Spatialising the Nation:
Buddhist Temple Murals in Colonial Colombo
T. Sanaathanan
Department of Fine Arts
University of Jaffna
Under the patronage of Buddhist revivalism in the early decades of twentieth century in Sri Lanka, a ‘new’ popular mural tradition came into existence. As in the case of Sinhala theatre and novel, in these murals too, the ‘colonial realistic’ mode was employed to propagate the nationalist ideology. By probing the visual and the visuality of the Buddhist mural decorations of M. Sarlis and Solious Mendis in the period between 1920s and 1930s, this paper attempts to read how these Buddhist art projects attempted to carve a national space within the colonial city of Colombo. Based on Carol Duncan’s arguments on art museum rituals and the nation space, this paper relates exhibitionary mode of the temple murals with that of the colonial museumu. As a result of existing in an ‘imaginative’ space between the colonial and the national, museum and temple, and myth and history, the style and the content of these murals played a crucial role in the transformation of the Buddhist worshiper into a national citizen.
A Meaningful Place: Memory, Space and Re-Settlement
The Tsunami Affected Burgher Women of Batticaloa
Neloufer de Mel
Department of English
University of Colombo
This paper focuses on a group of Burgher women affected by the tsunami in Batticoloa, Sri Lanka. It marks their re-settlement from Dutch Bar to the enclave of Panichchiyadi by paying particular attention to the ways in which memory and space mediate their post disaster re-settlement. This mediation is at the same time a re-engagement with the community’s historical, political and cultural economies; a re-construction of social relations; and a process by which a war torn topography is domesticated. It thereby holds the promise of a coming to terms with the ambivalent impact of the tsunami as a disaster constituting both loss and emergence. By highlighting how the Burgher women have emerged as active and resourceful members of their community, and in particular as developmental citizens vis รก vis the state, the paper locates them not as helpless victims of the disaster but as those engaged in actively creating out of the space they have been given, a meaningful place.
A Shrine and its Museum: Memory, History and Politics in the Sikh Golden Temple
Radhika Chopra
Department of Sociology
Delhi School of Economics
University of Delhi
This paper analyses the context of a museum within the sacred complex of the premier Sikh shrine, popularly known as the Golden Temple.
During ‘Operation Bluestar’, the military assault on the Golden Temple in June 1984, the Central Sikh Museum and many of its holdings were destroyed by rocket propelled grenade launchers. Subsequently - in fact about 15 years later - efforts to resurrect the museum ran into the issue of what the museum should exhibit. A key gallery in the reconstructed museum was a visual chronicle of Sikh martyrdom, which includes some paintings rescued from the fires that destroyed the museum, as well as portraits of modern martyrs painted over a period of time from 1987 onward. The paper dwells on the paintings and the artefacts in the gallery spaces at some length, to understand the issue of the construction of martyrdom in Sikh history and the place of martyrdom in the contemporary politics of modern Punjab.
However, in 2007, a controversy about a key "missing figure" in the exhibits arose. A portrait of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale (whom many see as a key leader and an animating spirit of the militant movement for Khalistan) was installed. The installation ceremony itself was a meticulously supervised event, regulated by the functionaries of the sacred complex, in an effort to offset the politically volatile and newly energised support for Bhindranwale. I hope to show however, that the portrait installation in the museum was a response to the uneasy politics that surround the memory and commemorations for Bhindranwale.
The politics of portraiture in the museum and the subsequent inclusion and earlier elision of key martyr figures shape the substance of my argument, ethnographically located in an analysis of the current displays of modern martyrs.
Folk Art, Primitivism and the Art Market
Roma Chatterji
Department of Sociology
Delhi School of Economics
University of Delhi
In India, 'primitivism' has been associated with the revival of her craft traditions. Thus nationalists like Ananda Coomaraswamy and E.B. Havell thought of folk art as part of a continuous craft tradition that spanned thousands of years. Artists like Jamini Roy also turned to indigenous art styles as a source of inspiration for a uniquely modern Indian art. Since the 70s however this relationship has taken a new turn, inspired by new kinds of patronage and new spaces of folk art production like craft ‘melas’ and in this situation there is an increasingly self-conscious use of so called primitive values by folk artists themselves leading to interesting innovations in style and thematics, and even to new hybrid forms. I will compare two different folk art forms to illustrate my argument.
Imagined Landscapes, Supple Identities: The making and Unmaking of Indian immigrants in Europe
Meenakshi Thapan
Department of Sociology
Delhi School of Economics
Delhi School of Economics
University of Delhi
This paper problematises the idea of imagined landscapes as those perceptions and images that enrich a potential Indian migrant’s view of Europe. These landscapes are part of a consciousness that is embedded in representations about Europe, based on constructions of exclusion deriving from a colonial past, embellished by the art, aesthetics and popular culture of contemporary life and squarely located in the quest for upward mobility. The paper also examines the perceptions about Europe from Indian migrants located in Europe based on their everyday lived experience and social location. The vast difference in perceptions lays out the framework for understanding how location, both as geographical space and as socio-political moorings, shapes the imagination of European landscapes in different directions. The consequent implications for the constitution and experience of identities among Indian immigrants in European settings forms the basis of the subsequent discussion.
In Search of the Village
Sasanka Perera
Department of Sociology
University of Colombo
In the dominant cultural discourse of the Sinhalas, the village or ‘gama’ is not just any place. It is an ideal place; a supreme place; a place with no contradictions; and a place of enduring imagination. This ideal village and its articulations emerge constantly in popular songs, paintings, popular verses, novels, textbooks, and now increasingly in video narrativization of songs as well. It also recreates an ideal notion of what should be aspired in ‘development’ and as a result has also become an iconic image in political and developmental rhetoric. It is a very powerful and consistent ideological construction that has not changed in over half a century, and is often taken for granted by those who articulate it as well as thousands of consumers. This paper would unravel the roots of this particular imagination by a attempting to understand how this image had initially been created in colonial travel writings, archeology and photography and how and in what form it had been adopted by the locals and in that process what had been left out of the initial colonial descriptions. Finally, an attempt would be made to understand why this powerful image has persisted over time irrespective of an often very different set of realities in the rural sector that seem to question the validity of this image as an ideal model.
South Asian Art: Between Nation and Diaspora
Iftikhar Dadi
Department of Art
Cornell University
Since the early twentieth century, artistic developments in South Asia were galvanized by exchanges within the region. But with the consolidation of the independent nation states from the mid twentieth century, artistic horizons were delineated by the nation-state formation. Now, contemporary artistic practice since the 1990s has been enabled by new linkages within the region, and between the region and the diaspora. This is based on increased travel, and new exhibition opportunities that situate the work of artists residing in the region with those residing abroad. By analyzing the work of South Asian artists in a number of major international exhibitions since the 1990s in the UK and the US at a formal and institutional level, this paper interrogates the very notion of a diaspora as a separate space from “home.”
Unfreezing the Fort: Place-making by Muslim Residents in the Galle Fort
Nethra Samarawickrema
Department of Anthropology
Dalhousie University, Halifax
The Fort of Galle, in the south of Sri Lanka, has captured the imagination of elites, both local and international. Having served as a command center for European colonizers between the 16th and 20th centuries, the Fort still contains vestiges of architectural styles of multiple colonial periods. In recent years, elite entrepreneurs and foreign expats have refashioned many of its buildings into expensive cafes, villas, and boutique hotels, using the colonial architecture to evoke a sense of decadence, rooted in colonial nostalgia. Such constructions tend to ossify the Fort in colonial times, failing to recognize it as a living city, inhabited by multiple communities. This paper contains an ethnographic account of one such community—the Fort Muslims—and their place-making processes. By looking at how Fort Muslims’ sense of ‘home’ has been shifting in relation to workings of power, status and social networks, it studies the Fort as a site of spatial struggle and negotiation. Through showing place-making in process and in flux, the paper works to challenge the museumization of the Fort and unsettle exclusive elite claims to imagining and memorializing it.
Tropicalites and past-lives in a post-colonial Sri Lanka
Aaron Burton
College of Fine Art
University of New South Wales
In the late 1970s my mother and father made a series of anthropological films in Sri Lanka. The films were informed by years of fieldwork and immersion by mother, Sharon Bell. I have even heard she was born Sinhalese in a previous life. Four women from the village of Kanewala, a community of fishermen from Duwa, as well as a traditional drummers/dancers were the participants and ‘subjects’ of the films.
Three decades later and I am attempting my own filmmaking in Sri Lanka. I aim to search out the faces and friendships that were preserved on screen. I aim to investigate in what ways our generation might be enacting our parents. Are we now facing the same challenges and adversities? Or have we transgressed social boundaries and expectations?
This presentation aims to explore contemporary approaches to intercultural representation and confront some of the dilemmas of a post-colonial “home away from home” for 'Westerners.'
