"The Breath with the Breath: Contemporary Performance Art in
India",
Melissa Rose Heer's dissertation
submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of
Minnesota for the PhD (May 2015) examines contemporary performance
art practices in India, with a particular focus on the work of three artists
with diverse approaches to this ever-evolving art form: Ratnabali Kant, Samudra
Kajal Saikia and Nikhil Chopra. In her examination of specific performances,
that have taken place between 1985-2012, weaves together performance studies,
histories of theater, postcolonial critique, and a theoretical analysis of “the
performative” nature of the nation-state in area of art and globalization.
Samudra Kajal Saikia’s Disposable House Project
is the first chapter of Melissa's case studies [Chapter 2 in her PhD
submission].
The roof of Kankhowa’s house leaks
Thousands of eyes from the evening sky
Keep staring at me
I cannot go out
I cannot stay in
-Kankhowa, The Body House of the Actor
Kankhowa’s illustrated
poem, The Body House of the Actor (2011), begins with a leaking rooftop
(fig. 13). The ceiling of the artist’s house is profusely dripping, pooling on
the floor and filling the space to the brim with elements from outside. It is
not simply rain that leaks into the house; rather, it is “thousands of eyes
from the evening sky.” Moreover, the house in this poem is also the artist’s
body. It is this house – the “body house of the actor” – into which the
spectator/reader begins to seep. Across sixteen pages of watercolor
illustrations accompanied by poetic verse, this porous body-house of the actor
is saturated with the bodies of spectators. The body appears and reappears in various
forms throughout the text: once, as a long leg wrapped around two figures shaking
hands at a doorway; once, as a faceless figure tightly embracing the ten wide-eyed
faces in its torso; later, as two legs on a chair with a long thin neck attached
to ten hovering heads; and still later as two brachiosaurus-like creatures
sticking their long necks through the open doors in each other’s bodies (figs.
14-17) As the watercolors soak into and across the paper, so this body drips
outside of its own contours and off the edges of the frame.
Even the name of the author
of the text, Kankowa, acts as an identifier for a number of bodies. The
attribution, Kankhowa, is the
nom de plume of the Delhi-based Guwahati
born artist Samudra Kajal Saikia, but it also refers to an interdisciplinary collective
of artists, writers, and actors that Saikia helped organize in 2006. In a 2010 article
in the Kolkata-based magazine,
ArtEtc, Saikia described this group’s
artistic process as “Disposable Theatre” which promotes a type of
performance-based art practice rooted in an interdependent relationship between
the actor and spectator that opens up a space for connectivity as well as
dissent.
Kankhowa’s practice takes the spectator as an integral part of the performance,
thereby opening a radical exploration of spatial experience that disrupts the
concentration of power and voice so often given solely to the actor. As Saikia
puts it, “where the spectator is privileged over the actor’s side, the spatial experience
is counted over the pre-designed text and the linearity of experience is deliberately
hampered, their power is not concentrated anymore.”
In my first chapter I
looked at the way in which Indian performance art arose out of the
activist-based roots of modern Indian theatre and its historical intersection
with the art world’s complex encounter with the global contemporary art world.
In this chapter I examine the ways in which the very definition of
spectatorship, in the work of Sumudra Kajal Saikia, is structured through a
conceptual reformulation of the actor/spectator relationship foreground through
the socially invested activist-based mission of modern Indian theatre. As I
will discuss, Saikia looks back to the work of the late twentieth century
playwright and theater activist Badal Sircar to think about how to address
issues of audience experience and participation within the context of
subnationalism and immigration in his home state of Assam. As illustrated in
his poem
The Body House of the Actor, Saikia is interested in a type of
cohabitation by cultural/ethnic “others,” which is mirrored in the cohabitant
relationship between the actor and the audience that arises in performance art.
My theorization of
cohabitation is informed by the artist’s own methodology of performative
interconnectivity, which he describes through this metaphor of a body that functions
also as a house. This body-house, for Saikia, is constantly bustling with new and
returning visitors, some of whom are strangers to each other. This metaphor
speaks to the concept that the actor and spectator may not “know” each other
directly, but are deeply connected through a mutual investment in viewing and
interpreting one another. Similarly cultural/ethnic “others” in the Indian
metropolis (i.e. the Muslim, Hindu, Tribal or Recent Immigrant communities) are
unified by the same desire for place-hood in a shared space, despite the
ideological tenuous, which separate them. For Saikia, the theorization,
visualization, and performance of the body house is an aestheticization of this
inevitable cohabitation.
In cultivating his theory
of the body-house Saikia draws from interpretations of the body found in the
writing of mystic poets. Poets such as Kabir and Lalon Fakir often describe the
body as a house, and Saikia uses this concept, as in The Body House of the Actor,
to illustrate the submission of the actor’s fixed body to a body that extends
outside of itself, becoming part performer, part spectator. These philosophies
visualized in Saikia’s illustrations reiterate the methodologies of the
artist’s broader body of work, which aims to implicate both actor and spectator
in shared public space. Since 2010, Saikia has utilized the text of The Body
House of the Actor to explore this interrelationship in a series of
performance-based works that reflect on the concept of home. Most recently the
text was part of a large public performance, funded by a Foundation for Indian
Contemporary Art Public Art Grant, entitled Disposable House (2012),
which was one of the primary works at a month long series of site-specific projects
in Guwahati under the auspices of Regional Arts Performance and Events Assam (RAPE).
The Disposable House
project took place on February 20th 2012, when five lifesize houses hoisted on
top of auto-rickshaws moved through the central city streets of Guwahati in the
state of Assam (figs. 18-26). The mobile houses were accompanied by a large
public procession of artists involved in the Regional Arts Performance and
Events led by Saikia. They started at the Jyoti Chitraban Film and Television
Institute, moved through the main commercial corridor of the city (Ujan
Bazaar), and ended at the banks of the Brahmaputra River, where the group
initially intended to set the homes afloat on the water. Instead, as I will
discuss, the cohabitant relationship between the actor and the audience altered
the outcome of the performance. The materials were given instead to local
homeless residents near the riverbank who were displeased with fact that
housing materials would be wasted if they were left to drift away in the water.
During this final portion of the performance, before the houses were initially
gifted to the Brahmaputra, and ultimately to those residing on its banks,
Saikia read aloud The Body House of the Actor text.
The body-house is a
metaphor for the fundamental philosophy at the heart of Saikia’s
performance-based art practices, as well as the activist underpinnings of his work.
These inseparable, amalgamated body-houses express the artist’s interest in the
profoundly paradoxical relationship between the artist and spectator, as well
as that between the self and other in society. The artist’s gaze is fixed on
both the shifting and intransigent ethnic, religious, racial and class tensions
in India, which have been spawned by its recent economic ascendency and
enduring colonial legacy. The body-house offers a site of critical
interconnectivity in which the many faces of power and dissent meld together
and break apart. Such interconnectivity produces an intangible and fluctuating architectural
corporality that contains conflicting desires for belonging.
This chapter examines
Saikia’s work in relation to the political theories foregrounded by modern
Indian theatre practitioners such as those of Safdar Hashmi discussed in the
previous chapter, and the work of Bidal Sircar. In addition, by considering the
body as depicted by mystic poets Lalon Fakir and Kabir, I want to give an
indication of what is at stake in Saikia’s work as it attempts to maintain and
perform acontested notion of
belonging
.
Saikia’s work and his
theory of Disposable Theater underscore how contemporary performance art
practices in India did not arise exclusively from either theatre or visual arts.
Rather, these practices can best be understood as emerging out of the interface
between these two – already mutually constitutive – art forms. In
chapter one, I argued that contemporary performance art in India unsettles the
dichotomy between visual arts and theatre, and showed how this untenable demarcation,
carried over from the Euro-American context (where it is arguably already
untenable), cannot be simply mapped across the complex histories of Indian art
and theatre. Consider, for example, the slippage between Saikia’s
self-identification as an actor and as an artist, and the way this slippage (which
this essay further enacts) self-consciously fails to resolve semantic
complexity. It is important to acknowledge the significance of this semantic
complexity because it works to undermine the authorial legitimacy given to “the
actor” alone. While the word theatre naturally situates Disposable
Theatre within the history of theatre, disposable equally suggests that
this is a radical form of theatre that disposes of its own structures and
practices. Kankowa cites the seeming cleavage between theatre and visual art as
among the various dichotomies it aims to reactivate (the public and the
private, the individual and the collective, the conventional and the radical,
and the mainstream and the alternative, to name just a few).
The concept of the
body-house and the theory of disposable theater expands and critically reworks
philosophies of theatre and spectatorship such as those articulated by the
Bengali dramatist, theatre director, and performance theorist Badal Sircar
(also known as Badal Sarkar). Sircar began his career as an actor and director
in the early 1950s and later became a writer of proscenium plays in the late
1960s. In the 1970s, however, during the Naxalite movement, Sircar began to
foreground a concept of non-proscenium theatre through his model of “The Third
Theatre.” Saikia, who graduated from Kala Bhavana Institute of Fine Arts in
Shantinekatan in 2005, was part of the Shantinekatan theatre group Sanko
(meaning small bridge or canal in Bengali), encountered Sircar’s theories as a
student. The group, later renamed Samakal (meaning current time or
contemporary in Bengali) was established in 1997 and was based around Sircar’s
theories of performance.
In his 1978 essay, “The
Third Theatre,” Sircar argued for a theatre that addresses what he describes as
the dichotomy between rural and urban culture resulting from colonialism.
Indian cities had acquired a colonial character under British imperial rule, particularly
through its educational system, to such an extent that culture in these urban areas
is understood to be rooted in English ideologies and interests. By contrast,
Sircar saw the culture of the countryside as less contaminated by this colonial
imposition, and thus as having maintained its indigenous cultural and artistic
roots. For Sircar, theatre is one of the primary cultural fields through which
this cultural dichotomy took shape. City theatre, in the form of proscenium
theatre, is based on styles and forms originating in the West, whereas rural
theatre continues to work in traditional folk-based forms.
Accordingly, Sircar
proposes a “Third Theater” that would work between these two forms. He writes,
“In such a situation, if we want to revitalize the city theatre or the village
theatre, we have to hit at the root of this dichotomy and attempt to create a
link between the two through a Third Theatre which synthesizes the two.”
For Sircar, a large part of
achieving this synthesis depends on dismantling proscenium theatre. The very
architecture of the proscenium auditorium, as well as its stage, lighting
system, and set design, are all modeled after forms rooted in the traditions of
the West. At a practical level, Sircar was concerned with connecting theatre
with a wider audience and, for this reason, wanted to reduce the exorbitant
costs involved in maintaining the upkeep of a proscenium theatre. Comparing
theatre to the more widely popular art of cinema, he argued that theatre should
draw upon its unique advantage of facilitating live, direct communication
between the actors and audience – the very advantage he saw inhibited by the
alienating structure of the proscenium auditorium. In proscenium theatre the
performer is elevated on a stage above the audience, engrossed in elaborate
sets and designs, and forced to shout to the back row to be heard. Moreover, through
the eyes of the actor, blinded by oppressively bright stage lights, the
audience appears as nothing more than a faceless mass consumed in darkness.
Thus, in addition to its colonial legacy, proscenium theatre renders a
disinterested spectator.
Sircar promoted a
non-proscenium theatre for its potential to dismantle the alienation between
actors and audience members produced by the dominant form. Such a theater could
cultivate a more direct form of engagement between performers and active spectators.
In 1967, Sincar had already formed the theatre group Satabdi, which
worked in open space without costume, make-up, lighting or props. By 1976, Satabdi
started doing open-air, free performances at Surendranath Park (then Curzon
Park) in Kolkata and the group travelled on weekends to nearby villages. These
non-conventional performances entirely rejected the use of characters, plot or
storyline. For example, the 1974 performance, Micchil, moved largely
away from narrative in favor of situation. It began with actors sitting among
the audience outdoors in urban space, directly engaging them in the performance
and ultimately inviting them to join it in a procession to end all processions.
Earlier works such as these
resonate strongly with the structure and rhythm of Disposable House.
Like Micchil, Disposable House involves a procession through the city
streets that involves the public in the realization of the performance. The organizational
framework of the piece simultaneously plays with elements of chance and uncertainly,
and like Sincar’s “third theater,” the performance itself is ultimately subject
to the unpredictable pulse of the city in space and time. Yet, Disposable
House is different in important ways. Saikia argues that while Sircar’s
articulation of the actor-spectator relationship “brought immense possibilities
for us to disturb,” this work is also interested in the limitations of
disruption and therefore strives to “search for some other language.”
Thus, the practice of Disposable Theatre both looks back at Sircar’s work for inspiration
and critically re-envisions the interconnected spectator/actor relationship
foregrounded by Sircar.
Saikia is especially
critical of the current state of Third Theatre. Citing a 2009 performance of
Raktakarabi
at the National School of Drama in Delhi, Saikia describes a situation in which
audience members were asked to first buy tickets and, only after passing
multiple checkpoints, entered into an “open-air” performance space,to find
actors on an elevated stage lit by bright spotlights. Although the space was
technically open-air theatre, Saikia describes how the situation cultivated by
this staging of the environment rendered the audience unable to speak. The
audience, sitting silently amongst each other in darkness, look up towards the
performative power of the actors. According to Saikia, “What went wrong with
Badal Sircar is, he took the ‘proscenium’ as the central object for objection
where his critique has larger promise.”
The mere physical removal of the play from the proscenium stage does not open
up the performance to a revision of the alienated spectator/actor relationship;
rather, dialogue happens when the actor’s body is inextricably intertwined with
that of the spectator through the articulation of shared ideological and
physical space.
The organization of the
Regional Arts Performance and Events in 2012 arose largely out of this desire
to re-imagine the role of a mutually constitutive artist, place, and public
within contemporary art practices in India. (Samudra Kajal) Saikia, who
co-organized the event with the curator Rahul Bhattacharya, and the support of
the
BlackRice and
Kankowa collectives, aimed specifically to
address the problem of “defining the ‘public’ within the existing public art
practices.”
In
previous ventures, Bhattacharya had expressed concern about the limitations of
space as it is regulated through the contemporary art scene in Delhi, including
those practices that describe themselves as “performative.” As performance art
was becoming more visible within the art scene through the Khoj international
performance art festivals in 2007, Bhattacharya responded by organizing a series
of events and a blog entitled
Can it Be Done in Any Corner You Like?
With Kankowa’s participation, these actions aimed to make an intervention into
performance art practice by bringing space and public engagement to the
forefront. The Regional Arts Performance and Events acted as an extension of
these aims, and furthermore articulated the imperatives of Disposable Theatre
to reshape the performer-spectator relationship. Put differently, performance
should not only take place within public space, it should produce a
conversation
within and with the space.
When the
Disposable
House project took to the streets of Guwahati the above notion of shared
space was pronounced largely through the concept of home. Saikia presented
“home” not as a private space or family-owned, static and insular property, but
instead as a mobile, malleable, entity offered up to the public. The
performance began at Jyoti Chitraban accompanied by the auspicious undertones
of a
hariddhwani prayer. Following the prayer, Saikia, alongside the
Baroda-based painter and multi-media artist Anuradha Upadhyaya, started the
procession through the city towards the Bramaputra with blooming lotus flowers
in hand “to purify the space ”
.A
group of artists involved in the Regional Arts Performance Events, themselves
followed by a truck carrying a group of local musicians, joined the procession
next as the musicians in the truck began playing
dotara and singing
dehatatwa
songs (Bengali songs that deal with themes of the body). Finally, the five
homes on auto rickshaws made of mixed materials, including timber, clay and
hay, joined in the procession. Each house invoked a concept: sufi house, urban
house, house of displacement, house of social norms and Kankhowa’s House (or the
body house of an Actor). And each house was covered by paintings suggestive of
its respective theme, which were made collaboratively by artists from across
Delhi, Baroda and Guwahati.
The procession of these
transient, communal, and pliable homes through the heart of Guwahati situated
both artists and unexpected spectators within a complicated and multilayered
engagement with history and memory in the public space of the city. Guwahati,
which is the major metropolis as well as the primary commercial and transit corridor
of the Northeastern State of Assam, reverberates with complex layers of social and
political history. Assam, which shares international borders with Bhutan and Bangladesh,
makes up the core of Northeastern India, a region geographically connected to
the rest of the country only by a narrow twenty-kilometer-wide passage. This
tenuous geographical location in relation to the rest of the nation was
underscored by the “subnational” politics that took shape during the Assamese
insurgency movement, which reached its height in the late 1980s and was largely
suppressed through the often-violent counter-insurgency of the Indian army.
Thus, the notion of who is
“at home” in Assam is fraught with historical and geographical tensions.
Interlinked with the politics of Assam’s position in relation to the Indian
nation-state, and claims over who has rights to this “homeland,” there are also
various tensions regarding immigration. From 1979-85 the “Assam Movement” campaigned
against the Indian government’s alleged policy of admitting “foreigners” tothe
area. The campaign leaders argued that immigrants from foreign countries,
mostly from Bangladesh (Formerly East Pakistan) and Nepal, were illegal aliens
unless given citizen status by the state. These accusations led to ethnic
violence and ultimately to the acquired citizenship and systematic deportation.
In his book,
India Against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality,
Sanjib Baruah offers a critical analysis of the interconnectedness between
Assamese subnationalism, immigration and colonial history. Not only did Assam’s
immigration politics sustain a crisis in governmental legitimacy (linked to the
perceived failure of Assam to resolve its immigration policies), it also further
perpetuated tension between so-called “indigenous” and “immigrant groups.”
Moreover, through the Armed Forces Special Powers Act of 1958 (AFSPA), which granted
special power to the army in so-called “disturbed” areas of India, surveillance
and control methods began to be used that were based on ethnic profiling to
distinguish between “ethnic,” “immigrant” or “tribal” communities.
Baruah’s larger argument
situates these more recent politics of immigration (as well as the Assamese
subnational narrative and its counter-narratives) within Assam’s colonial
history by demonstrating the ways in which colonial geography shaped projects of
personhood in Assam. Once Assam became a part of British India and the
pan-Indian economic sphere, colonial policymakers encouraged immigration to
increase settlement. Moreover, the immigration issue wrestles with unavoidable
historical problems: the treatment of India’s Muslim minority population and
what many see as an unavoidable legacy of India’s partition in 1947, and
India’s de facto obligation to allow Hindu refugees from Pakistan to settle in
India. As Baruah notes, “India’s policy on immigration is framed by a
pan-Indian formulation problem.”
Moreover, Baruah’s analysis
of the way the legacies of colonialism persist in contemporary politics of
place in Assam challenges misreadings of Assam within the global media where violence
is all too often presented as some type of failure of the “Third-World” to
achieve democracy, or, in India in particular, as problems relegated to “troubled”
areas such as the Northeast. Baruah’s historical account demonstrates how in this
region “violence is about the contradictions of the many worlds created by
modernity rather than about a place or a people being left behind of
modernity.”
To that end, narratives that construct Assam as a place and people “left
behind” efface a more nuanced understanding of the plurality of place and
people in the regions – that is, Assam’s many
homes.
This survey of Assam’s
recent socio-political history should not lead us to view Guwahati through a
simplistic frame that reduces the character of the city to a violent or tumultuous
political history. At the same time, however, an understanding of the politics of
immigration and subnationalism in Assam remain necessary for responding to Disposable
House’s call to think about the concept of home. Tending to this recent
past enables a perspective that implicates actor, spectator, critic, city and
state in shared social space and contests the frequent effacement of these
public histories.
Disposable House enters the public space of Guwahati and
its histories by simultaneously aesthesticizng and politicizing the concept of
home. “Home” becomes part-protest, part-ritual, part-celebration and, as such,
it is offered up to the space of the city and its “public,” which includes all
parties participating in the performance as well as any person on the street
who encounters the procession. The body-house becomes a metaphor not only for
the actor’s body but the social body as well. Of the five houses, the body-house
of the actor (or Kankhowa’s house) is the last in the procession. The concept of
the body-house unfolds largely through the conceptual foil of The Body House
of the Actor text, which, as I said, is read near the procession’s end at
the edge of the Brahmaputra. In the text the notion of an interconnected actor
and spectator are illustrated through the concept of cohabitation. Through
cohabitation the actor and spectator are merged into one indistinguishable
entity. By describing the body as a house within which many inhabitants reside,
Kankhowa suggests that this body-house is so full one cannot enter it. This
shared space is foregrounded by a shared act of seeing:
I am an actor. Before and after being an
actor, I am a spectator.
I see, I can see,
It is important that I should see.
I have to see other people looking at me.
Therefore, if I am an actor,
there are many spectators inside me. They
share the house with me.
That is why I am confused, how many people
live in my house.
I lose myself in my own house.
My house is so full of people that I
cannot enter my own house.
I remember Lalon Fakir. I remember Kabir.
If the actor defines his
own body by the act of being seen by the other, then this same body takes form
and is defined by the gaze of the spectator. As previously noted, the printed
version of this text is accompanied by illustrations. Juxtaposed against these
lines, there is an image of a blue figure sitting on a simple black chair in
the corner of the frame. The figure’s tall thin neck reaches up to the top of
the page and connects to a kite-like string of heads. The heads are faceless
abstract smudges of blue watercolor paint that faintly bleed into the paper.
Interestingly, vision does not belong to any one of the single heads; the
figure has no discernible eyes and neither do any of the individual heads. This
lack of a divided gaze underscores how the figure itself is comprised of a
shared act of seeing. The combined actor-spectator is grounded, and ultimately
formed, by its two legs that touch the floor. This image illustrates a
fundamental relational formation for Disposable Theatre: performer, public, and
space are presented as mutually constitutive.
The postcolonial politics
of immigration and sub-nationalism in Assam foreground the significance of
shared and unshared social and civic space (shared in the sense of coexistence,
and unshared in the sense of unequal distributions of power). Disposable Theatre’s
desire to articulate a notion of shared space does not imply that social space
is a vacuum in which power does not exist, but rather that both actor and
spectator are implicated in the politics of power. Thus, to return to the
earlier discussion of the power dynamics of theater, while a conventional
proscenium theatre places the actor in the authorial seat of power in a
performance, The Body House of the Actor aims to unsettle this dynamic
by demonstrating how it is the spectator’s gaze that forms the very
existence of the actor’s body. In this way, Disposable Theatre cultivates
shared space through the contestatory possibilities of performance as a form of
radical dissent. It contests both the logic of social control and surveillance
through which the state renders space unshared and a model of theatre that
reproduces this logic. To that end, the Disposable House performance
enacts an encounter with difference in a space that is shared between ethnic or
religious “others.” This dimension of the work is underscored through naming
two well-known poets (“I remember Lalon Fakir. I remember Kabir”) who are both associated
with nonsectarian beliefs. In a sense, the structure of The Body House of
the Actor text, as well as the ambiguity of the name Kankowa (which, as
previously noted, both names the artists’ collective and Saikia’s nom de
plume), function as a critical reenactment of Kabir and Lalon’s work.
As noted in my
introduction, Kabir was a fifteenth-century poet born in Varanasi. While there
are many divergent biographies about the legendary poet and his life, it is commonly
understood that during his lifetime he studied with an unknown powerful Hindu
guru, and later became a poet and teacher in his own right (although he did not
achieve wide acceptance or veneration until after his death).
He is now famous for his rough powerful voice and his critique of rigid
orthodoxies. Several religious sects have produced collections of his works and
his poems have been sung and recited throughout North India for over 500 years.
In the Disposable House
performance, Saikia announces, “Kabir stands at the market place, a burning torch
in his hand, one who has put fire to house may come and walk with me.” Before
reading from the The Body House of the Actor at the Disposable House
performance, Saikia first recites lines of a famous poem attributed to
Kabir,
I’ve burned my own house down
the torch is in my hand.
Now I’ll burn down the house of anyone
who wants to follow me.
This text appears
translated into both English and Hindi at the beginning of the video documentation
of the performance, which Saikia posted on YouTube to extend its public reception.
And, as Linda Hess has noted in the introduction to her translation of Kabir’s poetry
(with Shukdev Singh), this famous couplet expressed Kabir’s emphatic independence
from both of the major religions of his time, Hinduism and Islam, and his “penetration
of everything inessential.”
Hess explains that for Kabir, “the individual must find the truth in his own
mind and body so that the line between ‘him’ and ‘it’ disappears.”
To the extent that the burned house represents Kabir’s denouncement of a worldly
and sectarian identity,
Disposable House invites others to do the same. Telling
the crowd that Kabir “stands in the marketplace,” as Saikia himself similarly
stands in the street, the artist invites others to walk with him as they begin
their procession through the marketplace and towards the river to dispose of
the houses.
A famous story about Kabir
is worth noting here. It tells of his Hindu and Muslim followers fighting over
the ownership of the poet’s body after his death. Before any real violence
ensues, however, someone takes off the shroud to discover that a heap of flowers
has replaced the cadaver. The two groups agree to divide the flowers and each group
goes off to burn or bury them according to their respective ritual. The story, considered
inter-textually alongside Disposable House, offers neither a synthesis
nor transcendence of religious identity, but rather a foregrounding of the
necessity, urgency, and efficacy of performative practice. It is the
diffusiveness of Kabir’s body that precludes exclusive ownership by either community.
As such, it enables each group to enact a sense of belonging and attachment
through the performance of religious ritual. As is the case with Kankowa’s body
and the actor’s body in The Body House of the Actor, Kabir’s body
belongs to many people and inhabits many places.
The very notion of the
body-house resonates with poetic metaphors used by the second poet mentioned in
the text of
The Body House of the Actor, Lalon Fakir (also known as
Lalon Shah). Lalon was a nineteenth-century poet who was thought to have lived
in what is the present-day Kushtia District of Bangladesh (formerly part of
Nadiya District, India) where he died in 1890. No other Baul poet is as famous
as Lalon in Bangladesh and India, and he is one of the most well-known in the
West as well.
His fame is partly due to Rabindranath Tagore, whose thoughts and writing
during the
Swadeshi movement where largely influenced by the Bauls. In
1915-1916 Tagore published twenty poems of Lalon in the literary journal
Prabasi
bringing them to the attention of middle-class, Bengali society. Lalon’s status
as a cultural symbol was tied in part to his strictly nonsectarian belief that
eschewed any birth religion, believing, in Tagore’s words, that the only
religion is “the religion of man.”
Lalon’s poems were composed
in colloquial Bengali and used imagery from everyday activities such as
farming, fishing, and even home foreclosure, as metaphors for one’s spiritual
life. Often, his poems used the metaphor of a house for the body. As scholar of
Lalon, Carol Salomon, notes,
This is often the case with dehatattva
songs. The body may be depicted as a house with two pillars (legs), nine rooms
the cakras; although the standard Hindu tantric system lists seven, they can
vary in number depending on the tradition, a basement (muladhar), and an attic
(sahasrar) in which a madman who is the Lord sits; or a bird cage with nine
doors, housing an unknown bird (the soul); or a broken-down boat constantly
leaking water (semen); or a tree of beauty that produces moon fruit
(offspring). Everything from a watch to the city Mecca has been used in Baul
songs to symbolize the body.
This is evident in works
such as Dhanya dhanya boli tare, which Salomon interprets as nine or ten
modifying doors that stand in for the nine or ten openings of the body. Lalon writes:
I've got to hand it to the fellow
who built a house like this,
with its foundation up in the sky!
The house has just two pillars, no more,
and their bases aren't attached to the
floor.
How will this house stay in one piece,
when it's battered by a raging storm?
It has a basement and nine rooms,
even an attic at the very top.
There a madman sits,
in solitude, the sole Lord.
Upstairs and downstairs,
one after the other,
are nine and a half doors.
The conceptual layer of
this poem that is particularly relevant to the Body House of the Actor
is the composite and porous nature of the body illustrated through the home’s multiple
levels and doors. Saikia reenacts Lalan’s notion of the body-house to illustrate
a model of an actor who is made of many parts that are open to, and composed
of, the spectator. This multiplicity undermines the notion of an insular and
fixed actor who opens up his mouth to deposit knowledge into others. The
entryways and doors of thesebodies not only invite the other to enter, but
suggest that he/she is already inside. Such co-mingling of bodies suggests that
dialogue and narrative is not transmitted by the actors to the public, but
activated through an already interconnected relationship. The body-house acts
as a theoretical model for participation, which also allows for the subversion of
dominant relational dynamics. It argues, paradoxically, that while a passerby
on the street encountering the performance may appear “passive,” he/she is
fundamentaly intertwined through the very act of spectatorship, and thus,
invited into the performance and its critique.
This invitation for others
to enter into the “body-house” of critique – or rather to recognize that they
are already a part of it – is illustrated in elaborate detail in the watercolor
images in the Body House of the Actor text. The watercolors depict
porous bodies, melded with others, reappearing in various forms of intimate
interconnectivity. One image in particular shows a multi-part figure, drawn
with overlapping lines, that has two eyes shared between three mouths. The
figure’s hands grasp a torso composed of a
framed image of a house.
Residing in the background are a cityscape and a tree, whose branches house an
abundance of birds. Here the actor, made of many people, offers up his/her own
body, the body-house, to the city and its inhabitants. This “offering up” of the
body-house to others is further underscored by the collaborative nature of Disposable
House, which Saikia attempts to realize through the collaborative paintings
on the houses and the participation of the auto-rickshaw drivers, local
musicians, the various artists and interested spectators who walk along the
streets in the procession, and ultimately the homeless Guwahati residents who
repossess the house structures.
Interpreted from a
politicized standpoint, this collaborative, non-individualistic approach to
performance and art-making resonates strongly with the theories of the Communist
playwright, actor, and performance theorist Safdar Hashmi (as discussed in the
previous chapter). As we have seen, Hashmi became famous as a powerful advocate
of Street Theatre in India, was part of the Indian People’s Theatre
Association, and became one of the founder members of the Jana Natya Manch
(JANAM) in Delhi in 1973. More relevent in this context, Hashmi’s work involved
activist-based performances that were done in the streets in front of large
public audiences that addressed a variety of
social and political
concerns. JANAM famously performed
Machine for a trade union meeting of
over 200,000 workers in 1978. This performance was followed by series of public
performances through the late 1970s and 1980s that sought to raise awareness of
the position of marginalized communities with respect to topics such as
violence against women (in
Aurat, 1973), the poverty of peasant
communities (in
Gaon Se Shahar Tak, 1978), and unemployment (
Teen
Crore, 1979).
When Hashmi was brutally assassinated in 1989 during the performance of his
public street play
Halla Bol, he became a powerful cultural symbol of
artistic resistance against the state. The Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust
(SAHMAT) was founded the same year in his name and continues this day to serve
as a space of support for a young generation of performance artists.
During his lifetime, Hashmi
also wrote prolifically on street theatre, outlining his theoretical and
political understandings of the stakes of public performance. His critique of a
self-contained, individualistic notion of the actor and artist is most clearly
articulated in his 1983 essay “The Enchanted Arch: On the Individual and
Collective Views of Art.” Like Sircar, Hashmi was critical of the notion of
proscenium theatre, but for different reasons. While Hashmi himself was known
to participate in proscenium plays, he was constantly forced to defend the
artistic legitimacy of street theatre, and was highly critical of the mythical
power given to the stage. For Hashmi, the notion of the individual actor thought
to contain coveted insights on existence was linked with a selective
sanctification of the proscenium theatre. “Here the proscenium is being seen as
a kind of enchanted archway to the region of divine inspiration, creativity or
the wherewithal in which the drama of profound analysis of man, love and death
is born. The proscenium becomes, as it where, the tree of wisdom under which
every Gautam becomes a Buddah.”
To counter this notion, Hashmi challenged the valorization of the proscenium
space, suggesting that it, like any space, is “empty” until it is brought to
life by performance. By empty, of course Hashmi does not mean emptied from
socio-political dynamics, but empty in the sense that the space is inert until
artistic movement reactivates it. But space is truly activated only through
collective action. In that same essay, Hashmi identified what he saw as a
“definite and irresolvable contradiction between the bourgeois individualist
view of art and the people’s view of art.”
Such commitment to the individual, and consequent anxiety about collaboration,
makes the artist unable to offer up a real critique of the state. Because the
bourgeois artist/actor places faith in the individual and fears collective
voice, he/she ultimately falls victim to the “mythic power of the instrument of
production.”
The instrument of production, here being, the artist or actor himself as
expressed directly through his chosen medium.
The notion of the
body-house offered by Saikia provides a contemporary architectural and
corporeal metaphor, which undermines the mythic valorization of the individual
actor and the proscenium stage. Instead of limiting artistic production to the space
of the illusionistic stage, the body itself is understood as a house that
carries with it every possibility of performance. Moreover, this porous and
mobile body-house, with its many open doors and windows, is formed through its
dependence on elements from the outside, which paradoxically build-up the
structure from within. This interconnected relationship between the inside and
the outside, the actor and spectator, forms the very basis of Disposable
Theatre. Through a collaborative model, it allows for conflicting positionalities
and dissenting voices.
As Disposable House
and the theories on which it is based suggest, this collaboration is possible
because both the body and the theatre are disposable. They do not belong
to any space, group or individual. They come alive only through the process of
disposal. This evokes religious practices from both Islam and Hinduism. In the
Islamic tradition ta'zīya, mobile mausoleums built as replicas of Imam
Hussein's mausoleum in Karbala, are used in ritual processions by Shi’a Muslims
during the mourning month of Muharram. Similar to the Disposible House
project, ta'zīyas vary in shape and size, and carried in a procession
through the streets. Although some ta'zīyas were originally madeof precious
materials for royal and wealthy patrons, to be housed permanently, the majority
of ta'zīyas are of kind of disposable art made of wood and bamboo for
the frame and tin foil, colored paper, mica and glass for the ornament on the
exterior. This Disposible House also resonates with Hindu ritual during Durga
Pooja in which the goddess Durga is processed through the street and
ultimately placed in the river to float away. Both practices include a
component of public process that ultimately leads to a ephemeral sacrifice.
This intersection of
disposability and collectivity is further reiterated through the work’s
engagement with performance-based rituals in Assam, particularly those that
take place during the harvest festival of Bhogali (or Magh Bihu). During
Bhogali, temporary houses called bhela-ghor are built for the harvest
celebration. On the night of the community feast, uruka, people gather
together for a collectively prepared meal and everyone spends the night inside
the bhela-ghor. At dawn, as community members offer prayers for a
bountiful harvest the following year, these “disposable houses” are burned down
and their ashes are scattered on the earth, either on the edge of the city, or
in the open space of the rural country.
In these festivals, the
disposal of the home becomes the generative possibility of the following year’s
abundance. The bhela-ghor homes underscore Saikia’s aim to create a
cultural symbol for the public linked to community-based and collective
practices that express a desire for regeneration. Appropriately than, even
though the homes were originally intended to be released into the Bramaputra
(similar to the procession and immersion of Durga during Durga Pooja),
the houses in the 2012 performance were given to local residents, who live near
the river and had inquired after the homes and their materials. Instead of
being submerged into the river, they were instead submerged into the
environment and re-appropriated as domestic structures by the people of
Guwahati. Thus, the materials of the homes, like the ashes of bhela-ghor,
are scattered through the land and given over to the community.
The second lives of these
homes, made possible only after their disposal, speaks also to Disposable
Theatre’s commitment to radical critique. Both ritual invocations—the harvest
festival and the Disposable House Project—emphasize the disposable,
ephemeral nature of the body-houses, which are moved through the city, and
later turned over at the banks of the river to make way for something greater
expressed by the work’s underlying non-sectarian message and its critique of
the state’s role in intolerance. At the edge of the river when Saikia reads
Kabir’s line, “one who has put fire to their house, may come and walk with me”
he underscores this message of both subversion and unification. The idea being
that whoever is able to let go of attachment to his or her own identity,
religion or ethnicity (“who has put fire to their house”) may come and walk in
solidarity. These lines echo the act of offering-up homes to the river in Disposable
House, which performatively suspends classification, regulation and
intolerance on the basis of identity in favor of a fleeting moment in which the
city both venerates and turns over its conflicting desires for home. The
complexity involved in Saikia’s work is that one sets fire to one’s own home
not to obliterate or subsume difference, but rather to challenge the ways power
depends on these categories and to demonstrate a relinquishment of them.
While Saikia’s work
ultimately aims to promote tolerance, it would be reductive and naïve to
suggest the underlying message of Disposable House is for everyone in Guwahati
to simply transcend their differences, and see that they belong to the same spiritual
home. Instead, Disposable House, as an activist intervention, offers a
much more complex model of pluralism in its critique of state power, one, which
I believe, harkens back to a model of interconnected habitation offered by
Saikia’s poetic description of a body-house as a space of both belonging and
difference.
It is valuable to note also
the ways in which Saikia’s performance perhaps “failed” to project the cultural
inclusivity and pluralism of his own philosophy. Saikia, who walked through the
streets with a bare chest, wore only a lungi, and performed devotional
rituals at the start of the procession, took on the character of a Brahman
priest or holy man, which evoked the presence of a figure who is ultimately
upper caste and Hindu. This important to consider not to disparage Saikia’s
work, but to think of the limitations of the body as a text in the
socio-political public sphere, and the complex reception of the artist’s body.
Saikia chose to present himself as a figure according to his own religious
background, and utilized an ethnic and religious subject-position that maintains
a level of acceptance and privilege within Guwahati’s socio-political landscape.
In this sense, even Saikia’s own intention of inclusivity, which he aimed to evoke
through the reading of Kabir, was perhaps less visible through the
representational presentation of the body itself.
To that end, the expository
and site-specific nature of “disposable theater” managed to produce unexpected
elements that transcended its own representational failings. In the final stage
of the performance, near the banks of the river, as Saikia read his “Body House
of the Actor” poem out-loud in preparation for the immersion of the body-houses
into the water, local homeless residents expressed their sense that it was wasteful
for the artists to simply dispose of stable housing materials in a purely
symbolic gesture. The group of residents who approached Saikia was of a mixed
ethnic and religious demographic, both Hindu, Muslim.
Both individually, and as a group, the residents rearticulated finale of the
performance, as well as the significance of the body house itself. While the
initial aim of performance was to dispose of the body-house in the river as a
spiritual expression of a unified tolerance critical of the state’s insistence
on ethnic differentiation, this untenable ideal was rewritten in the midst of
the performance as dissenting residents envisioned the work as having an
entirely different value, despite the potentially less religiously inclusive
role projected by the artist himself. The body house was reworked within its
own framework of dissent and ultimately reformulated through the critique
offered by the homeless residents.
The ultimately goal was not
to achieve an ideal of cultural harmony, but rather, to give the performance up
to the body-house of the city so that it might foster critical dialogue. While
it was initially conceived symbolically to express the connectivity of people
in Guwahati through an ephemeral act that expresses a relinquishment of the homes
of identity, religion, nationality, and political allegiance, the intervention
of local residents instead restructured its symbolic and material value in the
construction of actual new homes in the city. When the performance shifted
after its direct encounter with an unsuspecting critical audience, the
body-house redefined cohabitation through an ever malleable notion of home.
In the chapter that follows
I will turn towards one of Saikia’s predecessors, Ratnabali Kant, a performance
artist who was primarily active in the 1980s-90s. Kant’s practice of
“installation performance” further demonstrates a similar value given to
thecontinuous process of destruction, disposal and rebuilding, as fostered in
Saikia’s
Disposable House Project.
While Kant and Saikia have met at events in Delhi, and are aware of each
other’s work, they have never directly collaborated.
Nonetheless, as we will see, both artists are committed to interrogating
dominant paradigms of difference and othering, and turned towards body-based
practices in search of a malleable form of dissent that gives way to the
creative potential of destruction and renewal.
Samudra Kajal Saikia, “Disposable Theatre: Conceptualizing the
Spectator in Shifting Space,” ArtEtc
It should be noted that Saikia’s body-house is not like a Hobbesian
body, which aspires towards a
shared social contract
binding together the fundamental tenets of liberal democracy. Rather, the
body-house
is more akin to the type of
the unfixed antagonism described by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in their
book Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985). Laclau and Mouffe
sought to unsettle and
expand the concept of unity and group formation in the face of the pitfalls of
liberal
democracy. By providing a
theoretical framework for post-Marxist thought that questions ideals of a
subsuming unification,
Laclau and Mouffe offer a radical model of democracy in which antagonism and
conflict is sustained
instead of squashed. See: Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and
Socialist
Strategy: Towards a Radical
Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985) 184. More directly relevent in this context
is Claire Bishop’s frequently cited essay “Antagonism and Relational
Aesthetics,” which uses
Laclau and Mouffe to
challenge Nicolas Bourriaud’s arguments in his 1998 book Relational Aesthetics.
Bishop examines the work of
Liam Gillick and Rirkrit Tiravanija alongside Laclau and Mouffe’s notion of
radical democracy in order
to argue that these works are not simple relational but antagonistic in the
sense
that they are not
“intrinsically democratic.” See: Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational
Aesthetics,”
October 110 (2004). I take
a similar position in relation to Samudra Kajal Saikia’s work insofar as that
work, while interested in
building unity across communities in Guwahati, is equally interested in
cultivating a space in
which dissent and belonging coexist.
Bidal Sircar, The Third Theatre (Calcutta: Naba Grantha Kutir, 1978)
3.
Sumudra Kajal Saikia, Regional Art Performance and Events Final Report
(New Delhi: Sumudra Kajal
Saikia, 2012).
Sanjib Baruah, India Against Itself: Assam and the Politics of
Nationality. (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1999),
xiii.
Baul refers to a group of mystic
artists/writers/musicians from Bengal (India’s West Bengal and
Bangladesh). Baul’s are a
heteregenous group with a number of diverse sects that practice similar
mystical
beliefs expressed through
religion and/or music.
In the following line Hashmi writes,
“This is of course, pure drivel” to underscore how strong he
contests these claims. “The
Enchanted Arch: On the Individual and Collective Views of Art” in The Right
to Perform: Selected
Writings of Safdar Hashmi (New Delhi: SAHMAT, 1989). 26.
Syed Taufik Ryaz, interviewed by the
author, Kolkata, May 2, 2012; Samudra Kajal Saikia interviewed
by the author, New Delhi,
April 13, 2012.
Samudra Kajal Saikia, interviewed by
the author, New Delhi, April 13, 2012; Ratnabali Kant,
interviewed by the author,
New Delhi, April 5, 2012.
