Layout 3 - India Foundation for the Arts - IFA

installation, “City: Memory, Dreams,
Desire, Statues and Ghosts: Return of
Hiuen Tsang”, has the iconic sixthcentury
Chinese peripatetic Buddhist
monk, Hiuen Tsang, as a spectator—
this time of a partly burnt-out, mythic
city in Gujarat. The work splits time
to offer a living past that cannot be
captured by social history, cultural
anthropology, art history or, for that
matter, by well-intentioned
investigative journalism or human
rights activism. It is a past that can be
accessed only as an imagined
contemporary city. Sheikh tries to
locate his city directly in human
sensitivity, in that nether land of
emotions and awareness where the
bonding between a work of art and its
viewers bypasses the existing
categories of art. It is a way of keeping
open the past and the future by
affirming the timelessness of living
ethics not encoded in tired, hollowedout,
overused expressions like
tolerance, secularism and syncretism,
which probably sound doubly hollow
to victims of violence who have to
renegotiate life after their life-altering
experiences of violence. Sheikh’s work,
in this instance, is squarely located
within South Asia’s epic culture and
should be able to touch victims,
perpetrators and spectators if they
have any access to that culture. The
job of our epics now is probably to
facilitate another mode of human
conversation and self-negotiation.
Ashis Nandy is a political psychologist
and social theorist who works on
organised mass violence and human
potentialities.
ENDNOTES
Epic Culture – Ashis Nandy
1. Sashikanth Ananthachari from Chennai
received an IFA grant in 2008-09 for the
making of a film on the Draupadi Amman
Mahabharata Koothu festival that is
celebrated in 200 villages in Tamil Nadu
every year.
2. Yuganta: The End of an Epoch, Irawati
Karve (Orient Longman, 2010).
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