India Since the 90s

India Since the 90s is a six-volume collection of texts and images produced over the last three decades, in social theory, performance, moving image practices, urban studies, museum studies and photography.[1] The six titles in the series are The Hunger of the Republic: Our Present in Retrospect (edited by Ashish Rajadhyaksha), Improvised Futures: Encountering the Body in Performance (edited by: Ranjana Dave), The Vanishing Point: Moving Images After Video (edited by: Rashmi Devi Sawhney), Cities on the Ground: The New ‘Urban’ Experience (edited by Solomon Benjamin and the Frozen Fish Collective), Another Lens: Photography Practices and Image Cultures (edited by: Rahaab Allana) and Ghosts of Future Nations: Gods, Migrants and Tribals in the Late-Modern Museum (edited by: Kavita Singh).[2][3][4] The series, conceptualised by Series Editor Ashish Rajadhyaksha, and designed by Gauri Nagpal, was conceived in collaboration with the Shanghai-based West Heavens initiative supported by the Hong Kong-based art curator Chang Tsong-Zung.[5] Three titles have been published in the series in 2021–2022.[6]

Volume 1 Hunger of the Republic: Our Present in Retrospect
The Hunger of the Republic: Our Present in Retrospect

The first volume addresses India's political history, and comprises essays largely framed by critical political developments of the 1990s, such as protests after the Mandal Commission report (1990), the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi (1991), the demolition of Babri Masjid (1992), the Bombay bombings (1993) and the Gujarat riots (2002).[2] Its first essay frames the overall approach, taken from social scientist Rajni Kothari's last major book before he died, ‘Democracy: In Search of a Theory’ (2005).[7] Its central theme is the transformation of the relationship between the Indian state and its people, in its new status as parens patriae (or parent of the people), as Veena Das shows in her 1995 essay on the Bhopal gas tragedy, ‘Suffering, Legitimacy and Healing’.[8] Utsa Patnaik’s 2004 essay, ‘The Republic of Hunger’ also discusses how a similar transformation makes famine-like conditions in large parts of India invisible.[9] Historian Gyanendra Pandey’s 1991 essay ‘In Defence of the Fragment: Writing about Hindu-Muslim Riots’, looks at the 1989 riots in Bhagalpur that he studied as part of a human rights team, and asks how the teaching of Indian history can account for episodes such as this.[10] Human rights activist Teesta Setalvad’s 2007 essay “Being their Target’ produces a personal account of the extreme power of such a state apparatus in targeting political dissenters.[11]

Other essays in the volume include:

  • ‘The Imaginary Institution of India’ (1992) by Sudipta Kaviraj[12]
  • The Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee (APCLC) report ‘The Chundur Carnage’ (1991), also known as the Tsundur massacre.[13]
  • ‘India and the Colonial Mode of Production’ by Hamza Alawi (1975)[14]
  • ‘Rich Peasant, Poor Peasant’ by K. Balagopal (1988)[15]
  • ‘Beyond the Nationalist Panopticon: The Experience of Cyberpublics in India’ by Ravi Sundaram (1996)[16]
  • ‘The Republic of Babel: Language and Political Subjectivity in Free India” by M. Madhava Prasad (2011)[17]
  • ‘Void and Memory: Story of a Statue’ by M.S.S. Pandian (2004)[18]
  • ‘Media Trials and Courtroom Tribulations: The Battle of Images, Words and Shadows in the 13 December Case’ by Shuddhabrata Sengupta (2005)[19]
  • ‘Unframed’, Jayant Kaikini’s short story (1993)
  • ‘Hindu Death and Our Death’ by Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd (1996)[20]
  • ‘Interrogating the Thesis of ‘Irrational Deification’ by Sharmila Rege (2008)[21]
  • ‘Violence’ by Sunil Mohan and Rumi Harish (2013)
  • ‘Questions and Dialogue’ by Anita Dube (1987)

Several art works by Riyas Komu, K.P. Krishnakumar, K.P. Reji, Vivan Sundaram, Atul Dodiya and Raqs Media Collective are juxtaposed by letters addressed to the Supreme Court on abolition of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, photographs of the Union Carbide plant after the gas disaster, maps, excerpts of the People's Union of Civil Liberties report on Bhagalpur, and images from the APCLC report on Tsundur. A running thread is produced by a meme of the figure of Ritwik Ghatak hovering over newspaper reports of major political episodes in late 1980s and 90s India.[2]

Volume 2 Improvised Futures: Encountering the Body in Performance
Improvised Futures: Encountering the Body in Performance

The second volume foregrounds the human body in various conditions of performance. Its framing argument comes from a manifesto statement by the dancer Chandralekha, titled ‘Militant Origins of Indian Dance’ (1980).[22] Both Navtej Johar’s short text ‘True to the Bone’ (2018) and Padmini Chettur’s ‘The Body Laboratory’ (2016) explore the new demands on the dancer's body, and Leela Samson's ‘Classical Dance in Contemporary India’ (2014) addresses the larger question of tradition and what it can mean in the present.[23]

Street theatre is addressed through Safdar Hashmi’s play ‘Halla Bol’ (1988).[24] The musical persona of Lata Mangeshkar is evoked through a major debate on the singer's voice in Economic & Political Weekly (in 2004–05) and through the persona of M.S. Subbulakshmi as seen by musician T.M. Krishna (‘MS-Understood: the Myths and Misconceptions around M.S. Subbulakshmi, 2015).[25] The debate on the legal rights of Mumbai’s bar dancers is explored through essays by Anna Morcom (‘The Continuation and Repetition of History: The Dance Ban as Anti Nautch II’, 2013) and Sameena Dalwai (‘Caste and the Bar Dancer’ 2013).[26][27] Reality television and the sexed-up body is described by Rahul Bhatia's text ‘Hot and Bothered: Under the Sun with the Aspiring Stars of MTV’s Splitsvilla’ (2013).[28] The virtualisation of the body into a data subject is discussed by Maya Indira Ganesh's ‘You Auto-Complete Me: Romancing the Bot’ (2019) and Mila Samdub's ‘The Archers and Swordsmen of Digital India’ (2020).[29]

Other essays include

  • ‘Untaming Restraint and the Deferred Apology’ by Natasha Ginwala (2018)[30]
  • Danish Sheikh's play Contempt (2018)[31]
  • Orijit Singh's graphic text on Rohith Vemula’s suicide note
  • ‘Conceptualizing Popular Culture: Lavani and Powada in Maharashtra’ by Sharmila Rege (2002)[32]
  • ‘Kafka’s Castle: How to Perform a Good Employee’ by Amitesh Grover (2017)
  • ‘Not the Keynote Address’ by Akshara K.V. (2008).[33]
  • ‘Politics of Location: A View of Theatrical Contemporaneity in India’ by Gargi Bharadwaj (2019)[34]
  • ‘Contemporary Theatre Practice in Manipur: A Reckoning’ by Trina Nila Bannerjee (2019)[35]
  • Excerpt from Anand Patwardhan’s film Jai Bhim Comrade (2011)
  • ‘Friends with Benefits’ by Ranjana Dave (2017)
  • ‘A Garland of Rivers’ by Skye Arundhati Thomas (2017)

Accompanying the texts are a visual photomontage. Natasha Ginwala's essay for example is designed alongside images of the Shaheen Bagh protests of 2019, students at Jamia Millia Islamia, a campaign response by the Colombo-based A Collective for Feminist Conversations on the re-imposing of the Sri Lankan ban on women purchasing alcohol in 2018, JNU Student leader Aishe Ghosh shortly after she was attacked on the university campus, and images of Bindu and Kanakadurga, women who entered Kerala's Sabarimala temple in early 2019 before daybreak with a police escort, challenging blockades set up outside the temple by religious groups seeking to prevent their entry.[3]

Volume 3 Vanishing Point: Moving Images After Video
The Vanishing Point: Moving Images After Video

The third volume in the series, looks at the life of the moving image ever since digital technology replaced celluloid.[4] Even at the time of celluloid, there was a leakage into popular memory had posed a problem for the film archive, as Sudhir Mahadevan's 2015 essay, from his book A Very Old Machine, suggests.[36] Now, celluloid's elimination has pushed what used to be the cinema into a haunting, ghostly, absence, as several authors show, such as Subhajit Chatterjee's 2019 essay ‘The Brothers Ghosh: Bengal, Its Art Cinema and Its Homegrown Exploitation Genres’ (2019), which shows how several well-known films from the 1960s were remade in the 2000s as pornography.[37] The media art collective Desire Machine shows how movie theatres turned into military camps in Srinagar (‘Death Becomes Her: Bombay Cinema, Nation and Kashmir’, 2014).[38]

Media artist Jeebesh Bagchi's essay on the Cinematic Object after the 1990s shows how digital versions of cinema leak into a new commerce of the moving image.[39] Lawrence Liang explores the forms that such an economy produces, in his essay ‘From Cinema to the Moving Image and Back’ (2012). Documentary filmmaker R.V. Ramani, known for making a cinema of spontaneity and informality, recounts when he almost drowned in the tsunami in 2004 while clinging on for dear life to his camera, and later made a film he called My Camera and Tsunami (2011).[40]

Art critic Geeta Kapur’s 2004 essay ‘A Cultural Conjuncture in India: Art into Documentary’ speaks of how different art practices came together under a particular challenge posed to documentary film in the wake of the Gujarat riots of 2002, and the elections of 2004 that saw the defeat of the BJP.[41] It frames a section in which several essays look at the documentary impetus in the multimedia environments of artist Sheba Chachi (see ‘Sheba Chhachhi’s Multimedia Environments’ by Nancy Adajania, 2018), the work of the Mediastorm Collective and of the filmmaker Paromita Vohra (‘Who Is the First Person? On Making Documentaries’, 2011).[42][43]

The texts accompany found images from mainstream films, alongside artwork, as example, the opening essay by the Raqs Media Collective, ‘Now and Elsewhere: The Problem and the Provocation’ (2010) is accompanied by a still from Mochu's digital video ‘Cool Memories of Remote Gods’ (2017) and a montage of dance by Madhubala in Mughal-e-Azam.[44]

Other texts in the book include

  • ‘In the Face of Ambiguity, Refuse the Temptation to Guess’ by Sebastian Lutgert (2021)
  • ‘Disappearance, Desire and Haunting’ by Darshana Sreedhar Mini (2016)[45]
  • ‘Mediastorm: Memories of a Collective’ by Mediastorm (1991)[46]
  • ‘Thought Bubbles’ by Nalini Malani (2020)
  • ‘SRK, Cinema and the Citizen: What’s Next?’ by Ashish Rajadhyaksha (2010)[47]
  • ‘Firing Time’ by Geeta Patel (2016)
  • ‘Toward a New Frame for Regional Films: Manbhum Videos and the Other Side of (Indian) Cinema’ by Madhuja Mukherjee (2016)[48]
  • ‘The Gaddar Effect: Maoism, Mass Culture and the Legacies of Cinema’ by S.V. Srinivas (2016)[49]

Future volumes

In 2023 the urban studies historian Solomon Benjamin, along with the Frozen Fish Collective, will publish their volume titled Cities on the Ground: the New ‘Urban Experience, and photography curator, publisher and author Rahaab Allana will publish Another Lens: Photography Practices and Image Cultures. In 2024, art historian Kavita Singh will publish her compilation Ghosts of Future Nations: Gods, Migrants and Tribals in the Late-Modern Museum.[50]

Reception

In a review of the first volume in Pacific Affairs, Benjamin Siegel called it 'a valuable albeit difficult collection... Its curation is inspired, though its audience is somewhat unclear, with familiar and foundational texts side-by-side with more obscure selections'.[51] In April 2023 this volume was selected for translation into traditional Chinese, and distributed with a new design by the independent Hong Kong-based Typesetter Publishing.[52] The second volume received the Printed Book of the Year (English) award, 2023, from Publishing Next Industry Awards.[53] A review in The Hindu March 17, 2022 (‘The Body and Soul Story’) wrote that ‘instead of a typical collection of academic essays and articles, what we have is an interspersion of theatre and documentary scripts, Rohit Vemula’s suicide note, first-person ruminations by performers, as well as theories and analyses… peppered with interesting photomontages’.[54] In a review in the Critical Collective newsletter, art historian Hemant Sareen said the third volume 'brings together filmmakers, theorists and moving image artists to capture the peripatetic afterlife of celluloid in India'.[55]

The series has been distributed through independent circuits, via the Independent Publishers and Distributors Alternatives (IPDA).[56] In November 2022, four institutions, the dance venue Khuli Khirkee, Mayday Books/Studio Safdar, the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) and the Foundation of Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) came together to perform events across Delhi that drew from the books. At the CSDS event titled 'Revisitations: The Long 90s', several of the original authors came together to discuss what social scientist Ravi Sundaram described as the 'curious challenge' posed by India's Nineties, in which 'key political concepts of democracy, freedom and publicness, appear in a ghostly afterlife as a hugely expanded set of Constitutional Rights go alongside an equally massive digital expansion of state infrastructure'.[57] Among the events was a performance by the Jana Natya Manch using Teesta Setalvad’s essay ‘Being Their Target’, combining texts from this essay with Justice D.Y. Chandrachud's 2018 Supreme Court dissenting judgment on Aadhar, and Safdar Hashmi's 1979 manifesto on street theatre, followed by a conversation with Teesta Setalvad.

References
  1. For more on the series see https://tulikabooks.in/series/post/india-since-the-90s/
  2. Rajadhyaksha, Ashish (2021). The Hunger of the Republic: Our Present in Retrospect. Tulika Books. ISBN 978-81-945348-1-5.
  3. Dave, Ranjana (2021). Improvised Futures: Encountering the Body in Performance. New Delhi: Tulika Books. ISBN 978-81-945348-2-2.
  4. Sawhney, Rashmi Devi (3 January 2023). The Vanishing Point: Moving Images After Video (2022 ed.). New Delhi: Tulika Books. ISBN 978-81-947175-8-4.
  5. https://westheavens.net/en/publisher West Heavens is a small Shanghai-based organization set up in 2010 to set up different layers of interaction between Indian and Chinese artists.
  6. The series is distributed worldwide by Columbia University Press. See https://cup.columbia.edu/series/india-since-the-90s columbia
  7. Kothari, Rajni (2005). Rethinking Democracy. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan. ISBN 8125028943.
  8. Das, Veena (2017). Critical Events (Revised ed.). New Delhi: OUP India. ISBN 9780199485291.
  9. Patnaik, Utsa (2007). The Republic of Hunger and Other Essays (1st ed.). New Delhi: Three Essays Collective. ISBN 978-81-88789-33-7.
  10. Pandey, Gyanendra (1991). "In Defence of the Fragment: Writing about Hindu-Muslim Riots in India Today". Economic & Political Weekly. 26 (11/12): 559–572. JSTOR 4397413.
  11. Setalvad, Teesta (2017). Foot Soldier of the Constitution: A Memoir (1st ed.). New Delhi: Leftword Books. ISBN 978-93-80118-43-7.
  12. Kaviraj, Sudipta (2010). The Imaginary Institution of India: Politics and Ideas. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-52651-7.
  13. The entire report has been reprinted in the archives of the human rights activist K. Balagopal. See https://balagopal.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/19910800-THE-TSUNDURU-CARNAGE.pdf
  14. Alavi, Hamza (1975). "India and the Colonial Mode of Production". Economic and Political Weekly. 10 (33/35): 1235–1262. ISSN 0012-9976. JSTOR 4537329.
  15. Mannam, Brahmaiah (1988-12-10). "Rich Peasant, Poor Peasant (Seminar; December 1988)". Balagopal. Retrieved 2022-12-26.
  16. This paper was originally presented in the June 1996 in Madrid, at a conference by 5cyberconf on 'Internet and the Developing World',
  17. Ghosh, Anjan; Guha-Thakurta, Tapati; Nair, Janaki (2011). Theorizing the Present: Essays for Partha Chatterjee (1st ed.). New Delhi: OUP. ISBN 9780198071631.
  18. Pandian, M. S. S. (2005-09-01). "Void and memory: story of a statue on Chennai beachfront". Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. 6 (3): 428–431. doi:10.1080/14649370500170118. ISSN 1464-9373. S2CID 144545866.
  19. "Media trials and courtroom tribulations: The battle of images, words and shadows in the 13 December case : Journal of the Moving Image (JMI) : A Film Journal from the Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University". jmionline.org. Retrieved 2023-01-12.
  20. Ilaiah, Kancha (2009). Why I Am Not a Hindu: A Sudra Critique of Hindutva Philosophy, Culture and Political Economy (3rd ed.). Kolkata: Stree-Samya Books. ISBN 978-81-85604-82-4.
  21. Rege, Sharmila (2008). "Interrogating the Thesis of 'Irrational Deification'". Economic and Political Weekly. 43 (7): 16–20. ISSN 0012-9976. JSTOR 40277605.
  22. Chandralekha’s famous essay, "Militant Origins of Indian Dance" was published in Social Scientist. 9 (2/3): 80–85. doi:10.2307/3516927. ISSN 0970-0293
  23. Leela Samson’s essay was also originally published in Social Scientist, v 42 n 5-6, May–June 2014, available at JSTOR 24372985.
  24. Halla Bol was the famous play being staged by the Jana Natya Manch when Safdar Hashmi was killed on 2 January 1989. It has also been reprinted in Sudhanva Deshpande’s book Halla Bol: The Death and Life of Safdar Hashmi, New Delhi: Leftword Books, 2020, https://mayday.leftword.com/halla-bol.html
  25. T.M. Krishna, ‘MS Understood: The myths and misconceptions around MS Subbulakshmi, India’s most acclaimed musician’, earlier version published in The Caravan 1 October 2015, https://caravanmagazine.in/reportage/ms-understood-ms-subbulakshmi
  26. Morcom, Anna (2013-11-01). "Mumbai Dance Bars, Anti-Nautch II, and New Possibilities". Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance. Oxford University Press. pp. 141–170. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199343539.003.0006. ISBN 978-0-19-934353-9.
  27. DALWAI, SAMEENA (2013). "Caste and the Bar Dancer". Economic and Political Weekly. 48 (48): 131–132. ISSN 0012-9976. JSTOR 23528943.
  28. Bhatia, Rahul. "Under the sun with the aspiring stars of MTV's Splitsvilla". The Caravan. Retrieved 2022-12-26.
  29. Ganesh, Maya (2019-06-28). "You auto-complete me: romancing the bot". Medium. Retrieved 2022-12-26.
  30. "Untaming Restraint and the Deferred Apology - Journal #94 October 2018 - e-flux". www.e-flux.com. Retrieved 2022-12-26.
  31. Sheikh, Danish (2021). Love and Reparation: A Theatrical Response to the Section 377 Litigation in India (1st ed.). Kolkata: Seagull Books. ISBN 9780857427502.
  32. Rege, Sharmila (2002). "Conceptualising Popular Culture: 'Lavani' and 'Powada' in Maharashtra". Economic and Political Weekly. 37 (11): 1038–1047. ISSN 0012-9976. JSTOR 4411876.
  33. Deshpande, Sudhanva; Akshara, K.V.; Iyengar, Sameera (2009). Our Stage: Pleasures and Perils of Theatre Practice in India (1st ed.). English: Tulika Books. ISBN 978-81-89487-61-4.
  34. Gargi Bharadwaj, 'Politics of Location: A View of Theatrical Contemporaneity in India', published in the book Staging Change: Theatre in India edited by Anuradha Kapur, Marg, 2018, ISBN: TBD00068.
  35. Trina Nila Bannerjee, '‘Contemporary Theatre Practice in Manipur: A Reckoning’, published in the book Staging Change: Theatre in India edited by Anuradha Kapur, Marg, 2018, ISBN: TBD00068.
  36. Mahadevan, Sudhir (2015). A very old machine : the many origins of the cinema in India, 1840–1930. Albany. ISBN 978-1-4384-5830-4. OCLC 923734709.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  37. Chatterjee, Subhajit (2019-10-02). "A Rendezvous with the Ghosh Brothers: a sneak peek into Bengal's homegrown exploitation cinema". South Asian History and Culture. 10 (4): 397–421. doi:10.1080/19472498.2019.1614300. ISSN 1947-2498. S2CID 197692580.
  38. This was a moving image art installation inside Srinagar’s movie theatre Firdous.
  39. "Acceleration and Conflicts: Comments on the Cinematic Object in the 1990s and After : Journal of the Moving Image (JMI) : A Film Journal from the Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University". jmionline.org. Retrieved 2022-12-27.
  40. Ramani, R.V. (10 October 2006). "Waves of Wrath". Sarai Reader 06: Turbulence.
  41. Kapur, Geeta (2008). "A Cultural Conjuncture in India". coaccess. pp. 30–59. doi:10.1215/9780822389330-004. ISBN 9780822341864. Retrieved 2022-12-27. {{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help)
  42. Adajania, Nancy (2018-09-01). "The ecologies of technological experimentation: Sheba Chhachhi's multimedia environments". Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ), the. 7 (2): 204–220. doi:10.1386/miraj.7.2.204_1. ISSN 2045-6298. S2CID 116526469.
  43. Vohra, Paromita (April 2011). "Dotting the I: The politics of self-less-ness in Indian documentary practice". South Asian Popular Culture. 9 (1): 43–53. doi:10.1080/14746689.2011.553887. ISSN 1474-6689. S2CID 144112796.
  44. See Raqs Media Collective,'New and Elsewhere', in https://whtsnxt.net/123
  45. Mini, Darshana Sreedhar (2016). "The Spectral Duration of Malayalam Soft-porn: Disappearance, Desire, and Haunting". BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies. 7 (2): 127–150. doi:10.1177/0974927616667971. ISSN 0974-9276. S2CID 193768554.
  46. Mediastorm's collected works were assembled by artist and media practitioner Shaina Anand. 14 films and 3 live events that explode the relationship between Footage and Films into a galaxy of possibilities, at the 19th MAMI Film Festival, October 2017, Mumbai. See https://pad.ma/JYM/info
  47. Dudrah, Rajinder; Mader, Elke; Fuchs, Bernhard; Dudrah, Rajinder; Mader, Elke; Fuchs, Bernhard, eds. (2015-12-03). SRK and Global Bollywood. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-946047-2.
  48. Mukherjee, Madhuja (2016). "Toward a New Frame for Regional Films: Manbhum Videos and the Other Side of (Indian) Cinema". BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies. 7 (1): 58–79. doi:10.1177/0974927616635939. ISSN 0974-9276. S2CID 192793522.
  49. Srinivas, S.V. (2015). "Maoism to Mass Culture: Notes on Telangana's Cultural Turn". BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies. 6 (2): 187–205. doi:10.1177/0974927615600616. S2CID 151993103.
  50. Volume 4 has been announced by the Columbia University Press site: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/cities-untold/9788195639281
  51. Siegel, Benjamin (11 January 2023). "THE HUNGER OF THE REPUBLIC: Our Present in Retrospect. India Since the 90s | Edited by Ashish Rajadhyaksha".
  52. "Typesetter Publishing, Hong Kong". 16 February 2023.
  53. "Publishing next Industry Awards 2023".
  54. Jayraj, Geeta, ‘The Body and Soul Story’, The Hindu March 17, 2022, https://www.thehindu.com/entertainment/dance/the-body-and-soul-story/article65234102.ece
  55. Sareen, Hemant (24 February 2023). "Book review: The Vanishing Point". Critical Collective.
  56. The Independent Publishers and Distributors Alternative is set up by a group small publishers and collaborating partner institutions. The partners are: Daanish Books, LeftWord Books, Samskriti, Social Science Press, The Book Review Literary Trust, The Little Magazine, Three Essays Collective, Tulika Books, Women unlimited/Kali for Women, Zubaan/Kali for Women.
  57. Sundaram, Ravi (18 November 2022). "Revisitations: The Long 1990s".
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