Of Shadow Portraits and Heterotopias
Image by Linda Armstrong
Shadow Portraits, Sanskriti Kendra by Linda Armstrong
Here are two shadow portraits of the trees at Sanskriti Kendra. They are taken by Linda Armstrong, whose process of art making begins as a response to the natural world.
Winter mornings in New Delhi are misty and chill. Outside the studios where we slept, the gardeners and potters were wrapped in shawls, their breath turning to vapour. Peacocks scratched about in the gardens, pecking at windows, roofs, disturbing our morning dreams, the peahens always the most elusive. They left their feathers scattered like souvenirs, which I collected. Floating petals in clay bowls were an offering to the birds and to the wanton gods, who might, by accident, bless or curse my words. By eleven, the sun was at its warmest; by noon, the fields of mustard were coloured in a golden hue. The sweeper and the washer would arrive to clean our rooms. We’d sit outside to read or write or to draw, falling into the shadows and the silence as squirrels skipped across the lawns, climbing the neem trees, the cassias and jacarandas.
The shadow is what Foucault might call a heterotopia, a mirror image that captures dispersal and juxtapostion, the near and the far, when our experience of the world is not unlike a network, that connects, points, and intersects with its own skein.
The shadow is a space where light can’t reach because of obstruction by someone or something; it’s the space behind the subject or object, and in front of which there is light; it’s the reverse projection of a person or thing. For the shadow gives visibility to the self, or to the thing beyond the surface of the same, while exerting a counteraction to the space it reflects. In our own shadow we discover an absence from the place where we are. And it is from our shadow that we direct our gaze back towards our self, almost as if we were made new.
I’ve been reading about heterotopias for an essay that I’m writing about Poetry and Space. Though sometimes freaked out, I’m also inspired by Vito Acconci’s aesthetics, his transgressive approaches to space. And I’ve been reading again The Natural House, by Frank Lloyd Wright, in which he writes so beautifully about plasticity and simplicity, about form and function. He writes,
“In any final result there can be no separation between our architecture and our culture. Nor any separation of either from our happiness. Nor any separation from our work.” (44)
I should get back to my work, though it’s much nicer, right now, to draft this here, in the virtual white space.
see Foucault essay: “Of Other Spaces” 1967
The Four Friends And Other Tales
Tegan designed and coloured-in this picture for me, the day I came home from India. It was lovely to watch her concentration. She says it was inspired by an elephant mousepad I brought back for her, but it reminds me of one of the Jataka stories, The Four Friends, retold by Gonsar Rinpoche. Tegan and I used to read this story before her bedtime. It tells of the mutual friendship and cooperation of an elephant, a bird, a monkey and a hare, who live in the forest. The bird, being a carrier of fruits and seeds is a reincarnation of the Buddha, the wisest and the oldest of the friends; the elephant being the youngest and the largest, carries the others on his back. The Jataka tales are stories from the former lives of the Buddha, in which, while being a bodhisattva, he took the form of animals. His disciples and close friends existed also as animals.
Jataka tales are folklore written in Sanskrit, but they are found, apparently, in various languages such as Malay, Burmese, Lao, Khmer, Bhutanese and Tibetan. They are derived from the Pali canon, the Sutta Pitaka, which includes a collection of more than 500 poems, some of which narrate details of the jāti, or previous births of the Buddha. Many are translations of the Pali, while some are hybridised with vernacular cultural traditions that predate the sacred texts. There’s epigraphic and archeological evidence to confirm that the official Jataka tales date from around thte 5th century, but many apocryphal versions exist.
Some apocryphal versions show direct appropriation from Hindu sources. The ancient Indians were ardent students of zoology, as evidenced by the Upanishads and in particular the Garudapuranas, which contain the life histories of fishes and turtles. It’s interesting to note that these ancient scriptures anticipate scientifically modern concepts of organic evolution, environmental science and heredity. In one of the Upanishads, Virdjan tired of his solitude replicates by binary divison, as did the first amoeba. He becomes two beings, two individuals behaving and appearing heterogeneously as different sexes. In time, these individuals were able to metamorphose into animals becoming pigs, cattle, ants. The incarnations of Vishnu himself, as fish and turtle suggest the aquatic origins of animals, which Darwinian evolutionary science has since established.
This mythic encounter with biological diversity differs from one found in Plato’s Symposium. In speaking of Love, Aristophanes describes how the god Zeus weakened the original human race by eliminating the versatile and potentially chaotic third species of androgynous humans and reducing ’man’ to two halves of the same.
From what I can ascertain, out of respect for animals, ancient Sanskrit scholars did not practise vivisection, their knowledge being acquired from empirical sources. One collection of aural storytelling, the third century Panchatantra, or five principles, are a sequence of animal fables, with moral and sociopolitical themes that resonate in teaching about human conduct. Similar versions of this seminal work have been found in Syrian, Arabic, Persian, Syriac and English. The Panchatantra may be described as an early multicultural discourse; its origins are complex and contentious, the original Sanskrit text, attributed to the legendary Vishnu Sarma, being lost. Some historians suggest similarities and correspondences to Aesops fables.
At Borobudur in Central Java, a temple which dates from the eighth century, the bas reliefs depict scenes from both the Jataka tales and from the Panchatantra. We visited this astonishingly beautiful and serene monument last year. Among the 2670 panels of volcanic stone, our ever-charismatic guide Toni Tack from Perumahan University, chanced upon this infamous depiction of erotic simpatico between a cow and a monkey:)
I think the monkey is smiling.
Possession and Dispossession
I’ve been escaping to Blackheath on week-ends for a little peace and solitude from the city, with its vicissitudes of cultural monopoly… more about that some other fine day. Here is the view from the cabin where I stay. Time slows down here; when it rains there are colourful finches and parrots splashing about through the trees, on hot days blow flies risk my impatience and orange banded butterflies tango, and tease the eye.
I’ve been reading a marvellous book by Tabish Khair, The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness, Ghosts from Elsewhere which provides new readings of how the colonial/racial Other is negotiated through Gothic tropes in the work of Conrad, Kipling, Melville, the Brontes, Erna Brodber, Jean Rhys and others. But the book also re-examines the theories of subjectivity and difference, emotion and identity with an erudition that never falls short of clarity.
I had to temporarily leave my part-time abode for the launch of Anna Kerdijk Nicholson’s Possession, which lyrically reimagines the colonial perspectives of James Cook’s great southern encounter. It’s an ambitious, daring, nuanced, at times tense collection of poems. Each title, taking its inspiration from the poetries of Michael Ondaatje, Peter Boyle, James McAuley, Charles Wright and others, bears a tenderness that measures the tandem journey of the poet-explorer. I’m not sure as yet how this book might speak to the Indigenous reader, the non-European, the postcolonial subject, but I find it metaphorically impassioned and strikingly detailed. It captures the current mood of our colonial archival psyche, with all her vested and competing canons.
Here is an aspect of the view, at twilight … and some music by the Alister Spence trio, who played for my wedding reception. I particularly love the first track “Caught In Light”
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/musicdeli/stories/2010/2809109.htm
Poem by Leon Laleau
Trahison
Ce coeur obsédant, qui ne correspond
Pas à mon langage ou à mes costumes
Et sur lequel mordent, comme un crampon,
Des sentiments d’emprunt et des coutumes
D’Europe, sentez-vous cette souffrance
Et ce désespoir à nul autre égal
D’apprivoiser, avec des mots de France,
Ce coeur qui m’est venu du Sénégal?
Betrayal
This implacable heart, which matches
neither my tongue or my clothes,
after which bites, like the hinges of a trap
the borrowed sentiments and customs
of Europe—do you sense this suffering,
this despair, which is like nothing else,
breaking in with words from France
this heart, of mine, come from Senegal?
—-by Léon Laleau, translation Michelle Cahill
Léon Laleau was a Haitian politician, writer, diplomat. Born in Port- au-Prince he studied science and law, serving as Minister for Foreign Affairs. He signed the 1934 accord which, at that time, ceased the United States’ occupation of Haiti.
The Training Of The Heart
Today, I woke up and read a passage from my copy of Bodhinyana, a collection of dhamma talks by the Venerable Ajahn Chah, whose ascetic forest monastery I visited when I stayed at Wat Pah Nanachat.
The book is tattered, its cover torn, its pages separated as the binder’s glue long ago had come undone. Perhaps it’s worn from being carried on my travels through many seasons and countries. Before it came into my possession, it had belonged to the monastery at Wat Suan Mohk, in Surat Thani, so its pages have been turned by other hands. It was gifted to me, by one of the monks on the day of my departure. We were all waiting in the main sala, where we took our meals, our silence, at last, broken. When I mentioned how much I loved that book, the monk, limping from the pain of meditation, brought me his copy. The taxi had arrived by now. In moments I would be leaving the lush coconut grove, its wild and common creatures, the sear, burning light, the river, the salas, the sound of bells, the shock of hibiscus.
Not that it was easy to stay there. I have tried and failed, I think, at writing these things as poems. One cannot write or read the dhamma; one has to experience, suffer, and abandon. That is all. Poems, too, are such phenomena. Poems make a space for thoughts and feelings, for images, which are, in their essence, the heart’s nature, and for which language might otherwise fail. Perhaps, among other purposes, they are a mirror for the heart’s cage. This might be knowledge, or it might be ignorance.
The practise of meditation is the training of the heart, and the emphasis of the Buddha’s teaching. Ajahn Chah writes about this in Bodhinyana:
“All conditions that are born in our heart, all conditions of our mind, all conditions of our body, are always in a state of change. The Buddha taught us not to cling to any of them. He taught his disciples to practise in order to detach from all conditions and not to practise in order to attain to any more.” (66)
Janta Manta: some reflections
Jai Prakash at the Delhi Observatory
Recently, whilst in India, I visited Janta Manta, a collection of architectural astronomical and astrological instruments built from stone, marble and bronze tablets by Maharajah Jai Sing II between 1727 and 1724. In all he established five observatories, including the ones in Jaipur and Delhi. The concept was partly inspired by the Mughal emperor, Muhammed Shah, who lived in Fatephur, Agra, a city constructed by the emperor Akbar.
The purpose of the Janta Manta scapes was to revise the calendar and astronomical tables, to predict the times and movements of the sun, the moon and the distant planets. An astrological, and spiritual significance is inherent in these structures, the ancient Indian astronomers, being Jyotisa masters. Jyotisa astrology differed from its Hellenistic counterpart, deriving from the Vedas its central theme of the bandhus, or bonds between the inner and outer world; between microcosm and macrocosm. In Jyotisa astrology there are lunar mansions, nakshatras, among the twenty seven divisons of the sky. According to Jyotisa, the 360 bones of the fetus are derived from 360 days, fusing into 206 adult ossicles. Embryological evidence doesn’t confirm this numerically, but the principle of fetal to adult bony fusion is correct.
Among the structures in Janta Manta Hindu chhatris, or cupolas, reach skyward, positioned as platforms for announcing the eclipses, and the monsoons.
Jai Prakash: New Delhi observatory
Samrat Yantra, the giant sundial, Delhi Observatory
Samrat Yantra means “Supreme instrument”, a giant triangle, or sundial , it has a 128 foot long hypotenuese which is parallel to the earth’s axis and points to the northern pole. It’s the world’s largest sundial; its shadows move at 1 mm per second, which over the course of a minute, is a visually arresting experience, for the observer.
Subsidence of the structures, and the variable width of the sun’s penumbra limit the accuracy of these incredibly beautiful ancient instruments, although the Samrat Yantra can be used to tell local Jaipur time, to an accuracy of a few seconds. From Janta Mantar, the ancients tracked the stars, and calculated the eclipses, altitudes and collisions of the celestial bodies, as a way of understanding natural events, history and the conditions of their lives.
Split Soliloquies: Kristeva and Adiga
Last weekend at Dayanand College, in the ancient city of Ajmer, I was invited by Pradeep Trikha and Anurag Sharma to participate in the IV Biannual International Literary Conference on the Challenges of Multiculturalism and Diversity. I spoke on the fiction of Sophie Cunningham and Aravind Adiga. Here’s part of my plenary, adapted:
“I was born in Kenya, my mother Goan, my father Anglo-Indian. The packed their bags and left Bombay, their birth city for better prospects in East Africa, and then later, after the Mao Mao rebellion, to the UK, before migrating to Australia. Their story as economic refugees from a Christian minority group in post-Independence India is one of religious marginalisation that I hope some day to write.
The division of identities on religious grounds is being revived nationally and globally, as the Bengali critic Amartya Sen describes with such perception in his book, Identity and Violence:
“The politics of global confrontation is frequently seen as a corollary of religious or cultural divisions in the world. Indeed the world is increasingly seen, if only implicitly, as a federation of religions or of civilisations, thereby ignoring all the other ways in which people see themselves. Underlying this line of thinking is the odd presumption that the people of the world can be uniquely categorised according to some singular and overarching system of partitioning.” Prologue xii
Sen argues for the pluralistic perspective, the construction of identities across many forms of difference, the celebration of difference as a means to thwart violence. There is an inherent violence in the migrant experience. It is physically, culturally and psychically unstable. Deprived of language as a home, it is characterised by nostalgia, displacement, and by absence as much as the desire to recoup or return. The migrant is the ultimate maker of fictions; the one who becomes someone else.
I hope to consider writing my parents’ story, one day. There may come a time when I am ready to write it, and when those who read my work are disposed to reading it. There is a caste-based hierarchy in Australian literature: a white private-school elite, a self-perpetuating coterie whose subjects, stories and themes are white. There are people writing in the darkness, as Aravind Adiga’s characters are living in the darkness. We are like Shankara the half-caste who explodes a bomb in the grounds of his Catholic boys school, the violence giving his identity a meaning, or like Keshava the hoyka, who travels with his brother from Gurupura village to try his luck in the streets of Kittur, only to end up beaten and deranged. Easy to dismiss or exclude, occasionally ridiculed, we survive and continue our projects on a trickle of literature board support.
People speak about the attacks on Indian students in Australia occurring as a consequence of their economic exploitation, but let’s not forget racism. Racism as a form of intolerance is real, existing in all communities, undermining the equal opportunities of people from all socio-economic backgrounds. In every country I have lived in I have experienced racism. When you speak about racism it’s easy to be accused of being paranoid. It’s a word that makes academics and intellectuals uncomfortable, but I believe it needs to be raised and talked about objectively, in the interest of reform. Because if we cannot openly acknowledge our flaws as a community, we will never be able to bring about real change. As India needs to address, I believe, the conflicted problems of equal access to education and prosperity in order to move away from what remains a feudally-based social order, Australia needs to stop being tight-lipped and defensive about its racial anxieties. Migrant writers are tired of being forever grateful for being given the opportunity to start a new life. What we would like to see is the right to contribute on an equal basis to the cultural and literary identity of our adopted home.
In The White Tiger, it could be said that Adiga exploits the form of magic realism to construct a social message. As one aspiring to a higher social status, Balram’s soliloquies are split, he sees the darkness and he glimpses the light. While I waited at Jaipur Junction station for the superfast train to Ajmer, which, as it turned out, did not arrive, before me was the railway track splattered with human faeces, and urine, and there was a small, sweet rat climbing the rails. I looked into the puddles of liquid and could see no light. I was reading Adiga, standing up as there was nowhere to sit, and I thought of Kristeva’s notion of the abject, as a crisis to our psyche, and how powerful that becomes in a country like India. How India gives us the light in darkness, the darkness in light, a depth of perception that has influenced so much of Eastern spiritual thinking, a depth which is not one of a temporal Western philosophical or historical order but rather one which is cyclic, like history, repeating and renewing itself. As my mind syncretically entertained these notions, at last, a slow train arrived, and among the weary crowds a bright-faced girl stood before me about to board. By the way she was dressed I sensed that she could speak English. I asked where she was going and she said to Kerala, which is a two-day journey. She was carrying a plastic bag containing food and drink and she was brave, I thought, to be travelling on that train for two days. When I told her that I lived in Australia, she said that many of her clients were from Australia. This piqued my curiosity as to her profession. If she were in business, why would she be catching such a slow train? I guessed, as it turned out, correctly, that she must have been working in outsourcing.
Speaking to that young girl from Kerala who works in outsourcing, notwithstanding the disparities between our languages and cultures, after coincidentally reading Adiga; noticing human faeces on the railway track; observing the dirty puddles devoid of reflections; considering the abject crisis that Kristeva writes about in Powers of Horror, that loss of the distinction between subject and object, between self and other, was at once a complexity and a synchronicity that I found immeasurably rich.
Such abundance, I believe, exists, in the multiple narratives of cultural and religious diversity. “
'There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being.'
Derrida’s reinscriptions
“A body of writing is organic. Its words are like cells which grow and expand, into an architecture of passages. Nurtured by the flow of ink, by the promise of white space, shaped by the rules of syntax, some words form into patterns that create meanings, forming little embryos of stories, while other words miscarry. They read like pieces of coral, or broken shells, semantically fated, asking to be replaced with a different voice. In this respect a body of writing is spectral, a dopplegänger, a kind of fragmentary haunting. Writing is both the act of deciphering meaning and the act of inscribing it. It’s not one body of writing but many plurals of the same identity giving the impression of singularity and completion. It may disguise its own attempt to answer questions of authenticity and accuracy.
Derrida writes about this vividness; this process of reinscription within the text, because as he claims, there is nothing outside the text: il ny’ a pas dehors texte. There are only, in his view, projections of the desire to escape from difference, the desire to find a transcendental meaning, the desire for the purity of love. Derrida’s confession was that he only ever deconstructed those texts that he loved. Accordingly, he says, an author, a narrator, or a third person, is a whole, made up of parts, a ghost-ship, or a phantom crew navigating the uncharted, wandering within the diffusion of desire from love to love.
If Derrida is right, every narrator is made up of pieces, not unlike fragments of coral, each containing a thousand tiny air sacs, half-coloured, half-faded, washed ashore perhaps from a reef, or swept along by a windy swell. Each piece carries its hint of another life, its clues borne out by fish and reef plankton. So a story relies on small indeterminate truths. The nuances of our lives are fragile and subtle. They are vibrations, in which appearances touch and boundaries slip away. They are guessed as much as they are preserved. We live with the speculative, swept in the current of a partially imagined past through the appearances of the present, to a space where we might rest and heal. It is to this alchemy of memory, thought and dream that we unwittingly turn. “
this is an adapted extract from my fiction manuscript…
A New Decade
Raina and I spent New Year’s Eve at Dublin nightclub in Delhi, dancing to DJ Barkha Kaul, Blackberrying, drinking champagne and tasting the “heavy snacks”: deliciously soft Indian cheese…yum!
Raina wore a skinny black dress and knee high fuck mes; I wore my layered cream antique lace mini. We shared the same fragrance.
Sikander Begum in New Delhi
I need bedsocks and candles, winter shoes and a linen dress. Ann-Bridget took this picture. She’s a visual artist from Wisconsin and fellow resident at Sanskriti Kendra. We braved the traffic madness and pollution, the day-time Delhi dust, which I’m told by a friendly taxi driver, settles by night, to stroll the chic ambience of Kahn Market followed by a visit to the Sridharani Art gallery for an exhibition of colonial archival photography. The exhibition features the work of James Waterhouse, a seminal nineteenth century ethnographic photographer who captured the tribal and caste diversity in his astonishing study; The People of India. An Indian army officer and assistant Surveyor General, Waterhouse’s contributions were in the fields of cartography and scientific photographic research. The first camera he acquired in India was a half-plate set made of French walnut, to withstand the hot, dry climate of the central provinces. He was meticulous in his attention to the processes required to preserve his prints. Waterhouse portrays both low and high caste, both Moslem and Hindu subjects with equal dignity. I was impressed, in particular, with his depictions of Sikander Begum, the tenth ruler of Bhopal, who, in the time of Queen Victoria, recognised the legal rights of a Muslim woman to rule state. Sikander ruled with an iron fist. True to her name, which means “Alexander the Great” in Arabic, she was intrepid. She never observed purdah and was known for her proficiency in martial arts and her love of tiger hunting. Louis Rousellet, a French traveller in 1876 makes the following observation: ‘The Begum is a woman of about 50 years of age. Her thin face, lighted up by a pair of intelligent eyes, expresses such a singular amount of energy that one must be aware of it beforehand in order to realize that a woman is standing before you. The costume itself aids the illusion: tight fitting pantaloons, an embroidered jacket, and a poniard at the belt, have, as a whole, anything but a feminine appearance. Her gestures and manners still less remind us of her sex; on the contrary, they reveal the sovereign and the autocrat accustomed to find everything yield to his powerful will, but I once add that this majestic haughtiness lasted only for a few minutes, and soon gave way to a gracious and winning affability. It may be said that the Begum Sikander is, in every respect, one of the most remarkable types that India has furnished us with in this century.’ ’
