below Veloso Salgado, Vasco
da Gama before the Samorim
of Calicut, 1898, oil on canvas.
Photo: WikiCommons
NANCY ADAJANIA
TH E CR A FTS
H A VE TH E P O WER
TO RED EEM A RT
In 1898, the Portuguese artist Jose Salgado painted a dramatic history painting,
‘Vasco da Gama meeting with the Zamorin of Calicut’. Da Gama, the Portuguese
explorer who had pioneered a sea route linking West Europe to Western India exactly
400 years earlier, occupies centre-stage. He addresses the Zamorin – the Hindu ruler
of the city-state of Calicut – with a flamboyant gesture, his presence overwhelming
the supposed savages of the East. The savages, meanwhile, inhabit a court opulent
in its grandeur. The Zamorin wears pearls, emeralds and rubies; his courtiers are
dressed in the finest silks and cotton. Apart from his theatrical gesture and a brass
washbasin offered by a lackey, da Gama does not have much to offer. By Salgado’s
time, European colonialism was at its high noon, having remapped and redefined
the world in its own image. The rhetoricity of his painting – with its Orientalist view
of the Indians and its celebration of a Western triumphalism – clearly drowns out
the truth.
From the manner in which the Zamorin has been presented here – as an
onlooker dazzled by the European visitor – nobody would guess that he was the
Samudra Raja or Sea King, one of the most influential rulers in the Indian Ocean
zone. Or that he controlled the spice trade which connected the Malabar coast
with Egypt, Venice and, ultimately, Nuremberg. Claude Alvares, the historian of
decolonisation, notes that da Gama’s offerings were utterly tawdry: hats, strings
of coral beads, washbasins, jars of oil and honey
with some striped cloth thrown in (which the
Zamorin’s courtiers found laughable).1 This
painting, while recasting the threshold moment
of Portuguese colonialism, also conceals the
This pre-colonial latticework of
real barbarian in the tableau: da Gama, who was
globalisation straddled conventional
known to ‘take captives, chop off their limbs and
string them in pieces on the masts of his ships to
notions of East and West, as
intimidate others.’2
well as the religious differences
Such behaviour was ingrained in the project
among Hinduism, Jainism, Islam
of colonial empire, on which Portugal, Spain,
France, the Netherlands and Britain embarked
and Christianity, in its sharing of
during the 16th and 17th centuries. Based on an
abundance.
annihilationist winner-takes-all policy, it marked
a rupture with the mutuality and reciprocity that
had characterised the dealings of the merchants
who had participated in the Indian Ocean sea trade
until the arrival of the West European maritime
mercantile companies. It also created and enforced an ‘East/ West’ binary that had
not formerly prevailed. Among the actors in the pre-colonial world of Indian Ocean
trade were Indians, Persians, Malays, Arabs, Egyptians, East Africans – as well as
Sephardic Jews, Levantines, Armenians, Venetians, Flemings and Germans. This
pre-colonial latticework of globalisation straddled conventional notions of East
and West, as well as the religious differences among Hinduism, Jainism, Islam and
Christianity, in its sharing of abundance.
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By contrast, the rising West European powers were paupers who had nothing
of significance to trade except woollen clothes. They cornered the spice trade with
their superior firepower, their hunger for world dominance fed as much by greed as
by theological enthusiasm. The Portuguese and Spanish Empires, especially, were
animated by the bloodthirsty reflexes of the 1492 Reconquista, with its expulsion
or forced conversion of Iberia’s Muslims and Jews. Pedro Alvarez Cabral, who sailed
to Calicut two years after da Gama, demanded that the Zamorin ‘expel’ all Muslims
from his kingdom. The Zamorin flatly refused this ridiculous demand and instead
affirmed his policy of allowing people of all faiths to trade and worship in his
kingdom.3
The Zamorin’s liberal and inclusive attitude had been shaped by eighteen
centuries of transcultural interactions across the Indian Ocean. These interactions
began as early as the 3rd century BCE. Merchants from the littoral regions of
present-day India, Pakistan, Iran, the Gulf region, Egypt, and East Africa were
engaged in it, as were their counterparts from what are today Indonesia, Malaysia,
and South China. The Indian Ocean trade routes were also connected, through the
Red Sea, to the Roman Empire. As A L Basham writes, the Roman Empire imported,
from India, spices, textiles, jewels, iron, lac and indigo; elephants, lions, tigers,
buffaloes for its gladiatorial circuses; and monkeys, parrots, peacocks as pets for
Roman ladies. In return, India imported gold, tin, lead, coral, wine, and slave girls
from the Roman Empire.4
A flourishing trade in indigo- and
red-dyed cotton textiles connected
Khambat, on India’s Gujarat coast,
with Fustat or Old Cairo, between the
This transoceanic and
13th and 17th centuries CE. These are
transcontinental ecumene
known to scholars today as the ‘Fustat
textiles’. Similarly, the Kalamkari
was unified, across the
painted and block-printed textiles of
centuries, by the use of
India’s south-eastern coast were part
of a transcontinental and transoceanic
prestige languages.
network, producing distinctive handprinted cloth for clienteles in Iran
and in Indonesia. The paisley print,
long associated with Kalamkari, is of
ultimately Iranian and Kashmiri origin.
Literary texts also travelled across the oceans. During the 8th century, the
Abbasid rulers of Baghdad presided over a grand project of translation, carrying
Sanskrit and Greek texts over into Persian and Arabic. Sanskrit cycles of wisdom
stories like the Panchatantra were translated into Persian and Arabic in Baghdad as
the Dastan Kalilah wa Dimnah, and travelled along the Indian Ocean-Mediterranean
routes to North Africa and South Europe. The 12th-century Sanskrit Shuka-saptati
(‘The Seventy Tales of the Parrot’) – a book of worldly advice and ethical counsel
– was translated into Persian in North India as the Tuti Nama (‘The Book of the
Parrot’) in c. 1335 CE. It travelled eastward to the Indonesian archipelago, where
it was rendered into Bahasa in 1371 CE as the Hikayat Bayan Budiman (‘The Story of
Wise Counsel’).
This transoceanic and transcontinental ecumene was unified, across the
centuries, by the use of prestige languages. Here, we see the operations of what
Sheldon Pollock has called the ‘Sanskrit cosmopolis’, the transregional reach of
the Sanskrit language which covered the vast geographical and cultural domain of
South Asia, Afghanistan and Indonesia between 400 and 1400 CE.5 In the same spirit,
Richard Eaton has argued for the influential presence of a transregional ‘Persian
Cosmopolis’ embracing Central, West and South Asia between 900 and 1900 CE,
unified by the knowledge and use of Persian.6 And one notes the influential presence
of an Arabic cosmopolis, linking a vast stretch of the planet from Spain and Mali in
the west to China and the Philippines in the east, from 700 CE to the present.
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opposite Desmond Lazaro,
Maharasa Lila Pichavai (detail),
2002, pigment and gold paint
on cotton cloth, 243 × 243cm.
With: Bannu Ved Pal Sharma,
Shammi Sharma, Chitterji
Khumawat. Photo: Sue-Lyn
Moyle. Courtesy John Curtin
Gallery.
THE CRAFTS HAVE THE POWER TO REDEEM ART
51
The territorial borders that colonialism drew have often committed the people
of the postcolonial Global South to identities not of their own making. By contrast,
this transcontinental and transoceanic ecumene of the pre-colonial period was
expansive, cosmopolitan, and hospitable to plural, intersecting identities.7
THE LASC AR S AND THE LAB YR I NTH
‘He had thought that lascars were a tribe or nation, like the Cherokee or Sioux: he
discovered now that they came from places that were far apart, and had nothing in
common, except the Indian Ocean; among them were Chinese and East Africans, Arabs
and Malays, Bengalis and Goans, Tamils and Arakanese.’
—Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies8
In Ghosh’s superb novel, set in the early part of the 19th century, the transoceanic
sailors or lascars, ferry a motley group of people in the Ibis, a schooner that carries
the traces of the recently banned Atlantic slave trade. Hidden away in the hold of
the ship, this group of fugitives includes women and men escaping the clutches
of caste and patriarchy to reach the mythic land of Mareech or Mauritius. In the
middle of the Indian Ocean, they inhabit a heterotopia where the differences of
caste, class and gender melt away, and a new solidarity arising from a subaltern
cosmopolitanism can be forged.
The Indian Ocean’s history is an antidote to essentialisms of all kinds. It informs
Desmond Lazaro’s confluential and archipelagic imagination, which shuttles
among multiple languages, worldviews and artistic traditions. The artist inherits
multiple diasporas: his family moved from South India to Burma; his parents
migrated to the UK during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Born and brought up in
Leeds, he has lived in India and now calls Australia home.
In this triennial, Lazaro wishes to juxtapose a rendering of the ‘Maharaasa
Lila Pichavai’ (2002) with work from his ongoing ‘Cosmos’ series. The pichavai is a
cloth backdrop placed behind the idol of Shrinathji in the sancta
of Pushtimargi temples. The ‘Maharaasa Lila Pichavai’ was made
in collaboration with the pichavai painters Bannu Ved Pal Sharma,
Shammi Sharma and Chitterji Khumawat. The ‘Cosmos’ series
The Indian Ocean’s
– made almost two decades later – is a more personal journey,
coursing over both the European archetype of the labyrinth, as in
history is an antidote to
Chartres, and the Vastu-purusha mandala, the grid that configures
essentialisms of all kinds.
the Vedic Cosmic Person.
Both works articulate a transcendental quest. The pichavai
embodies Lazaro’s apprenticeship to the Pushtimargi tradition,
which sees creativity as an offering to the divine: a reflection of
divine play or lila. For a decade, he worked in a traditional studio
in Jaipur, learning the techniques and symbolism of the pichavai idiom. Lazaro’s
life-choices are, to say the least, unique. Why would an academy-trained Fine Arts
graduate from the UK spend precious years learning an art form that is also a
form of worship? Another artist might have brazenly appropriated the pichavai
form and used local artists-craftspeople to do his bidding. How did Lazaro, who
was taught to prize his artistic autonomy above everything else, work within the
protocols of a devotional community or sampradaya?
By contrast, the ‘Cosmos’ series – breath-taking in conception and execution
– signals the artist’s individuation. Rather than working within a sampradaya, he
phrases his spiritual and artistic quest through a well-informed eclecticism. What
bridges these distinct phases in his work is the constancy of chitra seva – painting
as devotion – which is the hallmark of the pichavai tradition.
above Shakuntala Kulkarni,
juloos, 2018, four projection
video, colour, sound installation,
5 min loop. Edition 3/5, plus
2 Artist Proofs.
AR MOU R , C AGE S AND HANDPR I NTS
Shakuntala Kulkarni was educated in the early 1970s at the JJ School of Art,
Bombay: a bastion of Indian modernism that privileged abstraction as the acme
of art and the figure of the male artist as genius. She has spent the rest of her
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THE CRAFTS HAVE THE POWER TO REDEEM ART
53
life unlearning the reflexes of this pedagogy, with its various colonial, modernist
and patriarchal axioms. It abhorred collaboration and discriminated against
the crafts – an umbrella term covering a range of so-called ‘folk’ and ‘tribal’
art practices. These terms gained currency during British colonial rule in India.
‘Folk’ signalled a primitive consciousness or the exotic Other; ‘tribal’ attested to
the colonial administrator’s need to classify indigenous people and forests into
exploitable entities.9 This writer prefers ‘subaltern
artists’ (adapting Gramsci) to underline their lack
of social and cultural capital while also emphasising
the importance of the politicisation of their
As their worldviews, inflected with
consciousness: a process that is, at best, a work in
progress.
their specific class and gender
Over the years, Kulkarni’s practice has been
positions, began to intersect, they
enriched by her investment in classical dance forms
such as Bharatanatyam and the experimental
began to ‘join’ together and ‘repair’
theatre of Satyadev Dubey and Badal Sarkar. She
the division between art and craft.
has worked with actors, dancers, cinematographers,
quilt-makers, and more recently, in her 2012
exhibition ‘Of Bodies, Armour and Cages’, with cane
weavers. The embattled female body marked by
patriarchal conditioning and social discrimination
has been the mainstay of her practice. In the armour series – through wearable
sculpture and performance photographs – we see the artist’s self in performance,
poised between aggression and vulnerability, aporia and articulation.
Incensed by daily reports of rape and misogyny, Kulkarni donned protective
gear woven out of cane that looks at once hieratic as well as eccentric. Imagine
her walking through public spaces in Bombay in an elaborate paraphernalia that
references, among other sources, First Nation Inuit headgear, Kathakali costumes
and sci-fi alien costumes. She has transformed herself into a combat-ready warrior
questioning the force-fit of gender constructs and deflecting sexual violence. But
as Ranjit Hoskote cautions there is a danger that this defensive armour could lead
to an incipient ‘militarisation’.10
Kulkarni’s drawings of the armour and headgear were translated into wearable
cane sculptures by the late Bombay-based Dinesh Pardeshi who made and repaired
cane furniture, and by Tonkeshwar Barik from Jorhat, Assam, known for his gorgeous
cane jewellery. In recalling the collaborative process, the artist foregrounds their
struggle to come up with ‘solutions’ to make the cane costume mobile and gendersensitive. At first, Pardeshi’s patriarchal reflexes could not accommodate a woman’s
opposite Drying cow dung,
body, especially the breasts, because in his mind he was making these sculptures
Bankura, 2016. Photo: Madhvi
for a man.11 As their worldviews, inflected with their specific class and gender
Subrahmanian.
positions, began to intersect, they began to ‘join’ together and ‘repair’ – at a literal
and metaphorical level – the division between art and craft, academy-trained and
subaltern artist. For the present author, these collaborative ‘solutions’ were not
merely technical but, rather, expressed techne, the organic interplay of imagination
and technique.
Currently based in Singapore, the ceramicist Madhvi Subrahmanian grew up
in Bombay. In the mid-1980s, she learned to make wood-fired pottery at Golden
Bridge Pottery (GBP) in Pondicherry, run by American ceramicists Deborah Smith
and Ray Meeker, and she has an MFA from Southern Methodist University in Dallas,
Texas. Subrahmanian’s ceramic practice shows no sign of defensiveness vis a vis the
Fine Arts tradition. Quite the contrary: she is the co-curator of ‘Breaking Ground’,
India’s first Ceramics Triennale, held in Jaipur in 2018, which was ambitious in
scale and experimental in tenor. And yet, across the long arc of her practice,
we sense her struggle to bridge the gap between the formalist abstraction of
contemporary ceramics, whose primordial and archetypalist impulses tend to
fetishize the medium, and its origins, which lie in humble materials and processes
that meld the aesthetic with the functional. In recent years, she has attempted to
break the spell of the studio object and restore the ceramicist’s art to the circuits
of everyday life.12
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The daily rituals of rural women have always inspired Subrahmanian – whether
it is making rangolis or floor drawings in the courtyard or making cow dung cakes
for use in religious rituals, for cooking fires, and as a fertiliser. In ‘Upla’ (2017), she
has composed an assemblage of cow dung cakes, each one rendered in pristine
porcelain, a medium described by the pioneering British potter Bernard Leach
as the ‘ultimate refinement of pottery’.13 The sanitised coolness of porcelain is
pressed with the warmth of deeply etched fingerprints, reminding us of women’s
labouring hands. Is Subrahmanian extolling the virtues of purity, whether of the
definitive expressiveness of this medium or of the sacred status of cow dung
in Hindu ritual? Or, closer to the bone, is she questioning the claims of the gaurakshaks, the cow vigilantes who have in recent years brutally lynched Muslims
and Dalits in the name of protecting the sacred cow?14 The (in)organic porcelain
cow dung cakes frozen on the wall remind us painfully of how the cow has been
fetishized by the forces of Hindu majoritarianism to incite communal and casteist
tension.15
However, some contradictions remain inherent in the work. The artist says that
she is ‘immortalising the traditions that women transmit through daily rituals’.
Yet she knows that this gesture of valorisation could turn a daily domestic activity
into an artefact.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
Claude Alvares, Decolonising History: Technology and Culture in India, China and the West 1492 to the Present Day
(Goa & New York: The Other India Bookstore and the Apex Press, 1991), p. 141.
Claude Alvares, ‘Lusophile Historian’, in Himal, 1 January 1998. Here, Alvares critiques Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s
book, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (1997), for not sufficiently questioning the brutality of Portuguese
colonialism. Accessed from: https://www.himalmag.com/lusophile-historian/
See Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1992).
A L Basham, The Wonder that was India (London: Fontana, 1974), pp. 231-232.
See Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
See Richard M. Eaton, India in the Persianate Age, 1000-1765 (London: Allen Lane, 2019).
See Ranjit Hoskote & Ilija Trojanow, Confluences: Forgotten Histories from East and West (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2012).
Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies (Delhi: Penguin/Viking, 2008), p. 13.
Nancy Adajania, ‘Coomaraswamy to Ambedkar: Tracing the Vanished Horizons of the ‘Vernacular in the Contemporary’
in Annapurna Garimela ed., Vernacular, in the Contemporary 2 (exh. cat. New Delhi: Devi Art Foundation, 2011).
See Ranjit Hoskote, ‘A Procession of Selves’, in Shakuntala Kulkarni: Juloos and Other Stories (exh. cat. Bombay:
Chemould Prescott Road, 2018).
In conversation with the author (March 2021).
Nancy Adajania, ‘Clay Bodies: They remember those who do not speak’, in Madhvi Subrahmanian: Mapping Memory
(exh. cat. Bombay: Chemould Prescott Road, 2017).
Bernard Leach, A Potter’s Book (London: Faber & Faber, 1940), p. 38.
In the 2015 Dadri lynching case, Mohammad Akhlaq was beaten to death and his son Danesh was assaulted for
allegedly possessing and consuming beef. See ‘Dadri Lynching: One year on, what has changed after Mohammad
Akhlaq was beaten to death?’ on FirstPost, 28 September 2016. Retrieved from: www.firstpost.com/india/dadrilynching-one-year-on-what-has-changed-after-mohammad-akhlaq-was-beaten-to-death-3023850.html
See Sakshi Dayal and Sanjeev Verma, ‘Two ‘beef transporters’ forced to eat cow dung by gau rakshaks’ (Indian Express,
29 June 2016). Cow vigilantes of the Gau Rakshak Dal in Haryana force-fed Rizwan and Mukhtiar – who they claimed
were beef transporters – a concoction of cow dung, cow milk, cow urine, milk and ghee to “teach them a lesson and
also to purify them.”
Rajkumar, ‘Akal’, in Nancy Adajania ed. ‘Some things that only art can do: A Lexicon of Affective Knowledge’
(Delhi: Raza Foundation, 2017), p. 21.
THE C R AFTS AND C OMMONI NG
The conventional reasoning in the white-cube circuit is that the crafts will
someday be redeemed by the arts. This Cartesian approach, based on a mind/
body divide, sees the crafts as quotidian, repetitive, ritualistic, domestic forms
learnt by rote from tradition. Art, on the other hand, is believed to manifest itself
when craft is elevated by the power of the individual imagination. What if we were
to argue that, instead, the crafts will someday redeem art from its conceptual
overreach? The sociality and commoning impulse of the crafts allows us to build
communities of care and empathy. The Bastar-based artist Rajkumar goes beyond
the binaries of art/craft, rural/urban, head/hand, by contributing the Hindi word
‘akal’ or ‘intelligence’ to our lexicon. In his Adivasi or indigenous account of the
knowledge commons, ‘akal’ is the kind of intelligence that is not extractive or
propertarian, but is fluid and ‘shares its gifts with everyone’:
‘There are thousands and lakhs [millions] of gurus in life, who will help us to
learn, to understand, to become aware. Alongside these human teachers, there
are the creatures of the natural world, who are also our gurus. That’s why I’ve
represented my head in the shape of a pitcher. You can’t predict when, where or
how, drop by drop we accumulate intelligence in our minds.
That experience, that water collected over the years – somewhere or the other,
we open our hearts and share it with others. That’s why I believe that intelligence
is like the flowing water of a river. It does not remain the private property of any
single person. It keeps sharing its gifts with everyone as it goes.’16
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