OUTSIDE THE FOLD

Vincent Van Ross.

Shukla Sawant took a pot shot at two divergent issues of historical and social importance in one go with her installations at the Anant Art Gallery captioned “Outside the Fold” which focused on people who were cunningly kept out of the mainstream of the society for social and political reasons. That was her eighth solo show.

In the first set of installations called “Remembering Pandita,” Shukla drew on Pandita Ramabai’s voice of social dissent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries geared towards emancipation of women in India. Pandita’s dissent originating at the local level in Maharashtra was meant to usher in a ripple effect on a national level in India.

The second set of installations titled “Sirop and Desert Island and Other Texts” attempted to unravel the sorry state of indentured labour in Mauritius hidden behind the “Tourist Haven” image projected by imperialist forces. It is the story of how the United States of America and European nations such as France and Great Britain (United Kingdom) used and abused the indigenous people of this island nation even denying them the very status of indigenous people to camouflage their nefarious military activities culminating in conversion of part of Mauritius into a military base (Diego Garcia) for them and for carrying out nuclear explosions. This is a national issue of Mauritius with international repercussions.

Associate Professor of Art History at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi since 2001 and an artist and writer in her own right, Shukla Sawant, exudes in-depth knowledge of, and, remarkable sensitivity towards the two issues she dealt with in the this exhibition.

Before her current assignment with the JNU, Shukla Sawant taught Art History in Jamilia Milia Islamia University for 12 years. She was also an active member of Shilpa Chakra, an artist group which co-oridnated its artistic activities from its office at Shankar Market in New Delhi.

For the first section entitled ‘Remembering Pandita,’ Shukla Sawant draws inspiration from the writings of Gauri Vishwanathan and Uma Chakravarthi. In fact, the theme of this exhibition was borrowed from Gauri Vishwanathan’s book entitled, “Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity and Belief.”

Shukla uses three ‘Ek Vastras’ i.e., typical Marathi saris in maroon and brown (one end of which are knotted into braids), pealed hands, books on bookshelf, images of feet in shackles, glass sculptures of books, scissors used for making screens for screen printing together with the audio effect of a printing press in operation as idioms to represent Pandita Ramabhai and the causes she stood for.

Youngest daughter of social reformer Anant Shastri Dongre, Pandita Ramabai (1852-1922), stormed the male bastion of religious incantations and narration by learning Sanskrit and Puranic stories from her father who was a Chitpavan Brahmin. This amounted to violation of religious restrictions which prevented women from doing so. While the scholars in Calcutta were impressed with her achievement and honoured her by bestowing the titles ‘Saraswati’ and ‘Pandita’ which were reserved for very learned people, the society at large rejected her and attempted to choke her voice of reason. Ramabai was the first women to be honoured with these titles.

In spite of being a high caste Hindu Brahmin, Pandita Ramabai, dared to marry a low caste ‘Shudra’ named Bipin Behari Medhvi who died after two years at a young age leaving her a widow at 23 with a girl child. Thereafter, she converted to Christianity and studied abroad focusing on the ill treatment meted out to widows in India. Later, she opened an ashram called ‘Mukti’ in Pune where widows from all castes could live together. She also set up a printing press with a view to counter literature directed at demeaning women. Pandita also authored two books ‘Stridharma Niti’ and ‘The High Caste Hindu Woman’ and translated the Bible into Marathi.

Shukla’s installations focus mainly on the singlehanded crusade of Ramabai against gender and caste inequities in the Indian society emanating from and propagated by religious texts. Ramabhai was particularly critical of the chain reaction that followed widowhood and made the lives of widows miserable.

It was Shukla’s prolonged interactions with contemporary artists and academics at the Mahatma Gandhi Institute in Mauritius that motivated her to take up her second project for this exhibition, namely, “Sirop and Desert Islands and Other Texts.” She was particularly influenced by the works of Mala Ramyead , Hans Ramduthnt and Marina Carter on this issue.

Among Shukla’s focus is an atoll of Mauritius in the southern Pacific Mururoa which was used by the French government to conduct 147 underground nuclear tests. The detonators were operated through a shaft that penetrated the volcanic rocks under the atolls resulting in cracks which caused permanent ecological and environmental damage to the area. The French government also sunk the boat with Greenpeace activists as they were opposed to the move.

The largest cluster of islands in the Chagos Archipelago and part of the British Indian Ocean Territory 1,600 km south of India, Diego Garcia, was detached from Mauritius in the 1960s by France and secretly leased to the United Kingdom (UK). The United Kingdom and the United States of America then entered into an agreement in 1971 to set up a joint military base there.

Consequently, the entire population from 65 islands of Diego Garcia numbering some 2,000 was forcibly deported to other islands some 1,200 miles away denying indigenous status to the inhabitants. This forcible depopulation of Diego Garcia ran into controversies. Diego Garcia is now being used as a detention centre for prisoners of war.

The use of slaves as plantation workers perpetuated by the French was replaced by indentured labour when these islands were passed over to the British (UK). While this limited the period of servitude according to the contract, the working conditions as well as modes of punishment remained unchanged. Though coffee and coconut plantations were common in Mauritius, sugar formed the backbone of the Mauritian economy.

Under the British, Mauritius ceased to be a free port. This resulted in a loss of trade. To compensate for this, the British encouraged enhancement of sugar production in Mauritius by bringing the duty on sugar at par with other British colonies in 1825. This gave a boost to sugar production. The output increased from 11,000 tons in 1825 to 21,000 tons in 1826 and, by 1854, it crossed the 100,000 tons mark. And, Mauritius became Britain’s chief sugar-producing colony accounting for 9.4 percent of the world’s total sugarcane production between 1855 and 1859. But, behind the scene, a sordid tale of torture was unfolding for the indentured labour. The hands and legs of the labour were tied and they were punched with fists and kicked around by the new masters. As if that was not enough, the masters lashed them using whips that too after smearing their backs with sirop (sugar paste or syrup) to make the lashing more painful.

Behind the inviting face of a tourist haven that Mauritius was being touted as, it hid stories of inhumanity, cruelty and meanness. Shukla brought this out quite strongly by covering two walls facing each other with postcard sized serigraphs of deck chairs that we find in beaches to represent tourism. Each wall had 11 rows of 24 cards each. On one side of the wall the cards were of blue colour and on the other side the cards were red in colour with white walls in the middle. I do not know if this was intended but blue, red and white are colours of the flags of the USA, the UK and France, the countries that were responsible for ruining these islands.

The other items used for symbolism included whips, sugar, a staircase consisting of sixteen steps filled with sugar, handcuffs, corrugated paper boxes, ropes, photographic images of labour with their hands and legs tied etc. These signify the depots where indentured labour arrived and the cruel treatment meted out to them.

Interestingly, she also placed three scratch cards for visitors to carry home as souvenirs. Now, this is where I admire Shukla’s ingenuity. Like the deck chairs that provided a deceptive front to the nefarious activities that were being carried out behind the scene in Mauritius, each heart-rending story printed on these cards are hidden behind a thick silver coating and the story emerged only after scratching!

In this exhibition, Shukla Sawant has put photography, print-making and sculpture along with readymade items to good use for creating the desired impact. By blending these with background music to create the audio effects of the printing press in “Remembering Pandita” and the bird calls of sea gulls in “Desert Islands and Other Texts,” Shukla Sawant transports us straight to the scenes and time periods of these incidents.

Shukla Sawant’s philosophy of art embraces an interventionist strategy. Her target audience is the middle class. Practicing what she preaches, Shukla makes use of text to explain the co-relation between her exhibits and the issues at hand.

With these installations Shukla Sawant makes an effort to shake up the complacent society and political establishments from their deep slumber by reviving the memories of the dent that Pandita Ramabai inflicted on the Brahmanical patriarchy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which have since been systematically suppressed and also highlighting the other side of moon in Mauritius where the imperial forces used tourism as a front to camouflage the nefarious activities they were carrying out behind the scene.