Multiple Indias: a traveling show of contemporary Indian art, now at Rutgers, addresses political, social and personal issues on the subcontinent

Sundaram, a well-known sculptor and painter and another of the senior figures in the show, recasts black-and-white archival images of members of his esteemed family in the photomontage series "Re-take of Amrita" (2001). The protagonists are the artist's aunt, Amrita Sher-Gil, one of India's first female artists and a renowned modernist painter, and his grandfather, Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, a Sikh aristocrat and photographer. Sundaram's digital manipulations reinforce the familial and artistic bonds between daughter and father (and by extension, Sundaram). By juxtaposing images from different sources in different states of dress he establishes character and creates sexual innuendo to attract our voyeuristic gaze.

Social Scapes

The exhibition gains momentum in the second section, Looking Outward: Contemporary Observations, in which individual responses to issues of national and global importance are embodied in a more diverse range of mediums and ideas. Of merit here, and throughout the exhibition, are the exceptional numbers of women artists who impart a feminist perspective to a broad spectrum of India's social ills.

Nalini Malani's impressive video installation, Unity in Diversity (2003), speaks to the continued subjugation of women in Indian society and to the failed utopias of Gandhi and Nehru. The title refers to Nehru's secular constitution, based on the humanitarian principles of Gandhi, which sought to eradicate the bonds of caste and religion. Malani reconstructed a stately upper-class, pre-Independence interior that is animated when ghostly figures of female musicians (based on the 19th-century painting Galaxy of Musicians by Raja Ravi Varma) appear on a video screen set within a gilded frame that hangs in the center of a red wall. Images of harmony and tranquility halt with the sound of a gunshot; the scene quickly spirals into a dramatic montage that implies violence, chaos and fear. A well-known black-and-white photograph of Nehru and Gandhi sits like a dusty relic on top of a small bookcase in the room.

An untitled interactive video installation (2004-05) by Shilpa Gupta, a leading figure of the younger generation, speaks urgently about the War on Terror. Projected onto the wall of a darkened room is a large computer screen in which seven female characters (all the artist herself) stand at attention and await the viewer's command; each is clad in camouflage clothing fashioned into the latest styles, such as miniskirts, midriff tops and capri pants. The piece is set in motion with the click of a computer mouse that unleashes a series of orders or exclamations:

   Stay/Look Straight
   Don't See/Don't Hear/Don't Speak
   Shut Up and Eat/Shut Up and Be/Hey Hey
   Don't Interrupt/Pray
   War on Terror/Where Terror?

The enlistees perform various military drills that seem to change at the viewer's whim. However, notions of the viewer's authority and control are undercut upon the discovery (only through didactic materials) that the women's actions are really scripted by Gupta.