Anish Kapoor: Embedded Impressions of Indian Culture

This MRP analyses key elements in several of Anish Kapoor's iconic artworks. While many of these works appear formalist at first glance, the artist's multicultural background plays an important and often under-recognized role. Born in Mumbai, Kapoor spent his formative childhood years in India before moving to London and starting his professional artistic career. Often eschewing his Indian roots in favour of being considered an artist, first and foremost, the subtler meanings embodied in Kapoor's work remains a challenge to those unfamiliar with Indian culture, religion and philosophy. This major research paper seeks to bring forth the Indian aspects found in Kapoor's sculptures and installations. Three sections – ‘Colour’, ‘Auto-generation’ and ‘Architecture’ – identify the presence of Indian thought and spirituality in Kapoor's use of intense colour, self-created objects, and evocative voids. I argue that Hindu concepts such as Sunyata ("emptiness") and Samkhya ("dualities") are fundamental to the artist's works. Ultimately, Kapoor’s work not only features traces of Indian themes, philosophies, and culture, but depends on these aspects for its most compelling affects. Keywords: Anish Kapoor, Indian culture, Sunyata, colour in art, Samkhya, voids in sculpture, auto-generation in art, contemporary art, installation ar

Fashioning readers: canon, criticism and pedagogy in the emergence of modern Oriya literature

Through a brief history of a widely published canon debate in nineteenth century Orissa, this article describes how anxieties about the quality of ‘traditional’ Oriya literature served as a site for imagining a cohesive Oriya public who would become the consumers and beneficiaries of a new, modernized Oriya-language canon. A public controversy about the status of Oriya literature was initiated in the 1890s with the publication of a serialized critique of the works of Upendra Bhanja, a very popular pre-colonial Oriya poet. The critic argued that Bhanja’s writing was not true poetry, that it did not speak to the contemporary era, and that it featured embarrassingly detailed discussions of obscene material. By unpacking the terms of this criticism and Oriya responses to it, I reveal how at the heart of these discussions were concerns about community building that presupposed a new kind of readership of literature in the Oriya language. Ultimately, this article offers a longer, regional history to the emerging concern of post-colonial scholarship with relationships between publication histories, readerships, and broader ideas of community – local, Indian, and global