Abstract
The focus of this chapter is the relationship between Jagdish Swaminathan (1928–1994), a Tamil Brahmin artist-critic and institution builder, and Jangarh Singh Shyam (early 1960s to 2001), a Gond Adivasi artist often said to have been ‘discovered’ by the former. To make this relation thinkable, the chapter introduces a historiographical distinction between primitivism and indigenism, referring to different ways by which the subaltern is addressed in history (as extension of primordial population and contemporary individual respectively). Taking the collapse of the Nehruvian system in general (mid-1960s to mid-1970s) and the Emergency in India (1975–1977) in particular, as the historical threshold between these two regimes of governmentality, the chapter also tries to expose the larger nihilistic and even self-destructive schemata within which Shyam and Swaminathan operated (of which the most extreme manifestation could be seen in Shyam’s alleged suicide in Japan).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
There are still confusions regarding Jangarh Singh Shyam’s actual year of birth, which is roughly calculated as being between 1960 and 1964. For a discussion of this problem, see Das (2017: 36).
- 2.
Contrary to the conventional preference for the first name ‘Jangarh’ in mentioning Jangarh Singh Shyam, I am using his last name throughout here.
- 3.
The term ‘Adivasi’ literally means ‘autochthon’, referring to India’s tribal communities. Pardhan is a clan (gotra) of the Gond tribe, India’s second largest Adivasi community.
- 4.
The phrase ‘Nehruvian regime’ refers not only to the tenure of India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) but also to the continuation of his top-down centre-left policies by subsequent leaders, especially his daughter Indira Gandhi (1917–1984). Though the period clearly starts with India’s national independence in 1947, there are three major interpretations about when it ends: first, with Nehru’s death in 1964; second, with the brief but crucial electoral setback faced by the ruling Congress between 1977 and 1980 following the Emergency; and finally, with the liberalisation of the Indian economy in 1991. This chapter follows the second periodisation.
- 5.
For a psychoanalytical account of primitivism as a fantasy unique to the colonial powers, see Foster (1993).
- 6.
A useful survey of the idea in the context of the Latin American nationalism is given in Tarica (2016).
- 7.
The belatedness of indigenism in India is understood in comparison to the Latin American political history where indigenismo has been the binding force as early as the Mexican Revolution of 1911, and an official policy of many of the newly independent countries. I will explain this difference in historical time below.
- 8.
The dialectical connection between the two is based on a larger modernist imaginary of exile, outside which indigenism has no aesthetic or political relevance. However, it should also be noted that the experience of exile is much more profound and political in the post-colonial countries, than it had been in the west (where exile is primarily a side-effect of economic advancement). In the Indian context, Geeta Kapur has grappled with these issues from her earliest publications onward: for example, see her (1971–72) In Quest of Identity: Art & Indigenism in Post-Colonial Culture with Special Reference to Contemporary Indian Painting.
- 9.
For instance, otherwise rich in its documentation of the pre-1947 South Asian art, art historian Partha Mitter provides a confusing narrative of primitivism, indigenism, and ‘revivalism’ (the project to retrieve elite cultural pasts), in his book, The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde 1922–1947 (2007).
- 10.
For example, the two book-length surveys of Indian modernism, Kapur’s When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practices in India (2000) and Sonal Khullar’s Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity, and Modernism in India 1930–1990 (2015), dedicate one chapter to Subramanyan, whereas Swaminathan is reduced to a few occasional observations and footnotes. Yet, none of these writers juxtapose one against the other, or seem to consider Swaminathan as an unimportant figure (in fact, wherever he is mentioned, Swaminathan’s charisma and appeal is duly acknowledged).
- 11.
As Mitter notes (2007: 78, 90), a primitivist project (“environmental primitivism” to be more precise) centred on the Santali-Adivasi culture of Birbhum was one of the most intriguing hallmarks of Santiniketan artists, based in the Visva-Bharati University founded by Rabindranath Tagore in 1921. As an alumnus of this institution, Subramanian’s ideas appear to be more primitivist than indigenist in the final analysis.
- 12.
Swaminathan was part of the Congress Socialist Party till Indian independence, after which he joined the Communist Party of India (CPI), which declared national independence as inefficient and considered the leading Congress party as their prime enemy (this position was reversed in 1951).
- 13.
This was the principal allegation made by the Indian Radical Painters’ and Sculptors’ Association, a highly influential but short-lived Marxist collective which originated in Baroda (in 1987) and was majorly composed of Malayali artists. See their manifesto-like catalogue essay written by the collective’s only woman and non-Malayali member, Anita Dube (1987).
- 14.
By the mid-1950s, at a time when the Soviet Union was widely criticised for its mishandling of the Eastern European political crises, Swaminathan started distancing himself from the communist ideology (he had already relinquished his party membership in 1953). The disagreement that he had with official Marxism, as it is explained in later writings (Swaminathan 1990), is regarding its stifling conception of historical progress. However, this did not stop him from appreciating and citing the ideas of Marxist intellectuals like Ernst Fischer and Herbert Marcuse.
- 15.
‘Numen’ is a mystical idea, originally formulated by the British artist and curator, Philip S. Rawson, which provides the linchpin of Swaminathan’s entire philosophy.
- 16.
Swaminathan married Bhawani Pande, the sister of a fellow cadre, in 1955. Disowned by their respective families, the couple approached the CPI leader S. A. Dange, and it is he who arranged their trip to Betul, where the party was engaged in trade-union activism.
- 17.
Emphasis added.
- 18.
Paz’s take on indigenism in general and Mexico’s state-sponsored indigenismo project is rather critical, recognising the problems of intra-colonialism and cultural stereotyping. Yet, its empathetic reflections on the antinomies of Mexican identity provided a helpful point of departure for many post-colonial intellectuals of the time, including Kapur.
- 19.
Paz wrote the catalogue essay for the exhibition ‘Group 1890’, an art collective venture organised by Swaminathan in 1963, and contributed to as well as co-edited a polemical little magazine called Contra’66, briefly ran by the latter between 1966 and 1967. Swaminathan’s intellectual indebtedness to Paz is clearly mentioned in the former’s autobiographical essay ‘The Cygan’ (Swaminathan 1995: 7–14).
- 20.
The left-extremist Naxalite movement originated in the armed peasant and tribal uprisings in the Naxalbari village (1967, W. Bengal), and was organisationally connected with similar contemporary developments in Srikakulam (Andhra Pradesh). With the formation of the CPI (Marxist-Leninist) in 1969, the movement spread all over India by the mid-1970s. Though the J. P. movement—also known as the ‘Bihar movement’—was originally initiated by the students of Bihar in 1974; it came to the centre stage of the North Indian politics with the leadership of the veteran Gandhian socialist, Jayaprakash Narayan (1902–1979) and his call for “Total Revolution” against the Indira Gandhi government. Both the Naxalite and J. P. movements were severely repressed during the Emergency, and only the former survives today, albeit in a highly fragmented and marginalised form.
- 21.
Emphasis added.
- 22.
It is helpful to remember that the centrality that indigenism acquired during this time was first and foremost a reaction against modernism internationalism in Indian art, with its centres in Paris, New York, and even Mexico (represented by the artists like Biren De, S. H. Raza, and Satish Gujral respectively). The earliest expression of this discontent was the Group 1980 exhibition in 1963, publicly supported by Paz and Jawaharlal Nehru. The group lost its unity as many of the artists later split into Neo-Tantric and Narrative styles of painting, with their mutually challenging stakes in the ideal of indigenism.
- 23.
In the case of Paniker and his Madras School of painting, their references to Tantric and other forms of subaltern spirituality—however weak they soon proved to be in resisting the larger dynamic of ‘Sanskritisation’—also became inspirational for a highly militant and subversive poetic expression, as it is later acknowledged by the celebrated Malayali poet and communist activist, Kadammanitta Ramakrishnan (1935–2008). His one particular poem, Kurathi (Tribal Danseuse, 1977–1978), was extraordinarily popular among Kerala’s ultra-leftist cultural circles.
- 24.
Paz’s fascination for the metaphors of spiritual-sexual union (Paz 1997), a central theme of Tantric mysticism, is widely noted by the critics. Swaminathan’s experiments with Neo-Tantric art in 1963 lasted only for a year, as he moved to more abstract and lyrical forms of expression.
- 25.
“[The] new art cannot be a departure. It has to be a beginning. […] It requires, above all, that the artist stands in front of the canvas as the early Aryan stood facing the morning sun” (Swaminathan 1995: 23).
- 26.
It should be noted that Sita Devi (1914–2005), one of the first recognised artists of the Mithila painting tradition, belonged to the Mahapatra Brahmin caste. Because of the community’s association with funeral rituals, Mahapatras are considered to be the lowest caste of Mithila Brahmins.
- 27.
The art world entry of Warli ritual painting, traditionally a female practice, was also made possible by the exceptional and transgressive life of Jivya Soma Mashe (1934–2018), the first male artist from the community.
- 28.
Emphasis added.
- 29.
Though numerous factors are cited for the implementation as well as the withdrawal of the Emergency (varying from India’s economic and structural crises to the characteristic traits of Indira Gandhi), I take the civil war led by the Adivasis (along with the Naxalites) to be the threshold point, given the centrality of indigenism in India’s political and cultural fabric.
- 30.
“The problems attendant on any approach to Adivasi art are varied and complex. Apart from the pejorative echoes which the term ‘tribal’ evokes when applied to certain communities and peoples, it also seems to contaminate their art with notions of being ‘archaic’ and ‘primitive’. In fact, the term primitive has often been used for the art of peoples living at a certain level of ‘arrested’ technological development considered to be backward in comparison to those with ‘advanced’ technologies” (Swaminathan 1987: 13).
- 31.
The Adivasi Mahasabha, originated from its discontent with the Indian National Congress, alleged that such a nationalist party was representative of ‘outsider’ (diku) interests. This line of criticism would later become the defining idea behind the formation of the Jharkhand Party in 1950. Coming to the contemporary context, D. J. Rycroft and Sangeeta Dasgupta note how the term ‘Adivasi’ is used in such a way that it resonates with the “transnational Indigenous movement, which situates tribal specificity and local autochthony in directly political relationships to statehood, globalization, sub-nationalism, etc” (Rycroft and Dasgupta 2011: 2).
- 32.
Confronted with the two alternative accounts of the myth as they are recorded by the anthropologist Christoph Von Furer-Haimendorf and the missionary Rev. Hislop, Swaminathan says: “Whatever reservations sociologists may have regarding these two versions, whatever be the allegations regarding the Hindu influence on them, it cannot be denied that both the versions deal with the liberation of the Gonds in unequivocal terms. In these versions, the Gonds do not emerge as another addition to the caste system or as being absorbed into it. On the other hand, they reemerge from captivity as free people” (Swaminathan 1987: 25).
- 33.
The Labyrinth of Solitude contains an important passage about the philosophy of time, which Swaminathan also quotes in detail: “there was a time when time was not succession and transition, but rather the perpetual source of a fixed present in which all times, past and future, were contained. When man was exiled from that eternity in which all times were one, he entered chronometric time and became a prisoner of the clock and the calendar. As soon as time was divided up into yesterday, today and tomorrow, into hours, minutes and seconds, man ceased to be one with time, ceased to coincide with the flow of reality. When one says, ‘at this moment’, the moment has already passed. These spatial measurements of time – separate man from reality – which is a continuous present – and turn all the presences in which reality manifests itself, as [Henri] Bergson said, into Phantasms” (Swaminathan 1987: 28, emphasis in original).
- 34.
One could see these continuing references to Upanishadic mysticism, that too in the context of discussing Adivasi art, as a personal testimony of the “symbiotic” life that Swaminathan was looking for. For example, a passage from the Perceiving Fingers states: “the sense of unity with all nature that the so-called tribal achieves through anthropomorphic transformations at a ‘physical’ level, Upanishadic thought achieves the same at a spiritual or philosophical plane” (Swaminathan 1987: 8).
- 35.
For a critical review of the exhibition, see Foster (1985).
- 36.
Like Swaminathan, Elwin also considered the Hindu caste system as highly detrimental to tribals, and eventually distanced himself from Gandhian ideas. But unlike the former, he recommended an isolationist and protectionist approach towards the tribals (even to the ridiculous extent of proposing ‘National Parks’ for them). Elwin published The Tribal Art of Middle India: A Personal Record (1951), roughly a decade before Shyam was born. It may also be noted that at the time of publishing Elwin’s book, the appellation ‘art’ was still uncommon in discussing tribal and folk art practices. As if giving a disclaimer, Elwin hints at this problem in the introduction: “I do not know how this book will appeal to artists. I offer it to them with real humility. They will not find here discussions on the philosophy or criticism of art, which I am ill-qualified to give. I hope that they will be content to accept the book for what it is, as part of the record, as an infinitesimal moment in the history of man” (Elwin 1951: 8).
- 37.
- 38.
The other three artists who participated with Shyam were Bowa Devi, Raju Babu Sharma, and Acharya Vykul (except Devi, a Mithila artist, the other two were Neo-Tantric painters). There were two more Indian artists whom Martin could not include due to logistical and technical difficulties: Jiva Soma Mashe and Jogen Chowdhury. (Mashe was mentioned in Martin’s first curatorial note—in fact, the only artist mentioned by name—as well as the final exhibition catalogue.)
- 39.
It should be noted that almost all of Martin’s ideas—be it a universal spiritual function of art verging on mysticism and magic, an ethic of all-inclusive contemporaneity, or the importance of individuality and nationality even in the most communitarian or archaic forms of expression—can already be found in Swaminathan and his Roopankar project. This suggests that when Shyam successfully made his inroad from Swaminathan’s fundamentally ‘national-modern’ framework to that of Martin’s ‘global-contemporary’, the basic assumptions behind him being ‘discovered’ were more or less the same.
- 40.
Akhilesh, an urban artist, prefers to be known only by his first name. According to Das (2017: 38), this was a trend prevalent in Bharat Bhavan in the 1980s.
- 41.
However, an opposite assertion is made by Nankusia and Shyam’s friend, Ashish Swami. They believe that an extraordinarily brave and pragmatic person like Shyam would never take such an extreme step, and his untimely death could very well be a case of homicide, for which the first culprits should be the museum authorities in Japan (Nankusia in personal communication with the author, 23 August 2017, Bhopal). These allegations are almost ruled out by both Akhilesh (in personal communication with the author, 22 August 2017, Bhopal) and Bowles (2009: 25, 101).
- 42.
After quoting Swaminathan’s doubt in using the appellation ‘Gond or Pardhan art’ for referring to a practice as individualistic and original as Shyam’s, Akhilesh says (in Das’ translation): “In reality, was Jangarh still a Pardhan? His music and song had as good as died. The subject matter of his paintings had moved far away from Gond deities. His paintings had essentially begun to be regarded as an elaboration of Jangarh’s own talent. Many who met him were not even aware of his roots as a musician. Possibly, Jangarh himself no longer felt that his Pardhan identity was important. […] As a Pardhan, he was dying a slow death. In the environment of an unknown city, he was instead emerging as an adivasi, but we would soon observe that he would also begin to lose his ‘tribal-ness’” (Das 2014: n.p.).
- 43.
Different from ‘Adivasi’, the name ‘Pardhan’ is much more primordial and culturally grounded, as the undated folklores and origin-myths of the community suggests.
- 44.
Also see Akhilesh quoted in Bowles (2009: 24).
- 45.
Original emphasis.
- 46.
The celebrated examples of such an affirmative philosophy are Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. However, even they come under the rubric of nihilism that we are addressing here, perhaps in a much more profound and unsettling manner (for it is not just coincidental that Deleuze committed suicide and Foucault tried the same numerous times, a point which I will discuss below). An equally important alternative approach, but with the aforementioned risk of negativity, is by understanding how life and death are articulated in Shyam’s own culture, and how he negotiates with them. However, due to space constraints, and the importance given to the artist’s departure from his indigenous identity, I cannot address this crucial question here.
- 47.
Emphasis added.
- 48.
Swaminathan’s obsession with the theme of mortality is explicit in the following unusually long string of questions: “What happens when a sparrow dies? What happens when a colony of ants is buried and crushed underground by a landslide? What happens when a yellow steak of power in the jungle ends the life of an antelope in the jaws of a tiger? What happens when a star dies? How many stars are there? How many dead, how many dying at this very moment? How many yet to die? What happens when a man dies? How many have died since man was? […] What happens when death comes? What is death and where is it?” (Swaminathan 1980: 6).
- 49.
To quote Povinelli (1998: 588): “Aboriginal traditions [in Australia] had no legal standing; they were allowed to exist only as nostalgic traces of a past, fully authentic Aboriginal tradition. As traces, neither fully forgotten by law or public, nor ever fully present to them, these prohibited practices continue to haunt all contemporary representations of Aboriginal tradition, casting an aura of inauthenticity over present-day Aboriginal performances of their culture. […] Aboriginal Australians express at their own risk their engagement with the democratic form of capital and governance within which they live; the memorial forms of their own histories; and their ambivalences towards these traditions, identities, and identifications”. Also see Errington (1994).
- 50.
Foucault is reported to have said: “I am committed to a veritable cultural combat to remind people that there is no more beautiful form of conduct which, as a result, merits reflection with such great attention, than suicide. It would be a case of working on one’s suicide for all of one’s life” (quoted in Osborne 2005: 284).
- 51.
For a post-Foucauldian theorisation of politics as the power of death over life, see Mbembe (2003).
- 52.
- 53.
A critique of modernity in this direction is provided by Mcloughlin (2009).
- 54.
Vidal is not alone in offering such hyperopic narratives, as his omission is a symptomatic feature of much of the Indian art historical scholarship. Let me give a quick and condensed overview. Commentators on Indian modernism have often discussed a peculiar ‘paradox’ that makes its history a textbook case study of post-colonial dilemma—it is modernism’s contradictory drives to be internationalist and indigenist at the same time. For example, whereas Rebecca M. Brown (2009: 1–11) foregrounds this problem through her somewhat clumsy expression “modern/Indian art” or “modern Indian paradox” (suggesting the inherent internationalist and indigenist tendencies of the ‘modern’ and the ‘Indian’ respectively); Geeta Kapur (2000: Ch. 10) has identified similar problems, but in less paradoxical terms, as that of a troubled national ‘sovereignty’ during the times of cold war internationalism and contemporary globalisation (where indigenism would provide a repository of critical tools in the national intelligentsia’s fight against imperialism). However, what is more telling is not what these writers discuss from their different but ultimately complementary perspectives, but what they choose not to discuss at all. The centrality that the heuristic notions of ‘sovereignty’ (of the nation) and ‘paradox’ (of indigenous modernism) enjoy in Kapur and Brown is based on their shared interest to conceal the real paradox of sovereignty that haunts the nation from within—a paradox for which the Emergency provides the ultimate historical expression. Hence, Brown’s discussion of a paradoxical indigeneity without raising the question of sovereignty at all and Kapur’s presentation of a national sovereignty as if it is an indigenous development—all leading to hyperopic narratives about the western baggage of international modernism or the neo-colonial onslaughts on the nation, with the effect of externalising the real questions that haunt our collective history from within.
- 55.
Considering Adivasis as political sovereigns is the most important challenge in dismantling the primitivist representations of them as ‘pre-political’ communities, especially in a context where their demands and assertions are explained in non-political (read “culturalist”) terms.
- 56.
- 57.
My emphasis.
- 58.
Original emphasis.
- 59.
Krishnakumar was the founding member and the main organiser of the short-lived but historic art collective, Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors Association (1987–1989). Mainly composed of Keralite artists working in Baroda (Gujarat), the Marxist collective vociferously rejected the burgeoning art market and sought to introduce an alternative method of art making and sharing.
- 60.
For a periodisation of the global contemporary in the Indian context by taking Krishnakumar’s death as the point of departure, see Parul Dave Mukherji (2012).
- 61.
The argument is not that there is no representation of Shyam as a ‘heroic’ or ‘legendary’ figure. For the most recent example in this respect, see Dutta (2018). Rather, the question is for whom Shyam appears to be heroic: the contemporary art world or the Pardhan community? This is an important issue when we note that ‘the age of heroes’ are said to be over in the narratives of the former (if not the latter)—“love the pixel, not the hero”, says Hito Steyerl (2012: 57).
- 62.
In the final estimation, Swaminathan’s unconventional usage of the term ‘civil war’ instead of “revolution”—a widely used word while he writes ‘The Cost of Progress’—itself suggests a subtle but more far reaching operation of power, casting a long shadow over our reflections themselves. For a discussion of these two terms with reference to Hannah Arendt, see Agamben (2015: 2–4).
- 63.
In fact, in the case of Swaminathan, the difficulty lies in the exact opposite, and thereby, privileged sense: the impossibility of presenting him as a subject of anthropological, rather than historical, discourse.
- 64.
Understanding exception as “the originary structure in which law refers to life and includes it in itself by suspending it”, Agamben says: “we shall give the name ban […] to this potentiality […] of the law to maintain itself in its own privation, to apply in no longer applying. The relation of exception is a relation of ban. He who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable” (Agamben 1998: 28).
- 65.
However, let me repeat, the figuration of death in discussing Shyam’s art and life need not be seen as something that exists only as a result of the arbitrary decisions made by the sovereign-interpreter (including this author). Rather, as it is in the case of any other modern subject, this sense of death could also be seen as the sign of the artist’s increasing awareness of his own unique situation. For in modernity, it is not only that everyone is a potential subaltern (though its actualisation varies in degree), but also a potential sovereign, at least in their moment of death.
References
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
———. 2015. Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm. Trans. Nicholas Heron. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Akhilesh. 2001. Pardhan ki Mautein. In Bahuvachan: Sahitya Bhasha Shodh aur Vichar ka Hindi Traimasik 3 (9). New Delhi: Mahatma Gandhi Antarrashtriya Hindi Viswavidyalaya.
———. 2017. Seershak Nahi. New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan.
Alvarez, Al. 1990. The Savage God: A Study of Suicide. New York: W.W. Norton.
Badiou, Alain. 2007. The Century. Trans. Alberto Toscano. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Banerjee, Prathama. 2006a. Culture/Politics: The Irresoluble Double-Bind of the Indian Adivasi. The Indian Historical Review XXXIII (1): 99–126.
———. 2006b. Politics of Time: ‘Primitives’ and History-Writing in a Colonial Society. New Delhi/New York: Oxford University Press.
———. 2016. Writing the Adivasi: Some Historiographical Notes. The Indian Economic and Social History Review 53 (1): 1–23.
Belting, Hans, and Andrea Buddensieg. 2013. From Art World to Art Worlds. In The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds, ed. Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg, and Peter Weibel, 28–31. Karlsruhe/Cambridge, MA/London: ZKM/Center for Art and Media/The MIT Press.
Bhukya, Bhangya. 2016. The Roots of the Periphery: A History of the Gonds in Deccan India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Blanchot, Maurice. 2010. The Space of Literature. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press.
Bowles, John H. 2009. Painted Songs and Stories: The Hybrid Flowerings of Contemporary Pardhan Gond Art. Bhopal: INTACH.
Brown, Rebecca M. 2009. Art for a Modern India, 1947–1980. Objects/Histories. Durham: Duke University Press.
Das, Aurogeeta. 2014. The Many Deaths of a Pradhan – Translation of ‘Pardhan ki Mautein’ by Akhilesh. 2001. Unpublished manuscript.
———. 2016. Walking a Tightrope: Indigenous Indian Art and Its Reception. Wasafiri 31 (3): 21–31.
———. 2017. Jangarh Singh Shyam: The Enchanted Forest: Paintings and Drawings from the Crites Collection. New Delhi: Showcase/Roli Books.
Dave Mukherji, Parul. 2012. How Global Is the Global Contemporary? Persistence of Ethnicity Then and Now. Presented at the After Midnight: Modern and Contemporary Indian Art, 1947/1997, organized by the Queen’s Museum, October 27. New York.
Dhareshwar, Vivek. 1995. Postcolonial in the Postmodern or, the Political After Modernity. Economic and Political Weekly 30 (30): 104–112.
Dube, Anita. 1987. Questions and Dialogue. Baroda: Faculty of Fine Arts Gallery.
———. 2014. Midnight Dreams: The Tragedy of a Lone Revolutionary. Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 36 (June): 40–53. https://doi.org/10.1086/678338.
Dutta, Amit. 2018. Invisible Webs: An Art Historical Inquiry into the Life and Death of Jangarh Singh Shyam. Shimla: IIAS.
Elwin, Verrier. 1943. Maria Murder and Suicide. Bombay: Oxford University Press.
———. 1951. The Tribal Art of Middle India: A Personal Record. London: Oxford University Press.
Errington, Shelly. 1994. What Became Authentic Primitive Art? Cultural Anthropology 9 (2): 201–226.
Evans, Al. 2004. Chee Chee: A Study of Aboriginal Suicide. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press.
Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press.
Foster, Hal. 1985. The “Primitive” Unconscious of Modern Art. October 34: 45–70.
———. 1993. “Primitive” Scenes. Critical Inquiry 20 (1): 69–102.
Foucault, Michel. 1997. The Politics of Truth. Ed. Sylvère Lotringer. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
Garimella, Annapurna. 2013. Aboriginalisthan in the Gallery. In Sakahan: International Indigenous Art, ed. Candice Hopkins, Christine Lalonde, and Greg A. Hills, 72–84. Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada.
Hacker, Katherine. 2014. “A Simultaneous Validity of Co-Existing Cultures”: J. Swaminathan, the Bharat Bhavan, and Contemporaneity. Archives of Asian Art 64 (2): 191–209.
Jain, Jyotindra. 1998. Introduction. In Other Masters: Five Contemporary Folk and Tribal Artists of India, ed. Jyotindra Jain, 8–16. New Delhi: Crafts Museum and the Handicrafts and Handloom Exports Corporation of India Ltd.
Jameson, Fredric. 1984. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. New Left Review 1 (146): 53–92.
Kalidas, S. 2012. Transits of a Wholetimer, J. Swaminathan: Years 1950–69. New Delhi: Gallery Espace.
Kapur, Geeta. 1971–1972. In Quest of Identity: Art & Indigenism in Post-Colonial Culture with Special Reference to Contemporary Indian Painting (Serial). Baroda: Vrishchik.
———. 1995. J. Swaminathan: The Artist the Ideologue the Man His Persona. In Lalit Kala Contemporary: Special Issue on Swaminathan 40, ed. Amit Mukhopadhyay, 61–62. New Delhi: Kendra Lalit Kala Academy.
———. 2000. When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practices in India. New Delhi: Tulika.
———. 2012. An Indian Critic and the Bard’s Puzzle. In Richard Bartholomew: The Art Critic: 6–27. Noida: Bart.
Kaviraj, Sudipta. 1988. A Critique of the Passive Revolution. Economic and Political Weekly 23 (45/47): 2429–33+2436–41+2443–44.
Khullar, Sonal. 2015. Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity, and Modernism in India, 1930–1990. Oakland: University of California Press.
Mbembe, Achille. 2003. Necropolitics. Trans. Libby Meintjes. Public Culture 15 (1): 11–40.
McLoughlin, Daniel. 2009. In Force Without Significance: Kantian Nihilism and Agamben’s Critique of Law. Law and Critique 20 (3): 245–257.
Miller, Jim. 1993. The Passion of Michel Foucault. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Mitter, Partha. 2007. The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde 1922–1947. London: Reaktion.
Osborne, Thomas. 2005. “Fascinated Dispossession”: Suicide and the Aesthetics of Freedom. Economy and Society 34 (2): 280–294.
Parulekar, Godavari. 1975. Adivasis Revolt: The Story of the Warli Peasants in Struggle. Bombay: People’s Publishing House.
Paz, Octavio. [1950] 1961. The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico. Trans. Lysander Kemp. New York: Grove.
———. 1997. In Light of India. Trans. E. Weinberger. London: The Harvill Press.
Poggioli, Renato. 1997. The Theory of the Avant-Garde. Harvard: Harvard University Press.
Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 1998. The State of Shame: Australian Multiculturalism and the Crisis of Indigenous Citizenship. Critical Inquiry 24 (2): 575–610.
Rancière, Jacques. 2017. Dissenting Words: Interviews with Jacques Rancière. Ed. and Trans. Emiliano Battista. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Rycroft, Daniel J., and Sangeeta Dasgupta, eds. 2011. The Politics of Belonging in India: Becoming Adivasi. Routledge Contemporary South Asia Series 43. London/New York: Routledge.
Scott, James C. 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Sheikh, Gulammohammad. 1998. The Tribal World of Jangarh Singh Shyam. In Other Masters: Five Contemporary Folk and Tribal Artists of India, ed. Jyotindra Jain, 17–27. New Delhi: Crafts Museum and the Handicrafts and Handloom Exports Corporation of India Ltd.
Singh, Kavita. 2001. Jangarh Singh Shyam and the Great Machine. In Marg: A Magazine of the Arts 53: 60–64. Mumbai: National Centre for the Performing Arts.
Steyerl, Hito. 2012. The Wretched of the Screen. E-Flux Journal 6. Berlin: Sternberg Press.
Swaminathan, J. 1980. The Traditional Numen and Contemporary Art. In Lalit Kala Contemporary 29: 5–11. New Delhi: Lalit Kala Academy.
———. 1987. The Perceiving Fingers: Catalogue of Roopankar Collection of Folk and Adivasi Art from Madhya Pradesh, India. Bhopal: Bharat Bhavan.
———. 1990. Pre-Naturalistic Art and Postnaturalistic Vision. In Lalit Kala Contemporary 40:50–56. New Delhi: Lalit Kala Academy.
———. 1992. Art and Adivasi. India International Centre Quarterly 19 (1/2): 113–127.
———. 1995. Lalit Kala Contemporary 40: Special Issue on Swaminathan. New Delhi: Lalit Kala Academy.
———. 2012. The Cost of Progress. In Transits of a Wholetimer, J. Swaminathan: Years 1950–69, ed. S. Kalidas, 110–111. New Delhi: Gallery Espace.
Tarica, Estelle. 2016. Indigenismo. Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Latin American History, March. New York: Oxford University Press. http://latinamericanhistory.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.001.0001/acrefore-9780199366439-e-68. Accessed 14 Jan 2018.
Tully, Mark. 1991. No Full Stops in India. New Delhi: Viking.
Vajpeyi, Udayan, and Vivek. 2008. Jangarh Kalam. Trans. Teji Grover and Rustam Singh. Bhopal: Vanya Prakashan/Tribal Welfare Department.
Varma, Rashmi. 2013. Primitive Accumulation: The Political Economy of Indigenous Art in Postcolonial India. Third Text 27 (6): 748–761.
Vidal, Denis. 2011. Primitivism and Post-Primitivism in Modern Indian Painting. In India Since 1950: Society, Politics, Economy and Culture, ed. Christopher Jaffrelot, 644–656. New Delhi: Yatra Books.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Luis, S.K. (2019). Between Anthropology and History: The Entangled Lives of Jangarh Singh Shyam and Jagdish Swaminathan. In: Perera, S., Pathak, D.N. (eds) Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05852-4_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05852-4_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-05851-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-05852-4
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)