Native Women of South India: Manners and Customs

Artist: Pushpamala N.

September 3, 2004 | 6.30 pm
Little Theatre, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai

Based In Bangalore, Pushpamala N. received degrees in Sculpture from M.S. University, Baroda in 1977-85. Over the years, she has worked in varied media, and is presently working in photo performance and video, and has exhibited widely all over the world. The artist has recently made a short film ‘Rashtriya Kheer and Desiy Salad’ for the Majlis recipe book project, as part of her fellowship with Majlis.

Clare Arni, received a B.A. in History of Art and Film & Media, from Stirling University, U.K. She has lived and worked as a freelance photographer in Bangalore, India (1984-94) and in Nottingham, England (1994-99) and since then is based in Bangalore, working on several book projects. She is presently documenting the vernacular architecture of South India for Marg.

In the 19th century India, there were the ‘Zenana’ or all women’s studios in cities like Hyderabad and Kolkata, run by British female photographers where women in purdah would get themselves photographed. “Native Women of South India”, is a performative work where Pushpamala, a South Indian artist and Clare Arni, a British photographer who has grown up in South India – one black, one white – play the protagonists in a project exploring the history of photography as a tool of ethnographic documentation. The series of photographs presents an eccentric array of ‘native types’ by recreating characters from familiar or historical sources, ranging from the religious to mythological to the fictional, to the real. The project ironically comments on the colonial obsession with classification as well as the Indian nationalist ideal of “Unity in Diversity”- the notion of looking at ourselves as diverse peoples making up the nation, using performance and masquerade borrowed from the popular forms we see all around us, in the “costumes of India” pageants, Republic Day floats, festival tableaux and dioramas, and in the dream projections of roadside studio photography.

Native Women of South India – Manners & Customs [2000-2003] is an arts collaboration project funded by the India Foundation of the Arts, Bangalore, and this program has been organized in association with Gallery Chemould, Mumbai.