It is almost 50 years since Simone de Beauvoir asked of the western world What is a woman? The question has not gone unreplied. De Beauvoir answered herself famously in that alternately applauded and pilloried text, The Second Sex. And at least two generations of women have asked the same of themselves since.
It is also the fiftieth year of Indian independence, as governmental bodies and various other guardians of public conscience never fail to remind you. And 12 Indian women, in particular, have spent a lot of time grappling with questions, when not grappling with paintbrushes. They are among the 15 women whose art works feature in what is only the second major showing of Indian women artists at the capitals National Gallery of Modern Art.
The show, entitled The Self and the World is a joint effort of Delhi-based Gallery Espace and the NGMA. It is part retrospective, part art historiography and part plain self-indulgence. For the curator of the show, Gayatri Sinha, it is only her second outing from a profession as art and drama critic. The first was in 1996 for the Festival Of India in Bangladesh.
The exercise is as much about the curator as the creator. Usually unacknowledged, and indeed, largely unpractised in India, the job of the curator is also therefore largely ignored. This show has been a peculiar challenge for Sinha, and now, that its been a good days work, she adds, exciting. I worked with words, with text, and wrote about the visual. But the visual art, being the more purely subjective experience, was particularly exciting. The word is a fact, but the visual art is not.
It is, she makes clear, one womans perspective of art by other women as much as a showcase for the art. It really all started with Sinhas book, Expressions and Evocations: Contemporary Women Artists of India, commissioned by Marg Publications. Renu Modi, proprietor Gallery Espace, was impressed by the book and ventured to ask Sinha if she would curate a show of the works of the same fifteen artists featured in the book.
Space and infrastructural problems made the two turn to the National Gallery for help. They obliged, made a happy connection with the much-touted fiftieth year of Independence and are now hosting the show.
The exhibition itself is impressive. It manages to be a crash course into the history of modern Indian art, is certainly a reader of the works of the artists featured, and at the very least, makes for a pleasurable afternoons work. The labyrinth that is the NGMA also provides side benefits such as plenty of exercise and mildly entertaining direction-games.
The visitor to the show, with the aid of only marginally helpful arrows, in the direction of 15 of the most familiar names in the Indian art world. Theres a chronological logic at work; Sinha uses as her starting point, the works of Amrita Sher-Gil, an artist at the apex of the modern Indian art movement. And, perhaps more incidentally to some, a woman. For Sinha, that fact contained a special meaning which had little to do with coincidence.
Then on to Devayani Krishna, printmaker of the 1960s, who struggled even for the means to produce her art. Says Sinha, She worked without even a rudimentary press. Piloo Pochkhanawala, represents sculpture imbued with a western outlook; alongside Meera Mukherjee, also sculptor, who was one of the last great Romantics.. Nasreen Mohamedi, Arpita Singh, Anjolie Ela Menon, Madhvi Parekh, Anupam Sud, Nilima Sheikh, Gogi Saroj Pal, Nalini Malani, Latika Katt, Navjot Altaf, and finally Arpana Caur are all products of the post-seventies mini-art enlightenment.
Sinha has been careful, also, to include artists who work in different mediums. Theres sculpture, prints, mixed media works, oils on canvas, watercolours..., she says with satisfaction. Her curatorial work is not informed by any post-modern imperatives. Absolutely not, she says firmly. Never mind that shes living in post-modernist times. She displays a piquant logic: You could deconstruct the work of Jeanette Winterson; but Wordsworth? Nalini Malani, perhaps, but not, for sure, Meera Mukherjee.
Feminists often ask themselves what and whom, precisely, they are fighting for. What do women, apart from the simple biological commonality, share? And here, in what way is an art exhibition purporting to showcase the works of women artists, not an impertinent assumption about those artists? Sinha steers clear of trouble: I deliberately avoided using the parameters of feminist or feminine. But there is a need to acknowledge both the woman artist as a speaking subject, and the existence of gender difference that guides the production of certain kinds of images.
This selection of those certain kinds of images has certainly not emerged from one kind of woman. But in most, you would be hard-pressed to find images of anything remotely male. Even Sinha confesses to having noticed this somewhat startling fact only when the works were being installed. Maybe its coincidence... she wonders.
Many works display a narcisisstic preoccupation with the female form, whether tortured or rapturous. And many more have thematic concerns vested purely in the feminine. Or is it feminist? If Sinha would concede to some po-mo jargon, she could at least call it a visual representation of femininity.
