South Asia as Affliation and Aspiration

TAKE ON ART . SOUTH ASIA. ISSUE 30 . MARCH 2023 Chaitanya Sambrani SOUTH ASIA AS AFFILIATION AND ASPIRATION Over the previous decade, the category South Asian has been instrumentally deployed in art historical discussions with increasing frequency. Some increase in the incidence of the term is attributable to energetic discussions surrounding the long hangover of colonialism,even as the concept originates partly as a legacy of the British Empire, and partly in US-centric strategic policy in the Asia-Pacific. In these respects, it is important that South Asia only attains cogency and value alongside similar categories in other parts of the Asian region, most particularly Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, it is probable that most individuals—including artists—living on the subcontinent think of themselves as Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Nepali, Indian, or Sri Lankan, before they identify as South Asian. The numerical and economic prominence of immigrant communities from the region in the UK, USA and other Anglophone developed economies underlies the enhanced currency and visibility of the term South Asian in art historical discourse. In such contexts, the adjective South Asian allows for a more tractable and less fractious address in terms of public pronouncements, and constructions of audiences and constituencies, than would be the case if individual countries of origin were to be named. Public institutions including art/history museums find it necessary and useful to address themselves to South Asians rather than to audiences of Indian/Pakistani/ Bangladeshi/Sri Lankan, etc., ancestry, even as the collective appellation serves to disguise if not ameliorate histories of conflict and distrust that continue to make themselves apparent across the region. 44 For museums displaying the art of the South Asian region, it remains important to highlight that the naming of certain objects, processes, etc., as being South Asian is conventionally relevant rather than being absolutely independent or self-evident. Despite (or perhaps because of) geographical factors such as mountainous and oceanic boundaries, South Asian artistic traditions have been enriched by significant relationships with other parts of Asia (West, Southeast, East Asia). Such relationships are both formative to the art history of the region, and informative in understanding the art on display. The history of pre-modern art traditions gives evidence of South Asia having played a dual position, as crucible and as crossroads. South Asian traditions of art, together with their religious, philosophical, and aesthetic impulses, have both impelled and in turn, been galvanised by currents from directly contiguous regions as well as further afield. The case with contemporary art can be somewhat different: at the institutional level, the discursive and exhibitionary apparatuses for contemporary art do not always feel compelled to highlight the South Asian-ness of the work of artists or groups. Meanwhile, among artists, it is often the case that a particular individual’s relationships to specific aspects of local and international art histories and art worlds are more significant than their affiliation to a “South Asian” way of seeing, being or making. It is relatively less frequent, though by no means unknown, to see institutions, curators, or individual artists to deploy South Asian as an epistemological, conceptual or ideological framework for a Chaitanya Sambrani is an art historian and curator specialising in histories of modern and contemporary art especially in South and Southeast Asia. He is Associate Professor at the School of Art and Design, Australian National University, Canberra, and serves as Curatorial Advisor (Asian Art) at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. given work or exhibition. The deployment of South Asian does not seem to occur with greater frequency than that of other affiliations. One area in which artistic practice situates itself in explicitly regionalist modes is that of figurative image-making (across painting, sculpture, printmaking, digital media, etc.), especially where references to tradition are conceptually integral to the practice. In such cases, the presence of iconographic, stylistic or material characteristics cognizable across national boundaries and salient in regional terms, can overtly declare a sense of belonging to or springing from a South Asian historical background. Artists working after various traditions of miniature painting, or those that make direct reference to cartographic representations and systems, or those that cite particular iconographic principles and types, are more or less explicitly situated within a South Asian sphere of origin and/or affiliation. As a category of affiliation and of solidarity, South Asia is inseparably linked to the Global South. According to World Bank data, all South Asian countries apart from the Maldives, Sri Lanka and Bhutan have a per capita GDP of less than 10,000 USD per annum. Most of the South Asian population lives in relative poverty. Notwithstanding this lived reality, it is relatively rare to see contemporary art practice explicitly aligning itself with the ideological dimensions of belonging in/to the Global South. The major exception here is work of activist and interventionist artists and the curatorial discourse surrounding such activity. There is a level of inevitability here inasmuch as affiliations to the Global South necessarily imply a critique of established structures of representation, power and patronage. Artists and curators working within these structures have relatively little incentive and/ or opportunity to embark upon such a critique. And again, the ongoing attrition of oppositional spaces in the name of national unity and pride militates against the possibilities of expression that privilege an internationalism affiliated with Third World/ Global South positioning. As an increasingly visible trope in art, culture and identity today, it may be that South Asia offers an alternative to the restrictions of national affiliation/nationalism. Identifying particular art practices and exhibitions as South Asian rather than Indian or Bangladeshi may well insulate them from the strictures and compulsions of national belonging. Such aspirational identification may also offer opportunities to work across artistic traditions as well as organisational systems and structures of representation, dissemination, and patronage. However, such deployment of South Asian-ness must always be accompanied by a realisation of the history of the category, and an awareness of its coevalness with other classifications, affiliations and aspirations. 45