"NEW LINKAGES: ARTICULATING THE AN[OTHER]"

  Contemporary literature on identity and social change evoke images of radical transition, disorientation, turbulence and peripatetic communities. With societies fragmenting and disintegrating, identities are embedded in contingency. Further, western theories of Asia reflect largely, power relations between Western/centre and Asian/periphery societies, thereby inciting critical interrogations of knowledge and power from a historical perspective. Such contradictory associations (intellectual, administrative and cultural) establish a peculiar post-colonial predicament, especially when scrutinized against capitalist/globalized structures and the politics of difference. The economic contracts of globalization define lives of the so-called Third Worlds, while fundamentalism and neo-ethnicism raise dystopias of nationalism and identity, memory and legacy wars, positing existential dilemmas that are global in their scope.

  Dominance is intrinsically linked to economics and politics, which eventually encompasses culture as well. The West/Centre is always contrasted with the rest/periphery. This is clearly evident in the histories of colonialism that eastern civilizations have been subjected to, and the construct of the inferior ‘Orient’ versus the superior ‘Occident’. India (and by extension the rest of South Asia) has represented to westerners the very antithesis of Europe: tradition vs. modernity, superstition vs. rationality, society vs. the individual. The way we talk about other people is a central problem of all human interaction and one of the constitutive debates within the social sciences. Although as a matter of fact we do talk about other people and other cultures apparently without too much difficulty, there are major philosophical problems which throw doubt on whether we can really understand people who belong to alien groups and foreign cultures. The philosophical issues are ones of translation and relativism, and this brings us centrally to the discourse of ‘the Orient’,  as exemplified in Edward Said’s seminal book, ‘Orientalism’ published in 1978, which radicalized cultural scholarship, especially in Asia and particularly India. The problem of ‘Other’ cultures has been a persistent aspect of Western thought and Western hegemony. This notion of the essentialized ‘othering’ resulted in variants of power and imposition historically in Indian politics and culture. This notion of ‘Othering’ is also very interesting now,  given that contemporary history is characterized by being both ‘post-colonial’ and ‘post-communist’, and the power shifts that are happening with the ‘rise of the rest’, despite the neo-imperialist military operations that erase local  histories. The ‘Other’ voices are definitely being heard around the globe, given the magnitude of information technology and satellite television. Earlier there were narratives laid out by BBC or CNN, now indigenous channels like NDTV or Al Jazeera focus on local narratives which are aired around the world, which strongly assert the ideas and interests of rising nations. At the same time with growing third-world economies is also a growing sense of national pride and regional politics, which have led to pathological confrontations in contemporary India, such as the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992 and the recent pogrom in Gujarat in 2002, both incidents occurred after the opening up of the Indian economy to global capitalism in the early 1990s.

  The above reading brings me to my central question in my paper, how does one contextualize Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism, in culturalist terms, given the flux of historical moments in our era. The binaries of the ‘East’ and the ‘West’; ‘Art’ and ‘Craft’ are continuing debates in academies, public life and culture. Contemporary Indian/Asian art is booming, biennales and art fairs are mushrooming in the Asia-Pacific region, culture is a global industry, and given the changing dynamics of global sociology, economy and art, and the momentum of the transference of concepts, currency, information and cross-cultural contacts around the globe, art practices has been radically transformed in our times, with a special emphasis on ‘local’ politics and ‘Other’ voices within aesthetic paradigms, a postmodernist shift. The objectives and representational efforts of European history have come up for interrogation in post-colonial theory in the last two decades, especially after the publication of Said’s Orientalism, via new forms of narratives that explored the discursive relationships particularly between Derrida’s deconstruction, Gramschi’s concept of hegemony, and Foucault’s knowledge/power theory. These new schools produced important critiques, especially thematized around ‘difference’ and ‘representation’, and underlining the fact that Western rationality is essentially imperialist and racist. Orientalism and colonial discourse studies are concerned to explore the problems of subjectivity and authenticity among social groups or cultures which are excluded from power.

  The debate about Orientalism (Said 1978) gave rise to a new approach to decolonization and the writing of history, especially the writing of Indian history. The central component of Said’s argument was that Orientalism as a discourse arose initially in Christianity as part of a missionary interest in the control of the Other by knowledge, and in the case of India, British Orientalism introduced a rationalist study of Indian texts, while aiding imperialist policies, to know, understand and conquer. In scholarly terms, the phenomenon of British Orientalism is dated between 1732-1835, centralised in Kolkata in the eastern state of West Bengal, during which a class of British administrators were trained by the East India Company to study the languages and cultures of India. The British Orientalists were a group who reflected the eighteenth century ideals of rationalism, classicism, and cosmopolitanism. Unlike many later British officers serving in India, especially after the coming of Christian evangelicals in the 1820s and the resultant institutional emphasis on English education and Western values, the Orientalists were appreciative of the ancient religious and cultural traditions of classical India. Consequently, they made significant contributions to the fields of Indian philology, archeology, and history and an elaborate and expensive program of literary patronage and research was undertaken. Faculty was trained, language instruction was initiated, an extensive library was established, and books were published in Bengali, Marathi, Urdu, Hindi, Persian, and Sanskrit, with traditional Persian and Sanskrit scholars working along with European academics, albeit within a paternalistic framework. The Indian Orient became the studied, the seen, the observed, the object, the essentialized ‘Other’; Orientalist scholars were the students, the seers, the observers, and the subject. Indeed, the effects of British Orientalism on Bengal and largely India were revolutionary. British Orientalism employed the tools of modern comparative philology, textual criticism and historical analysis on a vast scale in conjunction with traditional learning. Again, while such orientalist research was meant to aid European academics and imperialist policies, it also made the Indian intellectual and cultural elite, aware of their classical Sanskrit Hindu culture and striking civilisational accomplishments, which fuelled Hindu pride and ideas of nationalism, and subsequently led to the Indian Freedom Struggle and consequent independence from British rule in 1947.

  My focus on British Orientalism in the context of my paper is in relation on its emphasis on the classical textual Sanskrit Hindu forms of literature and culture, and the marginalization and annihilation of other forms of oral traditions and visual practice, such as the ancient guild system practiced in India for centuries, which was from the beginning of the Christian era till the 17th century AD; from which also evolved the exquisite Mughal miniatures, and other forms of art from rural and tribal communities. In conjunction with literary analysis, in the realm of Art, English artists brought in the values of the Royal Academy of Art in Britain, and a Victorian academism was promoted in the art schools established by the British in India, with other forms of practice being relegated as backward, primitive and ahistorical. The origin of the concepts of art, folk art, craft, classical art, fine art and decorative art as applied to the Indian situation owes much to the 18th and 19th century anthropological discoveries and resultant colonization. It must be mentioned here that the British rulers had to face numerous tribal and peasant revolts in India right from 1778 to the coming of Independence in 1947. We mark 1857 or the Sepoy Mutiny as the first War of Indian Independence, but these tribal revolts before and after 1857 were persistent flag-bearers of independence, and were hence marginalized and alienated by the established powers, remaining as peripheral presences in the public imagination, harassed and  meticulously displaced into the interiors, politically and culturally framed as backward and primitive.

  The British colonialist rule had tried to eradicate any vestiges of the ancient occupational guild system, in its attempts of modernization, and its effects can be felt even today in the contemporary art scenario in the binaries of ‘Art’ and ‘Craft’. Indeed, the concept of ‘Art’ itself was the inheritance of a European Modernist ideal that actively inscribed itself in re-writing the histories of non-western cultures. The imposition of western notions of art gave birth to such categorizations, and since then ‘fine art’ and ‘classical art’ began to be used as interchangeable terms, while the decorative, the folk or craft became synonymous. Even after independence, while instituting the nation in Art, in a replay of British Orientalism, and as forms of ‘internal colonisation’ the preference has always been for the ‘classical’, hence ‘higher/sublime/spiritual/Indian’ became discursive terminologies. In a polar opposite the art from agrarian societies became classified as ‘handicrafts’ made by anonymous craftsmen/women, self-trained in a generational guild system who ‘produced’, while the art academy (also introduced by the British) trained ‘modern’ artist assumed celebrity status as ‘creators’ of art. This double construct of Orientalism; Orientalism as a western’s other and the Orientalist position as an indigenous othering process, in the context of the marginalization of ‘Other’ voices from the mainstream of Indian Contemporary Art is critical, which mirror elite/upper caste perceptions of Art. For the urban academy trained artist, her/his origin, location, social class and formal training are advantageous and constructive, while the same notions constrict and categorize the artistic/creative prowess of rural artists, being self-trained and traditional, existing in past contexts. Interestingly, this ‘past’ is also an ‘authentic glorious past’, and any interaction with the modern would contaminate this attribution of authenticity (of a living folk tradition) that locates agrarian art practices in an ahistorical world. This problematic interface of the ‘rural’ and the ‘urban’, subaltern identity, the hegemonic practices of elite cultural institutions which systematically bracket peripheral art practices from socio-cultural inclusion poses a peculiar post-colonial predicament.

   Modern as a category in India, is a received entity, not physically known and thus contextualizing a hyperreal/phantasmatic Europe is always a function of translational entity, it does not present itself as a linear model. One is aware of the distinct strain that the appropriation of rural art forms by urban artists contributed to Modern Indian and Western Art. To quote the young art historian Santhosh S- “On the one hand, these cultural elites act as the gatekeepers who prevent any contamination to the ‘authentic subaltern’ through interaction with other traditions including modernity. On the other hand these elites appropriate the attributed qualities – the cultural forms devoid of practice and context – as supplements in their practices in order to claim themselves as authentically modern in the postcolonial Indian condition”.

   In the disciplinary framework of Indian Art History also,  its focus has been shaped via the complementary practices of Archeology/Indology/Museology locative in early 20th century colonial constructs, which continued into the post-independence project of nation-building, materially implicated in inventing a ‘golden’ Indian past (read classical which can be linked to British Orientalism). While the decisive contributions of cultural nationalists defined a modern Indian aesthetic away from ‘western values’, it nevertheless cordoned off the realm of art from the popular, privileging the ‘high art’ at the expense of folk or tribal art. Inspite of the Socialism in post-colonial India, the frame via which the folk and tribal arts was positioned was ‘high’ nationalist and elitist, nostalgic in essence, and the Festivals of India in the 1980s, valorized the rural arts via the ahistorical narrative.

   It must ofcourse be mentioned that the art education of Santiniketan and later Baroda, the two major universities in India in the sphere of Visual Arts, actively advocated the understanding of rural indigenous art forms combined with readings of world art traditions. And since the 1970s through to the 1990s, there were several urban scholars/artists who significantly pushed at the boundaries of conventional Art History and art practice, towards the writing of an alternative history of contemporary Indian Art. There are several registers in this discourse too, but I will not dwell on them, as it is will be digressing too much here. I will broadly contextualize the art scene vis-à-vis folk/tribal art in the 1990s, before I focus on the recent collaborative dialogue between the acclaimed tribal artist from the Warli tribe of India, Jivya Soma Mashe and the British artist, Richard Long who practices land-based art and installations.

   The notions of ‘anonynimity’ ‘authenticity’ ‘ahistorical’ and ‘collective’ in terms of Indian folk and tribal art have been increasingly questioned in recent scholarship, in an attempt to create individual histories set in their social and material context. The seminal exhibition, ‘Other Masters- Five Contemporary Folk and Tribal Artists of India’ curated by Jyotindra Jain in 1998, brought forward to the urban public realm the individual works of Jangarh Singh Shyam, Jivya Soma Mashe, Sonabai, Neelamani Devi and Ganga Devi. The project ‘Modes of Parallel Practice- Ways of World Making’ (1997-2002), a collaborative project between the urban artist Navjot Altaf and tribal artists from Bastar, namely, Rajkumar, RaituRam and Shantibai, in Madhya Pradesh sought reciprocal understandings of diverse art practices and conceptual frameworks, and a re-definition of the terminology of Art versus Craft.  In 2003, Sakshi Art Gallery, Bombay, presented the exhibition ‘Self Exploration’ of artists from Bastar, facilitated by Navjot Altaf, the main thrust was to understand the modernism and contemporaneity of these artworks and to dispel the fact that tribal art was essentially collective.  Asia Society’s ‘Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India’  at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai and which traveled to various cities around the world, curated by Chaitanya Sambrani in 2005, attempted to subvert constructed boundaries /hierarchies, marking the contemporary by questioning the polarities of the urban versus the rural, bringing together metropolitan/regional/local/rural narratives. Manu Chitrakar, Swarna Chitrakar, Raj Kumar Koram, Santosh Kumar Das, Ganga Devi Bhatt and Sonadhar Vishwakarma shared equal space with urban artists in galleries both in India and abroad, positing tradition/modernity /contemporaneity as mutually inclusive paradigms in a normalization of diverse visual practices co-existing in our times. And in July 2007, Gallery Chemould, Bombay hosted the works of Jivya Soma Mashe and his son, Balu while Sakshi Gallery hosted the solo exhibition of the Gond tribal artist, Rajkumar in October 2007. These are optimistic markers; however few in numbers, but I want to be an optimist and believe in the concepts of inclusion and cohesion and interrogating forced binaries. Modernity is not a fixed paradigm, it is relational and tradition and modernity are mislaid polarities, for one is always found in some measure in the other. An artist, whether urban or rural, is a recognized individual in his own locale and times, and the erasures, particularly in the case of the argument posited here, occur in our pre-conceived notions of this ‘other’ cultural artwork and hierarchical art historical readings via the registers of Modern/Indian/Art. Also, the notion of contemporaneity is seen in that which is happening, capable of transmitting meaning at its moment of occurrence, while also including things that happened in the past. This is what makes the works of these ‘Other’ groups contemporary, for they position themselves in a process of looking back to their folk/tribal traditions, while continuously articulating present experiential realities, that imply the differences and the meeting zones that define contemporary visual art.

  I will present one case example, as a support to my paper, and this is the ‘Jivya Soma Mashe/Richard Long: An Encounter in India’, conceived by the French curator and critic, Herve’ Perdriolle, who settled in India between 1996-1999; to research the folk, tribal and popular art of India. The curator sought to initiate a dialogue between two people from different cultures, who did not speak each other’s languages (Jivya Soma Mashe speaks his Warli dialect, a mix of Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati and Sanskrit, which has no written form), while Richard Long speaks in English, peppered with a handful of words in French, and Herve Perdriolle in French, communicating with rudimentary English. This is central to the argument of communication and language, a point which I raised in the early part of my paper regarding translation and relativism in Orientalist thought. How did three creative individuals communicate in this project, given their radically different backgrounds and contexts, and how was such an interventionist strategy by urban practitioners into a rural and tribal context in a collaborative practice vigorous enough? I will explore this further later, but first a brief introduction on the two artists, Jivya Mashe and Richard Long.

  Traditionally, tribal art springs from the most fundamentals of life and invocations towards the Nature Spirit and its regenerative functions. It is the arts of a people whose lives are tuned to the rhythm of Nature and its laws of cyclical change, with earth and harvesting, intricately woven with household and fertility rituals, locative in communitarian and ritualistic acts of the clan/tribe. In Warli art, it was the married woman who painted on the walls, known as savashini, and the conventions of painting being handed down from previous generations, while the wedding priestess animated the paintings through song and performance. In this act of collectivity, the modern assumptions of the artistic Self was dissolved with no apparent demarcations between the ‘maker’ and the ‘user’. But, it is also necessary to realize that folk/tribal art is essentially individualistic in its origins; that the work of the individual comes into existence before it is adopted as a social symbol or as part of a communal system of symbolic signs. In this context, how did Mashe build his own individual language, given the feminine context of this tradition?

  In the 1970’s the introduction of brown paper and white paint revolutionalized the collective aspects of this tradition, from the wall to individual papers. Born in the 1930s (his exact year of his birth is not known, since Mashe does not remember his age, but his son says he is in his mid-70s) Jivya Soma Mashe was the first male painter from this tradition to chart out a trajectory that not only defined his Selfhood in an awareness of his contemporaneity vis-à-vis his history, but also brought him at par with his urban counterparts. A traumatic childhood of being separated from his family led him to find solace and a form of self-expression through painting; always distanced both on psychological and physical terms from his community (his home-studio is atop a hill away from the centre of the village), Mashe’s visual field was derived from the farm-lands, with the actual activities providing a repository of images that animated his paper-space, with a bird’s eye view of events and people. Ofcourse in terms of form, his figures pertain to the geometric simplification that characterizes Warli art, but compositionally and in terms of content, there are several radical departures. In conjunction with human, plant, animal and insect life are images of modernity – schools, hospitals, trains, restaurants, and policemen, coalescing his experiential reality with time as a continuous process; Myths and legends co-exist with actual events, evolving dialectical relationships with the Self and the community. Mashe has exhibited widely in metropolitan museums and art, both in India and abroad (his first solo exhibition was at the prestigious Gallery Chemould in 1975) and since then he has been represented in numerous exhibitions abroad, namely the Center Pompidou in Paris, which has a vast collection of avant-garde Western art, among others. In the 70s, Mashe would work on the farm-lands of a local money-lender and paint for Warli festivals, weddings and other ancestral ritualistic practices, on an honorary basis. I visited his home recently in Kalamipada in Thane district, he owns two concrete houses and has bought hectares of land for cultivation, he is proud of his achievements and financial independence that his creative prowess has brought him, a collector has gifted him a computer, and he paints everyday, speaks of the land politics and policing in his region, how development projects by the government will endanger the fragile ecosystem which he expresses in his art, and how Warli art is slowly disappearing from his community’s traditions, and he wishes that people would respect Nature more, all contemporary concerns shared in common by us.

  Richard Long (born June 2, 1945) is an English sculptor, photographer and painter, and an acclaimed land artist. He has had formal art education, and in the late 1960s he started exploring Land Art. Several of his works are based around walks that he has made, and as well as land based natural sculpture, he uses the mediums of photography, text and maps of the landscape he has walked over. I paraphrase from his artist’s statement: “His first work made by walking, in 1967, was a straight line in a grass field, which was also his own path, going ‘nowhere’. In the subsequent early map works, recording very simple but precise walks his intention was to make a new art which was also a new way of walking: walking as art.  Each walk followed his own formal route, for an original reason, which was different from other categories of walking, like travelling. Thus walking - as art - provided an ideal means for him to explore relationships between time, distance, geography and measurement. These walks are recorded or described in his work in three ways: in maps, photographs or text works; they are the distillation of experience.

  Walking also enabled him to extend the boundaries of sculpture, his landscape sculptures inhabit the territory between two ideological positions, namely that of making ‘monuments’ or conversely, of ‘leaving only footprints’. (Unquote)

  Also, the act of walking for Mashe over his lands is also an act of reclamation. His walks over his lands emerges in his paintings as mapped pathways, in the form of dotted lines, or other formal devices that record metaphorically his experiential reality.

  This collaborative project ‘Jivya Soma Mashe/Richard Long: An Encounter in India’ took place in 2003, and culminated in two international exhibitions in Dusseldorf (2003) and Milan (2004), along with published catalogues. Its trajectories are both interventionist and collaborative, and as far as my readings via the images tell me and given the language problem, the emphasis has been not on coherence, but difference, on parallel practices and diverse processes, mutual respect and experimentation, and figuring out the dialectical relationships of distance and proximity (here Mashe working within his non-western geographical, linguistic and cultural context, in proximity to his own home space) and Long negotiating as a Western ‘Other’ from a different culture, nationality (read British) and language, and both highly respected in their respective cultures. It is also interesting that such a happening took place on Warli tribal land, where historically also there were Warli revolts during the British colonial rule; And a contemporary British artist using natural materials similar to traditional Warli art, creatively intervening on Warli tribal land in post-colonial India.

  How is then a ‘dialogue‘created here? The linkages can be drawn via both ideology and formal elements in both their works:

  Ideologically, a deep sensitivity and respect towards the earth, landscapes and natural ecosystems and a use of natural materials.

  The artistic dialogue is established between the narrative paintings by Mashe performed with cow dung and acrylic paints, his brushes being bamboo sticks and the land art and installations by Richard Long, who used natural materials such as rice, ashes, water, or designed archetypical forms with earth. As a participatory act, this project is an optimistic one, in an emphasis of the plurality and cohesion via the Eastern lens, positing tradition/modernity/contemporaneity as mutually inclusive paradigms in a naturalization of diverse visual practices co-existing in our times. This paper is a ‘work in progress’ and hopes to interrogate important shifts in contemporary cultural practices, of contextualizing the Orient, vis-a-vis Postmodernism and Globalism.

Amrita Gupta-Singh, India

back

©SCCA 2001-2002