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Who owns Salt and Gold?
One of the finest young painters in India, Josh PS has finally arrived with his solo show titled ‘Who Owns the Peacock Throne’ at the Nature Morte Gallery, New Delhi. JohnyML, who has observed the growth of Josh PS as an artist and a fine human being from close quarters analyses his latest works against the backdrop of the works that he has done so far.
Post colonial discourse is an objective retrospective. It analyses the present of the erstwhile colonial states against the backdrop of the colonial past. Though a positive project, the post colonial discourse has its on short comings as it tends to gloss over certain moves by the colonial masters as they helped the colonial subjects to move towards the notions of civilization and progression, like education, medicine, industrial development, railway, electricity, postal systems etc. What had been lost to the subjects of the native states through the implementation of these progressive moves mostly remain in the subjective narratives of the native people as expressed in autobiographical literature and art. The glossed over areas exemplify the suggestive silences within a discourse and in a metaphorical sense, these silences are the stains on a dizzyingly colorful fabric of an erstwhile colonial land.
These suggestive silences or stains are what Josh P.S traces in his recent set of works, which were recently exhibited in the Nature Morte Gallery, New Delhi. The loaded title, “Who owns the Peacock Throne?” sets the tone not only of the show but also of the artist’s concerns with the colonial and the post-colonial discourse. For the artist, historical and chronological narratives are as good or as bad as myths. His rhetorical question about the ownership of the Peacock Throne does not pinpoint the wars waged over it but the suggestive titles of the constituent works, ‘Is it Kohinoor’, ‘Where is Kohinoor’ etc indirectly bring forth the issue of symbolic power manifested through colonial aggressions. Both the Peacock Throne and the Kohinoor diamond lose their material values and enter into the symbolic realm of power relationship that leads both the onlooker and the artist to the lanes of suggestive silences and stains.
The symbolism of colonial power, resistance and struggle against it and the preservation of the symbols and images from both are the three factors through which the post colonial theories function. Josh evokes this methodological approach to history in order to make an interpretative and interventionist analysis of the silent stains. The proliferation of colonial power started off as the White Man’s unquenchable thirst for exploration slowly took the form of exploitation, affecting the land and mind of subject populations. The intricate relationship between colonialism and resource search for economic supremacy shows that the subjects’ resistance to colonialism was/is not exactly against the master’s handling of the wealth but against their own inability to exercise power and right over the wealth produced by them. This struggle for regaining ability (as seen in the Swadesi Movement) is/was pivotal to any population that fought the colonial masters.
Josh, placing his project within the history of anti-colonial struggles in India, finds two symbolic materials to further his argument; salt and gold, the materials that made the Indian populace realize that they did not have the ability to hold power over these two resources of their own land/produce. In history, we have seen how salt as a simple but essential component of life becomes a site of power contestations with the imposition of tax on its production and consumption by the colonial masters. In his repertoire of paintings, Josh introduces salt as a symbol and as a narrative. He creates a monument to the salt movement of the 1930s by painting a pyramid structure of salt and at the same time in another painting Josh leaves the whole pictorial surface vacant except for a stain of salt water on it.
This intriguing relationship between a monument and a stain provides certain clues to understand the absence of people (the stains and suggestive silences) who have been working in the salt fields, who had participated in the salt march at Dandi, the unrelated tales of their woes within the political and economic spheres. Josh critiques the meta narratives of modernism by singling out Mahatma Gandhi (with a few unnamed people around) at the commencing moment of the salt march movement. The conspicuous absence of too many people is countered in other canvases by painting hosts of people who could be generally seen as workers. The master is totally absent here while the subjects narrate their story of struggle. He repeatedly paints vacant and abandoned salt fields and salt sediments. He reverently paints the images of the routes through which the Dandi March was conducted. Also does he paint Gandhi’s personal woes in the hazy representation of Sabarmati Jail.
Keeping Gandhi’s historical monumentality and relevance intact (by not indulging to critique his heroism), Josh generates a counter narrative by painting a few German and Japanese army personals in their war fatigues from the WWII scenario and gives a perplexing title ‘I Suspect Him as Subhash Chandra Bose’. The title suddenly evokes a curious historical search as Josh does not say who is that ‘Him’ in the painting. The onlooker is initiated to do a succession of a mental morphing of Subhash Chandra Bose’s face with the personals represented here. This game, a game placed within the discursive field of non-violence and violence, apparently destabilizes the narratives related to Gandhiji. Both Subhash Chandra Bose and Gandhiji become players in the same game or the agents of same struggle or even the heroes of the same war, leaving the moral-ethical preferences based on violence and non-violence. Within this interlocking narratives, salt, the simple constituent in the symbolic chain of anti-colonial struggle functions as a metaphorical adhesive.
What makes Josh’s works interesting is their deliberate avoidance of the subjects and the masters from the historical narratives. Josh’s interest in the Holocaust narratives and images here comes handy for formulating his painterly concerns. Having studied the Holocaust documents, Josh has done a series of works on the Holocaust sites. In 2002 he did a large painting, representing the gate to Auschwitz. In most of the works from his Holocaust series, Josh either avoids the representation of the ‘victims/subjects’ or abstracts them to hazy images. The institutions, the panoptic structures of jails, concentration camps, buildings for scientific experiments using human beings as raw materials etc repeatedly come to his works as dominant images. In the present ensemble of works too Josh makes a deliberate choice to keep the subjects/victims out of the direct narratives in order to underline the silences and stains. The very absence of their presence, in fact fuel engine of silent narratives, which are otherwise glossed over in the postcolonial theories.
Josh draws an interesting parallel between the progressive nature of colonialism and its own decaying at the hands of the symbolic agents like salt. All the salt fields, coal mines, gold mines etc (or generally speaking, all the production centres) have railway lines running into them. These iron lines are the connecting links between the producer and the consumer. Or in other words, they symbolize the entry of the master and exit of the victim. In further elaboration it could be said that the railway lines stand in for the conversion of labor into capital and capital into culture and then to the cultural capital. However, this process is under constant decay through a silent rebellion of the product. Capital is destabilized by the product, like salt catalyses the rusting of iron. The mangled railway lines within the salt field are a powerful symbol that Josh has created in this show. This work strangely reminds the viewer of a work by Surendran Nair, who placed an iron knife in a box full of salt, a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi, as a part of the SAHMAT’s Box project in late 1990s.
If salt is simple, gold is precious. If salt is Gandhiji, gold is Subhash Chandra Bose. That could be a stretched connection. However, Josh places gold, with all its symbolic power, along with salt in his pictorial imagination. After a visit to the Colar Gold Mines in Karnataka, Josh realized how salt and gold are the two sides of the same coin; the coin of colonialism, anti-colonial struggle, post-colonial thoughts etc. He counters the image of Dandi March with the image of gold mine workers trying to scale the heights and depths of mines. There is a monumental painting in which a tight close up of a woman’s hands holding golden ornaments. This traditional narrative of gold is however restricted and redirected to a new realm of thought by capturing the images of actual gold mines, processing units, the wasted earth after extracting the gold in photographs. Painting becomes impossible when the reality etched in film through a subjective perspective turns out to be more powerful and defy the rules of paintings and Josh knows it. Josh collects the actual gold dust (wasted earth) and mixes it with wax and coats his peacock throne with it, giving it a dark, grim and eerie feeling. He connects the symbolic with the actual in this process.
The history of anti-colonial struggle and the post colonial narratives often leave the roles played by women altogether or they push them to the sidelines. Using a pointillist technique (not like the pointillists of the late 19th century) Josh paints four women who have inspired him in the anti-colonial history of India. Begum Hazrat Mahal, Rani of Jhansi, Anne Beasant and Sarojini Naidu are presented in monumental portraits, which demand a particular distance for viewing. The closer you go the hazier the images become. This demand for physical distance perhaps is a critique on the historical narratives as the stories of women are obliterated in the general narratives.
As mentioned elsewhere, the preservation of images and symbols from the colonial narratives gets cultural meanings in due course of time. In preservation, aggression and suffering become memories, providing them with cultural values, shedding its pains and pangs in the process. Hence, the nondescript memorial of Vasco da Gama at Kappad Beach in Calicut, Kerala, where the explorer disembarked in 1498, an unremarkable local museum where the caps and paraphernalia of the explorers are displayed in glass cases, the crown of Queen Victoria and so on become painless cultural metaphors. Josh paints them with a sense of detachment, like any other casual viewer who carelessly glances over these images, but at the same time, the artist by titling them “Chronology of Conquerors” leads them directly to the field of a contentious colonial discourse: should these preserved images be considered reverential? Or should they be reinterpreted and condemned? Again, should they be considered cultural raw materials or should they be valued as the milestones of a historical struggle?
Each nation has its museums that showcase and flaunt its national and cultural pride. “Chronology of Conquerors” talks not about the plundered wealth that is later dubbed as cultural asset, on the contrary Josh tries to drive in the point that these images speak of a mutilated past, without any glory or pride. They are fossilized in the glass cases, leaving themselves open to the gaze of the visitors (including the artist). The gaze that scrutinizes the veracity of historical symbols and cultural metaphors is accentuated in the series, “Chronology of Conquerors” as well as in “Is it Kohinoor?” where the white man’s scrutinizing gaze pierces through a diamond as the casual visitor’s/ artist/s camera wielding image is reflected on the glass cases of the museum.
Josh’s paintings are not colorful in conventional terms. They are grey. They simulate the grayish tone of the old documentary films also they simulate the grainy jumpiness. They look like stains on the white surfaces. Josh has always been interested in stains. Throughout late 1990s worked on the idea of stains. Despite the frugal materialistic circumstances of the time, he bought several canvases in order to create single stain of blood, spit, sweat, semen and other bodily fluids. He used his own blood and semen to create the stain series. In one of the works of the same period, he placed a few naphthalene balls on a measuring scale and let it evaporate. The scale was left with the stains and smell of the naphtha balls.
Though Josh was not talking about colonial history at that point of time, those experiments led him to reach the present series. I would say that he reached this stage through the experience of death. A friend of Josh died in late 1990s and he was a musician. As a tribute to the departed friend, Josh grew a single sheaf of paddy in a violin case as a part of his public art project done in Jamia Millia Islamia. Josh was interested in the concept of contours left in the atmosphere by the dead people. For him it was a stain and a trace, a trace of a lived history. In his solo show titled ‘Repetitions” in Kochi, Josh tried to measure the meaning of life and death through minimal diagrammatic drawings. Later in Delhi, in another solo exhibition, Josh presented his works in a stack with the photographs of the same works displayed on the wall. The floor of the Garhi gallery was strewn with naphthalene balls and one used to get the feeling of fossilizing and preservation of art. From there he embarked on the Holocaust series.
Born in a small village named Vakkom, in Trivandrum district, Kerala, Josh did his bachelors in painting from Trivandrum Fine Arts College and masters in the same discipline from Jamia Millia Islamia. One of the finest painters, in the line of Shibu Natesan, Josh’s artistic journey has always been eventful. Keeping a hermitic distance and a fiery sense of humor Josh looks at life and death with an aesthetic attachment. He paints stains and silences. “Who owns the Peacock Throne?” is a landmark in his artistic career.
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