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card showing water cascading down the Thai mountain Chiang Mai. The waterfall looms above the written message, which seems overshadowed and menaced by it. In contrast, the writer claims that the group feels sufficiently at home, so long as it remains an "India group."

New York resident Zarina documents her own diaspora experience through nine etchings—collectively titled Homes I Made/A Life in Nine Lines (1997)—portraying the floor plans of the nine apartments she has lived in as she has moved from India to Thailand, Japan, Germany, France and the U.S. While straightforward in their autobiographical factuality and their avoidance of sentimental idealization of home, the floor plans radiate a melancholy that crystallizes the idea of diaspora—the idea of leaving a bit of yourself in each place, and taking away a bit of a new self.

Another of the broad themes that run through much of the work is concern over the Hindu nationalism that has been rising steadily in the wake of the riots that followed the destruction of the 

[[image]]

Barbari Masjid mosque in Ayodhya in 1992. In Hindu tradition Ayodhya is the birthplace of the god Rama, and Hindu nationalists had protested since 1972 that the mosque had, supposedly, been built on the site of an ancient temple to Rama. In 1992 a Hindu nationalist mob razed the mosque in preparation for rebuilding the Rama temple, setting off Hindu-Muslim riots throughout India, but above all in Bombay, where the Hindu nationalist group Shiv Sena is centered. In the enlightened Indian art community there is understandable concern lest the nation's secular ideal be endangered—concern which can only have been intensified by the recent electoral victory of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party and its alarming forays into nuclear adventurism. 

In one of the etchings in his India Portfolio (1993) Brooklyn resident Vijay Kumar transforms the New York Times coverage of the destruction of the mosque by superimposing etched images of death and interment. Atul Dodiya, who lives in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), depicts Gandhi's birthday celebration in Mumbai in his painting 2nd October (1993); the strangely ominous image refers to the fact that not only did much of Gandhi's activity take place there, but also the worst of the Ayodhya-related riots. Mumbai resident Nalini Malani's disturbing watercolor depiction of unidentified scenes of struggle and violence in Control (1993) may also involve such a reference.

Still other works deal more directly with Indian tradition in itself. Ravinder G. Reddy, who lives on India's east coast in the state of Andhra Pradesh, has penetrated a rich lode of visuality in Family (1997), his 3 1/2-foot-high, polyester-resin fiberglass sculpture of a naked man, woman and child. The three smooth, curvaceous figures are deep blue. Associated with the deities Krishna and Kali, the blue skin color bears implications of traditional rural Hinduism, as does the domestic scene based on low-caste or Untouchable village life. Simultaneously grandiose and cartoonish, Reddy's works elevate those at the bottom of the social hierarchy to "high art" status atop the cultural pyramid. 

The watercolor miniatures of Pakistani-born Shahzia Sikander, a Houston resident who was in last year's Whitney Biennial, refer directly to the Moghul tradition and indirectly, perhaps, to recent uses of that tradition by Western artists such as Francesco Clemente. Uprooted Order Series 3, no. 1 (1997) demonstrates Sikander's virtuosity with a symbolic metalanguage that discombobulates Indian tradition at the same time that it pays homage to it. Female figures reminiscent of traditional Hindu temple sculptures of goddesses float enigmatically amid mandala-like shapes and floral foliage. While the internal elements of the work are, or could be, all Indian, the structural recombination of them suggests various Western tendencies from Surrealism to postmodern pastiche. Compact and delicate, the works have their way with Indian visual tradition without a sense of transgressive intervention. 

Despite the persisting Western view of India as a backward society plagued by such practices as bride murder and widow burning (suttee), this exhibition revealed a contemporary art world that is socially progressive and enlightened, perhaps more so than ours. The fact, for example, that 14 of the 26 artists in the exhibition are women no doubt results from curatorial choice, but it also reflects the unusual openness of the Indian art world towards women artists, critics, and curators. While this proportion would be unusual in a Western show, it apparently does not seem strange in the context of contemporary Indian art. In an essay in the catalogue, curator Jane Farver cites the assertion by Indian critic Geeta Kapoor that today on the subcontinent the icon of the male Modernist has been "stripped bare by the brides, even." [[footnote 5]]

If we don't more fully engage the contemporary art of Asia, Africa and Latin America, we may wake up one day to find that the art history of our time was happening elsewhere and we failed to notice it.

All the work in the exhibition, including work of the artists not mentioned in this brief recapitulation, was outstanding in quality, intelligence and thoughtfulness. Never pedantic, it nevertheless teachers; never reductive, it nevertheless analyzes. The strength and diversity of the Indian tradition seems to hold good, unbroken yet not rigid in confrontation with the rest of the world.

[[footnote 1]] See Max Kozloff, "American Painting During the Cold War," Artforum, May 1973, and Eva Cockroft, "Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War,"Artforum, June 1974, both reprinted in Francis Frascina, ed., Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, New York, Harper and Row, 1985. Also see Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1983. [[/footnote 1]]

[[footnote 2]] For more on this movement see Thomas McEvilley, "The Common Air: Contemporary Art in India," Artforum, summer 1986. [[/footnote 2]]

[[footnote 3]] In 1972 Neo-Tantric painter K.V. Haridasan told me, in conversation in Rishikesh, that he acknowledged some degree of this influence in his own work. [[/footnote 3]]

[[footnote 4]] "At the center of the work, personal sensibility interacts with group location or ethnicity—the place the artist and his or her ancestors entered and were shaped by the casual web. Obliquely intersecting this is the impetus of the place where the artwork is (physically or mentally) made; to honestly acknowledge its embeddedness in causality the artwork must somehow reflect the conditions of the place where it takes form. Another vector which sometimes will affect the being of the work, and sometimes not, is the conditionality of the place where it is to be exhibited, where it is to exert its effect, to become a cause in its turn. Surrounding these boxes within boxes—or contexts within contexts—is the grander matrix of the global frame. At their greatest potential, the meaning and presence of the artwork simultaneously contract to an intense focus on the particular and expand to a global scale through the incorporated awareness of the work's place within a reconceived history." Thomas McEvilley, Art and Discontent: Theory at the Millenium, Kingston, N.Y., McPherson and Company, 1991, p.179. [[/footnote 4]]

[[footnote 5]] Jane Farver, "Inside and Out of India: Contemporary Art of the South Indian Diaspora," in Out of India, Queens Museum of Art, 1997, p.13. [[/footnote 5]]

"Out of India: Contemporary Art of the South Asian Diaspora" was seen at the Queens Museum [Dec.10, 1997- Mar.22, 1998]. The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue with essays by its curator Jane Farver and Radha Kumar. The show did not travel. 

Author: Thomas McEvilley's latest book, Sculpture in the Age of Doubt (Allworth Press), will be published in January 1999. He is organizing a conference at the Mohile Parikh Centre for the Visual Arts, Mumbai, India, to be held in January 2000. 

Art in America 79

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[[image is the piece of art described later in the passage. it is titled below it "Nalini Malani: Control, 1993, watercolor on paper, 22 1/2 by 30 inches. Collection Chester and Davida Herwitz."]]