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FREEDOM: SIXTY YEARS AFTER INDIAN INDEPENDENCE Art & Heritage Foundation, Rs 2,500
This book is, and is not, an exhibition catalogue. That is what makes it a wonderful book to look at, read and reflect on. But it also makes one wonder. Are there unbridgeable distances, still, between writing historically about a nation, and writing historically about its art? Freedom excels in the former, but strangely refrains from the latter. And what does that “its” mean in the phrase, “its art”? How do the 60 works of art, so lavishly reproduced in this book, belong to India? In what sense are these creations, and their creators, ‘Indian’?
Top right is Dayanita Singh’s photograph, taken in 2000, of the Mahatma’s room in Anand Bhavan, Allahabad. Her artist profile in this book says that she lives and works “from” — and not “in” — Delhi. This is significant. Is the nation, then, a place as much of belonging as of departure? This would, in turn, complicate the implications of “freedom” and “independence”, and of the historical event these words refer to. Freedom — the book as well as the accompanying exhibition at CIMA gallery — commemorates 60 years of India’s independence. Most of the essays in the book are about India’s journey towards different kinds of openness in these six decades — the ‘freeing’ of the media, the market and the middle class, or of something as specific as public access to information.
So, in their different ways, all these essays are about ways in which globalization defines as well as dissolves the boundaries of the nation. Does art become, then, the sphere in which identities can be forged most ‘freely’ and ‘independently’, so as to leave nationhood far behind for a discovery of, and by, the world? Sumitro Basak, one the youngest artists in this book/show, calls his immense triptych Freedom (bottom). It is both a violent birth and a celebration of colour and form that is unabashedly Matissean. It affirms a creativity that makes its own maps of influence or inspiration — therefore, of modernity. From the earliest, most exquisite “Art of Bengal” (Abanindranath, Nandalal, Jamini Roy and Binode Behari) to Baiju Parthan’s futurist hawkmoth and Chintan Upadhyay’s designer babies, this is the story that the show tells and the book visually interweaves with its essays and poem. As Ashok V. Desai puts it in his elegant history of India’s struggle with poverty and starvation, this is a “turbulent, unruly, exciting course”.
Mythographer, poet, journalist, historian, social scientist, activist — each writer brings his or her own interests and style of expression to create a way into this story. André Béteille provides an anatomy of the Indian middle class, and its “style of life”, as the most “polymorphous” in the world. The pristine impersonality of this sociology contrasts with the engaged vividness of Aruna Roy’s “chronicle” of the people’s campaign for the right to information. The people here are the members of Rajasthan’s Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, and what is born of their extraordinary struggle is the present Right to Information Act, “a gift from ordinary people to the country”. Tapan Raychaudhuri’s critique of “Hindu fascism” is another chapter in his sustained exploration of a particular form of darkness in India’s history of the present, what he has calls elsewhere the “Shadows of the Swastika”. Vir Sanghvi offers a delightfully astute account of Bollywood and the opening out of Indian popular culture. Rudrangshu Mukherjee’s succinct history of journalism in modern India traces its origins to the coming of the British, but reads into the undeniably “dumbed down”, yet diverse, openness of the fourth estate “a story of freedom”.
Yet what one misses is a general introduction that would thread these pieces together, and also articulate a little more fully than the foreword does the vision behind this book. Roberto Calasso’s reading of the ancient Indian treatises on sacrifice, the Shatapatha Brahmana, is a deeply erudite way into the “savage woods” of Vedic orthodoxy. But it becomes an essay on the history of French Indological exegesis, instead of being the point of origin for the analysis of Indian modernity that follows. Sunil Gangopadhyay’s poem is the dark, and necessary, twin of the “strong, vibrant and dynamic” India-at-60 that the strikingly designed dust-jacket heralds.
One misses, too, a chapter on art, that would suggest ways in which these various stories of the 60 years may, or may not, be connected to the story of art. What, for example, is the story of the nation’s stakes in art, in writing itself into the history of “its art”? It is not enough, for instance, to interlace the story of how mazdoors and kisans have made governments more accountable, with reproductions of tribal art. Bhuribai’s Fish, Tortoise and Rhythm (top left) demands a kind of art-writing (and history-writing) that will have to do considerably more than comparing her to Picasso. One hopes that the “second volume in the near future”, mentioned in the foreword, would embark on precisely such an art-historical adventure. It should also have fewer typos, less interpretative and more accurate curatorial information, and mention names of translators in the text, rather than putting them on beautifully designed bookmarks.
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