Of Capacities and Containment:
Poetry and politics in the art of Subodh Gupta
By S. Kalidas
iss ghat antar baag bagiche In this vessel lie groves and gardens
iss hi mein sirjanhaara, In it, too, lives the creator
iss ghat antar saat samundar In this vessel lie the seven seas
iss hi mein nau lakh taara, In it, too, the nine hundred thousand stars
iss ghat antar paaras moti In this vessel lies the paaras*1 pearl
iss hi mein parkhan haara, In it, too, the diviner
iss ghat antar anhad garje In this vessel sheer silence reverberates
iss hi mein urat phoohaara In it, too, gushes the fountain,
kahat Kabir suno bhaai saadho Says Kabir*2, listen dear wise men
iss hi mein saain hamaara. In this alone is the Lord we seek.
(translation by S.K.)
Geeta Kapur*3: “I propose situating the Indian artist in an uneasy ‘subterrain’, in the ‘dug-outs’ of the contemporary, where s/he reclaims memory and history; where the levelling effect of the no-history, no-nation, no-place phenomena promoted by globalized exhibition and market circuits is upturned to rework a passage back into the politics of place.”
Steel, I think, first started seeping into Indian households when I was a boy of about eleven or twelve. Somewhat typical of post-independence urban India, ours, too, was a middle-class joint-family home where traditional Hindu beliefs and practices constantly negotiated for space with city living and modern western education. Steel, was the new metal that our pro-socialist chaacha (uncle) Nehru’s*4 suspicious (as my grand father was convinced) new Temples of Modernity were churning out in the remote tribal bowels of Bhillai and Bokaro*4 with the help of an un-godly Soviet Union. And now, insidiously, it was entering our hearth and home. In a corner of our house used to be a rickety reed basket reserved for torn and worn-out clothing. About once or twice every year, my grandmother would wait for the call of her favourite itinerant ‘bartan-wala’ (utensils seller), a wizened Muslim from Muradabad*5 with a huge load of brass and steel utensils slung on his bicycle, to pass down the street singing his sing-song sales pitch, “bartan wala!!!! issteel ke bartan lelo (utensil seller! Come and get your steel utensils)”.
To the wondrous amusement of us children, the next hour would be spent watching our grand mother drive a hard bargain over what she was convinced was but a fair barter. One slightly torn silk saree for a small steel bowl, four thin cotton school shirts for a set of two steel plates, an embroidered table cloth for four serving spoons... In the evening as we sat cross-legged on reed mats for dinner on the kitchen floor, fights would break out among the children over who was served on the new, bright, shining steel thaali (plate with a rim). Grand father, of course, never ate off steel. He was served on a bronze thaali and brass bowls with a sliver tumbler and a copper lota (small pot bellied vessel) for water-- all placed on a low wooden stool called the pirha or chowki.*6 Till he had his way, our house did not get a gas stove or a pressure cooker. Coal or wood fire in a stove made of bricks, mud and cow dung*7 was the altar of my grandmother’s ever busy kitchen.
To say today, that Subodh Gupta has become the ‘bartan-wala’ of the global art scene might sound as a facetious truism. But he does lug loads of Indian brass and steel utensils, much like the utensil-seller of my childhood, to far and distant places of the world; and I am told, like my grand mother’s humble protagonist, drives a hard bargain for what he thinks is a just deal. Also, like the ‘marginal/outcaste’ Muslim Muradabadi utensil-seller on the threshold of my grand father’s Tamil Brahmin abode, Gupta, too, tests the colonial/racial guilt and teases the aesthetic/consumerist desires of the ‘other’*8 Developed/Western World.
With India’s emerging strength in global economy, it is easy to see the ‘news-value’ of placing Subodh Gupta’s success in the global art scene in the notion of ‘identity’. Claiming for him thus a ‘national’ context; one that is seen as analogous to the rise of a Lakshmi Mittal as the world’s largest steel producer, or Ratan Tata’s takeover of the multinational steel giant Corus. Just as the established global orders of economy are learning to do business with China and India, the global aspirations of ‘conceptual art’ are leading it to constantly discourse and debate the notions of ‘identity’ and ‘self’ within the ‘contemporary’ space. However, unlike the stiff initial resistance encountered by Mittal and Tata in global markets, Subodh Gupta’s increasing incursions into the western/global art scene have so far not been met with any nuance of cultural chauvinism. On the contrary, his reception has been rather surprisingly celebratory. What distinguish him perhaps, are his tantalising feats of time-space crossovers crafted with formal ingenuity, imaginative acumen and dexterity of execution. By some visual magic, his iconic installations of Indian utensils manage to evoke the same innocent sense of wonder and delight in his foreign patrons that the itinerant bartan-wala did in me some four decades years ago.
Many Indians, though, might find the word ‘utensil’ too coldly clinical a term for the objects sought to be described in Subodh Gupta’s art. It does not quite connote the value endowed to these objects by the power of myth, legend, daily ritual and intimate usage. It is true that all these objects are widely used for cooking, serving or storing food in Indian kitchens. What is often overlooked is that in the Indian space these utensils have a secret, sacred life of their own. These objects – the lota (squat pitcher), the kumbha, the kalasham or the ghara (large pot-bellied pitcher), the pateela (pan), the thaali (plate) and the chimtaa (tongs)-- are also signifiers of widespread cultural, mystical and religious practices in rural and urban middle class India even today. This is the 250 million-strong middle class India with a sharply rising purchasing surplus that the business magazines are talking about and this is the India that Subodh so dramatically first seeks to recover and represent-- with all its chaotic contradictions and baffling complexities-- in his persona and in his art; and then diametrically (almost diabolically) seeks to universalise for the “other/contemporary” world.
Some have termed Subodh Gupta’s use of utensils (and other objects of daily use) as the use of “stereotypes and clichés”. But in Subodh’s context, ‘archetype’ would be the better word. In Sanskrit the generic word is paatram, meaning a vessel or a container. A paatram can be of many shapes, sizes, types and functions. The kumbha or the kalasham (pot-bellied pitcher) is the archetypal Indian paatram invoking the amrita kalasham – the vessel containing amritam, the nectar of immortality, over which the gods and the demons fought only to be seduced by the Lord Vishnu who dressed in drag to become Mohini, the Enchatress, thus saving the nectar for the gods.*9 Or then there is the akshaya paatram -- a vessel of food which never empties, like the one given to Draupadi the shared wife of the five heroes (the Pandavas) in the epic Mahabhatra by the Sun God Surya.*10
The basic design of the Indian lota/kalasham/ghara has not changed in at least three to four thousand years. The pot-bellied shape of the vessel is symbolic of the pregnant womb and thereby of the body of the Mother Goddess. The lota and the kalasham are the vessels in which water and other liquids, both secular and sacred, are served. In the holy city of Banaras (Varanasi) for example, thousands of sealed lota-s filled with gangajal (the water of the sacred river Ganga which is said to wash away all mortal sins) are sold everyday to be carried to homes in every nook and cranny of India for ritual purifications and funerals. As the sacred and the profane are never completely segregated in India, today Benaras is also a very dirty, hugely criminalised city, and the Ganga is an extremely over-used and over-polluted river. The lota is also, frequently, the vessel in which we carry water to the woods/fields for washing up after defecating. Indoor toilets with underground sewage are a luxury that less than 30 per cent Indians benefit from even today.
Food, implements of cooking and vessels to store and cook food; and ritual feeding (of the needy, the knowledgeable and the holy—including animals) have formed a central and recurrent motif in Indian life– both religious and cultural-- from the earliest times and continue till today. One of Subodh’s earliest video installations recalls the ritual feeding of Brahmins commemorating the death of a parent or a spouse in what is called the shraaddha ceremony. Then he gave a radical interventionist spin to this ritual of feeding and remembrance in 2006 when he fed soup that he had cooked to hundreds of people, in the process commemorating the siege of ‘sans papier’ immigrants (who had been suddenly and unjustly denied their rights to live in France) at the Eglise Saint-Bernard in Paris where he first showed his monumental sculpture A Very Hungry God at the White Night (La Nuit Blanche). With his mammoth skull crafted from scores of pots and pans and buckets, he not only evokes awe through scale, but also implies a ‘fearful’ hunger through the use of upturned and empty steel vessels that go to make the skull. The skull, as we know, is central to the occultist practices of Shivism and the Tantra. The begging bowl of Indian saadhu-s (wandering holy men) is also usually made of the cup of bones that cover the human brain.
Each day the Hindu venerates his 360 million gods and goddesses with many big and small gestures and rituals where such vessels made of leaf, straw, terracotta, iron, copper, bronze, brass and now steel and plastic are used in a number of symbolic ways. In traditional homes across India every morning, the kitchen floor and stove are first cleaned, applied with a layer of purifying grey-green cow dung and anointed with sacred marks and designs of white powdered rice by hand. Then the fire is lit and propitiated ritually, usually with a pot of milk to be boiled on it. A small portion is “fed” to Agni, the Fire God, before it can be used for the family’s consumption. After the meal is over these kitchen utensils are hand cleaned, polished with ash from the stove fire and then arranged on the wall or a ledge in a reverential display. In the bucolic idyll of rural and semi-urban India hundreds of such installations and performances are played out daily, not only for reasons of religion, caste or status, but also for deep personal (almost artistic) pleasure.
Interestingly, according to the classical Indian tradition, the rasa *11 or the emotional response to a work of art is not a value inherent per se in the work itself. A work of art in itself is like an empty vessel, into which the empathetic viewer/ reader by the virtue of his or her imagination, associations and references causes the emotional response to take place. The rasa is the unquantifiable sum of resonances evoked by the work of art and its admirer in each other. The artist merely arranges the elements in his work in such a manner as to suggest the sentiments desired in the mind of his or her viewer. It is also an accepted practice in India that an artist, a teacher, a shaman or a guru only offers so much to his disciple, patron or audience as much as he or she has the capacity to retain, absorb, appreciate and make good use of. This has been understood as the ‘principle of capacity’ (paatrata siddhaanta) of one who receives/beholds/listens to the work of divinity, art, poetry, science or metaphysics.
So how does Subodh Gupta manage to address both the culture-specific and the universal/global audiences at once? Most obviously, his art shows the capacity to move audiences from beyond his socio-cultural context. Like all true art, at all times and in all places, Gupta’s art too has the capacity to uncover the ‘self’ that is ever present in the ‘other’. In making this art Gupta employs the device of changing the role, context, size and scale (including in-versing time scale/frame in his videos) of the ubiquitous to effect the evoking of the iconic. More subtly, he may ‘re-incarnate’ an object by infusing it with memories/ associations/ functions from his cultural landscape. In many Indian homes, milk comes from the baalti (bucket) into which it has been collected from udders of the much loved household cow. In cities where cows are no longer permitted in residential areas, milk arrives in those typically shaped modern milk canisters that Subodh so imaginatively transposes in his series of works like the Two Cows. Or take his hut made of cow dung cakes (used for burning in kitchen stoves) that he so emblematically calls My Mother and Me.
At the same time, Subodh never loses sight of the possibilities of the erotic in his work. From his voluptuously rounded pateela-s signifying a womb pregnant with hundreds of possibilities, to his un-self-consciously sexy nayak-nayika*12 (hero-heroine) type self-portraits in works like Bihari and Vilas, the erotic is very much a part of Subodh Gupta’s chamatkaar (spectacle). Actually, by the constant invocation of the many metaphors of food and its containers, the sensual is never far from Subodh Gupta’s ever hospitable high table. His amazing work Silk Route (2007) comprising a huge, slowly moving sushi belt fitted with scores of tiffin boxes of varying sizes on the one hand is reminiscent of an urban hi-rise skyline as if seen from the deck of an approaching ship at sea (New York Here I Come!); on the other, it recalls the dabba-wallas of metropolitan Mumbai manually transporting wheel-barrows of tiffin boxes filled with home cooked food for white collar workers in a fast changing urban reality where packaged industrially cooked foods soon threaten to become the convenient norm. In this seductive formalisation of the ‘moveable feast’, the mantra for nirvana is a clever combination of eros and astonishment. By vividly unleashing these subliminally absorbed concepts of capacity and containment in his reductionist yet layered art, Subodh Gupta nimbly seeks to stride the trapeze so tenuously stretched between the poco-pomo global and the naïve-kitsch Bihari local with the panache of a mad man, a magician or a prophet.
Leela: a passion play of transgressions
This panache or ‘attitude’ strikes one even more in Subodh Gupta’s performance and video works. This ‘attitude’ can be traced to the Indian concept of leela. Leela was originally used in the ancient purana-s*13 to describe the heroic, amorous and pastoral dalliances of the cowherd God, Krishna. Over time, leela has acquired more secular nuances and is now widely used as a generic term for passion plays, spectacles and performances of all sorts, including politics.
Before he turned to pursue art full time, Subodh Gupta had been an active member of a street theatre group in his native Bihar, performing political leela-s of social unrest. Even today, Subodh maintains an acute sense of the dramatic and invariably devises ingenious gestures and/or minimalist visual emblems to encapsulate the whole experience of a lifestyle or a belief system. By smearing his naked body with fresh cow dung, Subodh seems to revel in the mock-pastoral leela-s of a nostalgic mythical time-space set squarely, and often harshly, within a circle of alien, concrete, post-industrial environment. Riding naked and mud covered on a cow in the grounds of an obsolete and abandoned factory (as in the work Cowboy, 1996) Subodh Gupta is ready to rodeo from Modinagar (an industrial city near Delhi) where he did his first performance, to Manhattan where his next showing is slated.
Here, he may also unload quirky visual metaphors and contrasting cultural idioms drawn as much from the ‘classical/ folk Indian’ as from the post-internet, Pop ‘global’ imagination. This sense of the ‘spectacle’ permeates a video work like the Irresistible Attack (2006) where the action in the field of a 21st century war– both so real and yet so completely virtual, toy-like and ‘other worldly’—is seen to end as an obeisance to a slowly deflating lingam, the phallic symbol of Shiva and macho masculinity.
Subodh Gupta’s most evolved video work for me till date is the one he has done for the global mega-brand Chanel in 2007. Asked to make a work on handbags, Gupta has made this wonderfully bitter-sweet 4.6-minute video where clips from real life and popular Hindi cinema face off each other in a two-screen format. Those who have grown up in rural and small town India will recall the primitive, hand-cranked ‘bioscope’*14 that held such a thrill for all children till it was replaced by the proliferation of the television in the late 1980s. By a shrewd juxtaposition of shots, sequences, songs and dialogues from various Hindi films relating to ladies’ purses/hand bags/ hold alls/travel bags/bundles of possessions tied up in rags and sheets, Subodh Gupta plays on the etymology of both the words bioscope (bios= life + scope= look at) and hand bag. On the second screen he shows a group of unskilled Indian immigrant workers in the Middle East packing their ‘foreign shopping’ and personal effects in large and small packages in preparation of their long journey home. Skilled and unskilled Indian workers outnumber the local Arab population in the middle-east by many times and work under harsh conditions at the best of circumstances.
Having grown up in a railway enclave as the son of a railway employee the possibilities of seeing the act of travel as theatre must have occurred early in Gupta’s mind. There is a simultaneous presentation of the real and the fictional in this video work that not only showcases the culture of bags and baggage in India, but also comments obliquely on the inequities of class, life of immigrant workers and the general Indian proclivity to travel with huge and heavy loads. Metaphorically, it could also be seen to allude to all the civilisational baggage we carry in our transit through life and place.
Baggages, migrations and ‘the return home’ have been enduring concerns of Subodh Gupta. It is a theme that crystallised in works such as Saat Samundar Paar (Across the Seven Seas, 2005) where he uses baggage trolleys of modern airports to allude to the grim historical reality of migrations from India, especially his home state of Bihar. From the 1860s when indentured labour was sent from here to work the sugarcane fields of Mauritius, Guyana, Surinam, Trinidad and other British and Dutch colonies, Bihar has seen migration of male workers in such a scale and for such a long time that a hugely popular folk musical theatre called the bidesia (the migrant)*15 has developed around the experience that seems to epitomise every Bihari’s fate. Sample the bidesia lament of young brides whose husbands have deserted them to work abroad: railiya na bairi se jahajawa na bairi se / mor saiyan ke bilmawe se paiswa bairi hamar (It is not the train, it is not the ship that is our enemy, but rather the money that compels our husbands to migrate to other lands).
Transits and transfers are disorienting and uprooting events. They easily voyage into violence. The culture of anarchy, crime and lawlessness in Bihar is by now legendary. With early works that showed the katta (home-made pistol) as a generous offering in a ritualised banquet (installation The Way Home) and paintings like Let Me Make My Damned Art Gupta mythologises the violence inherent in his environment in a localised dialect. Nonetheless, the echoes these works have evoked in non-Indian audiences may point to the fact that violence in its ‘perfected purity’ is after all, a timeless and universal rite.
Subodh Gupta makes a transition of sorts in his own idiom and dialect in his latest work Gandhi’s Three Monkeys.*16 Here a tragic-comic Playstation War Game is conjured up by sculptures of three soldier heads that are trimmed with eye shades, mask and helmet made of Indian brass utensils. The irony and wit in turning the mascot of a Man of Peace into a testament of violence apart, these bronze sculptures embody more subversive possibilities. In a personalised Pop patois these could be the idols of the new sightless, silent and deaf trinity of distilled violence-- the 360 million-plus-1th mutation in Subodh’s crowded pantheon of holy hybrids. This trinity is not the harbinger of the Apocalypse promised by the End of (a linear) History. Rather, it is the formal manifestation of the frightening realisation of the cyclicity of time-- a 21st century re-envisioning of the kalachakra*17, if you will. In this kool kat kurukshetra *18 (holy battle field), Subodh Gupta navigates his chariot of transgressions in a cathartic pageant –that of a world constantly being lost /destroyed and yet emerging anew, reconfigured, reconstructed from its own debris.
Om Shantih Shantih Snhantihi! *19 (Let there be peace, let there be peace, let there be peace).
NOTES
1* paaras moti is a mythical pearl (moti) that turns anything that it is touch to into gold.2* Kabir (circa 1440-1518) was one of the most luminous voices of the Bhakti Movement that swept across medieval India between the 12th and the 18th centuries.
3* Geeta Kapur is an eminent Indian art historian, independent curator and cultural theorist. The quotation is from the catalogue essay for subTerrain: artworks in the city fold curated by Kapur for The House of World Cultures, Berlin, 2003
4* chacha is the Hindi word for father’s younger brother. Jawahar Lal Nehru liked to be called as ‘uncle’ by the children of India. His birthday is celebrated as Children‘s Day. He set up the first Public Sector steel mills in the tribal belts of Bokaro and Bhillai with Soviet help in the late 1950s and early 1960s and called them the ‘Temples of Modernity’.
5* Muradabad (Moradabad) is an old centre of brass and (now) steel utensil industry in northern India.
6*Subodh Gupta’s work with chowki-s
7* cow dung and cow urine are considered purifying and vested with medicinal properties in Hindu tradition and a part of many daily rituals.
8* The Sanskrit word would be mlechchha: people of foreign extraction in ancient India. mlechchha was used by the Aryans much as the ancient Greeks used barbaros, originally to indicate the uncouth and incomprehensible speech of foreigners and then extended to their unfamiliar behaviour. As a mlechchha, any foreigner stood completely outside the caste system and the ritual ambience. Thus, historically, contact with them was viewed by the caste Hindu as polluting. Encyclopaedia Brittanica
9* Mohini, lit. the enchantress, was the alluring female ‘rupa’ (form) that the male god Vishnu took in order to seduce the asura-s (demons) and divert their attention from the pot of elixir that emerged out of the churning of the milky ocean, sheersaagar, in Hindu mythology.
10* a+ kshaya = that which does not finish (kshaya), empty, or end. paatram= vessel.
The story from the Mahabharata related to akshaya paatram: The five Pandava princes are in exile in forest. Draupadi, the shared wife of the five Pandavas, has an akshaya pathram given to her by Surya, the Sun God. This vessel can produce any number of servings of food as long as it is not washed and rested upturned for that particular day. One day, the easily angered sage Sri Durvasa arrived with his 10000 disciples visit the Pandava brothers in the forest in exile. Custom dictated that Draupadi, feed all her unexpected guests. But she had already washed the akshya paatram for that day. She became worried that she may incur the curse of the notorious Sage and prays to Lord Krishna, who appears and "inspects" the akshaya paatram. The Lord finds a small fragment of a leaf still attached to it. When the Lord tastes the morsel, the hunger of all 10001 rishis (sages) is satiated.
11* First articulated and discussed in the Natya Shastra (2nd cent BC) of Bharata, the nine rasa-s are: Shringaram (erotic), Adbhutam (wonderment), Karunayam (empathy), Hasyam (comic), Raudram (anger), Vibhatsam (disdain/dislike), Veeram (valour), Bhayam (fear) and Shantam (peace).
12* nayak-nayika. Loosely translated as hero-heroine, actor-actress or man-woman. In classical and medieval poetry and painting this relationship was highly discussed, theorised and stylised. Medieval aesthetics devised ashta nayika-s or eight archetypal heroines classified by their states and temperaments. The allusion to nayak-nayika-s of desi (Bollywood) films is obvious and not excluded.
13* purana-s are a genre of Hindu text telling the stories of Gods and Goddesses, genealogies of the kings, heroes and demigods, and descriptions of Hindu cosmology, philosophy and geography. Puranas are written in the form of narrative stories related by one person to another. The saint Vyasa is considered to be the complier of the purana-s.
14* The rural Indian ‘bioscope’ was a large box (very brightly painted on the outside) with a small film or slide projector inside and three or four peep-holes in its body for children to peer through. The biscope-wala would play his reel of spliced unrelated film clips to popular film songs from a78 rpm vinyl record player set on top of the bioscope for a charge of two or four ana-s (now obsolete Indian coins. An ana was worth six paise) and let children watch the film clips through the peep-holes.
15* bidesia: the folk theatre of migrant lower caste/Dalit workers of Bihar deal with issues of confrontation: between the traditional and the modern, between urban and rural, between the haves and the have-nots.
16* Gandhi’s Three Monkeys: The story of the three monkeys is always mentioned along with Mahatma Gandhi's name. According to Majorie Sykes (1905-1996) who worked with both Rabindranath Tagore and Gandhi, one day a party of visitors from China came to visit Gandhi. "Gandhiji, we have brought you a small gift," they said. "It is a child's toy, but it is famous in our country. One monkey has his eyes covered, one covers his ears and one his mouth; together they proclaim: See No Evil, Hear No Evil and Say No Evil.” Gandhi was so delighted with the set of the three monkeys that he made it his mascot and kept it carefully by him for the rest of his life.
17* Kurukshetra: the place in North India where the war in Mahabharata was fought. It is also now a generic term for contested spaces of any type. Lord Krishna, as the charioteer of the Pandava hero Arjuna, imparted the Bhagawat Gita (a discourse on morality, life and death) in Kurukshetra.
18* Kalachakra: is a term used in Tantric Buddhism that means "time-wheel" or "time-cycles". It refers both to a Tantric deity and to the philosophies and meditation practices; it is one of the most complex systems within tantric Buddhism. The Kalachakra tradition revolves around the concept of time (kala) and cycles (chakra): from the cycles of the planets, to the cycles of human breathing.
19* From the Upanishads, a body Sanskrit verses that form the core thoughts of Vedantic Hinduism. Considered as mystic or spiritual contemplations of the Vedas, their putative end and essence, the Upanishads are known as Vedanta --the end/culmination of the Vedas.
