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

Susan Snodgrass

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The social and cultural complexities of India are exposed in "New Narratives: Contemporary Art from India," an ambitious traveling exhibition that maps personal, political and historical narratives from the perspective of 21 artists and some 60 works. It debuted at the Chicago Cultural Center last summer and opens this month at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University. Organized by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs with the aid of independent curator Betty Seid, it is one of several large-scale surveys devoted to contemporary Indian art currently touring Europe and the U.S. (an exhibition organized by the Kunstmuseum Bern is devoted to a similar theme). (1) These exhibitions reflect the West's rising interest in contemporary Indian art as well as the country's flourishing art economy (as recently reported in the New York Times (2)).

More important, India, the world's largest democracy and third largest military force, emblematizes our globalized, Dost-9/11 world. There one finds a confluence of religions (Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism, Islam, Christianity, Judaism) and a hybrid economy that merges the post-Independence Marxist policies instituted in 1947 by prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru with economic reforms initiated in 1991 to open India's markets to foreign investment. The latter, known as "liberalization," has made India a key player in the fields of technology, communications and mass media, and supported a boom in the mega film industry known as Bollywood.

The impact of globalization is not, of course, without cost. In 2000, over 28 percent of India's approximately one billion people lived below the country's poverty line, (3) and there is a huge gap in income and consumption between the wealthy and the poor. In his travelogue Temptations of the West, Pankaj Mishra traces the effects of Western-style modernization upon the cultures of Southeast Asia, noting "India, with its severe disparities of income, caste, and religion is split into ... many separate worlds." (4)

"New Narratives" similarly conceives India as a series of more or less discrete worlds, with each artist exploring different aspects of Indian society and the contemporary Indian psyche. The rubric of narrative provides a connective thread within the diversity of current art practice (all works in the show except one have been created since 2000). Seid lends a literary framework to the theme of narrative and storytelling, as reflected in her catalogue essay. Critic Johan Pijnappel's insightful text on video art describes digital media, particularly multichannel, interactive works, as the "new narrative matrix." Pijnappel served as consulting curator for video and new media works, which prove to be some of the strongest in the show.

Perhaps to avoid the pitfalls of imposing any semblance of Western authority, the organizers have taken a fairly apolitical stance, despite the political content of many of the works. The wall texts and the catalogue would both have benefited from more information on India itself in order to situate contemporary art practice there within a broader cultural context. Instead, the exhibition's social content emanates solely from the works themselves, which are organized into three subthemes: Looking Inward: Narratives of the Self; Looking Outward: Contemporary Observations; Looking Backward: Interpreting Texts. Several artists who work across various mediums are represented in more than one section.

The show includes several artists with international reputations. Nalini Malani was included in the main exhibition of the 2007 Venice Biennale, while Subodh Gupta's monumental skull cobbled from stainless-steel cooking vessels commanded the entrance to the Palazzo Grassi. A suite of large-scale watercolors by Atul Dodiya was on view at Documenta 12 (as was a video installation by Amar Kanwar, an artist conspicuously absent from the Cultural Center show). The majority of the artists in this intergenerational sampling hail from either Mumbai or New Delhi. That nearly two-thirds of them are female is important to note. It is a reflection, according to the curator, of the growing number of women artists gaining visibility in the Indian art world.

Private Lives

Gulammohammed Sheikh and Arpita Singh (both born in 1937) are the exhibition's elder artists. Together, they provide some historical grounding to the show's first section, Looking Inward: Narratives of the Self, where autobiography and personal symbols cohere into private tales that often intersect with narratives from India's cultural history.

Sheikh is a central figure in contemporary Indian art as well as an important teacher. His ongoing project Book of Journeys, begun in 1996, was represented by a digital facsimile of the 36-page, accordion-style original, which he declined to loan for exhibition. The book records key moments in the artist's life; the gouache and acrylic images range from densely worked and saturated pages to delicate figural drawings. Sheikh is both a storyteller and a documentarian. Scenes from his childhood home in Gujarat, for example, and allusions to revered artists and poets unfold alongside responses to historic events, such as the nuclear tests India carried out in 1998 that brought worldwide condemnation.

Paintings by several artists similarly derive from recounted memories using personal iconography. In the oils of Singh, flat, stylized figures are juxtaposed with numbers and bits of text to form patterns that evoke calendars or vibrantly colored textiles--the latter no doubt influenced by her early career as a designer for the Weavers' Service Centre instituted under Mahatma Gandhi to keep indigenous textile arts alive. (5) While Singh's fragmentary narratives read like visual mantras, with their rhythmic repetition of personal images and words, Anju Dodiya's quasi-surrealist works translate as afterimages from a dream. A central female figure with a stoic expression dominates an ambiguous, ornamental backdrop of raised filigree; she assumes various roles and guises, from the mythic Penelope to the Hindu goddess Shakti. Freudian interpretations are encouraged by the artist's materials, as her scenes are painted with acrylics on brocade-upholstered mattresses.

Vasudha Thozhur's multipaneled oils combine self-portraiture and symbolic imagery to create visually rich narratives that transcend the merely personal. In the four-panel work Untouchable (2002-03), the vivid feathers of a peacock, the national bird of India, fill the third and largest panel. To the left, Thozhur depicts herself with a shaven head (a symbol of mourning); to the right is a disembodied leg marked with red Hindi text; the same color is used for the more graphic, abstract notations that occupy the work's first panel. As the title suggests, Thozhur speaks to issues of loss and marginalization, India's caste system, and the subordination of women. Sanctum (2006) employs similar conventions and a sequential format to describe the personal sanctuary of the artist's own studio.

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In Personal Space (2003), one enters the private world of Jayashree Chakravarty. This giant scroll, crafted from layers of paper and fabric stiffened with glue, unfurls into the textured, undulating wall of an enclosure, which the viewer navigates at will. The surface is painted in an earthen palette with occasional swatches of white and blue, while linear patterns suggestive of roadways and transportation systems chart a course unknown.

Hema Hirani Upadhyay and Vivan Sundaram make visible the ties of family by revealing moments from their private lives. Upadhyay collaborated with her mother, Bina Hirani, in the installation Mum-my (2007), a small domestic environment at the center of the first gallery. A large white cloth crocheted by Hirani covers a chandelier and drapes nearly to the floor. Exposed below are two prosthetic legs (belonging, the wall label states, to the artist's father) that pull the cloth out in opposite directions, as if it were occupied by a bent-kneed dancer. Surrounding this intimate, surreal tableau are four mixed-medium paintings, whose abstract, curvilinear patterns reveal small photographic images of the artist stitched to their surfaces in red thread. Separately displayed photos document an Indian residency project This space between you and me (2002), in which she wrote a letter to her parents by planting grass seed in word forms along a dirt path.

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.

Anita Dube similarly employs a sleight of hand in her video Kissa-e-Noor Mohammed (2004), one of the most poignant works in the show. With a straightforward head shot, the camera focuses on Noor, a bearded Muslim businessman who is given his 15 minutes of fame by the artist. Noor, who calls himself "an ordinary man, a hard-working man," tells the simple story of his life. He speaks of his friendship with Dube, of his deep feeling for poetry and literature while musing on the larger subjects of art, love and religion, finally warning against the evils of the "art of politics, which is fascism." After 15 minutes of wonderfully woven confession, acute observation and commentary, the credits roll and Noor is revealed to be the artist in drag.

Dube's faux interview, one of four single-channel videos compiled in a short program, contrasts sharply with Tejal Shah's quasi-documentary I Love My India (2003). Here, the artist poses several questions to random visitors in an arcade: What is democracy in India? What are your thoughts about the violence in Gujarat [where in 2002 ethnic riots erupted between the state's Hindus and Muslims, leaving thousands dead, missing or injured]? Their answers--reflecting ignorance, apathy and disillusionment with government--are delivered as they shoot at a target configured from balloons that spell out the work's title.

Valay Shende's single-channel Scrolls (2002) also comments on Gujarat. The artist appropriates scenes from a popular TV series, "Mahabharata," based on a Hindu myth about feuding brothers, as a metaphor for communal violence. Beneath fictitious scenes of war and pageantry runs a news-style crawl that reports the names of those missing in Gujarat. Sheude (b. 1980, the youngest participant in the show) is one of the few artists to parody the popular media, a powerful and pervasive force in Indian society.

Jitish Kallat points to the extreme polarities between the country's wealthy and poor in his moving Death of Distance (2006), which also critiques the communications industry. A giant rupee coin stands on edge next to a series of lenticular prints juxtaposing two news reports that shift from one text to another depending on the viewer's position. One narrative reports the launching of a new telecommunications plan, whereby one can "Call anywhere in India for one rupee." The other tells of a young Indian girl committing suicide because her mother could not give her one rupee to buy a school meal. The same news account cites a UN report that "half of India's children are malnourished."

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These kinds of inequities are found throughout Indian society. It is a country in the midst of a great transition, unable to reconcile past and present, tradition and modernity. A number of artists create narratives that operate within some middle ground in hopes, it seems, of facilitating personal or collective transformation. In Crossings (2005), Ranbir Kaleka intertwines the story of a young Sikh boy's rite of passage and that of a homeless family through the powerful layering of projected video images upon large painted canvases. N.S. Harsha fuses humor and social commentary in his acrylic painting series "Charming Nation" (2005-06), where clashes between East and West, new values and centuries-old beliefs play out in comic book style.

Of particular interest is the varied work of Subodh Gupta, a well-known figure in contemporary Indian art, represented here by two pieces. Both works draw on the notion of the sacred cow (or kamadhenu) in Hindu religion and its central role in rural Indian life. A sculpture titled Three Cows (2003) does so quite literally by casting in bronze the bicycles and pails used to deliver milk. This rather tongue-in-cheek spin on the readymade retains the metaphoric and symbolic associations of fecundity and prosperity, taken to an almost absurdist extreme in the video Pure (2000), where we witness the artist showering in cow dung. In India, cow dung is used as fuel, as fertilizer, as building material and as a cleansing agent; it is also a symbol of purity.

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New Parables

Works like Gupta's and others that look to the role of ritual and tradition in contemporary life create a transition to the exhibition's final theme, Looking Backward: Interpreting Texts. Artists in this smaller section reinterpret poetry, historical documents and mythical tales to create new parables more in sync with the realities of today's India.

Striking is Sheba Chhachhi's installation Neelkanth (Blue Throat): poison/nectar (2002), a Boltanski-esque environment utilizing illuminated photographs. Within a darkened room rise thin aluminum towers, each bearing on top a miniature photo of a sense organ (for example, ears or eyes), that together form an ominous cityscape. A light box with a photograph of a landfill occupies each corner, and on the floor at center is a flat-screen TV showing a throat that appears to swallow the garbage projected in the corners. Chhachhi's work is based on an ancient Indian myth in which Shiva swallows a poison created by the greed of demons and gods. The artist recasts the myth as an allegory of the negative impact of rampant modernization upon India's urban centers and rural environment.

The female heroines who occupy the richly saturated figurative paintings that Malani makes in addition to her video installations derive from Eastern and Western literature (for example, Radha, the Hindu god Krishna's lover, and Lewis Carroll's Alice). However, Malani's female characters are seen as victims of male oppression rather than as symbols of courage and strength. Rendered mainly in watercolors, acrylics and enamels on Mylar in a style reminiscent of Francesco Clemente's borrowings from Indian art, they inhabit cell-like grids or ambiguous grounds that reinforce their sense of entrapment.

Three paintings from Reena Saini Kallat's series "Sword Swallower" (2004) combine contemporary portraits of everyday citizens (a Muslim man, a woman, a young boy) and scenes of warring demons from Indian mythology, in a commentary on the impact of centuries of violence upon the present. Atul Dodiya's installation Devoured Darkness (2006) was created in response to the violence in Gujarat, but it looks to the past for understanding and solace. Comprising three large gallows, the work takes its title from a line in a poem by Allama erabhu, a medieval poet-saint who called for an inclusive spiritual practice, available to all. (6) Portions of Prabhu's verse appear in three large panels, along with drawn and collaged images by Dodiya, each placed to the right of one of the gallows. To the left of each is a small mirror that frames the viewer's face, a surface offered for further reflection and a foil that implicates us all.

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The strength of "New Narratives" is the great diversity it brings to its subject and the democratic space it lends to each artist-author. In essence, the plurality of India is echoed in the plurality of its art. So, too, are the challenges the country faces-challenges endemic to cultures everywhere. One foresees, with pleasure, more exhibitions devoted to India's artists as they plot the subjective realities of place into the global art matrix. "New Narratives" is a significant chapter.

(1.) The exhibition "Horn Please: Narratives in Contemporary Indian Art" was on view at the Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland, Sept. 21, 2007-Jan. 6, 2008. It included many of the artists in the Chicago Cultural Center show, as did "India: Public Places, Private Spaces--Contemporary Photography and Video Art," at the Newark Museum, Sept. 19, 2007-Jan. 6, 2008; and "Tiger by the Tail! Women Artists of India Transforming Culture," at the Kniznick Gallery, Brandeis University Women's Study Center, Waltham, Mass., Sept. 25-Dec. 3, 2007. "Nalini Malani: Mother India" was on view at Walsh Gallery, Chicago, July 20-Oct. 13, 2007. Ranbir Kaleka's Consider, a newly commissioned multimedia installation, is on permanent view at the Spertus Museum in Chicago.

(2.) Steven Henry Madoff, "India's Art, Booming and Shaking, "New York Times, Oct. 7, 2007, Arts, p. 29.

(3.) India's Human Development Report from the United Nations Development Program. Retrieved from http:// hdrstats.undp.org/countries/data sheets/cty_ds_IND. html, Nov. 4, 2007.

(4.) Pankaj Mishra, Temptations of the West: How to be Modera in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006, pp. 26-27.

(5.) Betty Seid in New Narratives: Contemporary Art from India, Usmanpura, Ahmedabad, India: Mapin Publishing in association with the Chicago Cultural Center, 2007, p. 42.

(6.) Ibid., p. 108.

"New Narratives: Contemporary Art from India" debuted at the Chicago Cultural Center [July 21-Sept. 23, 2007]. It traveled to the Salina [Kan.] Art Center [Jan. 5-Mar 16], and opens this month at the Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J. [Apr. 12-July 31].

Susan Snodgrass is a Chicago-based critic and an Art in America corresponding editor.

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