Interview: Chandan Bose's study of Craft in Telangana
Citation: Bose, Chandan. “Interview: Chandan Bose’s Study of Craft in Telangana.” The Jugaad Project, 3 Jan. 2020, thejugaadproject.pub/discussions-chandan-boses-study-of-craft-in-telangana [date of access]
Chandan Bose is the author of Perspectives on Work, Home, and Identity From Artisans in Telangana: Conversations Around Craft (Palgrave Macmillan 2019). In this interview, the author discusses some of the core ideas in his ethnographic analysis of ritual scroll painters in South India. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Figure 1. Scroll artist Danalakota Vaikuntam Nakash in his studio in Cheriyal. Photo by author.
In an earlier article for the Material Religions Blog, Prof. Bose had described how “groups of travelling performers and story-tellers, collectively called Adugukunetollu in Telugu…carry out their hereditary profession as story-tellers using the painted cloth scrolls, called patam, which means ‘image’.” Situating his research in the state of Telangana, India, Bose explored how these painted images “are woven into a narrative by the story-tellers about the lineage of certain jatis (occupational communities) of the region, and how they came to be associated with their respective hereditary occupations.” The community of traditional artists, or naqqash paint patams for storyteller communities who in turn narrate stories using these painted images. Each storyteller community is dependent upon their particular patron jati (caste), to whom they narrate their jati purana (etiological myths).
Urmila Mohan: In your previous article for us (Material Religions Blog, 2015), you noted that the performers use waterproof flex banners that are also cheaper and long lasting. Is this common? Is there a tension between the production of the scrolls, their value and their use which can be traced via (changes in) materials? How can such flex banners be ritually efficacious in the same way as cloth paintings?
Chandan Bose: As described in my book, a patam (telugu: picture or image) was meant to be perishable, and like images of deities, once it was old and no longer usable, it would (like a person) be given its last rites, and immersed in a river. Today the logic of durability and economic sustenance has replaced the principle of impermanence. It was the principle of impermanence that would forge and sustain social and economic relations between storytelling communities and naqqash artists.
A printed jati katha or flex scroll is considerably more affordable for storytellers than one commissioned from the naqqash (artist). For a new painted cloth scroll, which takes usually four to six months to produce, the naqqash will charge the story-telling community anything between 30-35,000 INR or 500-600 USD. The flex scroll on the other hand takes the storytellers not more than a few weeks to digitally assemble and print, while also costing them one-fourth of the price of producing a cloth scroll.
As stated by the members of the Dakkali troupe (a community of story-tellers for the Madiga community), the printed scroll lasts longer and is easier to maintain. Simultaneously, flex printing has only added to the historical reasons that have contributed to the weakening of naqqash-performer relations.
Figure 2. Digitally-printed flex scroll. Jambavantaru Purana performance. Nashkal village, Telangana, 2013. Photo by author.
First, production of scrolls was only one aspect of the economic life of the naqqash studio, the more prominent one being sculpting images of deities, making murals on walls of houses of upper-caste and landed elites of the region, and items of everyday use. This was also owing to the fact that a cloth scroll once made would remain with a storytelling troupe for anything between four to five years, and hence the demand for scrolls was not very frequent. Second, owing to the breakdown of the village economic and social structure under colonization, many jati occupations that previously occupied a position of power, such as weaving, lost its economic status, and as a result many weaving communities discontinued the katha tradition. As a result many storytelling communities lost their patronage, which further impacted their relations with the naqqash community. Third, the naqqash art-form today receives sufficient support from government and private institutions, following which most naqqash households in the region of Warangal have a regular supply of work which comes from urban-based government-owned retail shops or privately-owned galleries. In such a situation, naqqash artists do not find the need to depend upon the storytelling communities, and moreover are unable to commit to any commissions from the communities, primarily owing to the elaborate process of producing a scroll. Also, like the storytellers, the artists too consider such a commission economically unfeasible, since it would cost them less time and energy to take up bulk orders from retail outlets that would compensate them the same amount as would producing a scroll. Thus, what emerges is that instead of being the result of a shift to technological modes of production, the dissolution of artist-storyteller relations since the late nineteenth century has historically provided the cultural and economic conditions for this shift.
This practice of digital production has affected the historical relations that were shared within and amongst storytelling communities of the region. It was also owing to the elaborate process of crafting a cloth scroll, and its cost, that different troupes of the same story-telling community within a region were in the practice of circulating a scroll amongst one another, where the troupe that owned the scroll would lend it to another troupe for a fee. This exchange-based relation between communities and an almost communal ownership of the patam have been taken over by the possibility of private ownership of the digitally-printed scroll, that is relatively easy to acquire, and definitely more affordable.
Since digitisation of the scroll has either furthered the dissolution of erstwhile local structures or has provided a context for new cultural and economic practices, what requires exploration is whether there is a shift or alteration in the way the digitised scroll is perceived by both the practitioners and the audience.
The plasticity and industrial quality of the scroll or even the non-human technology that produces digitised images on the flex, are not considered as dissolving the sacred power that is contained within the scroll. The function of the scroll as claimed by the storytellers is to house ‘the story of the god’; the divinity that is invested in the scroll is therefore the result of its narrative quality and the skill of the storytellers to evoke this. It is the proper telling of the images in the scroll that creates conditions for the deity to present itself. The physical scroll is then not the source of sacred power and divinity of the deity, but a conduit through which these are manifested for the community. The storytellers avow that it is not the material of the scroll that is of significance; what is of significance is the way its materiality is both, constructed through ritual performance (offering of rice and meat), and realised through the spoken word (a particular story). The images in the scroll come alive through the telling of the story, rather than the story being told through the images.
It is the ability of the digitised scroll to contain and manifest the divine power of the deity that allows storytellers to continue relying on the latter for their livelihood. This reference to livelihood, substantiated by the storytellers' claim that “it is the story… that people are more interested in” also alludes to the way the audience too did not situate the materiality of the scroll in its material. In one instance, the way the audience enthusiastically responded to the digitally produced scroll, showed that the focus was not on the illustrative potential of images but the dynamism within the visual structure. That it is through narrative efficacy that static images are animated and brought to life. Thus, even the most intricately crafted cloth scroll would be frozen if the events within it were not ‘set into motion’ and ‘actually happened’ through the narrative performance.
UM: The issue of life force in art forms, especially ritual ones, is important. In your book, you mention Odupu as well as how the artist is like a sorcerer with the need to use theatricality/ornamentation. What does Odupu mean exactly in Telugu? What other kinds of ritual investments are needed to make these scrolls come alive?
Figure 3. Danalakota Vaikuntam Nakash in his studio in Cheriyal. Photo by author.
CB: ‘Odupu', as the artist Vaikuntam (one of the main subjects in my ethnography) explained to me was the 'perfection' in the image. Odupu refers to the image having a life-like quality. This is something Kirtana Thangavelu (1988), who worked on the narrative performances of patam-kathas (literally, pictures stories), also encountered, and she too translates it as 'bringing something to perfection'. In my analysis, I understood odupu to be integral to the function of the images, namely to narrate, and in order to narrate, the images have to be infused with life. Just like rendering the eye is reserved for the last stage by the sculptor, because the deity comes alive once the eye is sculpted, similarly, it was the sairatta or ‘writing’ fine black lines along the perimeters of figures and objects that gave them life. So, I located odupu at the end of a process whose end was to communicate a mythic and narrative universe that is sacred for communities. Now, there were several parallels to Odupu that I also encountered during fieldwork. First, Vaikuntam informed me that earlier (meaning, it is no longer practiced) there was a ritual that was associated with the story-tellers taking a newly commissioned and completed scroll from the house of the artist. A goat was offered as sacrifice, but not before it approved of the completed scroll. The fresh scroll would be presented to the goat, and goat was required to nod for the scroll to be considered complete and for the sacrifice to be performed. This Vaikuntam informed me is called Jartaa. It is believed to be a divine way of communicating the ability of the scroll to contain the story of the ancestral deity. In some ways one could see this is at the ultimate contract between the story-tellers and the artists. In the book, I have discussed how the under-drawing or nakkal is a kind of contract between the artists and story-tellers that was made in the presence of the latter. The Jartaa in some ways then has the potential to override the nakkal-as-contract in case the goat does not nod! But according to Vaikuntam, and this is the interesting part, Jartaa was only a formality, and witnesses to the ritual would consider a slight head movement by the goat as sufficient. This Vaikuntam told me smirking, I vividly remember.
Figure 4. Odupu refers to the ability of the artist to achieve a level of perfection. Photo by author.
This according to me alludes to one of my frameworks that I refer to in the introduction to my book - modernity or the language of modernity fails to encompass diverse realities. To understand rituals as structures also entails understanding how subjects create openings within those structures, and this duality is the condition under which a ritual is also imagined. I refer to my usage of Bourdieu's (1977) understanding of the gap between 'rule' and 'practice', whereby what is ultimately marked by reciprocity is constantly being deflected by contingent behaviour. This comes across in the way Vaikuntam mischievously grins while explaining the way he and story-tellers cleverly deceive the structure, by considering even the slightest movement of the goat's head as evidence of Jartaa.
Correspondingly, the links I establish between odupu and the narrative function of the scroll also refer to the act of story-telling. During my brief encounter of a narrative performance, and from the way narrative performances of visual aids have been studied especially by experts like Aditya Malik (2016), what emerged was the primacy of the performance and the narrative skill of story-tellers over the image in bringing the visual structure to life. The usage of the flex banner in the performance I witnessed was overlooked when the story-tellers told me 'what difference does it make. As long as we are telling the story, the scroll becomes the home of the deity'. This alludes to the relation between word and image in narrative performances, whereby it was the image that was proof of the word, and not the other way around. In this case it was the proper telling of the narrative that one can say creates conditions for odupu, the achievement of the perfect conditions under which the deity manifests itself through the scroll.
UM: Studies of Indian painting have tended to focus on genres such as Mughal “miniature” paintings. Simultaneously, the scroll paintings you study in Telangana and those such as Kalighat paintings from Bengal are considered ‘folk-art’. So, there are these divisions instituted by early art historians and, more recently, sustained by heritage-speak. This is a common inheritance and limitation with which most of us dealing with Indian knowledge traditions (whether of music, textiles or paintings) have to reconcile. What do you think of these divisions, in whose interest is it to maintain them, and how do you think insights from your book might be used for scholars to explore those categories?
CB: So a significant part of my book alludes to this phenomenon of categorisation and classification of knowledge systems. It is not something new but scholars like Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Saloni Mathur and Partha Mitter have spoken about this at length with regards to the South Asian context, and Glenn Adamson and Paul Greenhalgh in the context of Europe. The common link in their work is modernity’s preoccupation with fixity – be it geographical provenance, methods of production or networks of circulation – that lies at the root of the way the contemporary has inherited ideas about practice and where it belongs. So ‘folk art’ after all is a ‘disciplinary representation’ in order to further modernity’s own project of knowledge creation, and where disciplinary refer to technologies that colonial administrations evolved to govern colonies – anthropology, art history, and museum exhibitions. Anthropology specifically has a significant stake in the way it has historically not just understood but also created value for ‘folk art’ and folk culture. Right from the ‘cabinets of curiosity’ which allowed the world to be organised and understood by gaze, up to the work of anthropologists such as Franz Boas and Frank Hamilton Cushing in the early twentieth century who worked as curators in North American museums – anthropology has institutionalised an essentialist relationship between place and objects.
Art education in India in the mid-nineteenth century was initiated by colonial administrators in order to further industrial skill and trade within the colony. It was heavily influenced by this perceived ‘authenticity’ of the relationship between object and place. It was this authenticity that was then re-conceptualised as a tool for the anti-colonial and nationalist movements of the early twentieth century. But this assertion of identity through modes of production was not without structures and processes deeply embedded in a Brahmanical ethos. Owing to their liaisons with the British the Indian upper hegemonised intellectual tools to determine what constituted ‘practice’ and ‘tradition’. Be it in ritual, religion or modes of production, the division that we inherit about the ‘classical’ and ‘folk’ corresponds to an upper caste writing of the material history of South Asia. The term classical referred to the textual and rule-bound aspects of practice, namely those practices which fall within the ambit of European imagination of science and historicity. Folk emerged as the oral, experiential and the passionate – that needed to be tamed. The ‘folk’ then refers to more than just ‘local’; in a fundamental way it refers to that which has limited applicability because its history does not have global or universal values.
So it is not by coincidence that a majority of practicing communities whose livelihood is ‘folk art’ belong to historically marginalised communities of India. Moreover, the forces of market demand and supply within a consumerist and now neo-liberal Indian society ensure that this distinction is ‘culturalised’. Interestingly, when I was conducting my ethnography, I noticed how practitioners, who we would refer to as ‘folk’, did not distinguish themselves from the classical, but from the contemporary. They insisted that ‘contemporary art’ had a competitive edge over them since the ‘contemporary’ was synonymous to singular, exclusive and individual, while folk art is positioned as repetitive, communal and formulaic. But one needs to be careful and cautious about how one approaches these distinctions as constructed in everyday language, and this is what my book is primarily about. One of the critical ways that artisans claim a location within the contemporary market is by circulating information about themselves and their work within emerging networks within the city. Self-commodification is a critical way in which knowledge is generated. The practitioners were very clear that they did not want to dissolve the perceived difference between folk/traditional and contemporary art, because it was precisely the reproduction of this difference that generated value for folk art. So 'folk art' today can be thought of more as a performative discourse that is authored by the very subjects created in the process of 'folk-asisation'. It is time we look at the way ‘folk’ is being reconceptualised in India in order for the local to equip itself to negotiate with economic concerns and find new ways to seek legitimacy from the nation-state.
UM: The section where you discuss codification of caste identities and relate it to Vaikuntam’s subjectivity is very interesting. You compare this with Ganesh (his apprentice) who acquires his subjectivity as a craftsperson within the state’s heritage narrative. This narrative seems secular when it is associated with government patronage. Does this mean that religion (for instance, caste) does not feature in heritage as you experienced it or in patents such as Geographical Indications?
CB: Geographical Indications (GI) presented a really interesting turn in my research. Because here I was dealing with a gap between what the state and law were offering, and what subjects of state and law were expecting, and how were they articulating their expectations. Law, as it emerged from Vaiuntam's narratives, was a basis of expectation, similar to how scholars have thought about the idea of property. One of the things which came up during my conversations with Vaikuntam was how he compared intellectual property such a GI with the caste structure. Caste according to him served primarily to protect and ensure knowledge circulation within a community. Recently, my book was discussed by Sagari Ramdas (a rural livelihood expert based in Telangana, who also got a scroll commissioned for the Danalakota household around the narrative of agricultural distress) and Gayatri Nair (Sociologist, IIIT Delhi), and they helped reconceptualise this for me.
Is the question then 'what is it about GI that reminds Vaikuntam about the relation between caste and knowledge?' or is it 'does GI become a framework to understand caste, or is caste a framework to understand GI?' GI effectively is about geographical provenance and sees knowledge as resulting with one's relation with the land. Of course 'land' here refers to a modernist orientation to cartography and as a mathematical basis for mapping the nation state, and my section on GI refers to this. But more fundamentally, GI is about claiming political rights based on belongingness and exclusivity. So in some way GI now provides an avenue for erstwhile marginalised communities to, in a way, speak in the language of caste. Sagari Ramdas referred to this as Brahmanisation of thought, which ethnography should be extremely careful of, especially in a neo-liberal context within which subjects find new ways and languages to articulate historical practices.
If we look at government-sponsored training programs, this might become clearer. The training workshops are part of schemes called Guru-Shishya parampara (GSPS), which translates as Master-Disciple Tradition. To begin with, it is through a normative and patriarchal structure of pedagogy that the state imagines and interprets training and the transmission of skill. It is through these workshops that two individuals outside of the naqqash community started engaging with the practice. But as it was evident, the six-month training was not sufficient, and that those 'really interested' would need to follow up their training by being apprenticed to the senior artist. Certainly, that is how we embody skill - not through didactic curriculum, but through experience and 'slow learning'. But what emerges is that the apprenticeship model offers a template for casteism to be performed. I call it casteism, because the Guru/master and Shishya/student rhetoric is based on the debtor and creditor relationship, something that Veena Das talks about in Critical Events, which summarises the way the violence against women and other marginalised communities can be thought about.
So it is only if you put yourself in this 'debtor' position of being a Shishya/student that you are rewarded as a registered GI user and then get the Artisan Identity card. Thus, Malaysham (who took the GSPS workshop and was apprenticed to Vaikuntam) says, 'It is only those who are trained by the masters who deserve to be protected by the masters'. How does this help us characterise the role that the nation-state and the law play in integrating historical practices with neoliberal principles? Casteism provides a ready relational and intellectual trajectory, or what we might call an epistemological basis for modern discourses.
UM: The Islamic presence in Telangana or the consciousness of being ‘Hindu’ as an identity vis-à-vis Muslims (apart from caste groupings) seems to be absent from the book. Yet, they are implicit in the fact you could communicate in basic Hindi/Urdu with the painters from Telangana. Was there any occasion not mentioned in the book, where being ‘Hindu’ in the modern nationalist sense came to the fore apart from caste origins as history?
CB: The theme of religion brings up interesting observations. As I have mentioned in the book, my concern is not with uncovering history, but to understand the process through which history is articulated. It was within this milieu that the naqqash or scroll painter Vaikuntam constructs a dual kind of history, both secular and religious/ritualistic. One referring to the migration of artists from Mughal India to the Deccan, and then dispersing to different parts. And the other, about being descendants of Nimishamba devi. Now, the time period of my ethnography (for the book) is relevant here - 2012-2014. Vaikuntam would mention 'Persia' as the place from where this artform originated, and then traveled to India with the Mughals. In fact on a number of occasions he would say, and this is something I have not included in the book, 'How come we haven’t inherited any Arabic vocabulary within our naqqashi community? It is strange because our ancestors traveled from that part'. To be very honest, I only realised the significance of this enquiry much later. So overall there was an understanding of the role of geography, movement and cultural exchange within one's identity. But come 2018, and this is when I visited the family after I returned from New Zealand, having submitted my dissertation, this narrative about the artform traveling from Iran has been completely omitted. In addition, the narrative is now being directed by Vaikuntam's sons Rakesh and Vinay. That was one of the changes I observed on revisiting the field. Vaikuntam was no longer the talkative and eager person I met 4 years ago. He has aged a bit and Rakesh and Vinay are now more active when it came to decision-making and direction. So they are the ones, Rakesh especially, who now steer the conversation. It is interesting to note inter-generational dynamics, but at the same time also how the wider political context affects these dynamics. I remember bringing up something (during my 2018/2019 visits) about the mention of the community of artists migrating to India, and Rakesh promptly responded 'The chitrakar (artist/illustrator) community was always in Nirmal, under the patronage of the Hindu king. We do not have any connection with Iran. Maybe there were some influences, but my our family has always lived in this region'. It becomes interesting to see how the construction of history is so allied with the market and the political economy.
Today, when the ideology of what constitutes the nation-state in India has undergone a significant paradigm shift, and development follows heightened principles of inclusion and exclusion, insiders and outsiders, there is a competition for being stake-holders. Identifying as a ‘Hindu’ art form that is indigenous to India weaves a narrative that ensures patronage under the heritage discourse of the current political regime. And this in fact makes us reflect about the history of the nature of production itself, and how narratives, beliefs and practices around production have always aligned with patrons. Thus, how one identifies one's self and one's work is a result of political maneuvering. It is an active construction of the self, and as an anthropologist of art and heritage I want to understand the tools people mobilise to undertake this construction.
References
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. An Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Malik, Aditya. 2016. Tales of Justice and Rituals of Divine Embodiment: Oral Narratives from the Central Himalayas. New York: Oxford University Press.
Malik, Aditya. 2005. Nectar Gaze and Poison Breath: An Analysis and Translation of the Rajasthani Oral Narrative of Devnarayan. New York: Oxford University Press.
Thangavelu, Kirtana. 1998. The Painted Puranas of Telangana: A Study of a Scroll Painting Tradition in South India. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.
