The Eternity of Homecoming

AMONG THE FIRST works to catch one’s eye at Desh-Pardesh— At Home in the World, an ongoing month-long “multidisciplinary arts exposition” organised by Engen­dered and curated by its founder Myna Mukherjee, is a pair of untitled pieces by Seema Kohli. These 20×16 inch works were created by hand painting images onto old black-and-white, silver-gelatin photographs using Fuji photo colour. In one, we see women from successive gen­erations standing on a railway platform at Pind Dadan Khan (in Punjab, Pakistan), sometime in the first half of the 20th century. The hand-drawn imag­es superimposed on the photograph are metonyms for migration—people being carried using a makeshift palanquin, belongings bundled up with a cloth wrapped around a stick. In the other untitled work, we see a group of villagers reading the newspaper in the morning, a flock of hand-drawn birds flying away near them even as a throbbing human heart lies isolated in the corner.

Kohli’s invocations of a shared cultural core between the two Punjabs (of Pakistan and India, respectively) are subtle and formally innovative, qualities shared by the rest of Desh-Pardesh, which plays off themes of longing and belong­ing, unity and diversity, nation and mi­gration. The first phase of the exhibition is called ‘Future Past Continuous’ and began on March 13 at Delhi’s Travancore Palace. The second and third phases will be held at the capital’s Bikaner House and Stir Art Gallery, respectively, until April 10, with live performances sched­uled at the India Habitat Centre. Over 50 artists from across India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and elsewhere have contributed to Desh-Pardesh. “The name ‘Future Past Continuous’ actu­ally came from what I feel is one of the major distinctions between Indian and Western cultures,” says curator Myna Mukherjee during an interview. “Whereas much of the Western world views time in a linear way, Indians see time as a cyclic entity. Eternal recurrence, birth and re-birth, these are our frame­works for looking at time and so much of our art reflects this distinction.”

Formerly a management consultant working on Wall Street, Mukherjee founded Engendered as a way of show­casing and engaging with South Asian art and culture through the lens of hu­man rights and gender. Art exhibitions, film festivals, music, dance et al—across the last decade or so, Engendered has been responsible for organising and platforming artists from all of these me­diums and more. With Desh-Pardesh, the idea was to explore not just new ways for diasporic artists to engage with their homeland cultures, but to open up new modes of thinking about ideas like nationality, citizenship, immigra­tion and cultural exchange. “My father worked for the armed forces and so as a child I lived in a bunch of places across the country,” says Mukherjee. “As an adult I found that I wasn’t fully at home amidst the diaspora in America, even though I learned a lot at university (Carnegie Mellon) and made some lifelong friends. And when I came back to India it was clear to me that I was very different from everybody here as well. So, I always had an insider-outsider perspective on this subject and with Desh-Pardesh we have attempted to col­lect artworks that talk about this feeling in new and surprising ways.”

One of the principal delights of Desh- Pardesh is observing the way these artists have approached fusion, which is to say, the convergence of culturally disparate styles, motifs and techniques. The work of Pakistani artist Shiblee Muneer is a good example. Muneer is from a family of miniature artists; his grandfa­ther enjoyed the patronage of Bhupinder Singh, the Maharaja of Patiala. Muneer’s work unites the min­iature style with contemporary imagery and interrogates the terms of cultural exchange. A Muslim Andy (12×12 inches, blue leaf on coated paper) re-imagines a famous work by Andy Warhol—the ba­nana he drew for the iconic album cover of The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967). In Muneer’s rendering, the banana is covered with Urdu/Arabic calligraphy.

Noreen Rashid is another Pakistani artist whose work displays many of the same qualities. In Satisfaction 1 and 2, a pair of gouache paintings on wasli paper, we see desi women drawn in the minia­ture style, weighed down by shopping bags with famous Western brand logos emblazoned on them. The Conversation (18×28 inches, gouache on wasli paper) is a fascinating painting where a Coca- Cola bottle appears to have sprouted a profusion of wild flowers, clouds of butterflies hovering around them. In the past as well, Rashid’s work has featured Coke bottles in scenes that channel the miniature and pop art styles. In The Conversation, the ‘organic’ (represented by the flowers and the butterflies) is flowing out of an artificial, corporate entity, a duality that makes even more sense when you consider the influence of Coke Studio in India and Pakistan. The YouTube videos from this immensely popular musical series are typically filled with Indian and Pakistani commenters exchanging playlists and pleasantries in the comments section.

“Shiblee and Noreen’s works are fas­cinating examples of how Indian and Pakistani artists have a shared artistic lineage,” Mukherjee says. “When you are in the West, the distinction between ‘Indian’ and ‘Pakistani’ matters less and less. At the end of the day, you’re a brown person, a South Asian and you have more in common than not. I think with these two artists, and the others from across Asia, the fascinating thing is observing how artistic traditions in different forms of the subcontinent— while sharing certain histories— have all blossomed in their own unique ways.”

The work of Indian artists like Ranbir Kaleka — known for his video installations, projections and mixed-media works — will comprise the third phase of Desh-Pardesh, where there will be ‘mini-solo’ exhibits allowing every art­ist’s work to develop its distinct identity. Kaleka’s works, especially Crossings (2005) and Not From Here (2009), have previously invoked the pain of Partition, especially for Punjabis (“We think he’s a master,” says Mukherjee about Kaleka’s work). Images of a white horse recur in his work, symbolising dynamism and endurance amidst a turbulent, ever-shifting world. In House of Opaque Water (2012), he had highlighted the precarious existence of indigenous communities in the Sunderbans, forever at the mercy of the elements. Desh-Pardesh also has other remarkable expressions of indigeneity, like the works of Gond artists such as Bhajju Shyam, Japani Shyam and Bhuri Bai. Bhuri Bai’s Adivasi Ka Rehan-Sehen is a 120x 64 inches, acrylic-on-canvas work containing scenes from everyday Gond life. It’s one of those painstakingly crafted large-scale paintings that are mesmerising and immersive when viewed from up close — the more you gawk at it, the more you discover new and surprising details that had escaped your eye at first. It also reminded me of large-scale Madhubani paintings from my childhood in Bihar, where similarly quotidian scenes from rural life are often juxtaposed with more pointed, ecological commentary.

“Once again, when it comes to folk or tribal art,” says Mukherjee, “there is this false perception that these forms cannot be high concept, that only modern or contemporary art can be that way. But for me, the term ‘contemporary’ is not about style, primarily. It’s about talking about contemporary issues, talking about the here and now, which the works of Japani Shyam and Bhuri Bai certainly do. If you look at Bhuri Bai’s painting, she is talking about the anxiet­ies associated with a rapidly changing world, about people holding onto old ways of living. What could be more contemporary than that?”

MUKHERJEE’S PENCHANT for collaborations and socially conscious art is also seen in her work as a film programmer. The I View World film festival, started by Engendered, re­turned to Delhi earlier this month at the Travancore Palace between March 12 and 16, as well as at PVR ECX, Chanaky­apuri. Among the films being shown was the anthology film My Melbourne, consisting of short segments directed by Imtiaz Ali, Kabir Khan, Rima Das and Onir. Themes of belonging and alienation mark these four stories, which also involve gender, sexuality, disability and race. Sandhya Suri’s Santosh, Britain’s official Oscar entry for Best International Feature, also made the lineup. This widely lauded film stars Shahana Goswami as a widow who inherits her late husband’s job as a police constable. In the past as well, Engendered and Mukherjee have served as distribution and premier partners in America for films like Rituparno Ghosh’s Arekti Premer Golpo/ Just Another Love Story (2010) and Onir’s I Am (2010), both involving LGBTQ stories set in India.

Mukherjee’s background at Carnegie Mellon and then later at Wall Street has made her current position as a “cultural producer and curator” very interesting indeed. This is an era where procuring funds for the arts is becoming more and more of a challenge with every passing day, which is why the role of corporate patrons has been enhanced. On the other hand, artistic circles both in India and the West have often criticised or outright rejected corporate patronage on moral grounds—look at the increased scrutiny around litfest sponsorship in the UK and India, for instance. In such a tricky scenario, the role of people like Mukherjee, who have footholds in both worlds, becomes even more important. They have the potential to unite people, people who are often more than a little suspicious of one another.

“I wouldn’t even call it suspicious, to be honest, more like disdainful,” says Mukherjee with a laugh. “But I think the disdain comes more out of miscon­ceptions than anything else. I think the corporate world has the potential to teach you discipline and focus. And I think that art and artists are so vital for everybody’s lives, really, in terms of how they expand our consciousness, in­troduce us to new and counter-intuitive modes of thinking. So, I feel we all have things to learn from one another when we collaborate, when we solve prob­lems together.”

(Desh-Pardesh—At Home in the World, curated by Myna Mukherjee, runs across various venues in Delhi, till April 10)

art exhibitionsAt Home in the WorldBhuri BaiDesh-PardeshMyna MukherjeeNoreen RashidShiblee Muneer