viii PREFACE Preface i When Was Modernism ii PREFACE Preface iii When Was Modernism Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India Geeta Kapur iv PREFACE Published by Tulika 35 A/1 (third floor), Shahpur Jat, New Delhi 110 049, India © Geeta Kapur First published in India (hardback) 2000 First reprint (paperback) 2001 Second reprint 2007 ISBN: 81-89487-24-8 Designed by Alpana Khare, typeset in Sabon and Univers Condensed at Tulika Print Communication Services, processed at Cirrus Repro, and printed at Pauls Press Preface v For Vivan vi PREFACE Preface vii Contents Preface ix Artists and ArtWork 1 Body as Gesture: Women Artists at Work 3 Elegy for an Unclaimed Beloved: Nasreen Mohamedi 1937–1990 61 Mid-Century Ironies: K.G. Subramanyan 87 Representational Dilemmas of a Nineteenth-Century Painter: Raja Ravi Varma 145 Film/Narratives 179 Articulating the Self in History: Ghatak’s Jukti Takko ar Gappo 181 Sovereign Subject: Ray’s Apu 201 Revelation and Doubt in Sant Tukaram and Devi 233 Frames of Reference 265 Detours from the Contemporary 267 National/Modern: Preliminaries 283 When Was Modernism in Indian Art? 297 New Internationalism 325 Globalization: Navigating the Void 339 Dismantled Norms: Apropos an Indian/Asian Avantgarde 365 List of Illustrations 415 Index 430 viii PREFACE Preface ix Preface The core of this book of essays was formed while I held a fellowship at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library at Teen Murti, New Delhi. The project for the fellowship began with a set of essays on Indian cinema that marked a depar- ture in my own interpretative work on contemporary art. This was undertaken with the purpose of exploring narrative (in narrative, genre and within genre, allegories) and further, of opening out a theorized space for the cultural encounter. The essays index three areas of my engagement: art, film and culture theory. The book maps a terrain to situate these. In the course of the work every discursive detour has led me back to selected forms of art and to renewed modes of artwriting. If I somewhat circumvent the academic conventions of culture studies it is because my critical mode arises from and returns to a primary involvement with creative practice. ‘I am not interested in the academic status of what I am doing because my problem is my own transformation. This transformation of one’s self by one’s knowledge is, I think, something rather close to the aesthetic experience. Why should a painter work if he is not transformed by his own painting?’ Trinh T. Minh- Ha’s response to Michel Foucault goes on to say: ‘Recast in a critical light, the rela- tion between art and theory does not lead to a simple equation and collapse of the fundamental assumptions of the two. Rather it maintains the tension between them through a notion of the interval that neither separates nor assimilates.’1 As this book is the result of work researched and written from the mid- 1980s through the 1990s—to be precise, the selected essays were published between 1987 and 1997—I need to indicate why readers familiar with earlier versions of the essays may perhaps re-read them here. All the essays have been revised: annotations come in the form of addi- tional information, supporting quotations, extended notes and references. I have, however, placed certain constraints on the task of revision. Except where I have added a brief epilogue to the text or the notes, annotations fit the time-frame in which the essay was written. Rather than leaping into the present through authorial x PREFACE privilege, I wish to maintain the doubts and even the ideological misapprehensions that attend an argument and stress the authorial voice. I would like the reader to see the work as definitely periodized precisely so that the conscious post facto inclu- sions, the subtext retroactively woven into the text, can be seen to provide a reflex- ive aspect to the initial proposition. The selection of monographic essays on artists, interpretive essays on artworks and film narratives, theoretical and polemical essays on cultural catego- ries, work with different forms of address. The ongoing idea of the book was to re- lay the difference and to structure arguments across the essays, to foreground through revision the choppy sense of the historical in contemporary cultural practice. I hope the reader will be able to mark the motives and gain, through cumulative pressure, what one may call the book’s ‘conceptual topography’.2 The second major annotation of these essays comes via the text illustra- tions. In their original published versions the essays carried few, if any, pictures. Here there are more than 350 illustrations and each one is carefully placed in rela- tion to the text, as indicated by illustration numbers on the page. The pictures present something of a parallel argument to the one articulated in the text. This is not only because illustration is crucial to any discussion of the visual arts but also because I want to make a strong case for the remarkable visual narratives that cul- tural practice in India throws up. And for the iconographic augmentation of con- temporary life that emerges as a consequence. The domain of visuality established by Indian cinema from the prewar studios to the great auteurs of the postindepend- ence period as well as the more recently valorized status of modern Indian art can be acknowledged through carefully chosen reproductions. But while I would like to give visual culture its due attractions this is not an art book—it has no colour reproductions, for example. It is also not a book that chronicles modern Indian art, as even a glance at the table of contents will make clear. It is a book of essays where the visuals go in and out and play different roles. In the essays about artists and filmmakers there is what one might call an internal game of putting complementary images in place. In the essays that discuss polemical categories the pictures provide cues to scuttle foregone conclusions. Whether the images have representational value or are abstracted and eccentric, I would like to see them surface like alternative currents in the discursive scheme of the book. The essays are arranged in three sections. The first section, Artists and ArtWork, opens with an essay on women artists at work. This was for a long time a speaking text illuminated by projected transparencies. In 1997 it was written up for an anthology, now it has been further enlarged. I regard it as a slowly unfolding per- sonal statement and it is placed at the head of the book as very nearly a testimony Preface xi to my efforts at saying things differently. Amrita Sher-Gil and Frida Kahlo, Nalini Malani and Arpita Singh plot a work-scenario for women artists stretching across nearly a century; I get the cues through the mediation of their very individual yet paired and complementary personae and artworks, to articulate a well-calibrated gender discourse. This peculiar morphing of female artists imbricates my own sub- jectivity; the interpretive process pitches me into other narratives about the national and the modern, about subjectivity and transcendence. I learn to test what Laura Mulvey calls the ‘politics of authorship’ in relation to the teachings of feminist discourse.3 Writing in this personal mode is pleasurable, useful, sometimes painful: Nalini and Arpita are contemporaries and friends, so was Nasreen Mohamedi. The text on Nasreen, posthumously written, becomes more allusive every time I work on it. Perhaps I deflect the words from the straitgate of the vacant paradise Nasreen entered a full decade ago. In contrast to the first essay, I have been trying to de- authorize the writing on Nasreen by a selected excess of interlayered quotations that gives the little sheaf of verse and prose the option of floating away beyond the reader’s hands. The monographic essay on Subramanyan remains more or less as it was: an interpretive prose-piece with a premium on lucidity giving due respect to the artist’s own style of articulation, except that there is now a short epilogue that gives the sanguine story of the revered Subramanyan an edge—an eroticism that virtually asks to be made explicit, a projectile shattering the narrative of pedagogy associated with Subramanyan. The essay is included here to test its life in a new, more substan- tial context of several other essays. Set along with Ravi Varma’s nineteenth-century representational dilemmas, one can gauge the extent to which the issue of represen- tation is stood on its head within a century. Subramanyan from the School of Santi- niketan is naturally, historically, pitted against the Ravi Varma phenomenon. He further inverts the heavy take on representation by a strategy of deferral, by the formalist ironies of a mid-twentieth century modernist. Whereby he also gives a new and crucial turn to his Santiniketan lineage, bringing out those linguistic fea- tures that engage with twentieth-century art history as much as those that deal with the cultural gestalt privileged by his mentors. Ravi Varma is a figure of contradictions working out a professional career within the terms of colonial culture; a typical eclectic who tries to synthesize elements from the Tanjore tradition, from the Company School, from Victorian salon painting and theatre, from the performative tradition of kathakali and from neoclassical Malayalam poetry. Those reading this version of my essay will find that it has been turned inside out. The notes are now in the main body of the text, there is no longer a simple storyline, the farce implied in the discourse of high meanings is read against the grain.