Native Women of South India I ed. Pushpamala N. I pub. Nature Morte Delhi, Bose Pacia New York and Gallery Chemould Mumbai I 2007

Native Women

N Rajyalakshmi , Chief reporter of Ideal Times, interviews Pushpamala N. and Clare Arni on the Native Women  project.

NR: Why Native Women of South India?

PN: Well, Ms. Rajyalakshmi, Clare and I met several times to discuss my proposal for the India Foundation grant. While we were tossing around ideas, she said since I had earlier worked on images of Indian women, why not work on South Indian women? I loved it. For one thing, most typical images of Indian women were from the North, the North is the norm. And then we were both South Indian women. I am a Kannadiga from Bangalore, and Clare is British but has spent most of her life in South India. A native is the original inhabitant of a place, but who is more native, one who comes from there, or the one who chooses to be there? And who is “typical”? The project really plays around with the idea of the “native”. At this time of regionalist and religious politics, it’s a most contentious idea.

CA: I grew up and went to school in Madurai in Tamil Nadu and came back to live in India when I fell in love and married an architect from Bangalore. In school I wanted to have an arranged marriage with a Tamil Brahmin when I grew up! I’ve travelled all over South India extensively, and have been documenting images of South Indian women in the course of my work. I love the film posters with the actresses in uplift bras!

NR: Why masquerade?

PN: You know, when I was working on the project, and borrowing things from all sorts of people, old family friends said this reminds them exactly of my mother. There was one story by an uncle who said that when he was newly married – this was in the early 1950s - there was a knock on the door and when his young wife opened it, she found a holy man standing in the dusk. He barked at her that she was insulting him by not greeting him with the proper rituals. When she went back with all the puja things, she found him laughing uproariously- it was my mother in a yogi’s costume! She was a keen amateur actress and we grew up doing “Great Women of India” and “Costumes of India” pageants - this project is a bit like that.  The performance brings in autobiography and subjectivity, besides the irony that is implicit in replicating a cliché. One is inside the image, not just outside, looking.

CA: This is completely different from the way I work, but I was interested in experimenting with something new. I had done some family portraits earlier in England based on Raja Deen Dayal’s royal portraits. And my father makes “home movies”- the last one shot on a holiday in Goa was a murder mystery, very funny.

NR: Why did you choose to copy images?

PN: Copying is a very traditional way of learning how something is put together. A cultural theorist friend was very irritated with the whole show and said he didn’t understand at all why we didn’t just paste my face onto existing images. But then this can be done by any school kid who knows photo-shop, we didn’t have to spend years on the project. And as a sculptor, I’m interested in the materiality of it. Recreating the image meant that the entire picture was physically constructed life-size as a three-dimensional painted tableau, with backdrop, props, costumes and accessories, and then photographed. The production for each tableau took three months, because of the care in detailing. And because I was performing physically in them, we were able to further use the costumes and props to freely create many hundreds of new images from the original scenes, which became the ethnographic, popular and process series, which made the project so exuberant and playful.

CA: Initially we concentrated on replicating the original, with great attention to the costume, props and mood of the image. In the first shoot we used only studio flash lighting and experimentation was limited to the use of different photographic filters. The second image,  “Returning from the Tank” used a variety of lighting from diffused daylight, reflectors and flashes. We also broke away from the original image, taking inspiration from my collection of nineteenth century British postcards depicting typical Indian scenes. The idea of documenting the process of shooting came up, which became important images in themselves. Shooting these images made me break from away from my “advertising” way of seeing where careful composing cleans up the reality of the scene. I began looking at the photographic studio with its inherent play of equipment, crew and chaos as a set piece in itself.

NR: If you were really interested in “types”, what is the point of being so faithful to the original picture down to the smallest detail?

PN: It’s a kind of discipline. If one gets sloppy, the picture loses its rigour. For “Cracking the Whip”, I needed that particular kind of dagger belt in the original image. Ealamalai, my set painter advised me to get it made by buying a readymade belt from the market, and having the dagger pockets sewn on by an autorickshaw decorator. The authentic looking handstand in the Toda shoot took three months to make. Sculptor Balan Nambiar worked out the design and made a scale drawing for me. The stand was made of wood, with a steel geared wheel fixed on top as in a beach umbrella. Balan and I went to the metal scrap yard at the City Market looking for parts but could not find anything readymade. Finally we got the wheel made in an industrial estate and then welded it at his workshop nearby. The first carpenter I went to misunderstood the perspective drawing and carved what looked like a temple pillar! Another carpenter I found later modified it. It was then stained with bitumen to make it look old.

CA: Ms. Rajyalakshmi, each time we chose an image to replicate in the studio, we would spend time analyzing its physicality as well as its emotional content. What was this woman feeling in this situation? The fear and unease of a tribal woman confronted by a British camera, the terror of a criminal in an Indian jail, but also her strength in her criminality. Why was that lady alone in the moonlight with her pallu adrift? We became at one with these women and were able to share in their story. We would then empower her by taking her out of her milieu and re-contextualizing her in differing histories.

NR: How did you go about the research?

PN: From the beginning of the project, we started putting together material dealing with images of women, particularly south Indian women. It was an ongoing process and we went shoot by shoot. This consisted of books, catalogues, magazine and newspaper clippings, post cards, toys, votive images and photographs. Besides gathering readymade material, Clare took photographs of a circus, and of roadside shrines for the “Velankanni” shoot. The original project was much more modest, to create fifteen pictures, but as we kept working, we started elaborating the scenes in each shoot. For example, when I was trying to pose as Ravi Varma’s “Lady in Moonlight” we realized that it was a very strange picture, where this woman was sitting alone at a lake shore at night quite immodestly, with her pallu falling off, and her sari hitched up to expose her calves. It was an early “cheesecake” picture, using the mythological story of Radha waiting for Krishna as a pretext to paint a sexy woman! So we collected images from calendar pictures and advertisements for an extra shoot where we had the Lady pose in a series of “glamourous” images, which formed the popular series of the tableau.

CA: As a process, the collaboration moved from replicating an existing image where “copying” the original was important, to the emphasis being on experimenting. At one point the idea was to do only Ravi Varma works, but then we decided it would be more challenging to make each image different from the other. The final two shoots, “Circus” and “Our Lady of Velankanni” did not take their inspiration from a single source image but from differing ideas, memories and pictures. My desire in this collaboration, Ms. Rajyalakshmi, was to have the freedom to experiment with an artist rather than to build up a body of work that could be seen as a cohesive exhibition. I visited religious shrines, festivals and bookshops, documenting imagery to use for the final shoot, for finally creating a tableau from our own imagination. We took inspiration from exhibitions in London, Indian and European Art History, contemporary exhibition catalogues and many other sources. Images that were not used in the main category were then incorporated in the loosely called, “Popular” and “Ethnographic” series, but to me these were often as important as the “main” images and could easily be interchanged.

NR: Ms. Pushpamala, can you say something about your performance? 

PN: I had the same problem as the set painters who found it difficult to copy things! The wigs and crowns would get displaced or there would be elaborate mechanisms for holding up the costume as in the “Yogini” tableau, in which strings were tied to the ends of the scarves and held by an assistant outside the frame, to make them “fly”. Since I was producer, director and actor, and the shoots were done in my home studio, crew members would come up as I was trying to get the right expression and ask where various things needed urgently were kept - hammer, extension cord, paper clips, chalk piece etc. Sometimes there was a crew of sixteen people wandering all over the house looking around with no supervision. Each pose had to be maintained many times over, for the black and white shots, next for colour, next for the transparency, for every scene that we shot. I’m talking about the mechanics of it, because the entire mise-en-scene was important.

Clare walked in as Make up Ramakrishna was doing my “Lakshmi” make-up and said she wanted to be Lakshmi too. Strangely, I had hired or borrowed two of everything: two crowns, two saris, two wigs - so she had a complete costume ready. We had two Lakshmis on the lotus, Lakshmi shooting Lakshmi, four- armed Lakshmi. For the last tableau of “Our Lady of Velankanni” she decided to perform along with me. I thought I would have dark make up in contrast and became a Black Mary. We had two nuns and two angels, one white and one black. The ten- hour shoot was hilarious. Clare would set the camera up, run and take position on the set, and one of the assistants would click. The studio had 200 burning candles and studio lights. The angel wings kept falling out of place. I had to climb on a ladder and hold out a garland from the top of the set, with my make up running in the suffocating heat…

NR: Ms. Clare, this kind of photography is very different from your documentary work-

CA: In my regular photographic work, I prefer to use only natural light and ambient light, and liked to use colour transparency film before I started using a digital camera recently. I rarely do studio photography as my work involves architectural, travel and outdoor photography. For this project, we photographed each shot in black and white, colour negative and slide film so that at a later date we would be able to experiment with these images further. I had to juggle between three cameras with one tripod because we used film rolls, and each camera had one kind of film.  Around 4000 images were shot on fourteen shoots. This was the first time I used studio lights and worked with an experienced film lighting crew. The crew would give their ideas and advice, which often created a wonderful variety to the images. And when I became my own subject in the shoots, I experienced what it was like to be put in costume and make up and undergo a character transformation, to be on the receiving end of the camera!

PN: Historically, so- called ethnographic records were really concocted in the studio using exotic props and costumes, with no great regard for true documentation! At the same time, they were records of a highly constructed reality.

NR: Ms. Pushpamala, your project involved working with urban artisans-

PN: I worked with almost the entire gamut of people producing popular visual culture in Bangalore, the experience could form another project! Prabhat Costume Company had photo albums of some sort of garish theatrical tableaus which they showed to customers. One day the man explained that a traditional business community here had elaborate ceremonies when the daughters reached puberty and spent a lot of money on sets and costumes. Usually it was done when several girls in the extended family came of age. The girls were dressed as both gods and goddesses, Rama, Lakshmana and Sita for example, or Krishna and Radha in a palace setting. I remembered as a child seeing my neighbour’s daughter dressed as the goddess Saraswati in full make-up along with paper mache peacock, being worshipped on a throne. It seems that the masquerade is a kind of rite of passage, with young girls dressed as both men and women! 

The funny thing is, what is presented as “traditional” is in fact cooked up from an eclectic range of ingredients to be “effective”. Cinema hoarding painters, who are mainly Tamilians who have moved here from the film industry in Chennai painted the tableaus. My first painter G. Ealamalai works for Rockline Productions, a Kannada film company, but he also has a small studio in the Rajarajeshwari temple nearby, where he is employed to do the artwork associated with the Madurai style painted temple. His work ranges from religious art, film sets and hoardings to popular architecture – he told me he designed the huge kitsch archway forming the entrance to my suburb. The ideas are a strange mix taken from traditional iconography to comic books – a Swamiji nearby had commissioned him to design a new ashram complex based on Heaven and Hell!  

NR: But what does this work mean?

PN: The original project envisioned the setting up of an imaginary photo studio, the sort of old fashioned portrait studio with painted backdrops, to investigate popular images of south Indian women using the genre of photo-performance. This resulted in a large body of work which was exhibited as an installation based on the concept of a film or theatre museum, with more than 250 photographs in four series, each printed and framed in a different format according to the meaning of the work, and finally shown along with the painted backdrops, curtains, props and costumes. 

Ms Rajyalakshmi, rather than looking at it as a perfect art work it should be seen in the light of the number of questions that it raises in so many areas: of female representation, high and low art, ethnography and ideas of race and caste, colonialism and Indian modernity - and the history of modern Indian art and photography itself. 

We never had a regular production unit. A large number of artist friends and other people also became involved in the project as actors, direction assistants, or as advisors, by lending clothes and props, and giving information and suggesting reference material and ideas, making it a very interesting collaboration in a larger sense. The project somehow touched a chord by dealing with very familiar material and remaking it in the form of art…

Pushpamala N

Bangalore 2007

Catalogue Essay I Sakshi Gupta I pub. Sakshi Gupta Bangalore I 2006

SAKSHI GUPTA –  I: OBJECT 

Sakshi Gupta is a young Delhi artist doing a three- month art residency at the Bangalore Art Centre on the Hosur Road. The Centre is located in a furniture factory with plenty of waste materials, which the owner kindly permits the artists to use freely. The works in the show are created from materials found there and in the fields and factories around. Sakshi uses the principles of ‘poor’ art, transforming found circumstances and banal materials to make poetic objects.

Object no. 1: is a Bed that looks sumptuous and sensual from afar, like an object of luxury, perhaps a wedding bed with a coverlet of gold and silver. It is only up close that the surface reveals itself to be entirely covered with sharp, thin, glittering steel rods stuck together with a rubber solution that gives it the brown-gold stains. The bed is not soft, it is encased in armour; it is a yogi’s bed of nails.  Peacock feathers lie between the steely pillows. 

Object no. 2: is made up of the twisted claw-like roots of rose bushes that were bought from a farmer in the area. Hanging from the sky and seeming to proliferate profusely, the root shapes take on a surreal quality with the act of displacement from their natural place beneath the earth to the naked air. 

Object no. 3, the Chair, was a use-less chair, an un-sittable chair, constructed from thin fragile wood strips from a factory close to the Centre. After it was made the chair was given a ceremonial death-rite, by floating it on a raft of coconut fronds on a lake nearby and drowning it in the water. The wood may be swollen and shapeless now. The artist’s plan was to exhibit it in that state in a glass box filled with water in the gallery, like an object preserved in formaldehyde, along with photographs of its floating and submergence.

Each object is anthropomorphized, angst ridden. While the artist feels object- like and at the mercy of outside elements, the “things” are transformed to take on a disconcerting persona of their own. Beds, chairs and rose bushes can also rise up and hit you!

Pushpamala N

Bangalore 17 July 2006

Post Script

Sakshi Gupta also goes to Rajasthan twice a year to run an artist’s workshop initiated by Mumbai artist Chintan Upadhyay in his native village. She has made open air site-specific sculptures there using local materials. The villagers around have been intrigued by the activities of the city artists. They have now started their own museums in three villages where an object from each home in the village has been collected, catalogued, labeled and displayed.

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