When was modernism geeta

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See Venniyoor, ibid. For an overall idea see Mildred and W. Difficulties of business forced the Varma brothers to sell the press p.

See Venniyoor, Raja Ravi Varma, pp. Marcus, University of California Press, Berkeley, , p. The text reclaims, through its severally replayed discourse, the absent subject in conjunction with the question of praxis; it makes subject and history properly partisan within a larger utopian project. Taking himself as primary material Ghatak puts himself on screen as the principal actor, demonstrating how a subject is formed by his emphatic presence IIIus.

And the sensuous mobility, the plasticity of his body-presence is rich material for the purpose. Both aspects function in a historical dimension so that while a sheer This essay was first presented at a conference, Third Cinema, organized by the Edinburgh Film Festival at Edinburgh, in In the sense that the author enacts 'his life', ]ukti is a mockautobiography.

However, as it calls into play evidence from the symmetrically composed but alternative histories that have been condensed into the fictive character, the effect is to turn the confessional, nearly nihilist strain of the narrative into an ideological testimony of the subjectivity at stake. In jukti Ghatak makes the invisible and therefore covertly manipulative voice of the author expressly visible by acting in the film, and moreover by acting the role of a historical twin called Nilkantha Bagchi.

In this sense the authorial voice comes to us in double register but for that very reason its hold is loosened.

Once provided with a body the author is available for anatomical operation; the various pitches, the strains and stresses of the voice can be didactically laid out and examined. So that if ever there was an ideal author-subject that asked, like a metaphysical voiceover, 'Who is it who thus lives and dies?

But for that very reason it is also invested with a more concrete immanence within the historical realm. Ghatak's play along the author-actor--character equation is thus a kind of hermeneutic exercise: he is interpreting for his own generation metaphysical questions that have a historical function. There is, in other words, the testimony of Ghatak as author with a means through his art of interrogating his lived history, and of Ghatak as the protagonist of a contemporary story who recounts in third-person narrative a tragic destiny.

The projective ego of Ghatak is undone in the full equation. It becomes a signifier in the orbit of an overarching historicity held up by the two intentionalities of author and character. Both belong to the first adult generation after Indian independence.

Both examine narratively the choices of the Indian left. Ritwik Ghatak's biography is marked by a lifelong relationship with the communist movement and with its cultural front to which a large number of intellectuals and artists owed allegiance until the mids.

Simply signposting the context, we should note his reckoning from the left position of the national struggle culminating in the simultaneous declaration of Indian independence and the tragic partition of the nation on communal grounds; his deeply sceptical evaluation of the gains of Indian independence in the hands of what he would call a bourgeois-landlord ruling party; and finally his anguish at the disarray and sectarianism of the Communist Party from the s onwards.

When he made ]ukti in he was at the end of his tether and his health was failing him. But he was astute enough to realize. To this purpose he became madly energetic, proving the degree to which he was engaged with contemporary politics. But more importantly the degree to which his intellect and his Articulating the Self in History imagination had internalized the dialectic, so that his desperate testimony was also ultimately a project for the future.

Jukti, along with trying to pose the correct political choices, works out the problematic of praxis. This is, as we shall see, the explicit note on which the film ends.

About ]ukti Ghatak said the following: Which is the correct way? Society is a complex phenomenon and it sho-uld be tackled with great judiciousness. Multiple trends and tendencies cross each other continuously. The problem is which one to choose, and how to go about it. I have emphasized that the genesis of all our present-day problems is that great betrayal, the so-called Independence.

But I did not specify the current phase as strictly neo-colonial. I can visualize only tv. If you are aware of German youth during , you will understand the tensions in our present-day youngsters, fast turning into lumpens. The entire structure is crumbling down and I believe that some drastic turn is bound to come soon.

And although democracy was restored in Ghatak died in Ghatak's prophecy about the lumpenization, indeed the continued brutalization of Indian political life can be said to have been borne out. Alternative cinema, with some of its major practitioners coming from the third world, has battled to represent imperialism, hunger and the preconditions of praxis.

Ramachandran, Gieve Patel and Bikash Bhattacharjee. By the end of the s an affiliation was formed with what was at the time the School of London after R.

This move also tried to take into account the lost phases of twentieth-century art: Mexican muralism, German new objectivity, American regionalism. That is to say, all those artists left in the wide margins of the twentieth century that a too-narrow definition of modernism ignores. The narrative move activated the strong traditions in Indian art itself, including its revived version in the nationalist period. At this juncture K. Parodying as well the ideologies of the popular, he slipped over the cusp-beyond modernism-and made a decisive new space for Indian art.

This was extended by subversive tugs in social and sexual directions in the hands of an artist like Bhupen Khakhar. A reconfiguration also took place of the realist, the naive and the putatively postmodernist forms of figuration. Indian art, even as it ideologized itself along older progressivist terms, came in line with a selfconsciously eclectic and annotated pictorial vocabulary.

To the traditions of K. Subramanyan and Bhupen Khakhar add Gulammohammed Sheikh, and we can see how these artists moved via pop art into a representational excess of signs to renegotiate several traditions at once.

By its transgressions what is retroactively called the postmodern impulse opens up the structure of the artwork, too-neatly placed within the high culture of modern India.

The new narrators rattle the bars of national tradition and let out the parodic force suppressed within it. Prominent among them are women artists of a figurative turn. Arpita Singh Illus. These artists introject a subjectivity that is existentially pitched but does not devolve into the currently celebrated schizophrenic freedoms. Gender interventions come to mean that the narrated self is inscribed into Left: 22Sudhir Patwardhan, Ceremony, Right: 23Bhupen Khakhar, In a Boat, Above right: 26Jogen Chowdhury, Nati Birodin , For there is always in our unresolved modernity and in our postmodern retroaction the haunting need to release a repressed consciousness, and in the case of the more politically inclined artists, to introduce a mode of intervention.

It is this last moment figured brilliantly in the writings of Theodor Adorno that is hard to relinquish: the notion of the aesthetic as subversive, a critical interest in an otherwise instrumental world. Now, however, we have to consider that this aesthetic space too is eclipsed-or rather that its criticality is largely illusory and so instrumental. Krishnakumar who committed i suicide in Illus. Their mode of intervention and how they pitch themselves into the practice and discourse of radicalism make an exemplary story terminally situated in the project of modernism.

It is often argued that the anti aesthetic in the rnodern-postmodern Above: 29 K. Krishnakumar withunfinished sculptures, This is the position of the third cinema protagonists, the crisis in modernism itself being attributed to revolt by cultures outside the west. We also know for a fact that black ideologues and feminists have found the possibility of conceptualizing a far greater degree of freedom through an understanding of postmodernism, through an understanding of the operations of power in relation to which their own art activity is inevitably positioned.

This has to do, as Hal-Foster points out, with a critical deconstruction of tradition, not an instrumental pastiche of pop or pseudo-historical forms, with a critique of origins, not a return to them. In short it [postmodernism] seeks to question rather than exploit cultural codes, to explore rather than conceal social and political affiliations.

P At this point it becomes more than a polemical strategy to say that with the advent of the postmodern there is a release of new productivity in India and that it provides a relief from Indian modernism developing according to its so-called inner logic. It is worth noting, therefore, that this entire discourse might mean something quite precise within a continuum of Indian art: strongly imagist and almost always covertly symbolic, Indian art may have already come into crisis through the too-easily assimilated modernist principle of metaphoricity.

Not so in India. With the market entering Indian art practice on an institutional plane the factor of commodification is firmly on hand. In fact Indian artists may be nearer than they know or acknowledge to postmodernist kitsch through 'instrumental pastiche' and exploitation of 'cultural codes'. In India, now, one may find a mock-surreal confrontation between the protagonists of the real as against those of the simulacra over the live body of the modern-a confrontation to claim the very sublime that Lyotard attributes to the postmodern avantgarde.!

Which is why, in place of Lyotard's illusory account of transcendence, the term 'interference' may be more correct. For myself I hope to find affinities for Indian art beyond the simulacra and towards a historically positioned aesthetic. There is an attempt at a radically different ordering of the part to the whole so nor that the different ordering of the relationship between metaphor and metonymy is worked out as a form of 'cognitive mapping'. The conditions of ace hypostasis are staged precisely to resist the unadmitted stasis of the commodified image.

Thus the image that Shahani so sumptuously nurtures as a cinematic privilege, or rather as cinema's privileging of the imagist realm that constitutes the unconscious itself, this image is made profoundly ironic in its very beauty in films such as Tarang and Kasba Ground Realities At this juncture I would like to reverse the argument.

We do not, in the third world, have command of the mechanisms that may be used to undo the terms of this reified culture which offers so many seductions.

But it subsumes nevertheless the politics of actual difference based on class, race, gender into a meta discourse of the one world order rivalling, despite its protestations to the contrary, any global hegemony sought or established by the modern.

All this is further contextualized by the fact that India has now been pulled into the logic of multinational capitalism, a fact only lately declared and now openly celebrated.

The Indian government now puts out posters showing a great elephant breaking free of his chains. It is not clear whether the elephant is the people, an artists the nation, the state, or the big bourgeoisie, but perhaps that is the whole point. There is this deliberately conflated representation of an Indian identity hitherto signified ore than entirely, even defensively, in nationalist terms, terms that are now seen as fetters.

It seeks the disintegration not only of socialism but also of postcolonial national formations. Below: 32N. Rimzon, The Inner Voice, ism as such. Especially as the neoimperialism of the west is happy to let reactionary nationalisms thrive--on the basis of fundamentalism, violence, territorial fracture.

Within the first world plurality is nothing more than liberal tolerance and neoethnicity is another face of antisocialism. It needs to be said that painfully wrought nations in the third world cannot be subsumed in that discourse.

And how shall we oppose the collectivities forged in the name of the holy by the e. In an age of political retrenchment it may be useful to place nostalgia for socialism to the fore and designate it as properly symbolic.