Abstract
This chapter revisits a documentation project in 1985, when the artists N. Pushpamala and Ayisha Abraham and the author visited Naya Village in Midnapore district of West Bengal in India as postgraduate students of the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, India. This documentation project was conceptualized by Professor Gulam Mohammed Sheikh to address the wide gulf that existed between folk artists and art school-trained artists and art historians. Subsequently, the photographs that were made as part of the project got immersed in archival oblivion. Only recently did they get excavated by Pushpamala who scribbled on the back of one of the photographs, ‘Visiting Anthropologists!’ This is a parody that has been turned into a heuristic device in the chapter to stage a larger conversation across anthropology, art history, and contemporary art practice.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
A patua is a village scroll (pata) painter who paints on pasted sheets of paper backed by a cloth and performs by singing the story composed by him. The stories are usually based on Puranic mythologies, usually Mahabharata, Ramayana and often-local myths involving the snake goddess, Manasa. More recently, a new genre called the Babu scrolls have emerged. They are based on colonial times, which include stories of martyrdom of nationalist heroes who fought against the British Raj.
- 2.
On the back of one of the photographs, N. Pushpamala has scribbled ‘Visiting Anthropologists!’ as a witty comment which has inspired the title of this paper. The three of us in turn took most of the photographs.
- 3.
Decades later, when I joined the department of art history and aesthetics as faculty, I was part of the shift to New Art History which took the shape of a national conference and a publication: Towards a New Art History: Studies in Indian Art, 2002. Anthropology impacted us via Cultural Studies and opened up the vector of politics of representation.
- 4.
I draw from Elizabeth Edwards’ definition of a photograph as a material object that has a front and a back through which the scribble on the back is part of its contextual reality. Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Material Beings: Objecthood and Ethnographic Photographs’, Visual Studies, Vol. 17, No. 1, 2002, 67.
- 5.
For instance, the first national anthem of India, ‘Vande Mataram’, was composed in 1937 in Sanskrit; it was originally a poem composed by the Bengali writer, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, in the 1870s, which was turned into a song by the poet Rabindranath Tagore.
- 6.
Malinowski applied his reflexive way of grasping the power relationship between an anthropologist and his subjects to photography, being particularly attentive to the eye level of the camera vis-a-vis the group facing the photographer. He rejected both the high and low angles in favor of eye-level shots to undermine a possible objectification of the natives.
- 7.
I take genre less to connote and classify, but more as a link between the genesis and the production of the group photographs. In Remembering the Present, anthropologist Johannes Fabian extensively engages with the category of ‘genre’ tracing its emergence to eighteenth-century Europe, especially to Holland and its visual practices which, in a sense, anticipated the invention of photography.
- 8.
The image is available at the following link: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsehistory/2017/06/13/bronislaw-malinowski-lse-pioneer-of-social-anthropology/
- 9.
For example, see the following observation by Michael Young: “The height of the camera was commensurate with the height of the subject. Malinowski crouched when photographing children. He neither looked up or down at his subjects. The effect is one of directness…Vertical framing was foreign to Malinowski’s style, and horizontal framing massively predominates in the collection”. Michael. W. Young, Malinowski’s Kiriwina: Fieldwork Photography 1915–1918 (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1998); p. 17.
- 10.
Image is available at the following link: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bronis%C5%82aw_Malinowski_among_Trobriand_tribe_2.jpg
- 11.
The photograph is available at the following link: https://alchetron.com/Edgar-Roquette-Pinto
- 12.
Verrier Elwin (1902–1964) was an ethnologist and tribal activist, who began his career in India as a Christian missionary. He is best known for his early work with the Baigas and Gonds of Central India. Inspired by Gandhi, he allied himself with the nationalist movement, and later Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru would continually seek his expertise for tribal and rural development.
- 13.
All the photographs of the documentation trip referred to in this chapter were turned into artworks by Pushpamala and were on display at a show entitled India Re-Worlded: Seventy Years of Investigating a Nation curated by Arshiya Lokhandwala at Gallery Lakeeren in Mumbai that started from September 2017. This fact explains the black strips on the eyes of Dukhshyam and his extended family as part of the ethical use of photographs in the absence of written permission from them. Riddhi Doshi and Rachel Lopez write on them in Hindustan Times: “Artist Pushpamala N revisits old, found images from her 1985 trip to Naya village in West Bengal to reflect upon how she experiences the photographs now. Those casually clicked pictures now take on a different meaning and context. …‘The visual difference in the pictures between us and the villagers mimicked records of old European colonial anthropological expeditions, and yet the photographs possessed the familiarities that we could have as insiders’, says Pushpamala. The difference between the lifestyle of the artist students and villagers is stark. It almost looks like they are from different worlds, but the ease of the body language suggests the connect of being and experiencing the same nation”, observe Doshi and Lopez. https://www.hindustantimes.com/.../story-nTCgmKsnOuWje2tL2QMBFP.htm
- 14.
Performative mimesis builds on Derrida’s notion of mimesis, which he derived from the French Symbolist poet, Stéphane Mallarmé. See Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982).
- 15.
This excerpt from the Epilogue best matches the ethnographic turn in art writing that we first had witnessed in art practice. It is reminiscent of field notes maintained by anthropologists.
- 16.
Adajania voices Altaf’s concerns that seem to resonate with Sheikh’s radical pedagogy: “Can individuals belonging to different ethnic class and backgrounds communicate, work together, create a political solidarity, and produce shared cultural meanings?” (Adajania 2016: 11).
- 17.
Apart from N. Pushpamala, there are many other contemporary artists in India who have shown deep concern with ethnography and the archive; Navjot Altaf being a pioneer, joined by artists like Nikhil Chopra, Naveen Mathews, Sharmila Sawant, and many others, despite their very diverse modes of art making.
- 18.
Maybe this explains why in India anthropology was not enlisted in the nation making project because of the painful reminder of colonial photography and its objectification of the native body.
- 19.
Retrospectively speaking, today it is possible to understand Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy’s very entry into art history through the prism of cultural anthropology if we trace it to his first seminal work entitled Medieval Sinhalese Art (Broad Campden 1907). Jawaharlal Nehru’s The Discovery of India, 1946, is another such example of salience of the ethnographic lens.
References
Adajania, Nancy. 2016. Navjot Altaf: The Thirteenth Place. Mumbai: Guild.
Coomaraswamy, A.K. 1956 (or 1957??). The Nature of “Folklore” and “Popular Art”. In Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art, 130–143. New York: Dover Publications.
Dave Mukherji, Parul. 2006. Towards Performance Mimesis. Theatre India – National School of Drama Theatre Journal 13: 178–192.
Edwards, Elizabeth. 2002. Material Beings: Objecthood and Ethnographic Photographs. Visual Studies 17 (1): 67.
Fabian, Johannes. 1996. Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire. Chicago: University of California Press.
Foster, Hal. 1996. The Artist as Ethnographer? In The Return of the Real. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Jayakar, Pupul. 1981. The Earthen Drum: An Introduction to the Ritual Arts of Rural India. New Delhi: National Museum.
Kapur, Geeta. 1991. Place of the Modern in Indian Cultural Politics. Economic and Political Weekly 26 (49): 2803–2806.
Khullar, Sonal. 2015. Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity, and Modernism in India, 1930–1990. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lomnitz, Claudio. 2005. Bordering on Anthropology Dialectics of a National Tradition in Mexico. In Empires, Nations and Natives: Anthropology and State-Making, ed. Benoit De L’Estoile, Federico Neiburg, and Lygia Sigaud, 167–196. Durban/London: Duke University Press.
Pink, Sarah. 2007. Ethnographic Photography and Printed Text. In Doing Visual Ethnography. London: Sage Publications.
Ramaswamy, Sumathi. 2010. The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India. London: Duke University Press.
Shah, Haku. 1985. Votive Terracottas of Gujarat. Ed. Carmen Kegal. Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishers.
Tharu, Susie. 2007. Notes for a Grammar of the Visual Vernacular. In Native Women of India: Manners and Customs (a project by Pushpamala N. and Claire Arni), ed. N. Pushpamala. Delhi: Nature Morte Gallery.
Wright, Terence. 1991. Fieldwork Photographs of Jenness and Malinowski and the Beginnings of Modern Anthropology. Journal of Anthropology Society of Oxford 22 (1): 41–58.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Dave Mukherji, P. (2019). Mimicking Anthropologists: Re-Membering a Photo Archive via Pata Paintings, Performative Mimesis, and Photo Performance. In: Perera, S., Pathak, D.N. (eds) Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05852-4_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05852-4_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-05851-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-05852-4
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)