‘Har Ghar Tiranga’: The Heart, the State, and the Indian Constitution

On the occasion of the 75^th anniversary of Indian independence, August 15

In the wake of the “Har Ghar Tiranga” campaign, a campaign designed to encourage every Indian home (har ghar) to display the National Flag (tiranga, literally tri-colored), it is useful to think briefly about the evolution of the national flag, its place in the nationalist imagination during the anti-colonial struggle, and the particular way our relationship to the flag is a matter of the heart, the state, and the Indian constitution. Some people have thought that the orange in the flag represents the Hindu constituency, the green the Muslim community, and that all “others” are represented by the white in the flag.  Gandhi had said as much, in an article for Young India on 13 April 1921, except that at that time red took the place of orange, but he also added that the charkha or spinning wheel in the middle of the flag pointed both to the oppressed condition of every Indian and simultaneously to the possibility of rejuvenating every household.  The Constituent Assembly debates, which led to the adoption of the tricolored flag on 22 July 1947, suggest that some members were more inclined towards another interpretation, seeing the green as a symbol of nature and the fact that we are all children of ‘Mother Earth’, the orange as symbolizing renunciation and sacrifice, and white as symbolic of peace (shanti).  That may be so, but the tiranga cannot be unraveled without some consideration of how it emerges from the three-forked road of the heart, the state, and the constitution.

Just what, however, is a national flag and why do all nation-states have one?  The national anthem and the national flag are the bedrock of every nation-state; nearly all also have a national emblem, as does India.  India has a complicated history around the national anthem, “Jana Gana Mana”, and the country officially also has a national song, “Vande Mataram”; and, then, there is an unofficial anthem, “Saare Jahan Se Accha”, which has wide currency.  This makes the national flag especially and supremely important in India as an unambiguous marker of the nation-state. The honor and integrity of the nation are supposed to be captured by the flag, and the narrative of the nation-state everywhere offers ample testimony that the national flag is uniquely capable of enlisting the aid of citizens, giving rise to sentiments of nationalism, and evoking the supreme sacrifice of death.  In a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and highly polyglot nation such as India, the national flag is there to remind every Indian that something unites them:  before their allegiance to a language, religion, caste group, or anything else, they are Indian. Thus, in every respect, the national flag commands, not merely our respect, but our allegiance to the nation.

The Ministry of Culture’s “Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav” website, of which the “Har Ghar Tiranga” campaign is one component, adds something quite different to the discussion. It states that “our relationship with the flag has always been more formal and institutional than personal”, and the campaign seeks to evoke in every Indian a “personal connection to the Tiranga” and “also an embodiment of our commitment to nation-building.”  The idea, it says candidly, “is to invoke the feeling of patriotism.” To understand just what this means, we have to disentangle two elements:  first, the question of patriotism; and, secondly, the fact that the relationship of Indians to the national flag is sought to be altered from a formal, stiff, and institutional relationship to a more personal and engaged one. Let us first turn to the second point, before returning to complete the broader discussion on patriotism.

Unlike countries such as the United States and Canada, India for a long time did not in fact permit ordinary citizens to fly the flag from their residence or business. This right was preserved as the prerogative of the state.  “The Flag Code-India”, overhauled in 2002 and replaced by the “Flag Code of India”, and the Prevention of Insult to National Honour Act, 1971, set down the protocols to be observed in flying the national flag. In a now little-remembered but highly significant ruling on 21 September 1995, the Delhi High Court directed that the then “Flag Code-India” could not be interpreted so as to prevent an ordinary citizen from flying the National Flag from their business or residence. This eventually brought into existence the “Flag Code” of 2002, which permits unrestricted display of the tricolor consistent with the dignity and honor that is owed to the National Flag. However, aside from the question of the material to be used for making the National Flag, which has been the subject of considerable discussion in recent days, the Flag Code still imposed restrictions, such as being flown only “from sunrise to sunset “ (Para 2.2, sec. xi). The changes, moreover, were never public knowledge, and as a consequence it is safe to say that Indians have had a distant and formal, rather than personal and intimate, relationship to the National Flag. It is precisely this relationship that the “Har Ghar Tiranga” initiative has sought to change.

What is striking, and no longer seems to be a part of public or even institutional memory, is that in the two to three decades before independence, Indians did indeed have a personal relationship to the Congress flag or, as English officials with some derision described it, the Gandhi flag—the very flag that, after modifications, including the replacement of the charkha with Ashoka’s Lion Capital, would become the National Flag adopted by the Constituent Assembly.  Congressmen and women fought government officials with zeal for the right to hoist their flag.  They found that hoisting the flag invariably attracted the wrath, and often the vengeance, of British officials, and invariably ordered the flag to be brought down. On the rare occasion that a government official allowed the Congress flag to fly, he would receive an instant reprimand from the colonial government.  This happened in 1923 in Bhagalpur, where the official consented to have the Congress flag flown alongside the Union Jack, albeit at a lower height.  Not only the Government of India, but the British Cabinet issued a stern note saying “that in no circumstances should the Swaraj or Gandhi Flag be flown in conjunction with even below the Union Jack.” During the Salt Satyagraha, boys as young as eight years old were whipped for the offense of flying the flag or trying to hoist it.  The indomitable Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, in her riveting memoirs, has described the tussle over the flag during the Salt Satyagraha, with the Congress Volunteers hoisting the flag time after time, and the police lowering it each time.  “Up with the Flag”, “Up with the Flag”—the echoes kept ringing in her ears.

The right to fly the National Flag, in other words, was won after an arduous struggle.  The flag evolved over time:  it was Bhikaji Cama, who edited the newspaper Bande Mataram and closely networked with Indian revolutionaries in Europe, who unfurled the first Indian national flag at the 2^nd Socialist International Congress at Stuttgart in 1907,  and Kamaladevi rightly points out that she “installed India as a political entity” by doing so.  The same flag had been hoisted for the first time in Calcutta in 1906.  By 1921, the charkha had been installed at its center at Gandhi’s instigation, and the flag was again modified in 1931.  As Gandhi had written, “a flag is a necessity for all nations.  Millions have died for it.  It is no doubt a kind of idolatry which it would be a sin to destroy.”  Seeing how British hearts pounded with pride at seeing the Union Jack fluttering in the wind, Gandhi asked whether it was not similarly necessary that all Indians “recognize a common flag to live and to die for”?  If the Congress flag accompanied every campaign, artists similarly positioned the flag prominently in their artwork.  In a 1945 color print celebrating Subhas Bose and the heroes of the Indian National Army who were put on trial on charges of treason, we see the Congress flag with the charkha, and the INA flag with the springing tiger, on either side of Subhas Bose (see fig. 1).  Martyrs fell along the way, but their struggle was not in vain:  in Sudhir Chowdhury’s print from 1947, the heads of the martyrs, among them Bhagat Singh and Khudiram Bose, lie at the feet of Bharat Mata, who hands the tiranga to Nehru on the eve of independence (see fig. 2).  In her various hands, she holds the other iterations of the national flag before it evolved into the tiranga.

Fig. 1, Sudhir Chowdhury, I.N.A. officers with Netaji, c. 1945.

If Indians fought for the national flag with zeal, they did so because they believed in what it stood for and they did so from their own volition against colonial oppression.  The affection for the flag came from within, as a mandate from the heart rather than from the state.  In any discussion of what the flag means today, it must be borne in mind that though the business of the state is to produce patriotic citizens, a patriotism that is manufactured by the state cannot endure and is as ephemeral as a market commodity.  It is no less pertinent that the Constitution of India has nothing to say on the national flag.  Though former Chief Justice Khare, heading a three-member bench of the Supreme Court, stated in 2004 that the citizen had a fundamental right to fly the flag as guaranteed by Article 19 (1)(a) of the Constitution, the article in question is about the freedom of speech and expression, and the right to fly the flag was interpreted as being subsumed by the larger right specified by Art. 19 (1)(a).

Fig. 2: Sudhir Chowdhury, “Worship of Martyrs”, c. 1947.

The Constitution has, of course, nothing to say explicitly on thousands of subjects, and Chief Justice Khare did what courts must do, namely interpret the Constitution.  That is well and good, but we must confront the fact that many who honor the flag do not necessarily honor the Constitution. The state may be no exception; indeed, it is far likely to honor the flag rather than the constitution.  A rogue can fly a flag as much as a saint; it takes almost nothing to show one’s patriotism.  If patriotism can be purchased on the cheap, for a 5-rupee (7. 5 cents) plastic flag put together in China, which the present regime in India has derided as the mortal enemy, it is practically worthless.  That larger right to freedom of speech and expression which subsumes the right to fly the flag is critically important, but it is also equally important to recognize that the Constitution, as the supreme law of the land, itself subsumes the National Flag.  Now that the citizens of India have won the right to hoist the National Flag without restriction, consistent with respect to the National Flag, it is perhaps time to think about the corresponding duty they owe to respect the freedom of speech and expression, and the obligation, which the present government has shown little if any interest in honoring, to protect the Fundamental Rights promised in the Constitution to every citizen.

First published under the same title in a slightly shorter form at abplive.in, here.

Gujarati translation by abplive.in available, here.

The Art of the Freedom Struggle in India

As India prepares to celebrate the 75^th anniversary of its independence on August 15^th, attention will naturally gravitate towards those who were the principal architects of the movement that gave us azaadi. In the current mood, and under the present political dispensation, one can be certain that even though the putative “Father of the Nation”, Mahatma Gandhi, will be mentioned in the usual pious tones, many others will be celebrated as the greater architects of the freedom struggle.  The marginalization of Gandhi has, of course, been going on for some time, indeed long before the present BJP government came into power, and the extraordinary success of the South Indian film “RRR” tells us something about the film culture of our days, the political sensibility of many Indians, and the manner in which the narrative of the freedom struggle is being rewritten. The film is a visual extravaganza that celebrates most of the “real warriors” who delivered India from the yoke of colonial rule, and it comes as no surprise that neither Gandhi nor Jawaharlal Nehru are deemed worthy of inclusion in the galaxy of heroes. Quite predictably, the film invokes, particularly towards the end, the legacies of Subhas Bose, Bhagat Singh, and Sardar Patel among others.  The screenwriter of the film, Vijayendra Prasad, has gone on record as saying that online posts—from Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp—from some friends made him question five years ago whether Gandhi and Nehru had done anything for the country, and he says he began to reject the orthodox historical narrative that was being taught in Indian schools when he was a child.  When you learn your history from WhatsApp and Twitter, what you get is “RRR”—a visual spectacle, but absolutely brainless, and one that is curiously devoid of any understanding of the language of cinema. This is, of course, apart from the question of what the makers of the films understand by India’s adivasi culture, or their interpretation of caste and its political histories.

One way to comprehend what was transpiring during the freedom struggle and in its immediate aftermath is to understand how artists at that time responded to the events unfolding before them.  A very small if sophisticated body of work has emerged around this subject, but what has been written on it—often in obtuse language—is largely for scholars, all the more ironical because much of the art of that time is ephemeral, more like bazaar art, and one would imagine that the scholars who have sought to rescue this work from oblivion are sensitive to the fact that bazaar art is after all for the bazaar, that is for common people.  What becomes evident from a perusal of the art is that the artists and printmakers saw in Gandhi the supreme embodiment of the aspirations of a people striving to be free.  They unhesitatingly turned Gandhi into the presiding deity of the political landscape.  By far the greatest number of nationalist prints, as they may be called, feature him and the political events and the political theatre to which he gave birth—whether it be the Champaran Satyagraha, the noncooperation movement, the no-tax campaigns such as the Bardoli Satyagraha, the Salt Satyagraha, or the Quit India movement.  What is even more extraordinary is that the printmakers and artists also unhesitatingly placed him, and him alone of all the political luminaries of that time, as akin to the founder of religions and as the true inheritor of the spiritual legacy of Indian civilization.  Thus, for example, in the poster by P. S. Ramachandra Rao that appeared from Madras in 1947-48 entitled “The Splendour That is India”, Gandhi is placed in the pantheon of “great souls”—Valmiki, Thiruvalluvar, the Buddha, Mahavira, Shankaracharya, the philosopher Ramanuja, Guru Nanak, Ramakrishna, Ramana Maharishi—who are thought to have animated the spiritual life of a people (see fig. 1).

Fig. 1: P. S. R. Rao, “The Splendour That is India”, Madras, 1947-48.

Let us turn, however, to some more modest prints that came out of a workshop in Kanpur established by Shyam Sundar Lal, who described himself as a “Picture Merchant” and set up a business at the chowk. It is not possible to go into the details of how Kanpur came to have such an important though not singular place in nationalist art, but it is useful to recall that Kanpur [or Cawnpore, as it was known to the British] was the site of critical events during the Rebellion of 1857-58.  As a major manufacturing hub and production centre for supplies required by the army by the late 19^th century, Kanpur also became important for labour union organizing and it was a city where communists and Congressmen both jostled for power.  We do not know exactly how these prints were circulated, distributed, or used.  Did they pass from hand to hand? Where they pasted on walls in public places or framed and displayed in homes?  We do not even know how many copies were printed of each print, and indeed how many designs were in circulation for around the twenty to thirty years that the workshop was in business. But the prints that have survived make it possible to draw some inferences about how printmakers viewed the nationalist struggle.

One of the artists who produced prints diligently for Sundar Lal’s workshop was Prabhu Dayal and we may confine ourselves to three examples of his artwork. In a print entitled “Satyagraha Yoga-Sadhana”, or the achievement of satyagraha by the discipline of yoga, Gandhi is shown centre-stage, with Motilal Nehru and his son Jawaharlal positioned at either end of the Mahatma (see fig. 2).  He sits meditatively on a bed of thorns, reminiscent perhaps of the dying Bhishma as he lay upon a sheaf of arrows and delivered a last set of teachings on the duties of the king and the slipperiness of dharma. There are no rose bushes without thorns; similarly, there is no freedom without restraint and discipline. The resolution for purna swaraj had been passed in December 1929 by the Congress at the annual meeting in Lahore presided over by Jawaharlal, and it is the rays of full independence or “poori azaadi” that shine upon the three.

Fig. 2: Satyagraha Yoga-Sadhana, print by Prabhu Dayal, published by Rashtriya Chitra Prakashak Karyalaya, Kanpur.

More remarkable still is a print from 1930 which casts the epic battle between Rama and Ravana as a modern-day struggle between Gandhi and the British, between ahimsa (nonviolence) and himsa (violence), between satya (truth) and asatya (falsehood; see fig. 3). The ten-headed Ravana is incarnated as the hydra-headed machinery of death and oppression known as the British Raj. This struggle is represented as the Ramayana of our times. In this “struggle for freedom” (“swarajya ki larai”), Gandhi’s only weapons are the spindle and the charkha, though just as Rama was aided by Hanuman, so Gandhi is aided by Nehru.  There is no mistaking the fact that Nehru is rendered as the modern-day Hanuman, who, in his hunt for the life-saving drug (sanjivini), carried back the mountain.  A forlorn-looking Bharat Mata, Mother India, languishes in one corner of the print, cast in the shadow of the architecture of the new imperial capital built by the British as a monument to their own power. Gandhi in his rustic dhoti, bare-chested, presents a stark contrast to the Hun-looking British official in high boots whose hands bear a multitude of weapons of oppression: artillery, the baton of the police, military aircraft, indeed the entire arsenal of the armed forces and the navy. The oppressive and power-crazy British also wield Section 144 of the Indian Penal Code, which restricted the assembly of people and was used by the colonial state to foil nationalist demonstrations—and is still being used in independent India.

Fig. 3: Prabhu Dayal, “Struggle for Freedom” (“Swarajaya ki Ladai”), c. 1930, published by Shyam Sunder Lal Agarwal, Kanpur.

Prabhu Dayal, however, was ecumenical in his comprehension of the different strands of the freedom movement.  Contrary to the view which some had then, and which is increasingly becoming popular among those who deride nonviolence and imagine that Gandhi was an effete individual who placed before his country a worldview for which a muscular nation-state can have no respect, Dayal did not see Bhagat Singh or Subhas Bose as having an antagonistic relationship to Mahatma.  Much of his work suggests the complementariness between Gandhi and Bhagat Singh as in, for instance, this print entitled “Swatantrata ki Vedi par Viron ka Balidan”, or “The Sacrifice of Heroes at the Altar of Independence” (see fig. 4).  Here Bhagat Singh, Motilal, Jawaharlal, Gandhi, and countless other Indians are lined up before Bharat Mata with the heads of the immortal martyrs, ‘amar shahid’, who have heroically already laid down their lives for the nation: Ashfaqullah [Khan], Rajendra Lahiri, Ramprasad Bismil, Lala Lajpat Rai, and Jatindranath Das.  Prabhu Dayal did not doubt the sacrifice of the “Lion of the Punjab”, Lala Lajpat Rai, or of the many young men who took up arms in their quest for India’s independence.

Fig. 4: Prabhu Dayal, “Swantantrata ki Vedi par Viron Ka Balidan” (The Sacrifice of Heroes at the Altar of Independence), c. 1930, published by Shyam Sundarl Lal Agarwal, Kanpur.

Much of this artwork has only in recent years begun to receive the critical scrutiny of historians and other scholars.  These prints do not only tell the story of the freedom movement; rather, they helped to forge the identity of the nation.  What kind of art will do the same at this critical juncture of India’s history remains to be seen.

Note:  All the prints are part of the author’s own collection. This article is related to, and in part drawn from, his forthcoming book, Insurgency and the Artist (New Delhi:  Roli Books, c. Oct 2022).

This is a slightly revised version of a piece first published under the same title at abplive.in on 12 August 2022.

Published in a Marathi translation at ABP Network, here.

Also available in Bengali translation at bengali.abplive.in, here.

And in a Gujarati translation at gujarati.abplive.in, here.

Objects and the(ir) Objective: The Story of India

[A Review article on India:  A Story Through 100 Objects, by Vidya Dehejia.  Delhi:  Lustre Press/Roli Books, 2021.  ISBN:  978-81-94969174.  279 pp.]

Some years ago Sunil Khilnani, author of the elegantly written The Idea of India, a long discursive essay on post-independent India very much shaped by a Nehruvian sensibility, embarked on a rather different enterprise as he attempted to grapple with a country characterized by a long past.  How might we imagine the history of India if we were to view it through the lives of some of its most arresting men and women—and equally some who won little recognition beyond their own community, fell into obscurity, or were architects of policies that have long since been disowned?  The outcome was a book that Khilnani called Incarnations:  India in 50 Lives (2016).  It is understandable that his narrative should be peopled by the likes of the Buddha, Ashoka, Shankara, Kabir, Nanak, Mirabai, and Gandhi, but the choice of Charan Singh, a wily politician who served as the country’s caretaker Prime Minister for six months at the head of a wobbly coalition, will seem odd to many except perhaps to those who remember his reputation as an unstinting champion of the rural peasantry.  The choice of Satyajit Ray may seem inspired to film afficionados who recognize him as one of world cinema’s supreme auteurs, and whose Apu Trilogy is a landmark of humanism, but I suspect that the hundreds of millions who follow Salman Khan or Shahrukh Khan have barely heard of a director who crafted his films in the image of Mozart’s operas where, as Ray once explained, ‘groups of characters maintain their individuality through elaborate ensembles’.

Khilnani did not claim to be writing about the 50 most influential Indians, or the ‘greatest’ Indians, but it is in the nature of things that his 50 lives should have been construed as in some ways the lives of the most eminent Indians.  Any enterprise such as Khilnani’s must be marked by eccentricity.  It is a similar eccentricity, if that is the word to designate choices that sometimes appear unstable, quirky, and occasionally outlandish, that characterizes Vidya Dehejia’s audacious and intellectually provocative attempt to narrate the story of India through 100 objects.  Dehejia is principally an art historian and would doubtless have been inspired by A History of the World in 100 Objects (2010), an attempt by Neil MacGregor to write a ‘world history’ through 100 objects in the gargantuan collection of the British Museum of which he was then the Director.  MacGregor was constrained only by the parameters set for him:  ‘The objects had to cover the whole world, as far as possible equally’, and address the totality of human experience, not only the lives of the rich and the powerful; consequently, the objects chosen could not merely be great works of art but had to speak to everyday life.  Dehejia in principle sets for herself a somewhat similar task with regards to the objects that she chooses, stating that she has tried not to privilege any political standpoint and that she has sought to be ‘even-handed and fair-minded’ in the story that she tells.  The desire to be ‘even-handed and fair-minded’ may evoke some cynicism from the reader with a knowledge of the British attempt in India to represent themselves as neutral gatekeepers, but others might say only that Dehejia is being true to the calling of her profession.

It is, however, in the structure of her book, lavishly illustrated and meticulously produced by New Delhi-based Roli Books, that she most closely emulates MacGregor with one significant difference.  Both books are divided into twenty chapters and generally four to five objects illustrate the thematic argument of each chapter; however, where MacGregor proceeds strictly chronologically, moving from one phase of history to another, Dehejia’s fidelity to chronology extends only within each chapter. Thus, for example, in discussing ideals of womanhood in India, Dehejia moves from a bronze statue of Queen Sembiyan Mahadevi, c. 900 CE, to a watercolour on paper from 1615 of Nur Jahan, whom some readers may perhaps be surprised to discover was an expert markswoman; and from there to a recent statue of Ahilyabai Holkar, who was an astute ruler as much as she was a pious Hindu in the mid-18^th century, to two early nineteenth century representations of Saraswati and Bharat Mata.

To understand the circumstances that have conspired to make possible a work such as Dehejia’s, it is necessary to recapitulate a few recent developments in historical scholarship.  There is, after some decades where cultural studies predominated and the gaze was riveted on the politics of representations, once again the turn to material history. It is immaterial that the Chola Temple Walls which Dehejia adroitly describes as a ‘Public Record Office’ (pp. 68-69), covered as they are with inscriptions, cannot quite be held in one’s hands as is generally true of many objects. Her objects are artefacts that inscribe a past, speak to the present, and occasionally portend the future. Secondly, Dehejia is still beholden to one of subaltern history and postcolonial theory’s most potent insights, namely the place of the ‘fragment’ in the imaginary of the nation.  Taken together, her objects—and other like objects—are more than the sum of the parts; but each is a fragment, sometimes calling forth other associations, occasionally a whole unto itself, and sometimes orphaned.  Thirdly, and relatedly, since national histories have become suspect to enlightened liberals, more particularly as they generally degenerate into becoming nationalist histories, scholars have had to search for new ways to write national histories without succumbing to the nationalist malady. Dehejia’s history of India through 100 objects can certainly be read in this vein.

It is as an art historian that Dehejia comes to her task and this shows equally in her choice of themes and the objects to illustrate the themes. Though four to five principal objects are apportioned for each part, the section on the ‘Art of the Illustrated Book’ is an exception with seven objects—and all these are examples of what may be called ‘high art’, folios from rare manuscripts and miniature paintings. At least half of the objects chosen by her are sculptural works or miniature paintings and the overwhelming and some will surely say misleading impression left upon the reader is of a civilization that was shaped predominantly by the artistic sensibility of Indian people.  One hundred objects are numbered but the ‘100’ is not to be taken literally, nor are the objects always drawn from India, even if they are clearly ‘Indic’ in origin or produced in some fashion under the sign of the Sanskrit cosmopolis:  thus, for example, a 9^th-century Sri Lankan statue of the Buddhist goddess Prajnaparamita is offered as an illustration of the ‘yogic body’, but the argument is supplemented both with seals from the Indus Valley (ca. 2000 BCE) to suggest the antiquity of yoga in India’s imagination and the famous 7^th century CE open-air ‘Great Penance’ relief carved on two boulders at Mamallapuram where yogic postures are depicted (pp. 34-37). The commentary that ensues is what one might expect from an art historian, though here Dehejia’s declared intent to eschew a political position here perhaps does short shrift to the subject.  There has been a lively debate in recent years, particularly in the United States, on whether yoga is intrinsically related to Hinduism: both the Christian right and Hindu nationalists have affirmed (though for different reasons) such a relationship, while many especially liberal practitioners of yoga claim that it is a wholly secular practice shorn of any religious underpinnings.  There is some controversy over whether the main motif of this magnificent sculptural relief is Arjuna’s penance or the descent of the Ganga, but in either case yoga’s associations with Hinduism seem unimpeachable. 

-Great Penance Relief at Mamallapuram (formerly Mahabalipuram), Tamil Nadu, 7th century CE. The figure of the ascetic in a yogic pose can be seen at the center, about a third of the way down from the top.

Dehejia is less reticent, however, on how what objects tell us about Hindu-Muslim relations and the contemporary project to read Hindu aspirations into the past.  She does not state her position bluntly but her repudiation of the communalist standpoint is clear enough.  It is a measure of the restraint with which she writes that the discerning reader will at once understand her position while the reader who is disposed towards Hindu nationalism is perhaps likely to think anew his or her own position.  Consider her treatment of this subject through two objects. A Chalukyan period (ca. 1000 CE) granite sculpture of a dvarapala (door guardian) interests her since it frequently changed hands, moving one from Hindu king to another in a tale of vanquishers and the defeated (pp. 62-63). Sometimes objects, and sacred centres—most famously Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia, otherwise known as Sancta Sophia—fell to the conqueror of another faith, a phenomenon that she rightly points out can be seen ‘in most parts of the world’.  The communalist would like to read such phenomena exclusively through the lens of religious animosity, but it is the politics of conquest and the quest for power that characterize this history rather than the politics of religion. More arresting for many reasons, not the least being that even educated Indians know very little about the Deccan sultanates (1527-1686) and their extraordinary cosmopolitanism, is her choice of two miniatures from Bijapur (ca. 1604, pp. 106-7).  One features Ibrahim Adil Shah, Sultan of Bijapur, who wore the rudraksha beads associated with Shiva, playing the tambura; in the other miniature, produced at the Sultan’s behest, the goddess Saraswati, a veena resting on her left rap against her right shoulder, is rendered much like a Mughal princess.  This hybridized painting is emblematic of the syncretism of the Muslim courts.  Adil Shah had inscribed along the top the words, ‘Ibrahim, whose father is guru Ganapati and mother the pure Saraswati.’  Should we be surprised that in more recent times Ustad Bismillah Khan, the master of the shehnai (the double-reeded oboe common in north India) nonpareil, played at the Kashi Viswanath temple and that he regularly prayed to Saraswati?

Sultan Ibrahim Adil Shah playing the tambura; ascribed to Farrukh Beg in an inscription written by Muhammad Hussain Zarin Qalam, c. 1610-11. From an album page. Collection: National Museum, Prague.

I would like to insist that one cannot begrudge Dehejia her choices.  Nevertheless, even as she candidly terms them ‘idiosyncratic’, the debate is not thereby closed.  Each object tells a story, and she is adept in narrating the story, but thousands of other objects, each illuminating in its own fashion, would have served her equally well. A number of arguments may be raised in this connection, again less so as criticism than as provocations. First, I wonder if it is not the case that Dehejia has been perhaps overly influenced by trends highlighting “diversity” and the occluded subjects of history.  A watercolour from 1615 of Empress Nur Jahan underscores her abilities as ruler and as an expert markswoman (pp. 236-37), and the aforementioned bronze statue of the 10^th century Chola queen Sembiyan Mahadevi and the 2011 statue of the 18^th century Ahilyabai of the House of Holkar are in the same vein (pp. 234-35, 238-39). In recent years there has been a spate of biographies of Mughal women of the royal household, some written, it seems, to counterbalance the lavish attention bestowed on the great Mughal rulers.  This is all fine and admirable, but still at the end a rather anodyne exercise, establishing only, as Dehejia argues more than once, that patriarchy in India (and elsewhere) has prevented women from attaining their full potential.  The more critical question is whether women in politics may furnish us a politics that will yield a more just and equal society. Secondly, and somewhat in this vein, India has historically provided richer possibilities of imagining a world that is not tethered to rigid conceptions of male and female, masculinity and femininity.  The stunning statue from a copper alloy of ca. 1000 of God as ardhnari (half-woman) points to a world where both masculinity and femininity were preceded by androgyny (pp. 84-85).  According to Dehejia, ‘the dominance of the male is clear in the fact that the composite image is called Shiva as Half-Woman’, but one must perforce ask:  ‘called’ by whom?  There is nothing intrinsic in the image which suggests the conception of God as predominantly female or male.  But supposing that Dehejia were right, one is then moved to inquire whether the art of the West, or of China, Japan, or Africa, also allowed for such imagery of the divine godhead?  Is the dualistic framework of thinking as much a problem in classical Indian thought as it is in the philosophical systems of the West?

Shiva as Ardhnari (Half-woman), c. 1000 CE, from Nepal. Copper alloy with gemstones. Approximately 83 cms. Collection: Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The colonial civil servant and ethnographer William Crooke wrote a delightful and now forgotten book called Things Indian (1906). There are some 175-200 odd essays on subjects such as amulets, bamboo, the bazaar, camels, carpets, curry, diamonds, elephants, embroidery, fairs, rice, salt, tea, and snakes.  I am tempted to ask, after reading about amulets in Crooke’s book, why ‘bangles’ are not one of the 100 objects that Dehejia writes about:  the bangle-seller has been a ubiquitous presence in our bazaars and fairs, and the scene of a woman breaking her bangles upon learning of her husband’s death is to be found in scores of Hindi movies. A similar thought might arise regarding the mango and the banyan tree, but here Dehejia anticipates the reader in capturing these two ‘objects’ alongside the tiger, the peacock, and the lotus flower in the definitive stamps released by the Indian government’s post and telegraphs department (pp. 260-61). But their reproduction in this doubly diminutive form nevertheless suggests once again that everyday objects are slighted in favour of works of arts.  Where, the reader may also ask, is the cricket bat? If cricket is, alongside popular cinema, the enduring passion of so many in the country, it would appear to be deserving of some attention.  I was thinking likewise of the matka (clay water pot), the belna (rolling pin), and the pots and pans of the Indian kitchen.  The pressure cooker—the traditional one, not the new incarnation known as ‘instant pot’—was invented in the US and became practically obsolete there, except as a retrofitted bomb, but in India it has found an enduring home and the Indian kitchen is unthinkable without it.  Yet it is a mark of the suppleness of Dehejia’s thinking that some of these pots and pans do make their appearance in her ‘objects’, having entered into the imaginary of the contemporary artist Subodh Gupta’s massive installations, ‘Spill’ and ‘Very Hungry God’ (pp. 268-69). Objects with which we have lived for a very long time may take on new forms.  We can read new meanings into them.  It is to Dehejia’s credit that her book allows for this fecund play of possibilities.

Subodh Gupta, “Spill”, 2007.

[First published in a slightly shorter version in Open magazine (26 July 2021) under the title “An Objective History” and also available online (16 July 2021) here.]

Imagining Beethoven in India

This month marks the 250^th birth anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven.  In ordinary times, Germany, Austria, and a good part of the world beyond Europe would have been ablaze with celebrations:  as the opera composer Giuseppe Verdi, a man whose reputation in some circles would be just as great, remarked: “Before the name of Beethoven, we must all bow in reverence.”  However, in India, even without the coronavirus pandemic, there would not have been much of a stir.  Beethoven’s name is by no means unknown, and India doubtless has its share of afficionados of Western classical music.  Fifty years ago, the Indian government even issued a postage stamp in his honor.  But it is an unimpeachable fact that unlike in China, Korea, and Japan, where Western classical music has over the decades gained enormous ground, there has never been anything more than a miniscule constituency in India for such music.  A few years ago the German violinist Viktoria Elisabeth Kaunzner wrote that a “performance by the Seoul Philharmonic conducted by Eliahu Inbal of Shostakovich’s Symphony no.11 prompted the same kind of enthusiasm from the audience that one sees after a goal is scored at the FIFA World Championship”.  This would be unthinkable in India—even, to be quite clear about it, in Russia, Germany, or elsewhere in Europe or the United States.

Ludwig van Beethoven: undoubtedly the most famous portrait of him, by Joseph Karl Stieler, 1820.

*The Imprint of a Man’s Life: Visualizing Gandhi’s Biography

Fig. 1:  “Pujya Gandhiji Ki Jivan Caritra”, or The Life Story of Revered Gandhiji: a print from the famous workshop of Hemchander Bharagava & Co., Delhi.

One more Gandhi Jayanti [Birth Anniversary: October 2nd] has gone by and the thought that occurs to me is this:  just how was the life of Gandhi conveyed, in his own lifetime and in the aftermath of his death, to his countrymen and women, across towns and in India’s hundreds of thousands of villages?  What did they, who could not read, know of his life in panchayats and little hamlets?  Did the Patuas or Chitrakars move from village to village and unfold the panels of their scrolls and so make vivid the episodes drawn from Gandhi’s life?  If they did so, the scrolls appear not to have survived.  There is something suggestive, in this regard, about a touching scene in the classic movie, Garam Hawa:  the workers at the shoe factory of Mirza Sahib are gathered around a man who reads from a newspaper an account of Gandhi’s assassination.

There may thus have been many modes by which the life of Gandhi was put into circulation and the mind instinctively turns to biographies.  Of biographies of Gandhi there is now no end, and each generation, so says Ramachandra Guha in justification of yet another life of Mohandas, needs its own Gandhi.  India sent us Mohandas, Mandela is reported to have said, and we sent back a Mahatma, and it is in South Africa that the first slim biography of Gandhi was penned.  Many of the biographies that followed are, as befits an epic life, gargantuan in scope.  There was, at first, D. G. Tendulkar’s Mahatma in 8 volumes; various volumes by Pyarelal appeared at a leisurely pace over the course of a few decades. But these works were published many years after independence, as is true of something like 700-800 biographies of Gandhi in English alone.

Anthologies of Gandhi’s writings began to proliferate around the mid-1920s, and his own ‘lieutenants’, most famously Mahadev Desai and later Pyarelal, were quick in bringing out systematic narratives of his satyagraha campaigns. The two volumes of Gandhi’s autobiography, written in Gujarati and rendered into English by Mahadev, appeared in 1927 and 1929, but the autobiography takes the story of his life only to the early 1920s. Gandhi’s writings began to be disseminated by Navajivan Trust, a publishing house that he had established in 1929, but nevertheless it is unlikely that most Indians would have become acquainted with the contours of his life through published works.

By the early 1920s, print makers, working out from a number of cities, among them Delhi, Kanpur, Allahabad, Lahore, Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay, had begun to take the narrative of the nationalist movement to the masses.  These prints may have been passed from one hand to another; they may have been framed and placed prominently in homes, but it is also likely that they were affixed to walls, doors, or poster boards in public spaces.  Gandhi figured prominently in these prints, many shaped around the non-cooperation movement, the Salt Satyagraha, or the teachings with which he became associated on subjects such as the constructive programme, swadeshi, and the economic impoverishment of India under colonial rule.  One of the more striking of such prints, from the Delhi-based Hemchander Bhargava & Co., takes as its subject the totality of Gandhi’s life, from cradle to ‘martyrdom’, and offers cues on how Gandhi’s life was stitched into the fabric of the nation.

Fig. 1a:  “M. Gandhi Jivani”, that is “The Life of M. Gandhi.”  This is a variation of Fig. 1: the print is identical, except for the fact that the background blue is a darker shade of blue, and the longer caption of Fig. 1 has been replaced with a shorter and less ornate caption.

Entitled “Poojya Gandhiji ki Jivan Caritra” (The Life Story of Revered Gandhiji; fig. 1), the print invites the viewer to read Gandhi’s life through rites of passage or critical events.  The narrative commences at the bottom left with the infant Gandhi; moving along a vertical axis, the viewer encounters him at various stages of schooling in his native Gujarat and England before he arrived in South Africa as an attorney.  It is there that he developed the idea of nonviolent resistance:  in doing so, he stripped himself of his Western clothes and donned the garb of a satyagrahi.  As the viewer moves along the horizontal axis at the top of the print, the next phase of his life is vividly brought to the fore.  In 1915, Gandhi returned to India with Kasturba, and campaigns at Champaran and Kheda acquainted him with the conditions of Indian peasantry.  By the mid-1920s, Gandhi was preoccupied with the constructive programme, and finally in 1930 he launched the next phase of mass nonviolent resistance with the Salt Satyagraha.

The viewer, at this point, moves vertically down the right side of the print.  Gandhi made his way to London for the Round Table Conference to negotiate the terms of India’s future; he also met with the King-Emperor. In the mid-1930s, he installed himself at an ashram in central India.  Visitors to his ashram almost invariably found him spinning. He appeared to have withdrawn, once again, from the struggle for political emancipation; however, the print can also be read as inviting the viewer to reflect on the relationship of political independence to economic independence and social change in Gandhi’s thinking.  He launched the final phase of the freedom struggle with the call for the British to ‘Quit India’.  With this, the print-maker turned to some of the people who filled the last years of Gandhi’s life:  Nehru, children, and his grandnieces Manu and Abha.  The two young women were his constant companions and sometimes dubbed his ‘walking sticks’.  Finally, Gandhi’s life is brought to a close with his assassination:  the martyred Gandhi is placed squarely in the center of the print and both dominates and anchors the entire narrative.

Fig. 2:  “Bapuji ki Amar Kahani”, the Immortal Story of Bapuji.  This artist is described as the Chitrakar Lakshminarayan Sharma, and the publisher is Picture Publishing Corporation, Bombay.

Other similar prints of Gandhi’s life story circulated as well.  From Picture Publishing Corporation in Bombay we have a print, created by Lakshminarayan Sharma, with some significant, indeed extraordinary, variations (fig. 2).  The narrative is structured in a like fashion, but the Indian tricolor, which is noticeably missing in the first print, occupies a good portion of the lower third of Sharma’s print and offers a different framing device.  The baby’s cradle is draped in the tricolor, as if to suggest that Gandhi was ordained from birth to lead the country to freedom; on the bottom right, Gandhi foregrounds the flag and the words, ‘Sampurna Swaraj, 15 August 1947’, suggesting that he successfully shepherded the country to its destiny.  Most significantly, Gandhi lies in complete repose, his body adorned by the tricolor.  The script at the bottom enumerates the date of his death; the smoking gun suggests that the satyagrahi met a violent end.  “He Ram” are the words that Gandhi is thought to have uttered as the bullets pierced his body and he fell to the floor, but both the assassin, Nathuram Godse, and his younger brother Gopal would dispute that Gandhi said anything at all.  The text to the right, “Bapuji Ne Diya Jalaya / Uski Jyoti Barayen Hum” (‘Bapuji lit the flame, It is for us to further that light’), read in conjunction with his draped body and the globe that he has conquered with his stride suggests not only that Gandhi has merged into the nation but that he belongs to the world.

There is much else that is captivating in Sharma’s print, but it is in the juxtaposition of the two prints that we can discern what is remarkably different in openly pronouncing Gandhi the “Father of [the] Nation.”  I have had various occasions to remark, elsewhere in my published work, that Gandhi was just as much Mother to the Nation as he was Father of the Nation.  It is not even remotely accidental that Manu’s greatest testimonial to Gandhi is a little book called, Bapu, My Mother.  The print from Picture Publishing is, if we may put it this way, far more masculine in its sensibility and representational apparatus. It excises not only Kasturba, who was Gandhi’s life companion for something like 60 years, from the narrative but all women.  One can dispute the degree to which Gandhi was comfortable with idea of women’s complete autonomy, but it is inarguably the case that Gandhi played a critical role in bringing women into the public sphere.  There is not a hint of this in Lakshminarayan Sharma’s rendering of Gandhi’s life story (fig. 2).  The Bhargava print (fig. 1), by contrast, is sensitive to the place of women in Gandhi’s life, and in its recognition of the role of women in the Salt Satyagraha it offers more than just an affirmation of how women came into the freedom struggle. Gandhi sought not only to liberate India from colonial rule but to emancipate politics from its association with an unforgiving masculinity.

A biography is seldom only a chronological narrative of a person’s life; these prints are no exception.  We may, in conclusion, take a few illustrations of how the print from Hemchander Bhargava’s workshop seeks to offer a decisive interpretation of Gandhi’s life.  It is attentive, for example, to the sartorial Gandhi:  as we encounter Gandhi along the different stages of his life, we find him stripping himself of clothes and trying, in his own words, to reduce himself to zero.  Of Gandhi it can be said that he commenced his adult life vastly over-dressed and ended it, by the reckoning of some, vastly under-dressed.  His dhoti and shawl are not just blood-stained; blood drips down.  The nation, too, has been stained by the dastardly act of the assassin; the country is drained, dripping with the blood of the innocents.  The loss of blood points to the sacrifice of the Mahatma, but was this sacrifice in vain?  Was the martyrdom of Gandhi necessary so that he could begin life anew?

(First published in a shorter version in the Hindu Sunday Magazine (6 October 2018) as “The Imprint of a Man’s Life”; the online version called “Gandhi and the Printed Image” can be accessed here: https://www.thehindu.com/society/gandhis-story-in-images/article25113640.ece)

*Ranjith Kally, Photojournalist Extraordinaire

(First of two parts)

 

With the passing of Ranjith Kally in Johannesburg on June 6, apartheid-era photography has lost one of its stalwarts. From his appointment in 1956 as a photographer to Drum, a magazine which Bob Crisp and Jim Bailey launched in 1951 as a vehicle for the expression of black urban life, until his retirement in the mid-1980s, Ranjith Kally worked assiduously and yet creatively to furnish a record that is nearly without equal of the racial element in South African life and, just as importantly, of both the heroic and everyday transgressions of the insidious racial boundaries that make South Africa’s struggle against apartheid one of the most arresting chapters in the modern history of the triumph over oppressive adversity.  His sprawling oeuvre is a veritable library of what are now recognized as iconic snapshots of the principal political and artistic figures who brought the struggle in South Africa to the world’s attention.  But Kally was equally a chronicler of Indian life in and around Durban, working-class culture, the politics of the street, and the quotidian element in the social lives of South Africa’s black, colored, and Indian communities.  His camera was to become an object lesson in how one might begin to understand the extraordinariness of the ordinary.

Ranjith Kally

Kally was born in 1925 in Isipingo, which lies just south of Durban and had been a ‘whites only’ area before it was reclassified as Indian.  His grandfather had been among those who had worked on the sugar plantations; his father, Kallicharan, was similarly born into this work, leaving for the fields at 3:30 am where he executed his duties as an overseer.  One of Kally’s earliest and most moving photographs is of his father poring over a Sanskrit text:  reproduced in Kally’s Memory Against Forgetting (2014), it conveys an impression of his father as a learned man rather than as a farm worker.  His father is foregrounded against a black sheet, which accentuates the early morning light; as Kally was to write, “I had wanted to use an old book which he would read often and this is the pose by which I’ve come to remember him.”

Ranjith Kally’s father, Kallicharan, poring over a Sanskrit text.  Copyright:  Ranjith Kally.

Kally walked the three kilometres along a dirt road to school every day.  Schooling among Indian and black school-children seldom extended beyond adolescence in his days, and Kally took a position in a shoe factory after finishing standard six.  Meanwhile, a Kodak Postcard camera, which Kally had picked up at a jumble sale, had spurred his interest in photography, and after a part-time stint at the Durban-based newspaper The Leader, Kally assumed a paid position with Drum and the Golden City Post.  Sometime, perhaps in the early 1950s, a photograph by Kally was selected in a competition sponsored by the Japanese firm Pentax for third prize among 150,000 entries.  (However, in an interview that Kally gave to my friend, the historian Goolam Vahed, on 9 February 2016, he placed this event in 1957; however, in the introduction to Memory against Forgetting, as well as in The Indian in Drum, by Riason Naidoo, the competition is described as having taken place in 1964.)

 

Kally’s first photographs of anti-apartheid figures would be taken in the late 1950s.  At a break during the Treason Trial in Pretoria in 1958, the young photojournalist saw his opportunity.  Among those on trial were Monty Naicker, a doctor who turned to trade union activism before assuming leadership of the Natal Indian Congress and offering the NIC’s cooperation in the Defiance Campaign.  Monty played a key role in making possible the close cooperation between Africans and Indians that would signal the solidarity that would mark the distinctiveness of the anti-apartheid movement.  In his photograph, Monty commands the center; a young Nelson Mandela and the communist leader Yusuf Dadoo are in the background.

Monty Naicker at the Treason Trial, Pretoria, 1958; in the background, Nelson Nandela and Yusuf Dadoo.  Copyright:  Ranjith Kally.

Monty remained among Kally’s favorite subjects, and he was one of the Indian political leaders who was featured regularly in Drum; but Kally’s proximity to the Indian community, and his own awareness of the political moment, led him to other Indians who were staunch advocates of racial solidarity.  A photograph from the 1970s shows the attorney Phyllis Naidoo who engineered the escape of many prominent anti-apartheid activists:  taken at her offices in Maseru after she had herself gone into exile, a pensive Naidoo reflects on her narrow escape from an assassination attempt.

Kally would capture, in a series of striking photographs, the travails of the Meer family.  In the early 1960s, Ismail Meer, then in detention, sought a portrait of his wife, Fatima, and their three young children to keep him company in his prison cell.  In Durban’s Botanical Gardens, Kally seated Shamin, Shehnaaz, and Rashid around their buoyant-looking mother.  There is no hint here of anxiety, fear, or the oppressiveness of racial terror.  Less than twenty years later, Kally would snap a photograph of Fatima Meer, a gigantic figure in the struggle in her own right, emerging from a courtroom with steely determination flanked by three lawyers who represented her as she sought to fight the repressive apparatus of the state.  Taken together, the two photographs do not only point to the passage of time:  writ large there is the tale, inter alia, of women assuming a place in the public sphere, the many guises of the political, and the little-discussed role of Indian Muslims in shaping secular narratives of freedom.

However, for reasons that likely tell us something about Kally’s own political disposition, it is above all the figure of Albert Luthuli, the leader of the African National Congress, to which he was likely most drawn.  Kally was despatched to Groutville in 1961 when the news of the award of Nobel Peace Prize to Luthuli, who was under a banning order, was made public.  Kally photographed Luthuli against a rustic window frame, looking out at what is perhaps an uncertain future.  He is dressed in a workman’s overalls—rather apt, if we consider that he was a man of the people.  The frame tells its own story, of a man who had been framed by the state.  We may say that the framing device surfaces elsewhere in a different register, as in Kally’s photograph of a peace rally where a handful of men are holding aloft a huge photograph of Luthuli—a photograph also taken by Kally.  It is perhaps fitting that Kally concludes Memory Against Forgetting with a facial portrait of a smiling Luthuli who never stooped to the level of his opponent while reminding his readers that “as we celebrate freedom, we would do well to equally remember the legacy of the other great man of peace, Inkosi Albert John Luthuli.  While Madiba taught us how to forgive, Chief Luthuli first taught us how to love.”

Chief Albert Luthuli:  photograph taken of him in Groutville after he had been informed of the award of the Nobel Peace Prize.  Copyright:  Ranjith Kally

Ranjith Kally was 91 years old when he passed away.

 

Note:  I met Ranjith Kally thrice on my second trip to South African in November 2015.  I was keen on doing an exhibition of some of his works and arranging for him to visit UCLA.  But, alas, I was too slow in moving things along. Kally was kind enough to share with me high resolution images of some of his work; the photographs here are all under copyright with him and his heirs.  This part first of my tribute was published in The Mercury South Africa as “Photographer’s oeuvre a vision of urban black life” (14 June 2017, p. 7).

 

 

 

 

 

 

*Representing the Other: Emmet Till and the ‘Open Casket’ at the Whitney

The Fact of Being Black:  History, Culture, Politics II

’Twas down in Mississippi not so long ago

When a young boy from Chicago town stepped through a Southern door

This boy’s dreadful tragedy I can still remember well

The color of his skin was black and his name was Emmett Till

               -Bob Dylan, “The Death of Emmett Till” (from the Bootleg Series, Vol 9 [1962-64]

 

It was the summer of 1955, in Mississippi. The temperatures can rise to the high 90s, but this state had been burning for another reason.  The previous year, three young civil rights activists, who had been championing racial integration and attempting to register black voters, had disappeared.  Their bodies would be recovered from an earthen dam more than six weeks later.  The head of one of the Ku Klux Klan chapters in the state of Mississippi, who doubled as a preacher, was acquitted by an all-white jury that declared itself unable to convict ‘a man of God’.  Two of the three men were white, and the good old folks of Mississippi doubtless thought of them as race traitors; as for the one black men among them, James Chaney, the only good “Nigger” was a dead one—few white men doubted that.

Fourteen-year old Emmett Till, visiting his cousins in Money, Mississippi from Chicago in the summer of 1955 would have been unaware of much of this.  On August 25^th, he reportedly wolf-whistled at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, a local beauty queen who ran a little provisions store.  Three days later, at 2 AM, Bryant’s husband and his half-brother, J. W. Milam, kidnapped Emmett Till from his uncle’s home.  They bludgeoned young Emmett’s body until his face was unrecognizable and then shot him dead; his mutilated body was thrown into the Tallahatchie River, from where it was recovered three days later.

The Mutilated Body of Emmett Till, with his mother, Mamie Till. Photograph by David Jackson. Copyright: Time Magazine.

Emmett Till in 1955.

Once again, an all-white and all-male jury acted to preserve the interests of the white race.  Bryant and Milam were acquitted of the charge of murder; the grant jury that convened to discuss kidnapping charges against the two men refused to indict them.  In the town of Sumner, where the trial was held, visitors were greeted with the slogan, “A good place to raise a boy.”

Mamie Till at the Funeral of Her son, Emmett Till.  Copyright:  New York Times.

Months after the trial, Bryant and Milam confessed to the killing; their story appeared in the January 1956 issue of Look. But they could not be tried again, having been acquitted of that charge.  For their story, they received the tidy if not princely sum of $4000:  murder pays, literally.  Till might well have been forgotten, destined to become another statistic in the log book of white atrocities against black people, but for the fact that his mother, Mamie Till, took the bold step of having her son’s body displayed in an open coffin on September 3. Mourners recoiled at seeing Emmett’s horribly mutilated body; indeed, his body was in such an advanced stage of decomposition that he could only be identified by his initials on a ring on one of his fingers. Photographs of Emmett’s body were reproduced widely and appeared in hundreds of publications.  Mrs. Till, who died in 2003 at the age of 81, did not live long enough to see her son receive justice, but his killing is nevertheless said to have spurred on the civil rights movement.  Most histories of the Civil Rights Movement commence with Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat and move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, but Ms. Parks herself would go on record to say, “I thought of Emmett Till and I just couldn’t go back.”  The most influential documentary ever filmed on the Civil Rights Movement, the epic Eyes on the Prize, would open with the story of Emmett Till.

The casket in which Emmett’s body was placed is now displayed in the Smithsonian’s new museum of African American history.  There have been many other developments in the story of Emmett Till:  early this year, Carolyn Bryant, whose whiteness and lies—an ugly pairing that has destroyed many lives, indeed been the undoing of entire cultures—sent Emmett to his ghastly death, confessed that Emmett had made no physical or verbal advances on her.  “That part’s not true”, she told the author of a new book on the Emmett Till case.  But even more recently, Emmett Till is back in the public consciousness, this time with a controversial painting by Dana Schutz entitled “Open Casket” that was exhibited at the Whitney Biennial last month.  Schutz has based her painting on photographs of Till’s body that were published in Jet, the Chicago Defender, and a number of other magazines at that time.  It is not her painting which is controversial as such; rather, according to a number of African American artists, the subject is not Schutz’s to claim.  She is white.

Diana Schutz, “Open Casket”, exhibited at the Whitney Biennial, March 2017.

The artist Parker Bright positioned himself, over successive days, in front of the painting, sometimes with friends and fellow artists, to block the view.  The words, “Black Death Spectacle”, were splashed across the back of the T-shirt that he was sporting.  A black British artist, in a letter written to the two Asian American curators of the show, Mia Locks and Christopher Y. Lew, called for the destruction of the painting, arguing that the rights to freedom of speech and expression are “not natural rights” and that Diana Schutz, whose works command considerable sums of money in the art market, stands to profit from Emmett Till’s death.  Schutz has declared that she never intended to sell the painting; in her defense, she admits that she cannot know what it is like to be “black in America but I do know what it is like to be a mother.  Emmett was Mamie Till’s only son.  The thought of anything happening to your child is beyond comprehension.  Their pain is your pain.  My engagement with this image was through empathy with his mother.”

Protest before Diana Schutz’s painting, “Open Casket”. Photograph: New York Times.

Schutz’s defense does not appear to be implausible, and we should in any case be prepared to believe her both when she says that she never intended to sell her painting and that, as a mother, she can empathize with Emmett Till’s mother.  History is, of course, a profligate narrative of people profiting from the suffering of others, and many others are guilty of much more onerous acts of commission; it isn’t absolutely clear, as well, why, had she intended to sell her painting, Schutz would have been guilty of anything more than bad taste and poor ethical judgment. We may ask why Schutz must be subjected to some imaginary litmus test. It is perhaps also a tad bit unfortunate she chose to summon the “holy” institution of motherhood in her defense: if one intends to elicit some support, the figure of the mother can always be called forth.  But, beyond all this, lie some questions that in their elemental simplicity take us to the heart of the debates surrounding the politics of representation.  Who speaks for whom? With what right? With what notion of entitlement? With what responsibilities? Does one have to earn one’s stripes in order to speak for another—provided that is what Schutz was seeking to do—and just exactly how does one earn these stripes?  Over the span of centuries, many of those whom we accept as voices of conscience have urged upon us the notion that if there is injustice anywhere in the world, it is always a threat to justice; if someone else is without freedom, I cannot be entirely free myself.  Freedom is indivisible—at least some part of us must hold on to this idea.  If there are others who are suffering, wherein is my ‘happiness’? If at all I feel this way, do I not partake of that suffering?

In every great social and anti-colonial movement of the last several decades, one common principle has persisted among various differences.  In the women’s movement, the most astute feminists welcomed the participation of men, but on the condition that women would furnish the lead.  The major anti-colonial movements of the 20^th century did not disavow the support of sympathetic white liberals; but there was always the awareness that white men, even the best intentioned, often have a tendency to dominate if not hijack a movement.  Mohandas Gandhi never lacked English friends and sympathizers, in India and England alike; but they accepted the idea that they would support the freedom struggle from the side.  This seems to be an unimpeachable idea of social justice, one calculated to lead to a heightened appreciation of the dignity of the struggle itself; and these considerations, too, are not so far apart from the questions that have been raised by the black protest against Diana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till’s “open casket”.  Nevertheless, there is also something profoundly disturbing about the supposition that, as a white artist, the suffering of Emmett Till is not  hers to claim—at least not for purposes of representation.  If there are no “natural laws” that confer an automatic right to freedoms of speech and creative expression, surely there are no “natural rights” which would lead us to believe that blacks know blacks best, or that only women may speak for women?  It would be trivializing the issue if we took the examples of Ben Carson or Clarence Thomas to suggest the difficulties in supposing that racial solidarity trumps every other bond of fellow feeling.  But how long must we persist in the notion, which one would imagine has had its day (though of course one knows otherwise), that politics derives in the first instance from identity? Is the protest over Schutz’s painting anything really much more than this rather procrustean idea?

*Journeys of the ‘Black Christ’: Art & Resistance in Apartheid South Africa

Ronald Harrison – courtesy: Damian Samuels

In Memoriam:  Ronald Harrison, 18 March 1940 Cape Town – 28 June 2011 Cape Town

 

Ronald Harrison, a Cape Town-based artist whose painting ‘The Black Christ’ provoked the apartheid regime of South Africa to fury, has passed away.  ‘Uncle Ron’, as he was affectionately termed by his younger friends, had been suffering from cancer over the last two years, and he died of a heart attack just as he had finished the last of a series of five new paintings.  Those who had the great fortune to know him also know how deeply his loss will be felt among his friends, fellow artists, and soul-mates in South Africa’s journey from apartheid to freedom.  I still recall our first meeting in Cape Town, in the fall of 2006:  Ronald, a man of intense energy, softness, elegance, and compassion, not to mention fortitude, left an extraordinary impression on me as he must have on everyone else.

 

To understand the contours of Ronald Harrison’s life, one must begin with Albert Luthuli.  A majestic figure, a hereditary Chief of the Zulus, Luthuli was clearly the most inspirational figure of his generation in South Africa, and his untimely death at the age of 69 in circumstances that can only be described as suspicious robbed South Africa of its most creative exponent of nonviolent resistance to apartheid.  Luthuli had joined the African National Congress (ANC) in 1945, and he rose to become president of the provincial Natal branch of the ANC in 1951; the following year, Luthuli was among those who organized resistance to the notorious pass laws.  His part in the Defiance Campaign earned him the opprobrium of the government, and he was offered the choice of renouncing his membership in the ANC or being stripped of his Chieftainship.  Luthuli, characteristically, was never in doubt about his decision – but even as the South African government sought to demote him in the eyes of his people, he was elevated to the Presidency of the ANC.  Many honors were to come Luthuli’s way, including the Nobel Prize, the first ever awarded to an African, for Peace:  but the most lasting testimony of this gentle colossus’s fortitude and valor is the fact that the apartheid regime ‘banned’ him for much of the last fifteen years of his life, restricting his movements and preventing any mention of his name in public.  Luthuli nonetheless remained President of the ANC until his death, allegedly an accident on a train track close to his home, on 21 July 1967.  Few people doubt that Luthuli’s death was engineered by the apartheid state.

 

It is under Luthuli that Mandela, who was his deputy and president of the ANC branch in Transvaal, attained political maturity.   Though robbed of his Chieftainship, Luthuli clearly remained Chief to all his people – not only black South Africans, but all the oppressed of his nation.  Among those who viewed Luthuli as their political and spiritual mentor was Ronald Harrison, who was born in 1940 and grew into adolescence as Luthuli was coming into his own as one of the principal architects of the anti-apartheid movement.  Harrison was nearly fifteen years old when apartheid’s enforcers arrived at Sophiatown, near Johannesburg, and dismantled the entire black township within a few hours.  Later that summer, in 1955, the ANC adopted the Freedom Charter, whose Preamble stated that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based upon the will of the people”.   Twenty thousand women – African, colored, Indian, white – marched the following year to demand an end to injustices against African women.  The government’s response to the rising tide of resistance appears to have been to unleash more oppression:  at Sharpeville, nearly 60 peaceful demonstrators were killed in a police firing.

 

Harrison, meanwhile, had been gravitating towards art, and he has described himself as having the feelings of an angry young man as oppressive political events unfolded around him.  His “role model”, Chief Luthuli, had been exiled from the political world, and the ascendancy of Hendrik Verwoerd, described in Luthuli’s autobiography as “the author of our destruction”, to the Prime Ministership of South Africa in 1958 signaled to apartheid’s opponents that the regime would step up its repression.   In his inaugural speech, Verwoerd declared himself as “absolutely convinced that integration in a country like South Africa cannot possibly succeed”.  Where the US Supreme Court, in its famous 1954 decision, Brown v. Board of Education, had signified that it was prepared to overturn the century-old dogma of ‘separate but equal’, in South Africa Verwoerd was reaffirming precisely that discredited view:   “The policy of separate development is designed for the happiness, security and stability provided by their home language and administration for the Bantu as well as the whites.”   Verwoerd appointed as his Minister of Justice and Police B. J. Vorster, who lost little time in introducing the notorious Detention Without Trial Act:  though it conferred on the state the right to hold detainees without any right to legal representation for a period of 90 days, in actuality it was designed to permit detention for indefinite periods of time.

 

Faced by apartheid’s onslaught on humanity, Harrison pondered whether he, as an artist, could somehow contribute to the liberation movement.  As a Christian, Harrison felt immensely troubled that the apartheid regime claimed the mantle of Christianity; however, Luthuli, himself a man of intense if quiet religious conviction, represented the other, more ennobling and emancipatory, face of their faith.  Late in 1961, Harrison was to write in his book The Black Christ:  A Journey to Freedom (Claremont, South Africa:  David Philip Publishers, 2006), he was struck by something of an epiphany:  what if he were to signify the suffering of South Africa’s black people by equating it with the crucifixion of Christ, rendering Luthuli as a modern-day Christ and apartheid’s ideologues, Verwoerd and Vorster, as Roman centurions, “the tormentors of Christ” (p. 26)?  An Asian St. John and a coloured Madonna, Harrison surmised, would complete the picture.  So came about the birth of “The Black Christ”, the painting around which revolves Harrison’s multi-layered narrative of the struggle against apartheid, the terror tactics of the South African state, the relation of art to politics, his own troubled life until the dismantling of apartheid, and the fate of “The Black Christ” itself.  Though Harrison does not reflect on the history of representations of Christ, we might say that with “The Black Christ” he was also returning Christianity to its true origins in black Egypt, in defiance of Europe’s attempts to escape the Afro-Asiatic roots of Western civilization.

 

Completed in June 1962, “The Black Christ” could be exhibited in public only briefly before the state pounced upon Harrison.  The Dutch Reformed Church, to which apartheid’s proponents belonged, asked Luthuli to repudiate publicly this representation of him as a crucified ‘Black Saviour’, little realizing that, as Luthuli was under banning and gagging orders, it was strictly illegal for any newspaper or other media to even mention his name, much less reproduce anything attributed to him (p. 31).  Summoned to appear at a police station to explain his conduct, Harrison issued a statement describing Luthuli as a man of peace, someone in whom the artist had found his “perfect image of Christ” in the here and now.  Urging everyone to recognize the “predominant spiritual atmosphere of the painting”, Harrison felt that the painting showed that “racial discrimination should not be practiced, for we are all united in one bond with Christ” (p. 35).  Harrison was not only let go, but shortly thereafter informed that he could hang the painting in any church of his choice – one of those gestures through which a totalitarian state lulls its subjects and even opponents into a false sense of security.  Apartheid’s “two main icons” had, however, been ridiculed, and Harrison never supposed that his offence would be overlooked.  Sure enough, only a week or two after it appeared that Harrison had been granted a reprieve, the Ministry of Interior issued orders prohibiting any further display of “The Black Christ” until the Board of Censors had certified that the painting was not calculated to offend the religious sentiments of a section of the public (p. 39).  Harrison himself was briefly taken into custody and roughed up:  this may have sufficed to persuade him to heed the advice of friends and activists, who were keen that the painting be smuggled into London where funds obtained from its public displays would be channeled to the political victims of apartheid (p. 41).

 

Even as “The Black Christ” found its way to Britain, Harrison’s own crucifixion commenced.  Over the following year, he would be hauled into torture chambers on several occasions.  His interrogators sought to know at whose instigation he had painted “The Black Christ”:  they wanted an account of a conspiracy to humiliate Verwoerd and South African whites when there was none.  Harrison describes the merciless beatings, the constant abuse, the nights in dark cold cells huddled up in the nude (pp. 47-60). There is a chilling account of a doctor brought to ‘heal’ Harrison’s wounds:  as two men held Harrison down, the doctor yanked out the nail of his right foot’s infected big toe with a huge pair of pliers (p. 57).   After several days of confinement, Harrison was released; but several months later, he was again hauled into custody and ruthlessly beaten up into a piece of pulp (pp. 71-85).  Enveloped by darkness, Harrison might well have become a statistic were it not for the unexpected kindness of two jailors, in particular an African woman whose gentle touch brought him back to life (pp. 79, 83-84).

 

In the second half of his autobiography, Harrison moves in considerable measure from the travails of his own life to the turmoil in the nation and the history of resistance to apartheid. The odious nature of apartheid, Harrison suggests, is most visible in such barbarisms as the Group Areas Act (1950), which entailed large-scale uprooting of coloreds, blacks, and Indians and decimated entire communities, among them the famous District Six in Cape Town.  As his narrative shifts to the early 1990s, to the period when Mandela and ANC leaders were released from jail, and Mandela was elected to the office of the President of South Africa, Harrison recalls the long-term effects of apartheid.  He notes with sadness how a majority of colored people in many Western Cape communities, who had doubtless imbibed some of the racist rhetoric about the unworthiness of black people, voted for their former oppressors rather than the ANC, declaring that they would not consent to be ruled by ‘kaffirs’ (p. 157).

 

Over a period of 35 years, Harrison’s “The Black Christ” had found shelter in the basement of an English home, and Harrison movingly recounts the painting’s triumphant return home and its eventual acquisition by the South African National Gallery.  Though the original is now stored in the gallery’s basement, a replica is on display at the offices of the Nelson Mandela Foundation.  Madiba is among many of Harrison’s admirers and friends, and Dr Albertina Luthuli, daughter of Albert Luthuli and author of the foreword to Harrison’s book, was present at the funeral ceremonies along with Cape Town’s mayor.  As one contemplates the course of Harrison’s life, however, what unfailingly strikes one is the manner in which, to the very end, he continued to display remarkable qualities of compassion and forgiveness.  Nowhere in his book, or (as is commonly said) in his book of life, is there the slightest touch of hatred against his former oppressors.  Even the assassination in September 1966 of apartheid’s chief architect, Hendrik Verwoerd, elicits from Harrison the remark that he could not share in the jubilation experienced by apartheid’s victims:  “Verwoerd had been a monster; he had been a tormentor.  But he had also been a loving husband, a caring father, someone’s friend, the beloved son of proud parents.”  As he cautions us, we must ever endeavor not to become like those whom we despise.  The author’s generosity is present throughout his book, in his celebration of somewhat lesser known heroes of the struggle such as Barney Desai, who was instrumental in having the UN declare apartheid a ‘crime against humanity’, and equally in his willingness to accept the most elevated thoughts, whether their source be the Quran, the teachings of Christ, or the life of Gandhi.  Ronald Harrison’s life is palpable proof of how fortitude, equanimity, and a simple faith in the goodness of people might yet prevail amidst crushing adversity.

 

*Stones do an Epic Make: Musings on Visiting a Classical Chinese Garden

The Symphony of Stones, Yu Gardens, Shanghai. Photo: Vinay Lal, 2009.

I heard the eminent Chinese artists, Liu Dan and Liu Sola, talk about ‘stones’ today. Sola has written the music to the ‘Stones Project’, conceived by Liu Dan as something of a testimony to the critical importance of stones in Chinese landscape – and in representations of Chinese landscapes in painting, art and music. Yesterday, on a visit to Yu Gardens, the finest specimen of a classical Chinese garden in Shanghai, I was struck by the placement of stones in the garden landscape, their immense numbers, indeed their grandiosity. Water meanders in and around stones, breathes life into them, and gives shape to them; and yet the stones, standing forth as sentinels, as humans, half-humans, or animals, seemed to have enough of a life of their own. Stones have chiseled out the trajectories of rivers and streams, bending water to their will. Water and stones, together, create a swirling symphony in the classical Chinese garden.

When one writes music for stones, does one do so with the understanding that they are mute? Or perhaps with the awareness, as my friend Teshome Gabriel has written in his moving, lucid and characteristically suggestive meditation on stones [in The Future of Knowledge and Culture: A Dictionary for the Twenty-first Century], that stones speak a language that we do not understand? What kind of continuum is there between stones and humans? The story of Ahalya, first encountered in Valmiki’s Ramayana, comes to mind, though Tulsidas’s Ramacaritmanas is more apposite as a parable about not remaining stone-faced while thinking of stones. Brahma created Ahalya as the most beautiful of women: so beautiful was she that even the gods lusted after her, not least of them Indra. Ahalya is tricked into bedding Indra for the night; in his rage, her husband, Gautama Maharishi, condemns Indra to the woefully embarrassing display of a 1,000 vulvas on his body. (Indra, who could not henceforth venture out into the open, lest he should become the laughing stock of the world, performs severe penances and wins the approbation of Shiva, who agrees to transform the vulvas into eyes. But this is another story, with all the usual variations found in Indian traditions.) As for Ahalya, with Gautama’s curse she is turned into stone. Many years later, it is said, Rama and Lakshmana, as they are wandering around the forest, come by Gautama’s hermitage and are apprised of Ahalya’s story. Rama touches the stone with his feet, Ahalya – now absolved of her sins — springs to life, and Rama blesses her.

Humans work on stones and so make epics. That, at least, is the received narrative, and the Pyramids, Machu Picchu, and the Taj Mahal stand forth as testimony to this view. Human labor is transformative and we have long been accustomed to thinking of stones as inert and inanimate, requiring the labor and love of human beings to tweak some meaning out of them. That stones can move humans is amply clear, and the Kaaba and the Wailing Wall of Jerusalem equally suggest the manner in which stones themselves move through history. Increasingly, then, it seems to me that stones do an epic make. One Palestinian youth throwing a stone would be merely a miscreant; a few hurling stones would be viewed as a social nuisance; a few dozen of them throwing stones are treated as criminal elements, a threat to the social order; and thousands of them flinging stones become a wave that cannot be stopped. Thus was the Intifada of 1987, stones hurling through space and time and creating a revolution. The first lines of W. Hone’s “Canticle of the Stone” (London, 1817), seemed to have been written for the Palestinian Uprising: “O All ye workers of Corruption, bless ye the Stone: praise it, and magnify it as a Bullet for ever.”