In the Indian context, our experiences of modernity tend to be theorized under the rubric of the elite practitioners' angst in relation to hegemony of Western dominance. Due to this, the fight of the subalterns in India to register their presence in mainstream cultural practices faces multiple hazards. Even after attaining a political identity such as dalit and their recent assertion of a presence in the realm of political power, their struggles to participate in cultural practices have not even been addressed adequately and still their cultures more or less remain as something that has been accused of ‘contamination' and regulated by the upper-caste intelligentsia. Most of the attempts made by the subaltern art practitioners to engage with the larger cultural field are accused of as pop cultural betrayal through the regulation/attribution of their practices as authentic folk/tribal culture. The subalterns in India have a double challenge: the hegemonic and overarching discourse of upper caste national bourgeois intelligentsia on one hand and the global imperialism on the other, even though their identities are often interchanged.
To recognize the historical nature of Savi Savarkar's intervention we have to locate his artistic practices within this context. As a cultural practitioner he locates himself in the interstices of culture and politics, or in other words, art and activism. He is not professing of any alternative nor claiming to be the avant-garde. Instead, his works subvert the existing discourses on aesthetics by raising questions about the casteist nature of the alphabets and the grammar which constitute these discourses. While the so called mainstream avant-garde favors the modernist puritanical concepts like ‘truth', ‘goodness', ‘harmony' etc, savi savarkar favors an aesthetics of mistakes, what Rabelais called the gramatica jocosa (‘laughing grammar') in which artistic language is liberated from the stifling norms of correctedness. In this sense his works are anti-canonical; it deconstructs not only the canon, but also the generating matrix that makes canons and grammaticality. Savi Savarkar's quest for a new linguistic idiom is an outcome of the recognition that most of the existing linguistic options are inadequate to communicate with the expressive needs of an oppressed but multivocal/multicentered (or ‘polyphonic' in the Bakhtinian sense) community and culture.
In the case of India, the entry of subalterns into mainstream art practices through hybridic, transcultural engagement has been prevented till now by upper caste institutions primarily through the attribution of an authenticity (such as living folk tradition) that locates them in an ahistorical world. On the one hand, these cultural elites act as the gatekeepers who prevent any contamination to the ‘authentic subaltern' through interaction with other traditions including modernity. On the other hand these elites appropriate the attributed qualities – the cultural forms devoid of practice and context – as supplements in their practices in order to claim themselves as authentically modern in the postcolonial Indian condition. The ‘speaking subaltern' who, expelled from the paradise of subalternity, is accused of (moral and ethical) contamination and systemically marginalized as the one seduced by ‘outside' sins. One should consider the simplistic yet not innocent, understanding between subaltern identity and non-identity, between folk cultural authenticity and pop cultural betrayal as an outcome of this discourse.
Oppression as a subject matter was always part of the representative politics of visual art in general. Early instances of this representation can easily be traced back to the works of left-progressive artists such as Chittoprasad, Zainul Abedin, Somnath Hore etc. But what makes Savi Savarkar's intervention a ‘discomfort' is his political positioning against caste oppressions that are completely overlooked by the progressive narratives. With a vigorous critical energy he has engaged with the lived reality of the world of subaltern communities; a world that is much more oppressive and suppressive, a world in which resistances and contestations have multiple layers and take on multiple forms. Through this cultural intervention he also proposes that by not depicting this reality and acknowledging this fact, most of the progressive cultural practitioners had displayed their subservience to dominant discourses. His refusal to translate the caste oppression within the parameters of the grand narratives of economic oppression was a declaration of becoming part of newer knowledge and community formations which identify themselves as dalits. This newer community formation is not merely the unification of oppressed castes against the oppressive castes. Dalit formation is not the traditional liberal view of interaction of different preconstituted communities. But dalit as a newer knowledge and community formation resists this traditional liberal view because dalit is something other than the sum or the relation among castes. This is similar to individuals and their relations with communities because both individuals and communities are not preconstituted entities.
Savi Savarkar's interventions in the sphere of mainstream art practices have to be located within the new cultural politics which identifies its first goal as a struggle for equality. The larger revolutionary impulses it carries can only accompany this struggle. This new cultural politics is not simply oppositional; it does not contest the mainstream for inclusion. It recognizes the politics of inclusion as a politics of subjugation: becoming of a group is no longer open but is conceived as the becoming of some specific essence. This new cultural politics is also not transgressive in an avant-garde sense of shocking the bourgeois culture. Rather it attempts through distinctive practices and by collective insurgency to target the decentering of the very premise of logocentric thought itself. Oppressed people worldwide now are skeptical about the dialectical oppositional modes such as avant-garde because these discourses hardly consider the subaltern as a discursive agency. The potency of ‘avant-garde' claims of ‘higher' cultural practitioners lies in the construction of the idea that they have the resource, ingenuity and (self-assigned) right to make value-judgments above and beyond all social and historical values and realities. However, the emergence of new subject groups (definitely Savi Savarkar exemplifies this emergence in visual arts) and newer populace discourses indicates that the doubts raised by the people are valid, especially those who are depicted in all social theories as aphasic, about the appellations such as ‘opposite', ‘alternative', ‘queer', ‘secular', ‘parallel' etc. Simultaneously, it confirms that the untouchability/absenteeism constituted by the native elite is getting destabilized in the manner that the Othering constituted by Eurocentric systems of knowledge had.
The recent interest shown by the mainstream/conventional cultural institutions in dalit literature and art is not a product of a desire that allows dalit discourses to take part in the knowledge formation and cultural production. Instead, it was/is an attempt to preserve the conservative institutions from destruction and decentering. It is not coincidental that the people who engaged in the kind of arguments that bracket off and define dalit literature/art as “this” or “that” appear to be interested only in alienating the life condition of the dalit from its contemporary location and constructing it as something that is of the Chaturvarnya time. In other words, the historical memories of dalits are often sedimented in their cultural forms and social practices that are not amenable to investigation under the auspices of discursive reason. In order to address the significance of dalit society and culture, it is therefore necessary to reorient one's hermeneutic interest: away from models of linguisticality, discursivity, and textuality; toward the “phatic and the ineffable” . Therefore a discourse that decentres the object and re-invents the subject, not as another homogenous center but as a presence of plural discursivity, can only hold the subalterns' ‘double consciousnesses' .
Savi Savarkar's usage of the human body seeks a special attention in this context. The manner in which these bodies have been rendered displays an uncanny sense of resistance against all kinds of standardization or canonization of human bodies. The bold lines which produce the contours of the bodies are not used as the limit that marks the ‘natural' resemblance to the ‘universal' human body. These bodies are local in their specificity and at the same time they imagine a possibility of becoming which produces the prospect of political alliances through the recognition of multiple layers of sufferings and struggles. Or in other words, the unfinished, elastic bodies in many of his paintings transgress their own limits and keep open the possibilities of conceiving newer bodies. These paintings counter-pose the mutable body, the passing of one form into another, reflecting the ever incomplete character of being. As in carnivalesque aesthetics by calling attention to the paradoxical attractiveness of the grotesque body these paintings also attempt to reject what might be called the ‘fascism of beauty.'
Many of the human bodies in Savi Savarkars's works are fragmented and some of them are mutated and ambulated. Most of the figures display the agonies of their complex social existence. Many bodies bear the traces of the histories of casteist humiliation and torture. The surfaces and visual atmosphere of almost all the works clearly displays the way in which their lives are fragmented through the histories of exclusion and discriminations. Savi Savarkar's painting surfaces are not mere backdrops to the figures; on the contrary they are very much part of the figures and represent the battle grounds of human sufferings. In most of the instances, the violence unleashed on the human bodies are not represented through any graphic representation of the acts of violence. The lethal combination of direct colors, bold brush strokes and rough textures make the surface vibrate with the agonies of violence. In many instances like in the case of Dark Day I the figures are etched into this surface, indicating the fact that their bodies are the physical bearers of this casteist violence. In some other instances like Banaras and Ganga the propagators of heinous casteist violence, the muscular face which represents Brahminic ideologies, comes out of the surface and stares at the spectator with arrogance. The presence of the structures which represents industrial outlets suggests the contemporaneity of this violence. The screaming female figure, crushed under these muscular forces also suggests the gendered nature of this violence. The violated and dejected female figures like in the cases of devdasis also talk about the histories of sexual oppression. These representations also pose the question of the role of caste in gendering the bodies and the way in which this gendering reestablishes the rationale of caste itself. The miserable plights of the devdasis are a recurring thematic in Savi Savarkar's works. This thematic explores the way in which the anatomies of Brahminic religious practices are structured around casteist and sexist oppressions. His other works like Untouchable with Dead Cow also seek attention to the incidents of recent caste violence where numbers of dalits were brutally lynched by the upper caste militia by accusing them of cow slaughtering. These representations expose the nature of the brutal violence unleashed towards dalit communities and the casteist arrogance that treats the social status of the members of the ‘lower' castes lower than animals.
Savi Savarkar's inclination towards Buddhist philosophy as well neo-Buddhist politics works as the basis for his series of paintings on Zen masters and Buddhist monks. These paintings bear the historical memory of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar's legendary challenge to the Hindu varna-jati system through the massive conversion to Buddhism. The manner in which he represents these figures exemplifies the extent to which this massive conversion brought dignity to the lives of the ‘untouchables'. These works pay tribute to the political philosophy of Dr. Ambedkar and neo-Buddhist movements and register how these historical initiatives have transformed the lives of millions of people forever. Savi Savarkar's representation of the thinker also deserves a special mention here by the reason that his Thinker declares the arrival of the new subject and knowledge formation. To imagine these formations he hasn't followed the canonical Thinker of Rodin. This thinker is not the idealized thinker of the Western White male subjectivity. Unlike Rodin's sculpture Savi Savarkar's Thinker is not positioned on any pedestal or in isolation. He is very much a part of the community he belongs to and refutes all the logics of an idealized thinker. He can be anyone in the street; he is not an arm-chair intellectual; the aesthetical standards which regulate the notion of intelligentsia as the upper caste male alone are countered by these representative tactics.
One of the other factors that is easily recognizable in Savi Savarkar's artistic practice is the aspect of repetition in terms of thematic choice. There are multiple representations of Devdasis , Untouchable with Dead Cow , Brahmin Priests , Manu etc at different points of time in his career. With a renewed energy, each time he has questioned caste oppressions of various sorts through multiple tongues. Some times with a vengeance like in the case of the representation of the Brahmin priests and Manu and many other times with the gesture of solidarity to the struggles of the systematically ‘marginalized' communities. This act of repetition has to be read not in the conventional sense of repeating the same-old-thing but as a politico-linguistic strategy. In short, Savi Savarkar's act of repetition is not the recurrence of the same old thing over and over again. For him, to repeat something is to begin again, to renew, to question, and to refuse remaining the same. Gilles Deleuze has observed, repeating the past does not mean parroting its effects, but repeating the force and difference of time, producing art today that is as disruptive of the present as the art of past. These works ‘repeat' not in order to express what had gone before, but to express an untimely power, a power of language to disrupt the flow of dominant notions of identity and coherence.
One of the semantic components that are central to his critical artistic positioning is the usage of the language of excess which problematizes the dominant notions of beauty, harmony, aesthetic and skill in art. His unconventional usage of colors and mode of figuration raises concrete skepticism about binaries such as high art and popular art, figuration and abstraction, drawing and caricature by blending their boundaries. This move also postulates that in the context of India the concept of caste and the casteist notion of purity has played a significant role in the construction of normative aesthetics similar to the way in which binaries such as white/black has played in the western cultural imagination. The coming back of ‘caste' as an analytical category does not envisage it as an agency that transplants itself as a new centre, on the contrary it foresees the possibilities of decentring, differentiation, relationality, liminality, sharing and linkage. Savi Savarkar's aesthetic and artistic initiatives have to be located as a counter-institutional mode of cultural production which rediscovers the possibilities of a newer cultural politics.
* I would like to thank Dr. Deeptha Achar and Sneha Ragavan for their valuable suggestions. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness , Harvard University Press, Cambridge , 1993, p. 73.
Ibid, p.71. This concept derives from the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, who began The Soul of Black Folk with the observation that “one ever feels his twoness, - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (quoted in Black Atlantic, p. 126). Du Bois's purpose in mobilizing the concept of “double consciousness” was “to convey the special difficulties arising from black internationalism of an American identity” (p.126); but Gilroy wishes to generalize its applicability, according to its authoritative status with respect to black Western subjectivity.
For instance, on October 15, 2002, a mob lynched five young men, all Dalits, at Dulina in Jhajjar district of Haryana. Three of the five victims traded in animal skins, as a caste occupation. The five were first beaten up by a group that claimed to have caught them slaughtering a cow on the Gurgaon-Jhajjar road, and then taken to the Dulina police post. Instead of protecting the five men from further assaults and arranging for medical attention, the police allowed a mob to assemble over three hours and then stood by as it lynched the men in the presence of scores of onlookers. |
