ORDER/SUBSCRIBE          SPONSORS          CONTACT          WHAT'S NEW          INDEX/SEARCH

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reviewer biography

Current Reviews

Review Articles

Book Reviews Archive

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, 2004——13 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 transition——one 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 discourses——thus, 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.

top

 

 







Updated 1st September 2004


Contact LDR: ldr@leonardo.org

Contact Leonardo: isast@leonardo.info


copyright © 2004 ISAST