by Lisa Gross
Bangalore is a city on the move. One of the fastest growing urban centers in India and all of Asia, this South Indian metropolis has transformed itself from a small former colonial outpost, known for its enviable moderate climate and bungalow gardens, into the "Silicon Valley of India." The Internet Technology boom of the '90s fostered a burgeoning English-speaking, somewhat westernized middle-class, fueling the appearance of "Barrista" (a Starbucks-like coffee chain), a hopping bar scene and internet cafes. All of this has contributed to making Bangalore one of the most youthful and cosmopolitan cities in India.
Bangalore's rapid pace of development has also, however, created immense traffic congestion and air pollution problems. Auto-rickshaws (three wheeled, open sided taxis), motorcycles, cars, and the occasional oxen-pulled cart pack the roads and zoom and weave around each other in an alarming fashion. Yet a small-town feeling somehow persists. People remain loyal to local institutions like Koshy's, a 75 year-old Bangalore restaurant where people come to drink tea and read the newspaper, eat biryani or egg sandwiches and talk with their friends for hours, as the wooden ceiling fans whir overhead and former generations of owners stare down from their mortuary photographs. Old, quiet middle-class neighborhoods cluster around the city, filled with pastel-colored modernist cement houses surrounded by coconut trees. And despite all the development, the City Market area in the town center still remains a confusing, crowded and dirty warren of streets, filled with endless small shops and stalls selling everything from produce to neon plastic toys to ritual supplies like flower garlands and brightly-colored powders.
Though Bombay and Delhi remain the cultural and intellectual centers of India, Bangalore may soon be joining them. Within the last five years the Center for the Study of Culture and Society, a small research center in Bangalore focusing on contemporary culture and media, has become an important voice in India's academic world and the India Foundation for the Arts has become an important source of funding for the arts all over the country. Several independent film societies and film collectives such as Collective Chaos and Pedestrian Pictures have also sprung up. The local art college Chitrakala Parishat has transformed itself in the last decade into a nationally-respected institution with a vibrant student body. Though their numbers are still small, a tightly knit group of Bangalore-based artists, filmmakers and intellectuals have started to make their mark.
Of the wide range of media used by contemporary artists in Bangalore, photography carries a particular historical weight. Photography has flourished in India since almost immediately after it was invented in 1839. The British brought cameras to India in 1840 and used them for both aesthetic and "scientific purposes." Sometimes these goals overlapped. They made images of exotic vistas and catalogued "native types," using photography to strengthen their colonial grip.1 Soon after photography's arrival, it became fashionable for the wealthier members of Indian society to pose for photos in the new studios, mimicking Western-style portraits. Once photography became more integrated into Indian culture and society, however, new forms of photography, different from those prevalent in the West, began to appear. Hand-painted photographs with the qualities of Mughal miniatures grew in popularity. Fantastical and elaborate backdrops and props became de rigueur for every studio. Wedding photography turned into an artistic form in its own right with wedding photographers super-imposing negatives, adding whimsical frames, cutting and pasting photos into intricate collages and painting all around them. Today, wedding photographers use Adobe PhotoShop to create their fantastical assemblages. In addition to professional photography, amateur photo clubs became very popular in India and remain so to this day.
While in Bangalore, I met three women artists who respond to the rich world of vernacular Indian photography in their work.2 All three were trained in more traditional media like painting and sculpture and all eventually turned to photography and video in order to better express their wide-ranging ideas.
Ayisha Abraham uses photography to explore issues pertaining to history, memory and sociology. In one project, Abraham plays with the idea of picture postcards. Picture postcards of "exotic" and "Oriental" scenes and people were extremely popular in Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries. They often had captions on the back that either objectified the subject into a "native type" or sometimes made a witty yet condescending statement about the image. One postcard from this era shows a woman picking lice out of another woman's hair. It is entitled "The Hunt." Abraham made a series of postcards that played with this form. This series is entitled "…looks the other way." On each postcard she placed a disembodied segment from a studio portrait of a family member and wrote a caption on the back. Abraham was interested in showing the way that people constructed and shaped their identity by how they dressed and posed in these photos. On one postcard is a cutout of an English pith helmet sitting on a disembodied pair of legs in knee-high military boots. On the back she wrote, "With a different name he felt he could have access to more privileges." Each of the postcards deals humorously yet critically with the tensions many Indians felt under colonialism. Abraham was also attracted to the postcard form because of the ease with which she could distribute them beyond the confines of the gallery.
In her photograph-based sculpture, the artist Surekha also plays with the genre of Indian studio portraiture. One sculpture consists of two large, vertical panels of wood, hinged together and standing in a V. On the right side is a grid made from a mirror-like metal. Within every square of the grid rests professional studio portraits of girls between childhood and childbearing age wearing saris. Each girl's hair is intricately braided with jasmine flowers. These braids are worn during different rituals that mark important moments of womanhood like the entrance into puberty, marriage and pregnancy. They are a symbol of celebration: a special form of adornment. On the other panel is a similar mirrored surface. Instead of the clear, rectangular openings of the right side, these gaps are jagged, like a broken mirror. Fragments of newspaper clippings can be seen in the open spaces. They recount incidents of dowry-related killings, acid thrown on women and grizzly female suicides. Strings of Christmas-style lights are draped over both panels; the right with white lights, the left with red. These lights are used during holidays and occasions in many parts of India, and here take on symbolic significance. The two sides literally reflect one another and become enmeshed. The desire to live and celebrate becomes entangled with death and violence.
Pushpamala N. also refers to vernacular visual culture in her work. Pushpamala makes photographic self-portraits that allude to film narratives and play with different genres of Indian photography. She works with representations of women and deconstructs familiar stock images and stereotypes. In the last several years she has created a body of work made up of several different photo series that work in tandem. Her first series, entitled "Phantom Lady of Kismet" is shot in the style of film noir film stills. This series tells the story of twins who were separated at birth: one becomes a Bombay vamp, the other a masked super-heroine of sorts. Pushpamala based the masked figure on a stock character often found in Indian B-movies from the '50s and '60s. The original actress was an Australian circus and stunt artist named "Fearless Nadia." This character was usually seen in stunt movies but Pushpamala relocates this character to the world of film noir. The masked heroine decides to find her lost sister and is forced to enter the underworld of the Bombay mafia to do so. In many ways this series pays homage to Bombay as the city of cinema and a city of glamour and poverty.
Pushpamala's next project entitled "Sunhere Sapne" (Golden Dreams) is a series of hand-painted black-and-white photos that tell the story of a typical Indian housewife and her alter ego, a nightclub dancer in a golden frock with a bouffant hairstyle. In this series, Pushpamala plays with the Indian convention of hand-painted photographs. By basing the images on "stock shots," she creates images that evoke both personal memories and shared cultural associations. There is humor in all of her photos, but something darker lies underneath. Initially, many of the pictures appear nostalgic, but closer examination reveals Pushpamala's deft juxtaposition of past and present. The housewife is contemporary while her alter ego ressembles a 1960's "Bond girl." Each photo suggests an ambiguous narrative but it is up to the viewer to imagine the details of the story.
In another separate but related series, Pushpamala creates a catalog of "Native Women of South India." Here she plays simultaneously with the genre of studio portraiture and the colonial genre of ethnic types. For these photos she photographed herself as "Three National Stereotypes." These photos are entitled "Portrait of a Mohammedan Woman," "Portrait of a Hindu Woman" and "Portrait of a Christian Woman." In the first, Pushpamala wears a full burqa, in the second, a sari and in the third, a Western wedding dress with veil. In all of her pieces, Pushpamala works to subvert these stereotypes and archetypes, in the process infusing them with greater complexity.
These three artists are part of a new generation of middle-class women who are using post-modern strategies to critique and celebrate Indian culture and society. Though specifically Indian, their work shows the influence of artists like Cindy Sherman, Kara Walker, Lorna Simpson and Barbara Kruger, women who have similarly challenged traditional conceptions of gender, race and history. The Indian visual art world is still small compared to the United States, Europe and even East Asia, but it is rapidly growing and forming its own identity. This is only a snapshot of the artistic community in Bangalore; the city is in the midst of great changes and no doubt it will be an exciting place to watch as it develops.
1 Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997
2 Lisa Gross received a Bhatt Fellowship from the South Asian Studies Council for her research.