TAKE 1 - Black I Issue 1 I March 2010

The Phantom Lady Strikes Again

The air is thick with identity controversies which seem to manifest themselves over statues and monuments. The Phantom Lady ponders.   

HEROES

If you wander about the city of Bangalore, you will be surprised to find many of its public statues wrapped with cloth as if a local Christo had been hard at work. One of these was the statue of the Tamil saint poet Thiruvalluvar near the Ulsoor Lake erected by the Tamil Sangham. Ulsoor is a Tamil area, and hostilities have existed ever since the British, after the defeat of Tipu, created the largest cantonment in India in Bangalore and populated it with Tamils to counter the Kannada speaking City area under the Maharaja of Mysore. These hostilities have worsened lately with Kaveri water disputes. Kannada nationalists would not allow the statue to be unveiled, and Thiruvalluvar has remained a ‘conceptual’ work for eighteen years till a statue of the Kannada saint poet Sarvagna was put up in Chennai. Both were inaugurated in close sequence recently in a great demonstration of what was called ‘statue diplomacy’, and considered a momentous step in the strained inter- state politics by all.

The Tamils are great forerunners in many matters cultural, and the Dravidian and pure Tamil movements created a strong self-identity. Chennai itself is a city mapped by its statues of Tamil heroes. They say if you asked someone for directions there he would say - go past the Anna statue and turn left at the Kamaraj Statue - and so on. The Marina beach has large memorials on its sands dedicated to Annadurai, MGR etc. (On the pavement of the beach is also one of the most famous works of modern art in the city, Debi Prasad Roy Chowdhury’s bronze sculpture, Triumph of Labour). NTR as chief minister of Andhra installed a row of bronze statues of Telugu heroes on the Tank Bund Road in Hyderabad, and the joke goes that they all look like him in various roles as a film actor, including the woman poet. The twenty- two metre great granite Buddha which sank once, but has been safely installed now in the centre of the Husain Sagar Lake, is also said to bear a close resemblance to him.

Mumbai, being larger and richer than any of these cities, has planned to build a 350 crore Shivaji monument outdoing the Statue of Liberty, standing on its own island in the sea. The irony, as Girish Shahane writes, is that while Liberty is a universal symbol of freedom and democracy, Shivaji has been co-opted as a mascot for Hindu/ Marathi identity politics and has become a symbol of divisiveness. Mayavati’s agenda is more ambitious: she is erecting statues of herself and Dalit icons on twenty four memorial sites in the state of Uttar Pradesh. A front-page case has been going on in the Supreme Court to stop the construction work on public money. So what is the real opposition to Mayavati’s memorial building – its lavish use of government money, that she is a ‘heroine’ and not a ‘hero’, its Vanitas ; or the fact that it is going to be a place of Dalit identity, where there is none other? Or are these purposes so inextricably mixed like good and evil in our complicated times, that we cannot separate them?

After the first heady idealistic days of early independence, making political statues has become embarrassing for contemporary artists. The language of contemporary art is anti-establishment, while the public demand is for idealized neo-classical representations. Then who makes these statues? The good sculptors are usually trained in the big art schools and specialize in making political portraits, or are from traditional families of sculptors. Some time ago I visited a factory near Gwalior which takes orders to make political statues from most of North India. As a busload of us approached, we saw acres and acres of spectacular rolling hillocks, set with dramatic groups of figures of political leaders all gesturing into the air in their characteristic poses: Netaji Bose, Rajiv Gandhi, Indira, Nehru, Dr. Ambedkar, Bhagat Singh, Jhansi ki Rani, Mahatma Gandhi. It was an amazing sight: the heroes, the vast sky, the bare landscape, and the larger than life tableaux in various perspectives in the clear light of the panoramic view. The factory makes fibre-glass casts first from the clay models, then takes moulds from them and casts them in bronze. The waste fibre-glass models are then placed on the site, making a kind of unmeant installation of dark post-modernist satire. 

Who then can be the heroes of our times, and how can we celebrate their lives?

I recently saw The Advocate, a film made by Deepa Dhanraj on the Hyderabad lawyer KG Kannabiran, one of the founders of the human rights and civil liberties movements in India, a man who has spent a lifetime challenging the Indian State to uphold justice. While the first part of the film is a biography and history dominated by his charismatic presence, the second half, with interviews with his wife and colleagues, contains a critique. He is never shown larger than life, but as passionate, hardworking, brilliantly analytical, firm in his beliefs and relentlessly persistent. His wife, prominent in the women’s movement herself, critiques him for his lack of interest in women’s issues as being central to human rights; his colleagues, for other weaknesses in his thinking and practice. But finally, the film in both its parts makes a monumental plea for a way of life that is serious minded and committed to social justice, lit up with an intense life-energy. At a time of extreme hysteria over icons and symbols, the biography shows that a reasoned analysis and historical sense need not belittle, nor aggrandize, an exemplary life.

The Phantom Lady

1 March 2010

India Today I Issue on Beauty I 2009

Beauties and beasts

Published In India Today issue On ‘Beauty’, 2009

The cultural theorist N. Rajyalakshmi interviews the artist Pushpamala N. on the quest for eternal youth, beauty and fitness, and the culture of consumption.

NR: Ms Pushpamala, what do you think about the recent craze for plastic surgery in India?

PN: You know I’m really shocked at how powerful the plastic surgery lobby seems to be. Some years ago, Agony Aunts in magazines advised people with acne, big noses, skinny, fat, etc. to use grandma remedies, exercise, or just change their hairstyles or clothes to hide the feature. It’s straight away nose jobs and tummy tucks and botox injections now. And I’m sorry to say that our plastic surgeons being no artists, make all the noses the same, a Caucasian upturned Barbie doll nose, which you can see from Shilpa Shetty downward. I think a standard how-to manual comes along with the nose job kit, which the surgeons follow faithfully! 

NR: And the nose is one of the most individualized features!

PN: Someone told me that the shape of the nose and the shape of the chin are related, so if you change one, you have to change the other. I think this was Michael Jackson’s downfall – as he kept changing his nose, he had to keep changing his chin.

Which reminds me, fairness creams being big business here, all the ‘phoren’ cosmetic companies are in the race for the huge market. East meets West, tradition meets modernity etc. Shah Rukh Khan who started off being brown skinned is fair and lovely now, no doubt from using the men’s fairness cream that he endorses.

NR: But I see more people walking now in the cities, it’s quite the fashionable thing to exercise!

PN: Oh yes, the ideal of urban Indians in the past was the survival of the fattest - to let go as soon as you have your first child, let it all hang out from between your too-short blouse and the too-low sari waist - or have it all pop out extravagantly between the buttons of the too-tight safari shirt. It was a sign of prosperity and contentment. Men and women nowadays are buying sports shoes and going for brisk walks round and round the walking paths that have been created in all the former playgrounds of our cities. They are usually of Japanese- type design, and have artificial rocks created from gravel and Fevicol between picturesquely low rolling mounds of Chinese grass.

I saw a very funny Kannada TV talk show where the ‘thin’ male anchor is telling the fat ladies that if they don’t lose weight their men will fly away- and then there’s a sort of montage of large women jogging and puffing juxtaposed with rows of beauty contestants walking the ramp. Talk about sexism!

NR: And what do you think about beauty contests?

PN: Years ago, when ABCL was hosting the first Miss World contest in India in Bangalore, a motley crowd of protestors landed up from all over India, extreme right rubbing shoulders with the leftwing, feminists with religious bigots etc. saying it was against our culture, sexist and morally corrupting. But in fact, it’s amusing to see that all these so-called decadent Western phenomena match quite effortlessly with our good old feudal values like the arranged marriage market and buttress them. If the ideal of an international class is the minimal lean mean Kareena Kapoor in designer clothes, the desis love the heavily ornamented bahus of the K serials. I’m amazed at the number of jewellery shops – is there a recession?  In fact, much of the consumerism here revolves around marriage and dowry.

NR: And fashion shows seem to have caught the Indian imagination…

PN: Ms. Rajyalakshmi, walking the ramp is a rage everywhere and is an integral part of Indian culture now! All annual college functions have fashion shows. It fits in seamlessly with our yearning for past glories and our anxieties about caste and religion. Our fashion designers survive on their Punjabi wedding outfits. One of our fashion gurus who was incarcerated in a Dubai jail some years ago passed the time by training his fellow jail inmates how to walk the ramp, which apparently had a spiritual effect. Walking the ramp seems to satisfy some deep atavistic need in us, perhaps it goes back to our ancient custom of the swayamvar, or even the traditional marriage selection interview, where the girl was asked questions, told to thread a needle, and to walk up and down to check whether all her faculties and limbs were in working order.

NR: (laughs) Do you think we are obsessed by beauty?

PN: Well, recession or not, one business which is thriving and expanding in India is the beauty parlour. You find beauty parlours in the poorest slums and farthest boondocks. This is in a country, mind you, where most people lack piped water or sanitary systems, leave alone literacy or public health care. And these beauty parlours, amusingly, have blonde blue-eyed models advertised on their signboards. Colonialism is like a mind parasite! And while there is this whole cornucopia of cosmetics and toiletries to beautify us, our towns and countryside are being uglified relentlessly, from factories dumping toxic waste, filth and garbage, to mindless unplanned demolitions and building. So while the European cities we so admire remain beautiful museum pieces, we make our habitats unliveably ugly and unhealthy. The worst epidemics of cholera, hepatitis and plague start in our richest cities. 

NR: Gyms are flourishing too, sometimes three or four on a street…

PN: As in everything else, our film stars set the trend. It takes so much energy to make the pelvic thrusts and bosom shudders in filmy dances that they’ve taken to weight lifting, building six packs and power yoga, inspiring the nation. But somehow yoga has not really caught on in a big way with Indians, perhaps because it is actually traditional and has no exotic appeal besides being usually taught by conservative old fogies. I must admit I’ve started going to the gym myself lately to keep fit, in a gentle geriatric way. But the biggest racket now is the Ayurvedic massage spa, which is spreading out from Kerala with an unstoppable centrifugal force and is our latest gift to the world.

NR: How do you think globalization and liberalization of the economy have affected our self-image?

PN: It has created a culture of the surface, from economic and political policies to a general obsession with trivialities, or in trivializing everything. There’s a strange idea that multiplying luxury goods will benefit the poor. It’s like the icing on a mud cake, and the icing has only shown up the ugly poverty in the country, the kind of poverty that is not found anywhere else in the world except in sub-Saharan Africa. 

The media is the worst manifestation of this. A leading paper had horrific pictures of the Gujarat riots next to photographs of the latest modeling contest on the front page. All images become equal and saleable, pain and suffering become products. This is really evident in the Page 3 – ization of culture. A society’s art forms provide a mirror, a critique and a means to introspect. A serious discourse on art, literature, theatre, cinema and music is a serious introspection about our times and ourselves. I think there’s been a dumbing down of society lately that’s to be regretted. We’ve become beastly, though that’s an insult to animals!

NR: What effect do you think the collapse of the global economy will have on this euphoria of consumption, or this ‘beastly beauty’?

PN: Well, we’re considered economically booming so all the ‘phoren’ brands are wooing us with goods that they can’t sell otherwise. A friend remarked that just as ten years ago when Indians started winning international beauty competitions, cosmetic companies and designer labels flooded India, Slumdog Millionaire’s success would open the door for an influx of western film companies. I heard from film friends in Mumbai that there are scores of western film units coming there after Slumdog to film Dharavi, rag pickers, the Deonar Municipal Dump, etc. The funniest story was about the municipality hearing about a particular shoot and sending imported garbage trucks with mechanical road washers and garbage men dressed in spotless overalls and gloves to the spot to impress the units. Perhaps the government should stop ‘beautifying’ our cities by clearing slums, we can make more money out of slum tourism!

The last ten or fifteen years have been extremely contradictory times, with a kind of opening up, as well as a kind of looking backwards to some imagined golden past in order to preserve grand old hierarchies and exploitative systems. There’s been a lot of violence, a beastliness and brutality between different sections of society, struggling both to open up, and to close out. There have been so many tensions and aspirations released by a certain notion of progress which did not consider and still refuses to consider the ground realities. Why are we so seduced by the image of Singapore, a small trader island the size of Bangalore under a notorious dictatorship, which in no way relates to the needs of the vast and diverse sub-continent that is India? Surely we need to think beyond surface glitter. 

Pushpamala N.

Bangalore November 2009

Reframe DVD I pub. Lowave Paris I 27 November 2008

NATIONAL PUDDING AND INDIGENOUS SALAD

N. Rajyalakshmi, Chief Reporter of Ideal Times, Bangalore, interviews the director Pushpamala N.

NR: Ms. Pushpamala, the title of your film National Pudding and Indigenous Salad is rather unusual. What does it mean?

PN: (laughs) The film is based on family cookbooks dating from the 1950s and ‘60’s, the period soon after Indian Independence. Rashtriy Kheer (National Pudding) and Desiy Kheer (Indigenous Salad) are two Independence Day recipes using the colours of the Indian flag, which my mother had cut out from a magazine. I found them very amusing as a title for the film, which is about the modern Indian family as ideal citizens. And India, with its various communities and ethnic groups could be both described as a “pudding” or as a “salad” – melting into one dish, or coming together as separate ingredients!

NR: Madam, why recipe books? 

PN: I’ve been interested in using women’s material and women’s narratives. I happened to find these old and tattered cookbooks of my mother and mother-in-law, both of whom died more than two decades ago. It was very moving to read through them, they were like a diary, a document of their lives. I wanted to use this very personal material to say something larger about the period, and about the new nation. 

NR: But the characters in the film write on a blackboard, not in notebooks…

PN: The blackboard is a pedagogical device. I use bits of the original text in the film, but if I had made the characters write in notebooks, it would be too literal and illustrative. The blackboard becomes emblematic, and the space becomes a classroom, the classroom of the nation! In fact the father and son’s notes are literally class notes, while all three use lists, constantly ordering their worlds.

NR: And why is it a silent film? 

PN: I love early silent film! It’s a kind of “primitive” form and I wanted to see the 1950’s as a “primitive” period in modern Indian history, in the sense of a beginning - with a kind of freshness and naivety. I wanted the look of an old technical training film, somewhat distressed. And of course, the text could then come in as inter-titles.

NR: How did you put together a script from these cookbooks?

PN: There were several books from my mother-in-law, which had started off as the Colonel father’s used military notebooks, in which the entire family started writing things. She is at first pregnant with the son, who then grows up and also starts writing in the books! It was the history of a military family over ten years. Each character came across as a type, but the same time, there is a certain tenderness and pathos. The mother uses the notebook as a diary when she is pregnant, addressed to her army husband who is posted far away. I read the books closely and picked out the most interesting bits from the huge amount of material, which was in several languages, and put the text, image and music together as a montage. 

NR: Is the film supposed to be funny?

PN: It’s both funny and serious, Ms. Rajyalakshmi! The film has a lot of text, and nothing much happens, so the cartoon form makes things entertaining. Each character is sharply defined by a distinct walk, costume and music score. I tried to make a complex work formally from what was really very simple material with the pace, the editing and the unexpected juxtapositions. 

NR: Tell me about your role as the mother?

PN: For the first time, I played a real character from my own family, my mother-in-law, who I had never met!  Then I was trying to get the walk of a heavily pregnant woman, and the funny thing is, wherever I went, I always saw a pregnant woman. I would stop at once and observe her walk. I tried to borrow a readymade “stomach” from a costume company, which was hilarious - it was a sack filled with sawdust, and completely shapeless. Finally I used a pillow, which my friend who played the Colonel confirmed looked very realistic.

NR: Madam, this is your first video. Why did you start making films?

PN: I’ve been writing down video ideas for years; sounds on the left page and images on the right. When the time was right, it all came together. It’s a continuation of my interest in narrative: starting with sculpture, going on to performance photography, and now also to video films!

NR: How did you go about the shoot?

PN: The Colonel is an old friend from an army family who is a management Professor and had shifted to Singapore. I had to wait till Christmas till he came back for a holiday. I had organized the costumes, blackboard and props, but the most difficult was finding a ten year- old boy to play the son, and when I tracked one down, I couldn’t get through to his father, till two days before the shoot. We had a late night meeting to explain the whole thing to the boy; they went off the next day and bought the school uniform and shoes. A filmmaker friend organized the cinematographer free for a day, after he finished her shoot – it was my first film and I decided to have a static camera, and create a tableau. I was up till 2 o’clock the night before cooking for the unit and making the notebooks. The shoot was very simple: the film was really shaped on the editing table.

NR: Congratulations, Ms. Pushpamala. What next?

PN: There’s some fantastic material in those cookbooks, which belongs to me, which I don’t want to waste! So I am looking at making another recipe film, but it’s so complicated that it will take time to get things together…

Pushpamala N

Catalogue Essay I G. Mahesh I pub. Gallery OED Kochi I 2008

POETRY OF THE BANAL

Thinking around the paintings of G Mahesh

When I taught for a year in CAVA (The Chamajendra Academy of  Visual Arts) in Mysore around 1990 (Mahesh joined much later)  it was a new school where the students were given a stipend of a hundred rupees a month to attract them to join the art school. They mainly came from small villages and towns in Karnataka, from humble backgrounds usually artisanal: children of signboard painters, owners of small advertising companies, or traditional sculptors, whose introduction to contemporary art was usually from an enthusiastic school art teacher and from magazine illustrations. When I told my students to spend some time in the library everyday and look at art – they were shocked – they said won’t we be influenced if we look at other artists’ works? It was amusing that in spite of a complete lack of exposure to the actual modern art scene in the country, there was still, strongly pervasive in the popular imagination, the romantic modernist myth of the artist as original genius with artistic inspiration coming from the deep recesses of the psyche, universal and untouched by history.

If we take a look beyond the recent sensationalist writing about the “art market”, most contemporary artists in India have come traditionally from humble backgrounds and “mofussil” areas; art becomes a free zone in a way where you can be recognized for your talent and hard work and can rise above social limitations to form your own community. As an artist, you live in a state of heightened self-awareness, looking inwards at your subjective states as well as investigating the world outside, and trying to find solutions to the painful dilemmas and contradictions of life. The first step on the journey becomes the art school itself, with its sudden opening out to a world of sophisticated thought and unbelievable images. For most, it is also the difficult task of learning English, as most art books are in large part available in English.

In a canvas titled Edge of Desire Mahesh paints a black-skinned boy lying bare-bodied on the floor in the foreground, reading the catalogue of an international Indian art show of the same name. Behind him, outside, black skinned labourers scurry about on multi-storied buildings carrying building materials. The whole painting is framed by a wooden stretcher, which usually exists behind the painting, making it a sort of “behind-the- scenes” view. In his MA dissertation that he gave me to read, Mahesh writes of his growing up in a small village near Mysore and his passion for art and the passage to the art school and his influences there. People in his village call him “Black”  (and in India as we know, being black complexioned is considered inferior, ugly) and his feeling of being a “black outsider” seems to pervade his work. Mahesh’s work is in a way, simple, literal, seemingly the naïve expression of a village boy taking in the tumultuous life around him. The work is marked by not a little irony, however, which is immediately obvious by the text and titles he uses. The gentrified black boy able to read the English catalogue foregrounds the labour of the construction workers who are incessantly building the monstrous cities of India. The title of the catalogue plays upon the desires of both, each on either side of the invisible glass ceiling that divides the literate and the non-literate. The exposed stretcher brings to public gaze the actual support of the painting and acts as an alienating device, distancing both the reading boy and the illiterate workers from the spectator, while putting them both in the same space. 

One of the Mahesh’s constant preoccupations is with the confusion and angst of being an artist today; he repeatedly pictures himself grappling with the materials and tools of his practice, all the while trying to painfully locate himself and his role in the world around him. There is a whole succession of paintings of the artist at work. In the painting Let Me Paint Him… the artist, clad in T shirt and jeans, holds up a glass palette with paints squeezed on it, which reflects in coloured spots on the body of an old man dressed in a rustic dhoti sleeping on the pavement, resting his head on a pair of rubber chappals. Behind him there is a large white canvas leaning on a wall, and the name of a recent “superhit” Kannada film Duniya (The World) painted on the wall as graffiti. The painting works like a montage of text and image, looking at class, trade, artistic creativity and their place in society. Sometimes, the paintings are obviously tongue-in-cheek – where he is laughing at himself but also anxious of his identity. One called The Professional Painter shows a house painter precariously balanced on a scaffolding of bamboo poles, painting the exterior of a building. At other times, they can be celebratory, as in the water colour of a supine young man lying on the water like the god of creation, Vishnu, touching a lotus springing out of his navel.

The artist appears again and again, usually in recognizable self-portraits, but sometimes as an anonymous figure. He is always an outsider, not only in an urban setting but also in pictures of village scenes. Though he writes in detail about the rituals and flow of village life as being important to his work, when he appears in the rural scenes he is obviously an alienated urbanized figure who does not quite fit. In a large canvas titled Just for a Few Minutes of Light , he paints his mother lighting Deepavali fireworks – it is night and the figure of the artist peeps from behind a green wall, looking in, but not being part of the revelry. Cascading sparks from the bursting flowerpot create a halo around him, but also disfigure his face with spots. When painting urban scenes, he identifies himself with people who are “different’ – just as he sees himself as “black” there is an old couple, “white’ with leucoderma, standing against a background of workers laying and tarring a road, normal activities of a growing city. 

Unlike my early Mysore art school students who were terrified of being “influenced”, Mahesh writes analytically of his interest in the works of Breughel, Akbari miniatures, Munch and Bhupen Khakhar. One can see certain compositional elements and subject matter from their work in his paintings. His works are narrative, drawn in a naïve style reminiscent of Bhupen Khakhar’s work, painted as frontal tableaux or with objects and figures distributed all over on a white ground. Animals act as rambunctious and unselfconscious counterpoints to the awkward human dramas that are played out, usually gangs of street dogs that are shown copulating, being fed, chasing or being chased. Sometimes the artist shrinks into an intensely inward state, as in the painting Fear, alone, shrunken and radiating anxiety, very reminiscent of Munch’s painting of The Scream. Popular elements appear in the form of film posters and street life to make a sly comment. In one painting, a multi-armed street vendor with a cap sells the books of Derrida along with torches, key chains and flasks.

I have an extraordinary painting of Mahesh’s at home titled Thandege Thakka Maga  (Son Worthy of the Father) named after a recent Kannada movie. Figures are roughly drawn on a white ground with oil paint- there is a man dressed as the god Rama with a blue face sitting on a stone bench on the road, being handed a glass of tea by a boy in a Hanuman costume. A poster of the film showing a heavily moustachioed father and son is stuck on the wall behind. In the background you see the hind side of a cow. While it could possibly be a literal street scene one could come across in a small town, it is in fact a complex montage of different images that gives other comic or enigmatic meanings. Mahesh plays with all these possibilities in his paintings, working his way in a rather self-deprecating but sharply ironical way though the labyrinth of contemporary life.

Pushpamala N

Bangalore, January 2008

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