Political Aesthetics

Culture, Critique and the Everyday

Arundhati Virmani, Arundhati Virmani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317906285
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Political Aesthetics highlights the complex and ambiguous connections of aesthetics with social, cultural and political experiences in contemporary societies. If today aesthetics seems a rather overused term, mixing a variety of historical realities and complex personal states of being, its relevance as a connecting agent between individual, state and society is stronger than ever.

The actual context of political and economic crisis generates new relations between official imposed aesthetics and the resistance and critiques they trigger. Considered beyond the poles of power and protest, the book examines how traditional or innovative artistic practices may acquire unexpected capacities of subversion. It nourishes the current debate around the new political stakes of aesthetics as an inviolable right of ordinary citizens, an essential element of empowerment and agency in a democratic every day.

It will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, political culture and political aesthetics, as well as critical sociology and history. It will also be useful for some broad courses in media studies, cultural studies, and sociology.

Part I

Aesthetics in political culture

1 Imagining pasts and futures

South Africa’s Keiskamma Tapestry and the Indian Parliament murals^*

Rachel E. Johnson and Shirin M. Rai

Those who study modern democratic politics are coming increasingly to be reminded that ‘every kind of political rule operates in the context of a symbolic order that legitimates it and sanctifies it’ and that modern, bureaucratic, supposedly rational, forms of governance such as parliamentary democracy are no exception.¹ Following quickly on from this reminder, is another, that these symbolic orders are polysemic and layered; they contain within them traces, of the forms of rule that preceded them and of the historical contestations that have surrounded them. One cultural historian of politics, Phillip Manow has employed a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ to search out these ‘memory traces’ of older political orders within democratic political practices.² To similar ends, the sociologist Nirmal Puwar advocates the method of the flâneur in approaching the material sites of politics, to excavate ‘the sedimented, layered and contested stories of occupation, performance and ritual’ that they contain.³ Influenced by these approaches our aim in this chapter is to focus upon two works of art, within two different democratic parliaments and through these to explore the aesthetic gestures by which political spaces can be re-made.

In this chapter we explore two contexts in which the act of writing-over, of one symbolic order by another, is a self-conscious, ostentatious political performance in itself; there is a need for symbolic appropriations to be acknowledged and celebrated. In India the moment of independence in 1947 and in South Africa the 1994 transition to democracy witnessed new sets of elites taking-over existing political institutions. In both cases this involved a material and symbolic process of ‘reclaiming’ old colonial political buildings for the new postcolonial nations. We focus upon two artworks that have been viewed in India and South Africa as important interventions in this process. The murals that are painted on the wall of the outer corridor of the Indian Parliament and the Keiskamma Tapestry that hangs in the South African Parliament both depict serialized historical narratives about the life of the nation. In situ they both explicitly re-tell a narrative of the nation, which is at odds with the imperial iconography of the parliamentary buildings themselves. In so doing they mark the site of former colonial power with a counterstory of the nation becoming, an aesthetic act, which alerts us to the tensions and political erasures that emerge in articulations of nationalism.

Why were the murals, along with various portraits and statues commissioned by the Indian Parliament? Why was the tapestry along with a new art collection borrowed and bought by the South African Parliament? What did postcolonial Indian and South African political elites seek to represent through this art work? Why do they occupy the space that they do? And what do they tell us about the contemporary struggles over aesthetics and political meaning that continue to mobilize as well as agitate political actors? Our comparison, or perhaps more accurately our juxtaposition of these two artworks is a way of revealing the struggles over representation of the nation in postcolonial contexts. They are part of the complex and multi-layered ‘archi-texture’ of the parliamentary buildings, which continue to echo with older articulations of power and nationhood, providing points for ongoing contestation of what the nation is and should be.⁴ Whereas other chapters in this volume examine the intertwining of aesthetic and political thought in individual leaders as diverse as Mussolini and Gandhi, our chapter explores the aesthetic struggles of nation-building as expressed through buildings.

We suggest that the performative, the spatial and the aesthetic, allow us to ask important questions about politics and political institutions and their place in our past and present readings of national histories in three ways. First, the political imaginaries represented in and through artworks such as the Indian Parliament murals and the Keiskamma Tapestry produce both cognitive and affective responses, which are expressed in terms of history, past, present and future aspirations.⁵ Second, these imaginaries can help us reflect upon the processes through which they become hegemonic – how the dominant modes of power are reproduced and how the marginalized are kept outside the spaces of performance of power, in the shadows and ‘out of place’.⁶ Third, it allows us to ask questions about the palimpsest nature of multiple histories and imaginaries – representations of power are not stable; they are contingent. If a dominant political aesthetics reproduces consensus about the place of the powerful, critical aesthetics ‘foments dissensus, [it] makes visible what the dominant consensus tends to obscure’.⁷ Dominant political aesthetics are challenged in agonistic spaces and are reconfigured as they travel over time.⁸

Our comparison of the Indian Parliament murals and the Keiskamma Tapestry proceeds in three sections. First, we discuss the decision to commission the murals and borrow the tapestry as instances within the broader nation-building practices of 1950s India and 1990s South Africa, in which freedom from colonial and apartheid rule was translated into material moments for the new national citizens. Second, we explore the particular stories that the murals and the tapestry tell and the form that these narrations of the nation take. Finally, we consider what the differences between the murals and the tapestry might reveal about a shifting aesthetics of the postcolonial.

Material moments of freedom

Representing India

India became independent on 15 August 1947. To be Indian, rather than a subject of empire, or a member of a religion had to be transitioned in the wake of the bloodbath that preceded the Indian partition and continued to cast a long shadow over the period of ‘nation-building’. The new elites of independent India set about not simply occupying but indigenizing old imperial spaces of governance with new art and artefacts, new accommodations, rules, procedures and norms framing different spectacles of political power and of nation-building that preoccupied the nationalist government and its leaders. ‘Nation-building’ was a project that encompassed both the firming up of hegemonic political and cultural discourses through constitutional and legal arrangements, as well as economic and militarist infrastructures that allowed the knitting together of disparate populations into one stable political entity – the independent nation-state. In the iconic speech – A Tryst with Destiny – that Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of independent India, made on 14 August 1947 at midnight as India became independent, he set out the major themes that were to guide the project of nation-building:

Before the birth of freedom, we have endured all the pains of labour and our hearts are heavy with the memory of this sorrow … Nevertheless, the past is over and it is the future that beckons us now … [Our] dreams are for India, but they are also for the world, for all the nations and peoples are too closely knit together today for any one of them to imagine that it can live apart … We have to build the noble mansion of free India where all her children may dwell.⁹

Chatterjee has called the nationalism of elites ‘a project of mediation’.¹⁰ This involved, as we shall see below, the appropriation of the popular – the innocent and the wise ‘common man’ rooted in the ‘timeless truth of the national culture’; the ‘classicization of tradition’; and finally, the ‘structure of the hegemonic domain of nationalism … where it sought to overcome the subordination of the colonized middle class’.¹¹ While the nation has been translated into many discursive forms – language, performance, literature, rhetoric and territory, familial belonging¹² – in this speech Nehru brings together many of these moves and crucially for our purposes invokes the metaphor of space and dwelling in translating nationalism into the nation-state. This is poignant as the speech was given in the Central Hall of the British built Council Chamber – symbolic of imperial architecture even as it was also a response to the strengthening nationalist struggle in the country.

Some of the struggles for expressing the new nation as it took shape can be read off the murals, portraits and statues that were commissioned for parliament in the early years of independence. These are important because they were among the first imaginative enterprises of the Indian postcolonial state – the murals and statues in parliament were supposed to tell the story of India. The first Speaker of the Indian parliament, G. V. Mavalanker, set up a Planning Committee in 1951 and later a sub-Committee to examine the issue of decorating parliament. The sub-Committee felt that under the British, public buildings were designed and constructed in

the Western style, however unsuitable they might be for the country … [and that] art executed by the well known artists and sculptors of India, would … help [the visitors who viewed these] to purify their thought, advance their knowledge of the glorious past of their country.¹³

As the new republic took shape, marking it in public spaces was an important mode of translating freedom into material moments for the nation’s citizens – changes to the names of streets, removal of some and installation of other statues and of public art and artefacts, emphasizing both familiar public ceremonies and creating and staging new ones – through all this the nation was performed, given authoritative sanction and legitimized.

The murals in the outer corridor of the Indian parliament tell the story of ‘India, that is Bharat’ (the Sanskrit name for India) from its inception as an idea, to its moment of independence from British rule in 1947. Fifty-nine panels have been completed and displayed in the outer corridor on the ground floor of the Parliament House. The Indian parliamentary website explicitly asserts a link between culture, history and representation of the nation through the murals:

The practice in India of decorating public places, temples and palaces etc., with paintings and murals has come down to us since time immemorial. These pieces of art are symbolic of the life, culture and traditions of the people … they are reminiscent of the great civilisations and empires that flourished in India in the past and of the great kings, warriors and saints who by their efforts glorified this land of ours … It was natural, therefore, that the architects of modern India should have thought it fit to decorate the modern temple of democracy, i.e. the Parliament House, with paintings depicting great moments in the history of this country and to try to revive in some measure the glory that was ‘India’.¹⁴

To ‘read’ the story that these murals tell takes about 45 minutes; from gate five we turn right and do a ‘parikrama’ (circumnavigation) invoking the feeling of being in a ‘temple of democracy’ (as Nehru called parliament), of familiar sacred spaces for some and for others, an awe-inspiring distant cultural landscape. As the Report emphasizes, the selection of the themes of the murals was carefully made to inspire citizens and representatives by ‘depicting the outstanding episodes in the nation’s history’; the state wished to make a visual bridge between India’s ancient culture and its emergent identity as a modern new nation.¹⁵ What is retained, excised, transformed and indigenized holds clues about elite imaginaries and aspirations.

Art against apartheid

In 1994, South Africa elected its first democratic government by universal franchise. The new Members of Parliament sat down to govern in the same set of parliamentary buildings that had been used by the apartheid government before them and the British colonial state before that. Whilst some have suggested that the old buildings were ‘simply taken-over’ by the new leaders, a focus on the artwork in parliament reveals that any process of ‘appropriation’ is an ongoing and contested process.¹⁶ Until 1996, art depicting apartheid-era leaders and symbolism continued to hang in parliament. It was removed following the suggestion of the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology (ACST) that ‘parliament should be a catalyst for change in South Africa’.¹⁷ The old collection was thus replaced in 1996 by a collection of works known as Art against Apartheid, a collection of over 100 works by 78 international artists that was first shown together in Paris in 1983 in an exhibition sponsored by the United Nations and its Special Committee against Apartheid, UNESCO and the governments of Finland, Sweden and Norway.

It was reportedly the dream of the artists who formed Art against Apartheid ‘that it would one day be given as a gift to the first democratic government of South Africa’.¹⁸ In 1996, the then Department of ACST had championed the holding of the exhibition in parliament ‘as setting an important precedent for the way in which the role of arts in society is understood’.¹⁹ In a foreword to the exhibition catalogue the D...