At first, you might mistake the image for a stage. The structural logic of the shamiana – three-sided, made of vividly coloured red, ochre and green canvas, and open on the fourth – creates the illusion of a recessed, room-like space, crowded with many actors, in short, a stage. What you see, however, is a site of dharna or a sit-in where the figures milling around, mostly women, veiled or with head covered, are staging a protest for better wages, the fulfilment of the promise of MGNREGA, and the implementation of speedier and more equitable laws.
The location could be interchangeable – from Singhu border on the edge of Delhi to Shaheen Bagh to Bhim in Rajasthan – but in every case, the workers’ presence speaks of a churn and an insistent message for change.
Aban Raza speaks back to history. Impressively tall at nearly six feet, she appears to tread decisively between the conflicted, moving parts of present-day North Indian polity, recording unresolved and festering issues. We, the viewers, grapple with the images as signifiers of documentary record, historic intervention and a painterly idiom that appears both intimate and impersonal.
Who are these women, veiled and usually never seen in unregulated congregations? What does it take for them to step out from the encircling arm of patriarchy within their homes to gather and make a demand from an invisible justice system? Who is listening?
In the eight paintings on view in Nothing Human is Alien to Me, there is a startling oscillation that makes the images palpable and proximate. Raza stages both death in its violent throes and scenes of protest with their seething vitality. The links are there for the viewer to make, drawing as much from the subcontinent’s long history of protest movements as from current images on social media or as news items buried in the inner pages of newspapers.
Over the past 150 years, the subcontinent has thrown up many terms for rupture in the public sphere: strike, bandh, hartal, dharna, gherao, are used to describe street gatherings, marches and lockdowns. The consequence of ensuing chaos on the street, of bheedbhadakka, afra tafri, halla bol, chakka jam, stampede, lathi charge, and increasingly, police “encounters” in which suspects are eliminated, have a sickening rerun throughout the history of public protest.
Implicated in these gatherings, then, is conflict with state machinery and acts of reprisal; the crescendo-like climax of a protest and its gradual fading away from public memory.
At the time of writing, Getty Photos has documented 209,465 scenes of protest in India; this is a figure that changes every day. It is perhaps in the painting scenes of resistance and protest, with their commitment to greater equity in resources and recognition that Aban Raza is most articulate. The bright palette and seemingly cheerful chaos do not disguise the latent intent behind the paintings: of depicting social upheaval or inviting an attitude of protest.
Workers on strike find a corelative in an earlier work on women labouring under the hot sun on Rajpath – both are symptoms of a dystopian state machinery and its stolid indifference to the needs of labour. It is also that part of her practice to which she has brought the most comprehensive painterly resources. In modern Indian painting, the scene of protest or uprising is scant.
Some celebrated examples are Chittoprosad’s work on the Royal Indian Navy’s mutiny of 1946, the endlessly photographed processions and marches during the Quit India movement, or the heraldic sculptures of artists like DP Roychoudhury, which present another India in another time.
The present paintings draw from a matrix of social concerns – the shrinking state cover for disempowered groups as they slip through the safety net, the unrealised prices for crops for farming communities, pending labour law reforms, and the upsurge of public response to citizens’ rights under laws like the Citizenship Amendment Act.
Yet these works stand in a space of their own, recognisable through the photo-documentation of events. Comparable perhaps to Vikrant Bhise’s painting of the Dalit exegesis of our time, Aban Raza’s paintings stand at a distance from the broad spectrum of art being produced at present.
Nothing Human is Alien to Me will be on display at, Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke in New Delhi until December 15.
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