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We are straddling an incredible pandemic that has changed how we interact with each other, how we imagine solidarities and what transnationalism means to us. This is an existential crisis that three generations face together as adults. In the past three decades we have lived increasingly transnational lives, we have seen the largest migrations of humans and the denudation of forests as economies seemingly blend into the notches of each other’s material desires. Through colonization and WWII, we experienced similar movements of human populations, universalism in thought, political solidarity and exchange along with apathy and pain. Modernism was an antidote to the existential crisis caused through disasters. Art follows and mirrors human existence. Culture is the fabric that defines social interactions. Human imagination today is universal. This essay begins with studies on the careers of Judith Blum Reddy, Gayatri Gamuz and Jinsook Shinde. They are artists who came to participate in the Indian art scene through marriage and wanted to be part of India and its people. I conclude with a fourth case study on the young emerging artist Mayuri Chari who represents a decolonial struggle with identity. We will discuss universalism and lateral thought in the field of arts. How does a sanitary crisis, economy and political stages of maturity in a nascent republican democracy author Art History, or excludes?
Why isn’t art doing anything right now? Art can give solace, hope, happiness, kinship, erotic and aesthetic pleasure but capitalo-professionalism is so imbibed in the art culture of today that the utility of art needs to be derived through discussion and comparison. Modernism was an antidote to the need to forget the Spanish Flu, the wars and deaths. At that moment, people savoured hope and the possibility of progression. It was lost when it became a slogan. Conceptual Art proposed the primacy of human intellectual independence until it became a system of elite chicanery, hidden behind the veneer of every man is an artist .
I begin in a negative tone but shall elaborate into art practices of hope. Next year India will celebrate 75 years since its decolonization from Britain, but the process of decolonization is far from over. Beyond the more pronounced failures of a state in delivering equity through a federal structure, the overarching cultural influence and power is invested in the hands of a few in Delhi. Not only is this a reflection of politics, but culture as well. In a society where contemporary visual culture is highly dependent on foreign financial aid and collectors of art who gather around Delhi due to its proximity to power, art from the periphery, which includes large swathes of population and territory, is consistently failing to find the attention of Delhi. It is natural for the logistical and administrative need for foreign financial aid to be present in the cities where foreign governments have embassies and consulates.
State support of the visual arts is governed by the Lalit Kala Akademi and the National Gallery of Modern Art, both based in Delhi. Workshops, art camps, state exhibitions, awards and state sponsored fellowships and scholarships are the only access they have to financial and infrastructural support in culture. These institutions become gateways for them to travel across a diverse and immensely large country, meet artists who do not share their language, culture and at times religions.
Another opportunity lies in a spectrum of individual practices that sustain themselves in informal arenas of exchange – artists selling to patrons known to them, sustainable lifestyles away from the expensive metropolises, exhibition making at local levels through a network of small galleries that are best known for decorative art but most importantly a universalism that draws from a more proximal geography.
The pandemic with its curbs on global travel and constraints of quarantines and local containment zones has made the world much larger than we had begun to imagine it just before the onslaught. We had begun to live in a world defined by proximity, if you could find your way around the visas and afford the tickets.
Gayatri Gamuz (b. 1966) is a painter based in Tiruvannamalai, in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. Having come to India in 1989 and settling permanently here at the age of 22, Gamuz has spent more decades in India than in her native Spain.
She spent most of her 22 years in Alicante, where she studied painting at art school from 1986. Gamuz trained at the studio of Antonio Lopez Garcia, celebrated for his academic realism much to the chagrin of contemporary art critics. In fact, when she had her retrospective at the Museum Fundación Antonio Pérez in Cuenca, Spain, in 2013, she refused to visit the Spanish Abstract Museum because of her firm belief in figurative painting being the representative format for an artist.
Gamuz’s partner Ananda Surya began urban forestation drives in Kochi when he was 15. Four decades later, we see those efforts manifest in green cover that is nurtured and protected through voluntary public intervention throughout the city. I first encountered their Tree Festival in 1992. Gayatri and Ananda enrolled any visiting artist or performer who was to be found in Kochi — from locals to visiting tourists. At that time, Gayatri was painting nature, figurative and magically realist works.Having never travelled in Europe, she began to understand Indiaand its connection with nature through her journeys there. She thinks this was a land where animals came to live with humans and the disconnection between man and animal were not estranged as in Europe. Ananda and her could pursue their passions towards nature and sustain their art and poetry through agriculture. They built a home and studio in a farm in Tiruvannamalai, settling down at foothills of the Arunachala mountain, and senttheir sons to local schools.
She was instrumental in starting the Kashi Art Gallery with Ananda’s brother and sister in law — Anoop and Dorie Skaria. These initial acts of connecting Kochi to a world art map manifested in the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2012 as result of the internationalism they had reinvigorated drawing from Fort Cochin’s inherent cosmopolitanism in the composition of its communities and colonial architecture.
Her retrospective at the museum in Cuenca and at the Kashi Art Gallery was aptly titled My Name is Gayatri Gamuz. Her art was a mirror of her external life with her family, farm and Tiruvannamalai. She explored the scapes of femininity in her next show It is a Girl in 2015, where she photographed and painted rural women and girls from around her farm. Talking to writer Sujatha Shankar Kumar, Gayatri declares,
Over a year these drawings came automatically through a very introspective process. In each of them, I found myself.(註1)
When I interviewed her she tells me of the times she has been discounted as an artist for being a painter and particularly a woman, her foreignness making her invisible in the eyes of established male artists in the Indian scene. She never bothered as her drive to paint was intrinsic to a continued pursuit of nature. In the article she also states,
Paintings talk. They filter the life of people. Somehow painting is like a silent performer. It is there, speaking without words.(註2)
In 2017, she went through a crisis that was unexplained in which she could not paint or step into her studio. Either she had to quit painting or follow the revelations she began to encounter emotionally and sub-consciously. She again entered her studio to make initial impressions of the Arunachala mountain that in the 1950s Henri Cartier Bresson had captured in his photographs while attending to the dying Ramana Maharishi. Ramana Maharishi, a sage who believed deeply in universal human existence, made Tiruvannamalai famous for Europeans who sought his sanctuary like the millions of Tamil pilgrims who sought the divine light atop the mountain. These associations with nature predate Hinduism and were appropriated later, a manifestation of nature that authored culture in the Dravidian lands of South India much like the Uluru Rock plays a role in the identity of aboriginal Australians. Gayatri’s sketches of Arunachala gave way to non-representational forms that were manifestations of what she had intended to achieve through art. She achieved her ‘freedom’ to represent the presence of nature and its monumental presence in life.
Despite the years of being partisan to magical realism in figurative painting, Gayatri had told her stories through the format that dealt with her identity as a person and the reason for which she was in India. With deep oval forms, lines that formed horizons in oil, she was able to paint the representation of freedom devoid of ideology or denomination.
Jinsook Shinde shares the same amount of years with me in India. Born in 1952 in Daejoon, South Korea, she grew up in Seoul and came here in 1983. She was noticed by her school teacher who saw potential in her talent to draw, and funded her special arts classes. Jinsook knew she wanted to be an artist when she was young but decided she needed a subject that would support a practice and decided to study science in senior school. Later, she decided to quit that and joined the fine arts college at the Hongik University. She began studying abstraction within art history and realized that formally in the western canon it was derived through systematic development of formal stages such as those of Impressionism, Cubism, etc., but abstraction was ever present in the east. Abstraction within oriental thought arose from calligraphy, where the objective was to produce one powerful line and to achieve this an artist might have had to take an entire lifetime of effort. In the West, abstraction arrives through systematic changes in formal aesthetics; in the East, it arrives as a meditative process where ‘art is an expression of insight’ for Jinsook.
Jinsook left for Paris to study printmaking at the Atelier 17 under SW Hayter after her bachelor’s in South Korea. to pursue her investigations of abstraction developed from the ‘concept of a line’ through the process of etching. It was here through the painter Akkitham Narayanan and his Japanese wife that she met a painter Vilas Shinde who was from Bombay and was there studying at École de Beaux Arts in Paris.
During her younger years in Seoul, she would often visit Buddhist temples with her mother and saw resonances in Siddartha Gautam’s search for the truth after encountering the varied forms of suffering outside his palace. She was drawn to statues in the temple and thought they emanated an inner quest, but Jinsook remained unconvinced by the monks in the temples who failed to free themselves of materialism. The reason she came to India follows her long search for an alternate truth that manifests in the alignment of the body, mind and soul. Art is to her a vehicle to reach this alternate truth. She convinced Vilas to return to India with her. She came to Bombay in 1983.
Jinsook describes her process as one of simplification of the object. Change in nature mirrors one’s mind, a deep sea is calm but gradually turns to roaring waves when it reaches the shores. A flower blooms and withers away; it appears and disappears. Jinsook’s works are sculptural; she cuts painted sheets of paper into long strips and arranges them in combed lines forming an optical prism of colour that turns kinetic in one’s gaze. The work is reminiscent of mirages that arrive from Taoist architecture. Jinsook embodies this aesthetic with her strips of paper that she arranges into prisms that refract metaphorical landscapes, marbled paintings and Chinese calligraphy. Elements of colour that come from her adopted home India, the landscape of the Sahyadri Hills, all gather in her paintings that she makes on glossy paper, cuts them down to strips and then arranges horizontally between two sheets of glass. Her works present certain fluidity much like the wind. Her paintings are sculptural and animated like kinetic objects but still static. She induces speed with colour making her one of the most important painters alive in contemporary India when it comes to technique. She is a legend who uses a grinding stone to crush Chinese stone colours and her paintings present a very bold interior – a nature very akin to Korean women.
Despite being discouraged by fellow Indian artists in Paris and her parents in Korea on her decision to move to India, Jinsook was detached from their concerns as she was ambitious in seeking herself. Much like other artists from subaltern backgrounds and her belief in Buddhist philosophy that requires devotion to one’s parents, Jinsook kept her South Korean passport but does not intend to return having lost her parents a few years ago. She is keen to show her work but only to those who can see with their own eyes. For her abstraction and its understanding is confused in the subcontinent – lost between spiritualism and form-making. Aesthetics is formed from observation. During the lockdown, Jinsook played with a coconut for days, observing an inanimate object in which she came to see emotions over time, a magical sacred fruit that had life, soon it sprouted into a sapling. Right now she is contemplating its manifestation visually in her practice.
Judith Blum Reddy, despite her years as the partner of Krishna Reddy, does not abstract her forms nor does she seek metaphysics within her works. Her works are meticulous lists of words annotated through pictorial forms. Satire reigns in her work which criticizes the contemporary, its realpolitik encompassing Trump’s America. It begins with Paris in 1968, where she drew the student protests in the form of maps of districts and the slogans most resonant on the streets, to recent illustrations that depict paranoia that arrives with Covid-19. Judith is disorganized in her personal life, not one to make lists for her shopping or her routine, but in her art practice the repetition of words allows a peculiar format.
Abstraction can be an innate cultural trope. The Ganges, which holds India’s largest riverine basin, is home to around 400 million people and is considered the cradle of the Vedic civilization. It is not more than an inundated industrial sewer through vast sections of its course. Despite the Ganges being revered as a Goddess, there is no dichotomic conundrum with her followers polluting its water. On 14 sheets of ledger paper, Judith lists an ancient text the ‘Gangastottara-Sat-Namavali’ or the 108 names of the Ganges river in Sanskrit. One of her names ‘Anjana Timira Bhanu’ means ‘A Light Amid the Darkness of Ignorance’, and on another page ‘Daridya Hanti’ means ‘Remover of Poverty’. The present condition of the river is an abstraction of the reverence held in the imaginations of those who inherited its civilization. Judith, by listing them in a ledger book meant for accounts, states the obvious, the pun here is intended.
Socialism in India gave rise to bureaucratic chicanery that sought to alleviate the problems of people by forming Committees, Sub-Committees, Engineering Boards, Judicial Committees, Standing Committees, Commissions, Departments, etc., all to aid in the functioning of the State. So in the winters of 1971-72, Judith accompanied Krishna Reddy to New Delhi where he was to return after decades in Europe to set up the Printmaking Studio at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. They were there for four months where the project went through foyers of departments and committees without any hope of materialisation. They went back to Paris. Judith lived in the India International Centre for those four months and found the phone book in her room amusing. It had numbers listed for the President, Prime Minister, various government departments and ministries and an endless list of committees and sub-committees but also phone numbers to the few bridges Delhi had in those years. Accessibility was displayed but not performed, so she listed the contents of the phonebook over 63 handmade sheets of paper using soft pastel colour illustrating them with Indian motifs, postal stamps depicting Gandhi, tantric circles and blank organizational chart boxes. She visualized the corridors of power with intended humour. Her travel guide to India was another ledger book of 60 sheets where mountain passes and district names shared illustrations of images from Indian Tourist Books depicting tribes, gods and goddesses, the planting of rice and the rickshaw.
Judith came to India in 1967, twenty years after its independence and five years after it had been defeated by China. The modernist optimism of industrial progress and democratic equity had begun to fade. She arrived at Bombay with Krishna and travelled to live in Baroda where Krishna would teach classes at the art school famed for its Avant Garde discourse. Modern progressive formalism was giving away to an indigenous format of narrative storytelling. India existed as an abstraction in the minds of its millions, its diversity and geographical extent made many contending definitions of India that were divided by climate, vegetation, language and culture. The British gathered this vast expanse into a nation by building the world’s largest train network.
In 1934, after the Nepal-Bihar Earthquake, my family migrated away from Samastipur, fleeing poverty, settling down first in Calcutta and then carrying small quantities of coal in jute sacks on the train lines between the Jharia Coalfields and Assam. Slowly expanding the business through the network of trains across central and eastern India. By the 1950s, most of my village had migrated to Assam, Calcutta, Nagpur and Bombay forming a new cosmopolitan diaspora.
In her ‘Timetables’ 1997, Judith Reddy illustrates the timetables of the Indian Railway, one of the sheets lists the lines frequented by my family. Judith holds familial relationships with the families of the Indians artists who lived in Paris during the 1960s, particularly with Janine Bharucha and Asha Bhownagary the daughters of the polymath filmmaker and artist Jean Bhownagary. Her home on Wooster Street became a point of visit for Indian artists coming to New York from the 1970s. One of them who was in New York for her breast-cancer treatment, Rummana Hussain, was introduced by Judith to Holly Block the founder of “Art in General”, an experimental artist space in New York. Judith had shown there earlier. Rummana Hussain had initiated the practice of Conceptual Art in India and with In Order to Join, New York, 1998, she presented one of her most critical exhibitions a year before her death in 1999. Judith, independent of Krishna, held deep connections to the Indian art scene which had always been a source for her humour.
In another part of India where the process of decolonization has been unique, and defined by amnesia is Goa. Though celebrated for its laissez-faire environment and Lusitane heritage, Goa is the centre of conservative Hindu revivalism and its influence on politics. In the Northern part of the state, in a village bordering Maharashtra, Mayuri Chari is an artist who was born in a family of carpenters in the year 1991. She grew up knowing little about Goa’s colonial past. In her village, only Christians held that connection. Through school and at art school, she had little or no social interaction with people who maintained their Lusitane heritage. Her school curriculum or that at Goa College of Art bore no references were made to the past apart from basic lessons in history. Only a minuscule minority in Goa today speak Portuguese, despite a large number of Goans holding Portuguese passports, or are keen to apply for them in order to emigrate to the United Kingdom.
The Portuguese were harsh colonizers who instituted an inquisition in Goa in 1560 and only lifted it in 1812. After India’s independence, they refused to leave and had to be driven away through military actions in 1961 and only recognized the independence of Goa in 1974 after the fall of António de Oliveira Salazar. Since its independence, there has been a movement amongst its agricultural communities for reunification with Maharashtra, the state with which they hold cultural and linguistic commonalities, only to be opposed by an elite who refute any such connections. Chari comes from the communities that have long sought reunification.
Her village in Goa was a sanctuary of caste practices. Portuguese colonization had allowed a microcosm of ancient Hindu practices to survive, perhaps in decolonial defiance. Due to the inquisition, Hindus in Goa guarded their traditions which meant villages were divided amongst communities settled in accordance to their caste status that would decide the proximity to the village temple. Dalits until recently lived at the periphery of the village and are still denied entry into the temples. Whilst preserving their caste identities, Mayuri’s family and the others from the village adopted practices from their colonial masters such as the intricate embroidering of lace and cloth for marriage (trousseaus), a tradition common amongst Mediterranean communities. Mayuri was also expected as a girl to embroider her own trousseau so that it would be displayed on the eve of her wedding. She refused to move to Bombay and instead make embroidery as art today.
Over conversation, she draws out the differences between Maharashtra and Goa. Since the late 19th century, Maharashtra has been home to many reform movements against caste and untouchability as well as the stranglehold of religion over quotidian civil life. Most importantly, the Ambedkarite movement had emerged under the leadership of Dr. BR Ambedkar in cities across Maharashtra, specifically in Kolhapur, which is not far from Goa. Mayuri went to Hyderabad to study for a Masters in Fine Art in 2015 where she began reflecting upon her identity. For a college exhibition, she presented self-imprints of her body as an act to counter the patriarchal gaze of depicting women in the arts. She was shamed by both her male and female colleagues, upon which she decided to survey their responses to her work. Since then she has embroidered the bodies of women not as goddesses or as objects of consumption but as statements of self-awareness. These embroidered anatomical studies are self-portraits and monumental narratives that celebrate nineteenth century feminists such as Savitri Bai Phule.
Her village in Goa was a sanctuary of caste practices. Portuguese colonization had allowed a microcosm of ancient Hindu practices to survive, perhaps in decolonial defiance. Due to the inquisition, Hindus in Goa guarded their traditions which meant villages were divided amongst communities settled in accordance to their caste status that would decide the proximity to the village temple. Dalits until recently lived at the periphery of the village and are still denied entry into the temples. Whilst preserving their caste identities, Mayuri’s family and the others from the village adopted practices from their colonial masters such as the intricate embroidering of lace and cloth for marriage (trousseaus), a tradition common amongst Mediterranean communities. Mayuri was also expected as a girl to embroider her own trousseau so that it would be displayed on the eve of her wedding. She refused to move to Bombay and instead make embroidery as art today.
The article narrates the life of four independent artists who see India through the lens of its myriad of complexities. India forms part of their identity and their practices form part of our visual culture, art scene and art history. Dr B. R. Ambedkar founded ‘Navayana Buddhism’ in 1954 when he adopted it along with 380,000 Neo-Buddhists. Navayana means ‘New Vehicle’. It is a universalist religion that is founded on the tenets of rational thought, compassion, secularism, kindness and humanism. It rejects the divisions of caste, race and religion. When he chartered India’s constitution, Ambedkar incorporated principles of democracy from both the American and French constitutions to create a tool for emancipation of India’s casteless poor, women and minorities. Having studied in New York and London, he was a student of John Dewey the American professor and philosopher of social reform. Ambedkar omits the word nation from his constitution.
Art also exists in a universal realm. Many Indian artists aspire to show in biennales and museums abroad. They are keen to be part of world art history and they argue for equitable transnationalism. In order to celebrate universalism, we need to return the hospitality back home here in India and embrace artists and art practices that do not mirror us but become milestones in the broad scope of Indian art history. Diaspora artists from the Global South in Europe and North America become the conscience of their cultural scenes by critiquing it and it is important we hear those who live amongst us and know us better than ourselves having made a choice to become Indian.
Sumesh Manoj Sharma (b. 1983) is an artist, writer and curator based out of Bombay, he founded the Clark House Initiative in 2011 and is concerned with the global imagination of the Black Arts Movement, Aesthetics of the Alternative Geographies and Immigration Politics.