Amrita Gupta Singh: The retrospective, ‘The Earth’s Heart, Torn Out’/Navjot Altaf: A Life in Art, mapped five decades of the artist’s practice through a monumental and unconventional presentation. Charting the complex ideological and thematic formulations in Navjot’s work, the curatorial mode sought the form of the novel, rather than art historical chronology or linear shifts of style. In this juxtaposition of the past and present, how did this rhizomatic mode of presentation evolve?

Nancy Adajania: Thank you, dear Amrita, for engaging with the curatorial imagination informing this retrospective. I wanted to structure the exhibition such that it spoke intimately to Navjot’s risk-taking subjectivity. As you know, Navjot has had the courage to make sudden unexpected detours in her career – she gave up an extremely successful practice of painting to initiate a collaborative experiment in Bastar in the late 1990s. Thus the viewer enters the show in medias res, in the middle of things, as it were, rather than at the very beginning of her practice. I don’t adhere to any dogmas, stylistic or political. Chronology in itself is not unproductive, but then, a non-linear approach does not automatically guarantee a radical reading. Both approaches must be judiciously used in a manner that is organic and integral to the artistic practice under study.

In Navjot’s case, the ruptures and detours are buttressed by a strong consistency, a well thought-out gestation period. Her Bastar experiment is informed by her feminist consciousness. Her feminist consciousness, in turn, evolved as a critique of Indian Marxism, which treated the issues of gender and caste as superstructure problems that would be addressed once the revolution got under way. 

The different levels in the exhibition bear witness to the political contradictions and aesthetic struggles punctuating her practice. Each level is built around arguments, debates and stories in Ritwik Ghatak’s ‘Jukti takko aar gappo’ sense. For instance, the first level, which deals with her relatively recent works critiquing the consequences of the Anthropocene era, opens out as you say ‘rhizomatically’ to other explorations. Here I propose the argument: “Can abstraction be political?” to deal with the politicality of abstraction. For instance, take the series, ‘How perfect perfection can be’(2015-2018). We could read this as a gendered gesture where Navjot wrests the grid from the archive of an oppressive patriarchal Modernism, with its belief in a technocratic utopia, and annotates it with the tremors of the present – the effects of global warming. By juxtaposing a work of mature years like ‘How perfect…’ with her photographic series ‘Abdul Rehman Street’, which she shot during her student days in the early 1970s – a form of rhythmic abstraction – I was mapping her transition from a schooled formalism to abstraction with a political edge. My argument on the politicality of abstraction and, the corollary tension between the twin impulses of the discursive and abstraction in her work, acts as the fulcrum of the show. 

And yes, you are right – the curatorial approach for this exhibition is, in part, novelistic. It plots Navjot’s tentative moves, bold choices and faltering steps in life and art almost as if she were a character in a Bildungsroman. Through a few deft strokes, three successive self-portraits, for instance, we see how Navjot developed from a reticent girl to an assertive artistic subjectivity in the late 1960s while studying at the J J School of Art. You can compare these, as you walk through the show, with her later feminist self-portraits.

As a caveat, I do wish to clarify that while my writing and curation are deliberately transdisciplinary – deploying various methodologies drawn from political science, philosophy and anthropology – my practice is conducted as a critical engagement with an expanded sense of art history. You can write or curate against the grain of art history only if you know its internal workings thoroughly.  

Amrita Gupta Singh: Nancy, since you mentioned the filmmaker Ghatak, would I be correct in saying that your curatorial approach is also cinematic, the way in which your scenography plays out across the spiral form of the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, in a most vivid way?

Nancy Adajania: It is interesting how you have picked up on the cinematic impulse in my curation. I have always been fascinated by the architecture of the NGMA, Bombay, which is shaped like a cosmic spiral culminating in a dome. The challenge was to conceive an exhibition scenography that both acknowledged and disrupted this architectonics of continuous flow. In retrospect, I see how much of the exhibition mise-en-scene owes to my early training in cinema. In particular, Eisenstein’s concept of “polyphonic montage,” where one shot is linked to another, not through a single indicative value of light or movement, “but through a simultaneous advance of a multiple series of lines, each maintaining an independent compositional course and each contributing to the total compositional course of the sequence.” (Film Sense, 1943). The cutaway interior architecture of the NGMA — every floor can be glimpsed from every other floor — allowed for a simultaneity of curatorial edits, audio and visual, while keeping the narrative flow in circulation. You will sense associative montage, as well as jump-cuts in the interrelationships that I have produced between Navjot’s works. 

The works are placed in such a way that the viewer’s eye will move restlessly and fluidly through the various motions of tracking, zooming in/out and finally tilting up to see the projection in the dome. Further, the sound bleeds are orchestrated such that we can feel Navjot’s anxiety and the alternating states of muteness and articulation manifested in her diverse works. 

Amrita Gupta Singh: Such an exhibition form reminds me of Virginia Woolf’s statement – “A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.”Looking back, Navjot, how would you reflect on your intellectual trajectory and pushing your practice to speak with your life experiences?

Navjot Altaf: The quote byVirginia Woolf – “A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living”reminds me metaphorically of rivers, which express continuous change in nature and life, and of Marxian logic that nothing is static. In the context of ecology, the theory of constructal law by Adrian Bejan is what I am interested in, which puts forth the idea that “Life is flow: all flow systems are live systems…how nature has a tendency to generate design to facilitate flow, which also applies to our arteries, veins of bodies, tree branches and the river deltas.” The river deltas, the most bio-diverse systems on the planet are home for a number of species – plants, animals, insects, marine life etc. My practice has evolved from what matters to me, what moves me intensely in life and what positions my articulation through dialogue and a visual language that is interconnected.       

Amrita Gupta Singh: The retrospective corrects an art historical lacunae – the role of the 1970s left-wing students’ movement in Bombay and how that shaped both Altaf’s and Navjot’s practice. Nancy, could you share the historical significance of PROYOM (The Progressive Youth Movement) in the context of the political situation in India then, and how that urged for new forms of art making and public engagement? The fundamental question being – who should artists speak with and how? This was an ‘existential paradox’ particularly given Navjot’s academic training at the Sir. J.J. School of Art, Mumbai, in western formalist modernism.

Nancy Adajania: That’s true. Dominant art-historical accounts of ‘political art’ emphasise the Baroda School or the Radicals and leave out Navjot and her artist-husband Altaf’s contribution to the students movement in Bombay in the 1970s. My book, and this retrospective, are intended to correct this lacuna. 

In the early 1970s, Altaf and Navjot joined PROYOM, the Progressive Youth Movement founded by Dev Nathan and Kiran Kasbekar, who were influenced by Marxist philosophy and more specifically far Leftist politics. PROYOM brought together people from diverse fields including students, academics, writers, journalists, filmmakers and visual artists. The Thirteenth Place: Positionality as Critique in the Art of Navjot Altafcontextualises this politically fraught moment which has its genesis in the 1967 uprising in Naxalbari and the student uprisings in Europe, in 1968. 

Despite it being a gallery-commissioned monograph, which is conventionally meant to valorise the artist’s contribution, Navjot gave me the freedom to etch her proportionately into this narrative as a figure within a larger landscape of political history. I was thus able to produce a larger intellectual biography of the movement by contextualising the contributions of other people to that historical moment, including poets like Adil Jussawalla and activists like Dev Nathan and Vasanthi Raman among others. 

En route, I was also able to far exceed my brief and correct historiographical accounts both in political history and art history. As for the former, I explain the reasons for the whitewashing of P.C. Joshi’s presence in Communist historiography (both Navjot and Sudhir Patwardhan told me how their acquaintance with leftist politics began with Dange). And in art history, I take stock of the legacies of Marxist art historians like Arnold Hauser and Ernst Fischer – who both Navjot and I read despite belonging to very different generations – and ask why one has slipped off the academic radar while the other continues to exert a measure of influence. 

To return to the 1970s, Navjot and Altaf would print posters on political issues overnight and paste them on the walls of the city (the back wall of the Wheeler’s Bookstall at Bandra railway station was often covered by their slogans). They also held literacy classes and workshops in Bombay’s slums, and showed their works outside hospitals, at factory gates and in labour camps, as well as in schools and colleges. PROYOM was also in dialogue with Namdeo Dhasal, a co-founder and key leader of the Dalit Panthers movement. 

For this retrospective, apart from showing archival documents, Navjot has also made a new set of posters in consultation with her PROYOM friends Vasanthi Raman and Pravin Nadkar. These speak to the political urgencies of the past and the present. We decided to revisit the Wheeler’s Bookstall where they had displayed their posters in the 1970s and create indicative panels of posters that address anti-Dalit atrocities, violence against women and the lynchings of Muslims by right-wing goons.  

Amrita Gupta Singh: In taking the question of speaking/working with people further, Navjot, apart from PROYOM in metropolitan Bombay, you were also visiting the Adivasi bell metal sculptor, Jaidev Baghel, since 1973. What began as tentative inquiry into other life-worlds translated to moving to Bastar in 1997 to work collaboratively with Adivasi artists. What was this transitional period like, and what were your questions around class and the subaltern?

Navjot Altaf: Before Bastar, I remember one of our visits (during the mid-1970s) to a weavers’ village in Sambalpur, Orissa, where Altaf and I were amazed to see the sense of design and quality of weaving, how thread was prepared, tied and dyed calculatedly with a pattern in mind. The whole family from the age of 10 to 80 had to be involved in the process to produce that high-class silk fabric for an urban market but their own economic status was lower than the very basic standard of living. They were not paid very well by the co-operatives for their production and most of the community had no land.

I met Jaidev for the first time in Delhi in 1973, and then many times in Bombay, a city he visited frequently for his exhibitions or meetings with Roshan Kalapesi and others. My first visit to Bastar was before Shilpi Gram was conceived and built in the late 1980s /early 1990s. Jaidev never talked about his idea of Shilpi Gram at that time, but took us to places around Kondagaon to show local artists working in different materials apart from bell metal. This is when I saw some artists from Bhopal working at Bhelwapadar Para with local artists, basically using their skills to realize their ideas.

Concerning the inquiry into other modes of art making, it began with the experimental project, State of the Art and Circling the Square, which I was a part of in Bombay in the early 1990s. The process of both projects included people from other fields working with the artists, yet the collectively produced works, in both instances, were credited to the artists alone and no questions were raised by the artists, organizers, and the art critics regarding the collaborative process of the projects. Links Destroyed And Rediscovered, a year later was my first collaborative project followed by ImagesRedrawn, a sculptural installation, which I consider co-operative.

When I travelled to Bastar again to see the memorial pillars installed in public spaces in 1996, I met some of the local artists who were trained and worked independently at  Shilpi Gram studios, including those who are my colleagues now. They expressed their interest in interaction with artists from outside to take a break from what they were doing. So based on a mutually written proposal to the IFA (India Foundation for the Arts), the project Modes of Parallel Practice: Ways of Art Making to work side by side at Shilpi Gram, was the starting point. J. Swaminathan’s collection and catalogue writing for Bharat Bhavan had raised some questions in my mind and I saw myself intervening in that area from a feminist perspective. The process of working in a common space gradually encouraged communication leading to extensive travel within Bastar, where one not only sensed the dynamics of local art and culture, but also felt the socio-economic and power asymmetries at almost all levels. There were no women practicing art independently despite being trained at Shilpi Gram under various schemes. Numerous travels also included visiting few high schools in Kondagaon.

The focus of our conversation at Shilpi Gram studios was on how to understand each one’s premise and position as artists, whether we could communicate on art and other social issues, about our limitations and conditioning as we came from different socio-economic and cultural backgrounds. It meant developing ways of coining the terminology, re-reading and re-defining the terminology of art/craft and artist/craftsperson in the context of art history in India, and questions related to representation and self-representation from different perspectives and sexual hierarchies. Further, the language produced through different modes of art practices became important, what specific artistic practices are doing, and the process of self-reflection through practice in the context of critical thinking was deliberated upon.

Over a long period, collaboration as a strategy was negotiated between us when we intervened in a public space. What I would like to emphasise here is that it was not only about my intervention in a site-specific area, but my Adivasi colleagues’ intervention in their own areas as individual artists. The nature of our collective projects was different from artists working in the guild, who were often assistants in some studios in Kondagaon. 

Active listening and working towards expanding the research-based methodology to make art with community people is our basis. I want to mention that I had not gone to Bastar with an intention to collaborate with Adivasi artists to begin with. The IFA grant was to explore experimental modes, which could encourage interaction or collaboration between artists from different cultural backgrounds, and explore these possibilities and it’s problematic.   

Amrita Gupta Singh: Navjot’s readings in Marxism and Feminism and association with progressive movements (1970s-1980s) initiated her interest in the politics of culture, communication, and reciprocity. In your book,The Thirteenth Place, you have analysed her confrontation with Marxism, particularly in its lack of gender formulations. How did this translate into her artistic practice?

Nancy Adajania: Navjot was deeply troubled by the gaping lacuna in regard to gender inequality in Marxist discourse. Even in relation to the art historical discourse in the Indian context, she felt that the practices of women artists had not been sufficiently analysed in the 1980s and 1990s. Most of her reading in art history at that time concentrated on the writing of Western feminist art historians. 

InThe Thirteenth Place, however, I show how while a gender-sensitive art historical account was lacking at that time, Navjot’s emergent feminist art consciousness owes in large measure to the birth of feminist publishing within India in the 1980s. I cite the work of Urvashi Butalia, Ritu Menon, Susie Tharu, as well as to the feminist critiques of the patriarchal reflexes of male Communist ideologues, as proposed by scholars Kumkum Sangari and Vasantha Kannabiran. Navjot has read some of these authors, and as for the rest, she would have imbibed an intellectual stance in an osmotic manner from the larger discursive ethos. 

It has always been very important for me to create our own regional art-historical accounts (despite the rhetoric of decolonisation, we are always seeking intellectual legitimacy from the West). In my 2007 essay, ‘The Logic of Birds: Points of Departure For Indian Women Artists’, I analysed the work of Indian women artists against the backdrop of our women’s movement (See exh. cat., ‘Tiger by the Tail! Women Artists Of India Transforming Culture’ (Waltham: Women’s Studies Research Centre, Brandeis University, 2007), pp. 112 -125). 

One of the sculptures we have shown in the retrospective, ‘Palani’s Daughters’ from the ‘Images Redrawn’ series, marks her evolving feminist sensibility in the 1990s. These magnificent sculptures invoke the slippage between goddess and everywoman, between monumentality and feminist rhetoric. In ‘Palani’s Daughters’, a blood-soiled body writhes in pain among vaginal pods. Made in response to the accelerating statistics of female infanticide, the reference for this sculpture was a Mayan mother-goddess giving birth. In Navjot’s handling, Palani’s archetypal power gains contemporary relevance. The sculptures in the ‘Images Redrawn’ series were accompanied by panels displaying arrays of rolled paper. Unravelled, the rolls revealed a lining of photocopied women’s literature from India including a wide spectrum of texts, ranging from the Therigatha, the ancient songs of the early Buddhist nuns, to poems, short stories and novels written by contemporary writers, sourced from Susie Tharu and K. Lalita’s path breaking two-volume feminist anthology, Women Writing In India, 600 BC to the Twentieth Century.

In the retrospective, we see how Navjot carries forward this tension between the archetypal nurturing female impulse and the patriarchal socialised female body reduced to its reproductive function into her exploration of ecofeminism in relation to her recent critique of global warming and the disastrous effects of mining in Bastar in her epic video-installation ‘Soul Breath Wind’. SBW is informed by the work of ecofeminists such as Vandana Shiva who believe that the liberation of the earth from an extractive capitalism will lead to the liberation of women and the aesthetics of sustainability approach theorised by Sacha Kagan.

Amrita Gupta Singh: Navjot, could you tell us the kind of feminist theorists/practitioners you were seeking out in your questioning of Marxism. Alongside, you read Arnold Hauser and Ernst Fisher who propounded the intimate link between art and society.

Navjot Altaf: Well, Hauser’s The Social History of Art and Ernst Fischer’s Necessity of Art, with their affiliation to Marxian philosophy, were extremely relevant writings I was exposed to in early years of my career, which enhanced my interest in how art developed from the earliest stages to the moving image, and the relationship between creative imagination and social reality from a Marxist perspective. Some of the other readings at that time included The Aesthetic Dimension by Herbert Marcuse, Ways of Seeing by John Berger, Art and Society by Herbert Read, to name a few.

As far as feminist theorists are concerned, my first seminal reading (early 1970s) was  Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. What I understood at that stage was her critical approach with emphasis on how women were viewed by society in relation to men; how a male-centred viewpoint denied them to view themselves from their own perspective and their own subjectivity.

As Marxists, we resisted the causes of social inequalities all throughout. But regarding questioning of Marxism and the absence of gender analysis in Marxist theory, to begin withit was not through theoretical readings, but during our political meetings which women participants observed and commented on. Despite women’s deep commitment and contributions to the movement, the male members in the group overlooked the system of domination of men over women and the need to look into it. The autobiographies of women from the Telengana agitation critiqued male comrades for being insensitive to women’s personal problems like pregnancy/abortions or having children. The Stree Mukti Sangathanawas formed in the mid-1970s and the First National Conference of Socialist Feminists was held in Bombay in which women were actively involved (in the late 1970s, early 1980s). So women’s movements addressed questions of unequal wages for different genders, sexual division of labour, and domestic labour. My understanding that “women’s problems had social origins and could be resolved by social and political change” came through my understanding of western feminists’ analysis.

Vision and Difference, a book by Griselda Pollock, which I got in late 1980s, introduced me to women/feminists’ intervention in art’s histories in the west, which as she points out evolved from the collective critique of social, economic and ideological power which is the women’s movement. In the introduction she writes, “Women’s studies are not just about women but about the social systems and ideological schemas which sustain the domination of men over women within the other mutually inflecting regimes of power in the world.” It made me more aware of the socio-political and economic system which supports the construction and workings of patriarchal power. And the art world functioned within that system.  To understand the Marxian idea of art and how the feminists contest it, Vision and Difference was of great value.

Griselda Pollock, Rozika Parker, Linda Nochlin, Lucy Lippard, Helene Cixous were the authors in the early/mid-1990s I was able to access. Their analysis was of viewing themselves outside the world constructed for them by a male-centred society.  They were re-thinking a socio-political analysis of culture and talked about “what a specific art practice was doing, what meanings are being produced and how and for whom”. Few years later Luce Irigaray’s ‘Je, Tu, Nous’had quite an impact on me,  and Susie Tharu and K. Lalita’s ‘Women Writing in India’, was a revelation. For the first time, I came across a study of Indian cultural history illuminating the significance of gender. Also, feminist writings in India cite the fact that caste, class and gender issues are deeply interconnected. 

Amrita Gupta Singh: In your lecture at the NGMA, Mumbai, Is Abstraction Gendered?which was part of the retrospective, you traced Navjot’s first abstractionist forays to her simultaneous study of fine arts and applied arts at the J.J. School of Art, and then arrived at the insight of her inserting a feminist wedge into the art historical construction of abstraction, particularly the modernist grid. But before that you mentioned the term ‘vitalist realism’ to speak about her works that she made during her Marxist phase. Could you explain this term?

Nancy Adajania: Let me focus on the subaltern figures in Navjot’s drawings and screenprints of the 1970s. Seemingly by a paradox, she renders them real, not by using the conventions of social or socialist realism – which, by this time, had become a stage script – but by using the strategies of abstraction to create a twinned impression of legibility and illegibility, sharpness and blur, containment and risk, which generates an affective surplus. Instead of an illustration of reality, we have a startling sense of experiencing it in the flesh as it were, as affect. The kind of affect in which body and landscape, gesture and field, merge and cannot be distinguished from each other. Instead of trapping herself in the visual certitudes of ideologically motivated and prescribed forms of realism – which, in fact, turn out to be stylisations of various subjects such as labour, poverty, protest and so on – Navjot approaches reality in its puzzling fullness, its changing combinations of definition and uncertainty, inviting her viewers to join her in this investigation.

Thus, the overall climate of affect emerging from these works, whether they are her representation of the subaltern classes in the 1970s or her self-portraits of the 1980s, is one suggestive of a pulsating ecology, organic life-systems teeming with plants, insects and vital soil or what we might call jeev-jantu. I have said as much in my book The Thirteenth Place. But later while preparing for the retrospective, on looking long and deep, I thought of the term ‘vitalist realism’ to describe, provisionally, the evidence of such an artistic preoccupation, in which realism – in the sense of an embrace of a material reality in all its complexity – acknowledges the invisible yet palpable life impulse in all things as integral to that material reality. That life impulse is recognisable as a powerful rippling energy that organises forms, expressions and architectures of life from the molecular to the ecosystemic level.

The term ‘vitalist realism’ denotes a specific current within Navjot’s work – we also see it in a recent work like ‘Soul Breath Wind’. I should emphasise my precisely demarcated use of ‘vitalist realism’, as I do not wish to suggest that there is any systematic connection between Navjot’s artistic standpoint and various philosophies and models that are based on vitalist commitments – whether Jain thought, the work of Henri Bergson, the Gaia Hypothesis proposed by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, or the broad array of post-Continental ontological discussions clubbed together as ‘speculative realism’. 

Amrita Gupta Singh: How did you puncture the modernist grid, particularly in the video installation, Lacuna in Testimony, 2003?

Navjot Altaf: See, the grid as I understand it in Lacuna in Testimony, which is a digital video workdone after the Gujarat massacrein 2003is not used as an emblem. In fact, I see the grid as a matrix for mapping the numerous seen and unseen, the conflicting layered and complex contexts, current and historical links, the connecting points between places, people, and close and distant incidents in both space and time. In this work, this is seen in the windows which appear and disappear in an orderly manner but the content carried in that, does not.

Amrita Gupta Singh: In 1997, Navjot turned away from a thriving art practice and placed herself in Bastar to collaborate with the Adivasi artists – Rajkumar, Shantibai, Gessuram, Kabiram and Raituram, sharing a common studio space for long durational projects and collective experimentation in public spaces. One critical aspect in this durational engagement has been the subjectivity of an urban artist from a position of privilege and access to cultural resources negotiating in the Adivasi life-world. This included comprehending the social, material, and cultural histories of her Adivasi colleagues, who themselves see their role as individual interventionists in their own environment. What does critical emplacementmean in this context, a term you have used in your book? And how has she addressed the politics of speaking, listening, and inter-subjective communication?

Nancy Adajania: I coined the term ‘critical emplacement’ in the 2000s, in the early days of globalisation when it was fashionable to privilege the anxiety of displacement, and to valorise the nomadic practices of artists who travelled, produced and displayed art at international residencies and on the biennale circuit. In contrast to this narrative of chronic dispossession, I proposed the possibility of a ‘critical emplacement’, an experimental belonging in various locations. Critical emplacement, in my account, occurs when artists position themselves responsively in locations within or outside their own society, recognising that it is crucial to engage with the history of the chosen site and forge new social relationships and inter-disciplinary accounts around it. Thus, critical emplacement acts as a destabilisation and constant renewal of the frameworks of making, viewing, sharing and discourse. In this context, I read Navjot’s practice as a series of critical emplacements within various cultural and political predicaments, rather than as displacements from her point of origin. 

The Dialogue Centre built by Navjot and her artist-colleagues Shantibai, Rajkumar, and Gessuram in Bastar could be seen as an example of such ‘critical emplacement’. This experimental infrastructure marks a rupture with existing models of ‘intervention’. It does not fit neatly into the generic model of the metropolitan artist initiating an ethnographic project, nor does it replay the tried-and-tested strategies of the Leftist artist speaking on ‘behalf’ of subaltern artists. 

Most importantly, it overhauls the classic donor-recipient relationship, with its monopoly on expressive and critical articulation by the donor. Here Navjot’s role is catalytic rather than didactic. But this sense of ‘critical emplacement’ or experimental belonging is not just the privilege of artists who have the financial means and cultural capital. Shantibai, Rajkumar, and Gessuram, too, have critically emplaced themselves in this process, by emancipating themselves from the social and economic prejudices attending their artistic practices to produce a ‘third space’ as it were, one that cannot be subsumed under the classic State patronage or NGO paradigm. Often rendered invisible by society, it is rare for subaltern artists to be able to invite people from the community to sit side-by-side and discuss matters of civic and artistic importance. Here they are able to break away from the predetermined identities into which they have been socially conscripted. And instead, they can subscribe to an artistic position that is transitional and fluid. 

I have been a witness-participant at one of the symposiums held at the Dialogue Centre and have learnt first-hand how the politics of adjacencies plays out through an interplay of multiple subjectivities of varying privilege. It was illuminating to listen to Shantibai speak of her individuation from her artist husband Raituram’s ambit and it was deeply moving to be present when Rajkumar articulated his interpretation of the term ‘collaboration’ step by step. His interpretative innovation ‘akal baanta baanti’ or the exchange of intelligence was completely organic to his lived experience and the great transformation through which he had gone. On that day, Rajkumar put the heart back into art history.

Amrita Gupta Singh: The terms surrounding the representation of subaltern artists within the mainstream art world is fraught with ambivalence. Questions of their ‘contemporaneity’ and engagement with the ‘present’ world in the language of their aesthetic traditions are often debated, or their practices are labeled ‘alternative’. You have constantly critiqued this particularly through your long-term collaboration in Bastar, and also co-founding the DIAA (Dialogue Interactive Artists Association) with Rajkumar, Shantibai, and Gessuram in Kondegaon in 2000. This critique of the art historical binaries of art/craft and parallel modes of practice at DIAA turns around the very question of contemporaneity, which is supposedly (and always) urban! Do tell us more.

Navjot Altaf: Your description within a question describes some of the concerns and issues our Bastar project has been addressing for the past several years.  Yes, I do not feel comfortable with the use of the term ‘subaltern’ for Adivasi artists employed in a generalized manner.

If we look at the artists and their works I am working with, in the present context, and in the context of their (gradually) growing association with people living in the interiors in Chhattisgarh – they are confronting everyday/current socio-political and economic pressures being imposed on them by the dominant capitalist forces at various levels. Many of them are speaking of their struggle, individual consciousness, and collective actions – for example, in the Lohndiguda struggle, led by the farmers from 10 villages for a long time against land acquisition for the industry in South Bastar, they have recently succeeded in saving their land. Further, the Koyla Satyagraha Andolan in Raigarh district has been carried out by more than 80 villages to resist coal mines and related industries in favour of generating solar energy in smaller scale. They have become stakeholders in decision making as far as development is concerned.  

There are creative people like the local group of Mirror Theatre (Orissa)and some activists and cultural activists (in specific situations and contexts) who actively respond and engage with present political resistance against repressive forms of authoritarianism. They are employing art to speak for freedom of expression and right to their choice of existence, and even though they are economically not so sound, they do not like to be labelled ‘subaltern’. They are posing questions and want visibility. In the context of DIAA, if you see, their political position, from their interventions in public spaces, to engagement with the people’s struggle, however slow the process may have been, Rajkumar, Shantibai or Ganga speak about their layered experiences and processes through their art.

As for developing a language of their own aesthetics over the last 20 years, if you ask them (actually they should be answering this question), they see it evolving from their individual lived experiences – listening, observing, absorbing, training. And then through travel, interaction, collaboration and dialogue within the group (though not always free of tensions and our differences), and also outside with several current conflicting situations. So such a process in my mind as Peter Osborne points out “sets in play relational systems that are dialogical rather than binary… by “de-bordering”…(meaning). Difference has not been annulled but its borders have been opened, to be able to travel”.

Not projecting themselves as Paramparic Karigars is their conscious and subjective choice. Is it the way material is used by them or literally borrowed from their traditional wooden memorial pillars that restrict the works to be contemporary in appearance? Whereas the narratives in the works reflect the personal and the current issues, they confront and deal with these at day-to-day levels. I am really interested in understanding the way these works are viewed by the mainstream art world. I believe that considering the historical invisibility, such processes could forepart the value of visibility for contemporary indigenous art to help it enter into an art historical debate.

So to be able to change and create cultural spaces that allow for critical reflection and to apply critical thinking requires a process of both learning and unlearning, not only for the artists engaged in such projects but the art world as well. I agree with the idea of contemplating inclusive ways of reasoning which might empower us to imagine a political future which focuses on the expansive nature of cultural influences rather than focusing on stipulations. 

I would like to share with you an idea which I consider most important for the mainstream to pay attention to. Boris Groys in his seminal essay ‘Equal Aesthetic Rights’ points out that ‘contemporary politics of emancipation is a politics of inclusion – directed against the exclusion of the political and economic minorities. Which in the context of art is possible if only it is not rejected or suppressed from the beginning by any kind of aesthetical censorship operating in the name of higher aesthetical values’.

As recently as March this year, DIAA organized a seminar/samvad  titled समकालीन: Contemporaneouswith the focus on what happens when people want to speak for themselves and their experiences of life, their struggles and achievements; and what happens when nothing happens.

Amrita Gupta Singh: Navjot, one of the crucial aspects in your work has been to inquire into the sexual politics of the pleasuring body – through the imagery of masturbation, same-sex love and other forms of sexual agency. How have you annotated touch?

Navjot Altaf: You see, I was looking at the language of expression to speak about the construction of sexual difference, how women’s sexual pleasure or same sex love or other forms of sexual agency had been “prevented from expressing their sexuality in itself or for themselves” (Irigaray). I experienced it as a woman and through women’s critical and theoretical writings. Woman Masturbating, My Friend Jani as part of my watercolour series Images of Women, and the sculptural project,Images Redrawn, along with the videos Touch 1, 2, 3– is about desire and the need for touch, which I see as a communication with and through the body. The intimacy of sensation or the sensation for intimacy.

Amrita Gupta Singh: Nancy, would you like to add to this?

Nancy Adajania: In the retrospective, we have given space to the pleasuring self, free of naturalised patriarchal reflexes of guilt or fear. In a painting depicting a masturbating woman (1992-1993), for instance, Navjot produced a chromatic rhetoricity by painting the background in a powerful shade of red and representing the female body through tactile, pebbled textures. Here she wished to legitimise the act of masturbation, one that rarely makes a presence in contemporary Indian painting. Navjot has annotated the sensation of ‘touch’ in memorable video installations like ‘Touch 1, 2, 3’ and ‘Touch IV’ both from a phenomenological and political perspective. 

As the viewer ascends the various levels of the retrospective to reach the dome or the sky of the exhibition as it were, she would have been immersed in a heightened awareness of sound, colour, light and form – a politics of affect that is continuously fine-tuned through an interplay of abstraction and materiality.  

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