India poems I photographs by Waswo X Waswo I pub. 2005

PHOTOGRAPHING THE NATIVES  

I write this essay on the photographer’s request to express a certain critical view of his body of work, which he encountered during his exhibitions in India. I have not seen the exhibition, but I have twenty- eight of his photographs on my computer, which I am looking at very carefully. The photographs, which have been taken over several years that the author has spent in India, are quite beautiful, classically composed and lit, and seem to be finely printed in rich sepia tones. 

People in India have questioned the ethnographic character of the work, in both look and subject matter. The images and titles look strangely familiar. They are reminiscent of nineteenth century ‘Company School’ etchings of picturesque landscapes done by the British, of ancient monuments framed in a wild countryside and ethnographic portraits of the people of the country in their habitats, practicing their trades: ‘native scenes’, and ‘native types’. The titles too, are similar - ‘Rickshaw Wallah – Hospet’, ‘In the Rice Fields- Karnataka’, ‘Man with a Cow -Kerala’, ‘Elephant Festival- Jaipur’, ‘Counting their Coins-Jaipur’, ‘Morning on the Ghat- Pushkar’, ‘View from the Monkey Temple –Hampi’, ‘The Sickle Seller-Udaipur’, ‘On a Mountain Path – Dharamsala’, ‘Ritual Shower- Terumala’… echoing the British colonial passion for traveling the length of the country documenting its architecture and people, in sketches, water colours, etchings, plaster casts, or later, photography. 

By the mid- nineteenth century, photography was seen as an important tool for anthropological investigations to record newly discovered peoples. The five hundred photographs in the Peoples of India volumes published by the India Museum in London between 1868 and 1875 were significant landmarks in using photography to construct a sort of ‘comprehensive atlas’ of Indian types, which were compiled along similar lines to the architectural photographs commissioned around the same time. This compulsive surveying and archiving served several purposes: to collect information for commerce, to have a ‘moral hold’ on the people by categorizing them (as criminal tribes and so on), and in line with the scientific theories rising at the time, to prove the racial and civilizational superiority of the colonizers.

India is one of the big manufacturing countries of the world, producing most of the raw materials needed and most of the goods that are used by the people. It is a bustling diverse country with factories, cities, bridges, dams and Five year plans, a large technical workforce, universities, scientific and cultural institutions, the world’s biggest railway system. We are a large modern democracy, highly politically aware, with several national and regional political parties, trade unions; publishing hundreds of newspapers and magazines in more than twenty languages. The problems of development are great but issues are intensely debated and fought for at every level.

Yet, when I see the photographs, they are images of the ‘eternal Orient’, stilled in time. It is not as if these scenes are not real, it is only that it seems as if nothing else exists. The scenes are chosen to present a country hardly touched by the industrial revolution, a land quaint, exotic, archaic. The portraits are of humble people, shyly smiling, standing in front of their mud huts framed by dark doorways, or working in their fields. They are poor, but serene, content. The implements they use are sickles, wooden ploughs; their transport is rickshaws, bicycles, bullock carts or traditional boats; they sell from carts, they count coins.  Typically ‘Indian’ animals abound: cows, monkeys, oxen, bullocks, elephants, a skinny street dog. 

Waswo calls the set of photographs India Poems. To quote from his catalogue essay titled Dreaming the Monkey, Deep-Eyed and Lyrical, “ I do not see myself as a documentarian. I make no claims of revealing cultural realities. In fact, there is a lot of deception in what I do. My photographs include few references to the contemporary. There are no automobiles, no signs proclaiming STD or Internet, no men wearing Nike shoes, Adidas shoes, or Rayban sunglasses. This is a stylistic choice that leaves me open to charges of cultural distortion, romanticism, an eye for the exotic, or a self-willed blindness. Yet, I believe my photographs capture a higher truth. The images that speak to me whisper deeper, more archetypal truths, insights into existence. Like poems, they are open to the stuff of dreams; and like dreams, they are laden with meanings hard to articulate in the harsh light of day.”

Perhaps I do not want to repeat in this critique, the well- worn arguments about the politics of image making, the politics of identity, or the politics of power. I do not want to see Waswo as the representative of a powerful, dominant country, personally out to oppress me. I suspect he is an idealist, a photographer version of the thousands of Western people who have come to India since the nineteen sixties – seeking salvation in a simpler life, a simpler land; fleeing from the relentless materialism of their own cultures, countries endlessly producing and defined by, in fact, the very ‘automobiles, Nike shoes, Adidas shoes, or Rayban glasses’ that are deliberately excluded from these frames. 

This idyllic India, drenched in shimmering light and sepia toned, is the land of maharajahs and peasants, palaces and temples and huts. The ‘truths’ that Waswo seeks to reveal are not so personal or hidden. In fact they belong to a long history of representing the sub-continent that go back a hundred and fifty years. If one history of seeing India was to see it as an under developed, decadent and inferior subject civilization, another was to posit the inherent ‘spiritualism’ of the east against the crass materialism of the west. In constructing his archetypal ‘Other’, he is unable to escape from an inherited way of seeing the Indian landscape and its people.

Pushpamala N

Bangalore, 2005 

Indian Lady catalogue I pub. Bose Pacia New York I March 2004

NATIONAL AND GLOBAL

N. Rajyalakshmi, Chief Reporter of Ideal Times, Bangalore, interviews the artist Pushpamala N. about her views on internationalism.

NR: Miss Pushpamala, why do Indian artists imitate the West? Shouldn’t you be more Indian?

PN: Imitation implies blind copying, Miss Rajyalakshmi! Why should Indian artists or “Third World” artists be restricted to our ethnicity? Why can’t we take from forms current elsewhere and use them to break the norms here and to intervene in our reality? Our identities are not so fragile! The Kannada writer BGL Swamy has written a book called “South America in the Stomach” in which he talks about all the foods that we use in our cooking which originate in South America. Even the chilli that we think of as so quintessentially Indian was introduced by the Portuguese in colonial times. 

There is an assumption that a person’s subjectivity is formed by what they eat, read or see. But if the British eat a lot of curry, they are still seen as British eating curry. And if Indians eat only curry, it doesn’t mean we are not colonial in our thinking!

NR: Do you think you are representing real Indian culture?

PN: Maybe I am not interested in representing ‘real’ Indian culture at all. I critique it.  The Hindu Right has appropriated the right to define Indianness- and all these definitions come from the European discipline of Indology anyway, which vested feudal interests use to prevent social justice and questioning of the status quo.

You know, I have been working with hoarding painters to create tableaux for a recent art project ‘Native Women of South India’ which deals directly with ethnography. I discovered that hoarding painters designed everything in Bangalore from public arches,  temple architecture and ashram complexes  to film sets and TV serials, theatre backdrops, festival tableaus and political cut outs. These are the people with their weird, kitschy, eclectic mix of images who are defining ‘real’ Indian culture, creating a strange continuum between dream, commerce, reality and exploitation.

NR: Madam, you are a trained sculptor. When we have an old tradition of stone carving, why do you do this performance photo work, imitating cheap films?

PN: Susan Sontag writes that photography in essence is not an art form at all, but rather, like language, has the capacity to produce both mundane and artistic forms. It is a kind of vernacular and I am interested in the vernacular! It connects directly to the real world.

NR: Your work is funny! Is it art or entertainment?

PN: I like to use entertainment and the forms of entertainment to say something serious! Brecht said in the 1930s that theatre should be like a game of football- quick, lively and entertaining. You hold the audience’s attention while you make them think and question.

NR: What about the style of your work?

PN:   I’m afraid I have been completely formed by being a South Indian and growing up here reading PG Wodehouse and Mad magazine, Ms Rajyalakshmi! The South Indian languages are quickwitted, full of satire, irony and sarcasm. There is a lot of punning and wordplay. I love slang and idiomatic forms, they hit the nail on the head! I try to use visual language in the same way. I’ve always loved Indian silent cinema which uses inter-titles in three languages - local language, national language [Hindi] and international language [English] – sometimes each saying completely different things.

NR: Who is your audience?

PN: I like my work to be layered. I use familiar themes and humour but there is always an emotional undercurrent of autobiography. I do think of my audience as primarily Indian or sub-continental, who would understand the background and nuances. My images act like half-remembered things that people never really experienced…

I recently went for a lecture by the political scientist Dr Partha Chatterjee on the the new globalism. He compared it to late 19^th century imperialism and how British philosophers had given legitimacy to colonial conquest by propounding the idea of a civilizing mission. I later talked to him about how, for the project “Native Women” we had used a photograph of an Andaman islander’s from a notorious mid- 19^th century British anthropometric study, which compared the measurements of the skulls of  “primitives”, lunatics, prostitutes and criminals. He told me that in fact these Andaman islanders had been brought to Kolkata to the Indian Museum and displayed in glass cases there for public viewing. The photographs of these exhibits were still there in the archives.

At my Bangalore show last year, the Kannada literary critic Ki Ram Nagaraja had a very interesting response to my work Dard e Dil. He said the way the architecture of the old mansion was used as a character in the story, made him think of the ‘linguistics’ of the homes of the Kaadu Kurubas or honey- collecting tribes, which had what he called an elaborate ‘grammar’ of space.

All artists dream of an ideal community. I try to keep in touch with the progressive thinking of the time, and to connect to a network of creative people who form my ideal audience and the context for my work.

NR: People say you are a narcissist?

PN: You know, I love the scene from Silent Movie where Mel Brooks and Marty Feldman go to meet Burt Reynolds. For several miles leading to his house there are enormous billboards with his picture pointing the way – when they finally reach his mansion you see ten signs saying Burt Reynolds Lives Here.  And then it cuts to his bathroom where he is taking a shower, smiling into the mirror and soaping his armpits – it’s hilarious! When you stretch something beyond a point, it becomes ridiculous. I’m making fun of myself! 

The Mother Goddess is worshipped in the form of a polished metal mirror in certain shrines in Kerala. The mirror can be used to examine the soul, not only the physical body.

NR: Isn’t this play-acting embarassing?

PN:   Perhaps masquerade has been integral to the idea of India as a nation! Indian Nationalism defines the country as being made up of diverse ethnic communities co-existing happily together. In the silent film “Wildcat of Bombay”, the heroine Sulochana had eight separate roles – herself, a gardener, a policeman, a Hyderabadi gentleman, a street urchin, an European blonde, an old banana seller and an expert pickpocket who gives her money to charity! Every year on Gandhi’s birthday, people dress up as Gandhi and walk miles with a stick to garland his statue. Recently I saw a picture of an activist leading a police rights demonstration dressed as a policeman! 

Indian newspapers always have pictures of politicians going to remote areas of the country and dancing with the tribals, wearing the local headgear, or masquerading as mythological heroes. There is always the tension between the self and the Other, the mainstream and the marginal …

NR: What about the common man?

PN: Art is seen as something elite and superfluous to the life of the common man. Yet everybody makes and enjoys some kind of art. It is a way of exploring the world! Art making is the sensual expression of the larger world of ideas and a society which muzzles art expression or ignores it, becomes barren and impoverished, Miss Rajyalakshmi.

For the last ten years there have been increasing attacks on art shows, films, plays and books because they ‘offended the sentiments’ of some group or other, or were ‘against Indian culture’. We have to ask ourselves why we feel so weak and threatened that we cannot tolerate any questioning, any criticism.

NR: What is the artist’s role?

PN: In a post colonial country like India, artists have seen their role as developmental and have worked to build institutions and the infrastructure for creative life to flourish. The artists I admire are scholar- writer-teacher-artists. I believe the creative subjectivity and the anarchic individualism of the artist resist the homogenous culture demanded by both a feudal society and by a globalizing world!

NR: Do you find it easy to be a woman artist in India?

PN: The Nationalist movement in India released certain energies where a woman could enter public life. The first modern artist in India is considered to be Amrita Sher- Gil, an Indian-Hungarian woman trained in Paris. She was a contemporary of Frida Kahlo and died at 28 in 1941. Women artists of every generation here are active, vocal and doing some of the most radical and innovative work! You have to consciously make your space and hold on to your territory.  But it’s not easy! It’s still a patriarchal society and there are many pressures…

Pushpamala N.

Bangalore 

Bhupen Khakhar I Obituary I 2003

Bhupen Khakhar 

Bhupen Khakhar’s paintings have this quality of drawing you irresistibly into his world. 

Bhupen’s life and work has been described as being ‘both exemplary and emblematic’. There was a definiteness, a consistency and a completeness about his art and life. Indeed everything about Bhupen seems to be the stuff of legend: it is interesting the way he created that emblematic quality about himself. He seems to stand iconic in the centre like those saints or national leaders, while all around him are vignettes, which are told stories. Stories of his open house, Pandu the cook, his famous friendships, his lovers, his generosity, his pranks, (he once hired a wedding band to play for a friend’s birthday in Kasauli), his writing and his aphorisms,(one of his famous aphorisms was ‘a bouquet of plastic flowers is an eternal joy to the eyes’) and his early catalogues as James Bond, or as a body builder, ridiculing himself-

Bhupen Khakhar had a mischievous, puckish quality and a terrific wit. He saw himself as  the Outsider - a‘Detective Inspector’ poking fun at the solemnity of the Indian art world. His early work was thought frivolous, and dismissed. The British critic Timothy Hyman writes of the artist Ram Kumar’s fury at seeing Khakhar’s work in the 1970s: he thought this was ‘caricature and in art there is no place for caricature’. In the process of playing the Fool, the Insignificant Man caught in the rigidities of Indian middle class life - (he wrote once in a catalogue ‘I used to immediately take bath twice with cold water following thoughts about sex’) - to the Melancholy Fool who ‘takes off his clothes before the world’ to expose his weakness in a half-embarassed, half-defiant way, Bhupen Khakhar  became a Master Painter.

Perhaps this had something to do with his ‘coming out’ as a homosexual: the more explicit the subject matter, the more structured and classical the work. Bhupen Khakhar always avoided artistic bohemia, he (unlike  Souza or  Husain) maintained a stolidly middle-class salaried man look, preferring to be seen as Common Man rather than Camp.

Bhupen Khakhar’s interventions in the Indian art scene were special, unique and extremely influential. Facing the prevalent formalised abstraction in the Indian art scene of the 1960s, he struggled to create an urban pictorial language equivalent to the hybrid Bombay Gujarati dialect that he grew up speaking. Trained as a chartered accountant and lacking any formal study as an artist, he was criticized for his bad drawing and lack of skill as a painter. With his passion for art and incessant hard work, he turned his bad drawing into expressing the clumsiness, the banality, the pathos as well as the monumentality of the life of the Common Man, of the lower middle class life that he was celebrating. He became a masterly colourist, taking from the bad taste, loud colour palette of calendar art to create his own highly nuanced, subtle and rich painting technique. In the process, he reinvented a familiar world, the prosaic everyday life of modern urban India and made it into art, making us experience it afresh. His death is a great loss to the art world and all of us who knew him well and were influenced by his work.

Pushpamala N

Bangalore, 2003

La Centrale Gallery I pub.Montreal Canada I 2003

WOMAN ARTIST IN INDIA

N Rajyalakshmi, the fictitious Chief Reporter of Ideal Times, interviews the real artist Pushpamala N

NR: Ms Pushpamala, do you enjoy being called a woman artist? Isn’t it derogatory?

PN: Yes, some artists like one of my Professors in Baroda, Nasreen Mohammadi, who was a very fine abstract artist, did object to being called a woman artist. But since the 1980s I think there has been a very strong feminist consciousness and many artists found a whole new world of subject matter and felt empowered. Women artists now are doing some of the most exciting work in India, taking risks and breaking barriers with their practice! They have also become more articulate and confident -

NR: You chose to study sculpture. Was it difficult?

PN: I was a 40 kg weakling in art school, but I was always in the sculpture department. When I wanted to specialize, I asked my Professor whether I was too skinny to be a sculptor and he said, what you need is mental strength, not physical strength! That instantly convinced me! It’s hard work but so is making any kind of art.

Sculpture departments all over the world are very conservative. There is this image of huge bearded muscular men carving stone or welding metal- its very macho, and intimidating.

NR: But your work was recognized early-

PN: When I was a student in the 1980s in Baroda, I was part of a new generation of young sculptors who started doing strongly figurative sculpture in new materials. Our work was immediately noticed by the art world. The sculpture scene then was basically Henry Moore and abstract sculpture in stone and wood and metal. I chose to work in terracotta as an indigenous and ‘poor’ material.

( NR: Aren’t there very few women sculptors in India?

PN: Lets say there are very few good sculptors in India – and the most interesting ones are women! Like Meera Mukherjee of the older generation of artists from Santiniketan, who worked with the metal casting process of the Bastar tribals. Or Mrinalini Mukherjee who made large iconic woven hemp sculptures and now works with ceramics, Sheela Gowda who works with traditional materials like cowdung, thread and pigments, Anita Dubey who does surrealist conceptual work,  Navjot Altaf who has been working along with tribal artists in a tribal area doing very political work -  but the funny thing is, that most of these artists don’t come from a background of sculpture! They are trained painters, printmakers, even art historians. And someone like me who is a trained sculptor is doing photography and video. But everybody is using different kinds of media, which didn’t happen in the past. )

NR: Your work is funny. Isn’t it just satire and caricature? 

PN: You know, Ms Rajyalakshmi, women aren’t supposed to laugh out loud, to be boisterous? The world is full of jokes against women. But women, in fact, like all subalterns have a sharp sense of humour and wit. My use of humour relaxes the spectator but it’s very subversive. It’s also very aggressive! 

And women love my work. Men can be very embarrassed about it- but women seem to enter easily and identify with the fun, the satire, the sensuality, the pathos and the open self-revelation and confessional element in the work.

NR: Why did you start working with photography?

PN: My earlier figurative sculpture, which was mainly in terracotta, was too narrative, too real. I started moving away from it into a more minimal language, doing very strongly political, conceptual work in the 90s, responding to the violence and turbulence of the times. But then the work became didactic and spare -  I felt I had worked myself into a corner and was limiting the possibilities of my work.

The way I work with photography now, it is more expansive, more open, where I can put in all my interests- 

NR: Why do you use yourself in your photographs? Are you a narcissist?

PN: Narcissus was a Greek god who looked at his reflection in a pond and fell in love with himself. Women cannot be narcissists by definition, Ms Rajyalakshmi, because we can never love ourselves, we are always seeking approval from men and society!

NR: Will you say something about your recent work?

PN: My first photographic work, done in 1997, is a photo romance, Phantom Lady or Kismet, a film noir style adventure of lost and found twins set in the city of Bombay [Mumbai]. The Phantom Lady character is based on Fearless Nadia, who was a famous stunt film star from 1930s Hindi films. My next work, Sunhere Sapne [ Golden Dreams]  is the fantasy of a middle class housewife dressed in a housecoat and her alter ego, a mysterious woman in a golden frock with a bouffant hairstyle. The set of small hand painted black and white photographs have the sweetness and intimacy of old family photographs, but  it is shot like a thriller, and the content is dark.

Bombay Photo Studio is a series of individual studio portraits taken by Mr.  J H Thakker, big size sepia prints based on the typical family portrait or film star glamour pictures. My latest work, Dard e Dil [The Anguished Heart], a set of large handpainted photographs, is a tragic love story, a sort of Muslim social set in an old ruined mansion in the heart of Old Delhi. 

I am also working on an ongoing project with a photographer friend, Clare Arni, in which we are creating a series of images of South Indian women, like an ethnography of native types.

In all these, I play the protagonist or both the protagonists [I love using alter egos]  and use popular genres and archetypes.

I am also interested in referring to the history of Indian photography, which I see as the history of Indian modernity, which has had its own trajectory-

NR: But don’t you think you are reinforcing these stereotypes by enacting them?

PN: You know, I am much taller and larger than the conventional Indian woman. When I assume the character of the protagonist, the image changes immediately, becomes more powerful. And then I become an active agent, changing the popular images I work with- they become my own fantasies, projections of my own desires, and more nuanced, more complex. There is also a strong sense of vulnerability, of autobiography - so it goes back and forth between the personal and the social/political.

NR: Ms Pushpamala, there have been a lot of attacks on artists and women recently by fundamentalist groups. It is all about how women are portrayed or about enforcing a dress code. The accusation is that it is against Indian culture or traditional culture. Does this affect you?

PN: Women and artists are soft targets, easy to attack, Ms Rajyalakshmi. I was just thinking of the liberal climate that was there till the 80s. Savitri, an artist from a lower middle class traditional family who worked in a bank had an exhibition of ‘Self  Nude’  paintings , as she called it, in the early 80s in Bangalore. It created a furore and there was a hot debate in the papers for weeks about her work. She was very confident and articulate and defended herself stoutly. But there was no question of her or her exhibition being attacked - nor was it officially banned! A Tamil magazine in Chennai castigated her work and that was it.

Recently, in Bangalore there was an exhibition of photographs of the making of the idols of the Goddess Durga which was attacked by a group of men. They told the owner of the gallery to take down works that showed the bare breasts and limbs of the idols because it insulted the image of their goddess. This is ridiculous- it is a common sight to see the craftsmen making the images and  photographs of them are published everywhere! It is a way of intimidating people by irrational acts and creating an atmosphere for fundamentalism to grow. It is also very much to do with enforcing male supremacy and machismo.

NR: Indian artists are showing a lot internationally these days. Do you think your work can be understood abroad?

PN: No, maybe not all the layers, ‘in’ jokes, or references. But the work is performance related feminist art which I would say is its international context. Last year, when I showed Phantom Lady and my video Indian Lady in Montreal at La Centrale for instance, young people and students particularly loved the work. There is an image of India as either spiritual/ Orientalist, or as backward, rustic and disaster ridden. The funny thing is that people in the West and some people in India see Phantom Lady as ‘Western’. But the characters in Phantom Lady and the stunt and thriller genres I’ve used, have been popular types in Indian films for decades! And the shots of Bombay are at actual locations with real people in them. When we show internationally, I think we help break this ‘anthropological’ view-

Pushpamala N        

Bangalore  February 2003

Deccan Herald Bangalore I Book review I ‘Captured Moments- Shambhu Shaha’, Chandrima Shaha I ‘In her Own Right , Remembering the Artist Karuna Shaha’,Tapati Guha Thakurtha, Seagull Books I 27.05.2001

LITTLE KNOWN JOURNEYS

The two biographies bring to light the pioneering contributions of a candid photographer and a fiery artist. 

In a situation where there are hardly any publications on contemporary Indian art, Seagull Books have played an important role in commissioning and bringing out serious and consistently well- designed art books over the years. These two illustrated monographs on the Bengal couple, photographer Shambhu Shaha and artist Karuna Shaha, bring to the notice of the art world two different, perhaps neglected, kinds of journeys.

While for various reasons 19th century Indian photography has excited extensive interest and research, the history of modern photography remains largely undocumented. Shambhu Shaha was in some ways the pioneer, one of the first Indians to graduate from using a large format camera to a small one, and to specialize in candid photography. 

In an interview he says that he was so shy that he preferred to take photographs unnoticed, and later read in a journal that Cartier-Bresson took 'candid' photographs. That was exactly what he was doing, except that his technique was different. 'Cartier-Bresson used to keep his camera wrapped around his leg with black tape; I used a gadget that I attached to the lens. This was a sort of mirror that enabled you to see and shoot your subject, looking away from it at an angle of 90 degrees. 

Since his biographer, daughter Chandrima Shaha is a scientist and photographer herself; the essay is full of interesting information about the rough and ready inventiveness of the period. In another anecdote he talks about the enlarger he had to make because to buy one was too expensive in the 1930s. This consisted of a contraption made from the sliding copier of a camera; an aluminum cooking pot with a hole, with its inside painted black and a camera lens placed in it. It was with this makeshift enlarger that he produced some of his most famous photographs. 

Shaha learnt photography in the 1920s from the Nationalist revolutionary Hemchandra Kanungo, a colourful man who had just returned from exile in the Andamans and set up a studio in Shaha's hometown Midnapore. Kanungo took on students like a traditional guru, on the condition that they will later never turn away anyone who wants to learn from them. Shaha went through a rigorous academic training in drawing and painting before learning photography. Kanungo believed in holistic education, so besides concepts of light and shade, perspective and composition, they learnt ‘woodcraft, leather craft, bookbinding, printing, cooking, and English literature'. Shaha drew and painted all his life and felt that this early training helped him compose and print his pictures more sensitively. 

Women's Studies has opened up to scholarly research a whole world previously ignored; in a sense, valourising local struggles as vs. the grand narratives. Karuna Shaha developed a reputation in 1960s Calcutta as 'the lady who painted nudes'. Tapati Guha Thakurtha sees her as a pioneer who, while not featuring in the mainstream or avant-garde circuits, represents the struggles of the first generation of working women artists in the country. 

Karuna Shaha was the first woman student to be admitted into the Calcutta Art School in the 1940s. In the cloistered atmosphere of the art school a Matron was employed to chaperon the girls to and fro from the classes. In contrast, at home she faced the hard reality of having to support her family by teaching music and playback singing for films. As a young woman, she is fiery and tempestuous, doing relief work among the Burmese refugees and actively participating in the Quit India Movement. At this time she commits the legendary act of tearing down the Union Jack from the art school gates, for which she is expelled and sent to jail for two years. These years according the writer are strangely shrouded in the artist's memory, as if unimportant to her progress as an artist. Released in the 1940s, she tours with the IPTA, performing plays and meeting the stalwarts of the Left movement. It is at this time that she meets Shambhu Shaha who is part of the same left avant-garde. 

After an initial string of awards and successes Karuna Shaha sinks into middle class life, feeling increasingly isolated and professionally marginalized as a woman artist. In writing about her crisis, Tapati Guha Thakurta accepts the same parameters that Karuna Shaha worked in - the narrow Calcutta art milieu and the painter’s own fascination with academic painting. Throughout her life, the artist never seems to question her training in Western academicism or reveal any interest in any contemporary debates or art movements. 

It is interesting that in her three years in Florence in the early 60s, she does not look outside of the Academy to progressive currents and new ideas, but remains fascinated by the same nineteenth century modes that she had studied in Calcutta. In contrast, her contemporaries Nasreen Mohammadi and Meera Mukherjee, both highly individualistic and solitary artists, used their study in Europe to create strong contexts for their work - [International abstraction in the case of Mohammadi, and an interest in indigenous forms in the case of Mukherjee] - which sustained them throughout their creative lives. It is this failure to connect, and a certain orthodoxy of the imagination that seems to curtail Karuna Shaha's art and keep it firmly at the provincial level. 

Pushpamala N

Saffronart Art Cafe I Interview with Edgar Demello I 2001

A GALLERY FOR ARCHITECTS

Pushpamala n. interviews architect Edgar Demello

Architect Edgar Demello who recently opened the first architectural gallery in India, TAG&B or The Architecture Gallery and Bookshop at his old office on Cunningham Road in Bangalore, is interviewed by Pushpamala N.

Edgar Demello (born in 1947 in Abadan, Iran) studied architecture in the School of Planning and Architecture in Delhi and Urban Design at Delft University in Holland. He worked for a few years in Europe and came back to Bangalore in 1978 to start his own architectural firm Edgar Demello Architects.

He opened TAG&B in June 2000 in Bangalore.

PN: Edgar, why did you feel the need to start an architecture gallery in Bangalore? In the early 80s some of you had a discussion group called BASE, and then Raj Shetty formed the Discussions in Architecture Forum- DIAF. Has this grown out of that?

ED: Actually, there are not many architecture galleries worldwide. There are architecture institutes. TAG&B is a place for discourse among architects, a mediator between academia and practice. I used to teach part time and found that there didn’t seem to be a platform for the exchange of ideas, which myself and other architects had experienced in Europe.

Also, architects are not very comfortable about putting their work to critical appraisal by their fellows. The important thing that BASE did, which preceded the gallery was to allow us to do this, and put our work in context in a very free for all environment which as you know could get very aggressive sometimes!

Then the idea of TAG&B came about, to give a formal structure and to try and understand the process of design and building and not just the product. In the gallery, one of the most important and popular events is when architects discuss the process of their work – the mechanics of it- sometimes on site. For the students this becomes very important. And we really encourage people not to put any cosmetics on it – to talk about the whole mess- the mishaps, the problems with clients etc.

These events happen on Tuesdays and Fridays. Students come from Bangalore, MIT in Manipal and Hassan when we have video showings, slide lectures and exhibitions.

PN: But the general public is either indifferent or hostile to architecture.

ED: You know Charles Correa said that Mahatma Gandhi is not called the doctor or engineer of the nation, you call him the ‘architect’ of the nation, but in spite of that architecture doesn’t seem to be taken seriously by the public!

There are two things we want to do here: one idea came out the NAI (The Netherlands Architectural Institute). They have something called the school atelier, where school children come to the institute to be exposed to things architectural for instance, what is taking measurements… They are taken around the site and given projects, and exposed to history and processes.

We’ve been talking about this in BASE for ten years. Dev Bildikar the architect now wants to work out a programme for school children.

The other point is that we have to really believe that architecture is an extremely important part of our social consciousness. People say architecture is elite, we can’t afford it – is it possible for a gallery to mediate in this- to have confrontations and to provoke and engage people?

PN: Do you think this is because Bangalore, or Karnataka, never had major architecture schools or a major movement, or influential architects like for example the role that BV Doshi played in Ahmedabad? We never had a modernist movement.

ED: Very often the right patronage helps start certain movements- I think this is where Ahmedabad scores. There the big industrialists were concerned and wanted to invite people of international importance like Louis Kahn and Corbusier. It’s actually about finding the right people. Kasturbhai and Lalbhai got in touch with BV Doshi who had already worked with Corbusier in Paris in the early 60s, to start the architecture school – he had been talking to them about the Modernist movements in Europe. He got people like Bernad Kohn and Louis Kahn to start thinking about establishing an architecture school of excellence in Ahmedabad. A little earlier Vikram Sarabhai had already brought down Charles and Ray Eames, designers, architects and inventors, to set up NID, the National Institute of Design.

Something similar never happened in Bangalore… And Ahmedabad soon started to tie up with important schools in Europe and America on exchange programmes. The Delhi School hasn’t done this in 55 years!

PN: What would you say about the concept of Critical Regionalism?

ED: Critical Regionalism is really a commonsensical approach to the environment. Kenneth Frampton, the guru of architectural criticism first formulated that phrase in a book of the same name in the early 1980s. He was saying that the International style does not exist because Modernism has to do with the region and how you look at it through your culture and your climate. And what Norman Foster, British architect said – and I completely agree with him – is that in the near future the only thing that will distinguish buildings from one part of the world to another is the geographical climate in which it is built. Everything else will be a common denominator including the culture. But cultural expression in building really comes from responding to the climate.

PN: Tell me something more about BASE.

ED: BASE- it’s not an acronym, it’s more like a foundation or basis – happened in the early 80s when seven or eight of us met by chance. We had all got back from various parts of the country and the world- Nikhil Arni, the Kanade brothers, Sharad Padalkar, Venkatraman, Mohan Bopiah, myself and Sanjay Mohe – it was during the building boom in Bangalore. We had all grown up in the International style and we were looking for connections in the region. So we travelled to the backwaters of Karnataka and Tamilnadu looking at local architectures. All this was put into slide discussions but it took a while for us to realize that it was not the physical foms nd constructional inventiveness that was important but the spirit and essence it contained. We were romantics, once we showed these slides with great arrogance to Henri Ciriani a French architect, who BV Doshi had sent own to Bangalore, to show him what great ’indigenous architecture’ we had. He almost ridiculed our rather naïve and literal reading of tradition. Tradition is everywhere he said, but what do we do with it as contemporary architects ?  One must look at the vernacular within an urbane and civil context

- civil as in people- as versus civic as in establishment. 

PN: But visually, Bangalore looks crazy- it’s as if every individual or builder wants to fulfil a different fantasy.

ED: Because Bangalore is not homogenous like Chennai culturally, that’s allowed for very diverse ideas and architectural design positions. But there is a new maturity in the way people are looking at the city. I think the phase of Windsor Manor type neo-colonial architecture is over, and the phase of glass-fronted buildings! There’s a great feeling of optimism amongst a new generation of architects in their late 20s and 30s, on the one hand quite angry, and on the other hand, quite impatient that architects are not really looking at the city with the kind of inventiveness it deserves. I want the gallery to be a facilitator in actively involving these guys in the way a city can redefine itself.

Pushpamala N

Bangalore, February 2001

Saffronart Art Café I Interview with Balan Nambiar I 2000

TRADITIONS AND TENSIONS

Pushpamala N. interviews sculptor and scholar Balan Nambiar.

Balan Nambiar, [born 1937, Kannapuram, Kerala] studied sculpture in the Madras College of Arts and Crafts, Chennai. In 1971 he moved to Bangalore and has been working in the city as an independent artist. Balan Nambiar has intensively researched and documented the ritual art forms of Kerala and Tulunadu in Karnataka, for which he received the Nehru Fellowship.

PN:     Balan, your recent work 'Valampiri Shankha' is a stainless steel image of a conch shell. What connection does the shankha, which is an archaic Hindu religious symbol, have with the state-of-the-art technology produced by Texas Instruments who commissioned the work?

BN:     The first conch sculpture I made was in 1978 in the Portland Cement Factory in Heidelberg in Germany, where someone pointed out to me that it was based on the golden section. The golden section or the golden mean has a proportion of width to height of 1:1.618, which is supposed to be the perfect proportion, and has been used extensively by Greek and Renaissance artists and architects.

While most conches have an anti - clockwise spiral, the Valampiri Shankha [which means 'right turning' in Malayalam] has a clockwise spiral and is considered auspicious and rare. I heard a story that a German collector offered 50,000 DM for one! A properly grown clockwise conch when blown produces a sound which is closest to the 'OM' sound. 

The sculpture is the logo of the Centre of Digital Technology, a laboratory sponsored by Texas Instruments who are the pioneers in introducing digital sound processing [DSP] to India. I was thinking of the inherent mathematical effect of the sound of 'Om' produced by the Valampiri Shankha in terms of digital power. I wanted to make it in stainless steel, using the most sophisticated processes like computer and laser technology. The software AUTOCAD was used to design the sections.

PN:      Visually, the sculpture has a light, shimmering, glassy quality- almost like a mirage. ...Balan, you have used ritual symbols and stories from myths in your work but some motifs like the flame, rice plant, cactus and bird you say are autobiographical. Tell me about your life.

BN:      I come from a land owning family from Kannoor District in Kerala- but members of the family also worked in the fields- I used to plough the fields, plant rice and grow vegetables when I was a boy. There used to be Theyyam performances in my village and I used to watch the make up- they make elaborate ritual costumes from tender coconut leaves ...In high school I was very good in both mathematics and drawing. So after high school I did the Madras Govt. Drawing Examination, got a job in the railways as a draughtsman and moved to Chennai in 1959.

I was painting all the time and sending my work to exhibitions. Fellow artist Akkitham Narayanan introduced me to KCS Paniker in 1962. As the principal of the Madras Art School, Paniker took a personal interest in my work. He gave me the courage to give up my Railways job and I joined the art school as a student at the age of 30!

PN:      When you came to Bangalore in 1971 you must have been the only contemporary sculptor working in Karnataka. What was it like?

BN:      I am like the cactus plant, which survives in the most uncongenial place! When I moved to Bangalore in the 1970s, there was no proper art institute or gallery. The only other freelance artist besides me was the painter Roomale Chennabasaviah. I formed the Bangalore Art Club as soon as I moved here, where I ran evening classes for adults and children's classes at the Max Mueller Bhavan. The Brothers of the Holy Cross had given me their big hall on St. Mark's Road to use- I organized film shows, seminars, poetry readings, dance performances. I lived in an outhouse in the compound and did painting and drawing.

            
In  1973, Shankar Hegde of Hegde and Golay Watches asked me to do a sculpture for them. I made an 8 ft. high welded steel sculpture symbolising time in front of his factory- he was very pleased with the work and offered me a shed and facilities to work. It was a lucky break! Most factories are not keen on artists using their space because they feel it is not profitable. In 1975 I had my first big exhibition of large welded steel sculptures on the lawns of the Hotel Ashoka [there was still no gallery!].

PN:     Your outdoor sculptures 'Monument to the Assassinated' and 'Resurrection of Janaki' which you made in the Art and Nature Workshop in Delhi in 1995 have an unusually sharp political content. Can you talk about that?

BN:     For a long time I have been disturbed by some of the characters in the Puranas. One incident from the Ramayana is the death of Bali. Sugriva is the younger half brother of the forest king Bali, who wants the kingdom of Kishkinda. He makes a treaty with Rama to eliminate Bali in return for his help in searching for Sita. I consider this the first recorded illegal treaty in the history of India! Rama hides behind a tree and kills Bali. In Northern Kerala where I come from there are hundreds of shrines for Bali who is worshipped by the artisan community- blacksmiths, goldsmiths, and carpenters. In Kerala, in the Koodiyattam and Kathakali performances, the most experienced actor always plays the role of Bali, while Rama's role is always given to a junior artist.

There are several versions of the Ramayana- in the Malayalam version; Rama was hiding behind seven sal trees. In 'Monument to the Assassinated', I used seven 2.5 metre high slabs of kota stone placed in a row- a groove was cut at the chest level of all the stones to show the path of the arrow shot from the bow of Rama. Rama was depicted by two footmarks carved on a slab of kota- and at the other end; a split boulder on a raised platform depicts Bali.
Janaki is another name for Sita - the one who was born out of the ploughing of the earth. After her marriage she goes through every kind of suffering and at the end she disappears back into the earth. She is the daughter of the earth. 

In the work 'Resurrection of Janaki' I made a 10 metre long slit in the earth, which was surrounded by a line of boulders in an oval shape to suggest the womb of the earth. A big tree in the location was part of the work. Seven stones were placed on seven slabs at the head of the slit representing the Sapta Matrikas or Seven Mother Goddesses. They are the only witnesses for a possible resurrection... 

Pushpamala N 

Bangalore  2000