ISBN 978-3-11-071629-0
eISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-121706-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023930665
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.
© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Copyediting: Aaron Bogart
Cover design: Katja Peters, Berlin
Cover image: Atul Dodiya, Meditation (with Open Eyes), installation. Photo: Tate Modern, London
Typesetting: SatzBild GbR, Sabine Taube, Kieve
Printing and binding: Beltz Grafische Betriebe GmbH, Bad Langensalza
www.degruyter.com
that Victor Stoichita has designated as ‘splitting’ or the production of antitheses. Stoichita’s analysis of the interactions between such split-levels in paintings and prints from Northern Europe reads these breaks as intrinsic to the Christian contexts of these images: antitheses are frequently a device of allegorisation and transmission of Christian truths. Initially condemned by contemporary theorists as ‘pictorial heresies’, this mode of theorising pictorial practice acquired considerable resonance in North European painting and its printed replicas.43 The use of the window/niche/painting in the image of artists from the Jahangir album (Plate 2.1) – as in other examples where court artists pick up the motif – plays on different significations of the window in a new context. For instance, the window designated an opening into the inside world, an internal mirror through which to filter the outside world and see the immanence of God, an analogy that is frequently used in Islamic mystical texts, and to be discussed in the following section.
43 Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image, pp. 3–16
Illusion and Beyond
Access to the reception of migrant images in the North Indian court ateliers requires piecing together stray references from existing sources and, above all, recovering the praxis of artists through their painted work. The latter – as will emerge below – allows us to observe that no one mode of representation was singled out for its narrative superiority or optical exactitude and which therefore required mastering a set of techniques to be universally applied. Rather, the visual characteristics of the newly arrived European images were perceived as representing an alien (coming from firang)44 or specifically Christian mode of pictorial practice, a distinct visuality classified in such terms, one that could be acquired through copying and deployed to present subjects considered Western/Christian. Certain motifs – such as the window with the baroque curtain – came to function as codes for Western subjects and pictorial modes, as seen in this rendering of the Mughal artist Kesu Das of the subject of Saint Matthew and the Angel (Plate 2.4).45 The awareness of different modalities of seeing and translating the ‘seen’ into image was inscribed within the few textual accounts available on the art of painting in the courts of North India. For example, the chronicler, philosopher, and court historian Abu’l Fazl Allami (1551–1602) draws up a chronological sequence of artists and the pictorial modes they stood for: he ascribes the highest respect to the Persian master Bihzad, then refers to the ‘magic making’ of the European artists, who possessed the quality of making ‘inanimate objects appear to come alive’.46 These and other responses to European images in the South Asian courts and the pictorial effects they achieved were wide-ranging and ambivalent. Naturalistic representation exercised enormous fascination: engagements with it through practices of copying, juxtaposing, or creating playful reversals display an intrinsic attraction to the enabling potentialities of naturalistic visual regimes – the ‘magical’ power to which Abu’l Fazl and Jesuit accounts refer. At the same time, illusionist ways of seeing, when relocated in South Asia, entered a field of opposing pulls because vision itself – in the Asian contexts I examine – was implicated in a set of ostensibly contradictory theological and literary discourses. In these expositions, the image was perceived both as a space of desire and yet as having a seductive power that could lead to a form of capitulation leaning dangerously close to idolatry.47
44 Abu’l Fazl Allami, A’in-i Akbari, trans. H. Blochmann, 2 vols., Delhi: Low Price Publications, 2001 (1927), vol. 1, pp. 102–3.
45 Among other examples of this usage: The Disputing Physicians, folio from Khamsa of Nizami, by Miskina, reproduced in Brend, The Emperor Akbar’s Khamsa , figs. 3, 11; or a leaf from an album commissioned by Jahangir featuring the Virgin and Child by the painter Basawan (painted c. 1590 subsequently included by Jahangir in the album), San Diego Museum of Art. I have discussed this image at some length in: ‘The Breast-Feeding Mother as Icon and Source of Affect in Visual Practice – a Transcultural Journey’, in: Kumkum Roy (ed.), Looking Within, Looking Without: Exploring Households in the Subcontinent through Time, Delhi: Primus Books, 2015, pp. 105–33.
46 Abu’l Fazl Allami, A’in-i Akbari, vol. 1, pp. 113–15.
47 On the tangled question of idolatry and image making in Islam, Finbarr B. Flood, ‘Between Cult and Culture: Bamiyan, Islamic Iconoclasm and the Museum’, The Art Bulletin vol. 84 (4), 2002: 641–59, here 643ff. Jamal J. Elias, Aisha’s Cushion: Religious Art, Perception and Practice in Islam, Cambridge MA:
and colour tonalities of the landscape and clothing.124 This was clearly a product of the artist’s engagement with European art during the years he spent at Akbar’s court, and that he acknowledges here as a mode of painting deserving of emulation, together with the work of the celebrated Iranian master. Apart from exhibiting the skill of the artist in re-historicising an existing model, such a procedure assumes, in the words of Roxburgh, ‘a contract of communicability’,125 by which the viewer partly anticipates and is partly educated by a dynamic wherein an artist inserts himself into a chain of tradition, even as he carries it forward. Some two decades later, in 1608, Jahangir commissioned his artist Nanha to prepare a copy of Bihzad’s work with the intention of mounting both original and copy on two facing album folios. This version, inscribed by Jahangir, was instead painted in the ‘Persian style’, aspiring to be an exact replica of the deceased master’s work, and thereby challenging the discerning connoisseurial eye to distinguish one from the other.126
The abundant presence of European engravings at the Mughal court brought forth its own harvest of copies-as-adaptations, further attesting to the range of imitative practices which artists sought to master. The linearity of the graphic medium of print resonated with the aesthetic value, which all Persianate images attached to line and drawing (tarah). An engraving could be easily appropriated as tarah and replicated through the customary use of a pounce, as was done when copies were made and then pasted on to album folios. Additionally, a print could serve as the basis for a painting executed by a court artist by using a copy of the engraving as tarah. An exquisite rendering of the meeting of the Virgin Mary and her cousin Elizabeth by an unnamed Mughal artist transforms the print on which it was based into a resplendent painting exuding warm emotion that becomes legible when the image is recast in the medium of paint (Plate 2.10, fig. 3). The young Mary, having received the Angel Gabriel’s tidings, is skilfully portrayed with a hovering smile, holding the hand of Elizabeth, who solicitously moves her face close as if whispering a confidence. The painter, it appears, sought to exhibit his virtuosity in the careful rendering of garments and the softly articulated features of the figures. In an intriguing reversal, the younger Mary, who on the engraving is unmistakably the figure on the right, is dressed in gold and lilac, colours that are traditionally not hers, whereas the canonical Marian combination of blue and red has been instead assigned to Elizabeth. The artist has taken further liberties with the landscape setting by giving it a lushness and animating it with flowers, birds, and a bubbling brook, rather than retaining the arid-looking foreground of the engraving. Such a mode of artistic conversation between a print and a painting can be said to invest painterly skill with the power of creative
124 Private Collection, reproduced in Asok K. Das, ‘Transformation in Jahangir’s Taswirkhana’, in: Canby (ed.), Humayun’s Garden Party, pp. 135–52, here p. 140.
125 David Roxburgh, ‘Kamal-al Din Bihzad and Authorship in Persian Painting’, Muqarnas, vol. 17, 2000: 119–46, here 136.
126 Jahangir’s inscription on the right-hand corner reads: ‘Allahu Akbar. This work of Ustad Bihzad was seen and copied by Nanha Musawwir according to my orders. Written by Jahangir, son of Akbar Badshah Ghazi in the year 1017 (1608–09)’, cited in Das, ‘Transformation in Jahangir’s Taswirkhana’, p. 142. The copy is preserved together with Bihzad’s original as two facing folios of the Muraqqa-i Gulshan, Gulistan Palace Library Museum, Tehran.
repetition or reiterative transformation, making the production of images nothing less than a transmedial, intersubjective process.
Two examples with which this chapter concludes afford us a rare insight into gestures of self-positioning on the part of artists, a fleeting sense of how they perceived their own skills and chose to represent these – together with their individual persona – perhaps as an indexical trace within a work’s matrix. The first example counts among the most enigmatic and is at the same time possibly the most frequently reproduced painting from among the prolific number that emanated from the North Indian courts; its repeated appearance in anthologies and exhibition catalogues of Mughal painting, on book covers and posters, has led one scholar to characterise such visibility as a ‘commodification’ of the image (Plate 2.11).127
127 Valerie Gonzales, ‘Confronting Images, Confronted Images: Jahangir versus King James I in the Freer Gallery Mughal Group Portrait by Bichitr (circa 1620)’, in Frank Peter, Sarah Dornhorf and Elena Arigita (eds), Islam and the Politics of Culture in Europe: Memory, Aesthetics, Art, Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag,
of person.117 The double embodiment restages a concept of individual liberty ensconced in classical liberal theory that is contingent on the subjection or self-subjection of sections of humanity, at home and afar, that are by the same definition unfree.
The performative conjunction, which Pushpamala effects between the figures of liberty and the slave, works to re-anchor the circulating icon in its conditions of production. The racial economy of the works, describable as hybrids of an icon/ethnic type and a self-portrait, entails a two-fold ‘crossing of the “colour line”’118 by the artist, as she embodies in turn a white and a Black woman. Importantly, this act of transgression intersects with a moment of discursive instability surrounding systems of signification that seek to fix and naturalise difference within societies, to then decide on who can belong to the body politic. The cultural theorist Sara Ahmed defines the ‘stranger’ as an entity produced through relations of proximity within multicultural societies of the present. Being an alien is then a matter of
117 Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009, p. 21ff. Also, Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture, vol. 15 (1), 2003: 11–40.
118 The expression has been adapted from Cherise Smith, Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper and Anna Deavere Smith , Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011, p. 3.
inhabiting a certain body; racial difference, among other attributes, enables processes of recognition to designate those ‘outsiders inside’, whose presence makes it necessary to demarcate spaces of belonging, to police the borders of habitable domains.119 During the years when Pushpamala’s works above were being assembled and exhibited, France was seized by violent upheavals ascribed to migrant communities, relegated to ghettos on the outskirts of Paris. The problem of ontologising the ‘alien’ as a way of being in the world, to then exclude those labelled as such from rightfully belonging to the nation, is, however, not an issue confined to France, but – as mentioned above – an intensely debated question in several Western as well as postcolonial societies. Contemporary discourses of globalisation and multiculturalism, despite their effort to assimilate those considered unassimilable, end up, paradoxically, reinforcing existing boundaries through their prioritising of group identity, or the emphasis on becoming, even as they seek recourse to liberal concepts such as hybridity or in-betweenness. The process of demarcating boundaries within the ‘we’ of a nation can reopen the prior histories of bodies marked as alien – re-enactment of such histories through artistic intervention is one path to re-scripting the stories told within the narrative of the nation. A relationship of intimacy and sociality fostered through performatively ‘entering’ an alien body involves the production of meaning through the very fluidity of self-definitions that ensues. It challenges the construction of selves through stable binaries to disrupt existing ontologies.
Let us return to Delacroix’s Liberty and its double. For all the outrage provoked by the artist’s rendering of the female allegory, techniques of mechanical reproduction made it possible to domesticate its troubling sexual force. By delinking the head from the body, the image proliferated through postage stamps and bank notes and came to be imprinted on the memory of its users as a form that has the iconicity of a ruler’s profile on a coin (Plate 4.6). This makes Delacroix’s work an eminently reproducible image, a profile that spells the absence of reciprocity, a distant face that can be gazed at but does not look back. If we compare this with Pushpamala’s impersonation, the difference in the profile that veers towards a three-quarter view of the face reminds us of the physical and material presence of the artist (Plates 4.6a, 4.6b). A trace of subjectivity returns through the gaze, through the gentle, knowing smile hovering on her lips, bringing back that which was evacuated to produce the icon. The photo-performance produces an effect of oscillation, in that the viewer looks at it, registers immediate recognition, to be succeeded by doubt and then recognises the photograph as a double – an oscillation effect between credibility and its limits. Can the production of iconic interruption, while becoming the double of an image by entering it, open it up to a new context of actions and relations? An aesthetic that fissures the singularity of an icon to bring forth a form of excess has the power, as I have argued above, to trigger a debate about history and belonging within a national collective by disrupting inherited narratives that can now be overwritten. Our visual imagination of Liberty is unlikely to ever be the same.
119 Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Postcoloniality, London and New York: Routledge, 2000, p. 3ff.
Indian subcontinent. In spite of Swaminathan’s inclusive conception of contemporaneity and his refusal of historically constituted oppositions between the modern and its other, the Roopankar museum reinscribed these divisions by demarcating a separate section for tribal and folk arts, distinct from that of the urban arts that housed works of recognised modernist
artists from Vadodara, Mumbai, or Delhi. The trajectories of those practitioners who made up the former group – two examples of which have been sketched here – were marked by a set of transitions, personal and institutional, which they lived through over the years, and which positioned them likewise in a stream of modernism whose inventive possibilities they unceasingly explored from within an existing thematic repertoire. Their works, responding to the contemporary predicament through the filter of individual subjectivities, came to be framed and exhibited, bought and sold just as those of their urban counterparts. Yet they inhabited a world that ran parallel to that of mainstream contemporary art, even as the two constituted a coeval entity. Group exhibitions were held in separate venues: Jangarh had his first solo show in New Delhi at the Dhoomimal Gallery in 1984, which however received little notice among metropolitan artists. That apart, the venues where he and his companion artists showed their work consisted of craft fairs, such as the Surajkund Mela , a colourful affair that takes place in spring each year at Surajkund, on the outskirts of Delhi.108 In 1988, Jangarh’s work – together with that of the Warli artist Jivya Soma Mashe – was shown for the first time abroad. This took place as part of the state-sponsored Festival of India events that included a show Art of the Adivasi curated by Jyotindra Jain, and which travelled to four venues in Japan. The emergent faultline – expressed in Jangarh’s frequent references to the sheheri (lit. ‘of the city’) artists present at the Bharat Bhavan, a group to whom he did not feel he belonged109 – deepened after 1989, in spite of the fame and market success that participation in Magiciens brought.
Viewed against the background described above, it is evident that the selection for the Paris show of Baua Devi, Jivya Soma Mashe, and Jangarh Singh Shyam, collectively made by Jain, Swaminathan, and Martin, cannot be attributed to a ‘neo-primitivist salvage paradigm’.110 Far from being a group slated either to disappear against the weight of modernity or to suffer degradation through its forces, the artists they chose were embedded in contemporaneity, though dependent on state patronage and curatorial intercession. The three catalytic visionaries who mediated throughout shared a commitment grounded in a notion of inclusive egalitarianism, which was at once radical as it was somewhat naive. For the artists, the journey from the national to the global was a shift of scale rather than one of framework, the bewildering Francophone world notwithstanding; it was the outcome of an intervention in transformative processes well under way for some three decades, leading from the walls of the village home to the white cube of the metropolitan museum, and which were further galvanised by the recognition brought by this fresh opportunity. Similar processes, wherein indigenous artists have participated in experiments that seek a reflexive dialogue between local traditions and the world of modernist and contemporary art beyond the locality, have proliferated in several parts of the world, and thereby reinforce the stance of Martin and his Indian
108 Aurogeeta Das, Jangarh Singh Shyam: The Enchanted Forest. Paintings and Drawings from the Crites Collection, New Delhi: Roli Books, 2017, p. 34.
109 Cited in Jain, Jangarh Singh Shyam, p. 22.
110 This was one of the most frequent of criticisms levelled against the show, summarised by Poinsot, ‘Review of the Paradigms’, p. 98ff.
