Fate, Fortune, and a Life-Affirming Encounter with the Work of Navjot Altaf
Photo: Dasel Troy-Norbu
Essay: ‘As arresting now as when first sculpted, Navjot’s contemplation of the feminine form is no less contemporary, no less urgent to consider than when she created the red-and-blue lady thirty years ago.’
I first saw her at Civil Lines. There she sat at the bottom of a stairwell, her legs casually splayed and her hands held out. For what reason, I wondered. In supplication? In self-examination? Stepping closer, I realized the palms of her hands had no lines.
She is a sculpture: a red-and-blue lady, part of the 1995-6 series of larger-than-life sculptures of women by Navjot Altaf, entitled collectively Images Re-drawn. She now lives in Ein Lal’s beautiful North Delhi residence, designed and built by her husband architect Ashok Lal. Previously, the lady was installed in the architectural office downstairs, but since she freaked out so many clients who came to discuss plans, she had to be moved upstairs. “The clients who came to call felt uneasy in her presence,” Ashok chuckled.
Ein and Ashok’s daughter, Anusha Lal, remembered that once, in a previous house, the red-and-blue lady was inadvertently worshipped by the house-help: mistaking the sculpture for a deity, she fell to her knees and prostrated before this powerful, intriguing presence.
Over the months that follow my first stay with the Lals, the red-and-blue lady’s charisma continues to haunt me. I keep wondering if she was inspired a real person, and about what exactly she represents. Is her creator trying to tell us something about women and their fates, their fortunes in contemporary Indian society? I spend nine months of thought before birthing this article, an apt duration to wait given the context of women’s sovereignty and cultural acceptances of the body feminine.
I spend more time at the house in Civil Lines, examining the mounted glass cabinets hung on the wall directly above and behind the red-and-blue lady, deciphering this second part of the installation in search of vital clues. In the upper glass case, three photocopied pages from books, folded and fastened open at specific places, telling the stories of revolutionary, creative women: Reform and Nationalist Movements references the life of Sarojini Naidu; a fragment of a play documents a dialogue between a bride and a chorus; and a poem by Brahmotri Mohanty which includes the line, “Why this flush of shame?”.
There is also a significance in the very action of knotting and unknotting: as if the umbilical cord back to pre-trauma memory, is being undone, the trauma healed by the art of being shared, before the viewer reties the memory, which will now be remembered generationally.
Beneath this first glass cabinet, a second full of red cotton tied paper scrolls, reminding me of a box of scrolls that my grandmother used to keep in an antique box in her handkerchief drawer, with quotes from the Bible. My grandmother was not an overly religious person; however, since she had inherited the box from her mother, she felt it offered a kind of matrilineal protection. In the same way, I feel that the scrolls—often invested with words and quotes from books and papers by some of India’s foremost women freedom fighters—offer a lineage, a thread of connection to a powerful, female genealogy. We are reminded to the link back to them through these threads, these cords which once connected us all.
The threads which tie the scrolls in Navjot’s work are also reminiscent of the threads of Fate: spun, measured, and cut by the three Ancient Greek goddesses, respectively named Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos and collectively known as the Moiré. It is worth noting that these three sisters were fervently revered, even more so than the almighty ‘new order’ main-man, Zeus.
Navjot’s carefully thread-tied scrolls are written in different scripts—Urdu and English specifically—and the text accompanying them in this second glass case describes a Marxist vs. Ghandi-esque dichotomy.
To understand more, I turn to Nancy Adajania’s seminal work on Navjot’s oeuvre, her curatorial monograph on the eponymous 2018/19 retrospective of the artist at Mumbai’s National Gallery of Modern Art [NGMA]. In The Earth’s Heart Torn Out, Adajania explains that the photocopied texts accompanying the sculpture function as “a micro archive of feminist discourse and resistance from the 1980s and 1990s.”
Adajania argues that “in the 1990s, Navjot was trying to shape an artistic language that could counter masculinist propaganda without falling into propagandist clichés of its own, thus creating a slippage between goddess and everywoman, between monumentality and feminist rhetoric.”
While the sculptures in the Images Re-drawn series are accompanied by an archive that can only be half-glimpsed (and not touched), Navjot invited a very real, tactile interaction between viewers and the testimonial fragments of historical trauma in another installation “Between Memory and History”. In this work, Navjot folded paper inscribed with questions from testimonial literature and knotted them onto a gigantic mesh wall, which Adajania comprehends as a (secular) Shinto Buddhist shrine. The testimonials can be unfolded by viewers, read, even scribed on, before being refolded and tied back onto the mesh wall.
“I have no fate lines, thank god” by Navtoj Altaf. Photo Courtesy: Navtoj Altaf
I feel there is a similar energetic vibrancy to this kinaesthetic spiritual interaction as there is to the strings tied by pilgrims to the jali screens in Sufi shrines. There is also, for me, a significance in the very action of knotting and unknotting: as if the umbilical cord back to pre-trauma memory, is being undone, the trauma healed by the art of being shared, before the viewer (in the role of listener, receiver, understanding other) reties the memory, which will now be remembered generationally.
Among the hundreds of secret knots tied to the large crescent shaped wall of the installation, a viewer may have come across a ribbon that read: “My mother narrated nothing and we children asked nothing.” Navjot’s mother—who lived through the Partition—had perhaps hesitated before revealing the past to her children, not wishing them to relieve its traumatic events. “With the untying of each knot,” writes Adajania, “we shake loose the tree of grief bleached in the acid rain of history.”
We must uncover the matrilineal past, however, to avoid a repetition of trauma. It is this fact that Navjot seems to be most keenly aware, as an artist, a daughter, and a mother. It becomes clear to me from both the epic wall entitled “Between Memory and History” and from the red-and-blue lady’s stance that Navjot also feels the divine feminine, her memories, quixotic grace and grounded confidence are still in need of further visual representation. I approach Navjot directly to ask her what inspired her to create the sculpture in the Lal household.
“In my search of different historical contexts for art, I became fascinated with primitive cultures and their representation of women,” says Navjot. “Not for revivalist purposes, but in order to shift, move and re-place the archetypal in a contemporary context. It was the critical use of myth rather than its celebration alone that interested me.”
For the body of work which includes the red-and-blue lady, Navjot cites references from Mayan, African, and Indian pre-historic and indigenous cultures as well as popular images and text from women’s writings, magazines, and newspapers.
“She denounces the popular norms of the society in which men rule and decide about women’s lives. Her posture is frontal and she is not inhibited by her sexuality. My concern here has been about woman’s right to represent herself as well as how representation of female body is addressed in art.”
Images Re-drawn, Navjot explains, was a co-operative project which involved a Mumbai based sculptor A. Siddiquie, who had been mainly engaged with commercial mass production but was interested in working with an artist engaged with the issue of representing the female body in the context of art.
“The idea was to invite a male artist whom I knew and who as I mentioned was involved in creating stereotypical, decorative imagery of female bodies as curios,” Navjot says, “but was also interested in participating in a process which attempted to reclaim the female body from sexist usage—to reclaim it, in other words, from patriarchal construction.”
Navjot goes on to tell me that sadly, the collaboration turned out to be one fraught with contradiction. Both the sculptor and carpenter commissioned by Navjot failed to shape the lady according to her vision, unable to fully realize her liberated female body unconditioned by the male gaze—and beyond the constructs of the patriarchy. Whatever the personal feelings between conceiver and creator happened to be, the red-and-blue lady emerged, unabashed.
Incidentally, the tale behind Navjot’s creation brings to mind Shailaja Paik’s gender study, The Vulgarity of Caste, in which Paik describes how traditional tamasha workers, unable to be “classified” by the constructs of the governing system, were labelled by the colonial powers as “non-wives”. Though this may seem to indicate a certain freedom from expectation of gender role, in reality, it more often than not manifested in societal exile, invisibility and voiceless disenfranchisement from the legitimized spheres of “cultured” expression and domestic security.
Perhaps it is not wholly surprising to learn about the impasse between artists of different genders and attitudes towards gender: I am bowled over, however, to learn from Navjot the red-and-blue lady’s actual title. “The sculpture you have seen at Ein’s place is called ‘I have no fate lines, thank god’ and represents a woman embracing the power within to change social order and oppression of women,” she tells me. “She denounces the popular norms of the society in which men—in a patriarchal set-up—rule and decide about women’s lives. Her posture is frontal and she is not inhibited by her sexuality. My concern here has been about woman’s right to represent herself as well as how representation of female body is addressed in art.”
These words make me to sit up and face the work, full frontally; suddenly, the idea of having no lines of fate indicates freedom rather than exile, boundlessness rather than existing within the social constraints of class, gender, and skin colour. The very abrupt nakedness of the red-and-blue lady (“We had to cover her head with a dupatta,” confesses Ashok Lal), the shock of this nakedness in the context of our obsessively covered, or deliberately and seductively less-clothed normalized womanhood takes me beyond the precincts of the polis and places me firmly back in uncontacted forest, that same forest which has been at the margins of our city existence all this time, on the periphery of imagination, awaiting its moment to fully recover its rightful claim over Earth’s surface.
I keep aside the references, books, and interviews; and finally, come face to face with the lady who has no fate lines. I find her resolutely cheerful, refusing to sing the blues, suffused with a power whose source I cannot quite identify. I look into her face, with its full lips, lidded eyes. She could almost be a man, but she is definitively woman. There is a wellness about her, a child-like abandon of convention which cannot be described as innocence or knowingness, but more distinctly, as beingness. Telepathically, I ask her to speak to me, to teach me. I decide not to be a journalist, researcher, cultural historian, art critic, but instead, a translator of the inanimate.
This is what I hear her sing:
It does not matter if you speak my language, I will say what I need to say, loud and clear as the lady-men at the traffic lights who wrap up coins in lucky charm notes and bless you in your passing tuktuk with a power that stops column upon column of vehicles chafing at the bit, the power of a gypsy with her third eye still open and all-seeing. My lidded eyes may seem to be half-closed, even blinded by adversity, but I witness through contact, I am of the ground, of the earth on which I sit and stake my pitch and will not budge until you take notice. Like Hecate at the crossroads, I am the underworld goddess who presides over kerbside childbirth, behind the single frayed curtain doorway of a cement sack-rooved tin shack. I am the patron saint of that ancient crone with legs as thin as twigs who sits on the kerb, screaming at the top of her burnt-out lungs for paisa over the din of traffic. I smile when she smiles because someone has stopped for long enough to give her enough small change to feed her empty stomach a parantha, a bowl of dahl. I lift her hand and she waves to her anonymous benefactor, serene as a toothless child.
It is I who chivvies the daughters at the lights, chiding them when their acrobatic forward flips take them dangerously near to the wheels of juggernauts, the burning hot carburettors of zooming bikes. It is I who paint on their burnt cork mustachios all crooked, circle red rouge on their cheeks.
And what of fate? What of fortune? What does it mean for my people? They pull out the sum of a day’s takings from the hat of that shady maharaj Chance, the one who turns invisible between the change from red to green, in a swirl of fume-woven cloak.
But though our lines are not written, not on our palms nor in any lofty book of destiny, they are writ large on the air by wing of bird and patina of rain on a windscreen.
Without spool or thread, does the aural narrative of women, of the impoverished, ever get woven or stitched into the history books? Or are memories and questions asked by you, by me, exempt from the machine-bound, machine-made tome?
Our story is smudged in the rolled scraps of newsprint found in the gutter, reused to make a covering for the raw pavement on which we sleep under invisible stars, beneath a sky veiled by pollution.
You see that guy, paper thin, with not a scrap of clothing to cover his grey flesh, asleep three hours after grey dawn as the road roars past his exhausted stupor? That one about whom you are not even sure if he is still of this earth? I have his number. I check up on him. And I take him under my faded dupatta when his shuffle is through.
“I have no fate lines, thank god” is more than a sculpture to muse, more than a concept to contemplate. It has given me context within which to situate the bewildering and often distressingly confusing scenes witnessed every day on the streets. The lady has not made these scenes any more comfortable, but she leaves me with a sense that someone, an animist goddess, is here for those without the support of an authorized system. I flick back to the photographs in Adajania’s book of the secular shrine of memories and testimonials. Looked at from certain angles, the white ribbons could be flocks of cranes or egrets, their reflection in the sunlit floor of the NGMA, like a dance of mirrored energy.
My eye is arrested again. Next to the wall of folded words stands a sewing machine with no base, begging the question of continuity. Without spool or thread, does the aural narrative of women, of the impoverished, ever get woven or stitched into the history books? Or are memories and questions asked by you, by me, exempt from the machine-bound, machine-made tome?
The lady with no fate lines laughs at my anxiety. Our stories, she replies, are chirruped in a meta-tongue and rise above the concrete, as the aftermath of a trace of wing on the air. Be aware! Our silent spoken tales have the power and agency to stir the very course of planetary action by the benign force of thought, of collective flight.
As arresting now as when first sculpted, Navjot’s contemplation of the feminine form is no less contemporary, no less urgent to consider than when she created the red-and-blue lady thirty years ago. I was twenty then, tottering around London in the highest heels I could find and navigating a dizzy world in which the divine feminine was mainly represented by impossibly androgynous supermodels. It has taken me 25 years of teaching young people and the experience of bringing up a daughter in India to come to terms with another kind of earthed and earthy womanhood, one that fears no judgement and wields no weapon, one that simply wishes compassionately for the best fate and fortune possible to be bestowed on all those born of this Earth.
The conversation with Navjot has been epic and far-reaching. By now, I am running late for a round table meeting at which a team of seven patient young women sit waiting for me to lead them into a new term of looking after young children; but before we say goodbye, Navjot mentions her next solo exhibition at Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation in Mumbai, which will take place later in the year. I wonder if the exhibition will uncover further revelations of the female body politic. Has Navjot changed perspective in the intervening years, just as I have? Is her treatment of caste, gender, memory, myth, and environment imagined differently now?
Whatever she chooses to reveal to us, I think I will attend without adornment. Like Yeats before her, Navjot may well continue to agree that there’s more enterprise in walking naked.
***
Tansy Troy is an India-based educationalist, poet, performer, playwright and maker of bird and animal masks. She conceived and edits The Apple Press, a young people’s eco journal which features poetry, stories, articles and artwork. Tansy has published poetry, articles and reviews in The Hindustan Times, The Hindu, The Scroll, Punch Magazine, Art Amour, Muse India, Plato’s Cave and The Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English. Join her on the journey @voice_of_the_turtle and @the_adventures_of_tara.
