detour

Detour
Curated by Ranjit Hoskote

Dayanita Singh, Sonia Jabbar, Ram Rahman, Ravi Agarwal, Samar Jodha
18th December, 2009 - 9th January, 2010

DETOUR
Five Position Papers on the Republic

Ranjit Hoskote
When Shireen Gandhy of Chemould Prescott Road invited me to curate an exhibition commemorating the centennial of Gandhi’s seminal work, Hind Swaraj (1909), I responded with enthusiasm. I have turned to this complex text many times in the last 25 years, and to other key texts from the vibrant intellectual landscape of late-colonial India, such as Tagore’s critique of the nation-state in his courageous lectures on Nationalism (1916), Ananda Coomaraswamy’s insistence on the ethical as the basis for ‘Sva-rajya’ in The Dance of Shiva (1924), and Nehru’s memoir of an evolving self mediating between the oppressive and emancipatory potentialities of revolution, The Discovery of India (1946). By turns illuminating, exasperating and inspiring, these utopian and redemptive writings remind us that ‘nationalism’ was not a single script; that the India these thinkers envisioned was, and will always be, a work in progress.

This centennial is an occasion to consider whether the history of postcolonial India has been, not a linear progression towards new life-themes, but a roundabout return to the fundamental questions Hind Swaraj asks. Has post-1947 India been no more than a detour that brings us back to the debate between the two protagonists of Gandhi’s century-old dialogue: the Editor, embodying the reasoned and peaceful mode of emancipation, and the Reader, a belligerent advocate of violent revolution? The Hind Swaraj centennial also registers six decades of independence: we pause to compare foundational text with actual outcome; we trace the directions that India, incarnating one among several geographical translations of the conceptual Hind of Gandhi’s title, has taken. In this context, the detour is a productive trope of digression, self-interrogation and re-dedication.

*** ‘Detour’ marks the convergence of several trajectories. It is appropriate that Chemould should have extended this invitation: the gallery’s founders, Khorshed and Kekoo Gandhy, have always been committed to the ideals of a just, equitable and liberal national space, expressing this commitment in ways both theoretical and practical, and often at great personal risk, especially during the Emergency (1975-1977) and after the sectarian violence in Mumbai (1992-1993).

The invitation prompted me to bear witness to my own mixed practice as a poet, curator, theorist, editorial commentator and activist in the defence of cultural freedoms. In this spirit, I decided to invite—as collaborators in the ‘Detour’ enterprise—five artists I have long admired for the luminosity of their images or narratives, and also for the range of their imaginative and political investments. Dayanita Singh, Ram Rahman, Ravi Agarwal, Samar Jodha and Sonia Jabbar all work with the photographic image, but also articulate themselves across multiple media and contexts. They have placed themselves at hazard in the larger public sphere; indeed, have helped shape that sphere, rather than simply charting a career through the art world.

These artists have traced India’s collective crises and afflictions, mapping the journeys of individuating selves and menaced communities through a turbulent, transitional society. Dayanita Singh has explored the inner worlds of the marginal women of Benares, the women of Saligao, and the third-gender figure Mona Ahmed. Ram Rahman is a designer, writer, curator, photographer and activist for cultural freedoms, a founder member of the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (SAHMAT). Ravi Agarwal is an environmental activist, photographer and writer, founder of Toxics Link and explorer of the embattled terrain of the urban self. Samar Jodha is a photographer, film-maker and social activist who works with street children, peasantry, the ageing, and miners in the strife-worn North-east. Sonia Jabbar is an essayist, journalist, photographer, film-maker and human rights activist who has devoted the last 15 years to working in Kashmir.

For these artists, the activity of image-making evolves in intimate tandem with philosophical concerns, is informed by an attentiveness to re-defining the contours of the social and political contemporary. The questions of liberty, justice, equity and dignity, the discontents of a vexed collective memory, the awareness of constrained human agency and a vitiated lifeworld resonate powerfully in their work.

*** In critical homage to Hind Swaraj, ‘Detour’ thus brings together five complex artistic practices that address the many possible ideas of India, and the public urgencies that attend them. They ask what postcoloniality can mean as an opportunity for an amplifying self-transformation, and how that opportunity has often been wasted or perverted by a narrow self-interest.

‘Detour’ presents, as position papers on the Republic, significant suites of work or ongoing projects by Singh, Rahman, Agarwal, Jodha and Jabbar. Through the mise en scene are relayed passages from Thoreau, from whom Gandhi learned the value of civil disobedience; Gandhi himself; Nehru; Sunil Khilnani; and Ramachandra Guha, all influential contributors to our understanding of the ‘idea of India’.

The works in ‘Detour’ are animated by an astute politics; equally, they are modulated through a contemplative poetics. The archive, the collection and the series recur here: all five artists are engaged on long-term projects, so that their work acquires the currency of relevance as well as the weight of value. The ‘what-if’, ‘not-yet’, ‘perhaps-not’ and ‘why-this’ of inquiry are inscribed into these projects: if they critically unmask a continuously manufactured present, they also disclose the subjunctive, speculative and optimistic possibilities open to the cautious utopian.

‘Detour’ is a double-layered title. At one level, it refers to the manner in which one must sometimes go away to come back, move away from the object of love, attention or ideological commitment, in order to more fully understand and articulate it. Likewise, the photographic image registers a detour: it is generated at a remove from experienced reality, is born in the photographer’s imagination, then connects back with the circumstances that sparked it off.

Importantly, this is not a ‘photography exhibition’. Rather, ‘Detour’ is a platform where viewers may reflect on how the photographic image—variously constructed and recast—can act as a self-critical, self-renewing mode of investigation into what Bakhtin called a ‘chronotope’, that intricate meld of political structure, cultural environment, historical predicament and human desire, which must be released from such generic and constraining rubrics as ‘nation’, ‘state’ and ‘society’.