A long detour to Swaraj

Can an artist combine an astutely political engagement with public urgencies with the pursuit of aesthetic refinement? The answers to this FAQ usually stop at condemning the tendency among artists to lapse into sloganeering or to opt for a safe tokenism within the white cube. I had the opportunity to test some ideas around the vexed relationship between the aesthetic and the political when Shireen Gandhy of Chemould Prescott Road, one of Mumbai's earliest established galleries, invited me recently to curate an exhibition commemorating the centennial of Gandhi's seminal 1909 work, Hind Swaraj. The Hind Swaraj centennial obligesus to ask whether postcolonial India's history has been not a linear progressiontowards new life-themes but a roundabout return to the fundamental questionsHind Swaraj asks. Have we, six decades after independence, come back to thedebate between the protagonists of Gandhi's dialogue: the Editor, embodying apeaceful mode of emancipation, and the Reader, an advocate of violentrevolution? In this context, the detour is a productive trope of digression,self-interrogation and re-dedication : so that is what I titled my exhibition.As collaborators in 'Detour' , I invited five artists whom I havelong admired because their image-making is informed by a desire to re-define thecontours of the social and political contemporary. All of them work with thephotographic image, but also articulate themselves through book projects, filmand video works. Dayanita Singh, who has explored the inner worlds of themarginal women of Benares and the third-gender figure Mona Ahmed, wasrepresented through her imagemeditation on Nehru's ancestral home, Anand Bhawan,in Allahabad: a mausoleum where great ideas have gone to rest. Ram Rahman,designer, writer, curator, photographer and cultural activist, a founder memberof the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (SAHMAT), was represented through hismass-circulation SAHMAT posters and his digital collages contemplatingpostcolonial official architecture as a medium of nation-building fervour.Ravi Agarwal, an environmental activist, photographer and writer,founder of Toxics Link, was represented through his photographs of performancesin which he enacts the urban self trapped between a devastated ecology and arapacious metropolis. From the work of Samar Jodha, photographer , film-makerand social activist who works with street children, peasantry and the ageing, Iselected his ongoing portraiture of the television, scattered across variousrural and semi-urban milieux. And Sonia Jabbar, essayist, journalist ,photographer, film-maker and human rights activist who has devoted 15 years toworking in Kashmir, presented a documentary gathering the testimony of fourwomen survivors of the 'Kashmir problem' and a video elegy for those who have'disappeared' during the Valley's turbulent years. 'Detour' thus took the form of five position papers on the Republic, each addressing a possible idea of India. Each artist asked what postcoloniality meant as an opportunity for an amplifying self-transformation , and how that opportunity has often been wasted or perverted. Their works resonate, all the more powerfully for being crafted through an attentive poetics, with the questions of liberty, justice and dignity, and with the awareness of constrained human agency in a vitiated lifeworld.