Waking From Dreams of India

This work tells the story of my lifelong dream of exploring India, the land of my father's birth, and chronicles my actual physical journey through India in 2002 and on several later trips. My father left his native country at the age of seventeen. He died without telling me much about the culture in which he was brought up or the story of his early life there. Growing up in the United States, isolated from Indian culture and influence fostered the cultivation in my imagination of Orientalist fantasy about the land of my ancestry. My knowledge of India ripened from romanticized National Geographic specials, the masterfully aestheticized images of Henri Cartier Bresson, George Harrison's muddled psychedelic spirituality, and Rudyard Kipling's tales of exotic jungle adventure. None of this prepared me for the discovery of the circumstances that drove my father away from his family as a teenager, or the actual masala mix of complexity, misery and beauty of contemporary India that I finally had the opportunity to see for myself during a pivotal year of travel in 2002. This journey had taken place in my imagination as long as I could remember. I have now made a number of trips, during which I have collected a wealth of photographic images, videotape, and journal writings. I have been shaping this material into a cohesive body of work that connects and contrasts my youthful fantasies of India with my adult experience building a relationship with the land of my ancestry.

I present a portion of this work as straight documentary images that show the reality of India as I have perceived it.  These pictures necessarily represent an outsider’s perspective on the country, and concentrate on the changing relationships between traditional Indian lifestyles and westernized consumer culture. India began opening its borders to foreign investment in the early 90’s after a long period of economic isolationism. The resulting influx of Western goods, corporations, and higher paying jobs has helped create one of the world’s fastest growing economies, and fueled the growth of a dynamic middle class, whose consumerist aspirations and spending power have not been lost on corporations both domestic and multinational. These businesses plaster the cities and countryside with advertisements trying to seduce rupees from the new middle classes. The changes in the advertising industry of India echo the larger economic changes that are occurring in the country. Where hand painted signs and billboards recently held sway, buildings and billboards are increasingly covered with enormous digital banners. Interestingly, in the less developed south of the country one finds curious hybrids, such as hand painted billboards advertising the latest digital flat screen television. These changes are lifting many Indians out of generations of poverty, but they are also leaving many behind, and stretching the traditional fabric of Indian society. It is not uncommon to see homeless families fashioning shelters out of discarded digital banners, their short lived marketing messages superceded by their more durable waterproofing qualities.

The documentary photographs form a sort of factual basis for the constructed imaginative images with which I hope to symbolize the merging of my actual lived journeys through India with the expectation I carried for half a lifetime.  With these digital collages, I attempt to create an artistic journey through India as visually rich and layered as the one I have experienced in both imagination and in life. I am weaving media including digital and analog photography, printmaking, digital video, and text into a visual narrative describing this metaphoric and physical journey. I am working with ideas of sequencing and layering, merging images from different times and places using digital imaging, experimental printmaking and photographic technique to juxtapose ancient and modern, mythical and real, imagined and lived.

One way I am accomplishing these goals is to collage appropriated popular Indian “calendar art” imagery of Hindu deities into my photographs. In bringing this storied imagery into the contemporary art world, I am referencing contemporary clashes of values and cultures that are occurring on the subcontinent. By asking how Lord Krishna might deal with a Calcutta traffic jam, or whether Kali has a cellular phone, I am removing these printed gods from spiritual contemplation in sylvan glades and temples, and bringing them into the chaotic hurly burly that is contemporary India. This sort of question is partly tongue in cheek, but also a testament to the durability of a culture that has survived unbroken through thousands of years of invasion, warfare, colonial subjugation, westernization and modernization. For the Hindu gods are just as vital as they have been for eons. Rather than submitting to the forces of change that have buffeted the subcontinent for all these centuries, this is a culture that simply assimilates what seems useful, while retaining, for better or worse its essential character. Lord Krishna, Kali, Shiva, and the entire Hindu pantheon, representing an imperturbable and entirely non-western view of reality really do walk the streets of Calcutta, Delhi, Chennai, and Trivandrum. Their presence is palpable in the integration of spirituality into the daily life of India.

Printed images of Hindu gods were first mass produced by Indian artists trained in academies set up by the British colonial powers to instill in the “natives” a sense of scientific observation to break them of the habit of belief in the supernatural world. Ironically, these artists used their newfound Western skills to produce images of the old gods that had even more veracity and power than the “idols” that they had been making previously. These images have a long history of multiple interpretations. To western viewers, they represented a glimpse into the mind of “the other”. To Indians, they had practical devotional and political uses. Because the British rulers of colonial India curtailed Indian political activism, yet paid little attention to Indian religious institutions, Indians used the relative freedom of religious organizations to engage in clandestine political activity. Images that to Western eyes read simply as devotional images dedicated to exotic, obscure gods, were read by Indians as allegorical calls for political action, unity, and independence that were able to circumvent the strict censorship imposed upon the Indian presses and political organizations by the British imperial government. An emerging independence movement effectively used these popular images to help create a sense of unity and national identity, which finally enabled India to throw off the yoke of foreign imperialist control.

As a child of mixed British and Indian heritage, I witnessed and took part in similar post-colonial battles playing themselves out on a domestic scale. For me, the complex history of these images signifies the emergence of my own identity, which has been a slow process of assimilating influences from both cultures. My use of these images in a way brings them back to their original function as a kind of subversive bridge between cultures, with the understanding that part of their richness arises from the multiple meanings that are doomed to different interpretations by individuals on either side of the east-west divide. The question for me is larger than a simple return to my roots, or a search for cultural heritage in the wake of a diasporic voyage. This work examines what happens when one learns about his cultural heritage through a colonizing media. How does this mediated interpretation compare to the way that the object of this gaze sees itself directly? And what is "the other" when one is of mixed blood, seeing half of one's own culture through the lenses provided by the gaze of the other half? Finding some way to reconcile these differing perspectives inspires this creative project.