NOTES
- The Preamble of Constitution, adopted on 26 November 1949, begins: We, the people of India, having solemnly resolved to constitute India into a Sovereign Socialist Secular Democratic Republic and to secure to all its citizens: JUSTICE, social, economic and political; LIBERTY of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship; EQUALITY of status and of opportunity, and to promote among them all FRATERNITY assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the Nation…
- For an incisive account of economic liberalisation and globalization in India, see C. T. Kurien, Global Capitalism and the Indian Economy, New Delhi, Orient Longman, 1994. For the rise of religious fundamentalism, see Tapan Basu, et. al., Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags: a critique of the Hindu Right, New Delhi, Orient Longman, 1993.
- Olu Oguibe, “In the ‘Heart of Darkness’,” Third Text 23, 1993, in Eric Fernie, ed., Art History and Its Methods, Phaidon, London, 1995, 318.
- G. M. Sheikh, “Among Several Cultures and Times”, in Carla Borden, ed., Contemporary Indian Tradition, New York, Smithsonian Institution, 1989, 107.
- Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 2000, 6–11. On 7, Chakrabarty states:“Historicism is what made modernity or capitalism look not simply global but rather as something that became global over time, by originating in one place (Europe) and then spreading outside it. This ‘first in Europe, then elsewhere’ structure of global historical time was historicist; different non-Western nationalisms would later produce local versions of the same narrative, replacing ‘Europe’ by some locally constructed center.”
- On the construction of “Indian” tradition in the later nineteenth century, see Tapati Guha-Thakurta, The making of a new ‘Indian’ art: artists, aesthetics and nationalism in Bengal, c. 1850–1920, Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 1992.
- Chakrabarty, op. cit.
- See Beyond the Future: The Third Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, (exhibition catalogue) Brisbane, Queensland Art Gallery, 1999, 46–57.
- In this regard, see also Marian Pastor Roces, “Consider Post Culture,” in Caroline Turner and Morris Low, eds., Beyond the future: papers from the conference of the Third Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, 1999, Brisbane, Queensland Art Gallery, 2000, 34–38.
- I am particularly referring here to E. B. Havell's (1861–1934) determination to liberate Indian art from “the blighting influence of Victorian prejudice” see Havell, Indian Sculpture and painting second edition, London: John Murray, 1928, p. 4. See also Tapati Guha-Thakurta, op. cit., and Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India 1850–1922: Occidental Orientations, Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 1994.
- Apinan Poshyananda, “The Future: Post-Cold War, Postmodernism, Postmarginalia (Playing with Slippery Lubricants)” in Caroline Turner, ed., Tradition and Change: Contemporary Art of Asia and the Pacific, Brisbane, Queensland University Press, 1993, 3–4.
- Having said this, it is important to acknowledge that the Fourth Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art scheduled to open at the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, on 12 September 2002, has stated its objectives to offer an in-depth perspective on the practice of 15 artists from the region, spanning three generations of practice leading to the contemporary. Also, scholars such as John Clark (see his Modern Asian Art, Sydney, Craftsman House, 1998, and other publications) have been consistently interested in problems of nationalism, modernity and modernist art across a number of Asian contexts for a number of years.
- The subcontinent first appeared on the “APT map” in 1996 with India's inclusion. In 1999, Pakistan and Sri Lanka were added to the list of participating countries. Concurrently, Asialink initiated its first artists-exchange-residency in South Asia in 1996 with the Fire and Life project involving artists from India and Australia. For the Asia-Pacific Triennials see exhibition catalogues produced by the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, in 1993, 1996, 1999. For Fire and Life, see exhibition catalogue, Melbourne, Asialink, vol. 1, 1996 and vol. 2,1997.
- Chakrabarty, op. cit., 27–30. It should also be noted that the relative paucity of discursive apparatus (publications, websites, distribution networks) in several Asian countries and the domination of the arena of academic or art publication by a few Euro-American publishers has not helped the situation.
- For histories of the city of Bombay, see, Sujata Patel and Alice Thorner, eds., Bombay: Metaphor for Modern India, Bombay, New York, Oxford University Press, 1995, and Sharada Dwiwedi and Rahul Mehrotra, Bombay: the cities within, Bombay, India Book House, 1995.
- Aijaz Ahmad, “Cry the Beloved Country” Frontline Vol. 19, No. 3, June 22-July 05, 2002. (Sourced from http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fll913/19131140.htm). Ahmad's essay offers a perspective on not only the recent carnage against minorities in Gujarat, but takes stock of political and economic developments over the last decade, and the last year in particular, that have seen the forces of transnational capitalism and religious fundamentalism participate in a rapid erosion of the secular fabric of the country.
- Chakrabarty, op. cit., 27–30, 42–43.
- Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean, Introduction, The Spivak Reader: selected works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, New York, Routledge, 1996, pp. 4–5.
- http://www.opencirclearts.org/about.htm
- See my “Process Notes: The Open Circle Experiment” Lalit Kala Contemporary 44 (New Delhi, 2001), 34–40. Also at http://www.opencirclearts.org/e_chy.htm
- Details at http://www.opencirclearts.org/01_studyl.htm and http://www.opencirclearts.org/p_actions.htm
- The Jehangir Art Gallery (est. 1950) is a public gallery located in the heritage precinct of South Bombay. Nearby are the Gateway of India, the Prince of Wales Museum and the Bombay branch of the National Gallery of Modern Art. The Jehangir is a major tourist attraction, quite easily the best-attended gallery in the city. A few thousand visitors pass through its doors every day.
- Shilpa Gupta, Untitled (prove that you care), 1997. This text is part of the salesperson's “performance” and can be viewed in full at http://members.tripod.com/shilpagupta/pg_3_installation_prove.htm
- For a history of the J. J. School, see N. M. Kelkar, Story of Sir. J. J. School of Art: 1857–1957, Bombay: Government of Maharashtra, n.d. See also Guha-Thakurta and Mitter, op. cit.
- Dodiya was invited in 2001 to present an exhibition of a decade of his work (curator: Ranjit Hoskote) at the Japan Foundation Forum, Tokyo. See Bombay: Labyrinth/Laboratory, exhibition catalogue, Japan Foundation Asia Center, Tokyo, 2001.
- Apropos the Western-ness of illusionistic painting, it is instructive to remember that this kind of art is not that new to the subcontinent, nor is it a straightforward case of'imposition” on Indian artists. A number of artists have engaged with the tools and techniques of illusionism, from the religious pictures presented by Jesuit missionaries to the Mughal emperors Akbar and Jehangir in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and especially since the introduction of academic, neo-classical painting and sculpture in Indian art schools in the 1850s. As with the English language, it is no longer productive to view illusionism as only Western, or only an imposition.
- Appropriation and quotation are of course, seen as hallmarks of “postmodernist” art practice in the West. While it would be possible to make such a formulation in the “Indian” situation, I suggest that this would be inaccurate. For this would ignore the specific determinants of modernist or contemporary art practice in a non-Western context, applying a “universal” periodization based on style, theme or content, which springs essentially from a Western experience of modernism.
- I am referring here to the work of Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, 1984, p. xxi:“… mutation makes a text habitable, like a rented apartment. It transforms another person's property into a space borrowed for a moment by a transient. Renters make comparable changes in an apartment they furnish with their acts and memories; as do speakers, in the language into which they insert both the messages of their native tongue and, through their accent, through their own “turns of phrase”, etc., their own history… In the same way the users of social codes turn them into metaphors and ellipses of their own quests. The ruling order serves as a support for innumerable productive activities, while at the same time blinding their proprietors to this creativity…”
- Atul Dodiya, artist's statement, Bombay: Labyrinth /Laboratory, op. cit. 75.
- On Malani's work, see Kamala Kapoor and Amita Desai, eds., Nalini Malani: Medeaprojekt, Bombay, Max Mueller Bhavan, 1997; Geeta Kapur, “Body as Gesture: Women Artists at Work” in her When Was Modernism: Contemporary Cultural Practice in India, New Delhi, Tulika, 2001, pp. 3–60; and my “The possibilities of device: the work of Nalini Malani and Nilima Sheikh” in Binghui Huangfu, ed., Text and Subtext: Contemporary Art and Asian Woman, Singapore, Earl Lu Gallery, 2000, 127–137.
- “The Buddha Has Smiled” was the code phrase used by the Indian military authorities to signal successful detonations of nuclear weapons on 15 May 1998, the birth anniversary of the Buddha.
- Saadat Hasan Manto, “Toba Tek Singh” from Mottled Dawn: Fifty Stories and Sketches of Partition, translated from the Urdu by Khalid Hassan, New Delhi, Penguin Books, 1997, 1–10.
- India's Bharatiya Janata Party-led Right-wing government exploded five nuclear warheads at Pokhran on May 11 and 13, 1998. Pakistan followed suit with three explosions at Chagai on May 28 and 30. The Kargil War was fought between the two countries during the (northern) summer of 1999, on Himalayan battlefields over 4000 m above sea level. On the Kargil and nuclear issues, see N. Ram, Riding the Nuclear Tiger, and Praveen Swami, The Kargil War, New Delhi, Left Word Books, 1999 (both volumes).
- See my “Home and Away: contemporary Indian art in the international arena,” Art Monthly Australia, September 2002.