Debashish Banerji
The rapid contemporary globalization of the world has thrown together people from different territories and cultures into haphazard physical proximity, creating heterogeneous identities and diaspora in urban centers planetwide. The varied interactions of these populations are productive of innovative cultural patterns, marked by departures so radical from the traditional norms of parent cultures, that we need a new vocabulary to conceptualize these forms and processes. Hybridity is a word that comes to mind in this context, characterizing the jazzy, experimental nature of contemporary cultural mixing. The seeming innocence of such a celebratory view of hybridity, belies however some serious problems with the concept, both semantic and historical.
Historically, contemporary globalization may be seen as a penultimate stage in the thoroughgoing completion of a hegemonic western Enlightenment project. Armed with world-conquering technologies, the exploitative drive of Enlightenment Man as subject, seems poised to possess its “other” (object), the world. Displacing and uprooting territorial populations as capital resources, it exerts its homogenizing pressure constituting humanity as identical, though it may maintain superficial ethnic differences as cultural capital. Seen thus, contemporary globalization takes on the character of the late-20th century phase of a self-fulfilling prophecy, whose earlier name was Colonialism. The Renaissance mapping of the world, the voyages of discovery, the civilizing missions, the creation of new markets and resources, the exploitation and coercion, the moral disciplining, the classification of populations and cultures, the fixing of identities prepared the way for the cloning of the nation-state and the emergence of independent “third-world” nations committed to perpetuating the model of western ‘progress’, albeit for the primary benefit of the west. It is in this grim context of Colonialism that the concept of “cultural hybridity” makes its appearance in contemporary cultural theory, resurrected by Homi Bhabha from Bakhtin to explore the politics of cultural resistance .
The Foucauldian critique of Orientalism, launched by Edward Said , has played a key role in indicating the epistemology of colonialism, specially in determining its hegemony in Asia. According to Said, colonial representations of the Orient as an essential and static ‘other’ of the west, went hand in glove with imperial machinery to subjugate it. Thus, Orientalism invents the eternal and spiritual Orient, the opposite of the historical and material Occident, and utilizes its powers of persuasion and coercion to superimpose this invention upon the reality, all the better to control it. But apart from the questionable relation between invention and reality, this account of colonial hegemony depends for its justification on the a/trans-historical coherence of Orientalism as a discourse. It is in the context of this and such shortcomings, that Homi Bhabha reevaluates Orientalism through the invocation of psychoanalysis as not coherent, but conflictual in nature . In Bhabha’s analysis, this conflicted quality of Orientalism arises from the constitution of the “otherness” of its object analogically to the fetish. Thus, the Orient is approached on the one hand, through systematic acquisition of knowledge for its mastery, but on the other, as paranoia and fantasy in its irreducible alterity. In the fulfillment of its purpose, the eradication of the marks of difference through the reproduction in its own image of the colonized, it is haunted most strongly by anxiety in its otherness. Thus, the general act of imitation or mimicry on the part of the colonized becomes an anonymous destabilizing agent for the colonizer . This pathology of Orientalism opens up, for Bhabha, the possibilities of anticolonial resistance. If imitation haunts anonymously with its otherness, hybridity explicates the source of subversion by estranging identity through the sunken or denied aspects of the other. “When the words of the master become the site of hybridity … then we may not only read between the lines but even seek to change the often coercive reality that they so lucidly contain.”
In Bakhtin’s terminology, such subversive hybridity was classed as “intentional”. In contrast to this, Bakhtin identified another type of hybridity, which he called “organic” . Developed on a linguistic model, “organic hybridity” was the unconscious basis of change in languages. Though seemingly anonymous, such changes nevertheless could possess profound cultural implications – “they are pregnant with potential for new world views, with new ‘internal forms’ for perceiving the world in words”.
These unconscious processes of organic hybridity are “natural” factors of culture change, but colonial situations display other manifestations of these processes. The cultural intersubjectivity of such unnatural and forced liaisons may produce forms that are marked by an unprecedented strangeness. Such an understanding of hybridity need not be restricted to the subversive. In a general sense, adapting a paradigm from Pierre Bourdieu, through the heightened unfamiliarity of the contact, the doxic ground of unquestioned behaviors becomes unsettled and individual agents from either culture may find themselves in a liminal space, where doxa stand exposed as arbitrary choices. The creative will of the individual agent here comes into play in making the choices that produce the innovational hybrid object. In this sense, even Bakhtin’s “organic” hybridity is seen as not unconscious, but determined as individual act of conscious choice under specific circumstances of cultural intersubjectivity.
The entire history of Indian artistic production in the colonial period may be seen in this light, as characterized by a hybrid identity. The influence of western Renaissance style in Indian art in fact, makes its appearance in the 16th century, in the Moghul art produced under Akbar. Akbar is known to have appreciated copies of the Dutch masters brought into his court by missionaries, and to have encouraged his artists to incorporate elements of naturalism into their works [Fig. 1]. Through his reign and those of his immediate descendants, however, these elements of naturalism were seldom made an exclusive method [Fig 2]. However, the idea of paintings that imitated nature was certainly a novelty, which is known to have fascinated the kings. This provides a clear example of the exposure of the arbitrariness of doxa when put into contact with difference.
‘British occupation of India, establishing itself in political dominance of the entire subcontinent by the 1850s, played its part in the demise of the miniature tradition. Where excellence in art is determined by verisimilitude, proficiency in mirroring the natural world, this implies an ontology where the location of ‘truth’ is the natural world. This fact, dimly grasped by the Moghul monarchs, was what made Academic Naturalism the art style par excellence of the colonial project, based in Enlightenment objectivism. Truth was nature, the world, the “other”, objectified as being outside, and therefore needing to be “captured”.
Company Painting’ is the name designating this tutored form of western-style painting, patronized chiefly by British officers in the 18th and 19th centuries. Though the main employment of the British-trained Indian artist was in painting portraits of British officers and the household members of petty potentates (rajas, nabobs), the intention was also to serve the Orientalist interests of European residents and visitors [Fig. 3].
In other words, mimicry. In Bhabha’s text, the colonizer constructs his colonized “other” as one who will be recognizably the same as the colonizer, but still different : ‘not quite/not white’ . Bhabha’s example is the Indian civil servant in British India, trained in British ways, who mediates between the imperial power and the colonized people. Such a mimic Englishman, is at once reassuring and disturbing, for “mimicry is at once resemblance and menace” . In Bhabha’s analysis, the destabilization resultant from this is implicit and anonymous, an inexorable moment in the self-conflicted dynamic of colonial desire. In this light, the Company artists, quite inadvertently and with no individual agency, tilled the ground of contestation, leaving it unstable for the appearance of individualized resistance in the form of the culturally hybrid.
The culturally hybrid did soon make its appearance, however, in the guise of Raja Ravi Verma of Kerala, whose work, though a continuation of naturalistic depiction, extended the thematic base to include melodramatic presentations of Hindu mythological subjects. Verma’s paintings became hugely popular over the length and breadth of the subcontinent, and were reproduced as postcards, advertisements and porcelains [Fig. 4]. It may certainly be said that his popularity among Indians rested on the hybridity of his art- its depiction of Hindu subjects combined with its adherence to the ‘superior’ and ‘correct’ style of prescribed western practice. But though such hybridity could hardly be seen as intentionally subversive, it did serve some indirect subversive ends. For one, as per Bhabha, , Verma’s art, as recognizable imitation, yet conspicuously “other”, could not but amplify the general paranoia in the colonizer, already prepared by the imitators. Additionally, by its mythologism and historicism, it stirred Hindu nationalist patriotic feelings. And finally, by presenting simultaneously the ancient Indian subject and the modern western method, it brought to the threshold of articulation the opposed ontologies of the two, inviting the critique which would release these into consciousness as choices.
It remained for a group of ideologues and practitioners who converged in and around what came to be called the Bengal School to provide this critique. The founder of the Bengal School was A. Tagore (1871-1951). His work and that of his school has been called revivalist, but in fact, it forms part of a hybrid articulation of an anti-Enlightenment ontology. Three other thinkers that need to be invoked in the context of the Bengal School are E.B. Havell, Ananda Coomaraswamy and Okakura Kakuzo . The location of truth for these thinkers was not in the external object, to be ‘possessed’ or ‘captured’ by technology, but in the eradication of subject and object through a ‘knowledge by identity’. In Coomaraswamy’s version, the statue of the idol in the temple was not just ‘out there’; it was simultaneously ‘in here’. From different cultural origins, around the turn-of-the-century these thinkers represent the beginnings of the recognition of a global liminality – that intermediate space, where consciousness in colonizer and colonized, subject and object, facing alterity in one another, becomes unfamiliar to themselves, leading to a variety of alternate positionalities, based on alternate supposed locations of truth. Arising through creative negotiation from a ground of indeterminacy, these are the culturally hybrid. Reversing orthodoxy in the territory of its origin, this same liminality was manifesting at the same time as the subjectivism of European modernism.
A. Tagore, opened through his uncle, Rabindranath and other familial sources, to the mystic emotionalism of Vaishnava aesthetics, was strongly impacted also by the Pre-Raphaelite medievalism of Havell and the Zen orientation of Okakura, and driven to develop a subjective style, the basis of a new practice, the Bengal School [Figs. 5,6]. The work of all these individuals was not unproblematic, however. Though himself ambiguous about his political stance, the art of A. Tagore and his school were appropriated into nationalist politics, and he has been criticized for normalizing an invented, derivative style as essentially Indian.
But none of these critics have recognized the fundamental liminality of A Tagore’s work. We may content ourselves with observing three characteristics of such liminality: (a) from whichever side of the divide, the liminal space uproots doxic tradition, making it impossible any more to identify distinct cultures, leading to the unclassifiable and strange hybrid newness of the work. (b) As a corollary to (a), the liminal space, estranging one from tradition, individualizes, offering choices where before there were none. For the production of art, this has important consequences. However it may be used communally, art no longer proceeds from accepted collective presupposition. As product of individual choice, it becomes the aesthetic object, which stands on the ground of questioning, constituted equally by criticism and creativity. (c) The liminal space of hybrid identity is marked by bi- or multilingualism. Like the English texts of Coomaraswamy, peppered with Sanskrit, it is a site of dialogic negotiations of cultural concepts marked by identity and difference. A monolinguistic reading of the cultural productions of this space, privileging a dominant culture has to be scrupulously avoided, and substituted with a search for homologies in both cultures if the text is to be interpreted.
The art of A. Tagore and his school, nevertheless, by deliberately eschewing the presence of the industrial west, becomes the opposite of mimicry, destabilizing through hermetic exclusion. Thus, though A. Tagore’s work can be seen as hybrid, this hybridity manifests not Bhabha’s transgressive engagement with colonial culture, but an alternate identity, amplified through homologous complementarities. This leads me to propose a modification of Bakhtin’s distinction between organic and intentional hybridity. As questioned by me earlier in this text, perhaps all “organic” hybridity is also “intentional”; further, the “intentional” category reveals a vertical and horizontal dimensionality. Vertical intentional hybridity is Bhabha’s transgressive type and manifests engagement with hierarchy; horizontal hybridity is assimilative and complementary, basing itself on the telescoping of cultural homologies. In colonial contexts, both often operate simultaneously, feeding into each other to create the complex and open-ended dialog of liminality.
A clearly-mapped expression of this 2-dimensional model is visible in the ‘cubist’ paintings of G. Tagore. G. Tagore (1867-1938) was A’s elder brother. Though never formally considered a ‘member’ of the Bengal School, G. worked with his brother in the same ‘atelier’, the south-facing veranda of their ancestral home in Calcutta. Along with his brother, he came early under the spell of Japanese art. His own work from around 1910, shows the predominant use of Indian ink and a preoccupation with rapid calligraphic brushwork, like that of the Japanese sumi-e painters [Fig. 7].
The modulation of monochromatic ink against white paper was related in the Japanese Zen tradition to the dualism of form and emptiness – the seeming variety and solidity of the world of forms anchored only as shadow in a featureless transcendence. G. Tagore’s ink paintings partake of this quality, but like his brother’s, retain an irreducible localism which defies categorization as simple Japanese imitation. The Zen ideas themselves are echoes of very similar Indian Buddhist and Advaitic ideas. G. Tagore’s work of this period can therefore be seen as ideologically continuous with that of the Bengal School, and expressive of a hybridity of resistance through exclusion and amplification of cultural homologies – i.e. horizontal hybridity.
But from 1915, G.’s artistic interests diversified to the incorporation of western modernist elements in his own paintings . His first works from this period, which show some recognition of the urban landscape are a set of satirical social and political cartoons in an Expressionist vein [Fig. 8]. These works are characterized by the appearance of a critical consciousness and thus a deliberate manifestation in art of the vectors of social and political power.
From about 1917, a preoccupation with interior space and artificial lighting are seen to enter his paintings. Whereas, following an eastern tradition, forms in his earlier paintings stood silhouetted against a uniform presence of light, now the staged psychologism of projected light and designed space draw his attention. Nor is its political import lost on him. In one of his earliest untitled examples of such exploration (1917), artificial light is equated with the projective ontology of colonialism and its hypnotic and manipulative powers to subordinate through terror [Fig. 9]. In another painting of the same year, the duplicitous quality of projected light, messianic and propagandist, is appropriated by the ‘nationalist’ cause, in a depiction of his uncle, Rabindranath, delivering a political speech [Fig. 10].
From the 1920s, G. started using a quasi-‘Cubist’ idiom to extend the implications of artificial lights and built spaces. In a vein similar to that of the Rabindranath painting, he painted the ‘nationalist’ scientist, J.C. Bose, appropriating the light at its source through his own projective machinery [Fig. 11]. The painting is titled simply “J.C. Bose demonstrating his apparatus”. The ‘apparatus’ in question could be a projector and diffraction grating, demonstrating the bending of light. An oneric atmosphere surrounds the scientist, his form and the intersecting shadows around him modulated into overlapping planes, revealing spectral presences.
Cubism, as initiated and practiced by Picasso and Braque since 1907, was part of the European modernist rejection of naturalism. In the wake of the Post-Impressionists, Picasso invoked the Cartesian three- dimensionality of naturalistic illusionism only to problematize it in terms of the two-dimensional reality of representational space. However, G. Tagore’s paintings express their problematic through the explicit device of artificial light and interior space, creating psychological effects [Fig. 12]. Thus Ratan Parimoo sees these works as closer to the Expressionistic Cubism of Lyonel Feinenger [Fig. 13]. Like Feinenger’s , G. Tagore’s Cubism reveals intermediate planes of existence through the intersection of lights and interiors. But in his work, these intermediate planes, starkly articulated through varying shades of Indian ink, are full of mysterious life-forms.
Thus staging and lighting, the two principal means in the exhibitionary order of colonialism, projecting themselves onto reality through intersecting Cartesian categories, becomes the subject of these paintings [Figs. 14,15]. But the mutual interferences of these categoric projections, and their contact with elusive ground, create the dislocated and problematic liminal spaces, pregnant with the ambiguous potential of alterity. G. Tagore’s so-called ‘Cubist’ paintings thus become themselves the site for the enactment of their own dynamic – the birth of the unclassifiable within the interstices of colonizer-colonized relations, constituted through a simultaneity of horizontal and vertical hybridities.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1.) Francis Baker et. al, Europe and its Objects, 2 Vols., Colchester: University of Esssex, 1985.
2.) Francis Baker et. al, The Politics of Theory, Colchester: University of Essex, 1983.
3.) Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, CambridgeUniversity Press, 1977.
4.) Anjan Chakraverty, Indian Miniature Painting, Banaras: Lustre Press.
5.) Roy C. Craven, Indian Art, London: Thames and Hudson, 1977.
6.) Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, Cambridge University Press, 1994.
7.) Ratan Parimoo, The Paintings of the Three Tagores, Baroda: Maharaja Sayajirao University, 1973.
8.) Edward W. Said, Orientalism, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978.
9.) Edward W. Said, The World, The Text, The Critic, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1983.
10.) Neville Tuli, The Flamed Mosaic: Indian Contemporary Painting, Mumbai: Heart-Mapin, 1994.
11.) Robert L. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, New York: Routledge Press, 1995.
12.) Robert L. Young, Torn Halves, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996.
