Exploring South Asia: (Social) Memory, Movements and Messaging on Tulsi Pipe Road: ‘seeing’ public wall art in Mumbai, 10th March 2017, Friday, FSI hall, SAU
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Ankur Datta
Mar 5, 2017, 11:09:42 AM3/5/17
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South Asian University
Faculty of Social Sciences
Exploring South Asia Seminars
Winter Semester
2016-17
(Social) Memory, Movements and Messaging on Tulsi Pipe Road: ‘seeing’ public wall art in Mumbai
(Social) Memory, Movements and Messaging on Tulsi Pipe Road: ‘seeing’ public wall art in Mumbai
by
E. Dawson Varughese
This lecture is interested in how public wall art on Tulsi Pipe Road in Mumbai relates to and with its everyday gazers. Through public wall art, the wall of Tulsi Pipe Road is being readily transformed into a repository of post-millennial societal memory as the white paint is subsumed by colours, bold images and social messaging in English, Hindi and Marathi. The images are transitory not least because of the white-washing, a performative and curious mixture of ‘uniform’ beautification and equally, a censorship of sorts. The transitory nature of the artwork is not the only movement which finds inspiration in the white tableau of Tulsi Pipe Road; from this same wall, the people of Mumbai are called upon. Based on fieldwork from early 2016, I explore how the wall art interacts with its passers-by through the vehicle of social messaging, drawing on recent social memory and calling people to movement. Analysing a recently installed mural in homage to the late Abdul Kalam and a collection of three panel murals which explore post-millennial experiences of being a woman in India, the lecture posits that darśan, a mode of seeing usually enacted in sacred realms is being used in non-dharmic and moreover, secular situations of ‘seeing’. I suggest that darśan might at play in the consumption of the public wall art of Tulsi Pipe Road and thus I discuss the implications of how older Indian aesthetics of visuality are shaping the ways in which we see (in) New India.
E. Dawson Varughese
This lecture is interested in how public wall art on Tulsi Pipe Road in Mumbai relates to and with its everyday gazers. Through public wall art, the wall of Tulsi Pipe Road is being readily transformed into a repository of post-millennial societal memory as the white paint is subsumed by colours, bold images and social messaging in English, Hindi and Marathi. The images are transitory not least because of the white-washing, a performative and curious mixture of ‘uniform’ beautification and equally, a censorship of sorts. The transitory nature of the artwork is not the only movement which finds inspiration in the white tableau of Tulsi Pipe Road; from this same wall, the people of Mumbai are called upon. Based on fieldwork from early 2016, I explore how the wall art interacts with its passers-by through the vehicle of social messaging, drawing on recent social memory and calling people to movement. Analysing a recently installed mural in homage to the late Abdul Kalam and a collection of three panel murals which explore post-millennial experiences of being a woman in India, the lecture posits that darśan, a mode of seeing usually enacted in sacred realms is being used in non-dharmic and moreover, secular situations of ‘seeing’. I suggest that darśan might at play in the consumption of the public wall art of Tulsi Pipe Road and thus I discuss the implications of how older Indian aesthetics of visuality are shaping the ways in which we see (in) New India.
E. Dawson Varughese is a global cultural studies scholar and her specialism is India. She is the author of Beyond The Postcolonial (Palgrave, 2012) and Reading New India (Bloomsbury, 2013) and is a co-author of Indian Writing in English and Issues of Visual Representation (Palgrave, 2015). In 2016 Genre Fiction of New India: post-millennial receptions of 'weird' narratives was published by Routledge. She is currently writing a book on visuality and Indian graphic narratives in which she explores ‘new ways of seeing in New India’. She divides her time between the UK and India. See her work at: www.beyondthepostcolonial.com
DATE and Time: 10 March, 11am-1pm
Venue : FSI Hall, South Asian University, Akbar Bhawan, South Asian University, Chankayapuri, New Delhi 110021, Phone: 24122512; 24122513
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Dr. Ankur Datta
Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology
South Asian University
Akbar Bhavan
Chanakyapuri
New Delhi 110021
India
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South Asian University, New Delhi 110 021
Phone: +91 11 24122512 Fax: +91 11 24122511
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