AMERICAN ARTIST WALKER ‘DOES NOT SHY AWAY FROM COMPLEX HISTORIES’
by AMIT ROY
THE American artist has taken the idea of the joyous Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace and subverted it to create Fons Americanus, by way of a scathing critique of the slave trade in which America and Britain were implicated.
The sculpture, a 42ft tall fountain in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, incorporates a noose hanging from a branch, sharks in the water and a distressed boy filling a shell with his tears to denote the African experience of the slave trade.
This is not an exhibition that will go down well with right-wing English historians, who insist that colonial Britain might have had a few flaws, but brought a civilising influence on the whole to lesser mortals. Possibly, after Brexit, some of them say, the glory days will return.
Could Walker’s work be connected to the Windrush scandal and the “hostile environment” for immigrants witnessed during Theresa May’s tenure at the Home Office?
The response was a careful but honest one from Dr Achim Borchardt-Hume, head of exhibitions at Tate Modern. He said the Turbine Hall and Tate Modern were used “to have debates about the society we live in, the society we want to live in ... of course, there is a relationship thinking about where are we today in the context of post-colonialist history”.
Describing Walker as an “extraordinary artist”, Tate Modern’s director Frances Morris said: “The Turbine Hall occupies a unique place in the public imagination. It has acted as a stage for cutting-edge, risk-taking contemporary art.”
She encouraged people to examine public sculptures in Britain’s towns and cities with a new understanding after visiting Walker’s latest work, part of a series commissioned by South Korea’s Hyundai Motor Company.
Morris implied that sculptures which celebrated colonial achievements often hid a darker truth. Walker, she added, was “the first artist to respond to the role of civic sculptor in our towns and cities, bringing her own rereading of London’s vast Victoria Memorial”.
Clara Kim, the exhibition’s senior curator in international art (Africa, Asia & Middle East), commented: “Kara’s investigations of race and gender and sexuality and violence is something that resulted in a profound group of works in the way she brings in fact, fiction and fantasy, (which) come together in very compelling ways. Her work deals with complex histories and doesn’t shy away from it and there are no easy answers.”
Could an artist have taken the statue of Queen Victoria in front of the Victoria Memorial Hall in Kolkata, for example, and produced a similar critique of the British Raj in India?
The reply from Priyesh Mistry, assistant curator (international art), certainly wasn’t kneejerk: “The history of colonialism is very complex – we wouldn’t be here otherwise. I am Gujarati, my parents came from Kenya.”
Mistry later explained the historical and contemporary references incorporated by Walker in her monumental work.
“There are disaster scenes and threat from sharks and the dangers of that kind of journey across the Atlantic,” he said. “Contemporary references include Turner and Damian Hirst’s Shark.”
Mistry was referring to JMW Turner’s Slave Ship 1840, Winslow Homer’s Gulf Stream 1899 and Hirst’s tiger shark, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living 1991, which featured the creature suspended in formaldehyde.
Walker had also used the imagery and poetry of William Blake, currently the subject of a major exhibition at Tate Britain.
Mistry said: “There is a scallop shell as you enter the Turbine Hall which comes from depictions of Venus, including (that by) Botticelli. In Venus’s place you have a figure of a crying boy in this well, this pit, which references Bunce Island in Sierra Leone, a colonial commercial port where enslaved slaves were traded and forced on to the ships before they made that treacherous journey across the Atlantic.”
The “captain” was a composite figure of various people who had “led rebellions against colonial powers which had oppressed the African diaspora”.
“There is a direct reference to Queen Victoria at the back of this object – she stands there in joy and celebration in a way and full of life,” Mistry continued. “However, under her skirt there is figure of melancholy, kind of half hiding, which could be Queen Victoria’s own persona masked by all that good cheer.
“Finally, we have Venus herself on top of the fountain, a priestess from Afro Caribbean-Brazilian religion with water springing from her blessing the world
Tate Modern points out that “the full title of the work is... written in Walker’s own words.
...She presents the artwork as a ‘gift … to the heart of an Empire that redirected the fates of the world’. She has signed the work ‘Kara Walker, NTY’, or ‘not Titled Yet’, in a play on British honours awards such as OBE (Order of the British Empire)”.
Kara Walker: Fons Americanus is at the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern until April 5, 2020.
WHEN Rishi Sunak became an MP, he swore his oath on a copy of the Bhagvad Gita, but few people – including perhaps Britain’s first Asian prime minister – will have been aware of the efforts of a Shropshire-born civil servant in that little moment of history.
Charles Wilkins (1749-1836) was an employee of the East India Company and an avid Sanskrit lover. He arrived in India and went on to study the language under scholars in then Benares (now Varanasi, which India’s prime minister Narendra Modi represents) and produced what is believed to be the first English translation of the holy Hindu text.
It made the Gita accessible not only to the British, but also millions of Indians, including Mahatma Gandhi, and years later, Sunak.
This is just one of the anecdotes Manu Pillai uncovers in his new book, Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity, published earlier this year.
Pillai traces the transformation of the religion over the past four centuries – from the arrival of early Europeans in the Indian subcontinent to British rulers and the rise of Indian leaders during the freedom movement – and examines the impact of those influences.
Manu Pillai
“Most of us look at Hindu identity today through the prism of Hindu-Muslim relations, because in the present, that is what became,” Pillai told Eastern Eye. “But to me, it seemed like a lot of modern Hinduism was actually influenced by colonialism and Christianity.”
Not so much in the way that missionaries converted millions of people, Pillai explained, as they “never had physical success in terms of numbers”, but “they had a lot of intellectual success in terms of placing these moulds and frameworks of thinking, which we took in order to articulate a modern avatar for Hinduism. So, I thought that story deserved to be told.”
This is his fifth book, which Pillai began in 2019, following a dissertation on Hindu nationalism at King’s College London. At the outset, he clarified the book is not about his academic thesis, rather it examines the impact of the early Portuguese, the Italians and other Europeans, then the East India Company, the British and finally, Indian reformers and politicians prior to and after independence.
Pillai said, “Hinduism is not a Western-style religion. It’s a cultural framework in which there’s multiple diversities. Think of it like a draw cabinet; it is the overall frame that is Hinduism. But each door has its own individual identity, as well.”
And , the cover of his new book
Pillai charts the influence of hardline Portuguese missionaries whose influence is evident in Goa even today, while in the south, an Italian priest, Roberto de Nobili, adopted the local Hindu ways in order to spread the teachings of Christianity.
The book also shows how British colonial rulers were initially reluctant to the push from missionaries in the UK to proselytise communities in the subcontinent, before eventually changing their minds. Reformers such as Serfoji and Raja Ram Mohan Roy adopted a more modern approach, followed by Dayananda Saraswati, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Jotiba Phule and Veer Savarkar, whose interpretation of Hinduism came at a time of India’s freedom struggle.
This intertwining of religion and politics is not new, though, Pillai said. History has shown how rulers patronised places of worship and this continues in contemporary times, too.
The writer described how Jawaharlal Nehru (independent India’s first prime minister) and “the Nehruvian elites made a conscious effort to keep religion out, but bubbling just beneath that first level, (but) religion was always present in politics. Caste was always present in politics.”
Pillai said, “It was Nehru’s charisma and electoral success that allowed him to keep it at bay or in check. But it was never absent. By Indira Gandhi’s time, she started playing the religious card as needed, whenever she felt her party could benefit from it.”
He added, “The difference is religion has now come much more centrestage and openly acknowledged.”
Pillai also noted how economic clout and technology have both played a part in the recent assertion of religious identity, the most obvious is the patronage of places of worship, while carrying out rituals under the guidance of a priest over a video link is now the norm.
In the book, he writes about how the spread of the English language in the subcontinent meant exposure to new ideas, thus empowering Indians to not only challenge authority, but also learn about the world outside their country.
“The British employ Indians who can speak English. They pay those Indians. Those Indians are getting cash revenue. They are no longer dependent just on their farms (to earn their living). They use that to patronise their community. They build temples,” Pillai said.
“So, ironically, the wealth created by service in the British East India Company ends up in the flowering of Hinduism. The railways, which the British laid to move their troops around, also enables pilgrim traffic to temples. “All of these things come together – technology, politics and economics.”
More recently, Pillai said Hindu resurgence “isn’t purely due to political dynamics”. His view is that with rising disposable income, “you have time to think about identity, and now you have money to patronise things.”
He cites the example of Kerala, where he is from, explain how remittances from the Gulf countries led to a boom in old family temples being renovated. “There is something culturally coded in organising a big puja, or making donations to a temple is seen as an a c h i e v e m e n t , weighing yourself in grain and donating to a temple.
“So that kind of religious identity also boomed with economic boom. It’s not as an economic boom creates some rational paradise. On the contrary, an economic boom can actually result in a greater flowering of religiosity.
“Partly because of that, post liberalisation (of India in the 1990s), there’s been a new middle class that’s emerged, there’s also now disposable income. People have the wherewithal to now think beyond roti, kapda, makaan (food, clothes and shelter), and to think about who are we as a people? And the answer to that question lies in religion, culture, heritage.”
India and south Asia’s vast diversity dictate the way Hinduism is practised, across not just the subcontinent, but also across the world, where the diaspora communities are settled. Consequently, this shapes the evolution of Hindu identity.
Pillai said the next challenge for Hinduism will be maintaining that inner diversity, “because we live in times where there’s so much emphasis on that homogenised identity, on one reading of that label, of what it means to be a Hindu.
“It takes away from how much pluralism there is within the faith itself. The richness of Indian culture, in general, has been the fact that all religions that have entered India have become pluralized, even if it’s Islam.
“Islam in Kerala is not the same as Islam in Bhopal. When the north Indian Muslims under the Muslim League, as I mention in the book, went to Kashmir in the 1940s hoping to woo the Kashmiri Muslims, they were horrified. They thought that Kashmiris, with their saint worship, and all of that were not even proper Muslims. They said, ‘we’ll have to teach them Islam first, before making them Muslims, because they couldn’t recognise that version of Islam. “Everything in India is hybridised, and in many ways, that has been our strength, these hybrid identities have continued over so many generations. “What would be a major challenge is this tendency towards homogenising… towards feeling there has to be only one version of Hinduism and one interpretation of things.
“Even our epics have so many retellings. In Kerala there is an oral kind of Ramayana, in which Shurpanakha, when she propositions Rama and says, ‘I want to marry you’. And he says, ‘No, I’m already married. You go to Lakshmana.’ Shurpanakha turns around and says, ‘That’s okay; the Sharia says you can marry twice, more than one woman.
“So this is a Ramayana in which Shurpanakha quotes the Sharia, because it’s a Muslim Ramayana.
“That is the kind of country we come from. And I think losing that, where everything has become standardised, and that’s a global phenomenon, something we’re seeing around the world. That is a tragedy. That would be the bigger challenge.
“We need more people telling these stories about our inner plural, pluralism and diversity – which is not to devalue that framework. The framework has its own value. I’m not saying that Hinduism should somehow be only about its pluralism, but at the same time, it has to be a fine balance between maintaining that inner richness, maintaining all the threads in the tapestry without painting the whole tapestry one single shade.”
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