Where Three Dreams Cross: Well Worth a Look!

Last week I walked around the newly refurbished Whitechapel Gallery in East London to go through an enormous exhibition of photography from the sub-continenent with over 400 images dating back over a 100 years. Phew!

First of all, yes, I wholeheartedly recommend Where Three Dreams Cross.  It ticks all the boxes: iconic photographs by master photographers like Sunil Janah and Raghu Rai; archival portraits of colonial era Maharajahs; stills and photographs of beloved movie stars; some really good sociological and documentary work; and of course, if you just love photography as an art form, some really amazing work that is at once passionate and intelligent.

As an exercise in highlighting photography from the region, this is an amazing project. One of the curators, Sunil Gupta, himself a photographer and exhibiting currently in London, explained that the project took nearly four years to bring life. And the hard work shows.

Now a couple of observations:

1. For an expat, and definitely a "new" (as in post-colonial, post-Partition) Indian, the ideological agenda for the exhibition is a bit troubling. An exhibition that somehow makes the three nations "look" so similar and thus blames the political divisions on history or some sort of false distinctions is problematic in itself. When that exhibition is held - with self-rightous glee - in the country that carried out that bloody process of history, then one is left feeling distinctly queasy.

Perhaps it is a generational issue: Sunil Gupta is of an earlier generation, and perhaps feels more nostalgia for a "united" India than most of us from the sub-continent. Moreover, I was left wondering once again why racial or cultural markers are somehow meant to make us so "similar." How often do we see an exhibition on the region of Savoy (divided between Italy, France and Switzerland) with a similar intent? Or on Catalunya (divided between France and Spain)? The implicit imperial conceit in erasing our contemporary political and national identity in favour of racial/cultural markers encodes us in well-known colonial boundaries. And those are not only out-dated but also grate.

2. Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie has already expressed some of her unease in her piece published in Pakistan's Dawn and UK's Guardian. As I am not writing for mainstream press, I can be a bit more blunt. No, I didn't find myself trying to find images from India, but then that may be a function of our size.

I also realised that we - as in Indians - are better at representing ourselves than our neighbours. When we got the first camera, we immediately deployed it to "flatten" out the photographs to represent our cultural aesthetic instead of wielding it to re-create the western post-Renaissance three-point perspective.  We hand-painted the early portraits, overlaying technology with miniaturist precision to create images that were us.

Then in the 1930s, we took on German and Soviet oppositional aesthetics and deployed them for anti-colonial and then nation-building purposes.  The techniques were shorn of their Nazi (yes, that influence does not quite get a mention) and Communist agendas and used the way we wanted, for purposes that suited us.

Recent photographs reflect the same: we are good at representing ourselves, and more at ease being represented, than our neighbours. Perhaps it is a corollary of the past 60 years of democracy and republicanism, or merely our much-criticized hotch-potch secularism. But this exhibition definitely emphasises our love affair with the camera.

3. Another aspect that bothered me about this exhibition, and again I believe this resulted from its ideological impetus: India, at least it seems in the exhibition, ends in the south at Mumbai and in the east, at Bengal! I guess Tamil Nadu, Deccan, Kerala, North East's seven sisters don't quite allow for the easy racial/cultural markers of "unity" with Pakistan and Bangladesh.  However, this studied invisibility of our non-north/centrals parts really bothered me.

In making the Three Dreams Cross,  I feel that the Indian dream has been purposefully mutilated.

And that brings me to a final quibble: I understand the exhibition is about the three big countries in the sub-continent, but I would have liked to see more from other nations in the same region: Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, especially as, in the final case, issues of political borders formed by colonial heritage are still playing out in horrific bloody detail and are very much a colonial legacy for that that teardrop island nation as well.

Perhaps, I should just put aside my hopes and admit to the one fact I would prefer to forget: that like all exhibitions, this one says more about the curators who put it together than about the region it purports to show. 

PS: I spoke to Harriet Gilbert who presents the BBC World Service show The Strand about the exhibition. Fortunately, Sunil Gupta was also there. You can find the chat here (just let the player go past the 16:30 minute mark for the segment to begin).

Hypocrisy or Just Plain Ol' Hubris, You Betcha!

For the past few weeks, western media has been running stories on how "Hindus are driving out Christians" in India.

New York Times (never the best of sources, but widely read in that country) ran a headline screaming "Hindus Threat to Christians - Convert of Flee." Lets not forget this is a country where the presidential candidate can malign the opposition with the mere suggestion of being Muslim. And when the fury whipped up by the suggestions gets overt, and some voter declares that the opposition candidate cannot be trusted because "he is an Arab," what does the good ole American war hero respond? Not with a lecture about secularism and democracy and human rights of Arabs. McCain came back with how Obama was a "decent family man." As if Arabs cannot be decent family men! And then the clincher - "he's not!" He's not Arab? He's not Muslim? Why does this matter?

Why am I bringing this up? Well, USA is also the same country that periodically issues reports on "secularism" in India! This is also a country that makes a great song and dance about not issuing a visa to Gujarat CM, Narendra Modi, ostensibly for his Hindu Nationalist stance.

Now I am not defending Modi but the hypocrisy generated by the US is quite breath-taking. Palin's speeches are not that different from Modi, and the responses from her Bible-bashin, good ol' American followers is one that you wouldn't find even in the most illiterate village in Gujarat: calls for "kill him", "traitor", "off with his head." And all this for the opposing candidate, not some vague, nebulous enemy within. Lets put this in perspective - how about Advani whipping up the same frenzy about Sonia, with calls for killing her emanating from BJP supporters? Or how about audience jeering "kill him" for Advani at Mayawati's rallies? I can just imagine the headlines that New York Times would publish then.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the pond, BBC et al have been running similar stories. But then thats Britain for you: empire chala gaya, attitude nahin gaya! And the worst drivel comes from the second/third generation "British-Asians." (Indian press take note as they race to adore any firangi-with-Indian-name/skin).

The Guardian's Randeep Ramesh came up with this week's particular gem, and he wasn't even talking of politics, simply films (but how can you be a self-respecting western journalist without throwing caste into any and all discussions about India! Ramesh - discussing the film Omkara - declares: "Whereas 17th-century audiences in England could make sense of the Moor's existential angst, 21st-century Indians could not countenance an "untouchable" leader – a true outsider in society – preferring instead to make sure he had Brahmin blood."

Umm Mr. Ramesh, ever heard of Mayawati? Or the DMK? Or much of the UP legislative assembly? Or much of the Indian parliament (compared with the Oxbridge crowd that runs the British one). The whole point of the "half-caste" in Omkara - set in rural UP - is that he cannot call on any particular "power" base, including that of Dalit politics. In modern Indian polity, he is the ultimate outsider.

So why do I bring this up? Well, when 70% of the Muslim children in a developed country with a welfare state live in povery (UK statistics), any lectures to India (or any other country) smack of imperialist idiocy. And when presidential campaigns in the "world's greatest country" recycle fears articulated by Hollywood's greatest racist creation ("freed" slaves stuffing ballot boxes in D.W.Griffith's Birth of a Nation/McCain and Palin's smearing of ACORN), and the local media gags itself, then all finger-pointing at India becomes not only hypocritical, but even the veneer of virtue slides right off. Frankly boys, clean up your own houses first!

Meanwhile, why is it that the Indian mainstream media isn't willing to talk about this and instead continues to run completely idiotic articles about how Indian democracy can learn from the Americans?