A
Moment in Time: The Sardari Lal Parasher
Retrospective
by The Sarnir
Foundation and the Visual Arts Gallery
India Habitat Center, New Delhi, India
1 August, 200413 August 2004
Web address: http://www.indiahabitat.org/vag/vag2k4/august2k4_f01.htm.
Reviewed by Aparna Sharma
Aparna31S@netscape.net
A Moment in Time: The Sardari Lal Parasher
Retrospective was a fortnight-long
exhibition that brought together some
of the rare works by one of modern India's
significant visionaries, Sardari Lal Parasher
(1904-1990). A series of discussions and
panels throughout the event provided insight
into the work of an artist and thinker
sparsely mentioned in Indian art and history
texts. Having participated in the most
tumultuous times of Indian history (i.e.
during the independence struggle, partition,
and followed by the massive efforts for
nation building), Parasher speculated
deeply on the idea of modernism, and how
modernity would be visualised in the Indian
context. This project was, indeed, and
continues to be complex; for the investment
of India's cultural specificity cannot
be accomplished without evoking Indian
philosophical thought embedded in all
disciplines including the arts. The points
of contact and sharp variations between
the tenets of modernism as it emerged
in the West, and the Indian tradition
inject as much rigour as disputation into
situating modernity within the Indian
local.
Parasher's work is characterised by a
sense of transitionone that
resists resolution. His work emulates
both the immediacies of the environment
he encountered (having migrated to India
upon partition and served as a commandant
of a refugee camp in Punjab) and a timeless,
spiritual almost hypnotic quality. His
Partition Sketches, the most moving
series, reflect intensely the agonies
the end of the imperial era brought to
the subcontinent. With great concern and
dignity they portray the silence, grace
and resilience of those who migrated in
the mass exodus. The rest of his works,
too, are laden with an imperceptible sense
of anxiety, felt in the vibrancy and tensions
in the compositions.
The formal and material aspects of the
work are subtly luring. They are underpinned
by a deep personal response to the Indian
aesthetic tradition as enshrined in India's
ancient texts. The curvilinear
form and the motif of shakti, (energy,
the female goddess/principle) occur often.
In one of his statements, Parasher termed
his approach as pranantarik (prana
or life force bound inwards): it
is individual, diffused . . . an upsurge
of prana shakti or vital life force.
One can hardly encapsulate the experience
of participating in his work. And it is
in precisely this way that the Indian
tradition is invoked fully in Parasher,
as the aesthetic experience is more than
visual or pertaining to the form or content
of the work only.
Responding to Parasher's thinking, the
talks and seminars at the retrospective
too delved on the question of modernity.
They achieved in injecting necessary complexity
into the idea of modernity generally and
textuality more specifically. The first
seminar, "Posting Modernity in India
as a Question Mark," interrogated
modernism as a universal and temporally
consistent encounter. Author and art critic
Gita Kapur succinctly emphasized ideological
investigations for contextualizing modernity
and extrapolating it from Western hegemonic
discourses. The most active sites of contest,
she noted, fall outside the West, where
the experience of modernity has been disjunctive
and dialogic for categories such as the
subaltern. The moments of disjuncture,
which are widely discussed within post-colonialism,
command possibilities for empowerment
as they make occasions for 'reinventing
and reinscribing oneself in history and
politics', according to Kapur.
The discussion following the panel concluded
that modernity outside the Euro and North
American nexus was variegated chronologically
in comparison with the dominant West and
within national formations too, where
it hasn't been unified or blended either.
Thus, hinting the ignorance, universalising
and dominating tendency in the preoccupations
and concerns of some Western academia
with respect to the 'breakdowns' instituted
by late capitalism. The dalit movement
in India, the ecofeminist struggles across
portions of the 'third world', political
assertions on behalf of peripheral
states: these are situated in moments
of discontinuity with dominant ideological
discourses that force examining modernism.
In this sense the unity inscribed in the
understanding of history too comes under
scrutiny. The second seminar, Archaeology
of time, which comprised a cross section
of intellectuals and artists, traversed
such territory. The smooth notion of cyclical
time say in terms of the Yuga theory
pertaining to ancient India was one instance
that was critiqued as being monolithic
and contestable. Reviews, such as this,
explicate the exoticism, glorification
and innocence attached to cultures commonly
termed as 'native' or other' within
the framework of dominant ideologies,
not only from the West.
The experience of time being heterogeneous,
multi-layered and coexistent as suggested
at the seminar throws open possibilities
for text-making where time is not simply
linear and its experience not unitary.
In this context, an earlier talk by author
and publisher, Urvashi Butalia who responded
to Parasher's Partition Sketches
is particularly significant. Urvashi belongs
to the second generation after partition.
Having spotted the same silences in Parasher's
sketches as she had encountered while
researching her celebrated book on the
subject: The Other Side of Silence,
she emphasized that the inter-generational
dialogue transcended the bounds of time,
gender and disciplines: but at the same
time the specificities of successive generations
make an altogether different idiom: more
distanced and employing different language.
In place of viewing the 'dissolution'
of sentiment with pessimism, Urvashi suggested
that the distance of later generations
be viewed as a source for resolution.
This suggestion is crucial to textuality,
as the binarisms of inside/outside, within/without
are confused, with the confusion serving
as a hybrid site, enunciating from where
new visions and more critical juxtapositions
can be infused.
Another insightful intervention was
film scholar, Gayatri Chatterjea's introduction
to her developing research into early
Indian cinema. Gayatri concentrated on
the percolation of traditional Indian
visual culture. Using clips from Devdas
(1935) and Jogan (1951), she
noted that the movement instilled by the
cinematic apparatus 'shook' the iconic
image, investing narrative in it; transforming
the sacred into say the erotic as in the
examples she used. The Indian aesthetic
tradition is further imbibed in camera
movements and patterns of editing particular
to that era. These do not merely feed
into the construction of narrative; but
their import lies in their reversal of
dominant cinematic codes, be they from
the industries of the West at that time,
or those that developed later in India.
Gayatri suggested the early cinematic
image as secular, implicated in cross
movements and thus a site of exchange
between multiple discoursesthus,
more sophisticated and fine, engaging
the audience more profoundly than say
the contemporary popular image.
While most of the proceedings at the retrospective
were stimulating, the seminars would have
developed more cogently with deeper speculation
on some philosophical aspects of the discussions,
had the programme schedule permitted.
The panels too could have benefited from
a more geographically and intellectually
diverse representation. And while the
retrospective accorded Sardari Lal Parasher
an acknowledgement long overdue and confronted
crucial issues; it remained wanting for
rigour and coherence. Parasher had noted
the preoccupation of the arts of the modern
world with 'mannerism or formalistic problems
of painting and its language'; and without
fully separating from these movements
he attempted to imbibe insights and realizations
from ancient Indian culture. The retrospective
was more liberal and informed; viewing
modernity with necessary skepticism but
without getting too cynical.