Organizer and Chair: Walter Smith, Mississippi State University
Discussant: Mary-Ann Lutzker, Mills College
While the study of visual culture in contemporary Southern Asia is a growing sub-field, art historians have given little attention to visual responses to social and political issues. Conversely, visual culture is almost completely neglected in studies of contemporary events by historians, sociologists, and political scientists. Yet much of the reaction to the turmoil rocking Southern Asia over the past decade took visual form, and indeed, the very articulation of certain issues can be said to have been visual. We must remember, for example, that at the center of India’s Ayodhya crisis was an artistic monument, the Babri Masjid, and its destruction was a profoundly visual "anti-art" event.
The papers in this panel lay the groundwork in bringing this important aspect of contemporary South and Southeast Asia into scholarly perspective, showing multi-faceted visual responses to socio-political issues and events. The artist’s role as social and political activist will be particularly addressed, artists having placed their work at the heart of debates on secularism, communalism, political corruption and social justice. Visual art plays a didactic role as well, utilized to instruct and propagandize. While many artists project leftist political viewpoints, conservative and right-wing factions also utilize the visual. This panel will underscore the fact that visual practice is an integral part of social dialogue as a whole, shaping opinion and stimulating debate in ways equally significant as, though different from, literary forms of social debate.
Geoffrey Cook, Independent Scholar
The ancient Harappan or Indus culture has become a charged symbol in both India and Pakistan. This paper flows out of my earlier study "How the Harappan Past Is Viewed: Art Historian and Archaeologist," which demonstrates how myths and assumptions of the present determine the modern superstructure applied to the proto-historic as represented in the literature written by art historians and archaeologists for non-specialist audiences.
This paper extends the earlier research into the politics of contemporary South Asia to see how this ancient culture has been mythologized for political purposes of self-assertion.
In India it has been utilized by the Hindu right, of course, to assert its claims of an overtly ancient Ur-type Aryan culture. To a less dramatic extent Dravidian nationalists have made use of it as a tool to argue for Dravidian rights within the modern multi-ethnic nation state of India, while in Pakistan it has been utilized by secular forces for a vision of the nation that transcends the state’s founding force of Islam.
This paper focuses on how archaeology, proto-history and art history converge into the contemporary political debate within South Asia. It will do so using the methodology of the disciplines of archaeology, history, art history and political science to demonstrate how a variegated perceived (proto-) history is created for contemporaneous and often conflicting political ends and assertions.
Walter Smith, Mississippi State University
The Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust was founded shortly after the murder of street-theatre activist Safdar Hashmi in 1989. Since then, SAHMAT has been at the forefront of dissent in India. At various critical junctures, particularly the Ayodhya crisis of 1992–93, SAHMAT mobilized India’s art community to participate in various actions which spoke out against Hindu fundamentalism, communalism, and political exploitation of religious sentiments. SAHMAT, then, is the voice of "protest art" in contemporary India.
But just as the concept of "political art" in the West encompasses visual forms as divergent as those of social realism and German expressionism, the case is similar in India. Sloganeering and overtly political cartoons and posters are not the whole story. Individual and collaborative work of great subtlety has been organized by SAHMAT, again most notably in relation to the Ayodhya crisis.
This paper will focus on Indian reactions to and assessments of SAHMAT’s activities. These include commentaries by the general public as well as scholars and critics. Reaction to SAHMAT by the opposition—members of various right-wing political and fundamentalist religious groups—has been strong as well, sometimes taking the form of violent disruption, leading at one point to the Indian government putting a ban for a time on SAHMAT’s activities. This belies the frequently invoked image of the contemporary Indian artist as an elitist unconcerned with social issues, and having no impact on the world at large. This paper, then, will also assess ways in which SAHMAT’s activities have promoted progressive ideas, have "made a difference."
Kaja M. McGowan, Cornell University
A protector of children, the Indian goddess Hariti was once a ravenous ogress whose delight, until the day she embraced Buddhism, consisted in devouring children. In Bali, although images of Hariti abound, she is rarely known by that name, her character absorbed by an indigenous legendary woman, Men Brayut, the female half of a poor couple, blessed with as many as twenty children. Traditional imagery portrays these poor, devout parents with their rambunctious brood swarming all over their recumbent bodies. Once representing the ideal Balinese family, poor perhaps in monetary matters, but rich in progeny, it is not surprising that the Indonesian government has selected the Brayut tale, harnessing its possibilities for humor and religious moralizing toward making the goals of family planning a reality.
Since the early 1970s, Bali’s response has been remarkably swift to government efforts at fertility limitation, where two children—preferably boy and a girl—is the ideal. Kim Streatfield in Fertility Decline in a Traditional Society: The Case of Bali (1986) suggests that the immediate response on the part of Balinese was due to severe problems of land shortage. Although her assessment is accurate, scholars have neglected to analyze the powerful role of the arts in making readily acceptable Indonesia’s socio-political demands for population reduction. This paper examines how images of fertility are being transformed, as if overnight, by Bali’s active art community in accordance with Indonesia’s economically motivated demand for smaller families: from twenty to two.
Astri Wright, University of Victoria
Since the 1930s, independent artists in Indonesia have generated models for social engagement, believing that art can aid in transforming society. Despite oppression and punishment, whether from colonial authorities or the government of independent Indonesia, socially engaged artists remain in Indonesia’s modern art arena.
My research demonstrates the intensity, effectiveness and importance of non-verbal, symbolic discourse in the analysis of politics, society and change in Southeast Asia. My thesis is that where political speech has a history of symbolic form, and this history intersects with repressive political regimes, the arts become central to political communication. Unlike in North America, art cannot be relegated to a commodity niche without relevance beyond the artist’s social class and individual concerns.
Dadang Christanto is one of a relatively small group of activist Indonesian artists to achieve high visibility nationally since 1970, and internationally since 1990. That year his work began to express an insistence on the right to historical memory independent of government constructions, the right to mourn violent and unrecognized deaths, and the centrality of human dignity in all social processes. Titles like "For Those Who Have Been Killed" (1990–91) and "1001 People of Soil" (1996) accompany Dadang’s installations and performances. This paper will discuss Dadang’s work of the last two years, focusing on a Vancouver performance of 1997 and views expressed by both audience and artist in response. Differences in how the artist would do this performance in Indonesia, as compared to the West, will also be discussed.