| When I received the assignment from Dr Meenakshi Gopinath to talk on Post Colonial Art as a Site for Reconciliation, my first instinct was to think automatically of August 1947, and to use the departure of the British as a starting point for my deliberations. Somehow the word 'Colonialism' has become so synonymous with British rule in our subcontinent, that we tend to measure our subsequent growth against their imperial yardstick. |
| If one was to use a different scale, though, to use say a metric span of tens, and hundreds and thousands of years, one would realise that almost of us who belong to this South Asian subcontinent have in fact been colonised at one time or another, by someone or the other, long before the British came. |
| I was a native citizen of Harappa and Moenjodaro long before the Aryans overflowed into the Indus basin. |
| I was a native subject of King Porus long before a Macedonian adventurer Alexander led his army across the mountains of the Hindu Kush into my homeland. |
| As a local, I saw Chandragupta Maurya replace another colonizer Seleucus Nikator. |
| In my area, I witnessed the Edicts of Ashoka being chiselled into the hard granite of boulders that marked the extremity of his empire. |
| As a native fisherman, I watched as the Arab Muhammad bin Qasim waded ashore on the sands of Sindh, causing a tsunami of conversions to another foreign faith. |
| Despite the strength of my beliefs, I could not restrain the hand of Mahmud Ghaznavi at Somnath. |
| I left Sultan Ibrahim to his fate at Panipat and paid homage to the invader Babur. |
| I benefited from the largesse of the Mughals. |
| And I drew with my own hands the Viceregal carriage that transported Lord Mountbatten - the last British Viceroy and the first Indian Governor General - when he finally quit India on 1948. |
| Colonialism here did not begin and end with the British; it was simply perfected here. |
| And so while I recognise that the period of British colonial rule - not simply because of its obsession with documentation - has a greater immediate connection with us as we perceive ourselves today, more often than not through their eyes, I would prefer to examine Post-Colonial art in a wider radial rather than a shorter linear context. |
| Was Art ever a site for reconciliation? I am not sure that it ever was. Gandharan sculptures were designed to evoke submission to a higher force, and awe and reverence and humility in fellow man. The cave paintings in Ajanta and Ellora were made to transport a believing mortal into a stratosphere of apsaras and semi-divinities, not to reconcile him with reality. The muraqqas and the imperial memoirs compiled for the great Mughals described the grandeur of their court, depicted their magnificence, extolled their majesty. The Babur-nama, the Akbar-nama, the Jahangir-nama, and the Shahjahan-nama if anything documented violence rather than reconciliation. |
| [Extract. For the complete text, see Wne Bush Comes to Shoveio And yet, within all those oysters, one can occasionally find some pearls, some pure unblemished acts of reconciliation. For me, one such pearl in three hundred years of Mughal painting is not the graded string of royal chronicles but the unique Razmnama - the Persian translation commissioned by the emperor Akbar of the Mahabharata. |
| Akbar's Muslim subjects probably regarded his choice of a Hindu epic with the same misgivings that the followers of the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten had done when he first advocated the worship of a single God, Amun. To Akbar's Hindu subjects, though, this translation was more than a personal whim. It was a revelation, a revelation and at the same time a reversion of state policy. To us today, it may seem a small act; in its own context, it constituted a giant leap towards interfaith reconciliation. |
| As a theme for my talk today, therefore I would like to examine the need for inter-faith reconciliation through Art, rather than post-Colonial reconciliation. The Buddhists have forgiven the subcontinent for expelling their religion from the land of its birth. The Christians are learning to forgive India for encouraging them to return to Rome or to Canterbury. The three countries in South Asia have forgiven Great Britain its exploitation of the subcontinent. The Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi diaspora is enriching itself at the expense of Britain, just as British nabobs once enriched themselves at the expense of the subcontinent. |
| The need for reconciliation is between those communities who remain in the subcontinent, not with the colonials who quit it. |
| I do not need the massacre of Jallianwala Bagh as a spur to my conscience. I have Operation Blue Star. |
| I do not need the conversion of Aurangzeb's Badshahi Mosque in Lahore as an example of unassuaged desecration. I have the Babri Masjid at Ayodha. |
| I do not need the slaughter of hundred of thousands of my forebears who died defending their soil from rapacious invaders. I have more recent massacres enough to mourn: |
| Those in Kolkata in 1947 when bodies were left in streets to be picked at by vultures who could not distinguish between a Hindu corpse and a Muslim one; |
| Those again in 1947, in East and West Punjab, when a Mortuary Express ran between Amritsar and Lahore; |
| In East Pakistan in 1971, when former compatriots became new enemies, and former enemies became new saviours; |
| In New Delhi, when the assassination by two security guards became the death warrant of innocent Sikhs; |
| In Karachi, where Mohajirs drilled the kneecaps of Sindhis; |
| And most recently in Gujarat, where being a Muslim was not simply a matter of personal conviction, not simply a crime, but a death warrant. |
| And most recently in Gujarat, where being a Muslim was not simply a matter of personal conviction, not simply a crime, but a death warrant. |
| I mention each of these not as taunts, but as a reminder that these horrific acts of violence did occur. They happened once and can happen again. We have deliberately, consciously relegated such memories to the cellars of our minds, like old newspapers that we have no further use for but yet do not want to throw away. What did not happen was any act - public or private - of atonement, of reconciliation, of forgiveness, of artistic remonstrance. |
| What could we have done? I believe that even if we did not have the power to prevent the violence, each one of us - both the protagonist and the victim, both Pontius Pilate and Jesus, both Jahangir and Guru Arjan, both the Nazi and the Jew, the Hindu, Muslim and the Sikh, the artist and his audience, could have done much more to remind ourselves through Art of the inhumanity that we have perpetrated on each other, so that our successors do not repeat our mistakes. |
| By deliberately suppressing memories of our own Exoduses in and out of the Punjab, in and out of the Bengal, we have forgotten our own Holocausts. We have used Art to anaesthetise our consciences, not to arouse them. |
| Interestingly, literature often says what the brush is often reluctant to draw. While there are libraries of published accounts of the traumas of 1947 and of the 1971 war over East Pakistan, there are fewer paintings that illustrate the plight of the East Pakistani Hindus, or of the Biharis, or the 48,000 Pakistani prisoners of war and 45,000 Pakistani civilians held in protective custody by Mrs Gandhi's government. I find it strange that I cannot find any work by a returning POW or CUPC that tells me of what he or she had endured during captivity. It was almost as by sublimating their experiences, by forgetting history, they thought they had found a way of reconciling to it. |
| [EXTRACT] |
| The full text has been published in WHEN BUSH COMES TO SHOVE & OTHER WRITINGS (2006). |
