Outside the fold, an exhibition of installations and mixed media works by Shukla Sawant, juxtaposes celebration with lament. Addressing two very different issues, the display is uniquely innovative, thought-provoking and at times catches you quite by surprise.

The life of Pandita Ramabai - her acts of social dissent, religious heresy and challenges to patriarchy at the turn of the 19th century - forms the theme of the first part of the exhibit, titled “Remembering Pandita.”

* Gallery Snapshots: An experience in expression

The second project, “Desert Island and other Texts”, is the result of an extended enquiry into the history of indentured labour in Mauritius and the continued Western imperial aggression against islanders of Muruora and Chagos.

Shukla draws upon the work of writers like Gauri Viswanathan, Uma Chakravarti, Gilles Deleuze and Marina Carter to make her point.

Her installations use materials like sugar, readymade objects like flogging whips, printmaking, photography and sound to lend voice to those unheard of till now, while also revelling in the spirit of dissent of the chosen few who rose above the others to make their presence felt.

The Feminine Principle

Shukla’s female protagonist, Pandita Ramabai (1858- 1922), was a woman far ahead of her times. A figure of rebellion, Pandita broke all norms of Brahmanical patriarchy during her lifetime.

The daughter of an eccentric Puranic scholar, Anant Shastri Dongre - who despite the restrictions imposed on women, taught all his children to read Sanskrit – Pandita, acquired a questioning attitude at a very early age.

A series of deaths of everyone close to her led Pandita towards religious disbelief and she wrote extensive critiques of her inherited faith. Her subsequent embrace of Christianity too did not change Pandita’s spirit of unorthodoxy and self-interpretation of the given.

Widowed at a very young age, Pandita went on to establish a rehabilitation shelter for widows near Pune and even set up a printing press.

A triumphal tone of celebration, bordering on reverence, comes across through Shukla’s installations on Ramabai. ‘Ek Vastra’ deserves a particular mention though for its somber, yet innately powerful expression of the protagonist’s identity.

A Bitter-Sweet Legacy

This celebration of the independent feminine spirit is followed by a heart-wrenching portrayal of subjugation and repression.

The works on view in this section are the result of Shukla Sawant’s long term association with fellow artists and academicians at the Mahatma Gandhi Institute in Mauritius.

Unaware, except in a peripheral fashion about the hundreds of islands that dot the vast oceans of the Earth, most visitors to these tropical getaways remain oblivious of what lies beneath the rosy visions of utopia.

A brutal history of slavery, linked to Western economic and territorial imperialism, marks the history of these islands.

In the 18th century, slave trade was replaced by the system of indentured labour, which Shukla describes as a thinly veiled form of slavery meant to serve the islands’ mono-economies of sugar, coffee and coconut plantations.

Drawing here upon the writings of Marina Carter and her exploration of letters and petitions by indentured labourers against the harsh treatment meted out to them by plantation owners, the artist displays an acute understanding of their plight through her unique installations.

Shukla provides visitors of the exhibition with souvenir scratchcards that reveal ghastly tales of enslavement:

“I was under the engagement of Mr Noulin for three years, at the expiry of which I re-engaged for another year on the promise from my master that I should not again be beaten or ill treated.

He had been in the habit of ill using me, tying my hands and beating me, sometimes with his fists and at other times kicking me with his foot.

A short time after the second engagement of service, my master had me tied up in the sugar boiling room and there I was beaten with a rattan on my bare back on which sirop had been previously smeared by my master.”

All this and more lends “Outside the fold” a touch of singularity. The exhibition leaves one enthralled and yet perplexed at the same time. A must-visit for art lovers who seek profound meaning in the abstract images that grace the walls of a gallery.

Visiting Details:

Anant Art Gallery,
F 213 B, Lado Sarai
New Delhi
www.anantart.com

(The exhibition is on till September 18th)