(DOWNLOAD) "Aesthetics, Nationalism, And the Image of Woman in Modern Indian Art (Critical Essay)" by Kedar Vishwanathan # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Aesthetics, Nationalism, And the Image of Woman in Modern Indian Art (Critical Essay)
- Author : Kedar Vishwanathan
- Release Date : January 01, 2010
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 86 KB
Description
Between 1880-1945 in Bombay (Mumbai) and Calcutta (Kolkata) a burgeoning visual culture mobilized images for anti-colonial nationalism in order to symbolically structure the nation. Images of women proliferated in private and public spaces whereby these images were used as a method to imagine a nation free of colonial rule. Crucial to this development were the reformulations of modernity based on an ambivalent combination of British and Indian vernacular(s) inclusive of social mores and its associated cultural production --high Victorian visual art and aesthetics. This change was intertwined with the beginnings of the nationalist movement(s), which drew from iconographical elements of Hinduism. In this article, I examine how and why the image of woman was used for the construction of nation. I investigate in particular the influence of political movements in Indian art including movements such as the Raja Ravi Varma Printing Press, The Calcutta Art Studio, and the Bengali neotraditionalists. I demonstrate how the onset of the change in British and Indian cultural paradigms came to be reconfigured by male nationalists in order to imagine a modern Indian nation. Further, an analysis of the connections and relationship between the colonial administration and the Indian populace prior to the onset of elite anti-colonial nationalism is imperative to an understanding of Indian modernity and the shift in vernacular and visual aesthetics. British modernity, already established in fields such as education, social mores, aesthetic appreciation, painting, and technologies were, during the 1830s-1880s, being transported from the empire and carried over by ships, merchants, companies, and individuals to the port cities of Bombay (Mumbai), Madras (Chennai), and Calcutta (Kolkata) (see, e.g., Van der Veer; Bayly). These cultural diffusions operated as a reciprocal flow of culture from center to periphery and back again. There was also informational cultural flow, from India, which permeated London. Similarly, ideas of the Enlightenment such as liberty, self-governance, and individual rights seeped into the urban cosmopolitan loci of India. It was in these urban, soon to be colonial, metropolises that reformist movements started, anti-colonial nationalism erupted, and the symbol of the woman became the contested site of modernity between the colonial government and the nationalist movement (see Bayly; Guha and Spivak; Chatterjee). During this early period of cultural and administrative exchange, the British colonial administration rested on the principles of the civilizing mission. The mission would reform activities not deemed correct to the modern institutions of the enlightened empire and formulate new educational curricula based on the Macaulayan model that would reform Indian sensibility by producing subjects loyal to the empire, who were "Indian in blood and color, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect" (Macaulay http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/ macaulay/txt_minute_education_1835.html ). This reforming of sensibilities first started within the established landowning and aristocratic, as well as the bhadralok (respectable people) classes and created, to borrow V.S. Naipaul's enigmatic title, "The Mimic Men." It was first in 1830s Bengal that British officials became horrified by practices such as suttee/sati (a widow following her dead husband onto his funeral pyre) and the treatment of women in the colony (see Major). These officials pointed to the canonical texts of Hinduism which rationalized such atrocities. Thus, the Indian female was made the signifier of a tyrannical cultural tradition (Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments 118). This legitimized the civilizing mission and justified the reforms to "tradition" and brought about conditions for modernity in India.