Eminent artist - Yuriko Lochan's response to our request to attend the discussion

From: yuriko lochan
Date: Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 4:02 PM
Subject: Re: Invitation for Interactive Art Discussion on 14th Feb. 2010 at Gulmohar Hall, IHC
To: bhanu pratap




Dear Banu,

Thank you for inviting me to the discussion and the exhibition. I am sorry that due to my health problem I would not be able to attend the exhibition and discussion.

After I read the text which you have sent, I had 3 things came up which I want you to think about.

1; What is "Modern" in Indian context. 2. What is "Fine Art" in Indian context.
3; What is "History" in Indian context.

I strongly feel that the social development of this part of the world is complex, absolutely unique and marvelous, which you just can not contextualize with only European analytical method. But unfortunately this is the only way we have. We all see ourselves/ our art/ our culture reflected in the Western method. Of course, I do not deny that this is also a great way of recognizing and analyze what it is.

I think this is the key to answer many questions you have .... 'First try to find out what you are'.

Very difficult!

Hope your exhibition would be a great success.

Yuriko
- Show quoted text -
On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 2:15 PM, bhanu pratap wrote:


Dear Mrs. Yuriko Lochan, With reference to our telephonic conversation, please find below the topic description for the Interactive Art Discussion planned at the Gulmohar Hall, India Habitat Center on 14th Feb. 2010 Indian Art Defragmented

What is Indian contemporary art?
Art made by Indians today?
Something that is predominantly Indian from a surface sense?
Whats the difference between representing the Indian exotic life and the facts of the world around us?
Risqué painted females, Brahmin boys giving a lost gaze at the viewer. Cows or kites, which are perhaps pseudo depictions of Indian-ness in the arts.” Oh I am Indian, I will make a cow, oh I need a style, I will make the figures semi- ajanta –ish”. Is this the Indian modern art?
What is True Indian Modern Art?
Something that’s easily global on the surface , but is inherently Indian in a modern sense.
It’s a common notion and belief that Indian modern art started during the period after Amrita Shergil and during the Bombay progressive art movement.
If it is felt that Indian has really been modern since the last 15 or so years, how could the Indian modern art depict the modern life in the 50’s and 60’s?

The reason why it might be felt that Indian has been modern in the last decade or so, is because, of the free-er trade and commerce policies that were passed during the nineties. The arrival of free trade and rapid industrial growth with less sanctions engineered the era of modernity,while the vast network of machines and technology shrunk the world and connected its horizons with the threads of communication and transportation. It is also related to the growing power of the bourgeoisie in the various markets and fields. The changing lifestyles made it apparent that the new art depicting the new world was needed.
Could it be that most of the artists in the First Indian modern art movement had exposure to international environment? They were and are all great artists and great modern artist no doubt. But were they essentially artists reacting to Indian social, spatial circumstances?
Modern art might be accomplished today, because how can it be done by an artist who doesn’t live in a modern world.
If the modern world has arrived, are we ready to take it on?

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." -Martin Luther King, Jr. We wish you a speedy recovery.
Regards,
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Bhanu Pratap
+91 (0)9810633505(India)
http://www.bhanupratap.com


'The fragmented Few' is an art exhibition curated by Monica Dawar, displaying the works by Bhanu Pratap, Veraat Singh and Aakshat Sinha. The exhibition is one of a kind physical and online exhibition. The show will open for public on 14th of February 2010 and will be on display till 18th of February 2010 at Convention Foyer, India Habitat Center, Lodhi Road, New Delhi




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Best regards,

Yuriko Ando Lochan

Our art discussion listed at Delhievents.com

Our art discussion is also listed Delhievents.com
http://www.delhievents.com/2010/02/art-defragmented-interactive-art.html

Event listing on delhievents.com

This is the link to our exhibition listing on the website delhievents.com

Contemporary Indian Writing- part II

Another debut author, Vikas Swarup, a diplomat turned author and presently posted in, as India’s Consul-General to Osaka, Japan, also seems to chart out a similar terrain on the lines of Adiga, but without immunizing himself against the pitfalls of his cosmopolitan narrative. In Q & A, he eschews from celebrating the pluriethnic, rainbow riot of Rushdie’s Mumbai and focuses instead on a Mumbai encumbered by somber shadows of an ulterior reality. An orphan poor boy, Ram Mohammad Thomas becomes a spokesperson of the hitherto silenced minority, the deprived section of the country’s so called economic capital whose towering heights neglect the peripheral squalor of city pavements and slums. Ram describes Dharavi, Asia’s biggest slum as “a cancerous lump in the heart of the city. And the city refuses to recognize it….There are a million people…packed in a two-hundred hectare triangle of swampy urban wasteland, where we live like animals and die like insects” (156, 157).
Swarup evokes a morbidly pathetic site of Mumbai as it goes on to revel in its polyphony of inter-cultural ‘riots’. It is a very different Mumbai experience that exposes its underbelly of crime and dons, the organized network of corruption and bribery, where children are abducted, maimed and forced into beggary and rich are not ennobled, as money becomes the means to cover up their hideous personalities, fake smiles and criminal consciousness.
Thus, it seems as if the Indian writers in English do not possess the necessary vocabulary to express the consciousness of local and regional sub-cultures unless turned into elements of exotic appeal.
Based on the format of the TV quiz show, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, Q & A is a conglomeration of diverse stories linked together by a singular aim of portraying India in all possible colours, including the negative, thereby framing a larger narrative about human life and the rapidly depleting culture of humanity. As Ram goes on to win a billion rupees by answering all questions correctly, based on his life experiences, readers tend to indulge in a fantastic view of life as one’s saviour from the injustices of society and destiny. As Vikas Swarup states in one of his interviews to Hindustan Times, “It is a story of hope and optimism…Anything can happen here in India and we are doing it all with democracy…I wanted to show that not only education but life itself is the greatest teacher”
The narrative of hope is inscribed all over in the life of Ram Mohammad Thomas. His name itself is a testimony to the great ‘optimism disease’ that the underlying secular character of the country cannot and will not be overwhelmed by ethnic and communal strains in its nationalist fabric. Moreover, Ram is also made a victim like Adiga’s Balram. He is accused of cheating in the game show, arrested and beaten hard but this does not deter him from the path of hope. He is acutely aware of the fact that his miseries are the result of the lack of money yet he does not stoop low to co-opt himself within the system that he seeks to challenge. In fact, he comes across as more discerning than Balram. He is aware that if money is a source of power for the poor, it is akin to misery for the rich. “I wonder what it feels like to have no desires left because you have satisfied them all, smothered them with money even before they are born….Is the poverty of desire better than rank poverty itself. Ram’s narrative does not end up being a tale of class warfare. The inequality between the haves and have-nots is highlighted and the reader is left to formulate his own response. Thus, the novel ends up being a romantic investment in the life and destiny of Ram Mohammad Thomas and falls in line with the dominant genre of postcolonial bourgeoisie Indian English novel that postulate Romanticism and the transformative power of imagination as antidotes to pressing social realities.
Thus, while on the surface, both The White Tiger and Q & A may appear as flash in the pan novels, foregrounding the perspective of independent, lower class protagonists having their own motivations, it remains largely a cosmopolitan take on the subaltern reality, seen through “guilt- tinted as well as gilt-tinted spectacles”. The arrival of both Adiga and Swarup on the Indian English literary scene does not add much to the genre in terms of bringing in variety of ideology and technique , thereby expanding the contours of Indian writing in English today. I here recall Meenakshi Mukherjee’s ideas in ‘The Anxiety of Indianness: Our Novels in English’… “We shall probably see more and more writers ( can I add artists too?) who will (be) propelled by the logic of social dynamics within the country, lured by forces of global marketplace and driven by the mirage of international fame….”

Contemporary Indian Writing - part I

Shashi Tharoor in his essay ‘Rushdie’s ‘Overartist’: Indianness from Midnight to the Millennium’ talks about Salman Rushdie’s heritage to the Indian English fiction, derived from a “polyglot tumult of multiethnic and postcolonial India” (122) where “people of every imaginable color (sic), creed, caste, cuisine, consonant and conviction can live, strive and triumph together in one gloriously mongrel nation…” (135). With writers like Rushdie and Tharoor whose post-modernist musings are imbued with a “chutneyfied” vision of India, no wonder the ‘desi sadak’ and gullies of the ‘other’ India lose their visibility and rendered devoid of a significant presence within the contours of the Big Indian English novel. However, a sense of variety has begun to illuminate the said genre with new writers like Aravind Adiga and Vikas Swarup, who have shown their willingness to incorporate the subaltern perspective in their debut novels, The White Tiger (2008) and Q & A (2005) respectively. Both Balram and Ram Mohammad Thomas hail from rural hinterland and slums of the ‘other’ India but come across as bold, clever, independent and agents of their own destiny as they narrate their lived reality from their own perspective and conceptualize their relationship with upper class masters. Here one is tempted to map the credibility of the authors’ rendition of lower class consciousness. Admittedly, it is not easy for these urban writers to evade the charge of elitism altogether, of being out of touch with grass root realities and incapable of writing convincingly about the subalterns of the ‘idea’ called India.
Following is a kind of a review of both the novels to see how far these India writers in English have been able to do justice to their representation of India. A kind of a survey becomes important because Indian English has deftly usurped the position of Indian Literatures and distorted their efforts to present the real India by delving into a constructed representation of India, aimed at exoticising it and selling it in the western market. It’s a similar kind of experience when one visits the elite art galleries in elite circles of Delhi and sees a variety of aesthetically distorted and intellectually distanced canvases in the name of High Art and I so wish to call it the Indian English Art born out of the sole desire to sell India abroad.
At a time when India is trying to mobilize world opinion for getting a permanent seat in the UN Security Council and every next leadership summit speculating over India’s credentials to be the new visage of world power; both Adiga’s and Swarup’s protagonists tend to deflate these claims by their grim confessions about the ‘real’ India existing somewhere on the deprived peripheries of Delhi, Mumbai and rural interiors of the country. Balram Halwai in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger takes upon himself to puncture the India shining rhetoric and highlight the brutal injustices of society in a series of one-sided conversations with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao.
The White Tiger is rigorously inclined towards stripping the veneer off the amoral materialism that lies at the heart of society. India is the largest democracy in the world but weak enough to survive the distortions of the system where politicians are bribed, horse-trading finds its way into the corridors of Parliament, elections are rigged and corrupt politicians keep coming back to power. The poor residing in the darkness never get to cast their votes. They struggle to live as much as they yearn to die and escape the curse of poverty. Therefore, in the subversive act of murdering his master, Balram hides his derisive laughter at any pretension of justice or civility.
The novel documents Balram’s journey from the darkness of village into the light of entrepreneurial success, capturing psychopathic stirrings of his “half-baked” mind that refutes the traditional caste/class structure by exposing its incongruities. He affirms how the ever-widening gap between the rich and poor has reduced Life to a condition of eternal class warfare:
I won’t be saying anything new if I say that the history of the world is the history of a ten-thousand-year war of brains between the rich and the poor. Each side is eternally trying to hoodwink the other side: and it has been this way since the start of time. The poor win a few battles (the peeing in the potted plants, the kicking of the pet dogs, etc.) but of course, the rich have won the war for ten thousand years.
Being poor amounts to having no human value and relegates one to a status even worse than animals. “Men with big bellies” are out there to exploit and destroy “men with small bellies.”

However, what strikes as a jarring note here is the way Adiga uses the language of self-subalternisation and renders this portrait of social unrest devoid of meaning. Liberty, for Balram, amounts to switching sides in the Manichean world of two Indias and placing himself in the position of his former master. He will commit more crimes, pay bribes, and perhaps murder again if need be. Thus, the narrative ends up being a guilt-tinted, middle class, liberal take on the distortions of the system that leaves no alternative for its victims except one, that is, to wriggle their way through the system by colluding with the system.
Thus, Aravind Adiga’s novelistic agenda is not radically different from those of other postcolonial bourgeois migrant writers who wish to speak from the margins, yet end up assimilating into the coterie of the mainstream cosmopolitan elite. Literature of the periphery looses its thrust when an elite, middle class and Oxford returned Adiga attempts to communicate it, divorced as he is from the lived reality of the ethnic or caste ‘other’. Thus, the novel ends up being a surface documentation of the lives and experiences of poor and does not come across as a credible narrative of resistance against the oppressive power structure.




CONTD - next post
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Bharti Arora (The latest Fragmented Few)

The Esteemed Atendees

Here are the few names of the esteemed guests who are attending the art discussion, like Umesh Verma, Sudip roy, Rameshwar Broota, Anandmoy banerjee , Art historian Benoy K Behl, leading art critic and writer Keshav Malik, Associative Director, curator and art writer Latika Gupta .

Another sketch by Bhanu Pratap

An experimental piece I did, Its on a printed glossy paper in some art mag.,
Medium- pen, marker, whitener, acrylics.

Shameless self promotion by Bhanu Pratap.