No, no, don’t let the headline give you a wrong idea. I won’t be discussing cow rakshaks and cow bhakshaks here. The temptation, I confess, is strong. Nothing like fantasising about a good beef curry to get your gonads working. Also, the Indian cowboys are an exciting kettle of fish as they are not cowed down by minor irritants like the law or the Constitution and such. Their vigilantism is ever ready to rise up in violent defence of mother India and mother cow.
A pragmatic side of me wonders why we need a standing army at all; aren’t gau rakshaks enough? They are fierce, committed, bloodthirsty and a law unto themselves. They’ve almost perfected the art of lynching all comers on the streets. They won’t resort to cowardly tactics like using civilians as human shields. No Geneva Convention or other protocols of war apply to them. Why, not even rules of our own country apply to them. They will lynch a few ‘enemy’ soldiers at the border and bring the rest grovelling to their knees. Withdraw the army and para-military from the borders and despatch battalions of rakshaks from the cow-belt and see how our border security profile jumps up.
The mad cow disease was triggered by cows in the U.K. being fed their own offal. There are many such parallels we could find here. For one, when the cow rakshaks were fed with Yogi Adityanath as their chief minister. This was toxic fodder which, in turn, made the rakshaks super-toxic, triggering an entire chain of post-modern violence by pre-modern goon squads.
Succession question
So this column is in the nature of a reflection around appropriate leadership and the passing on of institutional mantles in a responsible manner, which would enable the institutions to grow. When the ‘Dhongi’ of U.P. was allocated the chief ministership, it helped put the already criminalised police constabulary there on hold, to be replaced by vigilante street mobs who enjoy the kind of enviable immunity that even AFSPA does not grant the army.
It’s against such a background of criminal succession in politics that I wish to examine two exemplary instances of enlightened succession from the world of the arts. The first is the inspired choice, end-March, of Delhi-based artist Anita Dube (59) as curator of the 2018 edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. And the second is the equally stunning choice, end-April, of Delhi-based photography expert Devika Daulet-Singh (45) as curator of the 2018 edition of the Chennai Photo Biennale.
These are two amazing appointments that the media doesn’t even seem to know how to celebrate and seems to have largely bypassed. One even feels like adding that the degree of crudity in the Indian media today is directly proportional to its ignorance and disinterest in cultural and artistic matters.
Dube is an artist-intellectual in the true sense of the word. As a prominent founding member (along with the politically charged K.P. Krishnakumar) of the short-lived, if charismatic and hugely influential, Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors Association, she has remained at the forefront of challenging commercial tendencies in Indian art practice. The group, which came together in Baroda in 1987, created a bit of a flutter as it frontally questioned what it described as the market-friendly ‘figurative’ work of the already distinct ‘Baroda School’, which included, among others, formidable artists/ intellectuals such as Gulam Sheikh, Bhupen Khakhar, Vivan Sundaram, Nalini Malani, Geeta Kapur, Sudhir Patwardhan and Jogen Choudhury.
Feminist contexts
As the manifesto writer for the group’s ‘Questions and Dialogues’ exhibition, Dube robustly put forward the idea of working with ‘social memory’ through found objects, fragments and industrial material. When the group was disbanded prematurely following the tragic death of Krishnakumar, its members scattered and Dube herself moved towards creating artworks with a distinct political/ feminist content. Some of the pieces she wrote for me a quarter of a century ago when I used to edit the arts pages of The Economic Times still retain an urgent immediacy.
As co-founder (along with Pooja Sood) of the Khoj artists initiative in Delhi, Dube has stayed at the cutting edge of contemporary Indian art practice, which careens dangerously between flatness, dimension and volume (or, in other words, painting, sculpture and installation) with photography adding another magical layer. One looks forward to the assured artistic and theoretical legacy she will bring to bear upon the Kochi Biennale and the marks of her unique signature as the first female curator of any Indian biennale.
Daulet-Singh too has raised the bar high for photo practices in India, including making pictures, printing, mounting and exhibiting them, and finally compiling and publishing them. After graduating with a BFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design, she started out quietly by setting up the photo agency Photoink, in 2001.
But, by 2008, she initiated a stunning intervention by transforming it into perhaps the first dedicated, professional gallery for photography in India (the erstwhile Piramal Gallery at Mumbai’s NCPA notwithstanding). Today, Photoink is at the frontier of the conversation around the medium and Singh, as curator, editor, publisher of some of the most impressive exhibitions and books, is decidedly a force multiplier in the field.
The fact that two co-ordinators of the Chennai Photo Biennale—Helmut Schippert, director, Goethe Institute/ MMB, Chennai, and photographer Varun Gupta, curator of the last edition—sought her out for curating next year’s biennale, has suddenly put Chennai at the centre of India’s photographic map. It is sure to draw an international crowd, as Daulet-Singh, again the first female curator of such an event here, dreams up some unusual and bold contexts in the city for locating contemporary practices of image making.
So here are two major biennales one waits for now with bated breath. It is the triumph of an intelligent, sensitive and responsible approach to succession and continuity, unlike what the political field offers today. And these will be sure antidotes to the creeping ‘mad cow disease’ in many fields.
