Leaving Behind the Stardust: Inder Salim and a life sacrificed to art
Inder Salim. Photo: Harsh Kumar
Performance artist Inder Salim has explored the profane, the political, and the poetic. Working closely with him, Abhimanyu Kumar explores the method behind Salim’s ground-breaking work, where the mundane becomes magical, imperfections are embraced, taboos are broken, and the audience shares in the transcendence of the artist.
The first day of our shoot. We have decided to start at Malcha Mahal, a medieval hunting lodge; although the description ‘hunting lodge’ does not do justice to its strange and hauntingly beautiful architecture and setting. It is made entirely of stone, with a plinth underneath raising the structure high above the ground; thick columns bear the weight of the roof overgrown with vegetation, making it almost one with the forest below and all around it. From the roof, one gets an utterly stunning view of New Delhi’s skyline with all the buildings of importance like the Parliament House, Rashtrapati Bhawan and others.
All the rooms—five in total—have arched entranceways, with separate openings into the forest; some of these openings have broken-down ornate grills barring them, but they hang loose from the hinges, rusted and pretty much useless as any kind of defence against nature or intruders. The relatively low ceilings give the place the feel of a dungeon. Sunlight doesn’t reach the large hall in the centre of the building; the hall is flanked by smaller chambers on three sides. Bats hang from the ceiling and the floor is full of their faeces. Occasionally a bat flies across one of the rooms, making a chilling ululating sound, which echoes through the entire structure. Narrow spiralling stairways lead to the roof from every room. Two of these stairwells are right at the entrance, wider and more conspicuous due to their location, full of spiderwebs and bats hanging from their nooks and crannies, and vegetation growing out of their cracks. The bats protest if you use the stairs.
The effect, in essence, is surreal. We have worked here before. The last time was for a workshop organised by the performance art collective In_Process, where Inder Salim and the other performance artists stood on the wide roof of the Mahal at the end of the workshop, facing the Indian Parliament, and dropped their clothes. Salim made sure to turn his naked buttocks in the direction of the symbols of the might of the Indian State which had just decided to abrogate Article 370, merging Kashmir into the Indian Union (on August 5, 2019). He is party to a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) in the Supreme Court, challenging the Union government’s decision. His performance there included writing Kashmir Ghost with charcoal on one of the walls of the monument.
In August this year, one year after the abrogation of Article 370, I started to work on a series of eleven videos with Inder Salim, commissioned by the Dubai-based Ishara Art Foundation. Salim is one of India’s greatest living artists, who has practiced conceptual and performance art around the country for over nearly 30 years. His work has been an anti-thesis of mainstream artistic practices, imposing a layer of mystique upon him.
The videos feature Salim’s poetry—most with the Kashmir as their core subject—compiled which have been compiled in a newly published book and form a part of the ‘Every Soiled Page’ exhibition. Featuring other artists such as Anju Dodiya, Astha Butail, and Neha Choksi, the exhibition explores themes of Resistance and Memory. The videos are currently being screened on the Ishara Art Foundation’s website.
*
We are at Jantar Mantar, looking for the protest we believe is supposed to take place to protest the abrogation of Article 370. Salim has come dressed in a black pheran, with holes all over it. In his hands, he holds a flag. It is a digital print of Van Gogh’s famous painting Starry Night, which to Salim is a metaphor of freedom, as the painting was made during the painter’s stay at an asylum. The word ‘Azadi’ is written underneath.
We realise the protest has already taken place a day before. But Salim performs anyway, undeterred. As a musician friend accompanying us plays and sings protest songs, Salim waves the flag and dances to the music. A bunch of random onlookers become the bemused audience of this solitary protest.
Photo: Harsh Kumar
*
It is in August 2020, a year after the abrogation of Article 370, when we begin the shoot at Malcha Mahal. Salim recites the poem “Azadi Parcham”, wears the same pheran, and carries the Azadi flag with him.
A lot has happened since: the NRC-CAA protests, the Northeast Delhi riots, and COVID-19. This time last year, only Kashmir was under a lockdown; now, it’s the whole country—albeit for entirely different reason. This time last year, only Kashmir was shouting for ‘Azadi!’; since then, many more Indians adopted the slogan in the NRC-CAA protests. The shadow of Kashmir has begun to loom large on the Indian society and collective psyche since the ruling BJP came to power.
In a sense, the spectre of Kashmir—to borrow of a turn of phrase from Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels—has been haunting India over the past few years, the most since the start of the Insurgency in early 90s.
“Azadi Parcham” is ideal to start the shoot, because it presents Salim’s views on both art and politics in a distilled way. Salim reads it on the roof, the paper with the poem on it in one hand, and in the second, the actual Azadi parcham (flag). It is a long poem, and its themes run through Salim’s life and work, his art—particularly modern art—philosophy, the history and politics of Kashmir, Partition, the Independence movement, which is also tied irrevocably with the destiny of Kashmir and Marxism.
Art is a game played by all the periods of all the times - Duchamp
Through the iron-barred window…I watch the sunrise in full glory- Van Gogh.
Art provides the synthesis of philosophical structures – Deleuze
This Azadi Parcham, literally a digital print
of Van Gogh’s Starry Night in my hand.
Again, I dreamt myself in Kashmir, with nothing on my balls.
Comrades, I have nothing logical to offer now.
Writing from a Political Pagal-Khana
Of our times, I see inmates playing chess.
After checkmate of King Chak,
You hurriedly rushed out from lovemaking act to
return back to the war zone,
Then you were Akbar the great.
Now, who are you?
…
First time,
I was set free by the very turning of pages of
Art books in Kashmir.
What is the ultimate purpose of life?
One ultimately joins the distant starry world.
No?
Colour is the winged machine with a generator.
I am on the accelerator.
Unfurling the Starry Night
Leaving behind the stardust.”
…
“First time,
I was set free by the very turning of pages of
Art books in Kashmir.”
Comrades, I have nothing logical to offer now.
Writing from a Political Pagal-Khana
Of our times, I see inmates playing chess.
*
Day two of the shoot. A week after Malcha Mahal. Today, we shoot at Lothian cemetery, one of the oldest in North India, and the oldest in Delhi. Many of the graves are of children of Britishers living in Delhi in early to middle of the nineteenth century. English officers who died in the Mutiny of 1857 are also buried here.
We want to shoot Salim reading a poem called “Radio Bombur”, which is about his childhood in Kashmir. The poem describes a childhood prank in which him and his schoolmates would catch a blue-bee, called Bombur in Kashmiri, put it inside a match-box, and pretend they were listening to the radio when it made buzzing sounds from inside. The schoolboys cross a cemetery on their way to school—so there is a link between the location we have chosen and the poem.
Salim carries a massive, white banner with him, over which the following words are inscribed in black in large letters: Wait, I Am Coming! It could be the excited cry of a schoolboy calling out to his friends. Or it could be something else altogether. Salim does not explain. He likes to invoke the Derridean concept of Differance when quizzed about the meaning of his performances and interventions. A concept developed by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the 60’s to explain his larger idea of Deconstruction, it signifies a ‘postponment of meaning’—as Salim puts it.
He sits on a grave and lets Rajni—a young artist helping with the shoot—apply the make-up. She dabs white paint on his face as he chats up two young local boys who have walked in, curious about us. Over the white paint, Rajni writes, as Salim instructs her to do: God Gave Me a Straight Line. It is a paradoxical statement since Salim once told me there are no straight lines in nature. Fond of philosophy, he has a natural predilection for paradoxes.
After the performance at the cemetery, we walk down to Kashmiri Gate, constructed by Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, It is Independence Day and the streets are more or less empty. The gate is said to face Kashmir and used to be the starting point for travellers going in its direction. Salim is wearing the same black pheran, with his face painted. He cuts a striking figure. Heads turn as he walks down. On our way, Salim tries to recruit four young men—who look like manual labourers enjoying their holiday—and asks them to walk with him. They seem intrigued by his offer but turn it down. Salim shrugs it off and walks towards the memorial which was a site of battle in the Mutiny of 1857.
A guard in-charge stands by the memorial with his dog, who begins to bark as soon as he sees Salim. The dog continues to bark as we walk inside, and, finally unnerved by his relentless hostility, we decide to shoot outside the memorial. But the unhinged barking—from an animal known to sense the supernatural—tells me that the Ghost is really and truly alive. To use another formulation from Derrida, the Absent has been made Present.
*
Salim is a Pandit from the valley, with the original surname of Tickoo. He left Kashmir with his ailing mother in the early 90s and has been living in Delhi since then. “My mother always wanted to go back, but she could not do so before her death. She would look outside the window in this room and reminisce about Kashmir.”
The window opens up to a view of greenery, and I can imagine why it made his mother wistful. I feel it, too. I’m at Salim’s 2BHK flat in Shahdara—where he lives with his wife—to interview him on his decision to be party to the PIL in the Supreme Court. Salim speaks of the past instead, of how matters went haywire in Kashmir with the exodus of Pandits from 1989 onwards. “The speed of time was multiplying on a daily basis those days. The administration collapsed. People did not know what was happening five kilometers away from their house in the absence of media or phones like we have today. At Lal Chowk [in Srinagar], a crowd came and set a bank ablaze. No one turned up to do anything about it.”
“Anyone could have killed anybody.”
The shock in Salim’s voice is still fresh as he tells me this story. For Salim, more than difference, the communities of Hindus and Muslims in Kashmir are more marked by their similarities. “The devotional songs are the same, the wedding ceremonies are the same, even the language (Kashmiri) is the same. Even during Partition, terrible bloodshed like elsewhere did not take place here.”
But he admits that the ‘connection’ is now lost. Despite his misgivings about what happened to him and his community three decades ago, Salim believes the Central government was wrong to abrogate Article 370. The Article had given special status to Jammu and Kashmir, conferring it with the power to have a separate constitution, state flag, and autonomy over its internal administration. “It is stipulated clearly in the Constitution that it could not be done without the assent of Kashmir’s Constituent Assembly.”
I ask if he will ever return.
“People did not know what was happening five kilometers away from their house in the absence of media or phones like we have today. At Lal Chowk, a crowd came and set a bank ablaze. No one turned up to do anything about it. Anyone could have killed anybody.”
“Not because the BJP wants us [Kashmiri Pandits] to go back,” he says. “My children would call me mad. To make the return of the Pandits possible, the government of India needs to create a system of incentives, like interest-free loans, jobs, shops, or land…”
Regardless of the politics, he feels the ‘Kashmiri Muslim’ is “the most tragic figure in the entire story, entire sub-continent.” After the Centre revoked Article 370, Salim performed Manto’s story Tetwal ka Kutta at Constitution Club, at a meeting organised to protest the Centre’s move. “[Tetwal ka Kutta] is a story about a dog who ends up in a No-Man’s Land between India and Pakistan, with armies stationed on both sides. The dog is taken to be an agent of the enemy by both sides when he was just looking for some food. In the end, they shoot him down.”
For Salim, the story is a metaphor for the time we are living in. “The dog does not want to die but we make a martyr out of it. That is what hostile armies actually do.”
*
The next day, we have planned to continue our shoot in Nizamuddin, so we spend the night at my place, which is in the same locality. Salim wants to cook mutton Rogan Josh, but we can’t find any mutton. In an alley in Nizamuddin, we find some beef.
Cooking later at night, with his upper torso bare in the hot kitchen, Salim tells me his figure is that of a person from the mountains, like that of his biological mother. “She had a longer torso and smaller legs like I do,” he says. In the pot, the beef simmers. He throws in some saunf in the mix, the ingredient that he says makes the dish what it is. That, and lots of tomatoes.
After checkmate of King Chak,
You hurriedly rushed out from lovemaking act to
return back to the war zone,
Then you were Akbar the great.
Now, who are you?
*
Photo: Abhimanyu Singh
Salim was adopted as a child. His mother had a child of her own before she adopted him, but the first child died in infancy. Born in Tral, Salim grew up in Bijbehara, both in South Kasmhir, the hub of present-day militancy. It was a childhood of want, lacking in modern amenities and goods. “In the entire village, there was only one shop where sliced bread was stocked. We called it the English bread and it was recommended to patients with fever by the doctor to be eaten during their convalescence.”
We are at his home, where he has two flats in a housing complex in an area where other Pandit families also live. They are all refugees, who came after the exodus in early 90’s to Delhi. “Kashmiri bread culture is very rich. In this area, there are two Pandit bakers,” he continues. “There are at least a thousand or two thousand houses here of Pandits.”
We are discussing breakfast and how integral (or not) it is to different communities in India. “In Kashmir, we eat different types of bread in the morning and evening. In the morning no one will have Katlam, and in the evening, at 4 PM when we have it with tea, no one will touch Lavas.”
He says that Kashmir’s cultural sophistication triggers from the region’s affinity to Persian civilisation and Central Asia. “For example, Wazwan [a multi-course meal consisting of mainly meat dishes] came from there,” he says. “So did the musical instrument Rubab. That influence is very strong in Kashmir.”
It was Salim’s adoptive mother who looms large over the memories he has of his childhood. In his studio in Delhi, he has two paintings in which he pays a tribute to her. In one, he uses her dentures. The other painting depicts the pan and the stove on which she boiled milk. “Sometimes the milk would spill over and collect in a puddle under the stove while some of it would fall around it.” He fixed a pan over the canvas and used a white cloth attached to it to show the rise and fall of the milk.
His father ran a grocery store but it did not do much business. After the death of his infant son, he slipped into depression, says Salim and never came out. “He was a gentle soul,” Salim says of his father. Her mother managed the household doing odd jobs and taking loans from her family.
Salim writes in Kashmiri, a line from one of his poems, “Be Ches Ne Vyeth” over and again, scribbling over the entire floor. He sings the poem, and swirls to its rhythm as he recites it, almost tripping over his pheran at one point, regains his balance, then swirls again, singing to a melody of his own.
Growing up with an absentee father and harried mother, Salim took to drugs like opium and hashish in the company of friends. He also faced sexual abuse at school. “It was rampant,” he says. “and even some teachers encouraged it and did it themselves.” His connection to colours, he says, is what saved him. “They always affected me in a direct, sensorial way. They had a healing effect over me.”
*
Day three of the shoot. The poem we shoot today is about his mother, and her love for a local Kashmiri delicacy, a kind of vegetable called haaq. The poem begins with a reference—without explicitly calling it so—with the death of Kashmiri militant Burhan Wani, who belonged to Tral like Salim.
We shoot at the tomb of Mirza Ghalib in Nizamuddin. Salim reads the poem, sitting on the raised plinth surrounding the tomb of Delhi’s favourite bard, his head covered in a veil. The veil is another tribute to his mother.
Later, we shoot at another monument in the locality and in its narrow by-lanes; Salim reads another poem called “He-She”, about a three-way abusive relationship between a woman and her two suitors, one Hindu and one Muslim—a thinly veiled allegory for Kashmir. Children trail him as he walks. A local takes him for a fakir and seeks his blessings.
We also want to shoot at the former site of CAA-NRC protests in Nizamuddin. The graffiti on the wall of the flyover which faced the site has been whitewashed by cops but the scribblings can still be made out. ‘These walls are more truthful than the newspaper’, says one of them. Behind the site goes a small alley from inside the colony, adjoining the park where there is more anti-CAA/NRC graffiti, which has been retained. We want to shoot there but we spot some policemen guarding it, as part of the heightened security measures due to Independence Day celebrations. We decide to try it some other time.
*
Day four. Yamuna bank. A week later.
Photo: Abhimanyu Kumar
We meet near Wazirabad bus stop to get to the river. Rajni is waiting for us. She has reached early today. The August sun is still strong.
The bus stop is right in front of a monument in red sandstone, with domes and arches, in the Mughal style. Rajni says the locals believe it to be connected to the Red Fort via a tunnel, built by the royals perhaps for escape during a siege—or to just take a bath.
We enter by climbing up the walls. Harsh, a young Fine Arts student helping with the shoot, gives me a hand. The monument is divided in two, with identical domed structures on two sides, and a round structure with a canopy-like roof in the middle. Inside one of the domed structures, we find sacks full of limestone, left perhaps by masons who repaired it the last time. Using it, Salim writes in Kashmiri a poem in his mother tongue called “Be Ches Ne Vyeth”—I Am Not River Jhelum (Vyeth)—scribbling over the entire floor. He sings the poem, and swirls to its rhythm as he recites it, almost tripping over his pheran at one point, regains his balance, then swirls again, singing to a melody of his own.
After shooting at the monument, we drive down to the river, through the narrow roads of a colony. On our way, Salim spots a mirror—the kind used in dressing-tables in households, large and rectangular—lying on the streets in a pile of garbage. He asks me to stop as he wants to pick it up. From close, the mirror looks cracked which is why it has been discarded. Salim wants it for the performance so we pick it up and carry it in the car all the way to the river.
Yesterday was Ganesh Chaturthi, so today is the day of the immersion of Ganesha idols into the river. But there is hardly a crowd at the bank. The area is littered with waste. Salim wants to walk all the way to the water, which is around hundred meters from the start of the clearing, carrying the mirror. He is also carrying a big, thick roll of brown paper, on which we paste newspaper clippings from last few months about Kashmir. The news spiked in August, since the one-year anniversary of the move to scrap Article 370 fell on the 5th of the month. The government released some political leaders of Kashmir, most-significantly Farooq Abdullah, the chairperson of the National Conference.
Wearing the pheran, Salim ties the mirror around him using chunks of cloth. It is too heavy so he has to still hold it from underneath with both hands for it to be remain stable. He wears a crown made of cardboard on his head. Before he starts walking, he pours black ink on his legs which drips down to his feet; they leave marks as he walks down. The sparse crowd of Ganesh Chaturthi revellers and locals look on.
As he walks, holding the huge mirror on his back, his face reflecting the pain its weight and edges cause him, with black ink dripping from his legs on to the paper (tied down with great effort as the wind is strong) over muddy ground and sand, he appears to be some kind of Christ, on his way to the crucifixion.
This Azadi Parcham, literally a digital print
of Van Gogh’s Starry Night in my hand.
Again, I dreamt myself in Kashmir, with nothing on my balls.
Comrades, I have nothing logical to offer now.
Writing from a Political Pagal-Khana
Of our times, I see inmates playing chess.
*
Inder Salim is certainly not Inder Tickoo anymore. As he told Tehelka in 2012, he did not even remember the family name of his past. “I’ve forgotten what my original name was. What does it matter?” The piece, “Can’t Put a Finger on It”, is titled in way that expresses the beguilement of the author. From my interactions with Salim for the last couple of years or so, it is safe to say he does not seem to want anyone to locate his ‘actual’ self. It is unlikely he will acknowledge anything such as an ‘actual’ self exists. These days, he is fond of citing a dictum from French philosopher Gilles Deleuze: Lose your face. To Salim, there is no such thing as a self, because it is after all a construction and to reach it, you will have to—following Deleuze—lose it. (“Lose your face: become capable of loving without remembering, without phantasm and without interpretation, without taking stock. Let there just be fluxes, which sometimes dry up, freeze or overflow, which sometimes combine or diverge.”)
Salim has his mundane identities that he has worn for years. He was an official in a bank; he served in both Connaught Place branch as well as in Shahdara, closer to where he lives. The steady job helped him run a family with two children, a son and a daughter. His daughter works in a museum and got married earlier this year, finally leaving home. He now lives alone with his wife, although the Lockdown brought their son back home after he lost his job in Bengaluru. “We manage on the pension I get,” Salim says about his financial situation.
I am intrigued by the tea in their household—it smells so different and refreshing from the usual chai available in Delhi. I ask Salim’s wife—Sudesh—of her secret ingredient. “Dalchini,” she says, cheerfully. “A favourite Kashmiri spice.”
Salim married early into his life. Sudesh is from Jammu and grew up with more amenities. “Being from a city, she thinks herself more sophisticated than me who grew up in a village,” he jokes.
Sudesh jokes in turn when I ask her what does she think of her husband, the artist. She chuckles: “Artist! He must have kept the studio upstairs so dirty, isn’t it? I rarely visit it,”
In the Tehelka piece cited above, he said he was a ‘failed painter.’ He gives several reasons for quitting: he could not find the money for canvases and colours. His studio is full of his paintings, mostly self-portraits, a reminder of his attraction to Van Gogh. (Like the Dutch master who famously cut off his own ear, Salim famously chopped off his finger and threw it into the Yamuna).
He dabbled in poetry too, when he first came to Delhi and started living here in early 90s. He caught the eye of late art critic Keshav Malik—another poet from Kashmir—who published his work in an anthology. It was a poem Salim had written on a painting of Malik exhibited at a gallery. It was his meeting with Shantanu Lodh that made him take a serious turn towards performance art. Lodh was an early pioneer of performance art in India, and his wife Manmeet Devgan continues to a well-known performance artist today.
Since the late 90s, Salim has performed regularly in big cities in India and abroad, including in UK, Japan, France and Kashmir, along with numerous other Indian smaller towns. In 2010, he spent many months on the road, taking a performance art festival he organised called Art Karavan to several Indian cities. He has also received prestigious grants for continuing his work, including one from the India Foundation for Arts based in Bangalore. He is a hero of many younger performance artists, a subject of many profiles and features in national journals over the years.
And yet, for most who are dazzled by the man and his work, his persona remains an enigma; and his method a mystery.
Salim calls the phenomenon the “Beating Stick of Meaning” or in the original phrase that he uses in Hindi, “Meaning Ka Danda”. “It is the ego of the people which makes them pose such questions. They expect to know and understand everything. But do human beings really understand all that they see and experience?”
*
In 1999, Salim travelled to Dusseldorf in Germany, his first trip abroad as an artist. The trip had potential for disaster: the curator who had invited him to Germany ditched Salim, and did not pay for his tickets or make proper arrangements for his stay. Salim was also a ‘greenhorn’ in those days, in his own words and was overwhelmed by the complex procedural formalities of foreign travel.
Salim credits a chance meeting with a friend of Joseph Beuys, an elderly Jewish property dealer and art promoter, who rescued him. Beuys’ friend allowed Salim to stay without cost at one of his apartments. He was fond of the arts and liked to use his wealth to patronise artists, including many musicians. “There would be a party every evening, with drinks and soft drugs on the house and musicians playing a variety of instruments,” Salim says. It was a defining experience for him, to experience this bohemian setting and style of living.
Joseph Beuys was an avant-garde German performance artist, and sculptor who became famous for his completely original take on art in the post-WW II years in Europe. He served in the second world war as a fighter pilot in the German army. Towards the end of the War, his plane crashed in the mountains, but he survived. He would later say that he was saved by members of the Tartar community, who wrapped him up in felt and covered his body with fat to rescue him from dying from extreme cold. This story is perhaps apocryphal, a part of Beuys’ myth-making tendencies but has become established as a kind of understanding of the reason behind his prolific use of the materials like felt and fat in his work over the years.
Some of Beuys’ performances have become legendary. Principle among them are the one titled How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, and I Like America and America Likes Me. In the first, Beuys performed with a dead rabbit, whereas in the second, he stayed in an art gallery in America in a room with a coyote. Explaining his first performance, Beuys noted that the rabbit was an “extension” of man, if the earth and all its beings were to be considered in their totality and he was trying to draw the attention of the audience to ecological destruction through the performance. In the second, he presented a critique of the American civilisational values, substituting the Native American population with a coyote, a spirit animal for the Natives. According to Beuys, for the settler Americans, the coyote, like the Native American population, was an adversary, a form of vermin, whom they had to exterminate to establish their own civilisational ethos. Beuys environment-related activism ultimately led him to establish the Green Party, which is now a mainstream political party in Germany.
Salim notes that the Beuys tried to use rituals and their primordial energy or ‘echo’ as a healing force for contemporary society and its traumas. This insight also tallies with how Salim views his own work and expects it to be received. Beuys’ had an insistence on the “meaning” of his work existing independently from the rational, thinking function of the mind expressed in “logical” sentences, in a theoretical, intellectual way.
Salim’s followers and friends on social media often ask him to explain the meaning of his performances while acknowledging the striking nature of the imagery he shares. This annoys Salim, like it used to annoy Beuys. He calls the phenomenon the “Beating Stick of Meaning” or in the original phrase that he uses in Hindi, “Meaning Ka Danda”. “It is the ego of the people which makes them pose such questions. They expect to know and understand everything. But do human beings really understand all that they see and experience?”
The implicit violence in the work of Beuys—the dead hare, the wild coyote—also resonates with the artistic practice Salim has created over last two to three decades of his life. And this violence can take many forms. It can be violence against oneself, like stitching his penis to his navel via a surgical procedure for a performance in early 2000s at a poetry reading in Delhi. The violence can also be metaphorical, as the time he urinated on a friend’s painting—depicting the landscape of Kashmir—at Devi Art Foundation in Delhi. The friend was initially stunned, but later preserved the painting with the dried-up urine spots on it.
Photo: Harsh Kumar
In 2002, the year of the Gujarat riots and a few years after he returned from Germany, Salim performed by the Yamuna. The performance would become much talked about in the years to come and it would set the tone for the rest of his career and practice as a performance artist. It consisted of him chopping one of his pinkies off at the Yamuna bank. Perhaps the experience in Germany where he learnt about the work of Joesph Beuys inspired him to do it.
The river was a former lifeline of Delhi; it’s “dirty” and “dead” status used to bother him. In 2009, he wrote about the performance in Open Magazine.
One hot April morning, I chopped off the little finger of my left hand and threw it into the dead river called Yamuna. They call me crazy. But I call it art.
…
One evening while returning home, it struck me that an element of my being falls into the dead river every time I cross it. I believe this is universal—every human being has that element. I decided to create a bridge, a small metaphysical bridge, to connect my being with the river. On a hot Sunday morning in 2002, I went to the Yamuna with some of my close friends. Like an engineer going to make a bridge, I had with me a surgical knife, a bottle of Betadine, some bandage, cotton, a drawing board, video and still cameras. I amputated the little finger of my left hand and threw it into the Yamuna, building a bridge between myself and the dead river. I titled the performance Dialogue With Power Plant, Shrill Across A Dead River.
Today, he regrets taking the surgical knife as he has since learnt there is a separate instrument for cutting fingers that can also cut through the bones cleanly. The performance got so grisly that some friends ran away as they “could not take it.”
In the years that followed, Salim started to work with Khoj Art Gallery, Sarai, and Devi Art Foundation, performing regularly, all the while counting currency notes at his job at the bank. He feels some regret over that too, as the job took away the best years of his productive capacities as an artist. But it brought him a steady income and helped him run the household.
There was no money in performance art.
This violence can take many forms. It can be violence against oneself, like stitching his penis to his navel via a surgical procedure for a performance in early 2000s at a poetry reading in Delhi. The violence can also be metaphorical, as the time he urinated on a friend’s painting—depicting the landscape of Kashmir—at Devi Art Foundation.
*
What makes a performance? Traditionally, we can call many things a performance; anything that involves aspects/categories of rituals (secular/sacred) and a certain degree of entertainment accompanying it—can be called a performance (The understanding here is drawn from Richard Schechner’s theories as explained in his work Performative Circumstances From the Avant Garde to Ramlila).
The ritual to become ‘art’, or claim the status of performance, must be divested from its original context and presented in another. For example, we brush our teeth every day in the morning in our homes, but if someone were to do it on a busy intersection of a street, it would perhaps acquire the contours of a performance.
Generally, a performance is granted the status of the non-ordinary—through the use of costumes, and props, or due to the fact that it takes place on special occasions, especially in a communal or religious setting. At the same time, it is also behaviour which is practised, or restored due to the rehearsals that precede it.
While some of this applies to performance art, some doesn’t. As a relatively new formalised practice, one that originated with any degree of self-consciousness in the 20th century—generally traced to the Dadaists active around 1920s—it modifies or defies all these aspects mentioned above, although they would suit most modes of theatre: practised behaviour, non-ordinary status due to time and space factors, and one that tends to contain the aspects of Efficacy—associated with rituals (scared/secular)—and entertainment, with emphasis on the latter.
However, performance art is not theatre, nor is it akin to dance performances, or any other performing arts, like live music. Performance art does not necessarily aim at entertaining the audience. Here, the ritualistic aspect dominates; the efficacy of the performative ritual lies in transmitting the message underlying it. In performance art, the actions are spontaneous; hence, it does not consist of restored behaviour or speech. And it is not held on any special occasion but can take place anytime, without anything such as a stage distinguishing active performers and passive audience. In performance art, the audience often becomes a participant, like in some performances by the famous Serbian artist Marina Abramovic.
Nevertheless, in its pure essence, the performative element remains similar in what is understood to be performance art as well as the performing arts. This performative element can be understood as the one which lies in the liminal space of acting and being, Me and Not Me. All performances inhabit this space where the performer is Not his or her ‘real’ or everyday self, but is playing at some kind of alternate Self. And yet, he or she is also Not Not the projected or performed self. So, one could say an actor playing Oedipus is certainly Not Oedipus, but is also Not Not Oedipus. Similarly, the performance artist may adopt a persona which would lie between this space of Not Me and Not Not Me.
“For instance, capitalist production is hostile to certain branches of spiritual production, for example, art and poetry.” Marx and Engels, Theories of Surplus Value, Part I.
The core of Performance Art is political. In its essence, it represents a move by artists to make art directly for the people, using what is most-commonly available—the body. The body can be understood in today’s context as the last autonomous site, which resists the diktats of creeping totalitarianism and surveillance all around us. The body has always been the possession most intrinsic to the individual self, which from the time of Plato onwards has been coveted by the State apparatus as the final frontier of total domination; once the body and its reproductive, sexual and dietary functions can be controlled, the totalitarian regime assumes perfection. In the advanced capitalist age in which we live, the refusal of performance art to become commodified via exhibition in galleries and sale at auctions, is also a form of political intent.
The two most well-known movements that are associated with performance art are also traced to the periods following the two world wars of last century: The Dadaists, active in the 1920s, and the Fluxus, and Happening movements of the 60s—the first two in Europe and the third in America. This goes to show that cataclysmic socio-political changes have been umbilically connected with its practice.
In our age, two of the defining political trends of our age are rising Islamophobia and authoritarianism, both of which can be traced to the USA’s ‘War on Terror’ which started after the 9/11 attacks. If seen through a wider lens, these developments denote a reduction in faith in liberal democracy as the panacea of all socio-political ills. For someone like Slavoj Zizek, trends like Islamophobia are nothing but the manifestation of a crisis in the ideological system which undergirds liberal democracy. World over, we also see authoritarian leaders taking centre-stage. In these major socio-political developments, the role of performance art has become more defined and prominent. Social commentators and philosophers like Judith Butler for example have noted the power of resistance that lie implicit in performance art or performative actions.
The origins of performance art in Asia can be traced to China and Japan. Although Asian artists like Yoko Ono for example, among a few others, had connections to Western movements like Happening and Fluxus, the form took time before coming into its own. In 1986, the Performance Art collective Concept 21 was formed in China by five university students from Beijing. They performed at the Great Wall of China, among other places and were motivated by socio-political issues, and redressal of historic wrongs. In Japan groups like Zero Zigen were already active, especially in the 60s and 70s. Several performance art groups had already come up in the 60s, but Jigen attracted notice due to its emphasis on nudity and sexual openness; it also helped that their performances were often captured on camera and films were made of their ritualistic acts. In South Korea too, performance art had arrived earlier than rest of Asia, around the time it did in Japan.
However, the 90s are generally considered to be the period in which performance art came of age in Asia. In 1993, Seiji Shimoda who was already active as a Performance artist in Japan, organized the Nippon Performance Art Festival, the first such festival in the continent. In China, the Open Performance Art Festival was held in 2001. It faced surveillance right from its inception, with police detaining artists. Now, it is held at a secret venue in Beijing every year.
The developments in China and Japan influenced artists elsewhere in Asia and countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan, among others, have all produced performance artists with a varied body of work, often making comments on the socio-political issues, past as well as present, affecting their countries.
In South Asia, performance art started to develop into an artistic practice of note in the 90s. The initial efforts were made individually and were sporadic; it took till 2004 for a formal network to be established called South Asian Network for the Arts (SANA), comprising Khoj from India, Vasl, a collective of Performance Artists from Pakistan, Britto, from Bangladesh, Teertha, from Sri Lanka and Suthra from Nepal. This can be considered the first phase of organised collaboration and development of performance art in this region.
“When I chopped off my finger the first time… It takes a cutter to cut it, not a knife… I was using a blade; it broke off. So, I had to change blades. It took me three-four blades to do it. But who will take you out of it? You are there and no one else will do it. It is not something you can just cancel. You have to do it. It is risky. It is like a love-affair, an obsession.”
While the activities and art of these early exponents of performance art collectives in South Asia has been documented, a new crop of artists and collectives are now doing valuable work in the field. Some of them are Kolkata International Performance Art Festival, from India, House from Pakistan, Background Art Collective in Bangladesh, Bindu in Nepal and others.
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Day 7 of the shoot. It is October already. We are at my place in the evening after shooting earlier at Mehrauli Archaeological Complex, where Salim is talking of his performance concerning Double Burials in Japan in 2010. He links it to a Japanese myth involving a king and the entry of the written word and language displacing the oral traditions of the country.
“While I was performing, I had put a white substance over my head. It started to melt and entered my eyes right when I was talking of the King being unable to see (in the mythical tale). Everything became blurred around me. It happens sometimes in performance,” he says. “Like when I chopped off my finger the first time. It takes a cutter to cut it, not a knife. Manish ran off. But Kaushal who was shooting stayed. I was trying to cut it but it won’t come off. I was using a blade; it broke off. So, I had to change blades. It took me three-four blades to do it. But who will take you out of it? You are there and no one else will do it. It is not something you can just cancel. You have to do it. It is risky. It is like a love-affair, an obsession. It is not discarded off easily. It stays on…”
He talks of the old Kashmiri practice of Double Burials, also common to Japan. “I believe Japanese characters look big because of Double Burials. They imitate the way bones were placed and arranged. You will design them on the floor before you paint them in a particular way. That takes the shape of a character. This imagery might have shifted from history and myth to language. This can be looked at anthropologically but mythologically, the genesis of Japanese characters is in Double Burial. I linked it to the Kashmiri tradition and the written word versus oral tradition. The King immediately recognised that the written word was not a boon. It will devour everything else, he thought. Because you are not dependent on your memory now.”
For this performance, he had adopted the fictitious persona of a Kashmiri professor called Salim. “I wore a tie too. But when the professor turns into a king, he gets naked. It was an elaborate performance.”
By 2010, the situation in the valley had become troublesome for the Indian government. Starting with the Amarnath Shrine Board controversy, the Kashmiri agitation for Azadi had turned into a sort of Intifada by 2010. Stone-pelting was the activity of choice of the youngsters resisting Indian Occupation and over 100 lost their lives in firing by troops. The killings restored a façade of normalcy.
Photo: Abhimanyu Kumar
In 2014, the right-wing BJP won the national elections. The Bhartiya Janata Party owes its existence to S.P. Mukherjee, as he formed Jan Sangh, the original party from which the BJP was born in 1980. The BJP has always had a muscular policy on Kashmir and its special status, which it has never accepted as permanent. After it took power at the Centre, the BJP first displayed its moderate credentials, by ruling the state in an alliance with PDP based on its numbers in Jammu; the Valley remained cold to BJP in the elections in which the National Conference (NC) lost power. By 2016, the scene in Sringar’s streets resembled the days of 2010. The killing of Burhan Wani by security forces made the situation worse. Massive protests erupted in Kashmir.
The same year, Salim tried something ambitious, something that had never been done before, an event called the Srinagar Biennale. His aim was to feature artists from Kashmir and elsewhere. “I went to Kashmir and met the political advisor to the CM, Amitabh Mattoo. He said the government had no objections and will fund it.” Salim then called a meeting of artists and activists he thought could help organise the event, but, he says, “No one among those assembled could come to any agreement about any of the items on the agenda of discussion. Some almost came to blows.” The chaotic response put pause to the Kashmir plans. The Biennale was later organised in Germany.
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Salim also raised the ‘Kashmir question’ in London in 2016, at the Sacred:Homelands event, a programme that featured the participation of artists from all over the world. Salim did a two-hour performance, where he talked of Kashmir and its traditions, as well as the protests that erupted especially after the use of pellet guns by the government. His performance was an elaborate affair in its conception, featuring a big banner inscribed with the phrase Thisness forming the background, as well as smaller placards positioned with the phrase Post-Truth.
The stage at Sacred:Homelands is not a proscenium one, raised and above the seats of the audience. Rather, it is level with their positions. Unlike theatre, no distinction is made between the performer and the audience through a raised platform.
The performance begins with Salim setting up the space as the audience walks in and sits down. In a bag, he carried white pellets, which he would throw on the floor in the middle of the performance, making a loud, clanking noise. In the corner of the stage close to the placards, he placed a stove with utensils and some spices as well as vegetables.
Unlike theatre, no attempt was made to hide whatever is going on ‘backstage’ to give the performance a mysterious aura which creates transcendence in ordinary theatrical performances. By hiding the process, the work of art is usually accorded a status which seems to insinuate upon its ‘finished’ and ‘special’ status, as something that appeared whole as an organically produced work of art. This is never the case in the variety of performance art that Salim prefers, where the process of preparation always forms an essential part of the performance, the journey a part of the destination.
The heart of the performance consists of Salim cooking yellow rice, a scared ritual in Kashmir for the audience of around 30-35 people.
Once the audience has settled in, Salim begins to chat. The presentation is long and rambling, like many of his works, but the audience remains riveted. He talks first of the pellets, picking one up from the floor where he has thrown a few of them down, and lets the audience know that the Indian government is using them on protestors in Kashmir, calling it the first ‘mass blinding’ in history. Contextualising his remarks, he mentions the phrase ‘Post-Truth’ again, telling the audience that even in the face of seeming hopelessness, something can be salvaged, that which lies in the hyphenated space between ‘Post’ and ‘Truth’, a phenomenon which characterises our civilisation today. “This life-force must be embedded in the abstractness, this dash between Post and Truth. It can be viewed in this Thisness of our moment. This is our truth. This is what we are. But when we are out of here, we have other forces on us, we are like the nuts-and-bolts of a system.”
This is how Salim views the world: as a place where we have to play our parts designed for us by others, willingly or unwillingly. He played his own part at his job at the bank for 30-odd years. For Salim, the moment in which he can be the artist that he really is, naturally assumes a sacred quality, something that lifts the very moment above the ordinary. This is what performances traditionally are, as moments outside regular times, in which transcendence is possible, in which the immanence of existence can be overcome. It is an immanence dictated by needs and customs, over and above which is the domain of art, where truth is sublime and paradoxical, and existence far more valuable due to its connection to a more rounded form of truth, absent in daily life.
In his generosity as an artist operating in this special time of performance, he extends its special-ness to his audience, whether or not they are able to grasp the value of what he offers to them. Often, mainstream art offers catharsis to the audience, but transcendence is usually reserved for the artists. Beuys believed that everyone is basically an artistic being, burdened down by the demands of capitalist society. He wanted to touch that core through his art. It is a similar endeavour for Salim; he offers the audience a chance at transcendence, too.
Salim then proceeds to change his clothes: from jeans and shirt with a sweater thrown over it, to a black robe, a pheran-like dress with photographs of saints, which he says is from Srinagar. “It is part Kashmiri culture to celebrate the heritage that has come down over centuries, including sufi poetry.” He completes the outfit by wearing a white, triangular cap, with the word ‘Azadi’ written on it with pellets, in Urdu. The cooking continues while he performs. After half an hour, with the pot simmering on the stove, he starts throwing down the pellets on the floor. They clang and bump off the floor into the audience. The harsh metallic sound echoes in the space. The entire floor becomes littered with them. Members of the audience pick them up, pass them around, touch and feel them; it’s the type of sensorial impact Salim likes. Materiality of objects is important to him.
He takes off his robe and marks his chest with a black marker pen with the sign of a dash. Then he holds the placards saying ‘Post’ and ‘Truth’ in each hand, with the dash symbol on his body forming the hyphen between the two words. In Salim’s philosophy, the body has an autonomous existence with its sensorial connections to those elements that go beyond strictly logical, beyond the sensory capacities that connect us, to what Beuys used to call ‘invisible energies’. The body with its intuitive sense of being, unconcerned with the purely logical, or empirical, or fact-based cognition of the world around us, can exist on a plane that is more attuned with the world which extends into the corporeal and visceral, as much as into language. Language, as the German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein believed, is not the limit of existence, at least not for the artist, and the audience which has a greater self-awareness of its responses. Salim’s naked body here also expresses the vulnerability of the body under occupation in Kashmir. But it has a larger context in his work.
After a while, the stove develops a snag. The cooking is interrupted. Two of the organisers try to help but fail. Someone from the audience says in Hindi: “Just give everyone a little haldi and it is done.” This is the moment for Salim to explain his method, and the beauty of the ‘imperfect’ moment.
“When we talk of performance art, we also talk about, when I said Thisness, whatever is available with us right now, and what are their limitations,” he says. “The planning actually goes bust and it does not work…this is how it should be. Otherwise, it is theatre.”
When he tries to light the stove again, and fails, the audience breaks into a laughter. Salim also smiles, as if accepting this interpretation and response of/to his method.
Photo: Harsh Kumar
The audience has warmed up to his seemingly idiosyncratic ways, and they ask him questions which he answers while the food gets cooked. He elaborates on his philosophical system a bit more: “Nationalism is the worst idea that has plagued humanity. I am a proud Pakistani, I am a proud Indian and under the garb of it, we allow the State to commit much monstrous and unthinkable violence. We justify it: for its protection, the State is justified to kill the Other. This is a paternal form of democracy. We do not want to free our children. We want them locked in and to fall in line.”
The food—yellow rice, a kind of khichdi—is done.
The performance is more than half-way through. At which point, Salim introduces the concept most central to his work, Empirico-Transcendental. He credits Foucault with having come up with the phrase, which the French thinker used in his critique of the philosopher Merleau-Ponty.
“The term means that, no matter what we do, we cannot divide the term in two. They are absolutely bonded. Just like there is a hyphen between Post and Truth, the same way, there it exists here. The material truth about Us, which is a huge understanding of ours coming via Marxist theory is of material and labour which goes into Us, because finally art is erupting from the marketplace. But this material truth about us is irretrievably connected to the Transcendental… (we should not be) endlessly driven by the logic. Logically, we are nothing in nature.”
Salim’s work often dwells in the liminal space between the logical and non-logical. In our general tendency to situate meaning within logical sentences, we forget that meaning resides elsewhere too, in smell, in sight, and other sensory faculties which respond to stimuli; these meanings/sensations/insights pass on to the subconscious, and further, the unconscious, where it is processed. In the hands of someone like Salim, they form the raw material for art. Salim has spoken in the past of Freuds’ concept of Buried Cities, a metaphor for the Unconscious used by the 20th century Vienna-based psychologist. Jung however developed the concept a great deal and took it much further. In his analysis, as he wrote in the Four Archetypes, the Unconscious does not differentiate between rational and irrational, logical and non(ill-)logical; both tendencies balance each-other. The Transcendental/Intuitive and the Empirical/Rational are two sides of the same coin according to this school of thought, to which Salim subscribes. And in the space between the two lies the potential for art.
“Does this space represent the chaos of Kashmir?” asks an audience member, in a serious and earnest voice, perhaps showing that the audience is finally convinced of the authenticity of the performance, even though they have perhaps seen nothing like it before. Nothing is obviously beautiful—the objects used are of a functional nature. Nothing is open to easy interpretations—no remarkable skill is being demonstrated in any aspect of the performance. In short, none of the categories that make up the art we consume today in galleries are on display here. This is rather an anti-thesis of such art.
So far in his career, Salim’s work has often been understood as having relevance in the context of Kashmir. But if seen closely, Kashmir is incidental to his work beyond a point. Much of Salim’s inspirations step from avant-garde artists like Antonin Artaud and Jean Genet; Artaud’s concept of ‘The Theatre of Cruelty’, was, in Salim’s explanation, a way to make an individual come out of the self-imposed boundaries of traditional ‘self’ and explore newer horizons, for which a breakdown induced through cruelty became necessary. Salim admires Genet’s lack of bourgeois morals and his in-your-face sexuality, depicted in films and his writings. Like Genet, Salim is well-aware of the limits of both the Sacred and the Profane and like all good artists loves to bring them together. He is fond of bestowing Jean-Paul Sartre’s honorific for Genet: Saint Genet.
His work is many-layered, inspired by myth, history and philosophy, with a unique take on what is beautiful and what is ugly; it deals in the mundane, and that which is generally considered to be wasteful, or dirty, or on the margins; it is not responsive to the tyranny of logic and meaning, in the sense in which he perceives his art; it synthesises errors and chance elements along with that which is planned; in his own words, it ‘embraces imperfection’.
At the end of the performance at Sacred:Homelands, Salim serves the audience food on a small plate, on which there is a picture of him and the mythical bird revered by the Aztecs: Quetzal. The inscription reads: Quetzal Told Me Azadi.
I feel it is no hyperbole to say that Inder Salim is perhaps the only current Indian performance artist who has developed an original system of thought, who has refined its his countours through his artistic practice, and honed it to a point where he can bring a transcendental quality to his work almost at will. His work is many-layered, inspired by myth, history and philosophy—involving what Deleuze called Multiplicities—with a unique take on what is beautiful and what is ugly; it deals in the mundane, and that which is generally considered to be wasteful, or dirty, or on the margins; it is not responsive to the tyranny of logic and meaning, in the sense in which he perceives his art; it synthesises errors and chance elements along with that which is planned; in his own words, it ‘embraces imperfection’.
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A small, red breasted bird alights and sits on one of the rocks between which the river flows in Morni, a small hill-station bordering Haryana and Punjab. We came here after attending the wedding of common friends—both performance artists—in mid-October. We are staying at a spacious studio-cum-guesthouse with inbuilt performance spaces. The project and the building are the brainchild of another performance artist Harpreet Singh, a pioneer in the field who has organised two biennales here, with scores of Indian and foreign artists.
This is our second day at Morni. In the evening we walk down to the river to shoot. Salim dons his pheran and face paint. On his back, he has a cape in bright yellow, on which a poem about a princess and a python who has coiled around her is inscribed in black.
Just before he is to start, he notices the bird. “Make sure the bird is in the frame,” he calls out to me from the other side of the stream.
I am afraid if I move too much, the bird will fly away. But our luck holds; I shoot Salim as he walks on all-four in the stream towards the bird. The bird itself is unconcerned with us; it proceeds to take a quick bath and then it flies away. The shot lasts for barely a minute. Later, Salim expresses an almost child-like joy to find that I got the shot right.
This ‘chance’ element is absolutely fundamental to his artistic practice; it is a natural corollary to his search for hyphenated spaces that lies between boundaries that separate the empirical and the transcendental. It also explains his reliance on ‘errors’ as forming a mode of cognition, and opening up new possibilities. In Salim’s system, as psychological phenomena which are deeply connected to the workings of the sub-conscious and the unconscious, they generate insights which are not possible to obtain solely through conscious applications of logic.
Perhaps, like Genet, he should also be called Saint Salim. His accommodative and all-encompassing practice, his respect for all life-forms, his sense of his own martyrdom, his ability to blend the sacred and the profane, his reliance on chance, and signs, his ability to bear bodily pain, they all point to that appellation.
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Abhimanyu Kumar is a journalist based in Delhi. He has written for various national and international publications in the previous decade and continues to do so. His first book of poems Milan and the Sea was published in 2017. His work on cow-related lynchings in India was featured in an anthology published in 2018 by Aleph. He runs a literary blog called the Sunflower Collective, now five years old. He is also interested in cinema and film theory, philosophy and history. You can find him on Instagram: @abhimanyujourno.
