The Phantom Lady Strikes Again
The Phantom
Lady ruminates on the heritage of modernism in India after seeing a show of
Madan Mahatta’s architectural photographs curated by Ram Rahman in Delhi.
INDIA MODERNA / DELHI MODERN
I just saw a
fabulous exhibition of Madan Mahatta’s architectural photographs from the 1950s
to the ‘80s curated by Ram Rahman at PhotoInk in Delhi. Ram has selected the
images from within his own constructivist aesthetic and Madan Mahatta’s
photography with its intense graphic quality and dark gritty textures is
visually stunning. Many of the small size photographs are actually portraits of
the architects in the domestic architecture of their own homes with furniture
designed by them. Nasreen Mohammedi would have been delighted to see these
images! Mahatta’s photographs cover the important period of Nehruvian high
modernism, a record of the creation of the new Delhi and the urban monuments of
the new nation, most of them commissioned by Nehru himself. Coming from a family
which owned the biggest and most reputed photo studios in North India, Mahatta
worked closely with two generations of India’s best known modern architects
including Charles Correa, Habib Rahman, Jasbir Sawhney, J.K. Chowdhury, Joseph
Allen Stein, Achyut Kanvinde, Ajoy Choudhury, Kuldip Singh, Raj Rewal, Ram
Sharma, Ranjit Sabhiki and designers Mini Boga and Riten Mozumdar. (In fact, I
had no idea that there was such a thing as modern Indian furniture design till
I heard about Mini Boga’s work, which unfortunately, is not known outside
Delhi).
As far as I
know, there has been no great International style architecture in the South,
(though Laurie Baker’s low cost architectural work can be considered modernist
in terms of his truth to materials and functionalism). However, a kind of
provincial modern architecture spread rapidly all over through government
buildings. Curt Gambit, an architect who has been researching on Bangalore,
thinks ideas of modern architecture spread through pictures in cement catalogues,
a new material just introduced in the period, from which Public Works
Department (PWD) engineers took inspiration. International style architecture
seems to have existed basically in Delhi, Chandigarh (commissioned by the
government) and in Ahmedabad, commissioned by industrial families such as the
Sarabhais. In fact, Gujarat was at the forefront of modernism in every way,
which ideal seems to have completely collapsed. Chandigarh itself, a new city
designed by Corbusier on the invitation of Nehru, has been criticised for its
mechanical inhumanity and lack of sensitivity to Indian ways of life, yet it is
an important part of our modern heritage. It appears that the Corbusier
buildings are in a sorry state, with the original furniture designed by him either
gone missing or vandalized.
Though there
has been a lot of interest in recovering the history of Indian photography for
some time, much of the research is on the pre-colonial era, written about by
scholars like Christopher Pinney, and in which Rahaab Allana of the Alkazi
Archive has been very active. But the history of post-independence photography,
which documents the building of the new nation and which defines our immediate
past within which we can contextualize ourselves, is less known. Ram, in fact,
has been lecturing widely on the history of contemporary Indian photography,
and has curated a retrospective show of the work of the Marxist photographer
Sunil Janah. Filmmaker/ scholar Sabeena Gadihoke has researched on women
photographers and her recent show of the life work of the first Indian woman
press photographer Homai Vyarawala has just travelled through the National
Galleries of Modern Art in India. Some years ago, Nafeesa Ali exhibited her
father Ahmed Ali’s photographs widely and Pablo Bartholomew has been printing
and exhibiting the photographs taken by his father, the late critic Richard
Bartholomew. While the photographers mentioned above mainly did press or
commercial photography, Richard Bartholomew’s images are more domestic and
personal, documenting family life and pictures of the studios of his artist
friends who belonged to the Delhi Shilpi Chakra or the Progressive Group. They
have an aesthetic of clean bare rooms with little furniture and informal
living, parents and children curled up napping on the ground in the heat. The
Modernist aesthetic for interiors in India seemed to have been a mixture of
Gandhian simplicity and austerity combined with Nehruvian socialism with bare
and unfussy spaces, handloom fabrics, natural weaves and vegetable prints.
The “modern” in
India is closely associated with the Left and perhaps this is why it is so
discredited today with the rise of right wing thinking. SAHMAT, the Safdar
Hashmi Memorial Trust, had a major conference on the Progressive movement in
Delhi some months ago covering theatre, literature, film and art. The
Progressives, a Marxist cultural movement, formed the avant-garde of modern
India over the1930s, 40s and 50s, and had a profound influence. Progressive
ideas again surfaced during the 1970s when there was a burst of creative
activity in all the arts and creative thinking. This was a highly influential
time politically and artistically which has not been studied enough.
Unfortunately a deep conservatism has set in with the Left which sees the
Progressive moment as belonging to a vanished era and a particular style, and
ignores the avant-garde critical work done today, (a critique made by Geeta
Kapur in the conference), which has only impoverished Left thinking. The
feminist, caste and gay critiques of a universal monolithic modernism are seen
as divisive and splintering. Rather than re-thinking and including these
critiques and discourses, there is a tendency to dismiss them. The fall of the
Soviet Union itself can be seen as the collapse of an extreme form of modernism
and universalism, which was insensitive to differences in pursuing a general
Utopian ideal. The closed thinking of the Progressives isolates them from us
and makes the movement seem distant. Left intellectuals now pride themselves on
their philistinism.
Today, there is
a widespread notion that India has gone straight from the pre-modern to the
post- modern, and is in fact a kind of quintessentially post-modern country,
successful in “infotech” while seamlessly adhering to its “ancient”
traditions. I end by quoting film
theorist M. Madhava Prasad who writes in his essay The Last Remake of Indian Modernity, that dominant Indian cultural
discourse has been about essential and unchanging identity that refuses to
accept the sharp break from the
past, which defines the modern condition in which we live:
The discourse
of Indian culture is replete with the jargon of being and belonging, and
within it art is assigned an expressive function tied to this phantasmic
essence, figured as besieged by a modernity that threatens to banish it into
oblivion. In such a conception, time has only one axis of articulation: there
is a past rudely interrupted which awaits the restoration of its line of
continuity, and the present, which is an interregnum of alienation. In this
scenario, modernity has no temporal depth, no ruptures or transitions internal
to its time. It is posed as eternally in conflict with its other – tradition–
in a space bracketed out of time.
Such a stubborn
disavowal of the contemporary is of course easily explained by reference to the
difficult historic struggle for cultural survival after the devastating impact
of colonial rule. But today we can and must pose against this nationalist
imperative the necessity of not only coming to terms with, but also of
embracing without reserve, the actuality of loss, rupture, ungrounding. It is
only through such a gesture of recognizing that the only position of
enunciation available to us is located in the modern, that we can emerge from
the stalemate of the politics of being. The nationalist discourse has glossed
the freedom won by our ancestors as the freedom to go back to being what one
always was (itself a fantasy construction), thus inaugurating the politics of
being. If modernity continues to appear to us as an external imposition, it is
only because we have not rallied to its cause, letting it instead only befall us. Against this constricting
definition of freedom which imprisons us once again, we should strive to reopen
the closed pathways to alienation, to the freedom of becoming.”
The Phantom
Lady
May 2012
