Nidan : International Journal for Indian Studies - latest Issue

This special edition of Nidan titled Sovereign Identities and Creativity presents a volume of work that focuses on the visual world through the lens of Hinduism and the through the dialogue of the Indian diaspora. The aim of this volume is to provide a view of the development of the study of the visual form towards creating a stronger art historical narrative within the framework of Indian-ness and Hinduism. While the borderline might be difficult to draw it does exist and becomes a way to register and describe these relationships within a contemporary global space. The volume comprises four papers from women writers who emerge from the Indian diaspora and who work in the field of the arts. There is flow of enquiry that extends from the discussion of iconic images in the work of Rabindranath Tagore to the lyrical paintings of Shalini Seereeram to the personal explorations of Reshma Chibba and finally the appropriation and misappropriation of Hindu icons in the modern western world in general and in South Africa in particular.

This paper explores the co-relation between the images in paintings and poetry of Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel Prize winner in Literature in 1913. The relevance of his poetry to his doodles, portraits, and works of other genres enhances the iconic and ideological significance of his abstract, semi-abstract, and representational paintings, substantiating his life-long quest for the beyond. The paper reveals a new understanding about his paintings, namely the relational identity between his paintings and poetry, and argues that the visual imagery in his ‘arts’ were expressionistic, flexible supple and transformable. Tagore’s ideology, feelings and life experiences were sources of his inspiration for his art, and their interrelation was complex. This line of investigation also marks a new departure in the exploration of the influences of Wassily Kandinsky, Charles Webster Leadbeater and the theosophist, Annie Besant.

Men and women in traditional wear; groups of coolie labourers posed looking into a camera; sugarcane plantations; bullock carts hauling cane from fields to factory – these are all familiar images of the East Indian experience in the West Indian colonies. The settings are usually rural and the eye looking in is almost always male. Over time as local artists began to depict their own experiences, again, it was mainly that of the male looking in on scenes. Sometimes it was a colonial gaze – one that celebrated simpler times, exoticized it; sometimes it was one that celebrated heritage and festivals, more often than not, Hindu and sometimes again, the plantation experiences that were rarely depicted in its hardship. It was an exercise in the making of a nation and a people in which the female subject found expression only through the male gaze. This paper attempts to explore some of the works of the artist Shalini Seereeram, as a way of introducing the idea that the diaspora is a space of privilege for the creative impulse.

This paper is interested primarily in the work of Shalini Seereeram, the first openly female LGBTQ artist in Trinidad. The conversation around LGBTQ rights is yet in a marginalized space, hardly a feature of popular discourse. The paper looks at the way in which Seereeram’s work challenges this lack of discourse and prompts the viewer to consider the body as a medium of affirmation - of sexual orientation, self and consequently citizenship. The traditional physical limitations of the body are erased as the artist narrates the human self into being. This work represents research in its preliminary stages, part of a larger work on contemporary Indo-Trinidadian artists and it makes reference from time to time, of another young, upcoming Indo-Trinidadian male artist by way of comparing how each artist conceptualizes his and her ethnic identity and place in the nation as one aspect of the movement towards naturalization.

This article looks at the use of Hindu iconography within South African visual art practice and its relation to race, identity, politics and womanhood in the work of Reshma Chhiba. It draws primarily on work from the 2013 exhibition entitled The Two Talking Yonis: Reshma Chhiba in conversation with Nontobeko Ntombela, and discusses Chhiba’s use of the image of the goddess Kali, the concept of yoni, the use of Bharatanatyam and understandings of feminine energy in relation to womanhood. It also threads a narrative of Chhiba’s ancestry through a poetic description of her grandmother’s journey from India to South Africa, and the embodiment of Kali as a form of defiance not only in her work, but also in her grandmother.

Visual culture and its transformative academic agenda has received much attention in the past few years, particularly so in South Africa from a broad spectrum of study. The commodification of Hindu deities is seen as a means of popularising these images while at the same time stripping them of the fundamental value as accredited to them by Hindus. The commercial viability of the pious image against the chaos of contemporary society is positioned as a capitalists’ dream. This article will look at the challenges experienced by Indian Hindus within a multicultural and post-Mandela South Africa. It will engage with particular images and forms which seem to compromise and bring insult to religious representations of Hinduism in contemporary South Africa. Various community newspapers bring to the fore the question of artistic freedom in conjunction with the question of contemporary religious practices which are operating within the historiography of a complex South African landscape. The phenomenon of cultural migration bears witness to the process of objects/cultural forms moving from one country or place of residence to settle in another. In this process the contemporary religious market, where images of the Hindu religion are appropriated, becomes a contentious issue. This type of commodification brings with it a narcissistic tendency which links to the controversial notion that any form of religion or spirituality can be appropriated freely, especially if it is not your own.

Market towns are a common phenomenon throughout India. I grew up in one of those in my early childhood in a little known town in Andhra Pradesh, South India. It is not too far from the neighboring farms and I grew up watching rural farmers coming to my town centre to buy their weekly supplies and watch a movie on their way back. Rickety buses would bring them into the bus station which is surrounded by vibrant markets where one could find virtually everything, at least for Indian needs of that period in the 1950s and 60s. The book under review by Gold brought memories of my childhood era for me. Gold effortlessly describes many facets of rural/urban life of Jahazpur which she aptly calls ‘Shiptown’.