Trying to find the aesthetic with the lens of history...
Anthropologist, art historian and professor of anthropology and visual culture at University College, London, Christopher Pinney ( http://www.christopherpinney.com/) believes the Empire follows art and not vice versa. He uses this hypothesis in the context of modern India extending the privilege of aesthetic and figural excess to much broader social and political practices. DNA's Yogesh Pawar caught up with him on the sidelines of a lecture in Mumbai. This is the unedited version of the full length interview which was carried on April 19th:
Why is someone who has lectured at universities like Northwestern, Goldsmiths, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, and Columbia and with your academic background interested in rural India?
Why not? I should ask. (Laughs) From the early 80s when I went to the Malwa region in Madhya Pradesh I have been fascinated with the rich socio-cultural tapestry of rural India and what it has to offer in the way the aesthete there plays out even as the culture, economics and
politics often tug in different directions.
I have a Kiplingesque connect with India. Though born in Sri Lanka, as a six-year-old when we went to Europe by sea, and the boat stopped at what was still Bombay. I have a distinct memory of walking ashore with my father at this beautiful sunlit place, between the rains of Sri Lanka and "the blasted hellish drizzle of England"... it must have lodged itself in my subliminal consciousness! The other reason for myinterest in India was my grandfather, who had been in an artillery unit in North India, and was never as happy as he had been then. I got from him the sense that India was somehow very important. So, from early on, I had the idea that a life that didn't involve spending time in India would be incomplete.
But I actually came to India to work on the industrial labour question, inspired by reading the work of the great British labour historian EP Thompson. Anthropologist Adrian Mayer, who'd worked in Dewas, suggested I go to Malwa and I thought, that's the place for me.
I met workers in their houses and the chromolithographs on the walls made me interested in that aesthetic. People I met showed me their photographs. Also, I was constantly being asked to take photographs of villagers. That was when it struck me that there was something here worth studying: a local aesthetic of legibility that was offended by shadow, by contrast.
Much of your work including Camera Indica: The Social life of Indian Photographs, Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India, and The Coming of Photography in India takes a look at the world through the lens of history. Would you say that the
status of photography in India has changed, from the colonial period till the present day?
My first book, Camera Indica, was divided into two parts. The first part was about colonial photography, which I argued was about surveillance and identification, often involving the imposition of identities upon Indians that they may well have resented. So photography, in its early Indian incarnation, came out looking like a villain. The second part of the book was a celebration of local Malwa village photographic practices: overpainting, fantastical backdrops, artisanal collage and montage work which, to me, represented a postcolonial Indian resourcefulness. These photographers were extraordinarily witty and inventive, disrupting the normative space of
Western photography, the desire to fix an identity within the frame.
I've returned to many of these themes in my forthcoming book. Except that now I would argue that creativity, projection and what I call prophecy is a characteristic of all photography, not just small town Indian vernacular practice.
As you've argued in Camera Indica, the studio becomes a place where rather than reiterating pre-existing identities, individuals could explore identities that did not exist in the social world.
Exactly. Photography lends itself to a kind of fantasy. You're given a space in which to enact an identity. And photography's peculiar magic is that it gives you a record of that moment, so that to ask whether that is or is not the real you is not an appropriate question. All photography has that potential - it allows you to come out better.
Pictures are not just illustrations of things we already know. I'm interested in picture-making technologies as avant-garde projects that make worlds.
To come back to your hypothesis, isn't most art a slave to patronage and hence will it not follow the empire/ establishment and not otherwise as you suggest?
Eco-political aesthetics, after all is the primary motto of all political transformation. We have to look at how the economic infrastructure, ideological thought processes and sociological narrative consolidate to form the reality we live in to understand this. Its like the aesthetic which made Europeans attracted to say the bright colour of Indigo or how the rising pepper prices made Columbus set out on his expedition. There are enough engravings which celebrate these seemingly unconnected triggers which set off an entire course of history and politics.
Many feel Indians as people revel in the ugly and cite the completely-removed-from-any- Indian-sensibility phallic Mumbai highrises or the Punjabi-Gothic loudness ofthe new look Delhi homes. Do you feel that we have lost all sense of the aesthetic?
I wouldn't go as far as that. I still feel the everyday aesthete of rural India is still immensely beautiful, but you are right about the utter lack of any historical sensibility or heritage patina to the over all understanding. In the village in Malwa where I work there was a raised stone platform with twin shiv lingas and yonis under banyan tree out in the open. This structure could easily be over 500-years old. Now the villagers have gotten together and built a brightly coloured temple 'to protect' the shrine. For reasons of convenience in maintaining they have chosen bathroom tiles for the walls both inside and and out. What this does to the serene beauty of the original
structure is too strong to say in words. But then maybe there is after all some sense in this aesthete too which is beyond us.
There is also the unique circumstance of multiple global intersections that one has to factor in. This is how even in the most remote village, a flashy new-fangled mobile will be whipped out with flourish to look at the tithi or thechaughadia of the day.
You're new project also works with Dalits using modern technology to improve their acceptance by upper caste Hindus
That is right. In a village near Ratlam the villagers say they've seen a five headed snake once every year at Naga Panchmi fleetingly. It had never been photographed before since it was presumably lithe and quick Yet am image was generated thanks to the local Suhaag studio and some ingenious photoshop by a Dalit devotee who has gained new found respect in the village.
The Dalits also want the entire process of how some of them come to be possessed by Gods and Goddesses recorded on video as this will prove that they are not lying and improve their acceptance. So advanced technology also keeps playing with the various narratives we mentioned
earlier.
But aren't you doing exactly what many European scholars are accused of doing by romanticising / mocking Indian superstition?
This discomfort with my work is largely metropolitan and there are many who see this as some 'new kind of Orientalism.' These images have been called superstitious by the rational 'modern' India and it marks a point of collision between two Indias. Mind you, I am not saying this is the real India. There are many and they often misunderstand each other. These images are, in fact, a response to global angst about the planet and we would do well not to ignore these or dub them
as kitsch. They need to be understood as a sign of our times.
Isn't this kind of existence then in way schizophrenic? On one hand you want the latest gadgets and aspire to eat at McDonald's and on the other you still think nothing of being stuck in age-old superstitious beliefs...
Unfortunately yes, the role models are urban and often out of sync with ground realities. Not that the authorities or government are making it any easier. The government thinks bringing latest mobile technology is a priority when it is crystal clear that the rural poor want uninterrupted power supply to run their threshers in the field for at least an hour at a time. This yawning gap between the 'felt' and 'assumed' need can be quite frustrating.
Doesn't this warrant a revolt?
Despite the legendary resilience of the rural poor, I must admit that I sense a shift. Nobody wants the Naxal menace to spread but we have to find out why outfits like BSP are finding gradual acceptance. In a small Malwa town when a statue was being installed in thepublic square, the upper castes wanted a Maharan Pratap but the Dalits have said they want it to be Babasaheb Ambedkar. Even until a decade ago this would have been unthinkable. The public and political space has been monopolized for far too long by the Nehrus and Gandhis. The Dalits and marginalised realise that if they have to sit at that table they will have to assert themselves. Even if this means, indulging in politics of spectacle themselves.
However much they may be derided as megalomaniacal, the Ambedkar Udyans of Mayawati need to be seen in this perspective.
Do you feel the entire narrative of political discourse in India is now slave to image only/ Is that why we see such a chaos of symbols and symbolism in everything Indian politicians do?
This has indeed begun to spin a bit out of control, yes. One of the most powerful examples of a party victim of its own image came with the 2004 NDA government India Shining campaign which the BJP then appropriated as its election campaign. And the election was lost at a level of the image. The aesthetic experience was completely incongruent with the political and economic grievance.
Psephologically, despite everything being pro-BJP, the images of the campaign cruelly amplified the grim realities. The Congress relied on a black-and-white Bimal Roy-Mehboob Khan mould campaign and romped to victory.
Given the intense disparities, corruption and polarisations do you then see any hope?
If you ask the Anna Hazares of the world you will get 'no' as an answer. But I see hope. The NREGS may have its imperfections in implementation but it is making a difference. Yes 1992-93 was blot but look at how Mumbai and India dealt with 26/11 and it fills you with hope
.
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