A few days from now photographer Avinash Pasricha will turn 75. He’s spent a large chunk of those years taking pictures of classical artistes in performance — his iconic image of the Carnatic singer M S Subbulakshmi is as close to a spiritual experience as you’re likely to encounter — and yet: what happens to those photographs in another decade? Will they too hit the dung heap of history?
There’s a collecting ennui when it comes to a body of work that needs to be preserved for posterity. Who is to do it? If Pasricha were to put together an exhibition of those images, he’d be sure to sell some of them individually, but the possibility of anyone picking up the whole shebang, as a slice of history, and for the sake of documentation, is almost nil. And yet, albums of this sort — already rare — are in urgent need of the attentions of the collectorati.
Pasricha’s is a professional collection, but what of Mohan Khokar’s (now Ashish Khokar’s) collection of dance photographs, currently on view in the capital? Here is a medley of images that revives a nostalgia deeper and further than our own lives, of people — dancers, troupes, costumes — we are familiar with only through others’ snatched memories, or a stray image on a printed page. What happens to annals as rich as this?
An interesting archive can be a source of endless pleasure, as we have seen with the Raja Deen Dayal photographs, or indeed the Ebrahim Alkazi collection that documents the landscape and skyline of our cities at the height of British engagement with India, the fierce elegance of the warrior kings of the nineteenth century, voyeuristic glimpses of the Begums of Bhopal behind the purdah, of nautch girls and other flotsam and jetsam of royal and street life. Alkazi not only collected but also exhibited tirelessly, serving us a slice of that exhaustively catalogued medley of work. And yet, what does the future hold for it? A collector’s passion — and often, funds — stretch only so long. Should these curated collections be managed by the state’s institutions? Do they have the space or even the inclination? And what of the private sector? Should it not be involved in building foundations that can house, or at least fund, such collections? With every passing year, and certainly with every decade that slips by, we lose bits of our history. Can CSR activities not be hijacked to divert a part of those resources to build and create collecting (as opposed to merely cultural) organisations?
We have, as yet, no museum where we can exorcise the collective angst of Partition. None that preserves our popular culture even — of cinema, or theatre, of music and dance. Certainly nothing that records momentous events — famines, floods, the more recent tsunami, and the human stories of those attached to these natural or manmade catastrophes. Nor any that explore our idiosyncracies as a nation — instead, we have the heavy hand of a five-thousand-year-old civilisation recounted by way of sculptures and coins, jewellery and manuscripts, steeped and wrapped and smelling like a bureaucratic mummy in urgent need of resuscitation.
Meanwhile, those who find themselves with a collection of some merit ought to turn part of that archive into a book — something Pasricha should be persuaded to do not just to publish as photographs, but one that documents everything from the mudra and taal to the artistes, costume, lighting and the moment. It is history, after all — fleeting, but not yet gone.
Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic. These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated
