All The Shared Experiences Of The Lived World II
[This is the second and concluding part of the conversation between R. Sivakumar and Parvez Kabir on art practice and its history.] ————————————————————- 1. Shiv da, in our last conversation you have told us about the role Santiniketan has in defining your works and thought. Let’s begin this conversation with the opposite idea; on the role your 1997 NGMA curation, ‘Santiniketan: Making of a Contextual Modernism’ had in defining the place of Santiniketan in the history of Modern Indian Art. If I am not wrong, you are the first Art Historian to present Santiniketan as a movement rather than a school. What are the reasons for such a reading? R.S.K.: I had been looking at and studying the work of the Santiniketan masters and thinking about their approach to art since the early 80s. The more I looked at them the more it became clear that the practice of subsuming them under the Bengal School was misleading. This happened because early writers were guided by genealogies of apprenticeship rather than their styles, worldviews, and perspectives on art practice. Although this became clear to me early in my study, I did not put my thoughts together until I was asked to curate an exhibition for the NGMA. It was one of the several exhibitions they had planned to mark the 50th year of independence and one of the very few that actually was realised. It gave me a chance to put my reading to test by presenting it in the form of a curated exhibition rather than as an inadequately illustrated text. Luckily many of the interested viewers responded to it positively and many thought that they had overlooked Santiniketan’s contribution not having seen it in any strength. But it would not be entirely true to say I was the first to present Santiniketan practice as a separate art movement rather than as a sub-group within the Bengal School. Benodebehari and K.G.Subramanyan had at least implicitly argued for such a disjunction. May be I was the first to argue for such a disjunction more directly. Putting the works of the major Santiniketan artists together and presenting their work in fairly large numbers also should have helped the viewers in gaining a clear and comprehensive picture of their achievements and differences. More significantly, having put to rest the 40s and 50s attempt to dock onto internationalist modernism, it perhaps simply came at a time the Indian art scene was more prepared to respond to the kind of art the Santiniketan artists had produced and its underlying perceptions. I am not sure, however, if everyone noticed the distinction I drew between Santiniketan as an art movement and Santiniketan as a school very clearly. There was both a Santiketan movement and a Santiniketan school, but these are two different things. The movement was shaped by the practices of the masters, chiefly Nandalal, Benodebehari, Ramkinkar and Rabindranath. Their art practices were interrelated but did not stylistically converge. They were linked more by concerns and as participants in a discourse to which each contributed in a different manner. They themselves saw this very clearly but many who wrote about them did not. They either plumped for Nandalal and Benodebehari, or for Ramkinkar and Rabindranath; one pair representing a traditionalist position and the other a modernist position. I am not suggesting that there are no differences between them but that they saw themselves as co-authors of an art scene being essayed around shared issues, complementing each other and expanding their concerns and reach rather than at war with each other. Nandalal acknowledged Benodebehari and Ramkinkar as artists of the first order among his students; they in turn saw him as a seminal mentor. Rabindranath too valued Nandalal’s evaluation of his work and declared when his paintings were well received in the West that the art of Santiniketan was getting recognized. Their regard for each other should not be mistaken as mere courtesy shown towards each other as denizens of a civilized community. They were at least as clever as those of us who see them as divided into conservatives and moderns and were not blind to the differences between them. They saw each other as necessary fellow travellers who collectively enriched the scene, and believed that a tradition is built upon differential evolution rather on unmitigated sameness. A movement always allows more latitude than a school. The Renaissance allowed Giotto and Cimabue, Masaccio and Fra Angelico, Botticelli and Piero della Francesca, and Leonardo, and Michelangelo and Raphael and Titian to co-exist and define a trajectory guided by a community of shared but variable values. A school on the other hand lasts only as long as similarities count more than shifts. One is founded on ideas and is held together by evolution; the other by the specificities of studio practices and beaks down as soon as these change. Thus the schools of Perugino and early Raphael, Giorgione and early Titian lasted only as long as Raphael and Titian upheld the studio practices of their masters. A movement is based on engagement with ideas or issues; a school is based on the perpetuation of a style. Santiniketan like the Renaissance was a movement with schools within it. But unlike in the Renaissance the issues that exercised them were not primarily aesthetic or limited to the issue of art language though these were very important. They were more exercised about the relation of art to cultural antecedents and of art to its time and place, to its historical and ecological location. While in the Renaissance the artists subsumed their other interests to issues of language in Santiniketan it was the opposite. This perhaps had much to do with the different historical contexts within which they evolved. Nandalal was the leader of both a movement and a school. And how the two interweaved is something that waits to be studied. And in that sense the larger history of Santiniketan remains to be
All The Shared Experiences Of The Lived World
[R. Siva Kumar is one of the most revered living historians of Modern Indian Art. A singular authority on the Santiniketan School and its tradition, Siva Kumar is also widely known for his works on living masters like K.G.Subramanyan, A.Ramachandran, K.S. Radhakrishnan and Jogen Chowdhury. Parvez Kabir was one of the finest young art historians of contemporary India and a former student of Siva Kumar–here, in conversation with him on his life and work. This is one of Kabir’s rare and unpublished conversations before he breathed his last this October in rather tragic circumstances. HUG publishes the first of the two-part interview.] ——————————————— Parvez Kabir: Shiv da, it is indeed an honour to be able to interview you on your works. Please allow me to begin with the commonest of all questions. When and how did you decide to do Art History? R. Siva kumar: I decided to do art history only at the end of my second year at Kala Bhavana, which is to say at the end of the foundation course when we were required to choose an area of specialization. Like others in my class I had come to Santiniketan with the idea of studying painting and not art history. I was drawn to painting while I was at school and had wanted to become a professional painter. So it was more by accident or force of circumstance rather than design that I opted for art history when the time came to choose. And how did this happen? During my first two years at Kala Bhavana I did enough to be seen as a stubborn and intractable student by most of my teachers. Paradoxically this happened because I was bent on charting an individual course and not because of any attempt to offend or revolt per se. But by the end of the second year my reputation was such I feared losing my seat. Having joined the art college against the advice of my mother who believed I was inviting starvation upon my self by seeking to be an artist I was eager to keep my seat in Kala Bhavana. And I thought the only way to ensure this was to take shelter under art history since my teachers there were generally more accommodative and convinced about the seriousness of my interest in art. However, my efforts to become an artist did not end with this. I actually tried to do my masters in painting at Baroda. But this did not materialize. Prof, Ratan Parimoo who was the dean then was more interested in seeing me join the art history department. My itch to paint subsided gradually only after I became a fulltime teacher of art history. P.K: You studied in Santiniketan in the late seventies. How was the academic situation back in those days? We know that Kala Bhavana always valued the study of Art History, but it rather conceived the subject as a supplement to the practice of Art. Was the department specializedenough in your student days? What kind of a scholarship did it initiate you in? R.S.K: Yes, that is right it began that way. Rabindranath wanted artists to be informed so that they would not be merely skilled professionals but artists capable of making informed choices as creative men with theoretical moorings. So while art was discussed and an art historian like Stella Kramrisch was invited to deliver lectures, art history did not become a separate discipline until much later. Even when we were students it was more or less the same, although there was a department by then and the teaching of art history was more formalized than in the early days. In my year there were two students, the other being Anil Singh my classmate from Manipur who did not, however, enroll for masters. And before us the Department had only three students. So the department was still very loosely organized and was still in a very nascent state. It was not specialized by present day standards, but this had its advantages. It didn’t initiate us into anything much except the very basics, and we were not taken on a high-powered conducted tour through art historical scholarship but left free to ramble and explore. P.K: Was it more beneficial as a matter of irony? It is sometimes said that certain students are better helped if they are left on their own. R.S.K: I at least benefited from the situation; because it gave me time to access Visva Bharati’s many libraries and other informal sources of knowledge it offered. Santiniketan was then home to several scholars and its informal milieu allowed one to take benefit of their presence. There were scholars like Sisir Kumar Ghose, Asin Das Gupta, Kalidas Bhattacharya and Anjan Shukla on the campus and it was not difficult to rub shoulders with them if one wanted. Visiting scholars also came from outside, either to participate in symposiums or to deliver lectures. That among them were Susanne Langer, Max Black, Richard Wollheim, P.F. Strawson, J. P. Mohanty, Amartya Sen, A.L. Basham, Shambu Mitra, Richard Gombrich, K.N. Raj, D.C. Sirkar, Kamleshwar Bhattacharya, Sarasai Kumar Saraswati, and Richard Soloman etc. would give you a sense of the range and quality of the intellectual stimulus that was on offer. May be this was small compared the fare on offer in large urban centres today but being a small community the interaction was often more intimate. And combined with the slow pace of life it gave one time to ruminate and internalize. Interactions with a few fellow students from other departments and young staff members of the university supplemented and amplified these exposures further. My teachers were thankfully liberal and as I mentioned they allowed us a fair amount of intellectual freewheeling. This allowed me to take some interest in related fields like literature, philosophy and psychology. P.K: It is quite curious to see a certain similarity between your scholarship and Kala Bhavana’s original pedagogic aims. We know that Kala Bhavana always pursued an all-round
The Loss of Wor(l)ds: Theatre in Manipur and Heisnam Kanhailal
Trina Nileena Banerjee “The child, I looked at the new born child crying. I noticed that the whole body of the child cries. But actors only use a certain resonator. Actors do this because we are socially and culturally conditioned. […] what we need is the creation of a new body culture…” —-Heisnam Kanhailal, interview with Naveen Kishore and Biren Das Sharma for the Seagull Theatre Quarterly in January, 1996.[i] —————— During a recent student production staged with much fanfare in a reputed auditorium in New Delhi, the audience (consisting mostly of young, elite college students) broke into peals of laughter every time the multilingual actors spoke in Tamil or Meithei, but watched courteously enough when English or Hindi was spoken on stage. Watching the audience as much as I was watching the actors on stage, I begun thinking of what, if anything, had changed from the time when, many decades ago, in 1963, Kanhailal Heisnam had been expelled from the National School of Drama on for having taken leave without official permission. The real problem, according to scholars like Rustom Bharucha (who studies Kanhailal’s theatre in exhaustive detail in his book The Theatre of Kanhailal), [ii] was Kanhailal’s inability to cope with the pressure of being expected to speak, write and work in English and especially in Hindi. These were languages that were unfamiliar and alien to him, just as he was alien in the space where he had arrived, albeit with much hope and optimism, as a student of theatre. Having been expelled, after a period of aimlessness, Kanhailal returned to Imphal finally in 1969 to begin his own work and established his theatre group Kalakshetra Manipur. However, unlike the far-more spectacular Ratan Thiyam, who even went on briefly to become the director of NSD in 1987-1988, Kanhailal remained for a long time on the margins of what was accepted and celebrated as ‘Manipuri ‘theatre practice at the nation’s centre. As a student of Kanhailal’s work, one is tempted to trace his special relationship to language and his long-lasting rejection of ‘words’ as an effective medium for theatrical communication, to this early experience of linguistic exclusion in the nation’s capital. Kanhailal’s experience is significant precisely because it is not merely personal; it is significant in that it can stand as emblematic of the systematic and enduring political, cultural and linguistic exclusion of the North Eastern states from the mainstream cultural history of India. The terms of cultural ‘participation’ are handed down from above; the inability and (god forbid) the choice not to participate might end in ridicule, failure and ostracisation. Kalakshetra Manipur, by the very nature of its austere premises situated at the outer-most limits of Imphal (at the foot of the hills that encircle the Manipur valley) seems to have quietly celebrated, over the many years since its inception, this position of silence and liminality as a source of strength, creativity and resilience. Kanhailal writes of his training process: “Believing in the autonomy of theatre, we swallowed the text and absorbed it into our body instead of speaking out the lines through lip movement, facial and finger gestures. We shattered the whole network of illusion on the stage. We were no longer burdened with the heavy light, costume and make-up. We cleaned the stage as an empty space where we began to unfold the autonomy of theatre…”[iii] However, rather than being the inward-turning process that it seems to imply, this methodical minimalism resulted in several interesting experiments by the director in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He stepped out of mainstream proscenium theatre practice to work with untrained villagers in distant areas of Manipur and market women from the famous Nupi Keithel (women’s market) of Imphal. Kanhailal was deeply influenced, according to his own admission and that of scholars like Lokendra Arambam, by the event of Badal’s Sircar’s visit to Imphal in 1973. Sircar staged his production Ebong Indrajit, and this was followed by a workshop production of Spartacus that Sircar staged with various young directors and theatre workers of Imphal. It provided the practitioners a window into a theatre aesthetics completely different from the traditional grammars of Manipuri performance practice. The young Kanhailal was so struck by Sircar’s method that he followed him to Calcutta and spent a considerable amount of time learning from him, watching him closely. He writes of the period: “Badal-da helped me very much. I give him the respect of a guru. When I worked with him I could not fully grasp his concepts. But as human beings, we learn from our experiences, don’t we? I learnt through all these experiences, the meaning came later.”[iv] Perhaps Kanhailal arrived at the meaning, several years later, while working with the seventy working-class women in the central women’s market of Imphal. In the winter of 1978, he fashioned a theatrical event called Nupi Lan (Women’s War), based partly on the history of women’s struggles and political resistance in Manipur since the late nineteenth century. The ‘market women’ of Imphal are referred to frequently in all important studies of Manipuri society, politics, history and culture. In Manipur, almost all trading activity is traditionally controlled by women and there are bazaars in Imphal that are run entirely by women. It is conventionally considered bad form for men to frequent these bazaars. Both buying and selling activities in these market spaces are conducted mostly by women. Imphal’s largest and most central market, called Khwairamban bazaar, is also operated completely by women. Women from villages all around Imphal travel to this market everyday to sell their agricultural produce. This Khwairamban market is also known as the Ima market (the market run by mothers) or the Nupi Keithel (women’s market). The history of the two ‘Women’s Wars’ or Nupi Lan in colonial times is associated almost entirely with the women’s market. These wars were waged, on both occasions, by the ‘market women’ against the policies and orders of the colonial administration, the first in 1904
Gay For More Than A Day Of Rage
Brinda Bose Since ‘straight’ is linguistic harakiri for 377-talk, perhaps we first need to get this crooked: if we say ‘we are all queer’, we cannot make a ‘they’ out of the LGBT community, and more importantly out of all that which 377 targets, ‘carnal intercourse against the order of nature’. We must first understand what ‘nature’ means in the context of carnal intercourse, of course, but most crucially we must believe that being queer is a philosophy and a politics and a sensibility of desiring outside the pale of proscription. And it is also today a politics and a philosophy of protest and dissent: an assertion of our sexual selves that are denied existence by others, but in tandem, always, a celebration of those very selves – continued, secret or outed, extravagant or quiet – despite such denials and exclusions. Queer Desire: Raging, Carnivalesque ‘We are all queer’ as a movement is in league with (and not opposed to or lesser than) other battles against discrimination, like that of dalits or Kashmiri Muslims or transgenders or working class labourers. Anyone who dismisses the fight against 377 as lower on the rungs of political significance is astonishingly classist and casteist in such an argument, surely? And to say that, since only 200 ‘offenders’ have been booked in 150 years of the existence of section 377 of the IPC, this makes it any less critical to understandings of identitarian politics is to be the worst kind of offender in hierarchizing identities, it seems to me. So here then is a ‘gay’ – and we can all be gay as much as queer – that must necessarily be both a blithe spirit and an angered, avenging one. It must fight for spaces as much as mark its presence outside of legitimately-granted territories, because its very definition is to be outside of the prescribed, and to be in combat for a place that it does not really wish to seek under its contrarian sun. And so this queering must be raging and carnivalesque at once, a gay that protests, resists, rebels, chooses, loves, desires, kisses, caresses, copulates, orgasms – in whatever way it ‘wants’ the other, simply and yet complicatedly being propelled to bodily pleasure and passion by sexual urges, oblivious to what the law allows or does not. And let us be clear on this, the fight against Section 377 is not about a sloppy sentimental ‘love’ that de-fuses hate all over the world: it is about searing passionate romance, and the right to sexual practices impelled by raucous lusty desires that are seen as dangerous to the moral fabric of the nation-state – those that are legally disallowed, but not privately disavowed. It is about love all right, but it is a risky, risqué love that dares and bares and gives and takes with everything it’s got. Why is it crucial to make distinctions between loves when all are difficult enough, Calvino might ask. Then consider this: surely the BJP too thinks that love is not a crime when indulged in glorious saas-bahu technicolor, even while it renounces homosexuality in the morning’s headlines? It is imperative, therefore, to distinguish between a love that decimates romance and passion and makes of it a duty and a sacrifice and an aspiration to a higher, saintlier plane of being and living, and one that is passionate in giving and much as taking, an erotics of pleasure-soaked romantic love. Desire – the kind we are fighting for – is an overreacher, always wanting something beyond what we are allowed to possess; Lauren Berlant’s ‘cruel optimism’ and Jacques Ranciere’s ‘cruel radiance’ (though neither used it in exactly this context), where the oxymoronic nature of any exercise of will and wish is emphasized, may work well to focus both the sharpness and the ambiguity of desiring processes, sexuality being no exception to this melding of potentially-contradictory impulses. Desire is a choice one makes, individual liberty may guarantee the exercising of that choice – but desire also exists beyond all guarantees, it goes where liberty – or liberality – fears to tread. This is one critical aspect of the battle against 377 we cannot afford to lose sight of, that the battle itself is contradictory, it is looking to legitimize a space that is by its very ethics (and I use the term advisedly) against the ‘order of nature’ and all that is legitimized by such ‘nature’ in the way the Court has read it. That is the real reason for it being a fraught battle even within so many of us who wish to identify as queer – whether LGBT or H(etero) – and we must begin by acknowledging and dealing with this fraughtness – or this queerness, if we will. Everyone who has ever indulged in any sex outside the penile-vaginal straitjacket (and that includes masturbation) can, within the legalese of the Indian Penal Code, be incarcerated for a criminal offense under 377. This IPC section in the news now may have been framed in British colonial times but was accepted and legitimized by Nehru and Ambedkar when power transferred back to native hands, and we cannot afford to forget that. And the Supreme Court may well say today that it is merely upholding the spirit of the founding fathers of our nation who in their wisdom did not think it necessary to throw out what the British had imposed on the subcontinent. And so the Supreme Court of India’s failure to uphold Delhi High Court’s 2009 landmark reading-down of the offending sections of Section 377 about ‘carnal intercourse against the order of nature’ damns not just the LGBT community which we belong to or support, but just about each and every one of us in our politics, philosophies, agentic actions, dreams and fantasies, as it also damns our first nation-builders whom we invoke in all our incantations of freedom and glory. ‘Reading Down’ Liberty and Progressive Divisiveness One of the astute ways