Cult of the Goddess seminar 2005 I pub. National Museum Institute Delhi I ed. By Arputha Rani Sengupta I 2015

Mother India

Images of Woman and Nation

The idea of  “Bharat Mata” is invented at the end of the 19^th century, perhaps as a response to Britain’s “Britannia”. The image is really a hybrid figure, cobbled together from existing iconography and mythology by adding contemporary symbols, and tends to proliferate in many avatars according to changing political needs. In a country like India where the land has been considered holy since the earliest times, it was only in the late 19th century during the period of early nationalism and Hindu reformism that the new concept of the “nation” began to be personified into a divine being called “Bharat Mata” - or “Mother India”. 

The Mother India image, an entirely modern construct, gets its potency by inciting primeval and traditional emotions to arouse patriotic feeling, which disguise its recent origins and almost deny the sense of a modern nation. India is not the only country to have created a female personification. However, the way the figure has been deified into a goddess, her many colourful forms, her changing iconographies, and the practice of actually worshipping the figure, seems to be a uniquely Indian phenomenon, reflecting the obsessive feeling for the mother in Indian culture. A peculiarly male way of relating to the nation after the long trauma of colonial domination, the patriotic relationship is turned into an infantile one-to-one bond between mother and son, rather than creating the sense of a shared community.

Early Nationalist period

According to Christopher Pinney, the earliest Bharat Mata image is Bharat Bhiksha, (“India Begging” or the “Begging of India”), one of the first lithographs by the Calcutta Art Studio, printed around 1878-80. This seems to be a rare secular image, as India is invariably depicted as a Hindu goddess with a trishul and lion like Durga.  Probably based on a Raphael etching, the print shows a young Indian child being held towards Britannia by Mother India, portrayed as an old crone. The allegorical meaning is not very clear- we cannot be sure whether the Romanized young India is being offered into the benign care of the British, or whether the old crone is displaying a new, reformed version of the country to the rulers for approval. The infantilization of the country however, was a common theme among western educated Bengali intellectuals in the nineteenth century who saw the land as being reborn after a long dark history of superstition and ignorance. (In fact Gandhi’s mouthpiece, much later, was called “Young India”.)

While the trend among a section of the middle classes was to admire British culture and attempt to transform Hinduism into a monotheistic religion like Christianity, the counter movement that grew around the figure of Ramakrishna and Kali worship contemptuously attacked Anglicization, and believed in the potency of idol worship. Kali had been the chosen deity of the revolutionary brotherhoods that were active in Bengal at the beginning of the 19^th century, and also specifically seen as the patron goddess of the present age, the Kaliyug. Ramakrishna believed that having pictures of gods was a mark of Hindu-ness, and that the images actively demand propitiation. 

When the technology of printing oleographs came to India, they were immediately used as a medium of propaganda to spread nationalist ideals. Display pictures, advertisements and postcards carried hidden codes and messages in an era of strict British censorship. Mythological images like Kali dancing on the body of a white skinned Siva, or of Durga as Mahishasura Mardhini, were used as nationalist allegories and circulated widely. These pictures were framed and displayed in houses, and worshipped in the private home temples.

However, in the course of time, when the image of a bloodthirsty folk goddess Kali dancing naked with a necklace of skulls symbolizing the country became somewhat of an embarrassment to the middle class intelligentsia, the more benign cow began to be used widely as an extremely potent sign, in what became a veritable war of images. Dayanand Saraswati, the founder of the Arya Samaj established the Gaurakshini Samaj or Cow Protection Association. With the cow protection agitation in Punjab and Bihar in the 1890s, the cow, seen as the gentle, loving universal mother, became the sacred symbol of the endangered Hindu nation needing protection from the violent beef eating non-Hindus. It was also kamadhenu or the mythical wish-fulfilling cow. A popular Ravi Varma lithograph showing the cow as a proto–nation with its body imprinted with divine images and feeding all the communities, being attacked by a demon, was seen by the colonial government as anti-British and heavily censored. The divine mother cow soon got transformed into the image of Mother India.

Hindu revolutionaries like Aurobindo at the time were writing “Mother India is not a piece of earth; she is power, a godhead…” Vivekananda saw India as the Divine Mother, and the ideal woman as a chaste mother rearing patriotic sons. Mother India could be imagined as a militant, powerful goddess, or even as a virtuous and helpless woman enslaved by hostile powers. In Subramanya Bharati’s play Panchali Shapatham, Draupadi in the hands of the Kauravas is described as the enslaved Mother India. The disrobing of Draupadi was a very popular allegory for the shaming of the nation by the foreign conquerors, which was instantly understood by the public. A popular Ravi Varma nationalist print doing the rounds at the time was of Draupadi standing behind a curtain cowering from Kichaka’s advances.

For the British rulers, India as the subject country was feminized - as a woman to be conquered and ruled, educated and reformed. The West was defined as active, masculine, practical, and the East as passive, feminine, spiritual. Many of the fiery issues of the time revolved around the rights and control of Indian women: like sati, child marriage, widow remarriage, or women’s education, prostitution and public morals. Historians like Partha Chatterjee have described how in late 19the century Bengal, life was seen as dichotomized into the public and private spheres. Public life, coming directly under the control of the foreign rulers, was a westernized world of rationality, science and technological progress, in which Indian men were forced to operate. Private life, the domain of women, home and family, was a protected area where “true” Indian spiritual values could be maintained. The woman was idealized as the carrier of ancient Indian culture and the bearer of the country’s shame and honour, whose purity had to be zealously guarded. Reformists, while seeking to create a “new Indian woman” were willing to allow her modern education and certain rights within the family, but her life was strictly circumscribed. The women who freely operated in the public sphere- the prostitutes, the actresses, the labourers and domestic workers, were seen as dangerous outcasts offering themselves up for sexual exploitation.

Dewan T. Madhava Rao advised Ravi Varma around this time to make popular prints of his mythological paintings as a service to the nation. It was an era when the ancient Sanskrit classics were fashionable amongst the intellectuals and literati of Europe influenced by the ideas of Max Mueller and Goethe, as part of the Romantic interest in exotic and Oriental subjects. Kalidasa’s Shakuntala was a great favourite amongst the translated Sanskrit texts. These were the most popular subjects in Indian literature, painting and theatre as well. Hindu nationalists had their own agenda in reviving interest in India’s golden past and invoking the idea of a grand civilization that existed before the foreign conquests. Leaders like Lokamanya Tilak believed that hero worship makes a nation great. It was thought that stories of great kings and ideal heroines would arouse a sense of Hindu identity and reinforce traditional society, which was being undermined by the new ideas from the West. The new print technologies were used extensively for this. Millions of copies of Ravi Varma’s mythological pictures were printed and circulated all over India after the establishment of his lithographic press in Bombay and then Malavli, replacing local gods with a pan-Indian iconography. 

The Devi

The beginnings of the popular national imagery of Mother India images can be traced to Ravi Varma’s 1898 oil painting of Bharat Mata as a beautiful young goddess dressed as a queen in a red sari, standing against a halo with two lions. In her four arms she holds the symbols of Durga and Britannia, the arrow and palm leaf, which are mascots of war and peace, and the goad and snare, mascots of state power. The lion, the symbol of imperial British power, is her vahana and in an ironic comment, lies subdued at her feet. The hybrid iconography, containing a mixture of Indian and European symbols, reflects an idea of self-rule at the time, which was in terms of sharing power rather than complete independence. 

Abanindranath Tagore’s celebrated 1905 watercolour painting of Bharat Mata however, expresses another strand of nationalist thought, coming from the Orientalist ideals of spirituality and austerity. She is conceived as a married woman dressed as a vaishnava ascetic in saffron robes. In her four arms she holds the rudraksh mala, a sheaf of paddy, a white cloth and a palm leaf manuscript, representing the different sections of Indian society.

This Hinduization of the national imagery was not popular with other groups, particularly the Muslims. Tilak’s introduction of the Ganesh festival as a nationalist rallying point had aroused resentment from its beginnings in 1893.  It appears that Ravi Varma’s real service to the nation was to provide a “heroic past” to the Hindu ruling classes, to project their own interests in the anti-colonial movement.

In a flood of calendar pictures that circulated all over the country during the days of the freedom struggle, Bharat Mata assumes different forms according to the political climate of the time. In 1920s and ‘30s posters, the map of India takes on an iconic value, with the figure of the goddess rising from it like a swayambhu or self-generative form. In many, the goddess is a divine queen who demands cruel sacrifices from her subjects. Freedom fighters pledge their lives to her by offering their severed and bleeding heads, like Bhagat Singh and other martyrs. She is seen offering a sword to Bhagat Singh or Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose just as the goddess Bhavani is said to have given the sword to Shivaji. In some, national figures like Gandhi, Netaji, or Bhagat Singh, tear open their chests to reveal her image inside. Mother India is shown with many arms, holding the symbols of the nationalist struggle along with her own weapons like the trishul. Later, at a time when Independence was being endlessly delayed, she is depicted as a maiden in chains.

However, it is interesting to note that at the level of popular imagery, Gandhi’s use of the “passive feminine” and “spiritual” values as political tools of resistance, or the ascetic ideals of Abanindranath’s Bharat Mata, never took root. 

The Virangana

In this profusion of tradition and Hindu religious sentiment enters the strange figure of Fearless Nadia, “queen of the stunts”, one of the biggest female stars of the 1930s and 1940s Hindi cinema. Rosie Thomas writes how this large, buxom, blonde and blue eyed, white- skinned former circus artist of Australian origin became the idol of the masses, playing an Indian avenging angel in a series of stunt films at the height of the nationalist movement. Her musclewoman persona is a counterweight to the other big star of the era, the delicate, aristocratic Brahmin beauty Devika Rani, trained in England in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and a grand niece of Rabindranath Tagore, who came to be considered a classic heroine. She traces Nadia’s success with the Indian masses to a long tradition of virangana or warrior women in Indian culture that was used in all the forms of popular entertainment during the freedom movement. The virangana, according to Hansen, is the good queen, whether fictional or real, who takes over the throne when the king dies, leads the people to battle dressed as a man, and dies defending her kingdom against invaders. The Rani of Jhansi is an important figure in this geneology. Fearless Nadia was a lively combination of the Hollywood stunt queen (Pearl White), the Indian virangana, and the cosmopolitan urban Bambaiwali.

The films of her producer JBH Wadia, first a staunch Congress supporter, then a follower of the Radical Marxist and Humanist MN Roy, were full of nationalist propaganda. The amazing thing is that Nadia was accepted in anti-British allegories though she was cheerfully breaking all Indian codes of dress and behaviour as a big white woman in skimpy dress thrashing Indian men, because she heroically took up the cause of nationalism and the rights of the oppressed, lower castes and women in all her films. She is portrayed as a virangana of the modern world, laughing at all obstacles. Her films are filled with images of modern technology, cars, planes and especially trains. Fearless Nadia is perfectly in control out of doors in the male world of technological progress- in fact, empowered by it.

Thomas sees Nadia and Devika Rani as alter egos, two opposed constructions of Indian femininity in the late colonial period.  While Devika Rani embodies the tradition of passive suffering, chastity and fidelity, the ideals of stridharma or “woman’s duty”, Nadia takes on the virangana persona, which actively upholds the moral order, justice and truth, the domain of men. She is given a freedom denied to other women because she earns it with her own heroic deeds. The two visions, she says, express two different versions of the nation, two different relationships to modernity and the world. One is based on an essentialized Orientalized tradition, while the second “recognized the hybridity and fluidity within the porous borders of the modern India”.  While the first used melodrama as a film form, the second used comedy, action and masquerade.

The Dasi

Prostitution became a major problem around the same time that the woman was seen as a devi, and the nation as Divine Mother. After the 1860s when Calcutta became the imperial centre, thousands of destitute women started pouring into the city. Many were Hindu widows or victims of Kulin polygamy (the custom where traveling Brahmins wed a series of women, who they sometimes never saw again) women turned destitute by the series of famines in the countryside, runaway or abandoned women. In earlier times, prostitutes, devadasis or courtesans had their place in traditional society, where their activities seen as sinful, but not illegal. During the colonial time, a strange situation developed when the authorities saw their existence as necessary to supply the sexual demands of the large numbers of British soldiers who were pouring into the country, but passed a series of stringent laws to control them due to the alarming rise of venereal disease in the British army. Cantonments had their own official brothels for the soldiers, where prostitutes were practically held captive and had to undergo regular medical checkups. Prostitutes in the city were also told to register themselves and were subject to severe harassment by the police. Any woman walking in certain areas could be picked up and questioned by the police. Finally women’s rights activists in England kicked up a furore over this, as also the Indian babus who found their own mistresses in the red light areas humiliated. The draconian laws, which punished only the prostitutes but not the men frequenting them, were then eased, or used in a surreptitious way.

The prostitute, the actress, the courtesan, the fallen woman, is also a traditional alter ego of the chaste woman  - the devi or Bharatiya Nari, the “ideal Hindu woman”. She has been pictured in countless novels, plays, farces, poems, art works and films till the present day, as threatening traditional values by practicing the very opposite of stridharma.  Kalighat paintings are obsessed with these images. The courtesan, the adulteress, even the modern educated woman are seen as threatening the very fabric of society, corrupting and castrating men and destabilizing social order. The vamp and devi are sometimes collapsed into the same character, as the heroine in Manoj Kumar’s early 1970s film Purab aur Paschim (“East and West”). She starts off in London wearing a blond wig and mini skirts, smoking and drinking, and ends up in an Indian village temple as a Bharatiya Nari singing a bhajan in a sari, won over by true Indian culture and the true Indian man! In the recent cult film Dil Chahta Hai - (made by a young, trendy director) - Dimple Kapadia is the alcoholic, divorced, older working woman, denied access to her own children, who finally dies of cirrhosis of the liver. Her character as an independent woman is pitiful, and set against the other two virginal young heroines, who look “modern” but operate only within the traditional limits of family approval.

Post Independence

Post Independence calendars show Bharat Mata throwing off her chains. She presides as Lakshmi over India’s development. In Mehboob Khan’s 1957 film Mother India, the peasant Nargis, abandoned by her husband, has to till the soil to feed her two small sons, threatened by misfortunes and lascivious men. She is a kind of rural virangana figure, who operates and succeeds in a man’s world, chaste and heroic even while she breaks the rules of stridharma by selling her mangalsutra, the marriage necklace, for survival, or shooting dead her deviant son. The socialist- realist film still of Nargis carrying the plough (only men traditionally use the plough) is a popular icon of modern India. 

The idealistic belief in the new nation of the early years of Independence gives way to cynicism by the 1970s, which directly reflects the way women come to be depicted as symbols of nationhood. The village is seen as the essence of real Indian values, the city, a hellhole of corrupt materialism. In Raj Kapoor’s late film Ram Teri Ganga Maili (‘Ram, Your Ganga is Polluted’), a cynical allegory of lost national ideals, the river Ganga is personified as an innocent hill maiden who is seduced by a visiting city boy. She gives birth to a son and starts off with her child in search of her lost lover to the plains, tracing the course of the holy river. In a series of adventures, she is dirtied and sexually used all along the way, arousing lewd male attention even in the pure maternal act of breastfeeding. The sexy picture of the actress Mandakini in “wet drapery” exposing her breasts under a waterfall – which somehow got past the censors - was widely used for the posters and publicity of the film. The double take is interesting. The director uses a voluptuous starlet to play a pure village virgin, and exploits her in semi- nude scenes throughout the film to illustrate a moral tale of contemporary decadence!

The recent film “Mathrubhoomi” (“Motherland”) by Manish Jha is a dark fantasy set in a future India that is woman starved due to widespread female infanticide. The Mahabharata tale of Draupadi being married to five brothers is used again, not as a tale of empowerment, but as leading to even more unspeakable sexual and domestic abuse of women. 

Many contemporary artists have used the archetypal Bharat Mata imagery in their work. Notorious among them is of course, MF Husain’s 1970s Emergency paintings of Indira Gandhi as Durga and Sita, also popular images in the calendar art of the time. Atal Behari Vajpayee had similarly eulogized Indira as Durga during the Bangladesh War. But later in the 1990s the Sangh Parivar organizations made violent attacks on Husain and his work for his depictions of Hindu female deities, warning him as a Muslim to keep off. [ As I write this, there is a new controversy over Husain’s nude Bharat Mata painting.] In Tyeb Mehta’s fragmented modernist images of Kaliyug – Kali and Mahishasura Mardhini counterposed with the figure of the falling man, the earlier heroic mode turns to critical analysis. Atul Dodiya’s series of watercolours of grotesque, emaciated hags, falling, crouching and teetering on a map of India, Tearscape, painted around the year 2000, are bitter expressions of loss and dispossession.

In this irrational regard for the nation as mother- goddess, where eulogistic images of mother’s milk, mother’s forgiveness, mother love, mother tongue, mother earth, reverberate as political slogans, in sentimental auto-rickshaw graffiti and in virulent regional and language identity agitations - the Indian man is forever infantilized. Problems are never faced, only maternal protection invoked. The relationship between the man and the nation becomes a duality, where the idea of community is circumvented into a one- to- one emotional relationship between the mother land and the child-citizen. The Indian woman is the adoring Yashoda captivated by the naughty pranks of the perpetual child Krishna. The Indian mother is worshipped, because she gives birth to men. In mother and child posters everywhere the mother fondles the male child: that is the greatest bond. Even the machismo of the “mard- na mard” politics around the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation created a helpless, sweet Ram Lalla figure to be babied by the whole country. The trauma of the colonial moment is never forgotten, the Indian male never grows up, and the Indian woman never breaks the maternal bond, never lets go. 

Pushpamala N

Bangalore 2006

Thanks to M Madhava Prasad for his critical comments and suggestions.

Bibliography

Totem and Taboo, Sigmund Freud, 1913  (Volume 3- Freud, The Origins of Religion, Penguin Books, 1985)

The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Post Colonial Histories, Partha Chatterjee, Princeton University Press, 1993

Not Quite (Pearl) White: Fearless Nadia, Queen of the Stunts, Rosie Thomas, from Bollyworld- Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens, ed. Raminder Kaur and Ajay J Sinha, Sage Publications, 2005

A Popular Indian Art, Raja Ravi Varma and the Printed Gods of India – Erwin Neumayer and Christine Schelberger – Oxford University Press, 2003

A World without Women, essay on Manish Jha’s film Mathrubhoomi ( 2003 ), Maithili Rao, Frontline, July 1, 2005

Photos of the Gods – The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India, Christopher Pinney, Oxford University Press, 2004

Dangerous Outcast, The Prostitute in Nineteenth Century Bengal, Sumanta Banerjee, Seagull Books, 1998

Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema, ed. by Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willeman, British Film Institute and Oxford University Press, 1994

From Goddess to Pin-Up: Icons of Femininity in Indian Calendar Art, catalogue of show curated by Dr. Patricia Uberoi and Pooja Sood from Dr Patricia Uberoi’s collection

Woman / Goddess, ed. Gayatri Sinha, Multiple Action Research Group, New Delhi. 1999

TAKE - I Issue 14 I August 2014

The Phantom Lady Strikes Again

There were some people who were crucial cultural players who seem have slipped out of the country’s cultural memory. The Phantom Lady rediscovers the critic and connoisseur Govindraj Venkatachalam .

'BEAUTY IS MY ADVENTURE'

ON THE LOST CRITIC G.VENKATACHALAM

Ram Rahman, while on a conversation on dance in Facebook, urged me to write a column on the important art critic Venkatachalam who it seems the world has forgotten. (I had always been wary of Facebook, thinking of it as a repository for dog, cat and baby lovers or for various kinds of self- indulgence and self-promotion, but it seems that it can also urge you to write.) G. Venkatachalam – “Venka” to many - was an important early critic, connoisseur, nationalist and Theosophist from Bangalore who was a patron and godfather to many artists. He is credited with discovering the genius of M.S. Subbulakshmi, who he met when she came as a sixteen year old to record in a studio in the city, and whom he immediately proclaimed as an immense talent.

There is an essay on him in a 1947 book Eminent Indians by the Sinhalese political journalist D.B. Dhanapala, where he writes, “ He is of great consequence for he belongs to a category of people who have made the colourblind see: Ananda Coomaraswamy, E B Havell, James Cousins, O C Ganguly, Percy Brown, NC Mehta, Stella Kramrisch. I am not quite clear where exactly in this list Venkatachalam’s place is; but he has done as much as anyone of these in making India art-conscious.” He talks about him as a great popularizer of art, “ While we learned the finer points and the more intricate philosophy of Indian art from men like Coomaraswamy and Havell we also learned to love Indian art as something connected intimately with us from Venkatachalam. He gave us the personal details of the artists, created them into human beings of flesh and blood…he infused ease into aesthetics, personality into painters; and friendliness into frescoes.”

Venkatachalam belongs to a quaint world of cultural clubs, drawing rooms and “At Homes”, where “Beauty” was sought and ideas like “soul”, “essence” and “inspiration” were intensely discussed. He is one of the cosmopolitan modernists of the pre-independence world, travelling all over India to give talks with “lantern slides” and representing Indian culture internationally. It is a bohemian, free wheeling world where nationalists and people from the arts travelled widely and knew each other intimately. In fact, Venkatachalam was so well known in Ceylon that Dhanapala makes a plea that he should be appointed cultural ambassador in Colombo.

When I was a student in Bangalore in the 1970s Balan Nambiar once took me to see a collection of Bengal School paintings housed in the Theosophical Society building in Ulsoor. There were many paintings of important artists hung in a large, gloomy hall, many of them damaged and ill kept. He told me it was Venkatachalam’s collection and that most of them were gifts. There seemed to be nobody in charge looking after them. The collection seems to have disappeared since, and like “Venka”, is lost to the art world, unknown.

S.G. Vasudev who was a protégé of Venkatachalam, said he first met him in 1959 when Venka saw his youthful paintings and urged him to join the College of Arts in Madras, convincing Vasudev’s reluctant parents and recommending him to the principal K.C.S. Paniker. He is not sure whether Venka was a theosophist (he was close to Annie Besant, though in his book Fragrant Memories he praises the philosophy of Jiddu Krishnamurti), but said he used to stay in the Theosophical Society whenever he came to Bangalore or Madras. Perhaps with his peripatetic bachelor life, Venka had no fixed home. Venkatachalam introduced Vasudev in the 1960s to painters like Husain and Satish Gujral, when they were largely unknown in the South and said he was collecting works to build up a permanent gallery of modern art named after Fred Harvey to be housed in the Theosophical Society in Bangalore. He was also collecting the works of KK Hebbar, Ara and KCS Paniker and of young artists like Vasudev, Viswanadhan and Rani Nanjappa. Vasudev remembers seeing a portrait bust of Venka done by Debiprasad Roychaudhury.

Venkatachalam is said to have had a genius for making friends. A close friend was “Kidi” Seshappa who brought out a political magazine called Kidi (“Spark” in Kannada) in the 1950s. Kidi Seshappa was exposed to art through Venkatachalam who persuaded him to take an exhibition of Indian art to Europe in the late ‘60s. Vasudev says that he was supposed to go along with the exhibition and help set it up in various countries, but finally it was Viswanadhan who went along with Seshappa and who historically remained behind to make his career in Paris.

Out of sixteen books written by him, I have one in my collection called Fragrant Memories published in 1941 by the Hosali Press in Bangalore and described as a book on “Modern poets, Painters, Dancers and Musicians”. The book is autobiographical and ranges from his meetings with Rabindranath Tagore in Mysore and Santiniketan to encounters with painters like Abanindranath and Gaganendranath, K Venkatappa , Sarada Ukil, Chughtai and George Keyt, musicians like MS, dancers Balasaraswati, Rukmini Devi, Shanta Rao, Uday Shankar and Ramgopal , critic Kanhaiyalal Vakil and Japanese writer Yone Noguchi ( father of Isamu Noguchi), philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, politicians from Nehru to Mirza Ismail; and in Shanghai, the Communist and Mao supporter Agnes Smedley. Even the politicians he likes are aesthetes. Venka is a man of the Indian Rennaissance, influenced by the ideas of Ananda Coomarswamy and Havell and a strong supporter of the Bengal school of art. In an amusing chapter on meeting Kanhaiyalal Vakil in Bombay, he describes the hot arguments they have on Bengal versus Bombay art and finally concludes that both were in fact fighting for the same cause.

Dhanapala writes about his art criticism as if he were a method actor: “Venkatachalam has a mind that is so plastic that it can fit itself into the crannies and crevices of other minds, making them his own. He is sensitive to a high degree to the intentions of the artists… like a great actor living the role he has to act, he gets under the skin of the artist… if he wishes to draw our attention to the Persian glories of Chugtai’s work he travels all the way to Lahore, has Mughulai dinners with him, sees him at work and play, before he makes an estimate of his work ”.

Venkatachalam describes himself as a dilettante and a born vagabond, tramping the streets of various cities in India “ discussing men and matters, art and artists”. For a dilettante, he is rather cultivated and knowledgeable about the arts, quoting Roger Fry and Clive Campbell often. He is impatient of traditional and conventional teaching and supports the freshness of invention, admiring rebelliousness, stubbornness, modesty, and austerity in his subjects. In his writing too he is suspicious of pedantry, “ Scholarship, I have always held, is a positive hindrance to art appreciation. You soon get lost in the archeology of it and the beauty, the simple direct beauty of a thing escapes you…”

Sukanya Rahman writes an amazing story about her grandmother Ragini Devi in her book Dancing in the Family. An American who trained herself to be an “Indian” dancer, Ragini falls in love with the poet Harindranath Chattopadyay and pregnant, leaves her husband Ramlal Bajpai in New York to come to India. Her daughter Indrani Rahman is born prematurely on the ship and she is stranded penniless in Pondicherry, unable to enter British India as her husband is a nationalist on the run from the police. On learning of her sorry state, Venka comes to her rescue along with Harindranath’s wife Kamaladevi and Annie Besant, looking after her and later taking her to meet Vallathol at the Kerala Kalamandalam. That is how she becomes the first woman to be trained in Kathakali and soon begins her travels with Gopinath popularizing the form across India. He was also instrumental in shaping Indrani's career, starting with her first performance at the Theosophical Society in Bangalore in 1949, after her training with U.S. Krishna Rao.

A bachelor himself, Venka is described as living an “enviable roving, rolling, carefree, bachelor life with the whole of India as his horizon … in Bombay for a month, in Calcutta for two, in Mysore for six and in Madras for a week ”, travelling widely in “Japan, Java, China, Korea and Ceylon carrying the gospel of Indian art”. The last time Sukanya Rahman met him, she says, he had a pretty young lady draped on his arm.

It is the norm today to describe a certain kind of liberal, modern milieu in India of the 1950s and ‘60s as Nehruvian; when in fact it was a continuation of the exciting, open, intellectual world that existed before independence. G. Venkatachalam’s writings open up a fascinating history of the burgeoning cultural scene being fashioned at the time (though he was a player post-independence too, being part of the Lalit Kala Akademi and cultural bodies), and of the unconventional friendships and relationships which shaped them.

I have always envied the film world its “film buffs”: those tireless enthusiasts who so love films and filmmakers; and it seems that here is a man who is the original Indian “art buff”- who takes such pleasure in art and artists - that we so lack.

Pushpamala N.

August 2014

TAKE – Sacred I Issue 13 I December 2013

The Phantom Lady Strikes Again

The Phantom Lady writes about the work and dilemmas of her close friend Rummana Husain (1952-1999) and the unusual show In Order to Join at the Museum Abteiberg in Germany inspired by her work, which brings together an array of international women artists born between 1947 and 1957  – Helen Chadwick, Chohreh Feyzdjou, Angela Grauerholz, Sheela Gowda, Jamelie Hassan, Mona Hatoum, Rummana Hussain, Shelagh Keeley, Astrid Klein, Ana Mendieta, Pushpamala N., Adrian Piper, Lala Rukh and Rosemarie Trockel –

RUMMANA HUSAIN / THE POLITICAL IN THE HISTORICAL

In Order to Join - The Political in a Historical Moment, a major historical show of international women artists of a generation who came to importance in the 1980s, curated by Swapnaa Tamhane and Susanne Titz and now showing at the Museum Abteiberg in Germany, is formed around the work of Rummana Husain, one of the pioneers of conceptual art in India. Rummana, a close friend, was born in 1952 and died tragically of cancer at the age of 47 in 1999, when she had just begun doing her most significant work. 

The show came out of the persistent work done on Rummana by Canadian curator Swapnaa Tamhane in curatorial collaboration with the Director of the Museum Abteiberg, Susanne Titz. Swapnaa has a two year curatorial residency at the museum, which has an important collection of contemporary art starting with the work of Joseph Beuys who taught at the nearby art academy at Dusseldorf, where his legend is present everywhere. (We had lunch at the Ohme Jupp, a restaurant in Dusseldorf which Beuys famously patronized serving German homemade food). When I asked Swapnaa on the reasons she decided to focus on Rummana’s work, she said she had started researching on Nalini Malani, Vivan Sundaram and Rummana, but found Rummana quite different and decided to work further on her. Possibly Rummana was the first Indian artist to work with identity politics, which I found disturbing at the time. I remember a sense of betrayal since I felt that we were both alike, that we both belonged to a free- floating bohemian secular world, and that she was somehow retreating from that position by foregrounding her identity as a Muslim. (This was especially so as just before this, she had been intensely against Muslim orthodoxy and had taken a strong position against the Indian government ban on Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses). This conversation was soon after the post- Ayodhya Mumbai riots in 1993, when Rummana had felt threatened and besieged by the anti- Muslim violence which shook Mumbai and changed its nature forever from the foremost cosmopolitan city to one marked by narrow sectarian parochialism. She replied that since I belonged to the majority Hindu community I didn’t know what it felt like, the depth of her fear. I think it was also a shock that because of the recent events she had been thrown out from a secure progressive centre to the nation’s margins.

I met Rummana in the mid –eighties in her earlier avatar as a painter when she was working in the Garhi Studios in Delhi. She had studied design in England. Coming back to India and marrying early, she had gone to live with her husband in Kolkata where she began painting. When her husband, a high ranking corporate manager was transferred to Jamshedpur, a small town in Bihar, she had refused to move there as she would be in the position of a corporate wife isolated from the art scene, and decided to work in Delhi. (Many of us from that generation had long distance relationships from our partners!) Her move caused friction with her family and particularly her daughter who was put in boarding school, and it took many years for them to have a close bond. The family in general treated her as an eccentric. In Garhi, she shared a studio with the sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee, and painters Manjit Bawa and Arpana Kaur. She was influenced in her painting by Manjit Bawa and had a close friendship with Mrinalini Mukherjee who scolded her like an elder sister about her bad painting (yet she was a most sincere and hard working painter). I had recently got married when we met, and my husband and I became close friends with her. She could be a bit of a drama queen, high spirited and outrageous, and had a great sense of humour.

Rummana came from a prominent and liberal Muslim family from Lucknow. Her father, a general, was Chief of Army Staff of the Indian army at the time of Indian Independence and a staunch nationalist. He had written a book about Independence in which he had lambasted his relatives who decided to migrate to Pakistan as anti-national and caused a furore in their circles. Her mother was active in politics and had been a Congress party minister. Both came from a milieu of progressive left thinking, being connected to cultural figures from the Progressive Cultural Movement that formed the avant-garde in India between the 1930s and the 1960s. She herself read widely and had a large circle of interesting and distinguished friends who she did not talk much about, but I remember she introduced me to Minnette De Silva, the internationally recognized Sri Lankan architect who is considered the pioneer of the modern architectural style known as “Tropical Modernism”, influencing figures like Geoffrey Bawa.

When she moved to Mumbai with her husband in the late 1980s she felt liberated from the intensely gossipy and competitive art scene in Delhi. But Mumbai was also lonely with no community studios or artist gatherings and one had a solitary life as an artist. I was just moving out of Mumbai to Mysore to teach at the time but we met often when I came back to visit. Mumbai was then the centre of the art scene and art discourse and the Mohile Parikh Centre for Visual Art had a series of important international seminars through the 1990s, discussing the changes in the art scene – “painting vs. installation art”, “modern vs post-modern art”, “national and global” “, “post-colonialism” etc. where major figures were invited to speak. We were both active participants in the debates, challenging the traditional status quo, and arguments could turn raucous and aggressive. We met Adrian Piper there and Rummana, later had a correspondence with her. The mid - 1980s in India was the beginnings of the ‘art market’ and a time of increasing communal tensions with the rise of religious fundamentalism and civil war situations in many states. Rajeev Gandhi as prime minister had started the liberalization of the Indian economy to let in foreign companies and it was a time of “India Festivals” internationally, which presented India mainly as a folkloric country while simultaneously using the cultural festivals to sign arms contracts with major powers. Some of us who were painters and sculptors were rethinking our work. The old organic ways of working seemed inappropriate to deal with increasing fractures in Indian society and we were looking for new forms and materials.

A crucial event, a trauma which changed everything was the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in 1992 by Hindu fundamentalist forces. Some of my scholar friends refute this and say that the 1947 Partition was equally traumatic, but Indian art was more affected by what happened in Ayodhya, for whatever reasons. The destruction of the Babri Masjid marked the sharp end of the idea of a secular and socialist India and the rise of the right wing, leading to a growing violence and anxiety in Indian society. Sahmat, or the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust, created by artists and intellectuals in Delhi weeks after the murder of the left theatre activist Safdar Hashmi in 1989, became an important force and platform for secular people to congregate. We were both involved in organizing their Artists Against Communalism  festival in 1992 in Bombay. Sahmat, which is a gathering of some of the most important cultural and intellectual figures in India, became the progressive community that Rummana was looking for. Involvement in Sahmat and some of their ideas influenced her work profoundly and she started calling herself an ‘activist -artist’.  Canadian artist Jamelieh Hassan was talking about meeting Rummana for the first time in Mumbai, how she insisted that her husband and she move from their hotel and stay with her as her guests, and their intense time together watching films. Rummana, I think, had found in Jamelieh just the role model she was looking for at the time: a feminist political artist- activist from a Muslim background.

One of the utopian ideas held by many progressive intellectuals in India and promoted by Sahmat is the idea of  “syncretism”, or the invoking of a joint Hindu and Muslim cultural past, particularly manifested in the teachings of the Sufi and Bhakti saints. There is also the history of the “Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb” ( Ganga- Jamuna culture) propounded by the Nawabs of Avadh which brought together the best of the Persian and Mughal cultures and the Benarasi Hindu forms in music, dance and literature, whose centre was in Lucknow and Faizabad-Ayodhya from where Rummana’s family came. Going further back in history, one could invoke Mughal Emperor Akbar’s new religion called Din e Ilahi ( Religion of God) created in 1458, intended to merge the best elements of his empire to reconcile differences, primarily drawn from Islamic and Hindu beliefs but also from Christianity, Jainism, and Zoroastrianism. These ideas of a Utopian past have offered Muslims in India a way to overcome the bitterness and deep trauma of fundamentalist attacks, connect to a common history of social harmony and justice and project a Utopian future. Taking from these ideas of syncretism, feminist ideas of the “personal is political” and images of common people’s labour and existence, Rummana created a language of images and symbols to create installations, video and live performance. The conceptual language she evolved was not minimalist but had a sensual materiality which involved deconstructing many traditional Hindu and Muslim symbols, with the women’s body (or her own body) as a container of this violence and trauma, using the aesthetics of the ruin and fragment. Her exhibition Home / Nation in the Chemould Gallery, Mumbai in 1996 was a pivotal, path breaking show. To quote Ram Rahman:

“Rummana Hussain’s Home/Nation evolved directly from her Sahmat activism. Rummana and her family had to flee their flat and remove their nameplate in an elite area of Mumbai during the riots that followed the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. A violent national tragedy finding its way into her personal spacedeeply shocked the artist. The communal riots in Mumbai suddenly thrust her “Muslimness” in her face in a way she had never imagined. A short while earlier, the discovery that the sores in her maid’s mouth were probably a manifestation of a thrush infection caused by HIV, and that she had hidden it in desperation from her employer, also caused great anguish for Rummana (the maid died soon after from

AIDS). It was around the same time that Rummana was diagnosed with breast cancer, to which she succumbed in 1999. This combination of events collapsed personal and national conflicts into a searing struggle in her person, which led Rummana to abandon her earlier expressionist figurative painting to search for other formal means as an artistic language. Home/Nation with its photographs of women’s open mouths, the maid rolling chapattis (Indian flatbread) in the kitchen, architectural doorways and arches, objects in bottles defining a so-called Muslim cultural identity from her roots in Lucknow, all defined the maturing language of assemblage that transformed Rummana’s work. The architectural elements came directly from her installation of Sahmat’s Hum Sab Ayodhya in Mumbai and subsequent travel to Ayodhya for Muktnaad. This work exemplifies the complete transformation of an art practice due to the events of that decade, something that occurred among many artists in India at the time.”

                               *

The exhibition In Order to Join is titled after Rummana’s work of the same name made during a residency at Art in General gallery in New York in 1998. In the video, she walks from the skyscrapers of Manhattan through the Queensboro Bridge to the crowded South Asian market at Queens – ‘joining’ the West to the East, the centre to the margins.  The exhibition can be seen as a unique event where several western art stars show in a context inspired by a less-known Indian artist. As a historical show, there were works from the 1970s onward along with contemporary works, many of them based on the notion of the archive, besides being ‘from’ the archives. The sometimes bloody and visceral, sometimes funny, cool, playful, confrontational or satirically biting dark works flowed through the museum making unexpected connections between artists,  “to look at works and practices that engage with a political framework …. while questioning their own position within these structures”.

At the opening of the exhibition, where Jamelie Hassan, Angela Brauwholz , Shelagh Keeley, ( from Canada) Astrid Klein ( from Germany), Sheela Gowda and myself were present, there were some interesting discussions around  being a woman artist. It appears Adrian Piper has a policy of not being part of shows focusing on women, race or colour, but the curators had managed to get photographs of her early performances. (As I write, I see she has withdrawn her work from a ‘Black performance art’ show in New York). Astrid Klein talked amusingly of her student days in Dusseldorf where she found in the Academy an intensely sycophantic atmosphere dominated by the persona of Joseph Beuys and said she made a conscious move to shift to another school in Cologne. She said she would never call herself a woman artist and this was the first time she was in a wholly woman artists show. This was also the case for most of the Western artists, who never showed in a ‘woman’s’ show earlier. In an earlier generation in India, artists like Nasreen Mohammedi had rejected the description, seeing it as an effort to stigmatize them. In fact when Arpita Singh initiated the series of water colour shows with Nalini Malani, Nilima Sheikh and Madhavi Parikh in the 1990s, critic Geeta Kapur had refused to write the catalogue essay for the ‘all-woman’ shows.

However the western art scene (where art institutions have had a longer history and stronger traditions than in India) has been more intensely patriarchal, more of a white men’s club. In India, being an artist is in itself considered a rather feminine activity. It is also true that in post-colonial countries women have been active participants in politics and reform movements, helping to build the nation, and there are powerful women leaders in many fields. The founder of modern art in India is considered to be Amrita Sher-Gil for instance, who practiced in the 1930s and has influenced a generation of male artists. It is an interesting fact that while an icon of feminism like Simone de Beauvoir could get the vote in France only as late as 1947, women in India got universal franchise at the same time in 1950 with the new constitution. Post 1980s, particularly, an array of consciously feminist and articulate women artists in India made directly political work using new forms and new media and changed the whole art scene in India.

Perhaps we have to differentiate between a ‘woman artist’, which is a passive definition of gender, from a  ‘feminist artist’ which is an active political position, not really defined by gender. By taking the political position you connect to the various broader debates and history of feminist thought, women’s movements and egalitarian ideas, which is a progressive platform from which we can all ‘fly’ without fear.

The Phantom Lady

December 2013