Problems of the Original
“Who is Fearless Nadia?” Put this question to anyone who belongs to the young generation of art lovers in India, the answer would be ‘N.Pushpamala’. The image of Mary Ann Evans, the Australian woman performer who came to portray the Fearless Nadia character in the Bollywood movies during the early decades of the last century, with the photographic intervention of Pushpamala somehow got merged with the one created by the artist. This merging of images necessitated a situation where the history of the original (Fearless Nadia) had to be sought through the pointers provided by the copy (Pushpamala). Perhaps, the conscious interventions of Pushpamala in the female representations of Indian culture intend at a critique of the original as well as a probing into the socio-economic circumstances in which the original was created.
About her photographic projects, Pushpamala says, “..rather than looking at it as a perfect art work it should be seen in the light of the number of questions that it raises in so many areas: of female representation, high and low art, ethnography and ideas of race and caste, colonialism and Indian modernity- and the history of modern Indian art and photography itself.”
The cultural/visual codes in/through which the female representation is made possible by various artists throughout the Indian (art)history, for Pushpamala and her collaborator Clare Arni come as a textual reference and they imaginatively reproduce more or less the same circumstances under which such representations are made. Reproducing a particular cultural situation, going by the words of the artist herself, is an effort to raise a number of questions. The imaginative reproduction of the flattened out/two dimensional ‘historical given’ in three dimensional actualities of artificial sets functions as the extraction of subtexts that could address the unvoiced concerns vis-à-vis the female representations in Indian modern art. These subtexts are what Susie Tharu in her text suggests as the parole against the static nature of langue.
The book ‘Native Women of South India, Manners and Customs’ is the compilation of the works that Pushpamala and Clare Arni did during 2000-2004 with the support of the India Foundation for the Arts, Bangalore. Placing South Indian Women as the cultural ‘other’ in the popular narratives of India, Pushpamala and Clare Arni builds a series of alternative narratives through reproducing the native women types as represented by the popular artists including Raja Ravi Varma. The book shows how the components of the artificially created sets form a different grammar and also provide the artists with angles that were obliterated while creating the ‘original’. In many ways the book documents the unspoken parts and residuals during the production of culture.
Reading of this book is like a steeple chase. At the outset you have Susie Tharu’s article ‘This is not an inventory: Norm and performance in everyday femininity’, which invests its whole energy on post structuralist linguistic theories. With all respect to Susie Tharu and her scholarship, one would wonder why the relatively comprehensive ensemble of Pushpamala is made so complex a structure by the author. Perhaps, this is one of the troubles that a reader like me faces when a social theorist tries to prove her prowess while analyzing a set of works of art. Interdisciplinarity is a welcoming thing in art criticism, but when it turns to out to be another way to colonize the artist, with superior information and intelligence, one would feel like leaving it there after the first few paragraphs (though I read it completely and impressed by the lucid narrative from Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red, quoted by Susie Tharu. If she knows that Orhan’s way of narrating the miniature paintings places the case well, why does she delve into a theoretical firework for arguing the case of Pushpamala?
Ashish Rajadhyaksha adopts the style of John Berger and employs a reverse technique of the visual quotes from the repertoire of Pushpamala for explaining why one could cast aspersions on the notion of an original visual reference. He writes with clarity and lucidity and by taking the reference of a single painting (Lady in Moonlight) by Raja Ravi Varma, questions the originality of its own references, using the creative adoption of the same by Pushpamala. In an interview with the journalist N.Rajyalakshmi, Pushpamala and Clare Arni, without delving into mystification, quite simply talks about how and why they reached certain visual references and delineate the process of their works.
The book documents everything, right from technical details to the places from where the costumes are borrowed. There are enough visual references so that the reader would not doubt the ‘originality’ of the arguments forwarded by the writers, artists and by the very book itself. In the first part, there are a few album pictures of Pushpamala’s mother, N.Vanamala, who is seen in various masquerades. Except for a candid reference by Pushpmala in the interview, nowhere in the book, the relevance of this lady who in many ways played a predecessor’s role in Pushpamala’s career, from within the familial limits is not narrated or theoretically dealt with. It is a minus point of this otherwise wonderfully documented book. And for me, this minus point looks like a glaring gap rather than a willful omission.
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