Recent work by the Mumbai-based artist and curator, one of the founders of the Kochi Biennale, Riyas Komu interrogates our relationship with both the symbols of the state and the values that they are meant to enshrine and invoke. “Holy Shiver”, a series of works including sculptures in metal, wood and terracotta, videos, oil portraits, woodcuts, installations and archival prints, refers to the instinctive response of the body, whether animal or human, when it senses danger and enters a ‘fight or flight’ mode. Horripilation (the hair on the back of the neck standing on end), the trembling of the extremities, the tensing of muscles — these primordial physical reactions to a perceived external threat Komu uses as an allegory for how the body politic responds when confronted with the ‘other’, whoever is identified as an enemy of the ‘self’.
The instinctual biological ‘shiver’ of the title of Komu’s show, that was on view in New Delhi in February and March, captures the aggression encoded deep within the nation-state, which sometimes erupts to split apart the surface of meaning and fracture the coherence of the historical narratives we have fabricated about India. Komu’s work, powerful, engaged and original, literally leaves one shaken.
Symbols of the state
Here we encounter the pages of the Constitution of India, on the one hand painstakingly illuminated like the manuscript of a holy book in medieval times, and on the other hand made illegible by having the letters inverted in a photographic negative. The charter document of the Republic is lit up and ornate in one rendition, dark and obscure in the other. Both are presented side-by-side, to mirror our contradictory political experience, whereby the Constitutional framework is simultaneously extolled and subverted.
Further along we find the Indian state seal, the Sarnath Lion Capital, twisted and hung up, fired and singed, burnt and blackened, forged and shattered, the invisible fourth lion imagined and materialised even as the visible three are rearranged and interrogated. The words of the state motto “Satyameva Jayate” appear again and again, as though haunting and dogging us with a question about the fate of truth in our political life, regardless of the lofty ideals we may profess. Does truth really prevail in our polity?
Sheer sovereign power, embodied in the massive crouching figure of a gigantic lion, lurks menacingly in a thicket of dried grass, poised directly below the pages of the Constitution and obscuring them to some extent. The odd juxtaposition between the modern text and the ancient beast suggests perhaps the mutually incompatible genealogies of sovereignty — one liberal and the other authoritarian — enfolded within our conception of India.
Irreconcilable pasts
The blades and clumps of grass planted in what might well be fire altars, remind one of Vedic civilisation that flourished in the Indo-Gangetic plain. In another room, the so-called “dancing girl” from Mohenjodaro — whose very nomenclature has been brilliantly deconstructed by the art critic Sadanand Menon — posits a different, insistently alternative civilisation of the Indus Valley that we have difficulty integrating into our national history ever since Partition.
She stands tall and insouciant, her hand on her hip and her posture defiant, frontally challenging the throne or seat of power stamped with the Dhamma Chakra, the Ashokan wheel of Dharma that is inscribed at the centre of the national flag and studded at the cardinal directions in the circular plinth of the Sarnath Lion Capital. A dynamic feminine figure — indeed a mere girl, if nationalist archaeologists are to be believed — talks back to the entrenched and established patriarchal state, and, incredibly, dwarfs it, cuts it down to size.
A bulbous sensuous polished wooden lotus is of course the “national flower”, aesthetically pristine, the very blossoming of the Indic world of classical antiquity. But unfortunately today, it is the symbol of the Bharatiya Janata Party, its form hijacked for a majoritarian agenda that sullies the beauty associated with it in countless literary texts, religious traditions and artistic works going back to pre-modern times. Every symbol is hard fought, and continually contested. We simply cannot afford to be sanguine about our complex political inheritances or our diverse cultural riches.
Our multiple pasts jostle for primacy in the national narrative of selfhood and sovereignty. As Indians we have no choice but to be aware of the contradictions written into the stories we like to tell about who we are and where we come from. Everywhere, elaborate human constructs of the imagination and fundamental pre-human reflexes of the body clash with one another. Norms and morals are confronted with fear and loathing.
Intimate enemies
But for Komu, the central dialectic of his work is the close encounter and terminal estrangement of Gandhi and Ambedkar, the Mahatma’s swaraj and Babasaheb’s dhamma, the two founding fathers dominating the show and providing the entwined double-helix of modern India’s political DNA.
In one large sculptural work of wood and bronze, two Ambedkars, one on a slightly higher plane than the other, stand with their backs to one another, their arms thrust out in opposite directions. Which way should India go? Which way is forward? The great man, bespectacled and clad in a suit, is energetic but Janus faced. Stairs go up, or come down, from the two levels where he stands. It’s not clear that we are simply ascending upwards to an enlightened and egalitarian social order, a new threshold of equality and justice. In fact, the staircase on which he is trapped and bifurcated suggests the staggered social hierarchy of the caste system that Ambedkar struggled unsuccessfully to annihilate.
The pièce de résistance of Komu’s show is “Dhamma Swaraj”, a triptych of imposing and disturbing oil paintings on canvas, in which the faces of Gandhi and Ambedkar are superimposed, one on the other, both slightly shaken and out of focus, as though the camera were jolted while taking a photograph. The result is three hybrid portraits of the two, uncanny and distorted, like human reality seen through the optic apparatuses of sci-fi aliens. The spectacles, ears, chins, noses, foreheads and necks of the two subjects are somehow blurred and merged, a trompe l’oeil , a perceptual trick, cognitive dissonance visualised.
This is the central confusion of contemporary Indian political consciousness, the merger and mixture of these two categories, Ambedkar’s dhamma and Gandhi’s swaraj, their impossible superimposition, their confounding overlay and their hidden harmony. We can hardly make sense of it. But there is no freedom without justice and no justice without equality.
Forms in dialogue
The artist boldly pushes the monumental and distorted faces of Babasaheb and Bapu, not separately but together, in our face. Familiar portraits of both, that we have all seen hundreds of times in public spaces, become absolutely weird and frightening. What is missing is the point of view that could keep both in our vision at once, distinct, separate and whole, fraternal twins rather than a monstrous mutant hybrid, radically alienated from itself and unable to integrate and harmonise self and other.
As statues of Gandhi and Ambedkar are being vandalised, desecrated, decapitated and broken all over India in the regime of the Hindu Right; as artworks are damaged, attacked and censored in a climate of illiberalism and intolerance; as communal hatred, majoritarian aggression and sexual violence target Muslims, Dalits, women and children, Komu’s work is an urgent meditation on the basic issues that are still at stake for Indian democracy. It reminds us of how much there is to lose, and how serious the danger posed by the Hindu Rashtra to the Republic of India is.
Ananya Vajpeyi is a fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi
