Metaphors for Larger Ruptures: The collected art of WOMAN IS AS WOMEN DOES
Nilima Sheikh, Revisiting Champa, 1984-2022, mixed media on handmade paper. Courtesy of the artist
Held in Mumbai, the exhibition Woman is as Woman Does presented moving homages to feminist artivism and archives of alternate ‘doings’ across the years since India’s Independence.
Part 1: Ferments of Re-doing, Stitching Feminisms of Difference
Washed with earthy blues and reds on a big, pale poster, there is a re-visitation to the Champa series from Nilima Sheikh’s signature hand. This, at first, is an ‘un-doing’. Sheikh, in Avijit Mukul Kishore’s The Garden of Forgotten Snow mentions how “the body could be a part of the work” in large-scale works. In a way, she alludes to a feminist method of ‘doing’.
This is where Woman is as Woman Does begins for me: in a ‘re-doing’.
The exhibition in Mumbai—curated by Nancy Adajania—showcased the works of 27 Indian women artists, all engaging with questions of feminism and its ‘movements’ in tandem with India’s journey post-independence. It was a collaboration between the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation and the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya. The works were showcased across two galleries within the CSMVS building from August 26 to October 16, 2022.
In the four decades that have almost passed since Sheikh’s earlier series, these words become insinuations of the present, reminders of violence orchestrated on women’s bodies. In the final canvas, a group of figures converge around an immobile body, shrouds dotted in the colour of diluted blood.
A brick red wall greets you when you first step into the JNAF gallery. To the left is the first exhibit: Sheikh’s aforementioned Champa series. On the left corner of this wall is a tablet-sized digital display presenting a close-up slideshow of Sheikh’s original series, When Champa Grew Up (1984-85), which now hangs in Leicester Museum & Art Gallery, UK. A glass panel beside the tablet-display contains individual canvases of her re-visitation of the Champa series, created especially for this exhibition.
Champa’s story is not alien to us: It is the narrative of a young girl, swinging through little dreams of washed blue, married off all too soon, consumed by the burnt yellow flames of a dowry system that plagues Indian patriarchy. A closer look reveals the leitmotif of fire in Sheikh’s painting, alternating between deeply painful remembrance and fierce protestations of repeated wrongdoing. In her revisitation, outlines of the original series are coloured sparsely in shades of red and blue that slip into brown and greys. In the corners of each canvas, stencilled words spelt in Hindi appear sporadically. In the four decades that have almost passed since Sheikh’s earlier series, these words become insinuations of the present, reminders of violence orchestrated on women’s bodies. In the final canvas, a group of figures converge around an immobile body, shrouds dotted in the colour of diluted blood.
The words are resonant now. They name each incident: Hathras, Asifa, Unnao, Nirbhaya, Kathua. And more.
These invocations echo an extradiegetic erasure as well. The Champa series was initially exhibited alongside anti-dowry songs by the Gujarat mothers during the protests of the women’s movement of the 80s. It is into this ‘history of doing’ that we enter. Adajania, in her curatorial note, references the women’s movement of the 70s catalogued within Radha Kumar’s The History of Doing, which lends to the title of the show. The layout and carefully curated selection of women artists across intersectionalities of gender, caste, class and ethnicities are representative of a postcolonial nation addressing these political concerns through protest, cultural reiterations, and strong feminist collaborative movements across the years.
Sheikh’s invocations of protest find visual resonance in the eighteen poster placards that cluster in six different centres of the JNAF gallery. Sheeba Chhachhi’s photographs that document the anti-dowry protests of the 1980s are mirrors to a range of moments, imminent and transcendental. Silent stills of self-reflectivity within the faces of the mothers shift to reverberating vocal remonstrations by the crowd of women, echoing remnants of pain and loud demands for justice by mothers and sisters who have lost loved ones to dowry deaths.
Arshi Ahmadzai, Pages from Blood Book Series, 2021. Courtesy of JNAF & CSMVS, Mumbai
If the works of Sheikh and Chhachhi elicit a historical footnote, the artwork surrounding them draw and build futures to this history of doing. The yellow wall to the right hosts a print illustration of Kamla Bhasin, feminist foremother and activist for Indian women’s rights. Ranjeeta Kumari’s Gaali Geet adds to the discourse of the protest songs, albeit sourcing from the oral narrative cultures of women from Dalit communities. There are video clippings with recordings of ‘songs of abuse’ sung by Bihari women during wedding ceremonies. You are invited to listen to the songs: teasing the new bride, foretelling her moments of pining and pleasure as she embarks on a new life as a married woman. Underlying this, is the bittersweet pain of losing their own husbands to migratory journeys.
Inclusions of art born from marginalities reflect Adajania’s sensitivity to difference in the feminist movements of Indian geopolitics. She mentions this deliberate choice to place art from various origins of privilege and erasure, parallelly. Chhachhi, in conversation with Adajania at the panel discussion Cadences of Resistance on September 28 describes a “moment of intersubjectivity” created when women from different identities come together. This intersubjectivity recognizes, forges friendships, and forms sites of collaborative resistance between women across various positions of lived experience.
Ranjeeta Kumari’s work captures, through graphic and video formats the amorphous intersections of a political and personal movement. A similar approach is seen in other works of collaboration: including Ita Mehrotra’s accordion comic, Forest Song: A Chipko Story, created in conversation with Chipko activists; documentaries of two separate but equally important feminist movements on Kali—the feminist publication house—by Anupama Chandra and Uma Tanuku; and Unlimited Girls by Paromita Vohra.
This delicate blend is felt with a silent force, as one absorbs the arrangement of works exhibited in the alcove leading from the yellow wall. Aqui Thami’s archive of indigenous herbs, Vidya Kamat’s mixed media print photograph and Pushpamala’s photo prints invite communion with recent developments by independent feminist artists, using deliberately chosen materials to present ethnic, cultural and national (anti)polemics.
Chhachhi… describes a “moment of intersubjectivity” created when women from different identities come together. This intersubjectivity recognizes, forges friendships, and forms sites of collaborative resistance between women across various positions of lived experience.
Thami’s Burning the Tite-pati: Healing practices of the Himalayan Indigenous Peoples is an installation on ten tile-sized slabs containing tiny baskets on their sides with the collected plant spilling out. Each slab has printed illustrations of the plant by the artist. Thami gathered these as gifts from bojus (Adivasi grandmothers) from the tribes of ten different Himalayan indigenous communities. Beside this installation, on the next wall is a series of four prints based off photographs of Himalayan flora taken by the artist during her research.
Thami’s archival collections are layered homages to female labour. Through artistic recording, she suffuses them with anti-colonial revolutionary spirit and preserves indigenous knowledge. A citation from Feminism for the 99% echoes here; these works of vocal and laborious protests against myriad oppressions through solidarity “demonstrates the enormous political potential of women’s power and their labour”.
In another medium, Vidya Kamat’s mixed media print photograph—Birthmark—juxtaposes a wet mouth against the rich texture of pink sequins on a blue fabric. A speech bubble beside the work conveys the authorial intent of investigating the imprints of cultural memories embedded on skin. The artist’s choice in placing these ‘feminine’ objects together is a deliberate rouse of our social compulsions within the dictates of patriarchy.
Almost in tandem, Pushpamala’s photographs from the Apaharana/Abduction series loom nearby. The prints narrate the Ramayana’s story of Sita apaharana by Ravana in three key moments, highlighted by a re-adaptation of Hollywood symbolism, calendar paintings, and Raja Ravi Varma oleographs. Like with Kamat’s work, another speech bubble in bright yellow narrates the artist’s reading, contrasting the state of women within an idealised national narrative that alternatingly employs the mythological tale. I read it in continuation with Kamat’s mention of cultural memory: Pushpamala is reiterating popular perceptions of women and their bodies, inscribed by cultural memory in the form of cinema, popular paintings and mythological retellings. Imbued by the overarching presence of the photographer’s subjectivity in creating these works, Pushpamala and Kamat alternately jar you with the female body’s metafictional awareness of memory and survival through resistance.
Following the contours of the gallery brings one to the last wall displaying four acts of collaboration. This seems only natural, against the reflections of Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life, where she mentions that feminism is a collective movement that “does not stand still.” These four acts differ in intent and method just as the others, but they are bound by this collective movement and its histories of reclaiming space. Shweta Bhattad’s collection of seed rakhis and plantable firecrackers recount a journey of revolutionising agricultural practices through innovation and inclusion. Stills from Whatsapp messages and Instagram posts narrate the story of Gram Art Collective and its agrarian inspirations for the making of art and craft within rural-scapes. Durgabai Vyam’s journey in creating the Jangarh kalam art (mistakenly called “Gond Art”, as pointed out by the curator in her note) for the graphic novel Bhimayana is a layered tale of overcoming marginalisation and asserting artistic innovation through acts of collaboration. Her recounting of the treatment at the Navayana office during a visit draws parallels between the othering faced by Ambedkar in his own journey.
While Adivasi and Dalit otherings are differently experienced; in the moment of collaboration, stories commingle to provide a glimpse into the fractures of our casteist society, even as members of the communities redefine spaces and assert independent modes of artistic expression.
Gargi Raina, Constructing the memory of a room, 2005, pencil, gouache, dry pastel, cut paper on paper. Courtesy of Bose Krishnamachari
Similarly, memories of pain watermark Ranjeeta Kumari’s powerful paintings, titled, Beyond the Line II. Reducing them to identity as a marker, however, would be a grave error. Kumari’s paintings are created with mixed media sourced from the everyday of a woman within a domestic space: long strands of hair, sequins and motifs of cloth fabric. They are suspended in movements of letting go and holding in. A red fabric hung to dry, bleeds colour; while a sieve unleashes rain from a dark thundercloud.
In the series below this, bangles and flowerpots are entangled in torrential wisps of hair. Are they moments of binding? Or unfurling? Perhaps the landscape painting to the left of these four portraits offer answers—in sequins and light outlines gathered within a red fabric; memorial lines of song birds, flowers and boats—reminiscent of the women they clothe, within homes left behind.
The body in pain—spectres of tears and dripping blood—returns in the work of Arshi Irshad Ahmadzai’s Pages from my Blood Book (Kabul), and Baaraan and Ijlal’s From the Mourners and Witnesses Series, forming two movements of memory and diasporic longing through bodily loss. This sensibility of loss is perhaps the same that Madhava Prasad attributes to catalysing the movement from “a postcolonial need to endow tradition within the art of being, towards a contemporary, decolonised art of becoming”. In contrast, this loss—from the viewpoint of feminist creation becomes a locus of catalysis—an emotive affect that moves the body into doing, a concept that Sara Ahmed proposes in The Cultural Politics of Emotion.
While Ahmadzai’s work creates a metaphor for her personal moments of larger ruptures through bodily bleeding, Baaraan and Ijlal’s sculpture and framed paintings do the same using symbolisms of marching and travel, to demonstrate their turmoil and the wounds of historical trauma left within. These movements, thus, continuously oscillate between the personal and political, the deep, bodily felt private and the languishing public. Woman is, ‘as woman is doing’, then, and we are invited into further acts of doing in the second part of the show. Here we shall see movement—not solely as a lament of loss—but also reparation in narratives of coalescence.
Part 2: Fractured Threads, Weaving Ruptures for Reparation
In the Premchand Roychand Gallery, the second part of the Woman is as Woman Does exhibition with its schismatic narrative oscillates between the public and the private. In her curatorial note, Adajania describes it as a “presentation of solidarities across difference” and representing the “politics of adjacency”. She also draws attention to visages which focus on the “schisms” between the “self and society”, many of which are washed away by undercurrents of loss. Therefore, although the works as a whole manifest reparation through solidarity, the haunts of loss are viscerally felt.
Here, as in the art of Chhachhi, Sheikh, and others, the work is catalysed by the ferments of injustice. By embodying this loss within most of the works, not only is there a record keeping of wrong-doing, but also a memorial of past and present survival. The artistic narration embodies resurrections of selves that have survived aftermaths of political and personal violence.
The exhibition immediately presents a recalling of Shweta Bhattad’s practice with the Gram Art Collective. This work, titled Azaadi ka Batwa, consists of a khadi batwa filled with a plantable Indian flag, embedded with various seeds. Symbolically, the work invites a renewed ‘cultivation’ of our constitutional rights.
In experiencing their riptides, one is also wounded from within, learning absurdities of war, seeking healing for those torn by its claws of communalism, hatred and political ineptitude. Perhaps it is this language of abstraction, subtly summoning spectres of Nasreen Mohammedi and her abstractions, that makes the whorls of these wounds all the more profound.
This call for re-growth finds revolutionary counter-narrative in the photographs of Navjot, which document the Koyla Satyagraha movement against the coal mining at Gare, Raigarh, Chhattisgarh. Internal threads of renewed reflection are asked of the spectator—reminders of the Chipko movement videos in the gallery upstairs. Here, art meets activism and raises discourses of discontent.
One also finds in the vicinity Shilpa Gupta’s hand-drawn maps with similar insinuations. However, these maps drawn by persons affected by political movement are intimate in its portrayal of difference. Memories of the displaced hands tracing on paper demand a more immediate emotional reaction from the viewer.
Returning to narrative presence, the dot art of Shantibai is a brush mark born of collaborations between Navjot and the artist in establishing the Dialogue centre. Her series of eight watercolours invoke oral narratives and indigenous rituals of eating, foraging and herb-based healing practices.
My Hometown by Sheikh is a domain of intonations. Three primary colours occupy the canvas: a lake of blue stencilled with an appeal during a time of personal grief within political turmoil, a figure in red whose arms rise as described in the narrative, towards flames of ash tinged in gold. Below is an androgynous figure in green, crouching down, with their hands pulling open layers of their upper garment to reveal cartographies of a lost land. This is a labour of homage, a stirring fury of grief and reminders encapsulated within loss of land. Adajania’s note cites her reinvention of Hanuman with the rip in his chest, through the character painted in the bottom half of the scroll. I read it as a soliloquy to the war-torn ravages of a personal Kashmir she has left, a motif that reverberates through works in her larger practice as well.
Another reinvention, seeking a space of meditation beholds one in Gargi Raina’s abstraction, Constructing the Memory of a Room. Splices in the chequered lattice on the canvas form a referential to far deeper schisms of violence ripping a country’s birth apart. Purvai Rai’s more simplistic echoes in a subtle gold against inky blackness becomes (as also noted by Adajania) a reflection of this riptide, except much closer and recent: the Delhi riots. The silent weight of utter grief and wounding is more convoluted, stacked in tight whorls in the masterpiece drawings of Zarina Hashmi, an artist who has explored the fractured remains of Partition and its grief within her abstract and conceptual works. Hashmi is also the oldest woman artist among all whose works find a place within the exhibition.
Zarina Hashmi, House at Aligarh, 1990, etchings on paper. Courtesy of Gallery Espace, New Delhi.
These three pieces—by Raina, Rai and Hashmi—form a close conversation of memory, grief and wounding. In experiencing their riptides, one is also wounded from within, learning absurdities of war, seeking healing for those torn by its claws of communalism, hatred and political ineptitude. Perhaps it is this language of abstraction, subtly summoning spectres of Nasreen Mohammedi and her abstractions, that makes the whorls of these wounds all the more profound.
This silent weight spills through video montages by Mithu Sen and Anita Dube, both of which are experimental performative pieces. Sen’s video montage examines the limitations of a language, echoing blood lines of the Blood Book (by Ahmadzai), except here it is abuse and its unnameable loss in violations of the body and mind. Sen’s piece features a character called Mago who visits the spaces of rehabilitation for victims of abuse. Through a language-less intrusion, she shows that trauma cannot steal languages of bonding as an activity, like the knowledge of film stars, the ability to form bonds by braiding each other’s hair and placing bindis on dolls. However, unnameable violence does not find linguistic satisfaction through her video experiment; instead semiotic red coloured lines run through the room and the video, a negative in red and white, significations of violation.
In contrast, Dube’s performative ‘qissa’ or narrative of anecdotes examines the fractures of communalist divisions and forms a plea for syncretic experience through dialogue and poetry. In Dube’s piece, she masquerades as ‘Noor Mohammad’, symbolically and metaphorically testing the waters of communal division and gender by extrapolating poetry and dialogue—almost to narrate the ‘doing away’ of binaries.
[Nanavati] makes her deceased mother a collaborator, resurrecting their broken bond within the act of stitching together: be it of her mother’s old shirts, or of letters and embroidered prints on linen and cotton cloth.
There are indications of art history in motion within the practice of Sosa Joseph. Her large painting, titled Pieta, rearranges all references to the original via multiple narratives of horror, lament and watershed grief. They are deliberately located in the geographies of the artist’s homeland by the river Pamba.
Feminist art history is found in its recreations of the washed colours of Nilima Sheikh. Here, the choice of colours lends the magical realist tone that Adajania cites in her note: they are pastel pinks, lacy blues, violets and sea greens unlike Sheikh’s warm, earthy tones. Another parallel with Sheikh’s body of work are the multiple divisional layouts with narratives of figures within boats, going hunting, embodying filial grief and in communion with spirits of the forests. In each micro-narrative, gestures of the body carry embedded messages.
Gestures can also be those of weaving together as in the practice of Al-Qawi Nanavati. Here, a personal loss augur acts of interweaving in multiple mediums, of embroidering fabric, and of letters and prints. She makes her deceased mother a collaborator, resurrecting their broken bond within the act of stitching together: be it of her mother’s old shirts, or of letters and embroidered prints on linen and cotton cloth.
Anju Dodiya’s two self-portraits in the midst of these works are solitary assertions of a growing feminist sensibility in painting. While one unfalteringly question imprisonment, the other lets loose a flurry of imaginations in stubborn attempts to float within an array of creative blockades—which seem to be self-imposed. In both, there is a deep understanding that often, obstructions that confront a woman or genderqueer person are not solely born of internal conflicts, but that they are very emphatically influenced by various patriarchies. Almost as an inception to further questioning, is the headshot of artist Sharmistha Ray—identifying as gender fluid—their picture an opening of different avenues of what woman is / can be. Or as Simone De Beauvoir so infamously wrote, how woman is not born, but “becomes”.
Perhaps the only set of photographs that fail to embody the “politics of adjacency” (as Adajania mentions in her introductory note) is in the photographic practice of Gauri Gill. In Gill’s work, the performative stance of the young girls at the Balika Mela studio, feels forced. In contrast, Navjot’s work is representative of a documentary attempt to capture the labour of protest and collective action, her subjects own their bodies (Koyla Satyagraha rally), conversations (Meeting with villagers at Gare), and movement. These themes were explored more minutely in Chhachhi’s work in the previous gallery. Moments are owned by the subjects of the photograph. And although the act of capturing introduces a fictive element, it does not interfere with the self-reflexive stance of the subjects, thus creating a moment of intersubjectivity.
In Gill’s work, a staged atmosphere pervades to the extent where the spectator can neither feel their subjectivity, nor does their spirit of life or defiance comes through. In gazing at the girls, one finds resilient symbols of hope—linked hands, newspapers, gestures of stardom—except they are disjoint and fragmented. If this is deliberate, one wonders how it then embodies a politics of adjacency.
Sosa Joseph, Pietà, 2019-2020, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke.
As a spectator, I can neither enter the intersubjective space of difference, nor engage with it because it is absent. I am only forced to confront a discomfiting performativity within the young girls. Even seen in proximity to each other, there are elements of desert light, an attempt to reconfigure the studio photograph trope but the description of how “girls came in, and decided how and with whom they would like to be photographed” seem surreptitiously absent in the pictures themselves, almost as if the photographer staged them. There is an indelible need for subjective expression especially when the artist and subject come from different positions of privilege. This politics of adjacency fails in Gill’s attempt, whereas it forms an archival document in Navjot’s work.
There are a few sore misses within the range of representations put together at this astounding show. One wonders how works by Tejal Shah, a textile designer and artist from India who identifies as non-binary, would have added to the exploration of “woman” as a non-defined, open entity of being. The absence of South Indian women’s collective collaborations like Ceciliae’d and Aravani Art Project were also felt. Barring Sosa Joseph and N Pushpamala, there were no other South Indian women artists.
However, within the large purview of work that Adajania put together—27 artists, and curatorial notes on the intimacies of process and nature of artist—is no easy feat. Perhaps an afterword to this might expect a larger array of all those missed, not to mention women artists who go beyond questions of the nation to examine themes of spaces and bodies. After all, as Adajania notes, this is an attempt to capture “kinetic impulses”. In its pursuit, female and/or genderqueer labour in art and activism are in an emotive movement, heading towards avant-garde visualities of interrogation and change.
***
Anna Lynn is a research scholar at EFL University. Her areas of interest include women's writing, art and cinema. The anxieties of a feminine heart are a constant muse and as the Woolfian stream passes, she presses watered images into writing. You can find her work on Sunflower Collective, Esthesia Magazine, Gulmohur Quarterly, In Plainspeak, and her blog www.seagirlstories.wordpress.com. Anna is on Instagram: @seagirlstories and @lettersinthemargins.
