Beyond the Future: Papers from the Third Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

CULTURAL TRANSFORMATIONS AND THE RECASTI NG OF IMAGERY I N I NDIA Jyotindra Jain Abstract Inherited art practices co-mingled with revivalistic Mughal court culture and Sanskrit drama; the proscenium stage and new images from photo-studios and lithographic presses in nineteenth century Calcutta, translating folk art forms into popular genres. Sitting in the bazaar and candidly reflecting the social environment in their work, the Kalighat artists not only became the first contemporaries of Indian art but, in a manner of speaking, anticipated the popular culture of the twentieth century that was to follow. The article is about how borders were crossed and traditions renegotiated. Once at a photo studio in the predominantly tribal region of Vyara, in the Indian state of Gujarat, I came across an interesting situation . A vil lager walked into the studio and asked the photographer-owner whether he could make a portrait of his father. The photographer, nodding his head affirmatively, asked his rural customer to bring his father to the stud io. To this, the villager explained that h is father had died a month ago. The photographer asked whether his father had a brother and if so, he should bring the brother along and he would make his father's portrait. A few days later, the photographer told me that he had d ressed up the villager's uncle as his father and done a portrait, wh ich was accepted by h im as h is father's portrait. What is striking here is the establishment of identity through personal and social paraphernalia - the iconography of the person rather than h is realistic representation. The images the masses were generally exposed to, before photographic reproduction, were those of their deities whom they recognised not on account of their individual istic facial features, but by their conception man ifest in their clothing , symbols and emblems. Even after photography became vastly popular in I nd ia, the emphasis on traditional Indian conceptual rather than the western representational mode of depiction continued . What is interesting is how and where borders were crossed and in what manner trad ition was renegotiated . My paper, though not about photography, concerns these interactions and their fallout. The age of mechan ical reproduction came to India in the n ineteenth century and its 'first port of entry was Calcutta': the modern ity sh ipments. Cultural containers b rought in watercolour, photography, engraving, European-style theatre, art schools, printing presses and universities. This, among other things, led to mass production and the proliferation of a new brand of imagery. The Indian craftsmen and the bazaar artists who had been engaged , for centuries, in producing objects of everyday l ife, using traditional materials, techniques and concepts responded to the new cu ltural cargo with amazing avidity and saw in it fresh possibilities of expression . Before mechanical reproduction, consumption of the sensuous and d ivine images was more a prerogative of the h igh caste aristocracy who commissioned them for their personal use. The masses generally lived outside the 'image world'. Mechan ical reproduction liberated the image, especially of the deities, from this private custody to enter the bazaar, shops, restaurants, outcaste ghettos, trucks and rickshaws . This phenomenon, in the process, loosened the brahmanic control over the sacred Hindu imagery, which until then requ ired to be ritually consecrated by a Brahm in priest before it was considered worthy of worship. Thematically, the images from this changing world of I nd ia had begun to liberate themselves from the normative religious iconography to expand into the realm of contemporary social life, whereas in terms of formal picture construction, the human and divine images shifted their stance from profile to frontal to fli rt with the onlooker. They began to look out into the camera or stare at the aud ience with a more engaging gaze. The changed figu ration , the drama and the ceremony of postures - often under a raised curtain - became hallmarks of the new imagery, owing much to the influence of the proscenium stage and the photo studio that were just becoming popular. Art academies were established primarily to train artisans, who were subsequently to lead India into the age of mechanical reproduction , but the academies i ronically ended up tutoring the elite who were to be the 'fine artists' and, in a sense, the predecessor of the modern I nd ian artist. I nterestingly, almost all the first engravers of 80