New Maps of Longing My Whole Understanding Of

New Maps of Longing My whole understanding of spatiality in art stems from travels in Kashmir; my notion of yearning comes from there. Nilima Sheikh, artist, on her Kashmir Paintings This is an archive. I’ve found the remains Of his voice, that map of longings without limit. Agha Shahid Ali, “Pastoral” In April 2002 one of India’s leading artists began executing a series of miniature paintings on the subject of Kashmir. These paintings were the first realizations of a long-term wish to, in Nilima Sheikh’s own words, “rework my fairly confused or at least mixed feelings on Kashmir.” Although Sheikh had “planned a bigger, more ambitious take, wanting to read and refer to various accounts of Kashmir historical and contemporary,” it was the “incredibly moving and also extremely visual” poetry of Agha Shahid Ali that galvanized her into beginning this “formidable” project.1 Sheikh’s Kashmir paintings have continued to evolve beyond that first set of 2002. Thus far, they have been completed and exhibited in four successive phases: in Manchester, within an exhibition entitled “New Indian Art” in April 2002, at Bombay’s Chemould Art Gallery in March 2003, at Berlin’s Alexander Ochs Gallery in 2004, and, most recently, within another exhibition of contemporary Indian art, “Edge of Desire,” that has traveled from Perth, to New York, to Mexico City and most recently, to Delhi. At the moment of writing, Sheikh is working on two new paintings for the fourth phase. The thematic and formal coherence of each phase enables a retrospective understanding of the project as a whole. No mere painterly dialogue with Ali’s poetry— the poet and artist themselves never met as she encountered his work only after his death— this unfolding, agonistic collaboration between the verbal and the visual encompasses a multitude of other conversations— between the Indian and the Kashmiri, between the self and the collective, between longing and belonging. The philosophical enacts the political. Unexpected pathways open up through the phanstasmatic yet persistent entanglement of nation with its territory of desire. The continuing dialogue between Sheikh’s paintings and Ali’s poetry shapes this, my final chapter. In fact, it has shaped the conceptualization of the entire book. If the discovery of Ali’s poetry enabled Sheikh to realize her wish to work with “Kashmir,” it was the almost simultaneous discovery of Sheikh’s paintings and The Country without a Post Office that enabled me to envision my own Kashmir project. Thus what now occupies the concluding position in this book’s argument is actually its moment of genesis. This duality has helped me pull inside out the analytical burden of my writing to develop a methodology for confronting, among other things, my own early encounters with Kashmir, encounters that I now recognize as moments when the child was acculturated to the conditions of citizenship. The family and subsequently the school became spaces for the child’s performative and pedagogic internalization of specific cartographies of collective desire. This is the same yearning for Kashmir that Sheikh admits her creative debt to. And yet, as Ali’s words from his astonishingly complex “Pastoral” reminds us, and as I have demonstrated through this book, such yearning is intertwined with yearnings from within Kashmir. Fragmentary and ephemeral, these latter are nevertheless bestowed legitimacy by Ali’s performative articulations. This is an archive, albeit one comprised of remains; the Kashmiri’s voice is a map of longing, but a map without limits. Through these transformative paradoxes, Ali highlights the arcana imperii, the mystery of the State, as the mesmerizing power of its institutions (maps, archives), a mystery that Sheikh too, as epitomized in the painting “Map of Longing,” confronts. Taking a cue from Sheikh’s as-yet-unfinished Kashmir series, I outline here “new maps of longing” for the Indian citizen. The central challenge emerges as the subject’s wrestling with internalized tools of intellection, naturalized modes of interpellation, and complicit surrender of autonomy. The emotional sign of “nation” conjoined to the bureaucratic sign of “State” subsumes the individual into orchestrated pageants of belonging and identity, but at the expense of the designated scapegoat-fetish burnished with declarations of “beauty.” How does one emerge out of the archive, how does one leave the map, when on the other side seems only yet another map of longing? Is there any force to the adjective “new?” In answer, I turn to the magnetic insistence of Sheikh’s Kashmir paintings that helped me conceptualize spaces and modes of exchanging new maps for old. By following these paintings, and by supplementing my analysis with recollections of that path, I reinsert within the realm of the political and the activist the therapeutic, epistemic resources of visual art. If the artist is the most effective vigilante of national desire, it is the artwork that can compel viewers to revisit traumas, realize silences, and empathize with suffering. Sheikh’s response to Ali’s poetry initiates one such chain of recognition, mourning, remembrance and reconciliation. To absorb the political significance of her Kashmir paintings we must unpack her work’s “medieval/ oriental sensibility” that, by drawing the Indo-Persian miniature tradition into an “elliptical feminine space,” forges a “radical compound of formalism and history.”2 Representation, that constructs the territory of desire, is reworked as the only means of freeing Kashmir from “Kashmir.” Pluck the Blood “A terrible beauty is born.” This quote from W. B. Yeats furnishes the epigraph to “I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight,” a poem by Ali that has appeared several times in this book. The poem is also pivotal to Sheikh’s first phase of Kashmir paintings, entitled Reading Agha Shahid Ali. Two of these paintings bear titles that quote directly from it: “Don’t Tell My Father I Have Died” and “The City from Which No News Can Come.” The titles of two others cite the statement “I Broadcast the Crimson” from Ali’s poem “The Last Saffron.” The fifth painting borrows the hope, “We Shall Meet Again, in Srinagar” from the poem “A Pastoral.” All three poems are from The Country without a Post Office, an anthology that Sheikh keeps returning to in her Kashmir paintings, although two poems from Rooms are Never Finished, “Lenox Hill” and “I Dream I am at the Ghat of the Only World” are also used from their second phase onwards. We shall consider later this iterative, additive quality of Sheikh’s “illustration” of Ali’s poetry. First, I want to probe, through the poems cited in Reading Agha Shahid Ali, the initial layer of response they elicited from Sheikh as artist. If Country without a Post Office presents Ali’s most delicately worked elegies for Kashmir, these poems in particular showcase the collection’s lyric grammar that converts political conflict into cultural loss as personal tragedy. This grammar is picked up by Sheikh and, in this first attempt to “embark on an alternative way of reading signs,” converted into her equally delicate style, described by Geeta Kapur as “the coded inflection of a carefully crafted visual language.”3 In “I See Kashmir,” emblematic figures caught in the Kashmir conflict— the boy tortured by soldiers, the poet rendered helpless by distance, women waiting for missing menfolk, Pandits forced out of the Valley— alternate with images whose jewel-like clarity illuminates condensed pain: the rubies of blood on snow, the green thread of hope tied at the Shah-i-Hamdan shrine. Such surreal dreamscapes recur in “The Last Saffron.” Here, the boatman who no longer rows tourists in shikaras, Srinagar’s floating gardens, and saffron, expensive and all-too-fragile, join audacious departures from grammatical rules tying memory to the grid of past, present and future tenses: Yes, I remember it, the day I'll die, I broadcast the crimson, so long ago of that sky, its spread air, its rushing dyes, and a piece of earth bleeding, apart from the shore, as we went on the day I'll die, past the guards, and he, keeper of the world's last saffron, rowed me on an island the size of a grave. These temporal irregularities are a distorting yet heightening lens that projects the already faintly unbelievable image of the floating garden on to the imprecise ontological realm of the strange meeting between Rizwan and the poet.4 “A Pastoral,” likewise, is entirely cast in the future tense. The combination of a grammatical convention for the expression of that which is as yet unknown with details of fabular precision (the horned lark that draws two dispersed Kashmiris into deserted graveyards and dusty rooms, the glass map of their country that will tear them into lace) engenders a compulsive urgency simultaneously prophetic, inevitable and mysterious, that spills out of these poems into the entire collection. “Pluck the blood,” orders “A Pastoral,” turning wounds into flowers. Sheikh’s paintings obey and echo this order. The Reading Agha Shahid Ali series engages primarily with Kashmir as a space of desire, invoked inevitably through the hindsight of unbearable loss. The most poignant images of The Country Without a Post Office reappear here: women crouched over fires, boys glancing backward in reluctant departure, a trail of shoes left by mourners dispersed through police firing, houses consumed by sooty, sword-like flames; temples and mosques reflected in lakes; recumbent bodies in island-graves ferried by hunched oarsmen. Etched in charcoal, these images iterated within the paintings stall the potential for narrative elaboration offered by their narrow horizontal extent, repeating the same “story” across different frames. These abject figures move across a lost utopia of cultural synthesis that is graphically represented by the artist’s use of vasli, the traditional surface of Indian miniatures.

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