In Delhi, Dynamic Images and Shared Solidarities
Rahaab Allana, guest editor of Aperture’s Summer 2021 issue, considers the relationship between photography, urbanism, and activist trajectories from within and outside a restless city.
Zishaan A Latif, The Art of Hatred, North East Delhi Riots, March 2020
Courtesy the artist
We are described into corners, and then we have to describe our way out of corners.
—Salman Rushdie, in an interview with W. L. Webb
In April 2019, as the general elections in India dominated the media, an international team of astronomers published the first photograph of a black hole, silhouetted against a disc of glowing gas surrounding this cosmic void, the threshold beyond which not even light can escape. The image showed us what we thought could never be seen, almost two centuries after the French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce used a camera obscura to take the world’s first photograph, looking out from his second-story workroom. These acts of imaging have generated a radical, fundamental warping of the space-time of human consciousness and triggered a cultural “event horizon,” by mapping the existential coordinates of memory, genealogy, ecology, aesthetics, history, and geography.
The “aura” of images proliferates beyond time and space, exemplified in this issue by works from both within and outside Delhi, and by various eras, cultures, and media. My mandate as guest editor was to build on previous city-centric issues of Aperture, but as a curator managing a collection, visiting personal repositories, and researching in state and private archives, I am aware that image making is always in the process of expansion and reflection, regardless of frame, paradigm, and aesthetic scaffolding. Through continued engagement with Aperture’s editorial team and independent artists, and while considering the possibility of addressing new audiences, we have tried to offer visual convergences, juxtapositions, and inversions, hoping to explore the forever growing parameters of place and to suggest the migratory, the mutable, the transient.
Courtesy the artist
Delhi, where I live and work, serves as only one complex node of visual possibility, but it can proffer a conceptual prism for the diffraction of evolving photographic practices, perspectives, and forms in and outside the region, with innumerable offerings yet to be made. This city, for me, is also bound to family, one that moved here from Mumbai half a century ago. It is where my thespian grandfather, using the backdrop of medieval ruins, staged productions of the famous play Andha Yug (The Age of Blindness) that draws on the Mahabharata, a classical Indian epic about warring royal clans who clash in a momentous battle. Andha Yug, written in 1953 by the renowned Hindi litterateur Dharamvir Bharati, can be read as a fierce castigation of the politics and politicians complicit in the atrocity of Partition, and as an allegory that continues to reverberate in the present with Delhi’s political position as the seat of assertions and abuses of power.
In this issue, the urban environment is a locus for the dynamic intermeshing of place, personal history, art practice, and radical critique, as seen in Shohini Ghosh’s interview with the writer-activist Arundhati Roy and in Christopher Pinney’s interview with the photographer-activist Shahidul Alam. It was my privilege to invite Alam to the city for a lecture, pre-lockdown, in 2019, and I was absolutely dismayed when the state and its machinery prevented his journey. Undeterred, Alam delivered a riveting talk via Zoom from an airport lounge. Even this interpersonal media may now be regulated.
The social mapping of urban terrain— its people, persuasions, seductions, illusions, and claims—is presented through fascinating interrelationships: Roy compares the city to a “novel with characters who appear and disappear, shaping the physical space around them.” Latika Gupta’s exploration of films/moving images by Anamika Haksar and Priya Sen looks in and delineates how these works capture an “old” and a “new” Delhi through the city’s restless, granular meta-histories as well as its embodiment of urban aspiration and dream, idealism and pragmatism.
Courtesy the artist
The lines of sight generated by this issue are intended to manifest through associations and touchpoints that highlight many other sites and works of resistance, albeit not in this single issue. To name a few: the work of Masrat Zahra; the cross- exposed portrait/landscape of a war-torn occupied Kashmir, now acknowledged to be one of the most militarized zones on Earth, by Sumit Dayal; the careful amalgamation of Dalit as well as feminist histories by the Nepal Picture Library; and even the Partition-related photographs by stalwarts such as Rashid Talukder in Bangladesh. The iconography of resistance grows by the day, and it has been an important vector, contributing to the creativity of subcontinental image makers who may or may not self-identify as cultural nomads, their visualizations an organic means of seeing the world, being in the world, and inscribing the world.
Many worlds within and outside Delhi are under threat of being erased. In the 1980s, I would find myself on the steps of the city’s iconic modernist buildings, such as the arts hub Triveni Kala Sangam, designed by Joseph Allen Stein, built in 1963. The modernist legacies of such constructions in the country have been captured by a handful of pioneering photographers, including Madan Mahatta, Lucien Hervé, and Werner Bischof. Mahatta’s documentation of the buildings— which highlight revolutionary architects of that era who used local materials and occasionally amalgamated American and German cultural strands, as suggested by the architecture critic Kaiwan Mehta—is increasingly resonant as the present government is destroying many iconic edifices in a grievously misplaced, myopic bid to further “modernize.” “Nationalism diminishes us, because . . . its principal human activity is war,” states Stein. Perhaps the internationalism of the mid-1950s that he was a part of in India must now be read against the backdrop of a larger community experience, and the uncertain future of urban heritage that is seen or indicated in Mehta’s piece through the work of Rajesh Vora and Akshay Mahajan.
Contemporary practice also leans on postindependence modernist trajectories in the visual arts that fostered interdisciplinary initiatives such as the Vision Exchange Workshop (VIEW), founded in Bombay (now Mumbai) between 1969 and 1972, which brought together painters, filmmakers, a cinematographer, an animator, a psychoanalyst, and the resident artist, Krishen Khanna. VIEW provided resources such as books, slides, and cameras, editing and projection facilities, a darkroom, and an etching press. It was a unique creative space in India that supported multimedia art based on aesthetic and conceptual collaborations among skilled exponents in various fields. Simultaneously, in print culture, we saw the rise of certain image- rich publications, particularly the Illustrated Weekly of India, explored in an essay by Sabeena Gadihoke as one of the first magazines available in the subcontinent. Designed in accordance with trends in international magazines, the Weekly featured news, analysis, commentary, and photo-essays as well as articles on popular culture. Priding itself on its role in developing a progressive public sphere, it followed a formal pictorial aesthetic even while it supported photojournalism.
The Pictorialist tradition was established by many regrettably under-acknowledged artists, including the virtuoso O. P. Sharma, whose work is included here with an essay by Diva Gujral. Sharma was also the founder of the India International Photographic Council, in 1983. The genre persisted in India postindependence and in South Asia through the numerous camera clubs and hobbyist associations that are still active today, and can also be seen in newer initiatives such as Film Foundry in Nepal. Sharma’s early experimental images that deviate from the pictorial are juxtaposed in this issue with more recent stark, dissenting counternarratives. Uzma Mohsin uses montage to layer images of the human actors protesting for their beliefs with textual evidence of claims and counter-claims surrounding these events, which occur within an intensifying ethos of toxic supremacist hate speech, erasure of civil liberties, and punitive crushing of dissent.
Ishan Tankha depicts the antigovernment, leftist, rural Naxal movement of the late 1960s through humanist images of its comrades taken from 2007 to 2015. Tankha’s images also point to recent moves by the state to attack, imprison, and subjugate the newly identified, present-day “urban Naxal.” Activist energies, and different forms of forensic yet poetic analysis, also manifest in the grounded work of Sheba Chhachhi, the contributions of Sunil Gupta, and the images of Aditi Jain, who all explore the construction of feminism and queer identities and lend voice to the censored, the cast down, the silenced.
My interest in learning from contemporary regional practices and lens-based artists began a decade ago through PIX, an exhibition and publishing initiative for visual discourses from or about South Asia. Anshika Varma’s focus on artist collectives in the broader South Asian region underscores how diverse artistic collaborations become a means of crossing frontiers and cultures—especially when current political tensions make those actual journeys difficult or impossible. These collectives raise questions about South Asian identity at a time of mass separation, uprooting, and exile, and hence, the very meaning of so-called national identities and related conflicts.
Varma’s contribution is also indicative of important festivals in the region—Chobi Mela, Photo Kathmandu, Chennai Photo Biennale, and Yangon Photo Festival, among others—that manage, against serious odds, to systematically document the simultaneous reification and expansion of the local, the domestic, and the Indigenous. These events and institutions can be read alongside earlier histories, such as those of the contested and short-lived biennials of photography that were organized by the Lalit Kala Akademi (National Academy of Art), in and outside the city, in 1989 and then 1993.
Courtesy the artist
The thematic trajectories encountered in this issue are both internal and external, abstract and intimate, as seen in the work of Srinivas Kuruganti, who focuses on South Asian diasporic communities in the United States. A continuing exploration of the interpersonal is also seen in the flourishing genre of photobooks—even unpublished ones such as Gulmehar Dhillion’s anti-Sikh riot diary of 1984—and is further discussed by Deepali Dewan in conversation with Indu Antony and Kaamna Patel, who present the entanglements of memory as well as sociopolitical critiques. This form is increasingly oriented toward shaping a more inclusive political imaginary and hospitable, yet complicated, definitions of home and community—profound connections of which are seen in imagery from the protests at Shaheen Bagh in Delhi by Prarthna Singh, which mark the ever-fraught identity politics of an outdated “nationalism,” and harness the revolutionary embrace of shared solidarities. And they also make me consider the hallowed space of publications brought out by Yaarbal Books around Kashmir’s past and present, including Witness: Kashmir 1986–2016, Nine Photographers (2017), edited by Sanjay Kak, and Cups of Nun Chai (2020) by Alana Hunt.
While the photograph is usually thought of as a concluded moment, the theorist Ariella Azoulay asserts that photography is an ongoing event that is “subject to a unique form of temporality— it is made up of an infinite series of encounters.” The images in this issue invite our continued engagement and encourage us to contemplate events happening elsewhere. But what is it that we, as image makers, as participants, or as spectators, ultimately encounter in photographs? At a time when Delhi, as other cities and towns in India, has experienced the devastating effects of pandemic through another shattering surge—drone footage of overcrowded and ad hoc crematoriums; floating, abandoned bodies in the Ganga river; a government in denial about the scale and cause of mortality and the appalling lack of beds, oxygen, and ventilators—one may scrutinize, yet again, the true nature of images being relayed day after day.
The visuals we generate embed “event horizons” that reveal the multiple dimensions of the “real.” And so, whatever our location, we might agree that, in myriad ways, lens-based practices serve as an uncompromising reminder of our finitude as well as our plenitude, in this or any other “age of blindness.”
This essay and photographs originally appeared in Aperture magazine, issue 243, “Delhi: Looking Out/Looking In.”
