Being Indian in several Western museums these days is a strange proposition. How does one react to being from the same culture as the grand show, or to the souvenirs, recast for specific markets? My encounters in this realm have never been straightforward.
What triggered off these thoughts was a recent calendar I saw in a museum shop on the east coast of the United States. It was based on Bollywood posters — not only the ubiquitous Sholay but also some of the ‘80s hits. What exactly was anyone supposed to make of it? Was it celebrating a specific repertoire or was it a clever gimmick to break the boredom of buyers who see the same predictable, familiar aesthetic all the time? I am a child of the ‘80s, the nondescript decade of decadence and confused excess.
These were the years I was growing up and forming an independent identity. Some of those film posters work as part of my personal narrative. There is no sentimentalism here, but let me explain in another way: what if there was a calendar with Korean film posters? How would it work on my wall? Unless it was highly stylised, forced into a bounded category, and given a lot of publicity, it might not excite me. Apart from having watched some good films, I just don't know enough about Korean cinema. What terms do people not like me exercise when they buy such a product?
Much more difficult to make sense of was an umbrella with repeated images from a picchwai on it. By all accounts, it was beautiful. But the more I thought of it, the more I realised I would hate to take it out in the rain and allow streams of water to roll off something derived from an art tradition as dazzling. I have to say though that I did buy a Durga magnet because it was a unique representation from the Jodhpur school, and I liked the idea of presenting it as an addition to a religious friend’s puja ghar. Mind you, I am not suggesting that any of the original art forms are sacred and untamperable — that would be the death of the arts. It's just that it is disorienting to see familiar visual images de-contextualised and served up as souvenirs.
It was much easier for me to see two of the most spectacular shows I have seen in 2008, one on the royal paintings from Jodhpur-Marwar and the other, Muraqqa-Imperial Mughal Albums from the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, dominated by paintings commissioned by Jahangir and Shah Jahan. Just like in the Padshahnama, all those years ago, I was overawed by the preciousness of the skill and the visual impact of what I was seeing. There they were, these priceless works, with no intermediary intervention. Anyone who visited could take away what they wanted from the show, see it as they liked to. I felt nothing more than sheer exhilaration here.
Does all this make me an Arts Nazi propagating elemental purity? Not at all. People should be free to interpret the visual and its inheritance as they wish. But despite our global exposure to the arts, our cosmopolitan attitudes and secular upbringing, many of us from India are likely to walk through museum shops watching ourselves reinterpreted in ways that don’t speak back to us.
We’d be thrilled to see Bill Viola or Zaha Hadid, even many contemporary Indian art practitioners. Despite our assimilation of the global arts cross currents and flavours, these Indian-flavored objects will still confound some of us. I’ve learnt a lesson: one woman’s context is another one’s souvenir.