"From Pushkar to Rotigraphy" A musing on Museums and the politics of Preservation

A Republican senator in the American Congress proposes a Bill to cut off financial aid to Palestinians for "eliminating evidence of Jewish activity on The Temple Mount". even as  Israeli  archaeologists destroy  signs of  pre islamic   Palestinian sites

Saudi Arabia is the home of Islam's most venerated sites yet a Saudi funded mosque restoration project in Kosovo is attacked for "not respecting international standards of restoration- for modernising the Hadum Mosque by building a car park in front of it and for whitewashing the murals because they did not fit in with the donors concept of "correct"islamic architecture".

The British Museum refuses to return  the Elgin Marbles  to Greece  And a British  Minsiter actually says  that   the dark  and hairy  modern Greeks are not the descendants of the Greeks who built  The Parthenon

Iraq demands the return of Looted Art from France, Germany, Britain and the American GI's who stole it from the Sumerian site at Ur south of Baghdad. Iraq is a country that has executed ten people for stealing the head of a winged Assyrian bull. It does value its heritage even if its leader has been successfully "demonised". as someone  who is too  "retentive"   of  Iraq's material  heritage,  He  forbids it sale and export to  Western Collectors and Museums.   and wants the return of already  plundered and stolen   Art  from  Museums   in the  West.


The Taliban blows up the Bamiyan Buddhas. They see them as un-Islamic. and believed that  the money being spent on restoring them by  the West should go  to feed  a  starving  People  first.

The Hindu right wing tore down the Babri Masjid. They plan to build a temple on the site .A site that , apparently, began  its holy journey as  a  Buddhist  stupa. A stupa that Brahmancial  Hinduism destroyed as it uprooted  Buddhism in  India.

It is against this backdrop of a so called 'Clash of Civilizations' that I site my presentation.

A presentation that is about reclaiming cultutral spaces.Defining a Right to Self Representation. A right that I came to recognize rather late in my career as a social documentary photographer.

I was a classical 'street shooter' hunting down 'decisive moments' - another Cartier Bresson clone. I was Documenting, very typically, a social underclass and ignoring any desire they, my 'subjects', might have had for a say in their representation.


"From Pushkar to Rotigraphy" is , an intriguing title. I had proposed it before 9/11 -"The  Day the World Changed".

I have not changed my original presentation, though. It was, and still is, about the politics of representation and preservation. The new context has just added another dimension. A new and desperate urgency  about the need to question the very idea of ,and the politics  of  Preservation  and the politics of  cultural spaces that are being used  to define  Nationalisms . Nationalisms that are being curtailed  in  the  so called New World Order. A world Order  that is beginning to  echo the  Imperial colonialism  of the past  in more ways than  one.

Culture is not a new battlefield. Cultures as sites  of conflict  and cultural conflicts  around  ideas  of  Identity and Heritage have been around for a long time. The reduction of  the world  to a 'Global Village ' just makes contemporary conflicts more dangerous.


My questioning did not begin on  9 /11

Ideas of cultural identity and heritage as the sites of strife and cultural conflict have been important for me for quite some time.

I know that History, Archaeology and Photography were 19th centuries inventions . Inventions that were inseparably intertwined with the spread of Colonialism. They were practices tied together in the Colonial politics of the Power of the West over the Rest .

 I think they still continue to be trapped in that problematic past. One just has to look at funding patterns for their continued practice.

My presentation , though, is a personal journey. A quest that raises questions - for myself-primarily. For you, if  you want to listen  to the  Other  .

I do not have all the answers. but then I am a fan of J D Krishnamurti.The guru who was against Gurus. I am more interested in raising questions. I am more interested in answers that are  not just My answer.

My journey begins, in this case, in Pushkar - the Rajasthani mela that is probably the most photographed and romanticised cattle fair in the world. And it continues, through Rotigraphy - the professional bread and butter practice of small time Indian studio photographers] to question a lot of my beliefs - the idea of myself that was constructed for me by a very colonial education system,by the very language I now think,talk and write in  - English.

My ideas of myself were mapped for me by the West. By its History of the world and of Photography. Histories that need to be reexamined. "Other" Histories need to be written.

Not all histories and maps one is supposed to negotiate the world with are accepted unchallenged -not even when they are mapping a 'terra nullis' Australia. And certainly not whey they are defining the 'disputed' borders of independent India.

How we map and see our selves is important .India is not a name we gave ourselves. It is a Greek word  I thought for a long time Until I lived in Iran   and read a bit of Iranian  history,.  Old Farsee  did not  have  a  'S'  in it. They used   a  ' H '  instead.  The Sindhu  became  the Hindu river.   And the  people  living around  the  Sindhu river became Hindus. - people who lived around the Sindhu river  The Indus that gives  us the  name India.

India is now Hindustan  the 'stan' of the  Hindus.  just because  Old Farsee  did not have  a  ' S '  in its  alphabet.

India is also Rupert Murdoch's Indya.com. and we are the new Dot Indians  -the dot com recourse of the world. It is also  Bharat  Mata

Maps are multi coloured things .They need to be multi faceted and open enough to allow for pluralistic pilgrimages .

Pushkar is a pilgrimage site built around a lake. A lake that three yrs of drought had nearly dried up, when i first saw it. The dry sandy shores taught me an unexpected lesson. They were sprinkled with 'antique sculptures'  that could / should   have been in  Museums. - Old Idols actually. Idols that had broken and could not be worshiped.  Idols that had outlived their ritual lives and had been ceremoniously immersed in the lake- over centuries.in a ceremony called  Thanda karna or a Cooling Off

Ritual  Immersion in water  was the final farewell ritual for Sacred objects . The idols and even the painted phads or scrolls had been, and are still  given  a sacred watery  send off  Their holy, Hot energies  are Cooled  Off by water

The presence of these  once sacred objects  in Museums  is a Colonial construct . One that  satisfies a political need.  The museums were, after all, designed as the New Cultural Temples of the future   and filled with the fractured fragments of the past. A politicised  Past powered by  colonial politics that made the sacred    secular.

They were the new sacred spaces and they had their own rituals of worship . Their agendas were clearly political .  They were the  new sacred Spaces that defined and concretised cultural identities that suited the new high priests of the 'modern' world by fixing  Other cultures - in the past . People who lived in the past posed no danger for the present . and even the  Future

Controlling the Past  meant  Owning The Future  too.  I am reminded  of George Orwell's famous quote from   his  book "Nineteen Eighty-Four"   "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."

People who were seen to live in the past justified the 'moderniisng '  agenda  of the  colonisers. People who lived in the past  were less  dangerous  to  colonial present. 

The museums created and  imposed a linear time scale for a culture that believed in cyclic time - in rebirth and constant change. In Renewal and not just the finality of  Death.

And Museums are about a Dead Past . They are about creating ghosts that are now haunting the present and pointing to a frightening  future. of   cultural conflict. A  coldly calculated and  curated  'Clash of Civilizations. '

How much of  that   Clash is fueled by colonial constructs of religion, I wonder ? Religion, you have to remember was certainly used by the Raj as a 'divide and rule' policy in  a multireligous  India   that they wanted to control.


 Did the colonial Museums and Colonial Archaeology have anything to do with the politics of a divisive colonialism ?   I think  they definitely did

Photography, as a 'Museum without Walls' certainly played a major role in the spread of colonialism. It was the perfect medium to justify the civilizing mission of the West over the Rest. It provided scientific visual proof of the 'lesser' beings and orphans of the world who needed the paternalistic care of the White Man. People who, in Darwinan  terms,  were on a lower rung of the  evolutionary ladder and needed  the Whiteman's civilization , his  church  and his commerce.

The documentary tradition in photography and even the Art oriented  'Documentary Style'  is derived from that , heavily loaded, anthropological and  colonial use of the medium.

The western , highly political gaze, was internalised in the former colonies and it still allows no space for any other point of view. I know that from personal experience.

My attempts at an alternative history and practice have only 'demonised" me in the Indian  photography world. A world that still sees photography and India in commercial or even Orientialist terms.

India is 'the most exotic place in the world" a leading photographer has written. in  a coffee table book on a very Orientalised India.

Photography has been called 'The museum without walls'  foor a reason .It is the provider of freely circulating images and imaginings.. Images that are perfect oriental scenery promoting tourism even as they reinforce a monumental and orientalised past and create imagined identities.  Imagined selves - monumentally reinforced.

For Tagore the Taj was "a tear drop on the cheeks of eternity". For a rickshaw driver inBangladesh it is a symbol of his cultural pride - an Islamic monument . And for a PN Oak it was a Hindu Temple.

It is not just the photographers and photography histories that are to blame. The photography industry wants a larger slice of the cake and a definite say in the practice of Photography in India. They want to sell more films.A billion people are a big market
but they don;t buy enough film because the masses don;t believe in the concept of Candid Photography.

A photograph is not than just a realist document for them- anchored in a realist discourse .It is a little leela. The rotigrapher's studio becomes the stage for a human leela.  A personal  theatre  and playground.

The world after all, is Maya.  An illusion. A dangerous Delusion

This is a space  that the propaganda  machine of the  Hindutva right wing successfully used  in the lead up to the destruction of the  Babri  Masjid.

Photographic studios  that I saw in Rajasthan provided  the perfect  propaganda  means for  the rising militancy of  the  Hindu  Right. Swords and   guns were among the props  that Ram Bhakts could choose  to arm themselves  as they posed  alongside a painted , very muscular and militant Shri Ram.  A militant change from  the more
androgynous  God  he had been  so far . 


SATISH  SHARMA

This is  a lightly  reworked  Seminar Paper that I presented in October 2001 at the University of Canberra