Pieces Of A Puzzle
Click here to read this on Rasa Journal where it was first published on Nov 8, 2021.
Context, not content
If you were told you had an hour or two to vacate your home forever, what would you take?
Valuables, cash, and heirlooms? Suitcases of clothes, personal effects, and the like? Or family photos?
If the last of these sounds silly, then you should know that that’s exactly what the Bollywood poet and lyricist Anand Bakshi did when his family had to flee their ancestral home in Pakistan’s Rawalpindi to Delhi in India during the 1947 Partition. The photos were of his mother, Sumitra Bali, whom he had lost at a young age as well as of the family in general. When his father yelled at him for carrying such “useless things”, he shot back, “Money we can earn when we find work, but if these photos of her were lost, no amount of money could ever bring them back for me. Pictures of her are all I have to live with, my entire life!”
These photos then travelled the Bakshi household from one residence to another in India and have been treasured as precious gems. This story by the lyricist’s son, Rakesh Anand Bakshi, may have remained only a family anecdote if it wasn’t for Anusha Yadav’s Indian Memory Project. Launched in 2010, it was her attempt at trying to bridge the gap between the history she read in books or saw in museums and the personal histories she had heard from family, friends, and acquaintances.
“My maternal and paternal families did not experience the partition but I had some friends in college who came from Lahore and Rawalpindi,” Yadav says, “and it was listening to their experiences that made it so real”. From then on, she set about on a quest to humanise history. Partition, for instance, she says was not just one story but 15 million of them. “There were people who were victims but did not suffer, for some it was an opportunity to rewrite their lives, and then there’s also an element of fictional memories.”
Based in Mumbai, Yadav, 45, credits her instinct for storytelling to the times spent in Jaipur while growing up and listening to such personal histories during dinner conversations and the like. She wanted to bring out these stories in the open for the wider public and as a photographer herself, photos seemed like a good medium to her. The Project has featured many more personal histories such as that of Bakshi’s, where anyone can submit a family photo and a narrative that explains the story behind it. Some are slice of life, some descriptive, and some leave you wanting for more.
While she credits the reach and easy accessibility of social media in making it happen, she also stresses upon the importance of establishing an emotional connection with the audience. “Context, not content, is god,” she says and believes that the Project helps “challenge the notion of what we think the subcontinent is because it is much crazier than we realise”. It is for this reason that she feels such stories and the accompanying photos should be seen by more people rather than only at galleries and exhibits. “I myself learn about India through the Project and have found India to be much more interesting than the nationalistic agenda,” she adds.
However, while the historians today squabble about the national history, Yadav narrates an incident where two sisters in their 80s squabbled amongst themselves when one of them submitted a photo narrative of their father. The other disagreed with it and wanted it to be altered according to her perspective. This is perhaps more telling of the nature of memory as well as our individual perceptions, both of which shape our histories whether personal, national, or global.
Bringing Our Gods Home
The puzzle of history is one that is constantly being put together and pulled apart. Which is why, almost a century after the European colonial powers retreated from their colonies in Global South, they now find themselves at a reckoning with history again.
Across the world, there are debates in academia and public discourse about the legacies of colonialism with respect to politics, economy, and culture. India’s Member of the Parliament, Dr. Shashi Tharoor spoke at Oxford University in 2015 where he made a case for the reparations that Britain owes to their former colony and since then, there has been a growing chorus in India as to how these reparations may be realised.
The most important work towards this has been done by Vijay Kumar Sundaresan of the India Pride Project. Most recently based in Singapore, he started by studying Indic art and iconography in 2002 and since 2006, he has written extensively about what he has learnt not just about art but the dark underbelly of the market for his blog, Poetry in Stone. As a cost accountant and chartered shipbroker, he has also offered his expertise to law enforcement agencies in India and abroad. He decided to set up the India Pride Project in 2013 because at that point he and his team felt that this needed to be a collective effort by the society.
The Project aims at “creating databases of published works, collecting past sale catalogues, and seeking and verifying citizen reportage for thefts,” he says. While the progress on restitutions on such objects from India has been slow, it has increased from 19 such returns between 1970 to 2000 to over 300 since 2013. Not even a single object was recovered between the years of 2000 to 2012, he informs. But what happens once they are indeed back home?
“The transfers are handled between the Ministry of External Affairs, Ministry of Culture, and the Archaeological Survey of India,” he informs. If the recovered artefacts, such as idols of deities, are tracked to their original temple sites, “our push is to return them to their original abodes,” he says. But in cases where their origins cannot be ascertained, the objects are sent to Delhi’s Purana Qila Museumwhich is a first of its kind home for lost antiques of India. It houses objects that are recovered not just from abroad but within India as well.
Originally from Tamil Nadu’s Chennai, Sundaresan is particularly passionate about idols from the Chola and Pallava dynasties but also makes it clear that the Project is about recovering India’s heritage in general. “We do not necessarily focus on Hindu icons — we have brought back Jain, Buddhist, Christian, Islamic, Indus and Harappan artefacts,” he says. “All these are a part of India’s history that have been crudely removed sometimes via illegal excavations wherein their context has been erased, making historically significant objects just showpiece dolls.” He points out that these artefacts were created for worship and not as art in most cases and denigrating them by placing them as garden or swimming pool furniture is a crime in and of itself. “We want to be a deterrent that will stop the demand side pull, i.e., dollar driven greed that is impoverishing the cultural wealth of India.”
Even though such lootings may have started as colonial plunder, they have snowballed into investment and tax evasion schemes. Today, many artefacts from the Global South are also housed in museums of Europe and United States where they are put on display in glass boxes, shorn of their original context for the casual onlooker. Simultaneously, these lootings have prevented many countries, India and those in Africa in particular, from realising a more wholesome picture of their cultural histories.
Understanding Hindu Aesthetics
In 2020, a twenty-something set up a Twitter and Instagram account which now have over 30,000 followers in total. The content? Hindu art. But why Hindu and not Indian? While the person behind hindu aesthetic wants to maintain anonymity, the individual is a passionate and religious Hindu with love for art, aesthetics, theology, and philosophy. In explaining its namesake, hindu aesthetic feels that it was because of the secularisation of the art — where iconography, themes, subjects, and technical details may be derived directly from Hindu scriptures but which are minimised and downplayed — in order to experience art in a Western sense. The idea behind hindu aesthetic, then, is to experience Hindu art as it was intended, i.e., elevation of mind and ātma for a more philosophical consideration of it.
For instance, a post about the Ardhanārīśvara form of Shiva and Parvati on Instagram is done in three parts where one can not only see various versions of the deity in painting and sculpture but also read about the story behind it as mentioned in the Puranic literature. The same concept is elucidated even more in its Medium publication with more artwork. So, through the post, we learn about the plays where the ace Indian playwright Kalidasa wrote about this godly manifestation — Kumarasambhava and Raghuvamsa — along with the relevant verses. The post continues, “Kalidasa refers to them as ‘jagatah pitarau’ or the parents of the universe, as Parvati and Paramesvara are said to be the primordial prakriti and purusa, unite to cause the existence of the entire cosmos. The post, like all others, is replete with references for all the visual and textual references used, which can be helpful for anyone wanting to explore further or verify the details.
While hindu aesthetic’s own field in daily life is far removed from art and Hinduism, the sheer passion behind the initiative still shines through. The breath of artwork and perspective posted across its social media accounts is, in fact, unparalleled for an average Indian social media user. While most Indians may not be bothered to visit a museum or a national gallery, they will readily ‘follow’ accounts such as that of hindu aesthetic to learn more about their culture and history. Social media, then, has not only changed the way we communicate but how we fundamentally experience life and its various aspects. And that is something hindu aesthetic understands and makes use of.
“I try and pull from religious studies, archaeology, art history — often making my posts multi-disciplinary,” hindu aesthetic shares over an email interview, “this sort of thing is extremely unique and isn’t offered by academia or researchers that tend to focus on a single subject of their expertise”. Because the content is focused at an average social media consumer who is interested in Hinduism and art, hindu aesthetic says the idea is not burden with details. “I set out to produce content that I would have liked to consume, and since no one else was filling the gap in Hindu art and appreciation, I created my own”, hindu aesthetic adds.
Where we tend to spend a minute or sometimes even less on a social media post, the creators have to spend a lot more on it. “Posts take me upwards of a week to look up material for research and writing, including tracking down books, papers, and art. This can be extremely demanding when attempting to balance with life,” the hindu aesthetic creator adds. Buoyed by the feedback and engagement from the ‘followers’, the creator wants to eventually set up a website and branch out into a YouTube channel with video essays.
The appeal of hindu aesthetic perhaps also lies in its accessibility where the audience is not being lectured to but can interact like a friend. That is not only an indictment of the conventional ways of how we have learnt history and culture but also makes one wonder about the essence of history and culture themselves? Are they solely the domain of the expert and the professional or are they something that a society experiences collectively?
In his book The Practice of History (1967), British historian G.R. Elton, discussed the need for the work of both the professional and the amateur historians. Where he felt that the professional strove for truth, even resorting to pettiness and pedantry in process, the latter was good at delighting our senses because the amateur historian was driven by love of uncovering a particular thread or narrative. The former lived his or her subject of expertise, the latter had an instinct for it. In the end, however, both of them needed each other in order to be able to judge evidence, construct an argument or narrative, and write.
Today, when Indians find themselves wanting for ‘real’ histories in order to understand their Indianness in all its forms, it is worth noting that there might be no absolute and hard answers but only approximations and differing vantage points. The work of likes of Yadav, Sundaresan, and hindu aesthetic also reminds us how much of what it means to be an Indian, in an historical and cultural sense, remains to be uncovered, discovered, and understood. After all, isn’t it how a puzzle works?
