ESSAY

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Excavating the History of the Present

Savi Savarkar’s art is political and provocative. He questions the established order of ‘brahminical’ art production, proliferation and consumptions. Having Ambedkarite ideology on caste and class issues as his driving force, Savi has been working towards establishing a visual language of his own for the last few years. Y.S.Alone, theoretician and art historian analyse the politics and aesthetics involved in Savi’s works.

Human figure has been the most consistent form of expression for centuries of artistic practices across diverse cultures. It has been centre of experimentation particularly since modernism when traditional ways of articulations have been questioned and new ways of unifying figure in the picture space have become a norm. How does modernism that enters India under the aegis of colonial modernity inform pictorial formulations that were acceptable and entered into public spaces? The very training process in the art school, inherited from the colonial times disallows questions raised about the social identity of the model in a life study.

The artistic endeavours are located in the midst of modernism in the realm of liberty that chose to become a silent spectator towards evolving such pictorial signifiers that defy conventional set of standards of judgments in their thematic context. Aesthetic formulations in the country function at twin plane: a) Conventional ways of articulated meaning as well as its understanding based on the conventional notion of beauty, b) the shaping of perception in the backdrop of caste considerations. Thus visual language gets so much bounded that the notion of modernity which, though it consists of notion of democratic equality, functions well within hierarchy and therefore traditional bondages attached with society and its functioning operate within the well orchestrated power of dominance.

To get legitimacy from the social high caste, visual language functions like bonded labor to articulate the voice of power of domination rather than to represent the possibilities of no social boundaries and a narrowly self imposed code of rules to define the aesthetic values that have been in circulation for a considerable period of time. The most pertinent question raised in this regard is- what are the possibilities of figure expressions engaged in multiple reflections; representing figure engaged in pain, sorrow and abject poverty. ‘Sensualism’ of the physical body has always been the centre of attention of many artists. However, there are some who deliberately avoided the sensualism of the unclothed female bodies to focus outward into the stark encounters in which the situational condition of variedness in the topography of the expression of hidden realities come out into the open. Sensuous body has been avoided as a part of one’s own self-conscious project to establish legitimacy in the gravity of existence. But such attempts never considered the central issue of caste-based realities. Conventional acceptability to appease one’s own optical vision as well as that of beholders, have been in practice to arouse sensualism represented through the female body, the body may be sculpted and may not be very sculpted in its curves and protrusions but has a definite leaning to create element of pleasure.
 
Savi Savarkar not only challenges such conventional notions of figure representations of  the female body but also brings-in ‘caste’ in the pictorial language as self-introspecting  individual, who belongs to a social group that witnessed the pain of discrimination in the form of ‘untouchability’ and numerous inhuman practices that have been inflicted on the depressed classes of  society. The way, in which the prevailing pedagogic practices in art schools and the gallery conventions operate within the framework of industrial capitalism, conventional visual signifiers based on the brahmanic mythology carry on this mindset extending to the practice and taste of art collection and forming a conjunction with the art school and the art gallery, duplicates dominant in the society.

The notion of individual has been constantly argued as the most liberating ideology of modernism in the way it opens up ways to question traditional practices.  However, unless one addresses the question of one’s own location in terms of class and caste, of the artist, art critic or the art historian, the interrogative potential of modernism cannot be realized.

Savi has been making sincere attempts to break from social hierarchy by exploring conditionality of pathetic living, allowing his medium to build images that are extremely hard-hitting. The body of work he has produced involved multiple layers of thought process which no other painter yet dared to venture. His forms have definite time-space delineating the contemporary as well as distant past loaded through certain symbolism that have been constructed in the process of ongoing historical time. Image representation is part of time reference rooted in past and present. Female body has always been subject of depictions in which the focus has been its sensuality. However, Savi goes beyond such accepted conventions. For him, the body is no less sensual but by bestowing on the female body marks of her caste identity, Savi makes visible the historical dimension of how a particular female body acquires sensuality becoming an object of sexual and social exploitation. While feminist interventions have also raised similar concerns via the male gaze, they have been steeped in the class inequalities. However, Savi, despite being a male painter, articulates a retake on the female nude by foregrounding the caste based inequalities. Translating caste based sexuality into pictorial codes to convey the abject condition of the Dalit woman and how this condition is given a “divine” sanction is part of Savi’s pictorial agenda.

But is it a simple narrative to address the issues of poverty and tradition of devdasi via the cult of the sacred prostitution? Perhaps a person who has no reference to the existence of such a tradition in the Indian society may find it difficult to accept and may consider as ‘imaginative’. Imagination is part of innovative productive process to articulate pictorial narrative. Savi’s imagination is grounded in history to articulate complex interplay between caste and caste based hierarchies to understand and expose the barbaric practices of exploitation.

Deploying frontality, Savi methodically compels the viewer to face the protagonist. The idea is not to create subjective metaphors that make sense only to the artist but to draw from common symbols and shared public memory to critique the hegemonic order. “After their use of body by the so called templewallas, they are sold for a few thousands in the Mumbai red-light area”, observes Savi. Driven by the experience of being part of the society that faced exploitations and social exclusion, Savi absorbs the pain and hence there is no attempt on his part to aestheticise the female body; as for the fact that social exclusion and stigma of untouchability in the pictorial conventions can not be compromised in the name of beauty. ‘Caste’ as aesthetic signification plays an important role on the pictorial surface of Savi’s paintings and graphics.

Depicting faces from front and side views embedded in certain symbolism indeed requires us to understand their literary forms of references which Savi has evolved by sheer observations and usages in the actual practices well embedded in their historical context. Heaviness in the face, torso, lower limbs schemed in the manner of generic compositions against colored areas has distinctness of commendable draughtsman-ship that has been involved through series of life sketches. His involvement with drawing has been so intense that it becomes like an industrial production but such stage was achieved after making his own iconography.  The body of symbols is created by the very process by which the enunciation ceremonies are performed and the way then Devdasi has to live a secluded life.

All that cultural nationalism has led to is vandalism of some works of art in the name of morality but it has never ever initiated any process to sensitize the lower-castes about their condition and their exclusion from cultural practices. Emulating Phule’s notion of knowledge and power and Ambedkar’s ideas of alternative cultural practices, Savi deconstructs the very premises of the Brahmanical philosophy. As for instance, the use of red/vermillion as kumkum which among the upper caste symbolized chastity of married women acquires contrary meaning when used by the devdasis. The practice of applying such kumkum on the face never departs even after coming to the urban prostitution zone. Thus despite change of location of operation, the conditionality of practices becomes integral part of the life of Devdasi. Despite urban living and influences, Savi argues that the urbanized environment does not torment the age-old traditional conventions and practices of subjugations to an extent that caste functions as a suppressed reality. Highly stylized simplistic images with forceful lines either in the singular or in a group of twos or threes are articualted to denote systemic oppressions in the educated as well as uneducated urban as well as rural societies.

As paradigmatic of marginalized bodies, the Jogtas assume centrality as castrated bodies. The process by which they are created show the poverty of an intellectual class that can not even raise a voice against a voiceless.  His Jogtas’ imprint on our sense perception makes their own self-existence as naked social realities.

As castrated being, the jogtas and the Devdasis share common condition and hence are shown together. When shown singly, the jogtas are loaded with the same passivity as that of Devdasis. It is interesting to observe that Jogtas dressed like Devdasis and put large kumkum on their forehead which Savi transform into a dense color bloc articulating human situation. His drawings, despite being synoptic in presentation cover a range of their situational location, merge into surroundings of their own.

Why is Savi obsessed with the single figures? Because Savi himself is a loner in his attempts to paint what others think as ‘other’ or an out-caste despite being part of the modernity. Savi challenges such single-minded assumptions and fights for his own space in the art-world which too has been successfully following the Brahmanical cultural nationalism. Savi prefers to draw instantly, soon after his observations or having met the real protagonist. It is these set of rules which made him to travel through troubled areas of Karnataka, Maharashtra and Gujarat for keen observations and to make record of such people in his own iconographic conventions. Drawings of a women whose life was tormented during the post-Godhara riots in Gujarat is highly distinctive in its own right bearing weight of her own conditionality and living with some positive hopes because her relatives were murdered during riots. Emphasizing the nature of humanness in the topography of hierarchical caste-structure, no fictive thinking is invested to create the images of daily life.

What makes Savi to break narrative into synoptic symbolism is to shatter certain assumption of celebrating the idea of visual pleasure. In a vertical and horizontal social space ‘celebration’ of joy gets imprecise as no other elements in his syntactical structure interlude to create any misnomer for suppressing the identity of image. Manu and images of Brahmins, for example, are among his most volatile works. Despite being historical categories, they are referred to as contemporary and still deeply informing society today. Depicting Manu and a pundit in the pictorial space with heavy black brush strokes against the foreground of either red, yellow or any other color, are projected as systemic opposites to the non-vedic cultural practices and philosophy that is deeply rooted in Ambedkar’s writings.

While Ambedkar was the first one to make extensive critique of Manu and deconstructed his writing as part of his intellectual project, on the other hand, Savi chooses to demystify the aura around Manu by aligning him with Nazi like characters. Stark contrasts are used to make image a grotesque reality, greed and cruelty. It may be recalled that image of Manu was installed in front of the Rajasthan High Court, thus symbolizing how the process of modernist project of Gandhi-Nehruvian nationalism can percolate to establish and legitimize the celebration of Manu in the contemporary India. Savi’s Manus are identical with the ideas of Manu controlling the governing polity and economy. By de-mystifying the image of Manu and a Brahman, Savi shifts the focus on the nature of conditionality controlled by series of impositions and systemic injection of ritualistic ideas by devising the relation between the ground and the actual figure.

While redefining the iconography of Manu, Savi intrudes into the foray of the symbolic order of the dominant since ages. Through the forceful entry he makes into this hereto forth guarded territory, his interventions into the symbolic order challenges the age-old hegemony rooted in graded inequality. In short, he redefines monumentality by giving visibility to those who were considered outside the pale of pictorial representation.

How does Savi address the symbolic order of the chatur varna system or the four fold caste system?  Drawing upon the personal and collective consciousness and relating with   experiences grounded in the shadows of oppression where survival with dignity becomes fundamental issue, he probes into the genesis of the varna and caste. Although the idea is just not merely to project of the existing order, but to urge us through formal distortions, to re-imagine an alternative order. In such cases, it is the dynamism of line combined with energy released through formal juxtaposition that expressed his cynicism as well as a utopian vision about a better future.

Ever since his training at the art school in Baroda, Savi has been constantly engaged in searching a language of potentialities to device his pictorial strategies to address the issue of ‘caste’ on the pictorial surface. His unperturbed involvement enabled him to go into the past to depict the symbols of broom hanging at the back and a sputum-pot hanging around neck, dead animal on the shoulders etc. Such signs became his immediate tools to make human figure more powerful to express his own inner-self. Though he paints such images rarely, nevertheless it has opened up many other possibilities to think differently, aiming to hit at the theoretical formulations that have gone into making of the very structure of Indian society, thus he arrived at ‘Foundation of India’. Many figures bear identical look. Their specificity is conveyed through surrounding symbolic forms like Masjid, books, temple, crow, begging bowl, bells etc.

Communalism has been a very burning issue in the contemporary society and yet Savi has refused to paint images of communal riots. He views communalism as the underside of Brahmanical hegemony and to view riots as based on religious divide alone is to get duped by misrecognition propagated by the mainstream discourse.

The pictorial form of the figurative deployed minimally through gestural strokes and that can stand in for different types of marginality cutting across gender divide has lent a structural simplicity to his works and allow him to capture the spectator instantly.  The impression we gather out of Savi’s work is that of an excavated history of our own time. Token distinctions between figures, ground and its surrounding are significantly shared by their involvement in the picture space itself. By pictorial quality achieved by the minimalist set of conventions, Savi tries to minimize the narrative as much as possible to capture the phenomenological condition of untouchability.  

The fundamental point of departure is to present ‘caste’ in a declarative sense so as to denounce all claims of the so called self-modernist claims of equality and democracy. In a spirit true to the ideology built by Ambedkar, Savi questions the very claims of a modernist avant guarde that aspires to speak in the name of the marginalized while turning its back to the most political category of our time- the caste system. Many modernists ventured in painting events based on mythological historical events to show adherence to the tradition. It has been done with the tendency of sheer romanicization of past without questioning its graded-inequalities. Such visuals are directed to project the sacredness of tradition in the present hierarchical structures to legitimize the well molded self-centric political positioning located in caste-dominant society. Savi preferred to denounce such conventions and opted to strengthen his position with series of visuals in a true Ambedkarite tradition.