Present Encounters : Papers from the conference of the Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, 1996

Kamala Kapoor The Inner Space: Women 's Art in India I ndian art either tends to project a largely misleading image of cultural coherence with the exotic, the epic, the occu lt and the fantastical, all ingred ients of the I ndigenous and the traditional and all unique to the local and national, or it projects an equally misleading image of an u rbane, sophisticated art that is familiar with the Western avant-garde, an i mage that is often dismissed in the international arena as repetitious and derivative. The truth lies somewhere in between , in the rupture where national and transnational frameworks intersect, where the I ndian identity determined by complex circumstances locates itself withi n a global perspective . A great deal of women's art that addresses a range of social, political and personal realities is located in this rupture and projects a significant yet undogmatic criticality that is rarely encountered . Given the shortage of time, this talk can neither claim to be a survey, nor i n any specific way to be representative of cu rrent art by women in India. I want to make clear, however, that the diverse work practices and motivations of these artists are not easily reduci ble to the common denomination of feminist art. To my mind it would be premature to map the territory of women's art practice i n I ndia from a feminist perspective. Feminists are not yet a homogeneous group i n I ndia but are d ivided by social class, caste, religion and age, and women's art, which is a more apt term than femin ist art, is further subdivided by style, medium and subject matter, and once again fractured by issues such as those of identity, the constructs of lndianness, the influences of the Euro­ American avant-garde and alternate possibilities thereof. These fracturings and divisions i ntermingle and subdivide in ever-increasing segments and permutations, each one fairly unique and non-subsumable under the heading of feminism per se. This is not to say femi n ism in I ndia lacks the base of a shared ideology; there is among a number of women artists a question ing of gender relations and of the discrimination of patriarchal hegemony and its power politics. But they don't often use their art as radical instruments of consciousness raising . Instead , they try and find themselves in and through their work, discovering effectively the poetics, so to speak, of an 'inner space' as a structure of being a nd knowing . Theirs are single voices committed to their beliefs and practices and not part of a concerted feminist movement as it is understood i n the West. It is these single voices, these voices of gender, that articulate art-making from withi n , that I will be talking about. Wh ile it is d ifficult to put things down in black and white when it comes to I ndian art, which has no rigid d ivisions between styles, no labelling of trends and no obsessions about linear, chronolog ical developments, it is necessary to briefly examine the broad differences between men's and women's art. What is i nteresting is that while women artists continue to employ devices of narrative, literary content and illusionistic space , even as many of them relate to the mu ltiplicity of artistic styles signifying modernist and postmodernist pluralism, male artists, for the most part, continue to explore the modernistic logic of their med i um a long with the two d imensionality of the painted surface and art's formal values. I n the process they seem to have established a select modernist tradition (shaped in part by the all-male Progressive Artists' Movement which first adopted modernism i n the early 1 950s as a reaction to pre-I ndependence nationalism) that is reflected in the hierarch ica l structures of the dominant contemporary art practice in the country. Among the important factors to be considered in this context is the extraord i nary production of women artists and the ideological and political engagements perceived in their work with its notions of selfhood , autobiog raphy, narrative , women's histories and women's work. A fallout of this phenomenon is now increasi ngly felt in fields contiguous to art, such as in art galleries, where women owners and di rectors outnumber men and are more willing to give 1 1 3