Pushpamala: A Performative Deconstruction of the Typography of Indigenous Women Through a Postcolonial Lens
By Katja Neef. ARTHIST 105: Global Art Histories, Semester One, 2020. Grade: A+
Photography has always been a method to record important moments in time while providing accuracy by capturing the subject, its setting, and the surrounding environment. Yet, seen through a postcolonial lens, photography specifically employed by ethnographers and anthropologists in the 1900s was instrumentalized to create the subordinate 'other' by fixating on differences by removing context. Pushpamala, a contemporary Indian artist, challenges colonial photography and exposes the anachronistic portrayal of history by transforming herself into both the exoticized ‘native’ and the anthropologist, thereby subverting and undermining the colonial gaze in a critical and satirical manner.[1] This essay will examine how Pushpamala navigates these fluid realities with the use of mise en scène, performance, and mimicry in three photographs in her series 'Native Women of South India'.
Through her series of ‘Native Women of South India’, Pushpamala critically sheds light on how colonial powers used pseudoscience to control and create imagined distinctions through physical and cultural differences as well as contemporary society as a whole.[2] Her art practice involves not only being outside the image but climbing inside the skin of the people she is emulating to reveal and understand their experiences concerning a broader colonial discourse.[3] Pushpamala’s wider work of art captures the ever-changing and constantly evolving nature of female identity through depicting a plethora of archetypes and exploring marginalization through a feminist lens, thereby opening the wounds of India’s colonial past.
Western binaries have created fictional distinctions between ‘Occident’ and ‘Orient’ by perpetuating 'otherness', and imagined racial demarcations are reestablished as opposed to being grounded in science.[4] This is evidenced in the filtering of media, photography, literature, and film through a western lens in which racially charged narratives are reinforced.[5] In Orientalism (1978), Said contends that assigning and rendering the Orient as being submissive and devoid of agency dehumanizes its populations.[6] This narrative can be traced back throughout history between the West and the East where representation is driven by political power and evidenced in modern literature such as Huntington's Clash of Civilizations (1998) where civilizations are divided into categories and their differences ignite conflicts, reducing cultures to static and essentialized qualities where race informs social behaviors.[7] Pushpamala implores the audience in the place of the spectator to feel a sense of discomfort by confronting this clash of colonial imagery through contemporary postcolonial art.
Figure 1: Maurice Vidal Portman, Ta-keda Woman, Andaman Islands, 1890s, Platinum print, The British Library.
Figure 2: Pushpamala N., ‘Toda (after late 19th century British anthropometric photograph)’. From the Ethnographic series Native Women of South India: Manners and Customs, 2000-2004. Sepia toned silver gelatin prints on fiber paper, 61 x 51 cm
Anthropological photographs serve as evidence of how colonizers asserted their powers and primordial racial superiority by depicting 'savages' and othering them in the process. Maurice Vidal Portman, a self-proclaimed historian and anthropological photographer who identified himself as the father of the Andamans, exemplifies this fixation and construction of 'savages' through documentation and photography for scientific insight as an outsider.[8] This naturalized and substantiated colonial efforts in 'taming' and controlling locals, as racial and physical differences are evident and assigned constructed meaning of inferiority.[9] This is evident in both photographs in figures 1, 2 and 3, the first photo being the original photo taken by Portman. In the original photograph, which Pushpamala recreates in figures 2 and 3, colonial equipment is depicted that is used to quantify and collect data from physical attributes of the ‘natives’ such as the metal apparatus prop supporting the arm,[10] as well as in the third photo where Pushpamala’s face is measured by phrenology calipers — resembling a gun put to her head — which supposedly determines her worth but threatens her cultural and gender identity as a woman with biologically determinist science.
Figure 3: Pushpamala N. Toda, From the Ethnographic Series Native Women of South India: Manners & Customs, 2000-2004. Sepia toned silver gelatin prints on fibre paper.
Pushpamala reveals the socially constructed nature of the photographs where realities are created rather than being an authentic representation, thereby essentializing the 'native.' These photos produced at the time exemplify the effect of racial typology, creating social hierarchy through the treatment of space and the human figures of those depicted compared to the 'unseen' anthropologist attempting to control the setting to produce an image fitting their own exotic fantasies. Portman claimed that ethnographic photographs have to be an accurate depiction where lighting, shadows, expressions, and posture must be uniform.[11] However, Pushpamala challenges the authenticity of the photographs as they depict more than just a 'neutral' capturing of its subject. The tonal contrast, contextual setting, and expression allude to disempowerment and the inorganic state in which these photographs were taken, reflecting the obsession of documenting physical features of different races during the 1900s.[12] Pushpamala, therefore, uses her artwork to shed light on how mediums such as photography were instrumentalized in exacerbating racial discrimination in order to assert their power and justify racism—questioning how conventional knowledge systems are produced and at what cost.
Instead of marginalizing the Toda women a second time through reproducing the images, Pushpamala reclaims the space and subverts the gaze in a satirical and critical manner by casting herself as the person behind the lens, in the frame, and in control. Pushpamala's use of mise en scène further explores the contextual setting in which the photos would have been taken in.[13] She recreates Portman's checkered board held up by unknown hands, which served as an anthropometric measuring device to be able to quantify and put the subject into statistics, showing the theatrical composition of these photographs.[14] The checkered board was a tool in making an othered people visible to the colonial world by having their identities defined by measurements, categorization, and documentation as well as objectifying and reducing them to mere ratios[15]. In Figure 2, Pushpamala highlights the absurdity of this by introducing it visually to a modern audience in a mocking way, commenting on the artificiality of how these images were envisioned and created.[16] Her photographs have a sepia toned filter that mimics the original anthropological photographs; however, they have subtle alterations.[17] Pushpamala's decision to remain clothed as opposed to the original images reveal the inappropriate nature of how colonial powers would remove indigenous bodies from their natural contexts, subjecting them to an inspecting gaze through photography, inadvertently objectifying, exoticizing, and eroticizing indigenous bodies through an orchestrated setting.[18] She uses her body as an Indian woman dressed in cultural clothing to embody the ‘otherness’ the colonial gaze is obsessed with, subverting this and resisting objectification.[19]
The viewing of images and photographs is biased and non-neutral as they are seen through different political, cultural, and social perspectives and judgments. Pushpamala does not critically examine the indigenous bodies, but rather the position of the spectator by rejecting the colonial fantasy of depicting indigenous as primitive.[20] These subtle changes and performative interpretation of the original photos highlights what is concealed in the social context and setting of the original photos and brings to light the underlying issues that occurred in the asymmetrical interaction between the colonizer and the colonized simultaneously highlighting the performative nature of photography.[21]
Pushpamala artworks act as a vehicle for social commentary and critique in which the distinction between her recreated photographs with the original photographs are blurred—emphasizing the anachronistic nature of photographs as a means to determine history which can be taken out of context and distorted.[22] Pushpamala, therefore, disrupts this idea of linear history recorded by anthropologists and ethnographies, which exert their power through photography as a medium to fashion the 'self and other' through representation and portrayal. In Figure 3, Pushpamala exposes the setting of how the series is taken and the dynamic at play between spectator and subject, reminiscent of the process of creating ethnographical photographs. Through composition and scale, she exposes the exploitative process and reveals the disconnect between the photographer and subject, thereby diminishing and invalidating its historical accuracy.
Figure 4: Pushpamala N. Toda, From the Ethnographic Series Native Women of South India: Manners & Customs, 2000-2004. Sepia toned silver gelatin prints on fiber paper.
The ‘native’s’ subordinate position is shown through her crouching position lower than those controlling the setting, thereby exposing the exploitative nature of anthropologists. The use of a dull backdrop in Figure 3 and 4 removes and displaces the 'native' from the natural context to emphasize physical features whilst ironically adding 'natural' props such as foliage to recreate the setting evident in Portman’s process.[23] This also reflects the narrative surrounding Portman’s construction of the ‘picturesque’ which required the photograph and setting to be devoid of unnecessary aesthetics demanding the bodies to be “stark naked”, which fails to capture the essence but rather depicts manufactured images of ‘savages’.[24] Through creating the set for her own reinstallation of ethnological photographs, Pushpamala exposes the real intentions of anthropologists, the process of staging ‘natives’, and how the portrayal of 'realities' is selective in what is shown to the spectator. This disregards how female and indigenous identities are constantly shifting and reimagined as they are everchanging and not static in history. The real tragedy in this construction of otherness and inferiority through pseudoscience is when those being categorized and reduced to stagnant identities start to believe these misrepresentations. Pushpamala thereby criticizes the relevance of knowledge created through physical anthropology in determining cultural and social aspects by reconstructing the photographs and deconstructing the essentialism of female indigenous bodies through a post-colonial lens using the ostensibly innocuous nature of photography.[25]
The staged nature of ethnographic photography allows Pushpamala to express her contemporary view through performance mimicking the similar construction of the original photograph.[26] The series can be seen as rendering the individual photos as unimportant through repetition and nameless faces as part of a collection where their identity is obscured.[27] The person depicted only poses as an addition to a collection serving as part of statistical and documented mass, as their individual experiences are insignificant which is a phenomenon experienced by people of color throughout history.
The examination of three of Pushpamala's photographs in the series ‘Native Women of South India’ concludes that through her sharp investigation of representations of the ‘exotic other’ in historic photographs, Pushpamala claims agency for those marginalized. By enacting the roles of the subject and the photographer, Pushpamala redirects the gaze back to the viewer confronting them through the eyes of a marginalized native Toda woman as well as a critical contemporary feminist artist of color. Pushpamala, therefore, employs photo-performance in order to deconstruct and produce a critical social commentary on the prevalent underlying issues of Western essentialism and gaze on culture and indigenous bodies, inextricably tying the problematic colonial past to the postcolonial present.
[1] Bhullar, “From deframing the oriental imagery to the making of the alternative other: Remapping the spaces of encounter,” 176; Mukherji, “Mimicking Anthropologists: Re-Membering a Photo Archive via Pata Paintings, Performative Mimesis, and Photo Performance,” 68.
[2] Gund Gallery, “Pushpamala N.”
[3] Kochi-Muziris, Biennale, Pushpamala N - Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014; Sinha, “Pushpamala N. and the ‘Art’ of Cinephilia in India,” 248.
[4] Gillen, “Some Problems with ‘the Asian Century,” 75.
[5] Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” 10.
[6] Said, Orientalism, 108.
[7] Mandaville, “How Do Religious Beliefs Affect Politics?” 124.
[8] Sen, Savagery and Colonialism in the Indian Ocean: Power, Pleasure and the Andaman Islanders, 4.
[9] Sen, “Savage Bodies, Civilized Pleasures: M. V. Portman and the Andamanese,” 365.
[10] Throckmorton, Postdate: Photography and Inherited History in India, 18.
[11] Pinney, “What's Photgraphy Got to Do with It?” 35.
[12] Baumbach, Henningsen, and Oschema, The Fascination with Unknown Time, 155.
[13] Mukherji, “Mimicking Anthropologists: Re-Membering a Photo Archive via Pata Paintings, Performative Mimesis, and Photo Performance,” 68.
[14] Throckmorton, Postdate: Photography and Inherited History in India, 18.
17 Sinha, “Pushpamala N. and the ‘Art’ of Cinephilia in India,” 246.
[16] Sandell and Nightingale, Museums, Equality, and Social Justice, 164.
[17] Gund Gallery, “Pushpamala N.”
[18] Sandell and Nightingale, Museums, Equality, and Social Justice, 164.
[19] Saatchi Gallery, “Pushpamala N.” Pushpamala N.”
[20] Sinha, “Pushpamala N. and the ‘Art’ of Cinephilia in India,” 224.
[21] Kaur and Dave-Mukherji, eds. Arts and Aesthetics in a Globalizing World. 10.
[22] Mukherji, “Mimicking Anthropologists: Re-Membering a Photo Archive via Pata Paintings, Performative Mimesis, and Photo Performance,” 68.
[23] Pinney, “What's Photgraphy Got to Do with It?” 35.
[24] Pinney, “What's Photgraphy Got to Do with It?” 35
[25] Sharanya, “An Eye for an Eye: the Hapticality of Collaborative Photo-Performance in Native Women of South India,” 126.
[26] Baumbach, Henningsen, and Oschema, The Fascination with Unknown Time, 155.
[27] Sharanya, “An Eye for an Eye: the Hapticality of Collaborative Photo-Performance in Native Women of South India,” 123.
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About the Author:
I'm Katja, a second-year Global Studies student majoring in Sustainable Development and the Global Environment. I have a passion for creating politically-charged art as well as learning about how art and global artists shape and critique the contemporary world we live in today.
