Designing (post)colonial knowledge: Imagining South Asia

This special issue of South Asian Popular Culture was inspired by the existing and emerging work on interdisciplinarity and design. Conversations among Amit S. Rai, Priya Jha, and Rajinder Dudrah over the past several years fleshed out some of the ways in which design studies would serve as a useful intervention in the study of colonial histories and postcolonial cultures of South Asia. Beginning with a definition of design as a cognitive assemblage which translates information and/or ideas into concrete forms, where we recognize that assemblage is neither irreducible nor immanent, this project connects with work done by scholars in fields as diverse as literary studies, feminist studies, postcolonial studies, new media, art history, anthropology, and film studies. How can the study of design help us to challenge assumptions about the distribution of power in a globalized, transnationalized era, particularly around notions of authenticity, exotic-ness, and colonial passivity in relation to post-colonial identity formations across nations? Designs may be regarded as diagrams of mental maps of individual and collective cultures, which can have profound implications for the re-envisioning of postcolonial histories. The infusion of design studies with strands of postcolonial theories such as nationalism; transnationalism; transculturalism; diaspora; displacement, among others, can reveal the much-needed work in linking these modes to the distribution of power through emotional evocations and ‘experience’. The methodologies developed through this integrative practice provides invaluable insight into analyzing the structures of power and identities shaped by the violent and traumatic histories of colonialisms and imperialisms.

In Saloni Mathur’s 2007 book, India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display, she reads sites as varied as museums and colonial postcards contrapuntally, and proposes that the arts’, crafts, and aesthetics were significant not only in a conscious effort to control the visual display of culture and as a set of aesthetic traditions, but also how they signified dynamic shifts in imperial contacts. Work by scholars such as Mathur, Karen Fiss, S. Balaram, and Ashoke Chatterjee, among others, contributes to a growing body of scholarship that examines the relationship between design and its construction of knowledge about multicultural identities in the colonial and postcolonial periods. The essays in this special issue pose questions about colonial history, colonial and postcolonial cultural practices, and the aestheticization of South Asian art, design, and media forms as they inform identities in a deterritorialized global culture. The sites of the investigation by the contributors reflect the interdisciplinarity of design studies and, share the insistence on emphasizing the vernacular: Indian fashion design (Mayer), lithographic design in Muslim princely states (Lanzillo), and Indian floor drawings (Dohmen) live alongside museum exhibitions, shopping malls, and film spaces.

Well into the 21^st century, we have witnessed profound changes in the ways that identities are positioned within and against global and local economic and cultural forces, and, between public spaces and private ones. Tupur Chatterjee’s essay which focuses on the architecture and industrial design at Select City Walk, one of New Delhi’s preeminent shopping malls, examines, how, at the heart of the gendered design of the malltiplex lies age-old discourses of casteism and class. Thus, Chatterjee ultimately argues that ‘the ‘safety’ of the middle-class consuming woman is crucial to the industrial design of the mall and the multiplex, and its architecture is meant to regulate a specific kind of gendered behavior/code of conduct.’ The thread of nationalism and its attendant patriotism that undergirds Chatterjee’s essay is also reflected in Aprajita Sarcar who turns to the history of partition in South Asia to interrogate the homogeneous nature of nationalism that relies upon an authentic self. Sarcar turns to ‘imaginative topography’ of a city which witnessed an influx of refugees. Significant to the organization of these events was the visibility of the porousness of borders and boundaries, and the fluidity of cultural, political and economic flows; a certain type of deterritorialization was already at work, most evident in the design of everyday life in Delhi.

How do we theorize the mobilization of emotional negotiations being made as we buy increasingly into becoming global citizens-as-consumers and vice-versa? Design studies centralize the continued interrogation of the cognitive dissonance between products that may be coded as ‘authentic’ and the ‘lived-in-ness’ of products and their concomitant symbolic and ideological meanings in the ‘real’ world, something that is inherently problematic for the analysis of non-western cultures. Critics in design studies emphasize the vernacularization of culture vis-à-vis analyses of the uneven processes of colonization and globalization. There is a process of indigenization of consumer goods, along with their attendant symbolic and ideological values, which cannot be transferred in an uninterrupted and unmediated way to passive consumers. Moreover, the invocation of being ‘haunted’ by ‘ghosts’ of cultures and experiences reconfigured by marketing that makes use of (and thereby recreates) aspects of post-colonial cultures can aid in tracing the processes by which material culture is inherently self-reflective in that it recognizes its own historicization in colonial cultures and recursive in its newer forms. In turning to film design, Aditi Chandra’s essay, ‘Absence of the ‘Un-exchangeable’ Monument: Cinematic Design and National Identity in a Time of Partition’ traces the erasure of images of monuments in two patriotic, post-partition films, Jagriti (India, 1954) and Bedari (Pakistan, 1957) in order to argue that ‘if the Partition was a time when national identity was created through exchange, potential to challenge that came precisely from that which could not be exchanged – the historic monument.’ The Hindu-Muslim encounter finds a different site of contestation and negotiation in Tim Dobe and Aaron Sinift’s essay, which presents a dialogue between an artist-practitioner (Sinift) and a religious studies scholar (Dobe), the focus of which is Sinift’s 5 Year Plan Project, a collaborative project which resituates the ‘spiritual’ within specific, historical and contested relations of Hindus and Muslims in highly local social, economic and political contexts. While Sinift’s work engages Gandhian critiques of neo-liberal capitalism and explores gift economies through the project’s organized collaboration with Indian and non-Indian artists and weavers, Dobe explores the relationships of Sinift’s art and postcolonial and religious studies work on spirituality, especially regarding the need to attend to Islamic identity and traditions in both South Asia and America. In a similar vein, Dilpreet Bhullar turns to contemporary artistic representations in India as they feed into already available Orientalist archives. History, thus, ceases to be simply a point of reference, and, instead, is used as a point of signification by contemporary artists as a move towards cultural decolonization. The use of Atlas.ti technology in the essay ‘Designing a Visual Palimpsest through Film: A Critical Examination of Jodhaa Akbar and the Nationalist Narrative’ re-organizes the relations represented in the film as a way to challenge ‘communal cynicism’ that undergirds Hindu-Muslim relations.

The special issue makes emotional aspects of cultural production the core of the analyses the contributors undertake, and centralizing design’s intersection with post/colonial theories opens up focus on the intellectual site of the hybridities. In doing so, the issue contributes to the archive of theories of decolonization and anti-colonial practices so that we can envision possibilities for a postcolonial present.

As a final note, we would like to send a special note of gratitude to Rebecca Wright and Bret Talbert, whose editorial skills and hard work proved invaluable in this process.