara
IV.4.73-76, images of deities are seen as heavenly (svargya) and images
that appeared human are non-conducive to heavenly light (asvargya).
Music has been divided into sacred and profane types in the Satapatha
Brahmana, III. 2.4. According to Coomaraswamy, marga means ‘to
chase’ and in the most simplest terms ‘margic’ is related to chasing the god
or divinity, whereas ‘desi’ means ‘to indicate’, that is, that which is mun-
dane and human (Coomaraswamy 1974). Therefore, marga versus desi
would be equal to sacred and traditional versus profane and sentimental.
Perhaps, this was the reason why Roy moved from Kalighat to the patua
art of Bengal. The reason that satire was used in Kalighat paintings—the
reason that it cannot be seen as sacred.
We have already seen that there was no demarcation between religious
and secular in the themes painted at Kalighat. Traditional, sacred, and
primitive art is supposed to be produced for religious purposes. In con-
trast, the Kalighat style of painting was influenced by the clientele it was
serving—broad thick lines were the outcome of the method of execution
that emphasized speed in order to meet the demand for cheap souvenirs
(Jain 1999). This challenged the notion of authenticity employed by mod-
ernism and takes us to the established link between visuals and collective
myths together making an art work. Furthermore, it has to be noted that
there has not been a detailed account of the condition of artists in the rural
areas from where they migrated to Calcutta. Also, there is no clear picture
regarding the purpose of production of artworks in villages.
Style and Self-consciousness
In order to know what constituted the style of Jamini Roy and how it was
different from other prevailing styles, we should first ask what style means
and what are its characteristic features? ‘Style’ helps us to classify artworks.
In general, it is a particular way of doing something (Oxford Advanced
Learners’ Dictionary 2005). ‘How’ a thing is done. Nelson Goodman
(1975) says the ‘how’ and ‘what’ (of something) cannot be easily sepa-
rated and they have an effect on each other. It is the way of doing, which
sometimes helps one to say ‘something’ (subject). Therefore, the subject
is not always pre-decided in its totality. The ‘how’ would refer to features
in relation to statements made, structures displayed, or feelings conveyed.
For instance, every aspect of the ‘how’ would not make up a style—it can
be one thing in one case and combination of two or three things in other
cases. Moreover, if not in each case, the subject at times does influence the
mode of doing or expression. According to Goodman, style is not totally
separate from the subject; the subject constitutes a part of the style, but at
the same time not every aspect of the subject is style. Moreover, apart
from the subject, style also has to be related to a given author/painter,
period, region, and school (ibid.).
I should begin by saying that the style of Kalighat painting changed
over time. But how do we discuss the intentions of the artist in relation to
style? Can somebody choose a style? On this question, Goodman says that
style does not depend upon the artist’s intentions; it exists even if the artist
is not aware of it (ibid., 808). But Jamini Roy seems to disagree. With
reference to some Bengali patuas, he said that wisdom is not acknowl-
edged until it is self-conscious (Centenary Volume 1987). Then, how do
we recognize style? And above all ‘who’ recognizes it? I try to find answers
to these questions through a discussion on Jamini Roy’s style.
Roy was a formalist,19 so the focus was more on the arrangement and
appearance of things. He forsook many European techniques and meth-
ods in order to make his art more simple and pure. Through his experi-
mentation with Kalighat and traditional patua art, he learnt rhythm and a
sense of poise evident in his picture of Krishna and Balram.20 He went on
searching for purity of line and abstract form, reduced his palette to pri-
mary colors, and also experimented with brush drawings in lampblack
(Irwin and Dey 1944).
Goodman says that style does not depend upon the artist’s conscious
choice among various alternatives available. He disagrees with Stephen
Ullmann for whom there is no point in talking of style if the artist does not
have any choice of alternatives. According to Ullmann, in order to deter-
mine style, one needs to be self-conscious about it (Goodman 1975: 799).
When we talk about traditional artists, we may call what they are practic-
ing ‘their style’, but they may not be conscious of this.
19
Roy was a proponent of formalism at a time when the dominant fashion was toward real-
ism. Formalism is a concept that determines the value of any artwork on the basis of its
form—the way it is made, its visual aspects, and its medium. Formalism emphasizes on com-
positional elements, for example, line, texture, color, shape, and so on.
20
Krishna is a Hindu mythical character believed to be a reincarnation of Lord Vishnu.
Balram was his elder brother. The two found a place in Roy’s paintings.
198 JYOTI
Goodman further notes that the way we perceive things is determined,

in part, by our knowledge of certain facts about their history of produc-
tion, ongoing discourses, and so on. A neophyte cannot decipher style.
Hence, we can say that style is something in relation to theme of the art-
work, that is, the subject matter, technique (how the theme is depicted or
expressed), and above all it has to be seen in relation to the author, region,
and time period. I do not agree either with Roy or Goodman. In my view,
there may be cases where artists are painting images in a style that they
have inherited from their ancestors without having full knowledge of the
stories or events related to those images. But we can surely see that it is in
relation to knowledge about the subject and the same images have been
painted differently by different artists. The themes may be the same but
artists may use different textures and colors. They may use lines differently
or apply other techniques which allow their works to be seen as belonging
to a particular community. Artists know what they are painting and how it
is different from the paintings of other artists; they can even recognize
paintings done by each other. They may not be using the same conception
of style as we do but they are self-conscious of it, in their own ways.
Anonymity and Recognition
The fact that there were other local artists who used to paint for Jamini
Roy and he just put his signature on these paintings (often after giving a
final touch to the paintings), is disconcerting. To make matters worse, Roy
sometimes did not even sign his works. On this, I follow Goodman who
says that style stands for signature but a signature is not a part of style
(Goodman 1975: 807). Therefore, it is not his ‘signature’ that created
confusion about the authorship of these paintings, but his style of painting
that is copied by others. Moreover, since signatures can be forged, we have
to ask what is it that enables us to recognize whether a particular work is
by a particular painter or not? What is ‘his/her’ style of painting? Again, I
need not overemphasize the fact that style can count for different things
depending on the context.
Here, I will also talk about the ‘intentions’ of the artist. Jamini Roy
wanted his paintings to be available to ordinary people. This led to the
mass production of his paintings. Roy allowed the use of his ‘signature’ by
other painters and also the mimicking of his style. In the case of Jamini
Roy, it was his focus on the line and purity (which was evident in his bold
treatment of line, choice of themes, and method of distribution of his
paintings). He consciously sold his paintings cheaply in order to bridge

the gap between the rates of artworks done by local patuas and his own
paintings. The notions of purity and simplicity, Roy aspired to, are com-
plex and needs to be explained. If it is about giving up costly colors for
naturally made cheap colors then we find various options being used even
within traditional art forms. It is an unspoken assumption that something
that is seen as more sophisticated and known as ‘art work’ is the product
of academic art institutions.
The attributes associated with one art form provide the defining criteria
for aspiring candidates to the category of art. By signing artworks of other
artists, Roy blurs the boundaries between art and artifact. This can be seen
as similar to what Andy Warhol did when he created the simulacra of Brillo
Boxes. But at the same time, these two cases are not identical because the
two art forms were part of different art worlds (Becker 1974). Nevertheless,
the effort was similar, that is, to challenge the existing notions of art in
their respective art worlds. The art world is constituted by the discourses
formed and modified by various actors in it. These include art colleges,
professors, artists, art critics, art historians, curators, dealers, galleries,
journal publishers, museum directors, art collectors, patrons, and donors—
all with vested interests. Thus, the art world is a field of power. The con-
text in which the prefix high or low is attached to an art object today has
to do with a system of knowledge. Those who are in power define the field
of knowledge and expertise. We should not forget anthropologists in this
world who either influence or get influence by the very categories of art.
This consciousness of art worlds being platforms of power contestation
should inform our quest and inquiries; leaving us to question even the
most basic concepts.
Following Ratnabali Chatterji, I realize that the very movement of
objects from the home to the museum marks its entry into the world of
high art. Here we are again faced with the problem of defining high and
low. It, as in the case of style, depends on the context and the actor who
is responsible for determining the classification. The efforts made by Roy
to bridge the gap between the high and low art have not achieved full
success. As we saw, Roy himself was criticized when experts found it dif-
ficult to distinguish between his original work and copies of it. The issues
of originality and signature as a mark of individual authorship play an
important role in this discourse. The very attachment of the name ‘Jamini
Roy’ with a particular style of painting and his signature on an artwork
makes it desirable as high art.
200 JYOTI
The fact that we know Jamini Roy’s name and not that of the other
artists painting in a similar style shows that this division still exists. Though
he was thought to be eccentric and was criticized for copying himself, he
at the same time got recognition as a creative artist only because his work
was considered to be high art. He learnt painting techniques from rural
artists and even changed the repertoire of painting material, treated paper
in the rural way with clay and lime and even reduced his palette to a few
natural colors. This mode of painting was new in the history of the mod-
ern Indian art. Stella Kramrisch calls this a “conscious and productive
home going”. In 1931, Roy held an exhibition where he displayed this
‘new’ genre of painting—among these were also paintings made by other
village artists, but were signed by Roy. He learnt simplicity of form, bold
line, and sweeping brush strokes from Bengali patuas but what were dis-
played in the exhibition were ‘his’ artworks. The patuas remain anony-
mous (also see Coomaraswamy 1974).
While tracing the history of Bankura District, Irwin and Dey talk about
various movements in Indian history that gave the Indian arts and crafts
their special quality and flavor. Influenced by religious movements such as
Vaishnavism and Shaktism, folk culture acquired a rebellious character. This
district developed sophisticated local culture due to the confluence of diverse
communities (Santhal, Mallas, and Hindus of mixed heritage and Sanskritic
culture) (Irwin and Dey 1944). Therefore, we see that there was no pure
culture of ‘one’ community. Hence, Roy’s quest of purity is in question.
Moreover, the influence of patrons as discussed by Ratnabali Chatterji
or the impact of communication with the outside village communities has
been totally ignored. Roy believed that his art was not something unique
and it should be reproduced in order to be available to everybody. Does
this easy availability make his art identical to Bengali patua art? We should
also take into account that there is a controversy surrounding the artworks
created by him. However, at the same time his works are also treated as
national treasures.
The idea that we need to preserve Indian heritage by preserving art-
works came from the British administration and not the Indians in the first
instance. They later internalized the British prejudice. Western influence
on modern Indian artists, for example, impact of cubism on the work of
Gaganendranath was ignored. A center-periphery relation between the
metropolis and backward colony existed in the realm of art. Subsequently,
after independence, the Government of India reproduced this structure of
prejudice determining the way that art was produced, circulated, and
awarded (Mitter 2007).
Conclusion
Irwin and Dey (1944) considered Jamini Roy as the most creative painter
of his time. Several other artists went to traditional Bengali pats for inspira-
tion, but they usually invited the patuas to urban art centers and were
content to learn the methods and techniques of painting from them. They
did not try to learn their collective myths or replicate their organization of
work. Roy tried to emulate their mode of organizing work and to imbibe
the social consciousness of the community in his artworks. He developed
his own style and like him, village artists also did so. But in the case of lat-
ter, it happened primarily only after the intervention of outside art world.
Roy through his efforts tried to close the gap between high art and tradi-
tional artifacts. He was successful up to a point but then his experiments
became too radical for the art world to accept. I find his radical experi-
ments with art production quite unique among artists of his generation.
I conclude by proposing the possibility of having a more local vocabu-
lary of art in the collective myths of the region or country. It’s time that
disciplines like art history and anthropology of art work together to ques-
tion the established notions and hegemony of a particular art world and
look for a more locally informed understanding of art beyond any similari-
ties or differences. The separation of art (esthetics) from culture should be
avoided with an acknowledgment that art can happen anywhere in any
‘institution’ or sphere irrespective of its nature. A more holistic approach,
both in various dimensions of ‘life’ retaining and perpetuating art and the
disciplines dealing with art, should be able to do so. In short, boundaries
based on power, hierarchy, and dominance should be blurred.
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London: University of California Press.
CHAPTER 8
Imposed, Interrupted and Other Identities:

Rupture as Opportunity in the Art History
of Pakistan
Niilofur Farrukh
This chapter attempts to contextualize two significant moments of disconti-

nuity in the art history of Pakistan which can also be read as moments of
opportunity. The first rupture, centered on modernism, created a tension
between artists and a society that could not access its seemingly alien esthetic.
Modernism however became an important discursive space where new ideas
could be tested against existing epistemologies, and this phenomenon,
which was common to all postcolonial nations, can be seen as an important
period of both departure and embracing the new. The relationship between
modernism and socialism and the impact of Cold War politics on the early
art scene discussed here for the first time gives art history of Pakistan a new
lens to examine the complicated influence of overlapping ideologies. The
second rupture was heralded by forces of religious extremism.
These two moments of rupture shifted the axis of entrenched values in
art and opened up opportunities of critical reflection through new frame-
works. They became sites of negotiation around issues of identity, and
N. Farrukh (*)
Karachi, Pakistan

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05852-4_8
206 N. FARRUKH
altered the way art and society engaged in a dialogue of change in political
and cultural crises. The debates provoked by art also created an awareness
mechanism through a complicated and often repressive postcolonial land-
scape. The outcome of these ruptures that stand almost half a century
apart has created a realization to de-link art from imperialistic ambitions
and build a South-South cultural unity of equal partners.
The first separation between art and people took place in the early
decades after the independence of Pakistan when the influence of the
School of Paris heralded modernism. The new idiom was perceived as a
metaphor for freedom and a connection to the world by a group of artists
though it found little traction in a society that lacked references to access
it intellectually or esthetically. To understand modernism both as a social
and political phenomenon, it’s crucial to revisit the role of colonial art
education in steering artists toward modernism despite a fierce will to be
independent. It led to the perception of modernism as a liberating force as
opposed to moribund traditionalism which made it attractive to a genera-
tion of artists who yearned to connect with the world as free progressive
citizens. This chapter also maps the journey of modernism from the early
experiments under the strong influence of the School of Paris to an inde-
pendent phase when the modernists began to confidently assimilate local
influences. It must be mentioned here that postcolonial debates point to a
problematic legacy of modernism. While it proved to be a crucial dis-
course to link decolonized nations with similar aspirations and gave artists
the idiom to break from tradition, it was also an effective tool used by
Eurocentric institutions to exclude subaltern cultures.
The second challenge of the internal divide came from religious extrem-
ism in Pakistan after the Soviet-Afghan War was fought by the West with
Mujahedeen, a global army drawn from orthodox militants trained to
defend Islam from Communism. Instead of disbanding after the end of
Soviet-Afghan War, this army collaborated with extremists within Pakistan
to turn it into its ideological battlefield with violence and intimidation as
its preferred modes of operation. A rupture within the collective identity
took place when Islam and terrorism became deeply intertwined and the
Pakistani nation found itself caught between two polarized positions, the
moderate voices that espouse a personal and reformist Islam as opposed to
the exclusivist and violent version created by extremists. This catastrophic
shift brought upon by the polarization and violence mobilized artists.
They joined progressive forces of resistance in a nebulous yet persistent
movement that instrumentalizes art to unpack the fundamental narrative
IMPOSED, INTERRUPTED AND OTHER IDENTITIES… 207
in Pakistan and the media rhetoric that has misrepresented Islam to a

global audience. It also forced art into a new relationship with religion
that transcends the sanctioned framework of reverence to one of criticality
and activism.
Modernism: Disconnect, Discontent

and Disillusionment
Pakistan began its history with a focus on one collective identity for the
nation, a religious one. This constructed identity soon proved to be more
rhetorical than practical in a situation in which a culturally heterogeneous
citizenry had yet to learn how to be a nation. Politically fragile after the
demise of its founder, the country faced challenges as its democratic free-
dom came under attack. Repeated authoritarian regimes strangled pro-
gressive institutions and set up autocratic ones to serve them. When an
organic national identity emerged out of this struggle, it reflected the ten-
sions along class, ideological and economic lines. Art in Pakistan has been
shaped by imposed and imagined identities spawned by conflicts and con-
tradictions. In the early decades, the artists keen to make sense of their
time could either choose the established path of the New Bengal School
or experiment with modernism espoused by the Progressive Artists Group
in Mumbai. Shakir Ali, Ali Imam, Sheikh Safdar, Moyene Najmi, Ahmed
Perwaz and Anwer Jalal Shemza chose modernism and founded the
Lahore Art Circle in 1952 modeled on the Progressive Artists Group. The
monumental challenge facing them was to assimilate the new idiom into a
personal expression, and develop an audience for their art. Both were
equally difficult, as none of the modernists at this stage had formally stud-
ied modernism, and as a result, they pooled their knowledge and tried to
address esthetic concerns at meetings held regularly at coffee houses. It’s
not surprising that the reception to modern art was lukewarm and some-
times openly hostile because the context in which they set up their art
practice was under the overwhelming influence of Abdur Rehman
Chughtai, whose lyrical depictions of Islamic legacy reflected the popular
notion of art. Historian Jalaluddin Ahmed in an interview with the author
recalled the awe-inspiring spectacle when thousands turned out in Dhaka
to welcome Chughtai shortly after 1947. They had come to greet their
hero who had created a space for Muslim culture and history in the New
Bengal School tradition.
208 N. FARRUKH
The form on the canvas that I thought was a pineapple

I was told was a woman in the work of Modern Art
When I asked what was the right side up of the painting
I was told it could be viewed from any side, the work of Modern Art—
S.M. Jafri circa 1960s
These humorous verses from a popular Urdu poem by Jafri, recalled

from memory, reflect the dilemma of the audiences; the poem was in
demand at mushairas (public recital of poetry) and on radio. It sparked
general debate on modernism in the public sphere, which was seen as
uncomfortable departure from the esthetic continuum. These harsh cri-
tiques of modern art were not uncommon, and first surfaced in 1949
when Zubeida Agha held Pakistan’s first modern art solo exhibition in
Karachi and Attiya Faizi, the leading critic of the time, responded with a
scathing review. Though sources of these debates are difficult to locate, it
suffices to make a mention here in order to instigate an idea.
The entry of modernism into South Asia can be traced to influential
pioneers who are recognized for their individualistic contributions.
F.N. Souza, who was one of these influential pioneers, saw modern art as
part of his activism against colonialism and did not see adopting Western
art as a betrayal of his strong support of the Freedom Movement. Souza,
a founder of the Progressive Artists group, in an interview recalled the
1940s as a period of his participation in the anti-colonial protests and was
quite impatient with the lyrical style of painting supported by the New
Bengal School, which he found was unable to express the turmoil around
him.1 The New Bengal School that began as a reformist art movement in
1850 to reclaim the traditions of Indian painting from the overwhelming
Western influence had become somewhat parallel establishment with its
patterns of conformity (Guha 1992). Souza was not the first to experience
New Bengal School’s constraints as Gaganendranath Tagore had already
begun to explore cubism and fauvism. Jamini Roy, who is also referred to
as an early Indian modernist, looked to the folk tradition of ‘patachitra’
(traditional scroll painting from Bengal) for his innovative paintings.
Calcutta hosted an exhibition of Bauhaus artists as early as 1922, which
must have also given local artists an introduction to radical departures in
European art. Souza who grew up in Goa experienced modern art via
1
F.N. Souza’s interview with Niilofur Farrukh for Newsline, circa 1990s.
printed reproductions of Picasso two decades later and was excited by its
possibilities. At this time, Souza who had been suspended from J.J. School
of Art for his political activism found in cubism, the idiom of defiance he
had been searching, and explored it through his countless figurative works.
Modern art, particularly cubism, which was an entry point for most
pioneers, had grown out of a similar social and political upheaval to
respond to a Europe rethinking its history and cultural norms. The artists
in Europe had extended their gaze to non-European contexts of Africa,
Japan and Arab cultural terrains to assimilate new ideas that led them to
challenge rigid frameworks. They too had faced the hostility of the Art
Saloon. As such, the pioneer modernists in South Asia could relate to the
impulse to question and search beyond their immediate context for
inspiration.
Modernism and Socialism: Strange Bedfellows in Art

As Pakistan gained independence in 1947, the dominant ideologies in the
country were socialism and modernism. The artists of the Lahore Art
Circle were committed to both, and debated them in local coffee and tea
houses, often with members of the group, Progressive Writers. These ide-
ological allies were in search of a social and cultural vision for an egalitar-
ian Pakistan. The writers and poets were engaged in social realism to
foreground issues of class and economic inequality. The artists’ challenge
was more complex as their modern art practice along the lines of the ‘Art
for Art Sake’ dogma had created a gap between them and the people.
They somehow managed to compartmentalize the difference between
their experimental practice and socialist beliefs, and remained equally
committed to both. The Progressive Writers were very supportive of the
efforts of the artists, and the leading revolutionary poet of the time, Faiz
Ahmed Faiz, and others attended their exhibitions regularly and wrote
favorable reviews.
The First Manifesto of all Pakistan Progressive Writers in 1949 stated,
“we wish to remove the contradictions that exist between our social sys-
tem and the needs of the ordinary people because these contradictions are
responsible for the fact that our society and along with it our arts and
crafts have stopped developing in a progressive direction….this is only
possible if we break down the existing capitalist and feudal system and
establish a people’s democratic system based on a socialist economy”
(Aslam 2017: 455). A crisis of leadership in the country and a lack of clear
210 N. FARRUKH
guidelines exacerbated the political struggle between the progressives and

the oligarchy. The oligarchy, consisting mainly of the feudal class, aligned
itself with the religious right and left Pakistan vulnerable to Cold War poli-
tics. Eventually, this group entrenched its power with the help of Western
powers, and initiated its own brand of McCathyrism in Pakistan. The
Communist Party of Pakistan with its network in all provinces was banned
in the early 1950s, and its leaders, workers and sympathizers faced torture
and incarceration. Censorship and divisive policies left little space for art-
ists and writers with a people’s agenda. Some courageous groups like the
Art Circle staged plays penned and acted by workers to stay connected to
the ordinary people. But conditions worsened with the ban of literary
magazines, theater productions and even companies were instructed not
to hire ‘communists’. Parallel cultural bodies to expand the rightist agenda
were established by the State, and culture became a site of ideological
conflict. This problematic relationship continued and successive govern-
ments censored, manipulated and exploited visual art, literature, theater,
dance and films to suit their political agenda.
Ali Imam, an emerging modernist, was arrested thrice for his political
activism, and went into self-exile in the UK, and many of his peers were
forced to do the same. When he returned home after 11 years in the mid-
1960s, Pakistan was largely ‘purged’ of Communism, and he was left with
little choice but to immerse himself in art. The growing influence of a
proactive American Cultural Centre was pushing abstract expressionism
with touring exhibitions and a wide circulation of glossy cultural maga-
zines. Alliance Francaise, Goethe Institut and British Council played a
very visible role in exposing the local audiences to modern art. Friendship
House, the Russian Cultural Centre was all but forgotten in this scheme
of things. Only when the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz was awarded the Lenin
Peace Prize in the 1960s that it was briefly in the limelight. Even so, very
few visited and the rumor that the place was under state surveillance did
not help.
Ideas of modernism in general had spread its tentacles in society, and
most Pakistanis believed that they were on the global path to development
by the 1960s. In the local print media of the time, there were frequent
references to a ‘modern Pakistan’ with infrastructure development, global
links, widespread education and a socially emancipated society, while there
was a big question mark regarding human rights as one military dictator
followed another.
Experiencing Alternative Modernity:

Localizing the Idiom
By the mid-1960s, many Pakistani modernists, who in the early stages had
confined themselves to narrow formalist experiments, gradually began to
assimilate local influences in their oeuvre. This led to Pakistan experienc-
ing an ‘alternative modernity’ as artists explored the personal and political
with pre-Islamic themes, the esthetics of miniature painting, Islamic pat-
terns and calligraphy.
The engagement with calligraphy was the most robust as the modernist
had at his/her disposal centuries of techniques and epigraphic forms.
Shakir Ali,2 a leading figure of the Lahore Art Circle, was steeped in the
literary tradition, and a frequent contributor of essays on art to Urdu jour-
nals. For his first foray into this genre, Shakir Ali chose to interpret Quranic
texts in a mural. That is, in a sense, he managed to bring aspects of ‘reli-
gion’ into the midst of modern practices of art.
With textures, marks and floral forms that were intrinsic to his iconog-
raphy, he chose to be deliberately asymmetrical and opted to work within
a loose structure. Shakir Ali’s calligraphies are respectful departures in
which the painterly skills and a modern sensibility have successfully sub-
verted the rigid protocols of tradition. Hanif Ramay,3 skilled in traditional
calligraphy, came with both a technical advantage and an ingrained respect
for the proscribed. This was negotiated by keeping the integrity of the
form while destabilizing the optical balance. To accomplish this, Ramay
isolated parts of the form, and turned them into color blocks. His ability
to manipulate the space within the form to alter the perception with color
became more experimental with time and is his unique contribution.
Ramay served as the editor of several Urdu journals often printed the
works on the covers which had considerable outreach.
Ismail Gulgee4 found his inspiration in action painting when he did a
large collaborative work with Elaine Hamilton, a visiting action painter
2
A popular and pictorial rendering of the work and life of Shakir Ali is available at: https://
nation.com.pk/12-Jul-2017/shakir-ali-the-maestro
3
For more information on Hanif Ramay, please visit the following Internet sources:
(1) http://blog.chughtaimuseum.com/?p=1781; (2) https://www.revolvy.com/page/
Hanif-Ramay
4
For a brief biographic sketch of Ismail Gulgee, visit: http://artasiapacific.com/
Magazine/57/IsmailGulgee19262007
212 N. FARRUKH
from America. This led him to use wide sweeping brush strokes simultane-
ously loaded with many colors for cursive styles. Soon this was to become
his signature style. His large works were sometimes layered with references
to classic calligraphic styles punctuated with spheres stamped with what
appeared like official seals that emulated Mughal ‘farmans’ or royal edicts.
Among all the modernists, Sadequain5 was the only one to come from
a family of professional calligraphers in Amroha, India. He, however,
chose to stay away from it till he had established himself as a modern
painter. His calligraphic corpus is the largest and most diverse among the
modernists and has a lasting influence on popular calligraphy. In his
‘Cactus Series’ calligraphy entered his practice with a fluid interplay
between vertical Kufic (Arabic script, also used for Urdu) alphabets,
thorny arms of the cactus and human figures. Throughout the series,
Kufic calligraphy is intertwined with the ‘cactus’ imagery. In the illustra-
tions of his anthology of rubaiyats (short poems), Sadequain invents a
free-flowing script that is whimsically guided by the rhythm of a verse.
When he moves from the paper to murals, the leap is both in scale and
conceptual development. The two murals at Frere Hall in Karachi and at
Lahore Museum are boldly experimental and mark a new threshold in the
modern art tradition—synthesis. The Surah-e-Rehman Series is his mag-
num opus in modern calligraphy. Based on hundreds of iterations of the
Quranic verse, Sadequain pushed boundaries of materiality and explored
leather and slabs of roughly cut marble in fusing countless calligraphic
styles to evoke the essence of the spiritual message.
The transition from self-referential experiments to a localized modern-
ism saw artists cross boundaries with ease. At the same time, revisiting
tradition with a new sensibility introduced a visual vibrancy that was
received with enthusiasm. The 1970s saw the modernists come into their
own after a long struggle. This was also the decade when the vision of a
future of stability seemed to slip with the breakup of the country that led
to the birth of Bangladesh in 1971. The democratically elected Prime
Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was hung by General Ziaul Haq, and Pakistan
saw the country’s longest and most repressive military dictatorship in its
wake.
5
For information on Sadequain and his contribution to calligraphic c modernism, please
read Iftikar Dadi’s essay, ‘Sadequain and Calligraphic Modernism’: http://islamic-arts.
org/2011/sadequain-and-calligraphic-modernism/
Complicating the Narrative of Extremism

Pakistani poet, Afzal Ahmed Syed in his poem ‘Hamain bohat saray phool
chaheyen’6 (we need so many flowers, 2000) writes,
We need so many flowers

Many, many flowers
To lay by the feet of corpses
To swathe the faces of the cadavers in sacks
Clearly, what he talks about is the extreme levels of political violence that
had engulfed Pakistani society that impacted everything from government to
public and social life as well as modes of political and cultural expression. As
he continues with his poetic narrative, between the lines of this powerful
poem, what Syed unveils is a nation living with anxiety and fear in an exis-
tence over-shadowed by bullets, bomb blasts and other kinds of killing much
of which were undertaken in the name of religious or ethno-cultural identity.
Just as much as these forms of violence found poetic expression, they also
found similar expression visual culture. These conditions created new meta-
phors and the flower, long associated with beauty, love and peace acquired a
new meaning. A rupture within the collective identity took place when Islam
and terrorism became deeply intertwined, and the Pakistani nation found
itself caught between two polarized positions, the moderate voices that
espouse a personal and reformist Islam as opposed to the exclusivist and vio-
lent version created by extremists. Interventions by poets, writers, journalists
and artists offer a narrative to re-contextualize religion within a contempo-
rary framework. There was widespread concern among moderate Pakistanis
that an alternative narrative was needed to articulate how ideology and geog-
raphy had drawn Pakistan into a conflict that was being constructed as a
religious one. This made it imperative to foreground the historical context
that linked the Soviet-Afghan War, 9/11 and the War on Terror to under-
stand the exploitation of religion by global politics. Their efforts took on
wider urgency when the press faced threats and dissidents were silenced with
death. Pakistan, which was founded on the fault lines of tension between
6
While these are my translation of the poem (reproduced here in part), another version
exists in the compilation of Urdu poems available at http://urdustudies.com/
pdf/24/16AfzalPoems.pdf (accessed on 13 October 2018).
214 N. FARRUKH
conservative religious groups and the moderate Muslim population of the

Indian sub-continent, has for long experienced the impact of local politics on
religion. The independence of the new country was opposed by leading sem-
inaries for they distrusted Mohamed Ali Jinnah, the first Prime Minister of
Pakistan, who as a secularist lawyer was not in favor of a theocratic Pakistan.
More importantly, they feared being relegated to the political fringe. Their
fears were realized when the biggest political party, Jamat-e-Islami, was
rejected at the ballot box several times. The popular verdict of the Pakistani
voter was discarded in 1980s when the frustrated zealots of Jamat-e-Islami
were entrusted by Western powers to recruit the Mujahideen army, which
was the ideological genesis of Al Qaida and the Taliban.
Throughout the 1980s, Pakistanis suffered under General Ziaul Haq’s
military dictatorship and his forced Islamization drive that introduced laws
against human rights, freedom of expression and tampered with the
National Constitution to strengthen control. Western powers supported
the dictator and gave Jamat-e-Islami a carte blanche to transform madras-
sahs, the traditional religious schools affectively into nurseries for the
Mujahideen. According to Tariq Ali, the well-known author and social
commentator, “symbiotic and perfidious relationships between many
Islamic groups were spawned and indulged by CIA and Imperialism ….
for decades the United States had clandestinely helped jihadi groups
squash pro-communist and nationalist Muslims inside the Muslim world.
By the end of the 1970s, this covert practice was visible and US had
become a covert supporter of international Jihad” (Fateh 2008: 272).
This historical chapter is aptly documented in the film, Charlie Wilson’s
War. A bi-product of this intervention, which is lesser known, is how the
forced introduction of the orthodox interpretation of Islam through the
national school curricula, a parallel religious judiciary and religion-based
constitutional amendments undermined human rights. The religious poli-
tics of General Ziaul Haq were rejected and actively resisted by writers,
artists, journalists and civil society activists in a movement that was bru-
tally crushed. National College of the Arts, Lahore, became a site of resis-
tance where the faculty and students protested against state laws particularly
the Hudood Ordinance.7 In Sindh, Nagori8 was the first to critique the
7
The ordinance was the controversial law, which was enacted in 1979 as a part of the
forced Islamization during the period of General Ziaul Haq’s military regime in Pakistan.
There were critical reactions against forced Islamization.
8
For more information on the work of Abdul Rahim Nagori, visit the website, Welcome to
My World: http://welc0m2myworld.blogspot.com/2009/11/abdul-rahim-nagori-painter-
known-for.html
Pakistani army for its violence against the people. In his powerful painting
of a totem pole, the new power structure is decided by the dictator.
Nagori’s small paintings, the size of a child’s primer, phonetically connect
the alphabet to instruments of violence and allude to grassroots pedagogic
change and erasure of history, introduced by the Ziaul Haq regime via
textbooks and curricula. In the madrassahs (traditional schools), the les-
sons of violence started early and “even the textbooks for the Jihadi
madrassah’s came from United States. In these books, the Urdu alphabet
consisted of jeem for jihad, kaaf for Kalashnikov, and tay for tope (can-
non)” (Fateh 2008: 273).
Years later, Khadim Ali, who escaped the Soviet-Afghan War as a child
and grew up in Quetta while living among the subsequent waves of refu-
gees from his country, created in a neo-miniature style an idealized page
of a primary reader. Here, the Alif, the first letter of the Urdu-language
alphabet, which traditionally stood for anar, the Urdu/Persian word for
the pomegranate, mutates into a grenade, which the children after the
Afghan War had become more familiar with as their gardens of pomegran-
ate were being destroyed by ‘daisy cutters’ and cluster bombs.
Beyond the Sanctioned Framework

In the socio-political context outlined above, contemporary art practice
engages the controversies facing Islam with interventions that are per-
sonal, experiential and activist and treads into a territory previously closed
by religious scholars that have discouraged critical ideas and debates in
Islam, which would prevent it into petrifying into an orthodox tradition.
These visual expressions of resistance transcended the historical frames of
reference that previously connected art and Islam only through a precise
and sanctioned format. These new works address both the personal ques-
tioning that tries to make sense of the multiple interpretations of religious
injunctions and also challenges the extremist readings to extend social
control. An attempt is also made by these critical artworks to deconstruct
reductionist stereotypes constructed by the global media.
Post-9/11, the shootings and bomb blasts throughout Pakistan have
claimed some 50,000 civilian lives carried out by non-state actors. Their
virulent hate propaganda from the pulpit and on websites has attempted
to justify the violence. Muslim youth indoctrinated with de-contextualized
Quranic quotations on Jihad were conscripted to fight in Soviet-Afghan
War, and later they regrouped to form the nucleus of the suicide squads
216 N. FARRUKH
for the Taliban and the Al Qaida. “The death cult of the jihadis evolved
into a form of a death cult where the highest level of Islamic worship is to
die and leave this world to its satanic existence”, explains Tarek Fateh
(2008: 272).
Tariq Ali goes on to add that these terrorists have no social vision as
“their goal is to seek paradise, not in life but in death” (Fateh 2008: 280).
Artists who have been a witness to this bloodstained history of bomb
blasts and terror attacks have begun to challenge the extremist rhetoric
with esthetic strategies that addressed issues of gender, social freedom and
secular knowledge, and have brought into discussion the human cost of
the War on Terror.
Mahbub Jokhio’s9 installation of child-size graves at the first Karachi
Biennale found people standing quietly around it. The bubblegum pink,
yellow and blue small graves point to the 134 childhoods that were lost in
a terrorist attack on Peshawar Army Public School in 2014. This work re-
lives a tragedy that left a nation in mourning. Another work that draws
attention to loss of empathy as the daily news of tragic deaths on the media
becomes as routine as serving bread and invites the audience to introspect
the brutalizing effects of violence is, Nausheen Saeed’s10 ‘Baked Delicacies’.
The piece with its life-size truncated body made from baked dough served
in wooden bakers trays is a haunting reminder of dismembered limbs col-
lected from blast victims. Similarly, designed to discomfort, Abdullah
Syed’s ‘Flying Carpet’ with drone-like forms crafted from menacing box-
cutter blades invites visitors to walk under it, and brings alive the experi-
ence of villagers who live in constant threat of hovering un-manned
predators. Syed’s aim is to bring into discussion both the psychological
and physical impact of drone attacks on a civilian population, which the
world only knows through media images of a target and a rising plume,
without any human references.
The madrassahs, run by charitable organizations, have long been a
source of affordable education to impoverished millions in South Asia,
which today have been demonized by the Western media, not unlike the
9
For more information on Mahbub Jokhio’s work, visit: (1) https://mahbubjokhio.wee-
bly.com/about%2D%2Dbio.html and (2) https://www.gasworks.org.uk/residencies/
mahbub-jokhio-2017-10-02/
10
For more information on Nausheen Saeed, visit, http://vaslart.org/nausheen-saeed/
exoticization of the harem by Orientalists. Hamra Abbas11 in her installa-

tion ‘God Grows on Trees’ demystifies the madrassah with 99 portraits of
madrassah students with whom the artist spent time. Presently an alterna-
tive narrative, the pre-teen school children in their uniforms smile at the
visitor through their individual portraits. Amin Rehman12 who lives in
Toronto focuses on global perceptions of the war on terrorism. He com-
municates the double speak of what has been called the ‘rhetoric of aggres-
sion’ in the media. The works deal with ‘looking both ways’, which is also
the title of one of his works. A suicide bomber’s claim that his act is a ticket
to heaven is over-laid with the Quranic verse that states, ‘the killing of a
soul is equivalent to the killing of entire mankind’, in one of Rehman’s
encaustic paintings. Rehman emphasizes how contradictory messages
make truth a victim in the propaganda of war. Perhaps the most telling of
his work is a sign stridently claiming in neon, ‘God is on our side – Allah
on your side’. This body of work unpacks cultural, religious and political
dichotomies quoted by extremists and media to support their agenda, and
calls attention to the power of language, its presentation and accessibility.
Many artists, by subverting the veil, the very garment used by the
orthodox clergy to objectify and control women, transformed it into a
potent symbol of autonomy and insubordination. Mediating the space
between perception and reality and the way this is stereotyped is brought
out in ‘Woman in Black’ by Hamra Abbas. Her larger-than-life black cast-
veiled figure in an aggressive posture with a stick deconstructs the myth of
the modest veiled woman. This work is inspired by the women students of
the Lal Masjid seminary who took over a children’s library by force.13
When confronted by the state, hundreds appeared in black veils with sticks
on the seminary roof. Later, many of them died when their seminary was
attacked by the army in a bid to close it down.
Mariam Agha’s installation, ‘72 Virgins for my Suicide Lover’ deals
with the link between sexuality and extremism. The installation based on
72 swatches of cloth bear stitched line drawings of the vagina. Embellished
with beads and sequins, they evoke the garments in a bride’s trousseau.
11
More information on the biography and work of Hamra Abbas is available at: http://
www.hamraabbas.info/category/news/
12
For more information on Amin Rehman, visit: http://www.aminrehman.com/cv.php
13
Women students of the Lal Masjid seminary occupied the children’s library building in
Islamabad in 2007 to protest against the official demolition of unauthorized mosques in the
capital.
218 N. FARRUKH
Agha, a young woman who works with textile embellishments, often

destabilizes the familiar fashion vocabulary with instrumentalist content.
This objectification of her body underscores the message in training videos
that brainwash suicide bombers with the promise of financial support to
their impoverished families and a place in heaven, where according to a
myth, 72 virgins await the martyr.
Yet, another law under the extremist interpretation of the Sharia14
framework against blasphemy has fueled violence and bigotry putting
both Muslims and non-Muslims at risk. Salman Taseer, the Governor of
Punjab Province, after he publically declared support for a poor peasant
woman on death row convicted under the controversial Blasphemy Law,
was gunned down by his own police guard, a self-confessed religious
fanatic. Amean J created a temporary memorial site with metal plates
etched with bullets to convey the violence of his death, which resulted
from 29 bullet wounds. It was shaped like a coffin and reflected its shape
in mirrors. The visitor’s reflection in the mirror suggests a sense of every-
day vulnerability when death threatened everyone who spoke out against
the blasphemy law.
Imran Qureshi’s site-specific work at the Sharjah Biennale, ‘Blessings
Upon the Land of My Love’, covers the brick-paved courtyard with red
pigment stains and splashes that seem to emerge from chrysanthemum-
like flowers painted in the same blood red pigment. Standing over the
painted surface, one is not sure if blood has drowned the flowers or flow-
ers are emerging from the blood. Bizarrely evocative of a bomb blast site,
it invites refection on the reality of public carnage sites. ‘Blessings Upon
the Land of My Love’ was recreated years later on the roof of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and has now acquired an iconic
status in Pakistani art that memorialize the victims of global terrorism.
The societal rupture caused by religious extremism has also created an
opportunity for art to develop a new relationship with religion that tran-
scends the sanctioned framework of reverence to one of criticality and
activism. Previously, art was created in celebration of the religious message
and called upon the believer to pay homage. This new discourse with the
same fervor contests fundamentalism and militancy that has polarized
Muslims, and put them in conflict with the world.
14
Sharia is the code of Islamic law.
Conclusion
Art has persistently underscored the need to re-negotiate the narrow ideo-
logical identity of Pakistan by extending the conversations on multiple
identities. This has expanded the space for a nuanced expression of the
collective self and an inclusive discourse of a pluralistic society. This chap-
ter tried to elucidate that over the last seven decades, new linkages have
been forged between art and people, the early disconnect caused by mod-
ernism was subverted by localizing the idiom to make it more accessible to
a larger spectrum of people. As a social discourse, it complicated the rheto-
ric of modernity as an optimistic and inclusive vision of freedom and
development in Pakistan. Resistance to General Ziaul Haq’s dictatorship
and the rise of religious extremism created a common platform of dissi-
dence for art. Contemporary artists that had been largely aloof from reli-
gious subjects because of the ambivalent relationship between visual art
and Islam outside the proscribed space were left with no choice but to
unpack distorted claims of the extremists and their sanctioned violence.
This initiated a seminal interface between art and religion beyond rever-
ence to one of criticality and activism. In this de-centered space where
identities are constantly being re-negotiated, rupture and conflict can be
plotted as turning points in Pakistan’s art history where interventions by
artists subverted the narratives from within.
References
Aslam, Khwaja. 2017. People’s Movement in Pakistan. Karachi: Kitab Publishers.
Fateh, Tarek. 2008. Chasing A Mirage, The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State.
Ontario: John Wiley and Sons Ltd.
Guha, ThakurtaTrapati. 1992. The Making of a New Indian Art. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
SECTION III
Art for Public: Individual, Institutions,

and Issues
CHAPTER 9
Transcending and Subverting Boundaries:

Understanding the Dynamics of Street Art
Scene in Nepal
Binit Gurung
Anyone travelling to Nepal through the country’s only international airport

would first find themselves in Kathmandu, the sprawling capital city where
there are as many gods as there are people, as the cliché goes. One with an
observant eye and a curious disposition would perhaps also notice the visual
culture that characterizes Kathmandu’s public spaces. The visuals, one may
observe, are not just out there. They speak to the audience without actually
‘speaking’ to them. The language is visual and the messages conveyed range
from being subtle to in-your-face. From the commercial visuals to the politi-
cal sloganeering on the city walls, different groups have used the visuals as a
medium to reach out to the unsuspecting masses.
Taking cue from these visual practices, Nepali street artists launched a
series of street art projects in 2011, months apart, declaring the start of a
street art movement in the country. The deepening political uncertainty at
the time (as a result of political differences over constitution-making that
B. Gurung (*)
Thames International College, Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu, Nepal

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05852-4_9
224 B. GURUNG
was underway in the then Constituent Assembly)1 and the relentless use/
abuse of public spaces by commercial and political interest groups with
impunity provided a strong impetus for the street artists to intervene in
the public spaces. This visual intervention in the public spaces was moti-
vated by their desire not only to contest the commercial and political
interests but also to communicate to the masses.
Street art historically evolved out of graffiti writing associated with van-
dalism. By the term ‘vandalism’, two interrelated things are to be consid-
ered. One concerns the intention of the graffiti writers and the other
concerns the reception of their works. Graffiti writers, writes Lewison
(2008), often want to ‘destroy’ the cities and make them uglier. They do
not intend to communicate to the masses. On the other hand, since the
graffiti writers prefer to use their own secret code or language, their works
are largely incomprehensible to the masses (Ibid. 2008). Such works are
therefore taken as acts of subversion and vandalism, more so because of
their illegality in many places. Though street arts too may not enjoy the
legal sanction, they however enjoy social and community sanction in most
places (Ibid. 2008). Moreover, street artists not only seek to infuse the city
with its aesthetics but also engage with issues that concern the city and
thereby resonating with most city inhabitants.
Street art has now come a long way since its beginning as a subversive art
form (Irvine 2012). While examples of graffiti could be traced back much
farther into the past in different civilizations, graffiti writing as a movement
started off in New York around 1970s as a subcultural movement. This
movement soon paved way for the emergence of street art in the 1980s
which was more at ease with the contemporary art forms unlike its predeces-
sor (Waclawek 2008). By 1990s, street arts had already spread from New York
to different cities of Europe and South America thanks to the advancement
in communication media and technology (Irvine 2012). As urbanization
scaled up across the world with the increase of population and international/
internal migration fuelled by the labour demands of the expanding neoliberal
regimes, street arts were no longer confined to a few world cities by 2000 but
were visible in most cities around the world (Ibid. 2012).
1
The first Constituent Assembly formed in 2008 was dissolved unceremoniously in 2012.
This indicates the extent of political chaos that pervaded the country during the period
between 2008 and 2012. Read more at: https://www.economist.com/banyan/2012/
05/28/into-the-wild
TRANSCENDING AND SUBVERTING BOUNDARIES… 225
In the context of Nepal, street art scene emerged in Kathmandu—one

of the oldest cities in South Asia whose history dates back to 200 BC and
is said to have been founded in 723 AD (Throndsen 1989 cited in
Sengupta 2011). The ancient city of Kathmandu is now a vibrant city
inhabited by diverse communities where markers of modernity remarkably
co-exist with those of tradition. It is no surprise when these varied influ-
ences are reflected in the artistic productions in the city. This particularly
holds true for street art, which has been evolving through our own social,
political and economic contexts. Street art in Nepal has been a turf of
young artists. As many fresh graduates from art schools fail to find entry
into the exclusive zone of gallery-based contemporary arts scene, they find
street art scene welcoming for their fresh ideas and approaches uncon-
strained by the conventional curatorial politics.
Nevertheless, the meaning of the term ‘street art’ has expanded over the
years. Today, what we call as ‘street art’ encompasses stencil graffiti, mod-
ern graffiti, sticker art, art of intervention, artistic street installations and
street poster art, among others (Alpaslan 2012). Street artists work with
different mediums, materials, techniques and styles. Street art is clearly a
broader category that includes different graffiti forms. However, this is not
to suggest that graffiti no longer exists separately. Graffiti forms continue
to co-exist with street art and are often mistaken for street art by those who
are not aware of their respective histories. The distinctive feature of a street
art is that the street artists use urban space as an open gallery and the
masses as an audience. It has unmistakably anti-institutional and anti-com-
mercial biases while being critical of the existing political culture.
Nepal is not the only country where street art received impetus from the
political change or tensions. In Egypt, for example, street arts first became
visible in the cityscape as a protest graffiti coinciding with the Egyptian
revolution in 2011 (Gröndahl 2012). This morphed into a full-scale street
art movement following the regime change triggered by the revolution
(Ibid. 2012). As it was not possible to paint critical street arts during the
rule of President Hosni Mubarak, his fall from power opened up a flood-
gate of self-expressions among the street artists in Egypt (Ibid. 2012).
The use of street walls to challenge the powers-to-be is not unknown in
South Asian Region too. The art protest movement started by Pakistani
street artist Asim Butt in 2007 is a case in point. While mural painting in
public spaces has a longer history in Pakistan, Butt’s intervention in the
urban street walls to oppose the declaration of emergency by the military
was particularly remarkable. His work, particularly the ‘eject symbol’,
226 B. GURUNG
which called for the ouster of the military, quickly caught on and became
a part of the pro-democracy movement in the country.
As street art seeks to directly engage with the people while visually con-
tending the dominant narratives of commercial and political interest
groups in the public spaces, street art is—in this sense—always political
even when street artists themselves may refuse to believe so. Turner and
Webb rightly note that “Because art locates people in all their particulari-
ties and complexities, and most importantly, in their materiality, in a mate-
rial world it is perhaps reasonable to assert that art is always at some level
politically engaged: it always locates itself in a time and space, and responds
to the local material context” (Turner and Webb 2016: 15). If this is true
for ‘art’ in general, this is undoubtedly truer for ‘street art’ in particular
because of its direct engagement with the material world. Irvine writes,
“Street art inserts itself in the material city as an argument about visuality,
the social and political structure of being visible” (Irvine 2012: 4, Italics in
the original). Here, one should not lose sight of the role of the street art-
ist. The personal merits as much attention as the political; the failure to do
so could lead to a deterministic understanding of one completely dictating
the other. Using some ‘sociological imagination’ (Mills 2000), one could
say that the personal is always in-the-making shaped by the larger struc-
tures of society. Hence, the personal and the social are always implicated
into each other.
In this chapter, I attempt to analyse Nepali street art as a particular art
form which embodies the interplay between, on the one hand, the per-
sonal and the political, and on the other hand, the local and the global. I
look at street art as an art form where both aesthetical and political aspects
of art come together. I maintain that street art is a social product shaped
by the larger structures of society, economy and politics within which a
street artist is located. Having said so, the agency of street artists can be
located in their urge to communicate to the masses and thereby change
the status quo. I seek to demonstrate this by discussing the themes of the
street art projects carried out by three major art collectives in Kathmandu:
Artudio, Sattya Media Arts Collective and Artlab and also by, drawing
upon my interviews with the representatives of each collective: Kailash
Shrestha (Artudio), Rupesh Raj Sunuwar (Sattya Media Arts Collective),
Kiran Maharjan (Artlab) and Dibyeshwor Gurung (Independent artist).
Towards the end, I attend to the questions of production and consump-
tion of street arts with reference to globalization.
Sociology of Art: Insights for Understanding

the Context of Nepal
Sociologists in particular, writes Bourdieu, have an uneasy relationship with

artists for the former wants to banish “artists from the history of arts”
(Bourdieu 1993: 139). In other words, sociologists tend to belittle the role
of artists and give primacy to the social context to analyse a work of art.
However, Fuente (2007), after having reviewed the latest trends in the soci-
ology of art, declares the inauguration of the ‘new sociology of art’. Unlike
the ‘old’ sociology of art that undermined the aesthetic properties of art, the
new sociology of art shows commitment to take account of aesthetic attri-
butes of artworks in keeping with social constructionism (Ibid. 2007). Long
before Fuente (2007), DiMaggio (1983) saw sociology of art ‘coming of
age’ with the publication of Janet Wolff’s Social Production of Art in 1981
and Howard Becker’s Art Worlds in 1982. The publication of these books,
DiMaggio writes, “vanquish the ideology of artistic genius and internalist
accounts of progress in art; provide a wealth of insight into the production
of art; and suggest (Wolff explicitly, Becker by example) the manner in
which we should approach art’s sociological study” (1983: 273–74).
Wolff (1981) reminds us that art is ideological in nature for it carries
the values, ideas and beliefs as espoused by the artist who himself is located
in specific social and economic structures. Zangwill (2002) who is against
the whole project of sociology of art nevertheless makes a valid point that
aesthetic is not antithetical to the ideological aspect of the arts rather the
latter ‘piggybacks’ on the former. According to Wolff (1981), the ideo-
logical nature of art is mediated by the prevailing aesthetic codes and con-
ventions. However, these aesthetic codes and conventions are also
historically constituted and hence, Wolff writes, “there is nothing sacred
and eternal about the aesthetic, which a sociology of art profanes; on the
contrary, sociology demonstrates its very arbitrariness in laying bare its
historical construction” (Wolff 1981: 141). Since Wolff clarifies that her
concept of ‘art’ used in the book is more or less generic inclusive of various
art forms which are united by the fact that they are all a social product, one
can safely extend Wolff’s idea to argue that street arts in Nepal too have
strong ideological elements, as they are no less of social product, which are
expressed through the aesthetics of the street arts. According to Allan
Schwartzman, street artists aim to “communicate with everyday people
about socially relevant themes in ways that are informed by aesthetic val-
ues without being imprisoned by them” (Allan Schwartzman quoted in
Gleaton 2012: 15).
228 B. GURUNG
While all street arts are located in a particular time and space, their
implications are not circumscribed by geographical and temporal bound-
aries owing to the forces of globalization and advances in technology.
While some denounce globalization as a cover for capitalism and imperial-
ism, there are others who see huge potentials in globalization and wel-
come it as a force that can lead to modernization, democratization and
progress. Kellner (2012) advocates a critical approach to globalization
that suggests globalization per se is neither entirely oppressive nor entirely
progressive. While acknowledging that there are oppressive aspects of
globalization-from-above characteristic of corporate capitalism, Kellner
brings to our attention that globalization-from-above is always accompa-
nied by globalization-from-below which allows marginalized and vulner-
able groups to use the institutions of globalization including new
technologies to pursue democratization and social change.
In the context of street art, globalization has enriched the artistic pal-
ette as artists now have access to a wider pool of ideas to draw upon. In a
way, globalization has liberated artists from the intellectual and conceptual
boundaries imposed by the nation-state. Street arts are constantly experi-
menting, innovating and presenting before us works that are not just local
or national or global. Hence, Nepali street art scene need not have parallel
elsewhere for any movement feeds on the dialectics between the local and
the global. Nepali street art scene is therefore unique in its own way and
therefore merits serious scholarly attention which seems to be lacking at
present.
Particular Amidst General: The Emergence of Street

Art in Nepal
One may locate the antecedents of the Nepali street art scene in the devel-
opments of Nepali contemporary art scene in 1990s. Novel art forms like
installation, performance art, video art and so forth emerged in the
contemporary art scene in Nepal in the decade of 1990s. These new art
forms that emerged in 1990s, Uprety (2010) notes, were the result of the
larger processes of economic liberalization, globalization and reinstate-
ment of democracy in the country. The period was also marked by boom
in media sector with the unprecedented increase in the number of private
media outlets in the country. Meanwhile, there was a spike in the number
of art galleries in Kathmandu accompanied by a greater movement of
Nepali artists outside the country for exhibitions and residencies. All these
played a significant role in shifting the contours of the contemporary art

scene in the country.
Turner and Webb (2016) characterize the 1990s as the decade when
the very frameworks for art were being re-conceptualized at the global
level owing to the rise of Asian art in general. In the case of Sri Lanka, the
decade of 1990s saw significant changes in the contemporary art land-
scape. This has been attributed to the arrival of younger Sri Lankan artists
in the visual art scene against the backdrop of the then civil war and rapid
urbanization (Weerasinghe 2005). These young artists experimented with
new ideas drawing on their immediate milieu and lived experiences (Ibid.
2005). Thus, to quote Perera, “they ruptured both artistic conventions
and ideologies prevalent up to that time as well as redefined the meanings
and politics of dominant aesthetics” (Perera 2011: 11). While visual arts in
Sri Lanka took explicitly political turn in 1990s, it was only in 2000s that
Nepali painters began to explicitly infuse politics into their artworks even
though the fusion of politics and arts was already prevalent in other artistic
pursuits like poetry, dance, drama and so on.
Ashmina Ranjit was one of the earliest contemporary artists who explic-
itly tried to bring politics and arts together in the country. When Ashmina
returned from Australia after finishing her BFA in 1999, she realized that
there was a pronounced lack of conceptual and critical evaluation of art-
works and that the art was primarily driven by aesthetic considerations
(Bangdel n.d.). Moreover, she was also struck by the conscious detach-
ment of art from politics in the country (Ibid. n.d.). Her foray into the
contemporary art scene was therefore driven towards bringing change in
art perceptions in Nepal. After the turn of the century, one could observe
an explicitly political turn in the visual art scene in Nepal. In 2003, a num-
ber of artists came together including Ashmina Ranjit to establish an art
collective called SUTRA. In its five-years of existence, the collective orga-
nized several exhibitions and workshops with an aim to influence public
thinking about arts.
In 2007, Ashmina Ranjit founded LASANAA as an alternative art space
through which she sought to challenge the conventions of Nepali art
including the way it was perceived. She advocated for ‘Artivism’ (meaning
the reconciliation of art and politics) which was evident in her perfor-
mance art and installations. The regime change in 2008 and the subse-
quent developments prompted a major shift in the visual art scene in the
country. As the country became republic in 2008 triggering a new phase
of political transition, it provided a conducive socio-political context for
230 B. GURUNG
the proliferation of politically motivated art works. Contemporary artists

like Arjun Khaling not only took membership of a political party but also
pushed his political agenda in his art works (Kunwar 2014). This explicitly
political turn in the contemporary art scene in the decade of 2000s her-
alded the emergence of street art in Nepal over the following decade.
The street art scene in Nepal started off in Kathmandu around 2011.
At the time, there was a remarkable surge in street arts in the city. From
my personal experience, I remember the boundary walls of the Himalayan
Hotel in Kupondole in particular would often catch my attention as I used
to pass by that street almost every other day. Some distance away towards
Thapathali, a mural depicting a giant Red Panda on the wall of a building
facing the Thapathali bridge would also unfailingly draw my attention.
Such encounters with street arts while going around the city sparked an
initial interest in me on street arts, for they appeared to me as a powerful
visual form of communication.
Street art, as it is conventionally understood, has barely a decade-long
history behind it. This being said, there is a much longer history of reli-
gious murals in the country. The history of religious murals goes as far
back as mid-fifth century during the Lichhavi Period (Subedi 1995). The
murals which decorated the walls of temples and monasteries of that
period had even impressed the then Chinese Emperor Wang hsuan-tse to
the extent that he praised them as great artworks (Ibid. 1995). No reli-
gious murals of that particular period exist today and only inscriptional
evidences of their existence have been found. However, some centuries-
old religious murals still exist on the walls of a number of very old temples
and monasteries in the country such as the Shantipur temple in Kathmandu
and Jampa Lhakhang monastery in Upper Mustang among others.
In contrast, the street art scene that emerged after the turn of the cen-
tury was largely influenced by the Western street art scene. It all started
with a series of pieces by Invador, a French artist whose mission was to
‘invade’ the cities through his creative pixel designs, appeared in different
parts of the city walls in 2008. However, it was not until 2011 that the
street art movement as such began to take shape in Nepal. Foreign and
Nepali artists using pseudo-names like Bruno Levy, Yeti, Rainbow Warrior
and Mr. K made the initial interventions in the visual landscape of the city.
Their street arts laid the ground for the beginning of street art movement
in Kathmandu. Kailash Shrestha soon took the baton forward by launch-
ing a street art project called ‘We make the nation’ in the same year.
Shrestha, whose aim was to be a mere ‘banner artist’ as a child growing up
in his remote village of Dolakha, went on to attend an art school in
Kathmandu. Upon graduation, he founded Artudio in 2010 as a space for

like-minded artists to come together and share their respective works.
Frustrated with constant political deadlocks and the increasing ‘visual pol-
lution’ spread by political parties and businesses in the city, Shrestha
decided to take to the streets not by organizing strikes but by registering
a visual protest in 2011 painting on the boundary walls of Hotel Himalaya
in Kathmandu.
We initially wanted to paint the walls of Ratna Park in Kathmandu and so

accordingly, we approached the concerned authority. However, our requests
went unheeded. We then reached out to the Hotel Himalaya asking if they
would allow us to paint on their boundary walls that faced the streets. They
agreed as soon as we put across the idea. In this way, using whatever few
resources we had, I along with some friends launched our first street art proj-
ect which also happened to be the first street art project by Nepali artists.2
As a medium of expression, street art gained popularity in the country

also because of its better accessibility for both the artists and the audience.
Irvine writes, “Street art thwarts attempts to maintain … ‘non-art’ space
and the institutional regime controlling the visibility of art” (Irvine 2012: 25).
Nepali street artists are also not supportive of the controlled visibility of
arts in the institutional spaces which are often exclusive to younger artists
as well as to those whose works do not fit into the existing conventions.
Younger artists who have just graduated from art schools have difficult
time to break into the contemporary art scene. They lack access to avenues
to display their artistic skills and talent. The street artists, I talked to,
admitted that they wanted to show that the gallery scene did not hold the
monopoly in the display of arts. Kiran Maharjan, a member of the art col-
lective ‘Artlab’, joined the street art scene following his failure to get his
works accepted by the commercial art galleries.
Right after I graduated from art school, I looked for avenues to showcase
my works. I approached several galleries and art shops but the owners did
not show any interest in my works. This experience then prompted me to
bypass the galleries and take my works directly to the masses through street
art. Moreover, I was already involved in the skateboard scene in Kathmandu
which has affinities with graffiti culture. All these later led me to street art.3
2
Excerpt from the interview with Kailash Shrestha conducted in Kathmandu, 5 July 2017.
3
Excerpt from the interview with Kiran Maharjan conducted in Lalitpur, 6 July 2017.
232 B. GURUNG
It should be noted that galleries are also commercial spaces. Such

spaces, according to Becker (1982), operate through a network of people
consisting of producers, distributors, dealers, promoters and critics among
others. It is their co-ordinated activities facilitated by their common inter-
est in art and their agreement on what constitutes ‘art’ enable the art
world to function. By placing arts in everyday surroundings, street art has
not only problematized the conventional place of art but, following
Papastergiadis (2010), one may say that it has also transformed the author-
ity of art by bringing it closer to the masses. Bourdieu (1993) reminds us
that one requires some cultural capital as a means to appropriate arts. Such
cultural capital, according to Bourdieu, is not accessible to the bulk of the
population. According to Bennett et al. (2010), it is the educated middle
class and elites who are likely to frequent art galleries and it is they and
their children who are likely to develop knowledge about arts and thereby
increase the cultural capital at their disposal.
Bourdieu (1993) underscores the role of education in cultivating ‘taste’
for artworks. He likens the educational qualification to the title of nobility
through which comes certain dispositions like patronizing museums and
galleries and so on. By taking arts to the streets and thereby to the
‘untrained’ public who were not supposed to lay their eyes on arts in the
first place, Nepali street artists like their counterparts in other parts of
the world have defied the conventions of art production and consump-
tion. Rupesh Raj Sunuwar who started off as a painter moved to street art
scene after he was emotionally affected by the massive destruction caused
by the massive earthquake of 2015 in Nepal.4 As he wanted to spread a
positive message to the people in distress, he painted a mural with a theme
‘We will rise again’ following which he got connected to ‘Sattya Media
Arts Collective’. Sunuwar was of the opinion that street art democratizes
‘art’ significantly (Fig. 9.1).
Arts are not just for the expatriates who can afford to buy and hang them on
the walls of their fancy living rooms and offices. An artwork should not be
taken merely as a decorative item rather it calls for serious engagement. This
engagement is possible only in the street arts where people encounter arts in
their everyday life.5
4
Nepal was hit by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake in 25 April 2015 which took the lives of
thousands of people and injured many more. More can be read at: https://www.pri.org/
stories/2015-04-25/devastating-earthquake-leaves-more-thousand-dead-and-rising-nepal
5
Excerpt from the interview with Rupesh Raj Sunuwar, 7 July 2017.
Fig. 9.1 Mural by Rupesh Raj Sunuwar. (Photography by Binit Gurung)
The Personal and the Political: Locating Aesthetics

in Street Art
While it is quite apparent that the works of the artists are shaped by the
prevailing socio-political and economic issues, the agency of the artists can
be located in the intentionality of their artworks, which manifests in the
contents of their artistic expression. Stating that arts are expressive in
nature, Dewey (1994) likens objects of arts to languages. He writes, “Each
art has its own medium and that medium is especially fitted for one kind
of communication. Each medium says something that cannot be uttered
as well or as completely in any other tongue” (Dewey 1994: 211). Street
art therefore is a unique art medium in which the personal and the politi-
cal come together. As the personal and the social are implicated into each
other, the personal doesn’t necessarily mean ‘private matters’ of an artist.
Following Mills (2000), it may be useful to bring up the distinction
between ‘troubles’ and ‘issues’ in relation to street art. Mills insist that the
‘troubles’ are private matters of individuals which they can address them-
selves from within their milieu whereas the ‘issues’ are matters of public
234 B. GURUNG
concern which pose threat to the values cherished by a large number of

people in the society. As street art is a form of visual language to commu-
nicate to the masses, what is expressed by the street artist is not his private
‘troubles’ but the ‘issues’ that most people can relate to. The personal that
prevails in street art is the self of the artist that is moulded by the society.
On the other hand, the political is the expression of the street artists which
maybe confrontational or instructive serving to bring certain issues to
prominence and influence public discourse about them. Shrestha, in one
of my extended conversations with him, explained to me that it was his
surroundings that would mostly influence the content of his street arts.
What goes around the city is what reflected on the walls of the city. Street
art can be a personal expression of the artists but it is ultimately social
because we are communicating with the society about something most peo-
ple can identify with.6
Dewey makes a similar point when he writes, “the material out of which
a work of art is composed belongs to the common world rather than to
the self, and yet there is self-expression in art because the self assimilates
that material in a distinctive way … The material expressed cannot be pri-
vate … But the manner of saying it is individual” (Dewey 1994: 212).
What is distinctive about street art is, writes Irvine (2012), its direct
engagement with the city. He explains, “The artists and the works presup-
pose a dialogic relationship, a necessary entailment, with the material and
symbolic world of the city” (Irvine 2012: 10). It is this very dialogue that
Shrestha sought to make explicit when he initiated his street art project.
At the time of starting our street art project, I was also annoyed by the
advertisement banners and hoarding boards that cluttered the urban space.
I could see that this indiscriminate onslaught of commercial and vested
political messages/information in the public spaces was making people visu-
ally insensitive and uncritical in their thinking. I wanted people to think
about current issues critically and not take things for granted. To that end,
we believed no other medium can reach out to the masses as effectively as
street art.7
6
Excerpt from the interview with Kailash Shrestha conducted in Kathmandu, 10 July
2017.
7
2017.
The intentionality of the street artist aiming to break the status quo is
out-and-out political. However, we should not lose sight of the question
of aesthetics here. For many, the political edge in art comes at the expense
of aesthetics as if both cannot co-exist. This line of thinking comes from a
view on “art as a second reality alongside the world in which we live day
to day, rather than as one of the powerful social instruments for the cre-
ation and maintenance of the world in which we live” (Donald Preziosi
quoted in Turner and Webb 2016: 16). Kemal and Glaskell (2000) note
that politics, aesthetics and arts could co-exist together in a meaningful
relationship. This is also how most street artists in particular would like to
view their works. Street artists in Nepal aspire for aesthetic depiction of
their ideas on the city walls and thereby speak to the masses. Following
Irvine (2012), one may say that street art ‘de-aestheticizes’ ‘high art’ and
meanwhile ‘aestheticizes’ the hitherto non-art spaces like the city walls.
This itself makes street art political in nature.
Though individuality is not overlooked in street art, many street art
works in Nepal have been projects where different artists came together
and worked out their ideas in a team before translating them into visuals
on the city walls. Artudio’s I’M YOU project led by Shrestha was a case in
point. Under this project, they painted man, objects, human apparition
with the words ‘I’M YOU’ in different parts of the city to urge people to
think critically and not take anything for granted. They basically wanted to
convey to the people that they all were connected and shared enough
common ground to make collective actions. In one of their notable art
works under the project, they painted activist Dr. Govinda KC in a sitting
posture with the caption I’M YOU. Dr. Govinda KC is a well-known
orthopaedic surgeon and a professor of orthopaedics at Tribhuvan
University Teaching Hospital in Kathmandu. The particular artwork in
question emerged in the context of Dr. Govinda KC’s repeated hunger
strikes since 2012 to protest against the irregularities in the medical sector
such as political appointment in national medical institution, exorbitant
fees for medical education, undue universities’ affiliation given to private
medical schools lacking adequate infrastructures and the unholy nexus
between medical mafia and politicians among others.8 By painting
8
A broad summary of Dr. KC’s demands and activism can read at: http://archive.nepali-
times.com/article/from-nepali-press/what-govinda-kc-wants,3869
236 B. GURUNG
Dr. Govinda KC’s portrait on the wall, Artudio artists wanted to commu-

nicate to the people that his fight against the irregularities in the medical
sector is indeed a public cause that should concern all Nepalis. By lending
support to Dr. Govinda KC’s activism instead of sitting on the fence, the
artists have taken “on the challenge of the political in their work” (Turner
and Webb 2016: 16).
Turner and Webb rightly note that “artists make work as responses to
the events that have touched them, that have crossed their paths and their
consciousness” (Turner and Webb 2016: 17). This is exemplified by the
works of street artists in Nepal. The Kolor Kathmandu street art project
done by Sattya Media Arts Collective in 2012 is a case in point. Under this
collaborative project, the artists painted a little more than 75 murals in all
the 75 districts of the country, each of them depicting a unique identity of
the place. The artists were critical of the urban consumer culture which,
they believed, made Kathmandu not only ugly with all the commercial
sign boards but also disconnected the capital city with other largely rural
parts of the country. The aim was therefore to connect the capital city with
the rural far-flung districts of the country with artistic imagination. The
project was also an initiative on the part of the street artists to reclaim
public spaces from the political parties which have long been taking liberty
with public spaces, virtually monopolizing them with their political slo-
gans. The attempt to reclaim the city by the street artists itself is a political
act. Molnár aptly notes, “The real political significance of street art lies not
so much in the direct political messages carried in the artwork but in the
very practice of street art itself ” (Molnár 2011: 9).
As a part of Kolor Kathmandu project, Dibyeshwor Gurung painted a
mural in Baluwatar, Kathmandu depicting the transformation of urban
landscape due to rapid urbanization in recent times. It depicts the implica-
tions of urbanization and rapid migration of Nepali youths outside the
country. Gurung in this noted mural wanted to highlight the mess that
characterized today’s urban landscape which could only be smoothened if
the youths stayed back in the country. As someone who had spent some
years abroad, the mural certainly represented fragments of his own experi-
ences of leaving the country. His experiences and observations in the city
were not entirely his. They were also shared by people in the city to a vary-
ing extent. However, Gurung was of the belief not all people would be
receptive to the ideas depicted on the street walls. As street arts are placed
in public spaces, they attract attention of people from different walks of
life and some might even take offence. Though Gurung never experienced
direct hostility because of his works, he nevertheless remained wary of
such a possibility. Aesthetics, according to him, plays an important role to
add nuances to the ideas that can be politically blunt.
When I want to project something that is politically sensitive or controver-

sial, I make sure I do not translate my ideas explicitly in my works. Some
people in the streets can take exception to certain political works and hence,
may create obstructions while working. Therefore, one needs to have a
nuanced approach in projecting political ideas of potentially controversial
nature.9
Artlab, a Kathmandu-based art collective which specializes on street

arts, first launched a street art project called ‘Prasad’10 in 2013 which
raised the issue of labour migration and brain drain to foreign countries.
Under this project, they painted over-sized portraits of national figures in
public spaces not only in the capital city but also in other cities like Birjung,
Pokhara, Beni, Dharan and Tansen with an aim to inspire the local youths
to stay back and contribute to the society as per their capacities. By paint-
ing murals of mostly non-political figures, the artists appeared to have
avoided touching upon the contemporary political issues. Kiran Maharjan,
for one, believed that a street artist needed to have mainly ‘street art aes-
thetics’. However, Turner and Webb remind us that “whether artists
choose to focus on their own aesthetic and maintain a distance from socio-
political concerns, or engage energetically in current troubles, they are
part of the culture, and in presenting a particular set of images and atti-
tudes, will necessarily reflect something about the lived world” (Turner
and Webb 2016: 15). By encouraging people not to succumb to the cul-
ture of migration through their works, the street artists working under the
‘Prasad’ project are implicitly politicizing what appears as personal. In
practical terms, it is impossible to draw a clear boundary between the per-
sonal and the political in the realm of street arts. Rather, street art embod-
ies the interplay between the personal and the political (Fig. 9.2).
9
Excerpt from the interview with Dibyeshwor Gurung conducted in Lalitpur, 12 July
2017.
10
‘Prasad’ is a Nepali term for devotional/religious offering in the form of edibles made to
God during religious occasions. It may also be loosely understood as an embodiment of
blessing from God.
238 B. GURUNG
Fig. 9.2 Mural by Dibyeshwor Gurung. (Photography by Binit Gurung)
The Local and the Global: The Production

and Consumption of Street Arts
Street artists in Nepal have not only represented the local issues and
themes pertinent to the everyday life of the people in their surroundings
but they have also raised issues of global concerns which may have direct
or indirect impact on the lives of the people at the local level. The depic-
tion of urbanization, depletion of environment and haphazard pursuit of
development among others are themes of global significance and relevance
which the Nepali street artists have depicted on the city walls. The street
artists may draw on ideas and styles originating in other parts of the world
but all their imports are tempered by local experiences and concerns.
The colours I’m using are not produced here, the paint brushes were
imported from some other country, the techniques and styles were invented
elsewhere too. If the use of foreign materials make an art less Nepali or non-
Nepali, there cannot be a truly Nepali art in today’s interconnected world …
I was inspired by not only by foreigners and their works but also by my own
tradition and religious murals of the past. Besides, I was very much influ-
enced by our own philosophical movement like Thaha Movement.11
The Nepali term ‘Thaha’ refers to a state of ‘knowing’. The Thaha

movement led by Rup Chandra Bista (1934–1999), in the second half of
the twentieth-century Nepal, emphasized on the need to develop critical-
ity in perception and thinking. To that end, Bista experimented with new
ideas and approaches while assuming several roles in his life as a teacher, a
local administrator and a political activist among others (Baral 2014). As a
teacher, he experimented with initiatives like labour-based education,
informal education and education for girls in his community (Ibid. 2014).
As a VDC chairperson, he established development-oriented institutions
like Palung Bikas Samiti, Bikas Ghar and Bikas Bari (Ibid. 2014). As a
political activist, he practised and advocated for a people-centred politics
under the influence of communism (Ibid. 2014). Bista mainly encouraged
people to cultivate critical awareness and knowledge about one’s milieu as
a means to achieve social justice and development.
Shrestha from Artudio believed that art can help develop this criticality
as advocated by Bista. Similar observation has been made by Papastergiadis
when he writes, “the critical work of art is related to its ability to expand
the contours of perception and experience” (2010: 19). The expansion of
perception, experience and thinking is also aided by the globalizing forces
which have spared no region in today’s times. Globalization has both sup-
porters and detractors (Kellner 2012). However, it would be erroneous to
characterize globalization with broad brushstrokes typical to each camp.
While globalization transforms the local culture or practices to an extent
owing to the influx of new ideas and practices from elsewhere, globaliza-
tion is still not a juggernaut that destroys the local culture and tradition
completely. Rather, all local cultures are adept at picking up elements from
outside culture without posing threat to their own tradition. Nepali street
artists capitalize on globalization while being critical to it. Their works are
informed by both the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ perspectives.
The spread of Internet and wireless technology around the world has
facilitated interactive communication in real time. This has allowed street
11
2017.
240 B. GURUNG
artists in one part of the world to get in touch with fellow artists in other
parts of the world and be abreast of each other’s latest works. Many street
artists travel to different cities around the world and work independently
or in collaboration with the local artists. Italian street artist Riccardo Ten
Colombo, for example, collaborated with Sattya Media Arts Collective in
the aftermath of the great earthquake of 2015 to do a street art project in
Kathmandu. Together, they painted coloured equilateral triangles, as a
symbol of strength and resilience, on the walls of those structures destroyed
by the earthquake. Similarly, French visual artist Julien de Casabianca’s
Outings Project launched in 2014 brought him to Kathmandu after the
earthquake. The Outings Project is driven by the idea that the arts con-
fined to the museum spaces should be made available for the wider audi-
ence. To that end, Casabianca employs street art and has brought images
out of the local museums to public spaces in various cities of the world.
Considering the loss suffered by people of Nepal due to the recent earth-
quake and people’s unshaken faith on god, Casabianca pasted a large
image of Mahākāla, an old painting of a deity, to the side of the building
where Artudio is housed. Casabianca believed that the deity could be a
source of hope and courage to some onlookers (Fig. 9.3).
An example of similar exchange in the South Asian region is the col-
laboration between Indian street artist Shilo Shiv Suleman and Pakistani
women’s rights activist Nida Mustaq in 2015 to work on Fearless Pakistan
project which took them to cities like Karachi, Rawalpindhi and Lahore in
Pakistan. At a time when the issue of women’s security in public and pri-
vate spaces was being discussed in India and Pakistan, they wanted to
make murals with the theme of fearlessness depicting the stories and expe-
riences of Pakistani women. To that end, they organized interactive work-
shops for the local women and engaged the latter thoroughly in the
process of making murals in different cities. In all these instances, we could
see that the ‘local’ figures prominently in every street art project even
when the artist in question is a foreigner. Irvine rightly notes, “A street
work can be an intervention, a collaboration, a commentary, a dialogic
critique, an individual or collective manifesto … Whatever the medium
and motives of the work, the city is the assumed interlocutor, framework,
and essential precondition for making the artwork work” (Irvine 2012: 3).
The works of foreign street artists have not always gone down well.
There have been instances when the visiting artists were not sufficiently
sensitive to the local context or worse, paid no attention to the historical
and religious significance of the local structures. One such instance was
Fig. 9.3 Mural by Julien de Casabianca. (Photography by Binit Gurung)

242 B. GURUNG
when Franco-British street artist Seb Toussaint and French photographer

Spag came to Nepal with ‘Share the Word’ project to work in the slum
located on the banks of the Bagmati river at Teku in Kathmandu (Thapa
2014). Though Toussaint’s initial plan was to paint in the slum by engag-
ing the slum dwellers, he wrapped up his project by painting the facade of
a nearby nineteenth-century Shiva temple in multiple colours (Ibid. 2014).
This triggered an uproar in the art community in Nepal which particularly
put the Nepali street art artists in a tight spot raising ethical questions
around the practice of street art for the first time in the country. Recalling
this incident, Shrestha criticized Toussaint for his insensitivity and the
younger Nepali street artists in particular for not having a sense of history.
Shrestha gave premium to a proper sense of history and tradition in street
art. His I’M YOU project was motivated by the same belief where he
wanted to talk about local identity in a global context.
We often talk against imitating other culture but then, we forget our own
identity and tradition. Our education system is shallow. Our history is
uncritical and we often take it for granted. Art can be a critical way of talking
about identity and history. For example, we painted Karuwa12 in the streets
of Tansen in Palpa district because Palpa is known for its Karuwa but
youngsters are not aware of that. We made the intervention to remind peo-
ple of their local identity without which we lose our unique identity in
today’s globalized world.13
Webb (2005) celebrates globalization pointing to its ability to reinvigo-

rate tradition. It is the hallmark of all dynamic cultures to take in ideas
from other cultures as much as necessary without threatening their own
traditions (Ibid. 2005). However, every tradition is syncretic in the first
place (Gellner 1997). In the context of Nepali contemporary art since
1990s, what contemporary artists are doing are not just local, national or
global. Their works are rather informed by a mix of ideas, symbols and
images drawn from different cultures. Commenting on the emerging
novel art forms since 1990s, Bangdel writes, “a new movement towards
experimentation, social engagement, and socially-conscious alternative art
12
‘Karuwa’ is a Nepali term for a type of brass jug. Tansen city of Palpa district is known
for its traditional brass jugs.
13
2017.
practices often served as reactionary voices that responded to local issues”

(Bangdel 2017: 60). By the late 2000, Nepali street artists, many of whom
were trained in art schools in Kathmandu, built upon these developments
in the contemporary art scene even while breaking away from it to enter
the hitherto non-art extramural spaces.
However, it would be naive to assume that people perceive the street
arts the way the street artists wanted them to. The street artists, I talked
to, shared that they were not much bothered when people understood
their works differently. Dibyeshwor would find it amusing whenever peo-
ple randomly approached him with their interpretations of the mural
which he painted at Baluwatar in Kathmandu. This would not have hap-
pened, he argued, if the encounter between his art and the people had
happened inside a gallery. Maharjan admitted that the artist would lose the
ownership of his art once it was there in the public domain. However, he
maintained that one needed to have ‘street art aesthetics’ to make it visu-
ally appealing and meaningful. Otherwise, the work would be meaningless
and perhaps ugly (Fig. 9.4).
Fig. 9.4 Mural by Artlab. (Photography by Binit Gurung)

244 B. GURUNG
If aesthetical value seeks to evaluate arts, aesthetics of street art serves

to differentiate between what may be considered the real street art/artists
and the lay ones. By stressing that one needs to have a sense of ‘street art
aesthetics’ to be a street artist, one can sense an existence of kind of a gate-
keeping mechanism in place in the street art scene even though street art
is theoretically open to anyone who can paint as the public space is owned
by no one in particular. For Becker (1982), the question of aesthetics is
not some abstract question but it is something that has real consequences
in the form of allocation of rewards and opportunities. What rewards and
opportunities can a street artist possibly have? There have been cases of
street artists cosying up to commercial enterprises in clear contradiction of
its anti-commercial spirit. Some street artists in the West like British-artist
Banksy and American-artist Shepyard Fairey among others are also
commercially successful and have been featured by contemporary art gal-
leries and museums. Such contradictions are not lost on street artists.
Despite its short history, Nepali street art is clearly growing and seems
to be moving gradually towards commercialization. Artlab, which
Maharjan is affiliated to, now focuses exclusively on street art and com-
mercial graffiti “due to its high demand in the market”, as Maharjan would
say. As more owners of restaurants and hotels in the city are increasingly
interested in having their spaces painted with colourful murals and graffiti,
offers for commissioned works are no longer difficult to come by. The
street artists also work with a variety of NGO/INGOs and embassies
based in Kathmandu. While Nepali street artists are aware that the com-
mercial turn in street art can go against the very spirit of street art, they
also argue that opportunities for commissioned works are in fact impor-
tant for them to sustain themselves professionally in the city. They also
justify their commercial stints as a way to fund their non-commercial art
initiatives. Besides doing some funded projects and commissioned works,
Nepali street artists have continued wrestling with the social and political
issues. Some street artists not only switch between commercial and non-
commercial works as and when needed. They also freely traverse across the
boundaries between the contemporary gallery scene and the street art
scene, thereby blurring the boundaries altogether.
There have also been instances of collaboration between the street art-
ists and the government in executing street art projects in South Asia.
Street art groups in Delhi like St+Art India Foundation and Delhi Street
Art, for instance, have worked with Delhi government agencies to paint
on the walls of public institutions/structures. Such co-operative relation-
ship has obviously contributed towards gradual mainstreaming of the

street scene in the city. Wherever the visibility of art is tightly controlled
within the walls of institutions, street artists paint surreptitiously in the
streets evading the attention of the authorities. In the case of Nepal, the
local authorities do not give permission to paint in the public spaces but
they do not go about stopping anybody from painting the public spaces
either. When private properties are involved, the artists in question often
take prior permission with the property owners before painting their walls.
However, street arts are ephemeral in nature. They may wear off natu-
rally over time or could be removed by local authorities or property own-
ers any time. The competing political graffiti of the political parties add to
the ephemerality of the street art in Nepal. However, the artists also cap-
ture images/videos of their artworks and share them in different social
media platforms. Art collectives like Artudio, Sattya Media Arts Collective
and Artlab regularly archive their street arts in the form of images and
videos in their Facebook pages, Instagram, blogs and websites.14 Though
several works done by the artists in the past no more have physical pres-
ence, people still continue to encounter them in the online media. This
has somewhat contained the temporality of street art and has further
democratized its consumption.
Conclusion
One cannot appreciate the street art scene in Nepal without taking into
account the contexts of its emergence. The developments of the contem-
porary art scene in 1990s in Nepal and elsewhere in South Asia and beyond
entailed significant reconfiguration of the very conceptualization of ‘art’.
In the case of Sri Lanka, the contemporary art during the period embraced
the personal and political sentiments of the artists for the first time usher-
ing in a fresh breath of air in the contemporary art scene in the country.
Nepali contemporary art in the 1990s saw the coming of many new art
styles and forms like performance art, video art, installation and so forth
Selected works of Artudio can be seen at: http://artudio.net/project/street-art/

14
Selected works of Sattya Media Arts Collective can be viewed at: https://www.facebook.
com/KolorKathmandu/
Selected works of Artlab can be seen at: https://www.facebook.com/artlablife/
Selected works of Dibyeshwor Gurung can be viewed at: https://www.instagram.com/
iamdib/
246 B. GURUNG
which expanded the contours of Nepali contemporary art landscape. The

liberalization of the economy, the reinstatement of democracy and the
context of globalization provided conducive environment for the contem-
porary artists to go beyond the established conventions of Nepali art. This
soon led to an explicitly political turn in the contemporary Nepali painting
in the 2000s.
The changes in the contemporary art scene in 1990s paved way for the
development of street art scene in Nepal over the following decades. While
building upon the developments in the contemporary art culture in the
country, young street artists attacked the elitism of the gallery-based con-
temporary art scene which was exclusive not only to them but also to the
ordinary masses who supposedly did not hold the cultural capital to con-
sume art works. Nepali street art received impetus not only from the devel-
opments within the contemporary art scene but also from the economic and
socio-political contexts of the country, not to mention the trends prevalent
in the street art scene beyond its nation-state boundaries. The themes taken
up by Nepali artists were not dissimilar with the themes taken up by their
counterparts in other parts of South Asia and beyond. Be it Egypt, India or
Pakistan, the common thread connecting the street arts in all these places is
their conversations with the prevailing social, political and economic issues
via the city walls which function as the open canvases.
As is apparent, street artists are ever-vigilant members of the society
who are abreast of the prevailing social, political and economic issues of
the country and beyond. Being a member of society, artists are also located
within the larger structures of politics, economy and society. Hence, artis-
tic ideas are not independent of the existing social and material conditions.
However, a deterministic reading of arts by reducing them to the social
and historical contexts in which they were produced would fail to explain
the important role of the individual artists. It is true that individual artists
often draw on their personal experiences while making art. However, the
personal is always in the process of being shaped by the society. The per-
sonal and the social are therefore implicated into each other. One is not
subordinated to the other, rather both are mutually inseparable.
The street art projects described in this chapter show that the artists
were motivated by their belief that that they could make some difference
via street art. By taking arts to the public spaces, the street artists are mak-
ing a political statement in a number of ways. First, the practice of street
art is in itself political. Breaking away from the gallery scene, Nepali street
artists have introduced arts to the hitherto non-art spaces. To quote
Papastergiadis, “when art challenges the boundaries by which we under-

stand the aesthetics of the everyday, and combines this experience with a
new understanding of connection to our surrounding world, then it could
be argued to have expanded the sphere of politics” (Papastergiadis 2010: 19).
Second, the contest for visibility in the public spaces with commercial and
political interest groups lends street art a political edge. Third, the visuals
laced with social and political connotations make street arts political in
sentiment because they are aimed to provoke people into thinking. Hence,
street art is an art form which embodies the interplay between the personal
and the political. This relationship is mediated by the aesthetics of street
art which facilitates and constrains the practice of street art.
Since communication with the masses is at the heart of any street art
initiative, a street art is not an expression of personal ‘troubles’ of the artist
but an initiation of a dialogue related to some public ‘issues’ that most
people can easily identify with. Instead of passively resigning to the public
‘issues’, in the Millsian sense of the term, they tend to make artistic inter-
vention in the public spaces. While artists cannot possibly change the
world through art, they can however employ art to “protest against injus-
tice, war, racism, oppression, human rights abuses, environmental degra-
dation, cultural loss, poverty and all forms of discrimination and
exploitation” (Turner and Webb 2016: 16). The agency of the street art-
ists can be located in their intentionality to change the existing state of
affairs.
As discussed above, Nepali street artists position themselves in their
own tradition and culture while appealing to the global discourse. They
have engaged with a range of issues like environmental degradation, ani-
mal conservation, urban consumerism and so forth which are also the
issues of global concern. Even though their works are physically located in
a particular time and space, the images of their works pass across the
nation-state boundaries freely in the world of Internet which helps to con-
tain the ephemerality of street arts and democratize its consumption. The
online archiving and sharing allow street artists based in different parts of
the world to give their local arts a global audience. Street art becomes an
avenue where the local meets the global mediated by the intentionality
and experiences of the artist rooted in a particular time and space. One
could safely conclude that the street art scene in Nepal is characterized by
the interplay between, on the one hand, the personal and the political and
on the other hand, the local and the global. This is quite evident in the
street art projects surveyed in this chapter.
248 B. GURUNG
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CHAPTER 10
Ruptures of Rasheed Araeen in the Politics

of Visual Art: Toward a New Art
Discourse in Pakistan
Amra Ali
The reading of contemporary narratives of art in their broader connection

to sociology and anthropology is a welcoming opportunity of discussion
within a South Asian context. This understanding of the complexities of
narratives would be relevant within a holistic view, inclusive of the local
and global contexts in which they have been made, shown, and written
about. The ground reality in Pakistan is that the value of art is still pre-
dominantly gauged within the dynamics of making and selling of objects
in the commercial gallery circuit, and by a close network of buyers. The
discursive space that would allow for ideas to develop otherwise exists
somewhere in the periphery, and it is not a cohesive base. It is dispersed
unevenly, often in its own insularity.
This is an engaging time in Pakistan, as writers and artists function
within the dynamics of appropriation, misappropriation, and colonial
mindset. If there has to be a movement beyond, past the current situation,
toward a more critical base, it needs to pull itself outside the insularity and
A. Ali (*)
Karachi, Pakistan

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05852-4_10
252 A. ALI
exclusivity of the gallery circuit, as well as the art academia, which seems
to be closely interrelated. It is, therefore, necessary to shift the conversa-
tions elsewhere.
The aim of this chapter is to discuss two works by Rasheed Araeen1
(1935‑), whose esthetics constitute of their socially productive interven-
tion within a public space and connect to a historical frame. Araeen’s
Theory of Nominalism was presented in Karachi, in 2003, and his work,
Shamiyaana: Food for Thought, Thought for Change, was installed at
Documenta 14, in Athens, in 2017. Araeen’s larger trajectory of subver-
sion and confrontation is well-documented. However, his proposals for
land and alternate solutions to potential ecological imbalances and prob-
lems of food deprivation and distribution of resources have yet to come
under discussion in Pakistan. His esthetics challenges the status quo of
inclusive circles, and insists on a broader connection based on an equal
access and participation by the public. The nature of Araeen’s collabora-
tion goes beyond its consumption as a commodity or an object of fetish.
It locates art within an ethical and social frame, rather than as spectacle or
embellishment. Of course, the inherent contradiction may seem to be the
recent presence, or canonization of Araeen in the most important art fairs,
such as Documenta 14, the Venice Biennale 2017, Frieze Art 2017,
Sharjah Biennial 2014, and at least two recent additions of Art Dubai.
The projects outlined in his book, Art Beyond Art, Eco-Aesthetics: A
Manifesto for the 21st Century, can become significant models for social
change, and could cross disciplinary interventions. Araeen raises two sig-
nificant points that become important in understanding the ethos of his
modernity. First, he locates his process of work that evolved over many
years as being a multilayered discourse in which he views Third Text, the
journal he published, as a collaborative work. Second, the obstacles he saw
resided in the “prevailing knowledge or dogmas of the established order”
(Araeen 2010a, b: 56). He discussed at length what he saw as the prob-
lems perpetuated by “modernism’s historical genealogy” (Araeen 2010a,
b: 56). On a note of despondency, which rarely surfaces in his narrative in
such a tone, he writes, “My path was thus obstructed not by the narcissism
of my own ego, but the self-delusion of a powerful ego which had con-
quered the world and was still trapped in its dehumanized vision. When I
1
For more information on Rasheed Araeen, visit: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/
rasheed-araeen-2364
RUPTURES OF RASHEED ARAEEN IN THE POLITICS OF VISUAL ART… 253
insisted on my own self, defined by my own liberated subjectivity and the

freedom of my own imagination, I became invisible. The darkness of
(neo-) colonial mist was still there to obscure you” (Araeen 2010a, b: 59).
In his book, Art Beyond Art, Eco-Aesthetics: A Manifesto for the 21st
Century, Araeen begins his chapter, ‘Return to Baluchistan, Nominalising
the Bourgeois Aesthetics’ with a photograph of a dried riverbed with the
following caption: “This photograph was taken from a bridge in Balochistan
which is about 30 feet high, but during the monsoon flood water flows
over the bridge” (Araeen 2010a, b: 68). Baluchistan appears to be the
core of Araeen’s modernity, which is also a critique of globalization and
contrary to the aspirations, the anti-esthetics of contemporary art and its
structural framework of commodification and appropriation. On February
8, 2001, Araeen delivered the first draft of his manifesto, ‘The Art of
Resistance: Towards a Concept of Nominalism’ in Karachi.2
It was apparent that the audience, which comprised of artists, writers,
and friends of the art community, were unable to understand the relevance
of a social project to their making of ‘art’. Araeen’s esthetics was located
art outside of the prescribed norms of painting the landscape or even
deriving inspiration from it. For example, it was very different from the
imagery and its linearity that Sadequain derived from the cactus, during
the artist’s stay in Gadani, also in Balochistan in 1957. Artists may have
looked beyond the art gallery since then, but the engagement has been
cursory, without a visible direction or discussion. It is still predominantly
about the making and acquisition of objects (and hence remains for and
within elitist circles). Araeen’s intervention was more of a form of resis-
tance to global power structures, aimed to connect the artist to the social
context. His approach was neither local nor global, but cosmopolitan.
That in itself was a problem for those receiving the idea of this work,
because there was no prior example of such a collaboration within the art
community.
There was a deafening silence during and after Araeen’s talk, making it
clear of its irrelevance to that particular context. The lack of discussion was
2
See Amra Ali, ‘Stranger at Home’, Dawn, February 18, 2003. This article was originally
titled, ‘Dr. Rasheed Araeen: A Profile and Some Thoughts on His Art of Resistance’, and was
changed by the editors. This was published a few weeks after Araeen’s presentation in 2001,
hosted by Anwar Rammal at Suman House. However, in his book, Araeen has noted it being
presented in December 2001. The final version of ‘Nominalism’ was published in Third Text
in December 2002 (issue 61), after it was presented in London in April 2002.
254 A. ALI
perhaps also due to the inaccessibility of Araeen’s wording, language, and

historical references. He rejected Western models of land and conceptual
art on their colonial eye: fetish, and romanticized notions of foreign lands.
The real problem seemed to be the lack of connection of Pakistani artists
and to these issues. In retrospect, it is apparent that there was no historical
context within Pakistan to base this work on, except, of course, if the artist
extended his role to do social work and not as an artistic exercise.
Araeen’s project itself was a proposal for a land art project looking at
alternative solutions to cultivating land in Baluchistan, to be self-sustained
by the local people. He proposed using local infrastructure and rules, and
for its full ownership to be transferred from the artist to the community
upon completion. Araeen’s emphasis was on “collective farming by people
themselves” that “would increase the efficiency of land”.
This was a particularly significant critique of the local governments that
invited multinationals for developmental projects, dislocating, dislodging,
and disrupting the natural social order, environmental balance, and integ-
rity of the land and its connection to its inhabitants. He wrote: “It is with
the imaginative power of art that I want to move forward; with a proposi-
tion that may lead to a new kind of thinking and produce a new kind of
critical practice, out of which may also emerge a revolutionary concept of
art based on the nominalism of everyday work carried out by people them-
selves or their material production” (Araeen 2010a, b: 65).
His practical solutions responded to the exploitation of natural resources
faced by domination. Araeen was aware of the idealism of his project, and
the high amount of funding that would be required (Ali 2003). But his
resilience seems to have become stronger and more determined, especially
in the face of obstacles. In a recent exchange of email conversations, he
expressed the need to (re)initiate the idea of this project.3
In Art Beyond Art, he discussed the multilayered and reconnected
aspects of his directional change from his confrontational works of the
1970s, done in the UK, such as Paki Bastard (Portrait of the Artist as a
Black Person), in 1977. In this performative work, he was “blinded by
dark glasses, gagged, holding a broom or mop or handle to suggest labor
as a cleaner” (Araeen 1979: 120). Araeen’s subjectivity was always rooted
within a humanist perspective that disregarded the material gain of art
making; his subversion later turned into collaborations and collectives that
3
Email communication between the author and Rasheed Araeen, January 2018.
were indeed far, beyond Art. He writes about his shift to ‘eco-aesthetics’
especially in the context of the Third World, whose resources have contin-
ued to be depleted by land grabbing and global ambitions. He was looking
desperately towards establishing an art discourse that would shift away
from the neocolonial mindsets of capitalist agendas; the discourse that had
“become trapped in a self-serving decadent paradigm of the worst kind”
(Araeen 2010a, b: 64–65).
Araeen differentiated his project from the conceptual artists of the
1960s, seeing their work as the blunders of “bourgeois altruism” (Araeen
2010a, b: 69). He further wrote in the manifesto, “their self-centered
discourse offered a fantasy, which they could manipulate conceptually and
present as a work of art. If a land appeared, particularly through the cam-
era’s eye, as a wilderness, it was only because they did not want to see or
allow their eyes to penetrate beyond what they wanted to see/ the people
who inhabited the land either disappeared from their gaze or became
object” (Araeen 2010a, b: 62). He was referring here to Richard Long’s
collection of specimens of objects such as rocks and earth from distant
walks and showcasing in museums. However, he lauded the “transforma-
tional function of [Joseph Bouys’] art project” of planting 7000 Oak trees
in Kassel for Documenta 7 in 1982 (Araeen 2010a, b: 71). He discussed
the example of Guatemala and Honduras where farmers discovered the
‘magic bean’ called Mucuna. The use of this bean in cultivation raised the
quality of maze to the extent that “erosions of land halted, destruction of
the rainforest curtailed, and migration to cities reversed” (Araeen 2010a,
b: 70).
In the prelude to his solutions of land problems in Baluchistan, he
described the context in which the work was conceived. He was very direct
in his attack on early modernists in Pakistan: of ‘Sadequain’s narcissism’
and ‘Chughtai’s Orientalism’; a ‘modernity imported on the “pictorialism
of Picasso, Klee, Chagall, Matisse”’, as he called it (Araeen 2010a, b: 58).
This was another important subtext in Araeen’s narrative, for his work has
not been studied or contextualized within the art historical narratives of
modernity in Pakistan. This is an unresolved subject, and there are sensi-
tive links, especially as we are now studying the earliest connections of the
artist to land and water, and the period before 1964. Araeen’s sensitivity
to the environment and vision of nature, particularly to land, earth, and
water, in pursuit of a more equitable balance with nature and the distribu-
tion of resources in the interest of the collective, seemed to have been
shaped by childhood experiences.
256 A. ALI
This land of Baluchistan has been of special significance to Araeen,

where he has dreamed of building a dam to store water for cultivation. His
earliest connection to water was of his living in Sonmiani, a sea-side town
in the southeast of Baluchistan, near Karachi. He remembers it as a beauti-
ful town, where he lived from his birth in 1935 till 1944 (Araeen 2010a,
b: 14). As he narrates, “my father sent us (my mother, a brother and sis-
ters) to our parental villages regularly every two years, and in 1941–2, we
lived in these villages. Just around my grandmother’s hawaili (family
home) was a rahat (Persian wheel) to draw water from the well. The
wheel, which was connected to the mechanism comprising a number of
buckets which went down the well and came up full of water, was moved
by two bullocks who went around a circle. I was fascinated, particularly by
the up-and-down movement of the buckets, the water they brought up
and released in the turf. One day when there was nobody to sit on the seat
behind the bullocks, they put me on the seat, and I had to run the whole
thing. There are many other things from my childhood which have played
a role in my aesthetic sensibility”4 (Ali 2003).
As a young boy in Karachi, he would try to escape the cruelty of the
teacher, would often skip classes, and with three or four fellow students,
he would wander around the city, often going to the Netty-Jetty Bridge of
Karachi harbor where he says that he would sit for hours looking at the
water. It seems that the memory of this experience in Karachi was also
connected to his experience from his East London studio at St. Katherine’s
Docks, which were large abandoned warehouses surrounded by water.
There was a small wooden bridge over the water that he crossed every day
that triggered his imagination, resulting in the Chakra Series of works: ‘It
was the memory of this experience which perhaps went into my percep-
tion of a landscape with water in Baluchistan’ (Ali 2003).
Two of his sisters still live in Uthal, a town about 100 kilometers from
Karachi. “I would probably go and visit them when I’m in Karachi. I
didn’t live in Uthal, but visited it in the summers of 1949 and 1959 and
4
Rasheed Araeen revisited the Netty-Jetty Bridge with this author on the eve of his retro-
spective, Homecoming, in Karachi, in 2014. The Netty-Jetty Bridge has now become a food
street. This subtext refers to Araeen being part of the history of Karachi, especially his link to
the 1950s–1960s.
spent two months there with my family every year. I’ve however many
memories of my childhood and boyhood in Baluchistan”.5
Returning to Baluchistan was an important turning point also because
perhaps this project was a symbolic gesture of embrace to his roots, a gift
and a call for collaboration with unknown participants in the future, who
would cultivate the land, and build the infrastructure of housing and ame-
nities; generations who would benefit. The artist would thereby relinquish
his ownership of the project. The irony, of course, has been that it remains
unrealized to this date, and he writes, “it is better to day dream with a
hope for a humane future than allow oneself to be dehumanized… by the
greed for money and power”.6
Araeen’s Shamiyaana: Departures and Destinations

Newman makes the following observations about the esthetics and struc-
tural features of Araeen’s works at the Documenta 14 in 2017 which are
centrally implicated in the politics of the works: “Two works by Rasheed
Araeen for Documenta 14, 2017 involved participation by the public,
incorporating paintings and structures with abstract designs. In both
cases, the effect was celebratory and welcoming. For Kassel, he installed a
reading room for a complete edition of Third Text under his editorship
with the table and chairs made using his module cubes with diagonal
braces, thus bringing together his structures, with his path making inter-
vention in the critical discourse of post colonialism and globalization
through writing and editing” (Newman 2017: 65).
Shamiyaana, Food for Thought, Thought for Change was installed at
Kotzia Square in Athens. Locally grown fresh and organic produce from
the nearby Greek food market was used by Organization Earth to cook
and serve free meals at the Shamiyaana for one hundred days of Documenta
14. Shamiyaana is the ceremonial cloth tent, usually supported by bam-
boo poles on the sides, commonly used for the gathering of family, neigh-
bors, and friends in Pakistan, to celebrate a marriage or any significant
milestone of a family that includes the cooking in outdoor tamboos (large
5
My email communication with Araeen, February 8, 2018. On each visit to Karachi, Araeen
visits his sister in Baluchistan and has extensive photographic documentation of the land.
6
The Theory of Nominalism was presented in 2002, Karachi. Araeen’s intervention was
neither debated nor entertained in the local art circles, except for an article by this author in
Dawn, and Niilofur Farrukh in Newsline magazine. Araeen was always seen as if distanced
and removed from the local circles.
258 A. ALI
cooking ware) and serving meals to the collective. In such gatherings,

there is always an informality, inclusive of children, and far and distant
relatives, even the poor who happen to pass by. There is discussion on
every subject, and almost always on the state of the country and politics
and a great bonding of community. Shamiyaanas can pop up overnight or
anywhere there is a need by a family, where the road is blocked off and traf-
fic diverted without any notice given or permission taken by the city munic-
ipality. It is perhaps because of this kind of engagement that he has grown
up with, that has allowed Araeen to conceive of the Shamiyaana, at
Documenta. From the readings of it, it seems that it happened very organi-
cally. It also made one reflect on the bridge that Araeen created effortlessly
between the private and public, the local and global.7
In Athens, “120 people were served food daily. After the first few days
of people fighting to get in, they were asked to get color coded coupons.
Some people became the regulars and others would come again after the
first visit. Araeen did not intervene to stop or alter the natural gathering of
people, who eventually became a community, even beyond the work and
Documenta 14. [He] wanted people to spend at least a set time frame eat-
ing and exchanging conversations”.8
Kotzia Square, which had been run down and abandoned for many
years, was revived by immigrant families, with a food market started
nearby, in the 1980s. Marina Fokidis, one of the curators at Documenta
14 in Athens, who saw the project through, remarked on the fragility and
criticality of the work. It was installed right in front of the municipality
7
Sometimes the Kanaat (white tent), as the Shamiyaana is also called, is used for seating
mourners outside the house for the reciting the Quran, and sharing grief, that concludes
with a communal meal. These are culturally expected norms, and wherever these are installed,
the neighborhood manages its own traffic diversions in an informal manner and comes
together. The Shamiyaana pattern referenced by Araeen is historically significant and also
refers to his own structural work, such as Sharbati, and to his recent paintings of flat color
bands, with interconnected geometric designs that were first shown in the exhibition,
Homecoming, 2014–2015. So, there is a meeting of these histories, in the most unusual
intervention in Athens.
8
Excerpt from Skype conversation between this author and Marina Fokidis (January
2018). Fokidis is one of the curators who witnessed the process of the Shamiyaana project
at Documenta 14, 2107. She is a curator and writer based in Athens, founding and artistic
director of Kunsthalle Athena, and founding and editorial director of the biannual arts and
culture publication, South as a State of Mind. Her interviews around the connection of
Athens can be seen online at http://myartguides.com/posts/interviews/documenta-14-an-
interview-with-marina-fokidis/
building and the Greek National Bank on the other side, making visible
the precarious economic condition of Greece, its growing number of
homeless: “Rasheed Araeen approached Athens and its perplexity in the
most sensitive way. He seemed to be able to hear the city’s voice, its needs,
and its possibilities. His Shamiyaana, in its four colors and patterns, as it
stood critically in front of the town of Athens, invited a multiplicity of
subjectivities to mingle freely-beyond restrictions caused by a set of factors
and the configurations of power as we know them. Rasheed probably
thought that time, interaction and the return of lost dignity is what people
needed to co-exist in profound ways. The food was cooked fresh and
served for over three months in the wounded space of Athens. And offered
a possibility for this special meeting-between different constituencies,
lonely souls, people carrying different urgencies, that do not necessarily
meet. The experiment worked. By approaching the city, in its platonic
sense, the polis- not as a mere site but as a body of fluctuating citizens,
Araeen brought back, the warmth and security of the broken domesticity,
that used to be an essential force in the location-and an alternative to the
western idea of the welfare state. Shamiyaana was a gesture that continues
beyond time and space as was embodied by all its participants, and beyond
art of course”, deliberates Marina Fokidis.9
Fokidis is quoted on the curatorial vision on the Documenta 14 web-
site: “In Szymczyk’s words, Documenta 14 might become a lesson in
breaching the normative economic, political, and geographic divisions,
and attempting a shared experience mediated by culture and, more specifi-
cally, the contemporary art exhibition. Athens stands metonymically for
that ‘rest’ of the world that has not become (and could not yet become) a
part of Documenta 14 in a proper sense, due to lacking privileges”.10
What Fokidis is referring to, in quoting Szymczyk, the curator, is the
essence of Araeen’s narrative. His ‘idea’ of finding resonance in the con-
text of Athens and the single-most significant art exhibition in Europe
seems to be an important lesson in the curatorial dynamics of the world art
exhibition, as it continues to play an important role in influencing Biennales
all over the world.
The Shamiyaana, sitting apart from the rest of the exhibition, seeks
inclusion on its own terms of representation. The magnitude of Araeen’s
9
This author’s email communication with Marina Fokidis, February 9, 2018.
10
http://myar tguides.com/posts/inter views/documenta-14-an-inter view-
with-marina-fokidis/
260 A. ALI
gesture at Athens stems from a critique of the larger structures in society,

of which art is a part. We see Araeen reinventing himself as he absolves
himself the rights over his art, toward a space of sharing. This rupture
within the context of Documenta 14 can become a strong anchor in influ-
encing and determining the direction of future exhibitions especially in
the context of South East Asia. There can be lessons and immense possi-
bilities in reinventing the biennial regionally. Karachi held its first biennial,
KB 17, in October‑November 2017. The connections to the city that KB
seeks can alter the dynamics of art and esthetics, without appropriating
Western models. As an example, the cultivation of land on a long-term/
self-help basis, or even more urgently, the crisis of untreated solid and
toxic waste being dumped into the Arabian Sea can be a focal point of
artistic and social collaboration.
Those benefitting from and participating at the Shamiyaana did so
regardless of their interest, knowledge, or previous connection to Araeen.
The work cut across nationalistic and cultural boundaries. Divisions of art/
non-art would seem like irrelevant clichés, as the artist inverts the nature of
Biennale, which still has the semblance of a fair and spectacle. Imagining the
Shamiyaana in Karachi, for example, would bring a totally different esthetics
than Athens. This can be a curatorial challenge worth exploring, if we are to
allow ourselves to listen to the voices from around us, amidst us.
Katerina Lygkoni, an invigilator at the Shamiyaana at Kotzia, narrated
her experiences of peoples’ exchanges of giving and sharing. One lady, she
said, would come every day and tell people not to waste food. She would
bring tissues and extra food just in case they were needed. “Irini, one of the
lady cooks at Shamiyaana, (you, [Rasheed] had met her), married her hus-
band (both at Organization Earth) at a civil wedding (a) few days ago. I
saw photos at Facebook. And I was happy to see that one of the people
who signed for it and escorted them was Nike, one of the invigilators at
Kotzia Square! They met under Shamiyanna of course”, wrote Katerina in
one of the email exchanges between this writer and Rasheed Araeen. She
wrote of the ways people who had met there kept the connection with visit-
ing each other in different cities, or through phone messages, and so on.11
11
This author’s communication with Katherina and Rasheed Araeen in December 2017
and January 2018. Katerina Araeen relates many conversations and exchanges at Shamiyaana.
These are some of the links in the media on Shamiyaana: https://www.hna.de/kultur/
documenta/nur-5-62-statt-9-euro-aerger-um-documenta-loehne-in-athen-8448758.html,
photos.app.goo.gl, https://photos.app.goo.gl/xLHJpluRU0baiZjv1
The testimonials from Kotzia gave a similar sense of bonding of com-

munity. Marina stresses that this was meant to be a place for genuine
exchange, and not a spectacle, or a charity. With a huge budget that was
to feed simple and fresh quality meals for up to a 120 people per day, each
person, many of them immigrants, was treated equally. She gave the exam-
ple of participants who wanted to give back, such as a person who took
permission to start free lessons on language and teach hundred words of
Greek to visitors at the Shamiyaana.12
The participatory nature of the work weaves beautifully the intricacies,
structure, and ethos of Araeen’s esthetics. His architectural drawings of
the 1970s on grid formations, colorful diagonals in structural works in
wood such as Sharbati (1973–2013), and his large paintings Ibn Sina, Al
Ghazali, Al Faraabi, Al Kindi (2012), executed in Karachi, in the limit-
less possibilities of color formations of interconnected diagonals and grids;
most importantly, Shamiyaana, as ‘structure’ specific to Araeen, reflects a
space that holds as a space for forging human bonds; his island of resil-
ience, always clearly separated from the establishment. On a more personal
note, it resonates with the warmth and humbleness of his own link to fam-
ily. In the family home that he designed and got built in the 1960s in
Karachi, the rooms were structured in keeping with the needs of his family
members, him being the eldest son who took care of them after his father’s
death. This writer has visited Araeen in his Nazimabad home since 2001,
and on each visit felt this to be the core, his earliest ‘structure’. This was
the second house designed by him in Karachi, also for the family. As you
approach it, turning into the lane where the studio of Ansari Photographer
has stood for decades, you see rows of grills on windows and gates. The
grills in linear geometric patterns, designed by Araeen at the time of con-
struction of the house resonate in his earliest works in black ink, and the
later structural work in grid formations. It is at these moments one
becomes aware that there appears no separation between the engineer and
his creativity that responds to his social context. The structure holds the
family, the history, and its bonds. Shamiyaana seems to evoke a similar
sense of bonding, as Marina Fokidis relates about the Greek culture of
close family ties.
At Documenta 14, Araeen’s Shamiyaana sits outside the frame of ‘art’,
literally on the street, where the discussion seems really about forging
Marina Fokidis. Op.cit.

12
262 A. ALI
bonds between people of all races and social backgrounds, free from the
exchange of money. The universality of Araeen’s vision and his insistence
on de-commodifying esthetics becomes a critique on the power politics
and insularity of contemporary and historical narratives in art. It insists on
locating art outside of the production of commodities for Western art
markets, or new global markets elsewhere.
Araeen has, though not in published writing, but on different occa-
sions, has conveyed his rejection of the new miniaturists of the National
College of Arts, Lahore, and more specifically of work that has found
inroads to new markets in the West. The directions in these works no
doubt created and sought market approval/patronage of Western muse-
ums as their prime audience. Ironically, Araeen has shown almost exclu-
sively in the West through the mid-1960s till the present, so this is the
inherent contradiction in his narrative. Having said that, one is also aware
of his subversion of racist and colonial biases of Modernity in the West. He
continues to contest established norms. Always the outsider, Araeen
remains at home, in a place between the east and the west, between art
and non-art. It is a difficult situation to be in, and there are fewer models
available that would support the understanding of his innovation and dis-
sent. On the occasion of Homecoming, he remarked about the difficulty of
being understood in Europe and Pakistan in a holistic manner. It seems
that there are different aspect of his work crossing some 60 years, from his
earliest interest in art, and his subsequent migration to the UK, where he
approached the three dimensional as a non-artist/engineer. How one is to
connect this long sojourn into a whole is a daunting task, especially as the
study of modernity is itself an issue to be read in its interface with the
artistic developments on the ground. So, reading Araeen is a problem; he
poses difficult questions to the history and values of art.
Araeen recounts the aspect of collective sharing of food with an earlier
work. In 1978, at his parents’ house in Karachi, Araeen and his brother
Majeed slaughtered a goat, the meat of which was cooked at home and
shared by the family. Muslim families follow this tradition to commemo-
rate Prophet Abraham’s sacrifice of the lamb in lieu of his son Prophet
Ismail. He narrates the feeding and taking care of the male goat at home
until its sacrifice. The meat is then distributed to relatives, and the needy.
One part is eaten by the family as gratitude. This was photographed by
Araeen’s sisters Najma and Nasreen. The documentation became the
work, I Love It; It Loves I (shown at Pentonville Gallery in London,

1983), which is also a reference to Joseph Buoys’ I Love America; It
Loves Me.13
The wide span of his career is punctuated with complexities of different
cultural and historical contexts. In 1975–1976, he narrates cooking regu-
larly for the Sunday events at Artists for Democracy (AFD) in London. He
writes: “This group was founded by a group of artists and led by David
Medalla; they were involved in working class struggles in the early 70s,
and then turned to art activities in support of antiracist and anti-imperialist
struggles worldwide. After successfully organizing an art festival against
the brutality of Pinochet’s military regime in Chile, at the Royal College
of Art in 1974, they established a squat for events, meetings …I joined the
collective on the invitation of Medalla, and held my first exhibition there.
AFD had no money and the Sunday gatherings needed some kind of
refreshment. So, I decided to cook food. People would bring their own
drinks and I provided ‘curry n’ rice’ for a small sum of money”.14
Reception and Curatorial Critique: Ways

of Reading Art
In Pakistan, Araeen has been generally viewed, often from a distance, as

solving someone else’s problem. He has, however, presented many impor-
tant works, such as his Theory of Nominalism (2001–2003), and deliv-
ered lectures (such as the key note speaker at the AICA conference in
2004), in Karachi. His most important works, such as his famous cycle tire
burning on a walk home from college, and recognizing the round rim as
his first ‘sculpture’ (1959), took place in Karachi. This solitary walk was
recently recreated in Karachi (2015–2016) and its documentation has
been part of the work at Araeen’s retrospective at the Van Abe Museum,
Holland (2017–2018). His Dancing Bodies, from the Hoolahoop Series of
drawings in pastel and ink (1959–1962), were done after the artist was
mesmerized by the movement of the hoola-hoop when he saw some chil-
dren doing it as he sat in the gardens at Frere Hall, in Karachi. His iconic
13
Rasheed Araeen, Notes on Shamiyaana for Documenta. Email correspondence,
December 2017.
14
Rasheed Araeen, Notes on Shamiyaana for Documenta. Email correspondence,
December 2017.
264 A. ALI
Disk throwing performance in the 1970s, at the Jheel Park in Karachi, is

remembered by many senior artists who witnessed it. Some of the photos
from the second disk throwing performance at St. Catherine’s docks a few
years later were exhibited at Homecoming, yet there was no question, no
query, no investigation on the nature and purpose of this performative
work, either in the reviews or panel discussion held along the show.
Araeen, in his own writing, speaks about the freedom of the idea to
travel, in his own words, ‘towards infinity’. The disks symbolic of the (his)
‘idea’ were released in the water in a performance in a public space which
ordinary people could witness, hence making it a collective collaboration.
They were then received in London and then Paris in similar performances.
We see Araeen seeking audiences across the globe, oblivious of nationalis-
tic or cultural boundaries, in many such conciliatory gestures. But the
reception to his ideas has been ignored, at best. One can safely conclude
that this was due to a lack of interest in any work that looked outside the
boundaries of depiction through image making. The earlier artists set cer-
tain conventions of patronage that remained within a tightly guarded
space. For example, Bashir Mirza was supported by ZA Bhutto and despite
his early Lonely Girl Series, he made several large-scale portraits of the
Bhutto family onboard. Ismail Gulgee, as Araeen recounts in an unpub-
lished paper, copied the work of Eleaner Hamilton, an American artist
who lived and worked shortly in Karachi, setting up studio at the Metropole
Hotel. This is when he stared using acrylic, like her. Besides, Gulgee was
also commissioned by the state to make portraits of visiting heads of state,
such as the Shah of Iran, Raza Shah Pahalvi among others.
Araeen is perhaps the only living artist whose trajectory overlaps with
the artists working in the 1950s and 1960s in Karachi. It extends to differ-
ent forms including performative work, and a vast amount of theoretical
critique (Third Text), as well as a curatorial work. He curated, ‘The Other
Story: Afro Asian Artists in Post-War Britain’ at the Hayward Gallery in
London in 1989. The work of 24 artists included his own as well as the
works of Saleem Arif, Sonia Boyce, Frank Bowling, Eddie Chambers,
Ayanish Chandra, Avtarjeet Dhanial, Ugo Egonu, Iqbal Geoffrey, Mona
Hatoum, Lubaina Himid, Gavin Janties, Balraj Khanna, Li Yuan-chia,
Donald Locke, David Medalla, Ronald Moody, Ahmad Parvez, Ivan
Peries, Keith Piper, Anwar Jalal Shemza, Kumiko Shimizu, Francis Newton
Souza, and Aubrey Williams. These artists were grouped into four sec-
tions: ‘In the Citadel of Modernism’; ‘Taking the Bull by the Horns’;
‘Confronting the System’; and ‘Recovering Cultural Metaphors’. Araeen’s
approach was ahead of its time then, as no other artist of Pakistani origin
was willing to speak out, let alone confront the art establishment and the
politics of racism in Britain. Araeen curatorial work was necessitated by his
discourse, whereas today curating is a specialized area of study and prac-
tice. There is a difference between professional ‘curators’ who bring a set
of appropriated values in mounting exhibitions, with disregard to the
social and artistic context of viewership and exhibition dynamics in
Pakistan. These are new systems being established and most certainly
geared for new markets in the Middle East and Asia.
There is documentation of brochures, press clippings, and art maga-
zines, published in Karachi in 1950s and 1960s that are being studied by
this writer. One brochure, which was a form of catalogue of today, lists a
painting by Araeen that was sold for (PK)Rs. 300, and works by Chughtai,
Zubaida Agha, Jamil Naqsh, all under Rs. 500. The Artists’ Club, Karachi,
of which he was a member, took out a magazine called Art & Life. The
first issue (Vol. 1, No. 1) was published in March, 1956 and priced at As.
(Annas) 8, with an annual subscription of Rs. 5 Its official address was
Turab Studios, on Elphinston Street, now Zaibnnissa Street in Saddar.
Araeen dealt with the public relations and A.R. Qureshi was the Editor.
These histories are significant to the development of the art discourse in
Karachi and Pakistan and important documentation of Araeen’s early
years. The disconnect to these reflects lack of continuity in relating to the
past, because the ‘discourse’ has been established by those who have either
been ignorant or selectively censored/altered the facts or both.
Araeen launched Third Text Asia, an extension of the journal that he
edited in the UK, in Karachi in the early 2000s. One of the subtexts here
is that his writing, performance, sculptural, and other works are all part of
one narrative, but due to the conventional division of text and image, his
work has not been understood holistically. Many issues of the Third Text
and other publications that he has edited were on display as well as on sale
at his mini retrospective Homecoming, in Karachi (2014–2015), but these
texts including Art Beyond Art, which carries his manifestos on Eco-
Aesthetics was not read as a work of art. This is an inherent problem of
reading art, and for which one can naturally address the nature of teaching
at the art institutions. In Araeen’s case, there might be disinterest, igno-
rance, and censorship on the part of the art establishment. Disinterest
because his narrative does not offer the glamorous spectacle of contempo-
rary concerns, ignorance because there is little desire to engage within a
discursive space, and censorship because his work deconstructs the appro-
266 A. ALI
priation of Western models of making and viewing art. At some point, it

threatens the power structures that support the influential galleries in
Karachi. Incidentally, Karachi happens to be the economic center from
where artists from all over the country, and especially from the National
College of Arts, Lahore, have launched their careers.
At Homecoming (VM Gallery, Karachi), more than a hundred works
included ink, pencil, watercolor, oil and early photographs by Araeen done
between 1952 and 1963, some being shown for the first time anywhere.
Audiences expected more of the iconic work such as ‘Paki Bastard’, or
more of the structural work done abroad. There was that subtext of local
audiences, especially the gallery going art community, always in awe of
something foreign. There was a disconnect between the expectations and
informality in which Araeen adapted to the curved and irregular architec-
ture of the VM. A very important curatorial concern at Homecoming for
this writer was the choice of its venue. To the disappointment of the elite
gallery crowd, Araeen’s retrospective was decided to be held at the VM
Gallery that is part of a community center. It is located in the older, less
prestigious part of PECHS Society in Bahadurabad in Karachi, whereas all
the affluent galleries are located on the ‘other side of the Clifton bridge’.15
While visitors had flown in from Europe and North America for this, the
Clifton crowd were visibly inconvenienced to be out of their comfort zone.
Araeen also refused to change the existing tube lights or other structural
issues while installing the work. He filled the walls with work that was to be
‘read’ in its connect to the past, decided to provide no information in the
conventional gallery or museum-labeling pattern. Without any slick effects
of lighting, or use of space, Araeen, the post-modernist, was also subvert-
ing contemporary concerns/canons; and he was deconstructing himself as
someone who had achieved great success in the Western mainstream.
The success of it was that it became an antithesis to current curatorial
work, which is modeled and appropriated on the frame of accepted
Western museum standards. There appear many levels of curatorial sub-
version, none of which were picked by the art critics who viewed the work.
For example, the audience was greeted by Araeen’s earliest water colors of
the 1950s and 1960s. At a time when artists have moved beyond the
depiction of boats and sails, here was Araeen, showcasing these works after
having kept them locked for 60 years. The audience did not know how to
15
The Clifton Bridge has been a mark of social divide in Karachi, separating the more
upscale and affluent areas of Clifton and Defense Society from the rest of the city. Incidentally,
two of the city’s art colleges are also located on either end of this area.
read Araeen. As always, his movement was in the opposite direction of the
mainstream. The irony that remains, however, is that Araeen has been seen
as a ‘diasporic’. It is the very idea of categorizing that has been part of his
resistance in the West. The issue of exclusion, and lack of understanding of
the complex interface of his narrative, is an unresolved area of Pakistan’s
art historical context. Always the outsider, Araeen remains at home, in a
place between the east and the west, between art and non-art.
His move to first Paris, then London, in 1964 was a break away after
being disillusioned with the commercialism and narrow approach to art in
the circles in Karachi. At that time, his work was seen as unconventional
and disturbing. He wrote, “I showed my work of hula-hoop series at Pak-
American Centre in 1961, but no one could understand it. The reason for
this was the limited understanding of modernism. In Pakistan then – and
even now – modernism meant that which could be referred to the already
established modernism, in the West and then it’s somewhat second-degree
expressions in rest of the world. In my work the audience could not find
any reference to any of the work which was already known and recognized”.16
As he notes further, “when I showed my Hyderabad series in 1963 at the
Arts Council gallery, I did have more audience and it was well-covered by
the press. But I think there was little understanding of its significance. I had
no supporter or buyer, and I sold only one small painting. It was a big dis-
appointment because many of my young contemporaries were selling their
works (Kohari sold almost his whole exhibition in 1963); it was this situa-
tion that made me leave my country and go to Paris”.17
The times, circumstances, and anxieties referred to by Araeen above, are
articulated by the art critic, Sultan Ahmed in the brochure for Araeen’s first
solo exhibition held at the Arts Council of Pakistan, Karachi, in July 1963:
“What is young Rasheed Araeen seeking? Does he feel so suffocated amidst
the crass commercial values of Karachi and its philistine pursuits that he
desperately yearns for an escape from them? He is a painter on the road to
somewhere; but what exactly will that place be neither he or we can say
now. A young man who respond forthrightly to his environments cannot
be easily predicted when he is at the center of contradictory forces”.18
16
The author’s email exchange with Araeen, September 18, 2014.
17
The author’s email exchange with Araeen, September 18, 2014.
18
From Rasheed Araeen’s extensive collection of brochures and documentation of his
shows and art writing from the 1950s and 1960s, in his home in Karachi; also in exhibition
catalogue of solo exhibition of Rasheed Araeen published by the Arts Council of Pakistan,
Karachi, in 1963.
268 A. ALI
Between 1958 and 1959, there began to appear an uncontrollable

energy and restlessness, perhaps even anger, with hurried diagonal lines in
stark black, watercolor, and black ink; its geometry is extracted from the
shapes of boats, was articulated in what may be Araeen’s first abstract
work, Boats at Rest, 1958 (part of Boats Towards Abstraction, 1958–1962).
Araeen recalled that at one point, the image of boats, no longer in front of
him, become abstract shapes. In Floating Boats, 1962, they appeared like
migratory birds whose movement is outwards. Apart from Araeen’s own
physical displacement to another continent in 1964, this was also meta-
phorically significant to his modernity, located outside what he saw as the
hierarchal formalism of artists such as Anthony Caro, William Tucker, and
Philip King.
Sultan Ahmed wrote of Araeen’s wind-catchers, painted in one after-
noon visit to Hyderabad (Pakistan): “The wind-catchers are not mere
wooden structures whose geometrical forms captivate him. They are a
world in themselves to him. He sees them as excellent pieces of architec-
ture, as symbols of freedom for the stifled and suffocated, and as men,
women and more often as peasants”.19
Homecoming was envisioned to take place at the VM Art Gallery due to
the proximity to Araeen’s family home and studio, located in Nazimabad.
In 1971, (late) Mohammad Aly Rangoonwala started the Zuleikhabai VM
Gany Rangoonwala Community as a vocational center for women as a
philanthropist Trust of the Rangoonwala family, and added the gallery in
1987. One of the three galleries of the VM was once a marriage hall and
one of them, a verandah, later closed off to accommodate the art. The
interaction of people of diverse economic and social background come
here for courses in painting, needlework, cooking, and so on, and the
Rangoonwala family, headed by their elderly mother, still eat at least one
meal weekly with less privileged children of the neighboring communities.
It was natural to pay tribute to Araeen in this community space that had
an inclusive meeting point of art and the communities who lived in this
relatively older part of the city. Tariq Rangoonwala, CEO of the
Rangoonwala Trust, honored Araeen by opening and dedicating an entire
new gallery wing with his name.
19
Excerpted from the exhibition brochure of Rasheed Araeen’s solo exhibition, published
by the Arts Council of Pakistan, Karachi, July 1963.
It is essential to have a longer and self-reflective exploration to reveal

the structural biases of the art establishment in Pakistan. However, the
preceding discussion will explain how Araeen has been by and large
excluded from these forums. One may see a glaring example of this con-
tinuing trend in Araeen’s exclusion at the First Karachi Biennale, held in
2017. It is also ironic that this Biennale that was spread across some 12
public and non-art locations across Karachi, excluded Araeen, who had
simultaneously set up his ‘tent’ at Documenta 14, in Athens (2017). It is
also ironic that Shamiyaana was based on the social and cultural life and
esthetics in Karachi, as a strong link to Araeen’s upbringing in that city.
There cannot be a more explicit demonstration and example of his contin-
ued exclusion in the Pakistani art establishment than this incident. This
subtext is important in reading Araeen, which simultaneously becomes a
reading of contemporary art narratives and structures that support or
excludes them.
References
Aikens, Nick. 2017. Rasheed Araeen: A Retrospective. Zurich: JPR Ringer.
Ali, Amra. 2003. Stranger at Home. In Dawn, February 18.
———. 2014. Rasheed Araeen, Homecoming. Karachi: VM Art Gallery.
Araeen, Rasheed. 1979. Making Myself Visible. London: Kala Press.
———. 2010a. Art Beyond Art, Eco-Aesthetics: A Manifesto for the 21st Century.
London: Third Text Publications.
———. 2010b. Obstacles, Obstacles and More Obstacles: Art Beyond Art, Eco-
Aesthetics: A Manifesto for the 21st Century. London: Third Text Publications.
Areen, Rasheed. 2002. The Art of Resistance: Towards a Concept of Nominalism.
Third Text 16 (4): 451–466.
Newman, Michael. 2017. Equality, Resistance, Hospitality, Abstraction and
Universality in the Work of Rasheed Araeen. Catalog Essay, Rasheed Araeen: A
Retrospective, 2017.
CHAPTER 11
Collectivism in the Contemporary Sri Lankan

Art: The History of an Unusual Case
of Artists
Anoli Perera
This chapter1 is an attempt to understand the nature of art collectivism

through a close exploration of the work of one particular collective run by
a group of artists. This is, the Theertha International Artists’ Collective in
Sri Lanka in the post 1990s, an epoch that witnessed the radical transfor-
mation of much of South Asian art within national contexts, particularly
visible in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Through Theertha’s
vision and mission that translated into a major constellation of programmes
insistently executed for nearly 18 year, the artists’ collective was able to
1
An initial version of this chapter was published under the title, ‘Theertha: A Journey by a
Collective of Restless Artists,’ pp. 117–139. In, Pooja Sood, Ed., South Asian Network for the
Arts. New Delhi, Dhaka, Colombo and Karachi: Khoj International Artists’ Association,
Britto Arts Trust, Theertha International Artists’ Collective, Vasl Artists’ Collective.
A. Perera (*)
Colombo, Sri Lanka
New Delhi, India

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05852-4_11
272 A. PERERA
establish a particular brand for their art activities within Sri Lanka, and
beyond. The intention of this chapter is to explore the socio-political and
ideological manoeuvrings and the grounding of the artists within the larger
landscape of art, back-grounding the culture and politics of Sri Lanka.
Art collectivism has a long and illustrious history within modernism
and in postmodern as well as contemporary contexts of art. Such collectiv-
ism has emerged within specific contextual and temporal dynamics, some-
times as an appendix of a social movement or as resistance to orthodoxy
and, at other times, as a cathartic or an empowerment strategy. The his-
torical trajectories of art across various parts of the world are punctuated
and enriched frequently by such collectivisms. Among many, there have
been Dadaists, futurists, surrealists, the Fluxus, the California Beats,
Guerrilla Girls, to name a few from the Euro-American centres of art.
They are well documented and have been global signifiers for anarchic and
anti-establishment stances in art, and some of them have also been sources
for critical engagement with contemporary society.
In order to understand the collectivisms within South Asia, and particu-
larly in Sri Lanka within which the artists have organized themselves for
socio-political as well as aesthetic purposes, it is necessary to look beyond
their engagements with Euro-American modernism. Also, it is imperative
to reason with the artists’ collective in Sri Lanka, beyond the trope of
resistance to cultural hegemonies of dominance. For decoding the collec-
tive behaviours of artists, there is necessity to create a premise that could
be sensitive of the contexts fraught with socio-political constitutions.
Describing the context for change within India for Indian artists, Geeta
Kapur describes it as “a civil society in huge ferment, a political society
whose constituencies are redefining the meaning of democracy and a
demographic scale that defies simple theories of hegemony” (quoted in
Turner 2005: 3). This can hold true for many of the Asian countries and
their artists’ restless need for finding and redefining their own parameters
for making their art contemporary. And this is intrinsically connected with
the way these nations’ politics and cultures played out in their own turfs as
well as outside. For instance, the economic transformations happening at
the end of last millennium in India and China, the two largest countries in
Asia, as well as elsewhere in the Asia pacific, had their own impact within
the region. The socio-cultural and political impacts of such changes
together with the newly emergent ideologies de-centred the older centres
and challenged the established hegemonies of dominance. As Turner has
observed, “the turn of the century has witnessed the beginnings of an
COLLECTIVISM IN THE CONTEMPORARY SRI LANKAN ART… 273
astonishing alteration in the balance of power towards Asia, militarily as

well as economically” (Turner 2005: 1). This transformation signalled
“the impending close of five centuries of global domination by first
Europe, then the United States” (Turner 2005: 1). At the same time, the
initial years of the new millennium facilitated the rethinking of the ways in
which world relationships had been fathomed so far, and many of these
relationships had to be “transformed by globalisation” and the so-called
war on terror (Turner 2005: 1). South Asia in particular had undergone
regime changes, economic expansions and restless political environments
in most of its constituent national regions, while globalization, consumer-
ism and materialism played into their social fabric bringing in new cultural
dynamics to reckon with. As Turner eloquently reasons, “artists can,
through their work, reflect the values and aspirations of their own society,
and of humanity. While some react with cynicism and even despair, others
produce an art of resistance. Over the past decades, many artists in the
Asia Pacific region have protested colonialism and neo-colonialism; global
environmental degradation; cultural loss; illness due to poverty; sexual
exploitation; social and political injustice; war; violence and racism. Their
work is in the broad area of social justice” (Turner 2005: 4).
The art of 1990s within South Asia and later decades implicitly mir-
rored the anxieties and the triumphs of the regional as well as global
changes referred to earlier. And in this context, a number of artists and art
movements in the move towards affecting transformations within the field
of art, sometimes facing resistance and reticence from the art establish-
ments at home and sometimes the sustenance for transformative energy of
artists, came from sources outside of their home countries.
Post-1990s Sri Lankan Art

The 1990s can be seen as a decade that stirred collective energies within
the Sri Lankan artists’ community that changed the course of art history
in many ways. This was the decade of ‘90s Trend’, an art movement that
thoroughly contemporized Sri Lankan art, and impacting the art commu-
nity which changed the way visual art was thought of, made and con-
sumed. The 90s Trend can also be seen as providing the defining energy
that fuelled many attempts of collectivism within Sri Lankan art scene and
its ideological positions, and it certainly had much to do with the forma-
tion of Theertha, an artist’s collective that supported and propagated
experimental and socially critical/interventionist art of the 90s Trend.
274 A. PERERA
Insightfully, Kapur notes, “once we admit history – over and above art
history – as the matrix from which the notion of avantgarde arises, then
there are always plural histories in the reckoning” (2005: 57–58). Taking
into account Kapur’s words on the avant-garde and the complexity of the
90s Trend, it cannot be understood only within an art historical discourse
of Sri Lankan art. To assume the purpose of its evolution as a contestation
between formalism and aesthetic structures of the previous art practices or
as an anti-art establishment ploy is reductionist. Rather, the 90s Trend and
its collectivism reflected a historicism that was rooted deep in Sri Lanka’s
socio-political moment of the time. Kapur cautions us further on the Afro/
Asian avant-garde by stating that two events should take place simultane-
ously for Asian and African avant-garde to come to its own (Kapur 2005).
The first of these is a “move that dismantles the hegemonic features of the
national culture itself ”, while the second is “a move that dismantles the
burdensome aspects of western art, including its programmatic vangard-
ism. That is to say such an avant-garde has to treat the avant-garde principle
itself as an institutionalized phenomenon, recognizing the assimilative,
therefore sometimes the paralyzing capacity of the (western) museums,
galleries, critical apparatus, curators and media” (Kapur 2005: 58).
In many ways this holds true for the 90s Trend art and its sense of van-
gardism. The 90s Trend certainly came out of a situation of political anar-
chy and social chaos. Sri Lanka was grappling with its own legacy of
post-colonial problems. In 1988, a violent youth uprising in Sri Lankan
society took hold of the southern part of the country, and long-drawn
armed conflict due to ethnic issues terrorized the north and northeast.
These dynamics allowed many thinking segments in the country and a
number of vocal artists in particular to question the identity, authenticity
of national political and cultural practices as well as the legitimacy of and
nationhood itself. If there were a sense of stability and assurance of a new
national identity for a few decades following Independence in 1948, by
the 1990s it was disintegrating irrevocably. Therefore, whatever art col-
lectivism that emerged as an avant-garde was heavily critical about the
state and its reflections of national culture, its interpretations of national
history, its handling of ideas of nationhood and the way the economy was
handled, other than the critical outlook on the existing practices of art
formalism which was seen as an introvertive exercise still heavily depen-
dent on modernist art practices introduced by the colonial masters.
The new art of the 90s reflected an insistent interest in socio-political
narration, witnessing and documenting what artists saw, heard and reacted
to. It also treated subjectivity as a casualty of urban myth while it enter-
tained approaches with a sense of feminist criticality and identity politics.

The unbridled globalization of the post-1970s period and its consequences,
its bastardized capitalism, extreme consumerism and the emerging youth
culture were intense topics for socio-cultural critiques. If the 90s art de-
centred art from its existing sense of formalism, it did so by the critiquing
art formalism’s aloofness or distance from the larger-than-life socio-politi-
cal narratives circulating at the time. The critique also targeted art formal-
ism for its ‘past bound’ ideological anchoring that refused to recognize the
‘now’ or ‘contemporary moment’ where multi-layered multiple histories
collided as a source of credible narratives for artists to work on.
Its evolution into the next decade saw a complex set of dynamics at play
within the visual art field, popularizing of the idea of ‘alternative’ as the
‘critical other’ to the conventional and established art. Within this, many
attempts were made by artists and individuals to support the newly emerg-
ing radicalism and corresponding ideologies of contemporary art. This
was possible since they sought to establish alternate art spaces, alternate
art educational institutions and alternate group efforts. The 90s Trend
was thus seen as a serious epistemic break in Sri Lankan visual art history
and practice.
If one were to locate Theertha in this contemporary art history tempo-
rally, then it would be placed at the point where the 90s Trend completed
its first phase as a movement, where its primary ideological positions were
firmly established and the art of the future—and the new millennium—
awaited new interpretations and directions. Theertha thus emerged as an
‘alternative’ to explore possibilities within this new ideology. As such, it
was an entity that combined art management, philanthropic entrepreneur-
ism, art activism and art education, all in a combination that supported a
highly experimental, critical and out-of-the-box, cross-border germina-
tion of art.
Theertha2: A Pilgrimage of Radical Artists

Theertha was initiated in 2000 by a congregation of 11 artists, many of
whom had spearheaded the 90s art transformation. As such, these indi-
viduals and Theertha automatically became the bearers of the 90s art
2
In Sanskrit, Theertha refers to a port to which things come and from where things depart.
The group was named Theertha with the notion that it was a place from where ideas would
originate and to which ideas and practices can come from elsewhere that might be adopted
and localized.
276 A. PERERA
legacy, with Theertha’s vision invariably holding the same liberating

stance of the 90s art that leaned towards the experimental contemporary.
The collective worked with a mission to stimulate the art community into
engaging with the broader spectrum of creative possibilities that were
opened up with the shift in thinking with 90s art. Theertha was also the
logical next step in the culmination of activities by many restless artists
who were interested in finding ways to deal with their own socio-political
dilemmas, the anxieties of taking a different position to that of officially
sanctioned art and an urgency to connect with the outside art world.
With reference to the stimulus and orientation of the collective, Perera
notes of the violent politics that emerged in Sri Lankan politics since the
1970s (Perera 2011: 11). The more specific of these were “the two anti-
state rebellions launched by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) in 1971
and in the late 1980s, and the Tamil separatist rebellion that emerged in
the early 1980s which ended in 2009 with the military defeat of the
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)” (Perera 2011: 11). Despite this
widespread and institutionalized political violence since the 1970s, “the
artists of the 1990s were too young to remember the violence of 1971,
even though some artists active in the 1970 such as W. Nayanananda used
art as a medium of expression for their experiences and memories as rebels
and political prisoners as well as to represent what they thought were the
ills of society” (Perera 2011: 11). However, as the art of the 1990s with
their pronounced interest in politics dawned, “initial efforts of artists such
as Nayanananda were taken to a much more conscious, interventionist,
vocal and consistent visual extreme by the new generation of artists who
became active at the time” (Perera 2011: 11).
There have been number of important moments when radical artists ral-
lied together to demonstrate their stance. Such collectivism can be under-
stood within a larger history of students’ resistance in the Sri Lankan
socio-political landscape. As Perera has pointed out above, most 90s artists
were too young to remember the early resistance and rebellions by univer-
sity students such as in 1971 and before. However, the legacy and memory
of resistance and protests for social justice were articulated within the uni-
versities’ students’ movements. At least since the 1950 and right up to the
present, the country’s university system has been an active ground for dis-
sent and rebellion against a number of causes. The majority of the artists
affiliated to ideas of collectivism mustered the memories of student move-
ment bringing forth personal experiences, as some of the artists were vic-
tims of the state’s violent repressions either as political activists or university
students involved in politics, or both (Figs. 11.1, 11.2, 11.3, and 11.4).
Fig. 11.1 Dinner Table, 2004. Installation by Sanath Kalubadana, an artist who
worked with Theertha. (Photograph courtesy of Theertha Archives)
In many ways, the 90s Art Trend and its politics of resistance and col-
lectivism is different from yet another well-known collective movement,
the 43 Group’s collectivism. The latter premised upon impetus for
resistance and change largely in a colonial context, without factoring in
the discontents of socio-economic and political conditioning that the stu-
dents’ movement had propelled. The 43 Group,3 a collective of artists
during the 1940s, organized themselves to bring in a modernist ideology
as an alternative to the prevailing academic visual art tradition at the time
introduced by the British during the British colonial rule in Sri Lanka.
They became influential in propagating the modernist aesthetics and cor-
responding formalism in the following decades up to contemporary times.
3
For a good description of the constructions of the 43 Group read, 43 Group: A Chronicle
of Fifty Years in the Art of Sri Lanka by Neville Weeraratne. Melbourne: Lantana, 1993.
278 A. PERERA
Fig. 11.2 History of Histories, 2004. Installation by R. Vasanthini, K.S. Kumutha,

K. Tamilini, S. Kannan and T. Shanaathanan in collaboration with people from
Jaffna at Aham-Puram exhibition sponsored by Theertha in Jaffna, Northern Sri
Lanka. (Photograph courtesy of Theertha Archives)
The artists that were involved in the 43 Group are Lionel Wendt, Justin
Daraniyagala, Ivan Peries, George Keyt, Aubrey Collette, Richard Gabriel,
L.T.P. Manjusri and Harry Pieres. The idea of resistance in the 43 Group
relied on the discontentment of the allegedly contrived art expressions.
This is not to say that the 43 Group artists’ engagement in art stemmed
only within an environment that eluded politics. The 1940s was a crucial
time in the political history of Sri Lanka, a time leading to Independence
in 1948, and the anxieties of the freedom struggle were felt within the
artists’ community as well as the whole country. Lionel Wendt’s photog-
raphy and his heavy involvement in the well-known documentary film The
Song of Ceylon presents his conscious celebration of what is ‘native’ con-
trary to the ‘Western’ values circulated. The group was noted for its
attempts to renew and revive what is traditional in the arts. Aubrey Collette
was well known for his cartoons that articulated political satire at the time.
Fig. 11.3 The Barrel Man, 2004. Performance by Theertha artist, Bandu
Manamperi. (Photograph courtesy of Theertha Archives)
And the George Keyt’s4 transformation from a European lifestyle to one of

simple living in the village is one of the critical stances taken by 43 Group
artists against the socio-political and cultural environments at the time.
Having stated these actions of the 43 Group members, I have to reiterate
that the 43 Group’s intervention was mostly about art knowledge and their
art was not about a critique of a socio-political burden or its economic reality.
4
For a substantial reading on the life, times and contributions of George Keyt read,
Buddha to Krishna: Life and Times of George Keyt by Yashodhara Dalmia. London: Routledge,
2017.
280 A. PERERA
Fig. 11.4 Snakes and Mikes, 2007. Painting by Theertha artist, Jagath
Weerasinghe. (Photograph courtesy of Theertha Archives)
As such I would like to argue, the 90s Art and the subsequent collectivism
resulting in group formations such as Vibhavi Academy of Fine Arts and
Theertha has its genealogy in the student resistance and their political
struggles in Sri Lanka.
Both were alternatives to what were in place. Vibhavi initiated in 1992
concentrated on teaching, providing an alternate forum for teaching from
what was offered by the state-controlled Institute of Aesthetic studies,
which later became the University of the Visual and Performing Arts.
Theertha on the other hand focused on many more activities including
providing forums for experimental and collaborative art-making, exhibi-
tion spaces of critical art, artists’ travels in South Asia and beyond, training
of art teachers, publishing and so on. Many of the key leaders in both
organizations, and particularly of Theertha, had an intimate relationship
with university-based politics briefly referred to above.
One of the main proponents of the 90s art as well as a founding mem-
ber of Theertha, Jagath Weerasinghe’s seminal exhibition Anxiety (1992)
illustrated his grappling with social injustice in the background of the vio-
lent 1983 inter-ethnic violence. The exhibition illustrated the divided
nation along ethnic lines (Tamil and Sinhala). Himself a student leader
during his university years, victimized by the state-sponsored violence,

Jagath Weerasinghe grew up in a background with a Marxist orientation.
His father was an ardent Marxist and trade unionist.
Another 90s artist, Chandraguptha Thenuwara, had his advanced art
education in the then Soviet Union. He brought in its socialist nuances to
his art activism within the art education programme he initiated with the
Vibhavi Academy of Fine Arts he established. Well known for his series of
work, ‘Barralism’, he cultivated an artistic perspective on the war and its
consequences on a nation’s landscape. Commenting on Thenuwara’s
work, Perera writes, “he has identified his entire discourse as ‘barrelism’,
which has transformed the image of an ordinary empty barrel into a series
of artworks through paintings and installations imbued with political
meanings directly linked to the political violence of the immediate past as
well as the uncertainties of the present”, which “probed contemporary Sri
Lankan politics” (2011: 65). As an avid activist against the war, he played
crucial role as an artist and activist for human rights. Although the initial
ideas and energy for 90s Trend came from individuals who graduated
from the Institute of Aesthetic Studies, its archaic curriculum and cumber-
some structures were too slow to respond to emerging ideologies and new
practices of contemporary art. Vibhavi Academy of Fine Arts was formu-
lated as an ‘alternative’, representing the desire to garner this contempo-
rariness in the visual art practices, teaching and learning.
The genesis of Theertha also has to be understood in a similar socio-
political context. For instance, the other founding artists of Theertha beyond
Weerasinghe, namely, Pradeep Chandrasiri, Koralegedara Pushpakumara,
Bandu Manamperi, Pala Pothupitiya and Sarath Kumarasiri, were active par-
ticipants and leaders in the students’ protests during their respective years in
the Institute of Aesthetic Studies. Chandrasiri’s well-known photo series and
installation of ‘Broken Hands’ was based on his personal experience of an
abduction and torture during his involvement in the Janatha Vimukthi
Peramuna (JVP) insurrection of 1988.5 And Manamperi’s penchant for resis-
tance to state-sponsored violence and critical stance in his performances fac-
tors in his memories of the army detention camp where he was incarcerated
as a 16-year-old teenager for his involvement with JVP ‘subversive’ activities.
He played an active role as a student leader in his subsequent years at the
5
As with its first insurrection in 1971, the JVP’s second insurrection in 1988 involving
mostly rural Sinhala youth aimed to topple the elected government which they considered
both capitalist and unresponsive to the needs of youth and the downtrodden.
282 A. PERERA
Institute of Aesthetic Studies where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree

in sculpture. All these artists contributed to the establishment of Theertha.
They added their own particular collective histories and idea of ‘transforma-
tion’ with a broader sense of political experience.
One could posit Vibhavi Academy of Fine Arts as the first instance of
collectivism to emerge in the 90s informed by the socio-political anoma-
lies of the time and with a spirit of resistance through art. If Vibhavi was
interested in art teaching to shape the ideologies of the new generation of
art students as proponents to carry on the transformative art of the 90s,
Theertha’s larger intentions were to build a base and structure to sustain
as well as propagate the products and producers of this knowledge. For
Theertha, transforming the taste and then nature of art consumption was
of utmost importance. The primary concern for Theertha was to build its
own art audience and to expand its ideology so that a large support base
for its kind of art could be established. As mentioned earlier, a clear gap
developed between conventional art patrons, largely from the English-
speaking and Colombo-based cultural elite and contemporary artists, who
mostly come from non-elite, non-English-speaking and unprivileged eco-
nomic backgrounds. These artists went on to produce art that were alien
to the prevailing aesthetic norms that guaranteed a disconnect between
what they produced from the dominant art-buying audiences.
In 2009, artists closely associated with the 90s Trend and Vibhavi
formed the ‘No Order Group’, which organized a seminal exhibition of
their work to establish their position on art. Writing on the criticisms and
rejections bestowed on their art, I have noted elsewhere, “for the 90s
Trend artists, one of the biggest challenges was to move the attention of
the art patronage and audience from Keyt6 inspired aesthetics, to notice
the grim ambience of their art, to convince their audience to read the new
narratives beyond the conventionalism of 43 Group’s modernism, overtly
established within what Keyt’s art presented” (Perera 2018: 308). It is in
this context where contemporary practices, sensibilities and tastes in art-
making clashed somewhat violently with the conventional that I recall the
discomfort expressed by a well-known archaeologist and art historian after
he had seen my 1997 exhibition, ‘the Vehicle Named Woman’, “which
was a body of work dissecting the woman’s subjectivity that included
6
George Keyt, a modernist painter and a member of the 43 Group had an enduring stylis-
tic influence of Sri Lankan art.
painted car doors hung on the gallery wall” (Perera 2018: 308). The main
source of his anxiety was that unlike the work of modernist painters such
as George Keyt and others of the 43 Group, “my work apparently did not
reflect a rooting to Sri Lanka”, and as he proceeded to critique, “when
one relooks at them in 50 years’ time, in the absence of its present context,
it will not able to present itself as an authentic Sri Lankan art or as a body
of work emanating a sense of Sri Lankan-ness” (Perera 2018: 308). This
was not a simple isolated comment on my worn work alone. Instead, it
was also a comment that was expected to identify the general trends mani-
fest in the art of the 1990s (Perera 2018: 308).
The unequivocal insistence of 90s art and its proponents did not go
unnoticed despite the state’s as well as the established art patrons’ distaste
towards their activities. In the mid-1990s, the philanthropist and patron
of the arts, Ajitha de Costa, initiated the alternative art space, the Heritage
Gallery, which showcased the experimental art of the 90s for several years.
The Gallery practically became a place where radical artists congregated.
Yet another space that was open to the 90s art was Barefoot Art Gallery,
earlier known as the 706 Gallery. The patrons, Dominic and Nazreen
Sansoni, hailed from a traditional elite background and became the initial
collectors to acquire 90s artists’ work. Their endorsement was welcome by
the artists’ community in Sri Lanka. The 706 Gallery, before it changed
into Barefoot, became one of the early contemporary art galleries where
most of the artists from 90s Trend exhibited regularly. These were impor-
tant factors in the art history of Sri Lanka, particularly for sustaining the
enthusiasm of the radical artists to some extent. However, there was a
larger share of rejection of the aesthetics (and therefore its art and artists)
of the 90s Trend by the conventional art patrons and art audiences. There
was a major discontent within Theertha towards the Colombo’s art audi-
ences and the cultural elite that showed a lukewarm attitude towards their
art and their collectivism. Therefore, Theertha’s collectivism ought to be
understood in this complicated scenario both as platform to react to these
rejections creatively and also as a comfort zone to sustain this kind of art,
which was not generally popular.
Cosmopolitan Collectivism
It is worth initiating a discussion on one of the many characteristics of the
collectivism that Theertha manifests, with an observation by Strathern and
Biedermann. With reference to Sri Lanka’s pre-colonial past, Strathern
284 A. PERERA
and Biedermann note, “well before the arrival of the first European inter-
lopers, a multitude of different peoples engaged in exploits of long-
distance travel, trade and pilgrimage, and it was not only ports but also
vast areas of the Asian mainland that interacted across the waters. Sri Lanka
sits exactly at the centre of the Indian Ocean: an excellent laboratory, one
might think, in which to test any ideas about the connected and the cos-
mopolitan. But it has barely been visible in the resurgence of world his-
tory” (Strathern and Biedermann 2017: 1–2). Despite this sense of ‘barely
visible’ of Sri Lanka’s cosmopolitanism within world history, it is evident
in many aspects of Sri Lankan culture, including its cuisine, music and
dance forms. But today, much of this cosmopolitanism is forgotten or ill-
understood locally as well within prevailing dogmas of cultural hegemony.
However, from the beginning there has been a self-conscious sense of
cosmopolitan connectedness at Theertha. Theertha, from its inception,
strived to maintain a cosmopolitan view that cut through racial, economic,
regional and cultural politics. The collective aspired for and worked
towards the fusion of ideas and blurring of boundaries. Therefore, imagin-
ing a larger and integrated art world that could transcend national and
geographical boundaries was both utopian and a tenable dream. This was
an existential and intellectual prerequisite and also a factor in sustenance.
Theertha began its journey with the intention of securing this vision.
The idea of Theertha’s cosmopolitanism is of a particular kind, often
found within Asia historically. Cosmopolitanism has been defined in many
ways, but mostly as something that transcends notions such as national,
local, cultural and political boundaries. It underlines the idea of being citi-
zen of the world, with emphasis on a larger sense of ‘humanity’. While
there are variations in the definitions of cosmopolitanism, one that I am
interested in is Sheldon Pollock’s idea, which underlines “being translocal,
of participating – and knowing one was participating – in cultural and
political networks that transcended the immediate community” (quoted
in Strathern and Biedermann 2017: 4). Strathern and Biedermann elabo-
rate on the idea of Pollock’s translocal as “a conscious participation of
people within a very grand ecumene: the Sanskrit cosmopolis, a swathe of
societies from Peshawar to Java that used Sanskrit literature to formulate
their vision of the world” (Strathern and Biedermann 2017: 4–5).
Admittedly, while there is a large temporal distance between 1200
when the kind of ideas referred to by Pollock prevailed and the 1990s, the
cosmopolitan ideals described above had a fluid and absorptive character
and hence travelled through time and space to resurface at different times,
including in the present. As such, a similar sense of cosmopolitanism binds

and enthuse artists of Theertha for further exploration of cosmopolitan
ideals. These artists cherished the ideal and idealized art world that would
work within the ‘now’, a world that would not be restrained by the shack-
les of mono-cultural anxieties or the residues of a colonial or pre-colonial
past. The art world that Theertha envisaged is expressed in Pollock’s idea
of cosmopolitanism vis-à-vis the expansion of Sanskrit within South Asia.
As Strathern and Biedermann explain, “for Pollock too, the concept of
‘cosmopolitanism’ promises to convey a sense of community or common-
ality that is not structured by any particular kinds of power relationship”
(Strathern and Biedermann 2017: 5). But importantly however, the
expansion of Sanskrit was “not the by-product of some Sanskrit-peddling
empire” (Strathern and Biedermann 2017: 5). Instead, as outlined by
Pollock, “adopters of the Sanskrit literary culture used it not to acknowl-
edge the superiority of India as a centre but to reconfigure their own sense
of centrality in more impressive terms” (Strathern and Biedermann 2017:
5). This consisted of “an endless string of self-conceived centres” (Strathern
and Biedermann 2017: 5). In this imagination, the “vision of the Sanskrit
cosmopolis was free not only from empire, but also from the strident uni-
versalism of religion…And it is free from ethnicity” (Strathern and
Biedermann 2017: 5).
Like this ancient sense of cosmopolitanism that prevailed in South Asia
of the past, Theertha’s sense of cosmopolitanism also recognized no hier-
archies within the country based on language, ethnicity religion, or
regionalism. In its dealings with the world beyond Sri Lanka’s national
borders, within South Asia and beyond, this sense of equality guided
Theertha’s dealings irrespective of the fact whether others reciprocated
this sensibility or not. One of the crucial contributions that founding art-
ists of Theertha made ensured local artists to venture into the outside
world, forging new connections and evolving new networks. Khoj
International, a Delhi-based artist-run collective, came into existence in
1997 as an “alternative in contemporary art practice” (Sood 2014: 32). As
the art historian Nancy Adajania writes, Khoj, a product of its time how-
ever did not come into being as a need “of a group of local artists or in
response to the challenges of an art-historical moment; rather, it presented
itself as a prognostication and possibility” in the context of which “it
looked forward to a utopian situation of dialogue among artists from dif-
ferent contexts, who would not otherwise have come into contact with
one another” (Adajania 2014).
286 A. PERERA
Khoj’s7 annual artists’ workshops were crucial players in propagating

group initiatives as a way forward in contemporary art in South Asia and
played a catalytic role at the initial stage in the evolution of Theertha. A
number of Sri Lankan artists were invited to these workshops including
myself in which the need and the urgency for artists’ collectives to do col-
laborative, cross-border and cross-media art projects were discussed fre-
quently. Furthermore, as noted by Khoj, “the idea of Khoj began in 1997
as a gift of possibility given by Robert Loder (the visionary founder of the
Triangle Arts Trust). At a time when Indian artists felt isolated and unsup-
ported, Khoj provided the possibility for young practitioners to create an
open-ended, experimental space for themselves on their own terms. Khoj
would be a space where they could make art independent of formal aca-
demic and cultural institutions and outside the constraints of the commer-
cial gallery.”8 The initial ideas that explain the genesis of Khoj are also
applicable to the genesis of Theertha even though their subsequent trajec-
tories were very different in response to local conditions.
Khoj was a creative and enabling response to the alienation felt by art-
ists not only within India, but also within the larger context of South Asia.
The formation of artists’ initiatives was not exclusive to Sri Lanka and
India. Similar interventions into contemporary art and the tendency
towards collective activities of artists within the South Asian region became
a phenomena in the last decade of the twentieth century spilling over into
the new millennium. In this, Theertha’s emergence is intrinsically con-
nected to the art fervour and transformations happening particularly
within India and the region in general. The need for artists’ mobility as a
way of art exchanges were called upon to counter or to overcome limita-
tions at the home turfs in these countries in South Asia. Khoj, being one
of the first artists’ groups to envision a different format for artist exchanges
in the 90s contemporary art scene in South Asia, played an inimitable role
in mobilizing artists in the region.
Khoj managed to harness the group energies of the artists’ collectives
from across South Asia, namely, Theertha (Sri Lanka), Vasl (Pakistan), the
Britto Art Trust (Bangladesh) and Sutra (Nepal). These were all alterna-
tive art initiatives that came up in the new millennium, with assistance and
camaraderie of Khoj, to work towards creating a collegiality and coopera-
tion that later became known as the South Asian Network for the Arts
7
More information on Khoj can be accessed via its website: www.khojworkshop.org
8
http://khojworkshop.org/khoj-legacy/ (accessed 3 June 2018).
(SANA).9 With SANA in place, Theertha found its own peer community
within a regional/international setting that understood artists’ anxieties,
frustrations and aspirations and which in a way was being misunderstood
in its own country. Its art found endorsement and appreciation within
these groups. With eruptive geo-politics and developmental anomalies
sweeping across South Asia, most of the experiences of groups within
SANA had similar bearings. Art that was produced by them engaged in
parallel themes and approaches.
The initial years with SANA intensified Theertha’s energy and credibil-
ity. Activities such as international residencies and workshops increased,
and international art exchanges strengthened within member groups. The
international art residencies and workshops regularly held at Theertha as
well as at sites facilitated by other SANA members showcased its experi-
mental approach to art. Performance art, earth works and installations,
which were relatively new art forms in Sri Lanka, also had the opportunity
to expand and evolve at Theertha-sponsored events.
What is particular to Theertha is its aspiration to be de-centred from the
supposed ‘West’ and relocate itself within South Asia and within the coun-
try itself. Often, Theertha was seen to be critical and resistant to undertak-
ings that had a Euro-American bias. This became more pronounced in later
years where its attention became more intensely engaged in sustaining the
local art scene and when international curatorial projects were presented
with a Euro-American interest. It is in this context that many of the
Theertha exhibitions were curated by artists themselves developing a
home-grown curatorial expertise within the country that was within the
purview of practising artists. Weerasinghe, acknowledging the important
role played by artists in the Asia region in ushering in a new era of contem-
porary art in the 1980s and 1990s, which was also evident in South Asia at
the same time notes, “while it was artists in the Asian countries who
brought in the new era, it was not they who defined and managed the new
era into the future” (Weerasinghe 2007: 84). Instead, he further notes, this
“directional guidance for contemporary art was set by art curators from the
developed world, funded by wealthy museums and galleries” (Weerasinghe
2007: 84). Weerasinghe acknowledges that given the relative lack of exper-
9
For more information on artists’ mobility in South Asia, read, ‘Re-imagining and
Re-narrating South Asia: Artists’ Travel and the Practice Visual Art as a New Experiential
Cartography’, by Sasanka Perera, pp. 251–274. In, Dev Nath Pathak ed., Another South
Asia. New Delhi: Primus, 2018.
288 A. PERERA
tise and critical discourse on matters such as curatorial dynamics in Asia at

the time, “international art curators played a pivotal role in consolidating
the radical developments in art in Asia during the 1980s and 1990s”
(Weerasinghe 2007: 84). The problem however is due to these curators’
locations, training, obligations to their patrons and relative lack of knowl-
edge about evolving and constantly changing local art situations, there
were vast gaps in the curatorial decisions they made with regard to art not
only in Asia but in South Asia as well as in individual countries.
David Clarke, with reference to this specific curatorial dynamic notes,
“few curators have a detailed knowledge of more than one part of Asia (if
that), and thus are rarely in a position to ‘discover’ relatively unexposed
artists” (quoted in Ali 2011: 9). As Clarke further notes, “those who pos-
sess local expertise will be familiar with the role of informant they are often
called upon to play, providing jet setting curators lacking contextual
knowledge with shortlists of potential artists and other necessary informa-
tion” (quoted in Ali 2011: 9). Theertha was quite sensitive to these lapses
from its very inception. Theertha worked with many international curators
and were willing to expand their knowledge when it felt there were serious
lapses in situations these curators were receptive to informed and nuanced
local input. But it is clearly within this context that Theertha self-consciously
and successfully developed its own curatorial expertise which it has by now
used widely in Sri Lanka itself and to a certain extent in other parts of
South Asia as well.
Redefining Artist’s Role

Within the collectivism of the 1990s, the conventional role of the artists got
radically remoulded. Theertha evolved from a mere organizer of interna-
tional workshops in 2001 to an all-encompassing art organizer by 2018 that
ran a gamut of activities including training for art teachers, colloquiums for
women artists, community art projects, art publishing, running an art gal-
lery and using art projects for heritage management. In such activities, art-
ists critically engaged with the ideas, such as conception, management and
execution of art. Given the manifold transformation of artists’ role, it
demands us to look for redefinition of artists within its collectivist vision.
The role that Theertha defined for artists had a built-in phrase which
was often quoted by Jagath Weerasinghe as “Personal is Political”.10 It
Personal communication from Jagath Weerasinghe, 1 August 2018.

10
evolved around the idea that artist cannot be removed from his/her social
responsibilities, and that the artist cannot be dislodged from this equation
because they themselves are part of the whole. Weerasinghe elaborating
on the artist persona emerging in the 1990s declares that “an artist who
was conscious of his or her intellectual and political powers and possibili-
ties. It was this radically new identity, which can be identified as an
‘enlightenment’ in its own right” (Weerasinghe 2005: 188). Seen in this
sense, if one cartographs how the artist’s persona was framed within
Theertha’s activities during its 17-year history, one would see this persona
as one that was quite broad which combined managerial and curatorial
roles while also amalgamating with these educationist and interventionist
aspects at the same time. To postulate this particular brand of artists’ role,
let me look at some of the key activities that Theertha has undertaken dur-
ing its existence.
To reiterate a point made earlier, Theertha is completely an artists-run
organization. Every aspect of its activities has been conceptualized and
executed by artists. This is somewhat different from the model of Khoj,
where its structure incorporated an art manager who undertook to m anage
what the core group of artists decided. As mentioned earlier, Theertha was
formed by a group of 11 artists. All of them happened to be friends with
a shared idealism to promote the changes that took place in the 90s.
Furthermore, these artists felt the stifling ambience of the local art scene
and were driven by the urge to be part of the larger art scene beyond Sri
Lanka that could give them more opportunities to be innovative, experi-
mental and also to be acknowledged for their art. It was a personal quest
as much as it was a societal one. Collectivism that proceeded with Theertha
in the following years got moulded into what is seen today by the virtue
of numerous activities, response to various needs and demands of certain
moments in its trajectory. The artists at Theertha organically stepped into
the roles, in the spirit of collectivists, as art managers, curators and educa-
tors. It ought to be noted that it had many pitfalls and disappointments.
It took the group considerable effort and time to consolidate its first inter-
national workshop so much so that Robert Loder, the founding member
of Triangle Arts Trust, introduced by Khoj to support Theertha, nearly
gave up his belief in the group’s credibility to organize anything. If not for
Khoj’s director Pooja Sood’s intervention and insistence on group-
synergy, the connection would have been lost at the outset. Eventually,
Theertha became a part of the Triangle Network’s South Asian partners
with a large portfolio of activities of significance to its credit.
290 A. PERERA
Theertha’s first encounter with the funding of culture and art came with
the International Art Workshop in 2001, which had received a substantial
grant from the Prince Claus Fund that supported art exchanges across
artistic, geographic and ethno-religious borders. The workshop was held at
the Lunuganga Estate of the renowned Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa
hosted by the Geoffrey Bawa Trust. The success of this workshop propelled
Theertha to continue the cause for a more engaged practice of art. Theertha
managed to attract funding from HIVOS and later from Arts Collaboratory,
Netherland-based funding bodies and Ford Foundation, for larger part of
its programming. In this wake, it was evident that artists had to also work
towards the exploration of funding opportunities for the sustenance of the
art practices that they as a collective strived for.
Although Sri Lankan art had changed ideologically by adjusting to con-
temporary anxieties and the art community had expanded over the years,
the infrastructure, art education and the overall perceptions and attitudes
towards the visual arts did not change to accommodate the demands of
the new art. Neither the government nor private patrons were forthcoming
in a progressive way. State sponsorships were embroiled in parochial poli-
tics and corporate attention was directed at high-visibility events such as
cricket matches. A handful of art galleries had emerged since the 1980s,
although they mostly functioned as retail shops to sell art rather than rep-
resenting artists in an organized manner. At the same time, the state was
not interested in art other than what was defined as ‘traditional’ or related
to what it perceived as ‘heritage’. Burdened with the long-drawn armed
conflict in the North and North East, education had a very low priority
within the state’s education and cultural policies. Within this complex
context the new art being produced in the 1990s, presenting a different
aesthetic sensibility, did not find enthusiastic endorsers. Theertha’s art
activities were shaped and defined in an attempt to navigate within this
regressive environment, and therefore the role of artists was more com-
plex than ever before.
The primary concern for Theertha was to build its own art audiences
and to expand its ideology so that a large support base for its kind of art
could be established. One of its key programmes included art teacher
training around the country. The argument for this was to change the way
art teachers think about art, so that a change of perspective was set in the
minds of art students. The other purpose of this endeavour was to create
a network of artists across the island enabling them to become propaga-
tors of Theertha’s ideas of contemporary art. Theertha went on to engage
in a more holistic approach to facilitating art exchanges. Operating with

the ideal of democratizing the art knowledge and access to training, it
consciously located the teacher training programmes in the regional and
economically backward areas. Sometimes using their university peer group
connections, Theertha artists purposefully linked with regionally located
art teachers, government educational officials and so on. With a back-
ground in students’ politics and their ideological commitment to the idea
of ‘contemporary art’, the Theertha artists became savvy in ‘selling’ their
training format to school administrations in different parts of the country.
Teachers allowed Theertha to hold the training workshops at various loca-
tions across the island, which came to them free of charge. Theertha art
teacher training programmes caught the attention of educational zonal
offices of the state in some of these regional areas, and Theertha started
receiving invitations to organize art teacher training sessions with govern-
ment help in some locations. As such, teacher training was held in
Dehiattakandiya, Kegalle, Kandy, Ampara, Matara and Aludeniya.
While Theertha did not associate with political regimes either as an
endorser or opponent, it was concerned with the effects and affects of the
Civil War. The artists were mindful of the repercussions of the war, the
divides it had created and the day-to-day conflicts and anxieties the war
had embedded on society and its human predicament. Coming from the
south of the country, and with predominantly Sinhala and Buddhist mem-
bership, Theertha was burdened with the same guilt that most progres-
sives and liberals in the country were feeling in the face of the intense
violence inflicted by the conflicting parties, Tamil insurgent groups and
the Sri Lankan military. The guilt was more intense with no real solution
in sight. The emergence of extreme ideologies of Sinhala Buddhist nation-
alism in the south, general socio-political intolerance towards Tamils as
‘enemies’ within the dominant ‘national’ psyche and the virulent forms of
Tamil nationalisms that groups such as the LTTE propagated demanded
counter-discourses with a more nuanced understanding. The artists within
a group such as Theertha, critical of chauvinist politics and their represen-
tations in the cultural domain, had to be intellectually awake in this wake.
Well aware of the divisive politics during the war, Theertha initiated its
series of publications, sometimes through partner organizations, on the
issues of art and culture with a critical edge. Published in Sinhala, Tamil
and English, much of the content of these publications focused on the arts
and ‘culture’, such as Patitha (in Sinhala), Panuwal (in Tamil), Artlab (in
Sinhala and Tamil) and South Asia Journal for Culture (in English). These
292 A. PERERA
publications became key texts presenting alternative readings on culture

and art for students at the university level and beyond.
The long-term associations with members of the Tamil artists’ com-
munity in Jaffna in northern Sri Lanka and the sympathies towards the
predicament of Tamils as a besieged ethnic community in the country
ensured that Theertha continuously maintained collaborative art pro-
grammes with Jaffna artists. These collaborations allowed Theertha to
organize the seminal exhibition, ‘Aham-Puram’, in 2004 at the newly
rebuilt Jaffna Public Library. Seventy-two experimental artworks were
shown amidst the war-torn area partly run by the state military and partly
by the Tamil Tigers in the backdrop of a faulty and short-lived ceasefire.
While such attempts were seen by some as anti-patriotic, and Theertha
and its members were castigated as traitors by extreme elements in the art-
ist community and elsewhere, these remain among Theertha’s intensely
cherished, ambitious and most impacting activities.
In the same breath, it is also pertinent to mention the emergence of a
feminist stance among Theertha artists. The feminist criticality in art that
started to emerge with the ‘90s Trend in particular found continued sup-
port through Theertha. The exhibition, ‘Reclaiming Histories: Retrospective
Exhibition of Women’s Art’ (2000), curated by myself and showing the
works by 50 female artists under the patronage of the Vibhavi Academy of
Fine Art, can be seen as one of the early attempts at building awareness of
women’s art influenced by the ‘90s Trend. While the feminist lobby in Sri
Lanka was active for a long time, their involvement with visual art remained
somewhat aloof. As such, even if artists attempted thematic investigations
of women’s issues, there was no consistent discourse or an orientation
within the larger feminist sensibility. It was difficult to find role models for
women’s art, guidance or cues to indicate a particular direction to a locally
rooted feminist approach. Due to this, during the initial period, some
women’s art reflected ad hoc appropriations of theoretical elements from
Euro-American feminism without really reworking these to merge with
local experiences. It has to be acknowledged that the ideological liberaliza-
tion that came with 90s Trend allowed feminist discourses to be absorbed
into the thinking processes of art, artists’ conceptualization of artworks and
overall art practices. This liberalized approach also gave rise to the radical
use of imagery, art methods and narrations with a high sense of criticality
that needed a certain boldness and an element of risk-taking. This added
extra pressure on women artists to go beyond their conventional roles, as
artist and as woman, and to be radical and work within the art discourse of
90s Trend. Theertha’s contribution to the evolution of contemporary

women’s art has been to provide the much-needed intellectual basis and
the subaltern/localized approach informed by feminism. The artists had to
go beyond the theoretical definitions presented by Euro-American femi-
nism and its art trends. The personalities and works of female artists associ-
ated with Theertha and its overall support for women’s art through
exhibitions and art publications have also helped to establish a certain iden-
tifiable particularity associated with women’s art. Many female artists of the
younger generation are influenced by this particularity and the thematic of
such art. Between 2005 and 2008, Theertha’s art programmes emphasized
supporting young female artists who were graduating from art colleges to
continue their practice and experiment with new ideas. This allowed them
to initiate a process of forming their own identities as artists. The Women
Artists’ Colloquiums and the International Women Artists Residencies
were initiated during this period.
In 2007, frustrated with the lack of flexibility in private galleries and
their inability to understand contemporary art needs, Theertha trans-
formed part of its office building into an exhibition space that was called
the Red Dot Gallery. Since then, Theertha has been concentrating on
establishing Red Dot Gallery as an experimental art venue and to build its
audiences and patronage. With an eye on standards in its gallery practices,
it introduced the annual gallery season Pradarshana Wasanthaya (the
summer of exhibition) in 2007 for three years to showcase innovative solo
exhibitions and present new and cutting-edge works of young and mid-
career artists.
Conclusion, as Theertha Continues

In many ways, Theertha’s numerous activities have managed to propel the
90s art into other directions. Many of its members, some of whom were
instrumental in initiating the 90s Art Trend, have been active in sustaining
the criticality and experimental nature of their art-making, presenting
extremely innovative and seminal exhibitions. Jagath Weerasinghe’s exhi-
bition, ‘Celestial Fervor’ (2009), presented a deeper and more sophisti-
cated elaboration of the thematic he has engaged with since his 1994 show
‘Anxiety’ that essentially provided the new parameters for 90s art. Similar
attempts have been seen in exhibitions by other Theertha artists such as
Sarath Kumarasiri (‘Kovil-Pansal’, 2009) and K. Pushpakumara (‘Goodwill
Hardware’, 2009) as well as the younger generation of artists, Anura
294 A. PERERA
Krishantha (‘Chairs’, 2007), Bandu Manamperi (‘Numbed’, 2009),

Sanath Kalubadana (‘My Friend the Soldier’, 2007) and Pala Pothupitiya
(‘My Ancestral Dress and My ID’, 2008). After the end of the armed con-
flict in May 2009, that had continued for 30 years, Sri Lanka experienced
a sigh of relief despite the immense losses. The end of the massive human
and material destruction that had gone on for so long, which paralysed as
well as brutalized the entire islands society, was a landmark political
moment. While this was a major change that allowed artists to connect
and work together much easily with the North and North East, it also
ushered in unbearably nationalistic political rhetoric from the victors that
seemed superficially and patronizingly inclusive. But in reality, these
remained racist, anarchist and violent. Some of the exhibitions mentioned
above such as ‘Numb’, ‘Celestial Fervour’ and ‘Goodwill Hardware’ by
Theertha artists responded to this post-war socio-political situation in the
South and recorded their suspicion, anxiety and frustration.
While its preoccupation with supporting contemporary art continues
intensely in the post-war period, Theertha’s activities also focused on inter-
preting the artist’s role in a broader platform for intervention to include
heritage management as art projects. Bordering between community art,
heritage management and archaeology, through programmes such as Ape
Gama (Our Village) and Let’s Take a Walk, artists worked with selected
communities to rediscover their own contemporary heritage and proceeded
to make cultural maps of their own localities. These programmes brought
to the surface issues such as ethnicity and religion, how different groups
have spatially integrated within their localities and so on, which were no
longer aspects of quotidian conversations. In other words, they were means
to understand a community’s own history as well as the present more inclu-
sively. These programmes appealed to the same interventionist sentiments
of Theertha which inspired it to undertake projects such as ‘Aham-Puram’
exhibition in Jaffna in 2004. Such projects involved negotiating with many
government and private institutions, individuals and groups in the com-
munities where the work was done. This role of the artist as a negotiator,
educator and heritage manager was something that came out of long-term
engagement with a spectrum of art activities that Theertha was engaged in
during the 18 years of its existence. The evolution of contemporary art in
the post-1990s decade has also seen this particular role emerging for the
artist, a role that is combined with a sense of social responsibility and a
belief that art is a civilizational tool, and therefore that artists have the
power to transform and intervene in the perceptual process of art audi-
ences. The massive emotional and physical destruction of a long-drawn-out
ethnically coloured civil war that ended in 2009, as well as the extensive
need for developmental activities and a heightened awareness of human
rights and cultural rights have dictated the overall public debates in Sri
Lanka. Being inheritors of an art ideology that equated ‘personal’ with
‘political’ and by considering critical engagement as an integral element in
its art, Theertha has been highly receptive to the nuances of these debates.
This receptivity is reflected in Theertha’s myriad activities where it has
combined certain aspects of social services with art, thereby producing a
unique image of the artist as a socio-cultural entrepreneur.
Colombo held its first biennale in 2009 (Colombo Art Biennale) with
the theme ‘Imagining Peace’, inviting artists to think beyond the initial
‘relief’ of ending the civil war and the much-celebrated ‘victory’. The sec-
ond Colombo Art Biennale held in 2012 February titled ‘Becoming’
continued this attempt of contextualizing art within the current mood of
the country. The initial ideas for the biennale as well as the selection of
themes for both events were formulated by Jagath Weerasinghe, and a
number of other Theertha artists were members of the Biennale’s Artistic
Advisory Board. This has allowed Theertha to be closely affiliated with the
Colombo Art Biennale and its activities. By now, the local art scene has
grown to include new patrons and galleries even though the need for
more is still acute. Other groups such as COCA and Colombo Artists have
emerged taking visible stands in terms of presenting current inclinations of
contemporary art and connecting with other art communities in the South
Asia region.
At the end of 18 years since its inception, Theertha’s initial purposes for
establishing itself as a platform to allow art exchanges to take place across
geographic, ethnic, religious and artistic borders have been overtaken by
other priorities such as art knowledge production and dissemination, need
for effective art educational programmes for higher learning, gaining visi-
bility for Sri Lankan contemporary art to be represented in international
forums and opening of interesting platforms for contemporary artists inter-
nationally to undertake collaborative work and so on. Such needs require
an approach with different emphasis and forging of new partnerships.
Colombo Art Biennale, Theertha’s long-term art initiative, ‘Sethusamudram
Art Project’ and with No. 1 Shanthi Road, Bangalore, and ‘Tale of Two
Cities’ with Gallery Espace, New Delhi, have been few such ‘new’ partner-
ships. Theertha which started in 2000 as a young artist group remains at
present a matured and well-seasoned group of artists with much more per-
sonal commitments and priorities in their lives than earlier. Their art is
296 A. PERERA
constantly scrutinized for maturity and innovation by their peers. Therefore,

Theertha’s future existence depends on its ability to get the continued sup-
port of its senior members, understand new demands of contemporary art
in the country and beyond, sustaining fresh energy and finding new rele-
vance in an art scene that has the potential to boom.
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Index1
A Arjun Khaling, 230

Aag ka Darya, 73 Art, 1–42
Abedin, Zainul, 120–122, 133 collectivism, 271, 272, 274
Abraham, Ayisha, 49, 51, 55, 57–59, history, 1–42
62, 66 history, Sri Lankan, 273–275, 283
Abu-Lughod, Lila, 94 practice, 117, 122, 126–132
Activism, 207–210, 218, 219 Art Beyond Art, Eco-Aesthetics: A
Adajania, Nancy, 67, 69 Manifesto for the 21st Century,
Adivasi, 140, 140n3, 149n29, 252, 253
150–156, 151n30, 151n31, Art Dubai, 252
154n34, 161, 166, 168, 169, Art for art’s sake, 74, 77
171, 171n55, 173, 174 Artists for Democracy (AFD), 263
Afghan War, 79, 206, 213, 215 Artist’s role, 288–294
Agha, Mariam, 217, 218 Artivism, 229
Akhlaq, Zahoorul, 79, 87 Artlab, 226, 231, 237, 243–245, 291
Altaf, Navjot, 67–70, 68n16 Art-politics, 119–125
Anand, Mulk Raj, 53 Arts Council of Pakistan, 267,
Anarchist-hero, 140 267n18, 268n19
Anthropological paradigm, 174 Artudio, 226, 231, 235, 236, 239,
Anthropology, 1–42 240, 245
Appropriation, 251, 253, 265–266 Aryan, 148, 148n25, 152
Araeen, Rasheed, 132, 135, 251–269 Asian Art Biennale, 124, 129
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05852-4
298 INDEX
Authenticity, 183, 184, 188, 190, 191, Cold War politics, 205, 210
195, 196 Collectivism, 271–296
Avantgarde, 274 Collins, Bradford R., 181, 182
Awami Art Collective, 89 Colombo, 271n1, 282, 283, 295
Communism, 206, 210
Communist Party of Pakistan, 210
B Contemporary art practices, 75, 76
Balochistan, 253 Contemporary narratives of art, 251
Bangladesh, 12, 15, 17, 23, 30, 31, 33, Coomaraswamy, Ananda, 54
94, 96, 101, 104, 105, 117–136 Cosmopolitan Collectivism, 283–288
Bangladeshi art, 117, 129 Criticality, 207, 218, 219
Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), Cubitt, Sean, 42
123–124, 123n2 Cultural fantasy, 140
Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy,
124, 126
Banks, Michael, 4 D
Baroda, 49, 53, 61, 62, 64, 66 Dadi, Iftikhar, 8, 8n5, 9, 12, 76, 87
Barrelism, 281 Death-bound, 175
Bastar (Madhya Pradesh), 143 De-commodifying esthetics, 262
Becker, Howard, 27, 40 Demystifier (of primitive life), 144
Bengali, 190–197, 200, 201 Dhaka Art Summit, 128
Bengali art, 190–196 Diasporic, 267
Bengal School of Art, 185 Discontent, 207–209
Betul (Maharashtra), 144 Disillusionment, 207–209
Bharat Bhavan, 139–140, 150, Documenta 14, 252, 257–261,
154–158, 159n40, 160 258n8, 269
Bharat Mata, 53 Dravidian, 152
Biennale, 89, 90 Drik, 128
Bourdieu, Pierre, 6, 7, 11, 12, 27 Dukhshyam Chitrakar, 28, 49, 51, 52,
Britto Arts Trust, 104, 126, 127 58–66, 70, 71
Butt, Asim, 225
E
C East Pakistan, 118, 120–122
Calcutta School of Art, 186 Eco-aesthetics, 255, 265
Carroll, Noël, 128–131 Ecological imbalances, 252
Casabianca, Julien de, 240, 241 Elwin, Verrier, 57, 57n12, 60
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 135 Environmental balance, 254
Chandrasiri, Pradeep, 281 Ephemerality, 245
Chatterji, Roma, 97 The Ethnographic Series, 68, 70
Chisti, Ruby, 20 Ethnography, 181, 184
Civil society, 272 Eurocentric, 206
INDEX 299
F Indira Gandhi National Museum of

Faiz, Faiz Ahmed, 209, 210 Mankind, 150
Faizi, Attiya, 208 Individual, 141, 142, 148, 149, 157,
Farago, Claire, 12, 14, 15 158, 161, 168–170, 172
Feminist ethnography, 93–112 Individualism, 183, 190
Fluxus, 272 Instagram, 245
Folk artist, 50, 52, 53, 60, 61, 63, 64, Intersections, 1–42
70, 71
Foster, Hal, 68, 69
43 Group, 277–279, 282, 282n6, 283 J
Frieze Art 2017, 252 Jama’at-e-Islami, 124
Janata Vimukti Peramuna (JVP), 276,
281, 281n5
G Jangarh Singh Shyam, 139–176
Gadani, 253
Galhotra, Vibha, 19, 21
The gaze, 105 K
Geertz, Clifford, 6 Kalighat painters, 192, 195
Gell, Alfred, 182 Kalighat pats, 187, 190, 193, 194
Globalisation, 117–136, 273 Kalighat style, 191–194, 191n8, 196
Governmentality, 141, 149, 166 Kapur, Geeta, 67, 130, 131, 134–136
Govinda KC, Dr., 235, 236 Karachi, 252, 253, 256, 256n4,
Graffiti writing Nepal, 224 257n5, 257n6, 260–267,
Guerrilla Girls, 272 266n15, 267n18, 268n19, 269
Guha-Thakurta, Tapati, 120, 127 Karachi Pop Movement, 86
Gulgee, Ismail, 211, 264 Kathmandu, 223, 225, 226, 228, 230,
Gupta, Subodh, 16 231, 231n2, 234n6, 234n7,
Gurung, Dibyeshwor, 226, 236–238 235–237, 239n11, 240,
242–244, 242n13
Khalid, Aisha, 79, 83
H Khan, Naiza, 8, 9, 87–89, 96, 103,
Hamra Abbas, 217, 217n11 104, 109
Hashmi, Salima, 8n5, 10, 12, 19, Khoj, 126
26, 29 Khullar, Sonal, 64
Hawaili (family home), 256 Kinnaur (Himachal Pradesh), 143
High and low art, 81, 84 Kolkata Art School, 121
Hyder, Qurratulain, 73–75 Kumarasiri, Sarath, 281, 293
Kutch (Gujarat), 143
I
Identity, 117–122, 130, 132, 134, 135 L
Indigenism, 122, 140–155, 141n7, Lahore Art Circle, 207, 209, 211
142n8, 142n9, 146n18, 147n22, Lal Masjid, 217, 217n13
171, 171n54, 174 LASANAA, 229
300 INDEX
Lenin Peace Prize, 210 Nation states, 210

Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam Native, 50, 52, 53, 54n6, 55, 56, 59,
(LTTE), 276, 291 61, 68, 68n18, 70
Lipi, Tyeba Begum, 96, 104 Native Women series, 52, 60, 67, 68
Local, 117–136 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 57n12, 65
Local vocabulary, 201 Nepal, 15, 27, 32
Nepali street artists, 223, 231, 232,
238, 239, 242–244, 246, 247
M The New Bengal School, 207, 208
Maharjan, Kiran, 226, 231, 231n3, 90s art transformation, 275
237, 243, 244 The 90s Trend, 273–275, 282, 283
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 53–56 Nisbet, Robert, 25, 37, 38, 41
Manamperi, Bandu, 19, 21
Manifesto of all Pakistan Progressive
Writers, 209 O
Marcus, George E., 182, 184 Outings Project, 240
Mead, Margaret, 3, 4
Midnapore, 49, 51, 54, 57–59,
62–64, 71 P
Misappropriation, 251 Pakistan, 8–10, 12, 15, 17, 19, 20, 23,
Mitter, Partha, 120, 121, 127, 188 26, 29–31, 33, 94, 96, 100, 109,
primitivism, 188 205–219
Modernism, 205, 206, 209–210, Pakistani art history, 78
212, 219 Pala Pothupitiya, 281, 294
Mughal architecture, 74 Panuwal, 291
Mujahedeen, 206 Papastergiadis, Nikos, 18, 19
Mujibur Rahman, Sheikh, 123, 123n1, Paradox of subalternity, 174
123n2, 124 Pardhan-Gond painting, 140, 155,
Mukerjee, Radhakamal, 38–40, 98, 156, 170, 173
186, 188 Participant observation, 53–55
Mukherji, Parul Dave, 24, 25, 28 Pata Katha, 61, 65, 71
Mushairas, 208 Pathak, Dev Nath, 94, 97, 98, 98n2
Muslim(s), 207, 214, 215, 218 Patitha, 291
Myers, Fred R., 182, 184 Patua (scroll painting), 49, 54, 57, 59,
Mystic-maverick, 140 60, 65
Myth, 183, 187, 188, 188n5, Patuas, 187, 187n3, 188, 190–192,
194–196, 201 194–197, 199–201
PECHS Society (in Bahadurabad,
Karachi), 266
N Perera, Anoli, 17, 32, 33, 96, 97,
National College of Arts (NCA), 100–102, 106, 107
Lahore, 77, 79, 87, 262, 266 Perera, Sasanka, 6, 10, 12, 14, 15, 17,
National Crafts Museum, 150, 159, 162 19, 33, 34, 97, 97n2
INDEX 301
Performative mimesis, 49–72 S

Photo performance, 49–72 Saeed, Nausheen, 216, 216n10
Picasso, Pablo, 183, 185 Samdani Art Foundation (SAF)/Trust,
Pink, Sarah, 55 128, 129
Political project, 140 Samdani, N., 129
Pollock, Griselda, 73 Sanctioned framework, 207, 215–218
Post-1990s Sri Lankan art, 273–275 Sattya Media Arts Collective, 226
Postcolonial problems, 274 Schneider, A., 108, 110
Preziosi, Donald, 12, 14, 15 School of Paris, 206
Primitivism, 140–142, 140n5, 142n9, Schwartzman, Allan, 227
158, 170, 174 Self-consciousness, 196–198
Primitivist fascination, 144 Shamiyaana: Food for Thought,
Programmatic vangardism, 274 Thought for Change, 252, 257
Progressional ballast, 142 Share the Word, 242
Progressive Artists Group (Mumbai), 207 Sharjah Biennale, 218
Public spaces, 223–226, 234, 236, Sharjah Biennial 2014, 252
237, 240, 244–247 Sheikh, Gulam Mohammed (Gulam
Pushpakumara, Koralegedera, Sheikh), 49, 53, 54, 61, 65, 68, 70
281, 293 Shrestha, Kailash, 226, 230, 231, 234,
Pushpamala, N., 49–52, 54, 55, 234n6, 235, 239, 239n11, 242,
57–59, 57n13, 61, 62, 65–72 242n13
Shyam, Jangarh Singh, 25, 29
Sikander, Shahzia, 79
Q Sinhala, 280, 281n5, 291
Qureshi, Imran, 79, 83, 218 Social anthropology, 181
Qureshi, Nusra Latif, 79 Socialism, 205, 209–210
Sociology, 1–8, 11–14, 16, 22, 23,
25–28, 32, 34–42
R Sociology of art, 27, 35, 41
Radicalism, 275 Sood, Pooja, 126
Rahat (Persian wheel), 256 South Asia, 3, 5–8, 11, 13–15, 17,
Rahman, Ziaur, 123, 123n2, 124 23, 25–27, 31, 33, 34, 38, 39,
Ramay, Hanif, 211 42, 271–273, 280, 285–288,
Ranjit, Ashmina, 229 287n9, 295
Red Dot Gallery, Colombo, 293 South Asia Journal for Culture, 291
Religious extremism, 205, 206, 218, 219 South Asian, 251
Resistance, 206, 214, 215, 219 South-South, 206
Roopankar project, 150, 156, Spag, 242
159n39, 174 Sri Lanka, 9, 12, 13, 15, 17, 20, 21,
Roquette-Pinto, Edgard, 56 23, 32–34, 94, 96, 100, 102,
Roy, Jamini, 26–28, 181–201 271, 272, 274, 277, 278, 280,
Rubin, William, 184, 185, 189n6, 195 283–289, 292, 294, 295
Rupture, 205–219 Stacey, Judith, 94, 97
Ruralism, 188 Structuralist anthropologist, 144
302 INDEX
Subaltern cultures, 206 V

Subjectivities, 141, 146, 164, 172, 174 Valorization, 183, 186
Sunuwar, Rupesh Raj, 226, 232, Vandalism, 224
232n5, 233 Vangardism, 274
SUTRA, 229 Vasl Artists’ Association, 87
Swaminathan, Jagdish, 25, 29, 139–176 Vedantic, 145, 154
Syed, Afzal Ahmed, 213, 216 Venice Biennale 2017, 252
Vibhavi Academy of Fine Arts,
280–282, 292
T Visiting anthropologists, 50, 52, 54
Tagore, Abanindranath, 120 Visual anthropology, 4, 35,
Tagore, Rabindranath, 120 110, 111
Tamil, 276, 280, 291, 292 Visuality, 226
Taseer, Salman, 218 Visual practices, 223
Tharu, Susie, 68 Visva Bharati University,
Theertha International Artists’ Santiniketan, 186
Collective, 271, 271n1 Vocabulary of art, 183–185, 201
Thenuwara, Chandraguptha, 281
Theory of Nominalism, 252, 257n6, 263
Third Text, 252, 253n2 W
Third Text Asia, 265 War of Liberation, 1971, 118, 123,
Third World, 255 123n1, 124, 135
Toussaint, Seb, 242 Weerasinghe, Jagath, 8n5, 9, 10, 12,
Tradition, 117–121, 127, 134, 135, 102, 280, 281
182, 183, 185–190, 187n3, 196, Women artists, 93–112
197, 199, 201 Women Artists of Pakistan
Triangle Art Network, 126 Manifesto, 77
Triangle Arts Trust, 126 Writing culture, 96, 98, 110, 111
Triangle Networks, 88
Tribal communities, 140n3, 143, 144,
152, 154 Y
Yousafzai, Malala, 80
U
Universalism, 183 Z
Unmediated, 184 Zia-ul-Haq (General), 77, 78, 80, 81,
Upanishadic, 145, 154n34 83, 87
Urdu poetry, 83 Zubeida Agha, 208

Intersections of ContemporaryArt, Anthropology, and Art History in South Asia: Decoding Visual Worlds

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Edited by Sasanka Perera and Dev Nath Pathak

“Contemporary art is a complicated terrain. Artists everywhere are motivated by a

“Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia:

ISBN 978-3-030-05851-7 ISBN 978-3-030-05852-4 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019931025

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019

Coming from a formal background in academic sociology and saddled

of the Theertha International Artists’ Collective in Colombo. Binit

New Delhi, India Sasanka Perera

1 Intersections and Implications: When Anthropology, Art

Section I Contours of Quest: Arts at Crossroad 47

2 Mimicking Anthropologists: Re-Membering a Photo

3 Reframing the Contexts for Pakistani Contemporary Art 73

4 ‘Art’ of Ethnography: Feminist Ethnography and Women

Section II Political and Aesthetic: Explorations of

5 Globalisation and Local Anxieties in the Art of

6 Between Anthropology and History: The Entangled Lives

7 Toward Blurring the Boundaries in Anthropology:

8 Imposed, Interrupted and Other Identities: Rupture as

9 Transcending and Subverting Boundaries: Understanding

10 Ruptures of Rasheed Araeen in the Politics of Visual Art:

11 Collectivism in the Contemporary Sri Lankan Art: The

Amra Ali is an independent art critic and curator based in Karachi,

Niilofur Farrukh is a Karachi-based art interventionist, whose initiatives

Pooja Kalita is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology, South

Survey of Bangladesh Series (Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, Dhaka, 2007)

Fig. 1.1 Barrel Installation by Chandraguptha Thenuwara, Colombo,

Fig. 2.5 The documentation scroll painted by Dukhshyam in 2015.

Fig. 11.1 Dinner Table, 2004. Installation by Sanath Kalubadana, an

Intersections and Implications: When

Many insightful reflections from history and philosophy of art could be

S. Perera (*) • D. N. Pathak

© The Author(s) 2019 1

c­ upboards; regimes of exhibitionism and commerce of culture too join in

a “discipline” or “science of words” (Mead 1995: 3, 5). Even though her

It is in this kind of context, we learn from informal accounts of sociolo-

carrying a certain self-conscious expression of imagination and creativity

words, in the field of apparent subjectivities and plains of imagination

vivid dialogue with others, enriching the understanding of contemporary

Triggers on the Terrain of Thought

some questions bridging what appeared to be disciplinary gaps between

identifies two important thematic preoccupations. These are, “works that

The focus on biography of artists as well as art’s relationships with the

Emphasis in the original.

Sri Lanka are clear examples of the discursive potential of contemporary

were actively engaging in these kinds of convergences in their art-­making

offers a responsible way forward on many fronts” (Preziosi and Farago

Gupta18 (India), Rashid Rana’s19 (Pakistan) prints and installations, and

well as disengagement. As Landauer has suggested, the mere fact that

Text message by Ruby Chishti via Messenger, 15 August 2018.

Fig. 1.1 Barrel Installation by Chandraguptha Thenuwara, Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Fig. 1.2 I Dreamt a Space Without Me by Ruby Chisti, Gadani, Pakistan.

Fig. 1.3 Breath by Breath. Photo-performance by Vibha Galhotra, New Delhi,

reflections on anthropology’s fear of the visual and its hesitation to criti-

Polyphonic Intersections and Bearings of the Book

For more along this line, see Taussig (1993).

of apprehension points out the inherent tendencies in all three disciplines

This question haunts three young sociologists, namely, Pooja Kalita,

of primitive myth in modern Indian art. Jyoti’s essay, ‘Towards Blurring

I have argued (in my book When Was Modernism) that disjuncture as a

term disjuncture now ─ in our increasingly globalized world ─ I will refer to

Though speaking very clearly as an art historian, the overall context

Looking at the Bengal School of Art in the light of nationalistic dis-

dictatorship of General Zia-ul-Haq in the 1980s that the women’s move-

New Delhi, India Sasanka Perera

1 Intersections and Implications: When Anthropology, Art

Section I Contours of Quest: Arts at Crossroad 47

2 Mimicking Anthropologists: Re-Membering a Photo

3 Reframing the Contexts for Pakistani Contemporary Art 73

4 ‘Art’ of Ethnography: Feminist Ethnography and Women

Section II Political and Aesthetic: Explorations of

5 Globalisation and Local Anxieties in the Art of

6 Between Anthropology and History: The Entangled Lives

7 Toward Blurring the Boundaries in Anthropology:

8 Imposed, Interrupted and Other Identities: Rupture as

9 Transcending and Subverting Boundaries: Understanding

10 Ruptures of Rasheed Araeen in the Politics of Visual Art:

11 Collectivism in the Contemporary Sri Lankan Art: The

c upboards; regimes of exhibitionism and commerce of culture too join in

were actively engaging in these kinds of convergences in their art-making