While Tibet has ceased to exist as an independent nation, Tibetan material heritage continues to be extensively circulated, collected, displayed, and interpreted in museums, the art market, and academia (fig. 1). Exhibitions of “Tibetan art” remain a regular occurrence in the exhibition circuit. Moreover, Tibetan objects are omnipresent in auctions of Asian art every season at all the major international auction houses and continue to fetch record prices in the global art market. This hypervisibility of Tibetan objects in museums and the market raises a fundamental question: Why is so much of Tibet’s material heritage circulating outside Tibet, displaced from its original place of worship and practice, and so far removed from Tibetans? This phenomenon is succinctly captured by Clare Harris, who notes, “The bulk of Tibet’s portable cultural heritage has been retained everywhere other than Tibet, and is now most readily at the disposal of everyone other than Tibetans.”⁵ Hence, further attention to the provenance of Tibetan collections dispersed across the world in public and private collections is warranted, particularly to assess the colonial entanglement of sacred Tibetan objects. 

The complex colonial entanglement of museum collections in the Global North has led to a growing body of scholarship suggesting that museums must engage with the communities to which these objects originally belonged as a form of symbolic reparation and restorative justice.⁶ This practice has been gaining recognition and momentum, with various attempts to “transform” the museum or, at the very least, alter the relationship between the museum and “communities of origin,” a move that has been deemed “one of the most important developments in the history of museums.”⁷ However, to this day, there is an acute absence of Tibetans in museums, whether as curators, interpreters, collaborators, or other agents in the construction of knowledge and representation or as members of the audience for museum displays.

“Doubly colonial” Tibet: An Inheritance of Loss

In her seminal text The Museum on the Roof of the World: Art, Politics, and the Representation of Tibet (2012), Harris highlights that the hypervisibility of Tibetan objects is due to the extensive scale of displacement of Tibetan heritage from the Tibetan landscape and people through repeated waves of extraction of objects in a “doubly colonial” context, that of both British and Chinese looting in the twentieth century.⁸ She articulates that Tibet is a possibly unique example of being “doubly colonial” as before the People’s Republic of China assimilated Tibet, it witnessed a British colonialist intervention in the form of the Younghusband “Expedition” of 1903–4. These repeated waves of pillaging have physically deprived Tibet of significant quantities of its material heritage, which is now found primarily in Western or Chinese museums and private collections worldwide, not in Tibet itself.

The Younghusband Mission was a British military campaign sanctioned by Lord Curzon (1859–1952), who served as viceroy of India (1898–1905), due to rising anxieties over perceived Russian influence in Tibet. There was no intention to annex Tibet into the British Empire, but the aim was to force the Tibetans to end their suspected dealings with Russia and to establish a dominant British influence in Tibet, an agenda some have deemed “almost entirely bogus.”⁹ Strikingly, the Younghusband Mission was primarily a military campaign, deploying the latest technology available to the British at the time: four field guns firing shrapnel shells and two Maxim machine guns capable of firing 760 rounds per minute. To illustrate the scale of senseless violence and plunder that took place during this invasion, let’s revisit the infamous “Battle of Guru,” known among Tibetans as the “Massacre of Chumik Shenko” (fig. 2).

On March 31, 1904, the incursion of British forces was halted by Tibetan forces in the valley of Guru in southern Tibet. According to Tibetan sources, the British proposed that as a precondition for negotiations, all Tibetan soldiers must unload their weapons and extinguish the fuses of their muskets.¹⁰ While preparations for negotiations were taking place, British forces strategically positioned their machine guns on nearby hills and surrounded the Tibetan army from three directions. According to Tibetan government records, when the British opened fire, 523 Tibetans were killed and 300 more were wounded.¹¹ While there is debate about what started the skirmish, it is apparent that the British army used a strategic maneuver to outflank and “box in” the Tibetan army, attacking them from three sides and firing over 15,000 rounds of ammunition on retreating Tibetans.¹² British forces pursued Tibetans for 12 miles and continued to kill and maim them.¹³ After this massacre, many battle trophies were collected from the bodies of the dead or from surrendered Tibetan soldiers, including earrings, gau (box amulets), bandolier belts, weapons, and clothing.

After seizing key strategic positions in Tibet, such as the monastery-city of Gyantse, British officers committed what Patrick French has termed “casual robbery” in deserted monasteries or houses.¹⁴ What began as collecting battle trophies at Guru became frenzied looting among the ranks at every available opportunity, but the expedition later followed a formalized protocol to sift through the material, which would, in appearance, be “a more reputable form of collecting for intellectual pursuits.”¹⁵ According to Harris, the Younghusband Mission is significant because it created a desire and appetite for Tibetan objects in the market.¹⁶ Even before Younghusband’s military campaign reached its conclusion in Lhasa, a steady stream of looted Tibetan objects had been trickling into Great Britain, some of which fetched high prices at Christie’s auction house in London.¹⁷

The state-led destruction of Tibetan cultural heritage peaked later, during the Cultural Revolution (1967–77), when according to Tibetan sources, more than 6,000 Tibetan temples and monasteries were ransacked and partially or fully destroyed mainly by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and agents of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).¹⁸ During this purge of Tibetan culture, sacred Buddhist sites such as the Jokhang temple in Lhasa were desecrated (fig. 3). This systematic desecration was through the destruction of venerated sacred images of Buddha, Bodhisattvas and protective spirits; the burning of precious manuscripts, manuscript printing blocks and thangka paintings as cooking fuel; and the turning of the area into a pig slaughterhouse and toilet by the PLA Garrison Command.¹⁹ Sam van Schaik notes this destruction was a “carefully planned operation” as each site was first inventoried, with “all precious stones and metal objects carefully labelled and prepared for transportation to Beijing.”²⁰ The desecration and destruction of the Jokhang temple are illustrative of what happened to many sacred temples and monasteries all over Tibet. 

In an overview of different case studies on plundered cultural properties for the International Committee of Museums (ICOM) publication Countering Illicit Traffic in Cultural Goods: The Global Challenge of Protecting the World’s Heritage (2015), Sam Hardy argues that the loss and destruction of Tibetan heritage under the Chinese state was “incalculable both in terms of culture and in terms of sheer quantity.”²¹ For instance, in the 1990s, monasteries in Tibet were targeted by Chinese gangs who “killed monks in their violent attempts to remove statues from monasteries” so that they could profit from the appetite for Tibetan material heritage in the global art market.²²  In 2008, the Chinese police confiscated cultural assets from Tibetan communities as a punishment for the Tibetan uprising, and this was evidenced by a marked flow of Tibetan cultural material onto the antiquities market.²³

The destruction and dispossession of Tibetan material heritage has been acutely experienced by Tibetan refugees, who were forced to sell their material heirlooms to survive and sustain themselves. The exodus of refugees from Tibet in 1959 has only added further symbolic capital to Tibetan material culture.²⁴ Despite the mainstreaming of debates around decolonizing museums and restitution of looted heritage, the case of Tibet in museums has remained conspicuously absent from both postcolonial and decolonial discourse.²⁵ Tibetans remain completely marginalized within such museum agendas and discussions, giving rise to a paradox that while objects from Tibet are much desired and welcomed in museums, Tibetan people are not.²⁶ Thus, the fractures in the geopolitical and cultural identity of the Tibetan people are further amplified as they endure the loss not only of their land but also of their material heritage. 

Uncovering the “Debt of Truth” in Tibetan Collections

Among the vast Tibetan collections dispersed across museums and private collections in the United Kingdom lie the muted and suppressed histories of violence and plunder that took place during the Younghusband invasion of Tibet, often embedded in the object’s very materiality. This was particularly evidenced by a gau pierced by a bullet and now held in the Cheltenham Museum and Art Gallery in Gloucestershire, which Harris argues was collected as a battle trophy by the British army.²⁷ Another gau riddled with a bullet hole (fig. 4) was discovered in the collection of the National Museums Scotland.²⁸ The late historian of Tibetan art John Clarke highlights that for a gau to be effective, it must be in contact with the body.²⁹ For this reason, although we do not have Tibetan bodies to examine to uncover the violence that took place during Younghusband’s military campaign in Tibet, the gau becomes a proxy for Tibetan bodies and lives in material form. During my collections research at various museums in the United Kingdom, I have encountered a vast number of gau and even if only a minority of them were removed from the bodies of dead Tibetans, this still potentially represents hundreds of lost Tibetan lives (fig. 5).

This loss of life can be even more “explicitly” evidenced through Tibetan objects I encountered during my doctoral fieldwork that have spots of what could be blood. I observed such spots on two objects, both with a direct Younghusband provenance—a gau in the World Cultures collection of the National Museums Liverpool and a wicker shield from the British Museum.³⁰ The gau (fig. 6) houses a tsa-tsa (clay tablet) of Mahakala and a folded kha-btags (white silk scarf). The handwritten label reads, “Charm against bullet—taken from the body of a dead Tibetan at Dongste monastery by Major.”³¹ The label refers to a Geluk monastery at Drongtse (‘brong-rtse), near Gyantse, that was founded in 1442. On examining this gau, I observed a sizeable, red spot on the object’s textile amulet (srung-nga) component. I thought this stain was possibly blood due to the acquisition circumstances (it was taken from a dead Tibetan’s body) and the knowledge of how the amulet is traditionally worn across the body. I immediately requested testing, and the in-house investigation was conducted by senior organics conservator Tracey Seddon. Due to the museum’s hesitance to authorize destructive sampling, we discussed and explored alternative, nondestructive analytical procedures. However, such methods were inconclusive.³² Joanne Dyer and Diego Tamburini from the Department of Scientific Research at the British Museum also conducted noninvasive testing on the shield, with FORS (Fiber Optic Reflectance spectroscopy) as the only available in-house option (fig. 7). Preliminary tests on both objects were unable to conclusively scientifically verify the presence of blood, and multiple experts, including the team at the British Museum, concluded that the only viable route would be to conduct proteomics analysis (a cellular examination of proteins), which would require destructive sampling.³³

Even with the small sample size of the collections review during my doctoral research, I uncovered two objects of potential significance at the British Museum whose origins were inscribed on them—a kapala (fig. 8) and a helmet (fig. 9).³⁴  Both had been “collected” by Major H. A. Iggulden, a member of the Younghusband Mission. Upon examination, I observed that “Palkhor Chode” had been inscribed on the base of the kapala. This refers to Pelkhor Chode, an important monastic complex in Gyantse (located in the historical Tsang province of Tibet), which was attacked and occupied by the British in 1904.³⁵ I argue that this kapala was inscribed by the field “collector” to mark the origins of this battle trophy collected from Gyantse. The helmet revealed a Tibetan inscription rgyal-tse (Gyantse), which is accompanied by what appears to be the Tibetan numeral seven (༧). I believe that these objects were removed and taken from the Pelkhor Chode monastery (or Gyantse dzong) by Major Iggulden, but were transcribed by two different types of agents: Indigenous (Tibetan) and colonial (British). However, it is noteworthy that the museum recorded neither of these easily legible inscriptions, particularly considering they reveal direct provenance. These gaps in the museum database are not highlighted to criticize the specific institutions, as this is symptomatic of the broader sector, but rather to show how such gaps could become focal points for museums to coproduce knowledge with living members of the Tibetan community, rather than re-amplifying what was said or done by British officers. 

Considering the limitations in archival information (notably on early Tibetan collections), and more importantly, due to suppressed and silenced histories in the colonial archive, new modes of scientific inquiry on Tibetan objects could be deployed to uncover “truths” in the collection. Such inquiries can make the hidden violence of Tibetan objects explicit, which historian Achille Mbembe calls a “debt of truth” that museums should address.³⁶ This case study also highlights the inherent conflict between institutional guidelines that seek to preserve the physical integrity of objects and the necessity of conducting tests that generally require destructive sampling.³⁷ Reflecting on the histories of the museumification of Tibet’s material heritage, venerated Tibetan sacred images and objects (such as gau) have been emptied of their sacral contents (gzungs-gzhug) in the name of scientific inquiry and thangka paintings have been radically altered with their textile borders (gong-gsham) removed to elevate them as “fine art.”³⁸ Considering sacred Tibetan objects have been subjected to such forms of museal violence across different institutions, museums must reconsider and prioritize such modes of inquiry that would uncover the colonial violence that caused the object to be in the museum’s collection in the first place. 

Reanimating Tibet in the Museum

While Tibetans have had limited agency in how much of Tibet’s portable heritage was deposited in museums across the world through “doubly colonial” extractive regimes, it can be argued that the objects have only survived significant periods of destruction due to their “museumization.” However, as is apparent, there are substantial gaps in the knowledge and provenance around/of Tibetan collections across institutions. To address these gaps and offer an antidote to the dislocation and destruction of Tibetan cultural heritage, museums must engage with Tibetans and reconnect these objects to the community (fig. 10).³⁹ To begin addressing the colonial entanglement, these Tibetan collections could serve as focal points for long-term and sustainable engagement between museums and Tibetans. Besides tackling issues surrounding the lack of Tibetan agency and the acute absence of Tibetan voice(s) in museums, this could give rise to innovative approaches to creating new knowledge and working with Tibetan collections. However, Tibet’s complex and contested nature raises a foundational question: Who can represent Tibetan interests in museums and in the related “authorized heritage discourse”?⁴⁰

While working with communities has become increasingly mainstream across the museum and heritage sector in the United Kingdom (and beyond), prevailing practices and discourse primarily focus on the outputs of community engagement or collaboration. As noted by some scholars, there is a need to move beyond the prevalent “black box” approach to community engagement and pivot the focus from the products of consultation or collaboration to its underlying process and methodologies.⁴¹As museums become increasingly social spaces and undertake more extensive consultation and collaboration initiatives, divergent actors and groups will inevitably emerge to compete for the role of representing a “community of origin.” Hence, the museum will have to mediate between these competing groups and subsets of communities. Considering the cultural and geopolitical implications and shifting goalposts in ethics, community-oriented museum practices must be grounded in sustained research, methodology, and ethical and critical precision, particularly when the ownership of material heritage is contested and its provenance is complex. My work remains grounded in a simple idea—let’s not propose or conceive of solutions to problems we don’t fully understand, especially if the decisions are irreversible and permanent, such as restitution. Museums (and academics) could instead try to create conditions or spaces that allow communities to undertake “slow agentive decision-making” in choices concerning the future of their heritage accessioned in Western museums, which will have long-lasting impact and significance.⁴² In such slow, agentive processes, it can become more apparent how sub-state actors such as Indigenous/historically marginalized communities could assert agency in authorized heritage discourse currently dominated by (direct and indirect) state actors. It’s evident that the complex and contested case of Tibet in museums requires a nuanced research-led approach. Perhaps this is a true litmus test for the decolonial agendas of the museum and heritage sector?

The post From Loot to Legacy: Rethinking “Tibetan Art” in Western Museums appeared first on post.

Before Nightfall, a 1981–82 triptych by Nilima Sheikh, imagines a scene unfolding at twilight on the campus of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda, a city in the Indian state of Gujarat (fig. 1).¹ The image conjures an otherworldly landscape, with the local flora and fauna painted as swirling forms and sweeping swaths of color. Nestled on the left is the Residency Bungalow, the faculty housing that served as Sheikh’s home for nearly two decades. The open structure of the house reflects the familial nature of the community in Baroda. Artists frequently dropped by each other’s homes simply to chat, conversations in the studio often continued over the dinner table, and students addressed their teachers as bhai or ben (“brother” or “sister” in the local language, Gujarati). 

Sheikh is one of several Baroda artists whose work has been categorized in art historical scholarship as “narrative-figuration,” a term first associated with the Baroda school in the early 1980s.² This designation refers to a distinct mode of figuration adopted by artists like Bhupen Khakhar, Gulammohammed Sheikh, and Vivan Sundaram, who created paintings grounded in sociopolitical critique, images of everyday life, and narratives embedded in local settings (figs. 2, 3). However, this formalist grouping excludes their contemporaries, artists such as Nasreen Mohamedi and Jeram Patel, who were working at the same time but in a decisively abstract idiom. It also reflects a tendency in the art historical discipline to classify artists by singular stylistic affinities. Against this, I challenge the idea that a stylistic label can easily be applied to the Baroda artists and argue that writing a narrative of this school demands a closer look at the collaborations, dialogues, and influences across generations of artists who taught, worked, and lived alongside each other.

During my interviews with artists from Baroda, I expected them to describe their classroom pedagogy or to discuss the development of their visual language. Instead, our conversations turned to anecdotes about gatherings in their homes, jokes about cooking or dancing together, and memories of the “homey” atmosphere on campus. Their words, when read alongside candid archival photographs, portraits of them and their friends, and artworks depicting their shared residential spaces, paint an image of the home as an alternative site of artistic and pedagogical practices, one that was as central to their experience as the classroom and studio.³ By examining these visualizations of social spaces and the dialogues taking place within them, I recontextualize their artistic practices through a lens of community and camaraderie. I propose that this framework has implications beyond a study of the Faculty of Fine Arts in that it allows us to understand postcolonial modernity more broadly as having developed through collective efforts and informal networks of exchange rather than through the stylistic innovations of individual artists.

The Faculty of Fine Arts, founded in 1950, was the first art school established in an independent India. Over the years, the Faculty incubated generations of Indian modernists, many of whom first trained as students and later returned to teach in the same departments in which they themselves had studied. Echoing the artists’ descriptions of a “homey” campus, the college began out of a single residential bungalow called Pushpa Baug (fig. 4). This house provided a bright and open space for the art school, with a veranda and balcony on the first floor, rooms that were used for lecture halls and studio spaces, and a guesthouse that was converted into a pottery studio. In the span of a few years, the campus grew around this central space to include half a dozen buildings housing multiple departments, including painting, printmaking, and sculpture. 

As a witness to these early years, ceramist Ira Chaudhuri described an extemporaneous development of the institution, when both teachers and the administration were navigating what was, at the time, uncharted territory in the newly independent nation-state. Practicing artists were invited from across the country to set up individual departments within the school. As new positions continued to be filled and young families began moving to Baroda, it became increasingly difficult to find accommodation. It was suggested that apartments in one building be combined, so that new faculty members and their families could live together in a common residence. This ad hoc development of the school resulted in an atmosphere where artists like Ira and her husband, sculptor Sankho Chaudhuri, became local guardians for many young students arriving in Baroda, and their houses, gathering places for the growing community. Students recall that they could drop by their teachers’ homes and studios anytime, a precedent likely set by the Chaudhuris. Ira ben explained this with nonchalance, “We just never closed the front door [of our house]. It was always open. People came in and out.”⁴ Despite the Chaudhuris’ meager salaries during these early years and their frequent difficulties in making ends meet, they made their home a refuge for any student seeking a meal, a loan, or a place to stay.

The shared space of community that was inevitably created in these artists’ homes can best be described as an adda, a term translated by linguist Sunitikumar Chattopadhyay as a “place for careless talk with boon companions.”⁵ Conversations in an adda were often long, meandering, and informal. The same could be said of the conversations taking place in Baroda. Nilima Sheikh describes the gatherings at her friends’ homes as fundamental to her time at the school. Yet, when I inquired whether these discussions included pedagogical discourse or feedback on her work, she was quick to say that her peers never taught her anything in that sense. Instead, these get-togethers included “random discussions. Hanging around the college canteen. Staying late in the studio to chitchat.”⁶ These informal hangouts both within and outside of the institutional spaces allowed for a fluid or unconscious mode of pedagogical instruction and a sharing of ideas beyond the constraints of the classroom or studio. 

The recruiting of teachers from schools around the country resulted in a confluence of diverse pedagogical lineages in Baroda. Sankho Chaudhuri and K. G. Subramanyan, for example, introduced ideas and methods from their alma mater Santiniketan, a colonial-era school founded in 1901 by the writer and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore. Santiniketan was modelled after the tapovans, or forest hermitage schools of India, where teachers and students lived together as a community. Tagore’s founding vision emphasized a linking of art and the environment, villages, and folk traditions that surrounded them, and he insisted that artists move out of their studios and into public spaces. Responding directly to the existing models of art education, the Santiniketan faculty integrated community-based practices into their teaching as an ideological and anticolonial tool against the rigid pedagogy of the art schools established by the British government.⁷

In contrast, the Faculty was established in the decades immediately following independence and developed its collective practices as a specifically postcolonial proposition, one fostered by artists seeking like-minded collaborators and, for many, a community different than those they came from. Since its early years, the Faculty had attracted students from both neighboring rural regions in Gujarat and urban metropolises across India. As a result of this heterogeneity, artists moving to Baroda experienced freedoms unlike any in their hometowns. Bhupen Khakhar, for example, noted that he came to Baroda because it would have been impossible for him to stay in Bombay and paint: “My family members would not allow me. . . . At the back of my mind, it also must be my gay attitude.”⁸ Similarly, as a young girl arriving from Delhi, Nilima Sheikh recalls being surprised that she was allowed to stay out and work in the studios until late into the night.⁹ Gulammohammed Sheikh, who had moved from a smaller town in Gujarat, was made to reckon with an unfamiliar kind of cosmopolitanism: “It was a new experience for me altogether. To meet so many people in the liberal environment that the university provided—it was almost like an extended family.”¹⁰ The addas, which enabled artists to retreat into a cosmopolitan bubble on campus in an otherwise provincial town, thereby came to symbolize a mode of sociality that was unique to Baroda’s local context.¹¹ At the same time, as my interviews with the artists revealed, it also led to moments of exclusion, marginality, and difference, despite the close-knit community. I thus argue that this period was entrenched in contradictions and simultaneities—a reflection of the complicated postcolonial climate in which the school emerged.

At the crux of this narrative is also the seemingly anomalous location of Baroda, a small town removed from urban centers such as Bombay or Delhi, which had previously been the primary loci of modernist movements and art schools in India. In many ways, it was this provincial location that encouraged the sense of camaraderie and interdependence among peers. The lack of a commercial gallery system and established collectors or patrons of art eliminated a sense of competition among friends or a desire to cater to the art market. With limited opportunities to exhibit works in Baroda, students would travel together to Bombay—carrying rolled-up canvases on the train, collectively renting out gallery spaces, and installing their works there themselves. Much like the ad hoc trajectory of the institution, the artists’ entry into the art market relied on self-driven labor and collaboration among peers.  

In my conversations with art critic Geeta Kapur, she was particular about using the word “bohemianism” to describe the atmosphere in Baroda from the 1960s onward.¹² Kapur’s presence in Baroda—as one of the first critics to write about its practices—was influential. As the partner of the artist Vivan Sundaram and a close friend of several other Baroda artists, she was uniquely positioned as a witness to both their artistic trajectories and their lived experiences. Reflecting upon her memories from the time, she spoke to me of the kinds of informal and deliberately sparse conditions in which they existed. Over the years, several artists came to inhabit the same residences, often due to the lack of alternative housing, to financial hardship, or through the provision of university accommodations. Artists rarely worked in their home-studios alone and, in fact, would leave their doors open so that friends could come and go as they wished. 

Kapur’s description poetically echoes the title of Sundaram’s 1981 painting People Come and Go, which is set in Paramanand, the bungalow that the artist Bhupen Khakhar built for himself in the middle-class Baroda neighborhood of Chikuwadi (fig. 5). Khakar named the house after his father and the Sanskrit word for “supreme happiness,” foreshadowing the revelry that he hosted there in the years to come. While the house had a separate studio, Khakhar preferred to work in the room pictured above, where he could be surrounded by friends, who dropped in at all hours and engaged him in conversation while he painted. Sundaram hints at Paramanand being a place where the community convened by depicting a welcome mat strategically placed at the bottom of the stairs and showing the door to the house left ajar. Khakhar appears to be in the middle of his painting process, examining a canvas propped up against a wall. British painter Howard Hodgkin, a close friend of the Baroda artists, is shown seated behind him at leisure, with his arms outstretched and his legs casually crossed. The otherwise tranquil setting is interrupted by “glitches” in the composition—a spectral figure of Vallabhai, Khakhar’s lover at the time, floats next to him; Khakhar’s body is painted in translucent hues as if fading into the background; and the picture planes intersect one another, like where a wall panel overlaps Hodgkin’s arm. These idiosyncrasies, combined with the dreamlike pointillist light that floods the room, indicate that Sundaram was not just painting from memory but rather creating a vision of memory—a reminiscence of camaraderie and intimate friendships.

I began my research on Baroda with the awareness that the crux of my argument relied on something intangible—unrecorded conversations, veiled social relations, and ordinary moments of companionship. And although some of this narrative could be gleaned from archival materials and conversations with artists, this research would likely have remained within the realm of the speculative were it not visualized through Jyoti Bhatt’s collection of nearly 1,500 photographs of the campus and the community taken between 1956 and 1999. Much like the formation of the community in Baroda, the development of Bhatt’s photographic practice was by happenstance. Since many students were not able to afford to have their work professionally photographed, Bhatt offered to shoot it for a small sum—in essence, for the price of the necessary film—which allowed him to learn new techniques at little cost. Studying the photographs in his archive chronologically, however, reveals a branching out of his subject matter from documentation of artworks to portraits of friends and contemporaries. Otherwise unassuming photographs of artists in their studios or posing with their work are filled with glimpses of conviviality, playfulness, and collaboration. 

In one photograph from 1970, three students are seated on top of a canvas laid out on the floor, simultaneously drawing different sections of a collaborative artwork (fig. 6). In another, from 1975, more than a dozen students are spread out on a porch, sharing a meal from an array of lunch boxes set between them (fig. 7). In a third, three students sit huddled together, poring over a single book (fig. 8). Lastly, a group shot from 1974 sums up friendships in the studio; amid art supplies, canvases, and frames, we see students holding hands, leaning on one another, and mid-laughter as if caught sharing a joke (fig. 9). 

As a witness to and participant in the formation of this community, Bhatt had untethered access to these candid moments, allowing him to capture the complex undertows of friendship and camaraderie on campus. And yet, despite my place as an outsider to this community, artists spoke to me with the same sense of kinship and familiarity that I describe here. My interviews, which primarily took place in their homes, were replete with nostalgic stories, complicated reflections on the past, and above all, an openness to sharing. Like Jyoti bhai said in response to my request to meet: “ઘર ખુલ્લું છે. ગમે ત્યારેઆવો (The doors of my house are always open. Come anytime you like).”

The post Artists’ <em>Addas</em>: Camaraderie, Community, and Cosmopolitanism in Baroda appeared first on post.

Since the 1990s, the Hindi film industry has undergone several transformations in response to socioeconomic and political changes in India. This is particularly a result of how the Indian nation-state and its film industries have entered into the global market. Though popular Hindi cinema has always circulated internationally through informal, ad hoc networks, during most of the twentieth century what was then known as Bombay cinema catered mostly to local audiences in India where it was central to producing a national identity. However, changes to production, financing, exhibition practices, and aesthetics from the 1990s onwards turned Bombay cinema into a globalized cultural industry in a process that film historian Ashish Rajadhyaksha refers to as “Bollywoodization.”¹ To emphasize this transformation, today’s Hindi film industry is often referred to as “Bollywood” or, for films produced in the 2010s and later, “New Bollywood.” For many, New Bollywood likely conjures up images of song, dance, and melodramatic excess, but as a global cultural industry, New Bollywood addresses audiences across multiple different media and discourses that circulate on a variety of global, digital platforms, and in everyday, local visual culture. In this way, New Bollywood continues to play a crucial part in producing a commodified, national, cultural identity that can be easily consumed both nationally and globally. 

A notable aspect of New Bollywood cinema is that it has created a space for gender and sexual identities that have traditionally been absent from mainstream Bombay cinema. In Indian society, nonnormative sexual and gendered subjects have a long history of stigmatization, marginalization, and criminalization because they were framed as “morally degenerate” – a view that was in large part shaped by the colonial era origins of many laws in India’s penal code that are still in use today. Concurrently with the changes in the film industry, the Indian state’s entrance into the global market has led to a de-territorialization of the nation-state. As a result, geographical location is no longer sufficient to produce a coherent national cultural identity for the state’s subjects. For this reason, as feminist scholar Rupal Oza has argued, cultural expressions of gender and sexuality have become subject to increased surveillance in recent years because they serve as crucial sites for demarcating and policing normative, national values at a time of intensified global cultural flows.² In this context, New Bollywood’s foregrounding of nonnormative gender and sexual identities seems to be in direct contrast to culture’s role in policing gender and sexuality, yet attending to New Bollywood’s diverse local and global entanglements will illustrate how this global cultural industry sutures together heterogenous narratives of social inclusion, consumer citizenship, and national development.

In this essay, I examine the processes that allow New Bollywood to integrate seemingly subversive subjects and topics within a modern Indian cultural identity. For my analysis, I draw on examples from actor Ayushmann Khurrana’s filmography, his global brand as a star, and his participation in advertisements. Khurrana’s career largely overlaps with the rise of global, digital streaming platforms on which New Bollywood cinema can now be watched worldwide. Moreover, Khurrana’s filmography singularly highlights how New Bollywood has positioned itself as a nexus for grappling with anxieties about shifting gender and sexual identities in globalized India through social-message films. In an industry frequently critiqued for its nepotism, Ayushmann Khurrana is also notable for entering cinema as an outsider. In fact, much like the characters he plays, he hails from an ordinary middle-class family. As a result, Khurrana has developed an image, nationally and internationally, as a socially progressive man who at the same time is representative of an aspirational modern, middle-class subjectivity. 

By using Khurrana and his filmography as a case study, I map New Bollywood’s wider entanglements with commodity culture and argue that New Bollywood plays a key role in developing a globally and locally meaningful image of the modern, Indian nation-state as technologically, economically, and socially advanced. My analysis further illustrates that this is made possible by framing the citizen as a socially responsible individual who takes charge of their own and the state’s development through consumption, a category that can encompass historically marginalized sexual and gendered subjects provided they have the financial means to do so.

New Bollywood and the Social-Message Film

From the last decade (2010s) onward, New Bollywood has demonstrated a rising commitment to telling stories centering subjects and experiences that have previously been absent from mainstream cinema. No filmography demonstrates this more completely than Ayushmann Khurrana’s. Since his screen debut in 2012, Khurrana has become known for playing male characters who find themselves in unorthodox situations or who behave in nonnormative ways. His comedies highlight anxieties about shifting gender and sexual roles in India through themes such as sperm donation, infertility, erectile dysfunction, the performativity and fluidity of gender, geriatric pregnancy, premature balding, colorism, same-sex desire, and female health care. In Shubh Mangal Saavdhan (2017), a young man discovers that he has erectile dysfunction when he tries to have sex with his fiancée (fig. 1), whereas in Dream Girl (2019), Khurrana’s character vocally cross-dresses as a woman to work in a call center where his clients are mostly lonely men (fig. 2). Stories like these dramatize a meeting between imaginary, ordinary Indian subjects and new subjectivities and expressions of desire, gender, and sexuality. Narratively, the films negotiate these encounters within familiar vocabularies such as the family melodrama familiar from earlier Bombay cinema. In this way, New Bollywood allows audiences to understand historically marginalized subject-positions in relatable, humanizing terms, and it offers these subjects access to the imaginary of modern India through a shared cultural identity. 

Though topics pertaining to sexuality, gender, and desire are openly discussed in New Bollywood cinema, the social message in such conversations is framed as a challenge to conservative norms and normative gender identities that exist in ordinary, middle-class Indian families while offering a model for reconciliating these seemingly opposing values. For instance, Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan (2020) addresses a gay couple’s struggle to be accepted by their families. The narrative frames LGBTQ+ experiences and desires as unfamiliar to most ordinary Indians. In a scene that is also featured at the start of the trailer, the explicit reference to male, gay sexuality is paired with the incomprehension of a family member whose conception of same-sex desire is so diffuse that he has no words for it (he consistently refers to it as “yeh” or “this”). In this scene, the Anglophone term “gay” as a label for same-sex desire is introduced to both characters and audiences in a comedic way that counters the medicalized language of queer desire and the prohibition against public discussions of sex and sexuality (figs. 3–5). The story of Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan addresses anxieties about how queer subjects might pose a challenge to the institution of the heterosexual family and to normative male identities. The male patriarch no longer has the same authority as the younger, gay male subjects who wear earrings and flaunt their sexuality through public kissing and rainbow flags (fig. 6). But despite the novelty and the potential controversy of the topic, the narrative serves to illustrate how LGBTQ+ subjects can be integrated into the social world of the film. In fact, the plot treats “homophobia” as the “disease” that threatens modern Indian society (fig. 6). 

Generally, New Bollywood cinema has demonstrated a concern with social-justice issues. For instance, Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan is significant for being one of the first mainstream Hindi pictures with an explicit LGBTQ+ plot, and it was the first to be both produced and released after the decriminalization of homosexuality in India in 2018—a historical event that garnered extensive coverage in international newspapers and by global LGBTQ+ movements. This judgment is also cited directly, and repeatedly, in Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan’s promotional material and in its dialogue. In the last few decades, a country’s ability to guarantee its LGBTQ+ subjects equal citizen rights has become an important way to build a positive image as evidenced by the discourse around pinkwashing by nation-states and during mass-mediatized, global cultural events like the Olympics and Eurovision. Both the landmark ruling and its invocation in a globalized screen text serve to publicize modern India’s progressive sexual politics.

Globally, perceptions of national development are often connected with a state’s ability to guarantee vaguely defined “liberal values” and “human rights.” India’s claim to be a modern, well-developed state hinges on its ability to address the stigmatization attached to these taboos and desires while integrating historically marginalized subjects into the modern nation-state. In this context, New Bollywood’s capacity to fold diverse subjects and topics into its vision of modern India through publicity, narrative, and aesthetics plays a crucial part in shoring up India’s global image—even more so as New Bollywood cinema, now frequently financed by multinational companies, often becomes accessible to a broadly conceived liberal, cosmopolitan audience on digital platforms like Netflix, Amazon, and Disney+ after playing in multiplexes in malls in India.

The global significance of New Bollywood and its orientation toward social-justice narratives is further illustrated by considering the labor of its stars who are mobilized to perform cultural diplomacy at events in India and abroad. In 2023, Ayushmann Khurrana was recognized in the American news magazine TIME’s list of “100 Most Influential People” for the second time in less than five years. TIME’s rationale for including Khurrana stresses the actor’s history of playing characters that run counter to gendered stereotypes and his commitment to stories that push middle-class social mores by explicitly addressing societal taboos. Furthermore, the magazine highlights how Khurrana’s filmography is complemented by his off-screen social-justice work, such as his appointment by UNICEF India as a national ambassador to support children’s rights.³ Extending the brand of the star to the nation, Khurrana’s global persona thus underwrites the image of a socially progressive India.

New Bollywood and Commodity Culture

The emphasis on progressive social values, both the actor’s and as expressed within the films, discursively vanish New Bollywood’s entanglements in a commodity culture that nevertheless permeates both screen texts and wider visual culture. The setting of New Bollywood cinema is often deeply localized, with stories taking place in named suburbs of metropoles or bigger cities in northern India: Chandigarh, Haridwar, Bareilly, Allahabad, etc. The diverse geographical locations are supplemented by scenes in call centers, marketing offices, and glossy malls housing national and international brands that produce a cultural imaginary of a nation fully integrated into global financial and technological systems. The stories also illustrate the entanglement between local spaces and the global economy through snappy, intertextual dialogue that invokes imaginaries of a global India that is technologically, socially, and economically advanced. To take three examples from Khurrana’s filmography: in his debut film, Vicky Donor (2012), Khurrana’s character’s usefulness as a sperm donor is contextualized through his enjoyment of shopping, and on two separate occasions, he is stalked at a mall; in Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui (2021), Khurrana’s character encourages audiences to look up the rating of his gym on the search engine Just Dial; and in Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan, the main characters work in a mall, where they promote toothpaste. Service-oriented jobs and real, recognizable brands embedded in the storylines reconfigure commodity culture as a realist aesthetic that undergirds the social worlds of the characters in the film. 

The Bollywoodization of Bombay cinema into a global cultural industry in which identity is commodifiable has enabled an aesthetic shorthand for representing these new subjects in a way that risks flattening the radical political possibilities of New Bollywood’s new representational practices. Specifically, by attending to the emphasis on commodity culture in the films, we recognize a flattening effect as historically marginalized subjects and family patriarchs are addressed equally as middle-class subjects, united by their capacity to participate in commodity culture. Queer subjects move through spaces just as frictionlessly as non-queer subjects because access to malls, cafes, and white-collar jobs are all conditioned on the ability to buy access. The commodified approach to identity representation means that difference is simply something that is “named” rather than an occasion for coalitional, intersectional politics as feminist scholar activists like Sharmila Rege have called for.⁴ Taking Khurrana’s social-message filmography as an example highlights how New Bollywood’s additive approach to diversity is often only skin-deep.

Moreover, the emphasis on commodity and consumption in the cultural imaginary of New Bollywood extends from the cinematic screen into a broader, everyday visual culture in which New Bollywood’s brightest stars advertise consumer goods and—sometimes—developmental government campaigns. For instance, if you had visited India in the latter half of the 2010s, you might have been greeted in the airport by signs and billboards of actor Akshay Kumar advertising tiles by Kajaria. Notably, Kajaria’s tagline promises that tiles made from the soil of the land will build the country (“desh ki mitti se bani tiles se, desh ko banate hai”).⁵ Similarly, train stations and urban roadsides were covered with advertisements featuring then-newlywed actress Anushka Sharma and cricketer Virat Kohli promoting bridal wear and steel for building a “home.” Pictures of yet another acting couple, Ranveer Singh and Deepika Padukone, promised domestic bliss through choosing the right washing machine. Likewise, Khurrana is among these stars. Indeed, you might see his face plastered along the length of buses as he endorses the right shaving cream (fig. 7) or on buildings (along with actress Bhumi Pednekar) selling affordable fashion to the young and hip (fig. 8), and his ads for the smartphone brand realme (fig. 9) might be screened in the multiplex before the start of the film and during the intermission—a place only accessible by passing through a security check that bars those less likely to have money from entering. 

The cultural imaginary of New Bollywood cinema and its stars participates in a larger political project of modern India in which the middle-class subject is mobilized to perform citizenship through consumption. Whereas the cinema activates consumption in conjunction with social messages as a way to promise citizenship and a stake in the cultural imaginary for all who can afford it, in the ads, commodity culture equates individuated social and economic development with the prosperity of the nation. By thinking of New Bollywood as a global cultural industry that operates across screen texts and diverse local and global star-driven discourses that circulate in everyday spaces, we can understand how diverse vectors come together to produce a cultural imaginary in which new gender and sexual identities are integrated into the vision of the modern nation-state through a vocabulary of middle-class commodity culture. But so long as belonging is conditioned on flattening lived experience into a commodifiable identity, this acceptance is not only superficial but also risks foreclosing more radical political possibilities. 

The post A Vision of Modern India: Social Messages and Commodity Culture in New Bollywood appeared first on post.

Bombay cinema looms large over media and cinema studies in India even though the history of the Bombay film industry is more recent than the history of film culture in the Subcontinent. The Bombay film industry as we know it today consolidated during the 1950s in the wake of the massive political and economic restructuring that followed the Partition of British India into India and Pakistan. Much before erstwhile Bombay became the prime filmmaking hub of independent India, film marketing, spectatorship, and criticism were already thriving practices in late colonial India (Fig. 1).

The rich history of pre-Independence film culture in India, however, remains understudied, and this has a lot to do with the difficulties of tracing non-textual and ephemeral popular-cultural forms through predominantly textual institutional archives. Recent film-history studies have drawn attention to the limitations of relying on sparse and badly preserved film archives, and scholars have instead begun to draw on a patchwork of sources, leaning particularly into the vast “parallel archives of paper” across vernacular languages to write deeper and more connected histories of print and cinema publics in India.¹ Adding to this web of scholarship, I examine three early twentieth-century Urdu film magazines published during the 1930s—The Film Review, Film Star, and Filmistan—as gateways into early film culture in India.² It was during the 1930s that film culture took off in earnest in the Subcontinent as the decade heralded the rise of the “talkies,” which introduced sound and, therefore, spoken language to Indian cinema (see Fig. 1). The decade thus marks a crucial moment of transition not only in film history but also in the trajectory of Urdu in twentieth-century India, which had by then become the subject of a reactionary language politics led by literary elites that was shrinking the boundaries of the Urdu public. Circulating in this sociopolitical context, film magazines bring into focus how Urdu was instrumental in cohering regionally diffused early film production into a shared and mutually legible film culture, and cinema, in turn, widened conceptions of the twentieth-century Urdu public by animating modes of viewing, listening, and speaking that blurred binaries of “high” and “low” culture in different ways.

Film Culture and the Urdu Public

The cover pages often offer the first clues about the audiences Urdu film magazines were addressing. The Film Review, established in 1930 in Calcutta, defined itself as the film magazine of mashriqi (eastern) India (Fig. 2), but this strong regional claim did not restrict the cinema public it was addressing. Publicity material across the magazines shows that the pre-Independence film-production business during the 1930s was scattered across a range of locations: Calcutta, Lahore, Bombay, and to some extent Delhi were the cities where noteworthy production companies were based (Fig. 3).

There is no indication of regional insularity in the way that the films were presented in Urdu magazines since, regardless of origin or language, they were framed as part of a wider market of “Hindustani” cinema—a collective imagination that overlapped with Urdu’s transregional spread as a lingua franca. Both the pseudonymous stylings of Filmistan’s editor as “Hindi” and the title dedication of the magazine evoke this transregional “Hindustani” imagination that is woven together by Urdu (Fig. 4).       

Moreover, the magazines themselves originated from regions just as disparate as the film industries they marketed—ranging from Calcutta (The Film Review and Film Star) to Lahore (Filmistan)—drawing attention to the expansive regional spread of the Urdu-speaking cinema-viewing publics being addressed. For instance, an advertisement in The Film Review alerting readers to the publication’s vast circulation network lists not only the Indian and foreign agencies but also the railway book stalls selling the magazine. These extended from Dhaka (Dacca) in the east which comprises present-day Bangladesh all the way up to Peshawar on the northwestern reaches of what is now Pakistan (Fig. 5).

The frequent and generous use of English across Urdu film magazines—with advertisements, film publicity material, and even cover pages of Urdu film magazines often appearing entirely in English—suggests a substantial transnational and multilingual audience. The tagline at the bottom of the page shown in Fig. 5 urging buyers to pick up a copy for their journey indicates that the magazines were largely ephemeral objects meant to be consumed as quick, on-the-go, pulpy pleasure reads. Finally, the ad’s emphasis on railway stalls as primary nodes of distribution and the explicit framing of consumers as travelers pointedly evokes an Urdu cinema public that was just as mobile and regionally porous as it was multilingual.

Advertisements targeting emerging middle-class interests were certainly not features unique to film-oriented magazines, as Urdu literary publications carried eclectic and visually evocative advertisements for new commodities and technologies that were visually keyed into the cosmopolitan character and consumerist impulses of Urdu periodical culture (Fig. 6).

Participating in the same consumer-aware print culture, Urdu film magazines displayed a much more direct and transparent understanding of their audience as consumers, and at the same time, films tended to be presented explicitly as commodities. This can, for example, be seen in a recurring ad template for Calcutta’s Krishna Film Company in The Film Review that extols the good quality of its film products to potential exhibitors, while also playfully evoking the mazah (pleasure) of a crowd mobbing the theater’s ticket window (Fig. 7). By evoking filmgoers as unruly masses, the ad also encapsulates thematic tensions in film-culture discourse, examined in the following section, which show that even as film magazines leaned into cinema as a trade and business, the way they imagined cinema-viewing publics was laden with both excitement and anxiety about public cultures derived from the bazaar, street, and quotidian life.

Gender, Urdu, and the Film Bazaar

In Filmistan’s 1932 afsana (story) issue, a regular opinion column by an anonymous critic vehemently derides filmmakers for including unnecessary bazaari (commercial songs) to ensure their films’ success.³ The column exemplifies how textual discourses on twentieth-century Urdu film magazines played into and perpetuated respectability politics by deriding the corrupting influences of the bazaar. Their visual culture, however, simultaneously undercuts this moralizing by magnifying the bazaar-associated sensibilities that had been absorbed into films. Relying heavily on cinema’s visuality, film magazines made generous use of glossy film stills, which is most evident in the great emphasis the publications put on being ba-tasveer (illustrated), that is, on including image supplements that usually carried half-tone photo blocks. The Film Review’s aforementioned full-page advertisement for its distribution agencies leads with the availability of half-tone photographic stills, establishing the inclusion of pictures as a key attraction and selling point for the magazine itself (see Fig. 5).

The most notable element of Urdu film magazines’ visual culture are the subjects of these images: female performers (dancers, singers, actresses, etc.) who are featured variously, in staged studio photographs, film stills, and illustrations (Figs. 8–10).

The illustrated cover of a 1931 issue of Filmistan’s special afsana issue (Fig. 8) depicts a provocatively dressed and sensuously postured woman as the literal conduit between literature and cinema. This imagery captures the sharply classed and gendered anxieties that films triggered by steadily blurring the boundaries between literary/“high” and popular/“low” cultures. The image underlines the contradictory impulses of Urdu print culture through the 1930s, when ideas of competitive nationalisms and social reformism awkwardly jostled for space with depictions of vanity, indulgence, leisure, and consumerism.

The ubiquity of feminine imagery attests that films made women, who in general had thus far been reduced to passive subjects of reformist and nationalist agendas, increasingly and dramatically more visible in the public sphere. Since the actresses of early Hindustani films usually came from courtesan lineages, they were socially marginalized, but cinema enabled them to craft something akin to professional identities.

O one from this humble earth, where is your destination?

Do you come from within four walls (home) or the market?

If you are honorable, then you are a beacon of beauty without question;

and if not, then get off the stage, for you are simply without shame.⁴

Apart from invoking the gendered private-versus-public divide that is typical of nineteenth century nationalist-reformist discourse, the poem specifically shows that the bazaar emerged as the lynchpin for anxieties about cinema in general and performing women in particular.

Conversely, conservative attitudes were also satirized in Urdu film magazines that gave voice to a range of opinions and commentary, including expressions of the new indulgences and pleasures that films afforded. A frequent satirical column titled “Gulabi Urdu” (Garbled Urdu) in The Film Review in 1931, penned anonymously under the moniker “Mulla Rumuzi,” plays with notions of adab (refinement) and sharafat (respectability) and mocks elite perceptions of cinema as the bawdy circus for the gawars (uncultured masses).⁵

Another article by an anonymous author in Filmistan expresses the exciting new modes of sociality that films were shaping through the trope of tafrih (enjoyment).⁶ Adopting the perspective of a young male flaneur enjoying the big city, the article describes the distinct pleasure of watching thrilling adventures in a cinema as part of a crowd. Cinema here is characterized as a form of tafrih for a rangeen pasand tabqa, or a colorful (leisure-loving) social group, a mildly derisive descriptor identifying the typical cinemagoer as a city slicker with money to burn. In addition to being a specifically urbane pastime, cinema-going is also cast by the article as a gendered activity that imagines the cinema theater as a space occupied exclusively by men.  

At the same time, the vision of film viewing as an avenue for male homosociality conjures tropes of early modern literary traditions like rekhti poetry, particularly the shahr ashob genre, which describes a young urbane dandy exploring the city and romancing young male paramours. Immersed in sensuality, rekhti poems express all manner of bodily and sensory pleasure with witty abandon, and they explicitly evoke homosexual desire.⁷ Such transgressive themes were derided by male literary elites whose views channeled Victorian ideals on gender and sexuality and sealed off Urdu literary genres into separate silos of “masculine” and “feminine.”⁸ Despite the mapping of these notions and attitudes onto early Hindustani cinema, cinema and film culture went a long way in allowing Urdu to transgress and transcend text-centered discourses in the twentieth century.

These examples show that Urdu film magazines, in both form and content, offer considerable insights that deepen the history of both film and Urdu in late colonial India and also highlight how they intersect and influence each other. The tensions in textual-visual discourses in Urdu film magazines reveal that cinema’s embrace of the bazaar in particular—as a space of social, cultural, linguistic, and gendered mixing and as a site of tafrih—animated uses, arenas, and publics for Urdu beyond the literary at a time when dominant discourses advocated for excluding entire vocabularies, registers, and indeed non-elite social worlds from the Urdu public. Early Urdu film magazines and other remnants of popular-culture ephemera therefore deserve to be analyzed more closely. Rather than simply folding its postcolonial history into totalizing narratives of national language politics and institutional erasures, Urdu film magazines have the potential to throw open discussions on the alternate lives of Urdu in twentieth-century India.

The post Imagining <em>Filmistan</em>: Urdu Magazines and the <em> Film Bazaar</em> in Twentieth-Century India appeared first on post.

This edition of post Presents was part of the 2023 C-MAP Seminar: Transversal Orientations III. The 2023 C-MAP Seminar was organized by Nancy Dantas, C-MAP Africa Fellow, Inga Lāce, C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe Fellow, Wong Binghao,
C-MAP Asia Fellow, Julián Sánchez González, Cisneros Institute Research Fellow,
Elena Pérez-Ardá López, C-MAP Coordinator, and Rattanamol Singh Johal, Assistant Director, International Program, with support from Marta Dansie, Department Coordinator, International Program, and Jay Levenson, Director, International Program. It was presented in collaboration with the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America at MoMA.

The post post Presents: Unsettled Dust—Archives, Epistemologies, Images appeared first on post.

The post In Memoriam: Kavita Singh (1964-2023) appeared first on post.

I remember vividly meeting the late Balkrishna V. Doshi for the first time at his Sangath Studio in the Indian city of Ahmedabad in January 2017. Doshi was an incredibly kind, modest, and unassuming human being, but there was something that emanated from him that people may describe as an aura — the feeling and the comfort of being in the presence of someone enlightened. It is not surprising that the great Indian architect, who passed away after a long and fulfilled life on 24 January 2023, was revered in his home country as a guru — someone who had not only made a lasting impact on the built environment, but whose wisdom also served as spiritual guidance.

Born into a family of furniture makers, Doshi’s prolific career was crowned in 2018 by the Pritzker Architecture Prize, widely considered the most prestigious accolade in the field of architecture. Long before that, he had received his initiation into modernist architecture in the Paris atelier of Le Corbusier, where he worked for several years on the Swiss-French architect’s projects in India, including the Chandigarh Capitol Complex. Having returned from France to the Subcontinent in 1954, he supervised the construction of Le Corbusier’s buildings in Ahmedabad (including the Mill Owners’ Association Building), the same city where he soon after established his own architectural practice under the name Vastu Shilpa, which translates as “environmental design.” In the decades to come, Doshi single-handedly designed a number of extraordinary buildings in his home city, as well as across India, several of which we had the fortune to present to our MoMA audiences in the 2022 exhibition, The Project of Independence. Among his many significant works are the Institute of Indology, Premabhai Hall (both in Ahmedabad), and the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, whose complex interweaving of interior streets and squares with shaded pergolas was not only informed by the precedent of great historical cities such as Fatehpur Sikri and Jaisalmer, but also speaks to Doshi’s championing of environmental concerns, making him a pioneer for contemporary thinking.

While in Ahmedabad, Doshi exerted his influence in bringing the prominent American architect Louis I. Kahn to the city in order to design the Indian Institute of Management, substantial parts of which remain under acute threat of demolition today. In 1962, Doshi founded and designed the Center for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT), which is located nearby and widely considered one of the leading schools of architecture worldwide. Besides helping conceive and realize the architecture of pivotal institutions in his newly independent nation, Doshi was attentive to social issues and built highly innovative low-cost housing projects for the poorest citizens that provided basic amenities and flexible units. Consistently, Doshi adhered to the tenets of modernism while searching for an architectural language and material expression that was at the same time firmly rooted in his country’s history and tradition, indicative of the optimism and postcolonial mindset that characterized his generation.

Martino Stierli

Cover image credit: Randhir Singh, Balkrishna Doshi, Mahendra Raj. Premabhai Hall, Ahmedabad, India. 2020-21. Digital photograph. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Committee on Architecture and Design Funds.

The post In Memoriam: Balkrishna V. Doshi (1927- 2023) appeared first on post.

One day in the late sixties, I was on the phone with Rahsaan and mentioned to him that just that day I had bought a house. He responded by asking, “Does your house have lions?” I said, “What?” He said, “Lions. You know, like in front of a museum or the post office. You know, concrete lions. My house has lions. Get a house with lions.”

—Joel Dorn, May 1993, Rahsaan Roland Kirk Anthology

Sonia Sanchez’s book of poems for the many sisters who lost their brothers to HIV/AIDS, Does Your House Have Lions?,¹ begins with this excerpt, first published in the liner notes of The Rahsaan Kirk Anthology, which shares this title.² Here, Sanchez blurs friendship and family, tosses humor into grief, and troubles history with memory. Titling her book after a found quote—at once a theft and a gift—Sanchez offers a practice of being without property and of naming without debt. A discipline to abolish in the ordinary.

Our film’s title, Does Your House Have Lions, leaves out the question mark. It is a statement. Speculative nonetheless, grammatically incorrect, no longer a question but still an ask: a house with lions. Lions, outside the house but also part of it, become aesthetic and material relation, not just a mediation of the world. They are outside for the world to encounter before someone comes knocking or (terrifyingly) barging in, but they are also interior to the friendship between Joel and Rahsaan. Both an announcement and inside humor. Gall. Audacity. Opulence. To ask that a house have lions is a bizarre request that has no real value—after all, these lions, whether of concrete or flesh, will not protect us from the police—and it is this stepping beside the imposition of value on life, what Katherine McKittrick might call “the mathematics of the unliving,”³ that we wanted to share in. We do not, thus, want to make much of these lions. They are only another quiet instance of the sweet, the small, and the extraordinary that friendship asks, dreams, and makes possible.

Does Your House Have Lions emerges from an ongoing video archive we have been building since our first meeting in 2015. This living archive documents our time together through filmed conversations, experiments in fiction and character-building, and off-the-cuff documentary footage, often involving people in vqueeram’s life. The scenes selected for our film foreground the friendship between vqueeram and Dhiren Borisa, who lived together from 2016 to 2021, and the friendship and working collaboration between vqueeram and Vishal. Since meeting vqueeram, Vishal has visited India regularly. His ancestors were coerced to leave eastern India in the 1800s to become indentured laborers on sugar plantations in Guyana. Both of his parents were born in Guyana, took independent routes across the globe, met in the UK, and eventually settled in Canada. These multiple registers of removal produce a kind of world-wandering and search for belonging that takes him back to India time and time again, though he doesn’t have any known relatives there.

Queer friendship offers both a door and an inside, a passage making an interior. Vishal’s travels to India, made possible by funding received for our ongoing projects, has fostered this intimacy and allowed us to think and make together, to speculate for hours and days when we are together, to film, to experiment, and to imagine what might be possible when our worlds begin to merge. Belonging isn’t an easy, obvious, and effortless thing. Queer friendship allows a wayward relation, a kind of passage that can feel like belonging. Lions is made in this passage—neither inside nor outside, somewhere in between, between friends but exposed to the world, watching the world watch them. Friendship is the method, and its way of looking is diasporic. Both labor at history and trouble belonging. This play of proximity and distance doesn’t leave one rootless. Fragility only tempers the firmness of one’s grounds but doesn’t disappear them. Like Dhiren says so eloquently in the film about their migration to Delhi from the constraints of a village near Mount Abu, where they are from, it engenders another register of loneliness. We wonder what it means to place these two diasporas together—one across centuries and oceans, the other, generational and within the same nation. What do their lonelinesses imagine together, when sitting beside each other? Can queer/friendship make two and more incommensurate archives sing together in the present?

The queer passage is as fraught as any other. It is full of claims, lapses, distances, difficult weather, and the unspoken. When the title of the document resonated with us, we wished for something for ourselves. By suggesting that queer objects protect the door, standing guard over who comes and goes from our interior spaces, Rahsaan and Joel were also insisting to not make much of things. More desire than function, Lions asks that we resist and trouble the political that imbues minoritarian tendencies like queer friendship and sex with revolutionary hope. They could be otherworldly, dreamy, full of possibility, but they cannot undo how sometimes, the world comes barging in unannounced. Queer friendships may be unhinged from the law—without protection and claim—but they cannot separate themselves from, let alone repair the stresses of, how lives must be lived in order to be survived—that we must go to work, step outside these shadowy cool corners we make in the world, and meet people who will not want this for us—and of course the many who threaten and want to see us destroyed. Even that which we rely on to protect us can poison our relation. Houses can feel stifling too. Money, which engineers Vishal’s capacity to travel to India and the enterprise of this film, when it became due wages, transformed into a menacing specter. It facilitated our intimacy but came to distort the claims we were making—“Is this work or friendship?” haunting every ask with the weight of a transaction—“Do I owe him something now?” warping joyous moments with the feeling of debt and worrying intentions with meaning. Gestures that sought to overcome and transform the divides of our worlds—our different social, sexual, and economic positions—sometimes ended up emphasizing the irreducible differences between us. The more we labored in friendship, the more it couldn’t do to change who we were and where we came from to each other.

Lions are often mobilized as metaphors of bravery, but as Akhil Katyal, poet and friend, reminded us, there is a “lie” in “Lions.” These lies are things we do to survive; they are how we grapple with how histories distort desires, how feelings are stopped from becoming words when we are asked a question we’d rather not answer. The camera interrupts this by surreptitiously lingering where the human eye is awkward. Sometimes it even generates distance between two bodies sitting next to each other so that one can say to an imagined audience what cannot be said to our friend who seems to be eavesdropping on a private truth, and in still other times, the camera makes possible the truest of our fictions—say instead of sitting in anxiety in a jacuzzi in a gay bathhouse, Dhiren achieves purple transcendence with their sexy dance in a swimming pool. Sometimes it is queer friendship that offers respite to these dispersed souls; sometimes it is the camera that puts these unlikely people in that frame and relation, creating fictions in its encounter with opacity, letting them lie next to each other. It is in the ways that we are not wholly given or beholden to each other that our film becomes an invitation to the viewer to make something. Opacity is the passage through which a viewer, also estranged from us, can make something of our collective dispersal—how we do and don’t belong with each other, can make an elsewhere possible. 

Sanchez’s is no easy text to borrow a title from. The book is dedicated to the sisters who lost brothers but not the brothers themselves. (In the movie too, the devastation of incarceration is witnessed obliquely through Dhiren and vqueeram than their housemates who were incarcerated). Sanchez’s book is generous and forgiving, and in that spirit of honesty, it refuses restraint on some of the damning and cruel ways that brothers with HIV/AIDS were seen—less as having a disease but as vectors of it, a compromise deeper than just immunity. Histories are difficult, borrowing is always a little like theft, and ancestors make mistakes. There are no road maps. Only passages we must traverse. Our film launched on April 1, 2021, during a particularly fraught moment in the current pandemic, especially in Delhi. The world is in a great hurry to move on from grief. Yet the stubbornness of grief can refuse the recalcitrance of the normal. We know grief is interior, personal, singular, difficult to share, to trust people in. What can we make when we align our different, incommensurate losses? We pause here. Can not letting (grief) pass also be a passage?

The post Friendship is a method appeared first on post.

Dayanita Singh’s art uses photography to reflect and expand on the ways in which we relate to photographic images. Her recent work, drawn from her extensive photographic oeuvre, is a series of mobile museums that allow her images to be endlessly edited, sequenced, archived and displayed. Stemming from Singh’s interest in the archive, the museums present her photographs as interconnected bodies of work that are replete with both poetic and narrative possibilities.

Sean Anderson is Associate Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art. A Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, he has practiced as an architect and taught in Afghanistan, Australia, India, Italy, Morocco, Sri Lanka, and the U.A.E. At MoMA, he has most recently co-organized with Mabel O. Wilson Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America, the first exhibition at MoMA to focus on the work of African American and African Diasporic architects.

This conversation took place virtually on June 29, 2021.

The post post Presents: Photographer Dayanita Singh in Conversation with Curator Sean Anderson appeared first on post.

The Indian artist Mrinalini Mukherjee (1949–2015) said that she wanted her sculptures to conjure “the feeling of awe [you get] when you walk into the small sanctum of a temple and look up to be held by an iconic presence.”¹ This is exactly the sensation one feels when viewing Yakshi (1984), a hulking, sinewy, dresslike form rendered in a Bengali natural rope fiber called sunn or sann, which, similar to hemp, slumps and droops, exaggerating the weightiness of its plaited material (fig. 1). The “organic unfolding”² of these pliable planes alludes to the painstaking process by which the work was created, to the hours of meticulous handwork. Its colors—a muted black and an inky blue-purple—defamiliarize the artist’s material of choice, foregoing the wheat–sheaf golden brown of traditional rope fiber, in favor of the rich hues possible with synthetic dye baths. 

Mukherjee’s handwrought, labor-intensive approach stands out in contrast to the dominant narratives of Western art history—in part because her sculpture, like that of so many other artists working in fiber in Europe and the United States in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, could easily have been labeled “fiber art” or “craft,” a designation that critically disenfranchised a generation of skilled artists that included Magdalena Abakanowicz, Sheila Hicks, and Lenore Tawney. Given Mukherjee’s choice of material, she, too, might have been pigeonholed as a “fiber artist” or “craftsperson,” and not given the appropriate critical appraisal befitting a sculptor of her caliber. Investigating her sources of inspiration, her life in post-Partition India, her approach to materials and processes, and her relative isolation from the Western art world clarifies why her position in the “ambit of contemporary sculpture”³ today aligns more closely with that of other sculptors working in fiber mediums, like Robert Morris and Eva Hesse, who have long enjoyed critical recognition.

Yakshi is one in a series of monumental “deities” (fig. 2) that, from the 1980s, address Mukherjee’s interest in the realm of the natural and the layered iconographic histories of her native India. The series calls upon the Indian performance traditions of Theyyam and Kathakali dances, which employ masks and theatrical costumes, but they also are highly personalized manifestations of the artist’s inner life (fig. 3). As Mukherjee told curator Chrissie Iles in an interview published in the catalogue accompanying a 1994 exhibition at Oxford University: “My anthropomorphic deities owe much to the equation with awe and reverence that a traditional invocatory deity inspires in her spectator. But my mythology is de-conventionalized and personal, as indeed are my methods and materials.”⁴

Her own “personal mythology,” as she told Iles, “was not rooted in any specific culture,”⁵ but rather in her experiences growing up in Santiniketan, a utopian community in West Bengal and home to Kala Bhavan, an alternative art school established by the poet Rabindranath Tagore in 1919. It was there at the school that her parents, Benode Behari Mukherjee and Leela Mansukhani, met as students and married in 1944. Her father spent much of his life working and teaching at Kala Bhavan, becoming one of the most influential Indian artists of the twentieth century. “Born out of the need to rehabilitate traditional Indian culture after the demoralizing impact of British rule,” the school broke with formalized teaching conventions in favor of an unstructured curriculum that encouraged experimental thinking.⁶ Central to the school’s alternative approach was Tagore’s abiding interest in the natural world, including mandated daily walks through the surrounding environment, and his belief in the power of art and craft to promote community vitality. Festivals, music, mural painting, and traditional crafts were all central to the school’s vibrant energy.⁷

Mukherjee, whose young life was divided between Santiniketan and Dehradun’s Welham Girls’ School in the Himalayan foothills, had initially planned to become a doctor; but in 1965, at the age of sixteen, she decided to enroll in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda (now Vadodara), where her father’s student K. G. Subramanyan carried on the philosophies of Santiniketan. “Our art tradition has few parallels in the world for its depth, breadth, antiquity, diversity, and unbroken hierarchy; and even today certain of its modes are active at the folk art and craft level,” Subramanyan wrote in an essay based on a 1971 lecture titled “The Image of the Indian Art Tradition.”⁸ Calling on fellow artists to take up working in unconventional methods using unfamiliar mediums, he pursued a distinctly postcolonial vision for modern Indian art, one that drew upon the past as a call to action for artists of the future.

Her upbringing and Subramanyan’s teachings led Mukherjee to discover fiber. At first, she played with a handcrafted weaving armature and then she perfected her work in hand-knotting with a series of wall-based sculptures. Her embrace of the medium was not unlike that of other Indian artists of her generation, including Monika Correa,⁹ who similarly turned to pliable materials such as jute, sisal, and wool to render woven forms (fig. 4). But unlike Correa, who had trained in the United States under the Finnish-American weaver Marianne Strengell, Mukherjee never sought out the loom. Instead, she mined the possibilities of macramé, an ancient Islamic weaving technique involving hand-knotting, to create her monumental pieces. Her intuitive and unstructured practice was guided solely by an idea, never by a sketch or maquette.¹⁰ As she gained experience with her material, she found that the rope could be twisted and turned in a variety of ways, and that it could mimic the sinuous curves of the human body. “My work is physical—my body, my materials, the way of life, the environment, all work together,” she said in a 1993 interview.¹¹

Mukherjee’s investigations into the sculptural potential of fiber, which began with a series of commissions and gallery exhibitions in New Delhi and Bombay in the early 1970s, dovetailed with the emergent Western interest in so-called fiber art in the same period. Artists such as Abakanowicz, Hicks, Tawney, Francoise Grossen, and Aurèlia Muñoz were working in similar formats and materials, experimenting with taking weaving off the wall—and playing with the sculptural properties of a medium long denigrated in the West as overtly feminine and domestic (fig. 5). These artists exhibited internationally, participating in the Lausanne Tapestry Biennials, perhaps the single most important event dedicated to the medium in Europe and the Americas, and railed against the hegemony of the “fine arts”—of painting, drawing, and sculptures in stone and metal.¹²

Critically speaking, the work of fiber artists like Grossen, Muñoz, and Tawney, whose rope-based macramé sculptures have much in common with pieces by Mukherjee, never found the support achieved by the likes of Post-Minimalist process-art sculptors like Alan Saret, Robert Morris, and Eva Hesse, who also worked with fiber and textile mediums (figs. 6–8). Elissa Auther attempts to explain this tension in in her book String, Felt, Thread, which considers the fraught distinctions drawn between the fiber artists and the Post-Minimalists: “Like so-called fiber artists of the same period, artists such as Saret, Hesse, Morris, and their cohorts made visible the boundary separating art and non-art by recasting fiber, a material socially valued for its utilitarian potential, as useless. . . . Furthermore, the use of fiber on the part of these artists sensitively recorded their physical interaction with material, redirecting the focus of authentic aesthetic experience from the visual or cerebral realm to that of the haptic, bodily realm.”¹³ As Auther points out, in both realms of practice, the material guided the result, with the process-centered approach itself becoming the work. Despite attempts to reposition the work of the fiber artists in the realm of sculptural fine art practice, even today, the separation between art (Post-Minimalism) and craft (Fiber Art) remains firmly entrenched.

Mukherjee’s position as a sculptor, first and foremost, was protected in part by the relative isolation she experienced globally, despite shared approaches with the international fiber art movement and with process-art sculpture. She did not receive a major exhibition abroad until 1994, when the Modern Art Oxford (then the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford) hosted an exhibition of her work entitled Mrinalini Mukherjee Sculpture (fig. 9), calling her “one of the most significant younger sculptors working in India,” who produces “craft-like organic sculpture on a human-scale.”¹⁴ Mukherjee reflected on Western obsessions with the dichotomy between art and craft in her interview with Iles for that show: “In India the arts have always existed alongside each other, at different levels of sophistication. India has an enormous wealth of craft, and I believe in an integrated approach to art and craft. . . . It is through my relationship to my material that I would like to reach out and align myself with the values that exist within the ambit of contemporary sculpture.”¹⁵ In the same interview, Iles attempted to position Mukherjee’s work in relation to Robert Morris’s felt sculptures, to which Mukherjee responded: “Though one may find similarities with process-oriented art, I see sculpture as a kind of organic unfolding—hence my choice of materials.”¹⁶

Later in her career, disenchanted with the rapidly deteriorating quality of commercially available rope, Mukherjee turned to ceramic and bronze. But she will be most remembered for her work in fiber, and for giving life to a material “usually meant to be a carrier, rather than a medium of sculpture.”¹⁷ Mukherjee’s work “radicalize[d] the meaning of magic by opting for flexible fibre instead of stone or wood—to turn it into a source of strength.” Yakshi exemplifies her ability to draw on the realm of the supernatural to create works that transcend the boundaries that constrained the work of so many other artists working in the West.

The post Mrinalini Mukherjee: Textile to Sculpture appeared first on post.