Exploring traditional and metropolitan Indian arts using the Muggu tradition as a case study

The past century has witnessed fervent debates about dichotomies in Indian art, articulated variously as high and low art, art and craft, and fine and decorative art. The current avatar of such dichotomies is expressed as a divide between metropolitan and traditional art. The former is understood to be that which is displayed and marketed in urban art institutions and associated with individualism; the latter is generally qualified by terms like folk, religious, ritual, rural or tribal, displayed and sold in non-institutional contexts and associated with a collective identity. Despite frequent attempts to resolve the above-mentioned dichotomies, such hierarchies persist. Indian art is currently experiencing a resurgence, which some see more as a by-product of a rapidly growing economy, rather than as an explicitly artistic maturing. Notwithstanding this recent boom, many writers and artists lament the state of Indian cultural institutions. One such critic is Rustom Bharucha, whose essay on Indian museums provides one of the starting points for this study. The difficulty of reconciling the modern and the traditional appears to lie at the heart of these issues – a problem that both metropolitan and traditional artists face. In this project, I consider myself as an example of a metropolitan Indian artist and the issues I encountered as possibly characteristic of those that other metropolitan artists face. As a case study of traditional arts, I look at muggus, floor-drawings made by women in Andhra Pradesh, south India. Their ephemerality, ritualism and aesthetics furnish relevant instances for a discussion on metropolitan and traditional arts, challenging existing stereotypes and prejudices in the display, production and discourse of traditional arts. This study crosses the academic boundaries of anthropology, art-practice, art history, cultural theory, ethnography and visual culture to allow for a more layered exploration of Indian metropolitan and traditional arts

Coolies of Capitalism

Coolie labour was often proclaimed as a deliberate compromise straddling the regimes of the past (slave labour) and the future (free labour). In the late 1850s, the locals were replaced by labourers imported from outside the province who were designated "coolies". Qualifying this framework of transition and introduction, this study makes a case for the "production" of coolie labour in the history of the colonial-capitalist plantations in Assam

Listening together-apart: Collaborations in matters of the sound-image

Listening together-apart is a practice-research project exploring collaborative approaches to the conceptual and actual composition of sound with moving images. Through a portfolio of compositions spanning film, installation, publication, performance, music and sonic arts this thesis explores the notion of the sound-image; an agential entanglement of sound, image, artist, audience, and the matters to which each sound-image speaks. Theories of non-hierarchical, non-binary relation in cultural studies, sound and filmmaking are explored through collaborative projects realised with artists and community groups, using the indeterminacy of Open Works as a site for creative investigation into these matters. This written commentary outlines the theoretical framework for this study and documents the practical and conceptual approaches to each work included in the portfolio

Coolies of Capitalism

Coolie labour was often proclaimed as a deliberate compromise straddling the regimes of the past (slave labour) and the future (free labour). In the late 1850s, the locals were replaced by labourers imported from outside the province who were designated "coolies". Qualifying this framework of transition and introduction, this study makes a case for the "production" of coolie labour in the history of the colonial-capitalist plantations in Assam

Text, Orality, and Performance in Newar Devotional Music

Dāphā bhajan is a style of devotional song performance practised by Newar men in the towns of the Kathmandu Valley. Although it is now primarily the farming community who maintain it, it originated in the court culture of the Newar kings in the 17th and 18th centuries, and reflects the interests of aristocratic society at that time in devotional literature and music theory. Texts of dāphā songs include compositions attributed to the kings themselves, in old Newari and Maithili, and poetry by Indian authors including Vidyāpati, Nāmdev, Kabīr, Sūrdās and Jayadeva. Transmission to the farming community, among whom literacy and knowledge of the languages concerned were limited, has shifted the balance of attention away from the texts themselves towards the processes of musical performance. As in some other South Asian singing traditions, the generation of intensity through music overwhelms the text, which loses its centrality, its form and even its meaning. The manuscript songbook from which a group sings can no longer be regarded as the vehicle of a written tradition: it is but one element in an oral performance tradition