Portraits

Notes from a show, 2024

This weekend, Prarthna Singh and Snigdha Poonam invited me to speak at a walkthrough of their show 2024: Notes From A Generation. Here’s a version of my speaking notes. This is not a critique or a review. The show is on at Tarq gallery, Fort, until May 11.

Hello and thank you for being here. I don’t have much of a visual imagination, and my visual education is meagre, but if you want a credential for my belonging here, or at least to these parts, the first art exhibition I ever went to was the monumental Picasso show, which was held at the NGMA down the road from here when I was a teenager.  

I’ve grown up now, and I’m a writer and editor. I currently work at a company that made the ballot boxes for India’s first-ever elections, so the question of marking time by elections, and of using them as a guideline to locate your place in history, is on my mind. That is one form of understanding that this show offers you. 

The question I would like to offer, as you absorb the work, is: do these faces define an era? Or do they do something contrary, and escape time? 

As I grow older it becomes easier to describe my past in shorthand. One of my first memories of journalism is also my first and clearest memory of the radio: it’s of listening to the news of Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination. I have a vivid memory of seeing the Babri Masjid being demolished on my TV, as do many of you — a collective false memory, since that footage never aired. The more memories you collect, the more ‘pastness’ you incur, and the easier it is to describe yourself as part of a distinct era. When I say my grandparents come from the age of Jawaharlal Nehru and my parents from the age of Indira Gandhi, it’s shorthand. I can look back and say that I am a child of the market economy and the long Manmohan Singh era. That’s my own shorthand.

I don’t know what forms the texture of the Modi years for people much younger than me, and how easy it is for them to locate themselves like this. So it’s tempting to come to this show for answers. ‘Show me the effect of the Modi years on these young adults.’ But does the exhibit do something else? Does it try to create an irony, a tension between the big political picture — a picture that they did not choose to be in — and their intensely private ways of being in the world? There’s an audio loop in the booth behind us where you will hear them speak. You will constantly hear them describe themselves in relation to other people: family, friends, rivals, BTS, even Modi. But I don’t get a straight answer to whether they see themselves as part of history in the way I just described.

Perhaps that’s because it’s not supposed to be easy. You remember, ten years ago, that we were supposed to be in this ‘leher,’ this wave of campaign enthusiasm for Modi. That came and went. What about the ‘dhara,’ the current that bears us all through history? That sense is still becoming, and the show is a reminder that it is in the process of becoming for me as well as for you, and not just for those younger than we are. 

Indians — some Indians — like to say, or used to say, that a common feature of belonging to this country was the belief that no matter how hard things got, tomorrow was bound to be better than today. Now that I’m approaching middle age, I tell myself that if I were a young person today I would have a hard time believing that. I’d have liked a show that canvassed young people for their answers. ‘Is tomorrow going to be better than today? Tell me so that I can decide whether that feeling is a function of youth, or a function of the political reality we live in.’ That’s a convenient way of extracting messaging from art. We’re not dealing in those conveniences here.  

So what do I read in this show? First of all, and every time I’ve been here, it’s the overwhelming sense of how beautiful it is to be young, and how extraordinarily beautiful the people who come from our subcontinent are. Right? That’s the gift of the act of looking, of attention. Second, I think it offers resistance to a formal glibness that is also a neurological crisis. We’re up to our ears in captioneering, Instagrammified consumption of the portraits of strangers: pre-arranged midshots in candid surroundings, or the humansofxyz model. It’s a mode of aesthetic consumerism that’s totally compatible with the way tech platforms rewire our brains. It demands our empathy in a way that gratifies us. I have nothing against demands for empathy, or against oral history. I like both those things a lot. But we’ve become accustomed to pictures and stories of other people yielding to our gaze very easily.

This show comes to you without captions, without text or identity markers that help you slip into that mode of easy empathy. Does the lack of those particular markers proscribe your responses, or does it set them free? That’s another question I suggest you consider as you look at these portraits. 

I want to talk about the artists themselves, and a quality they both share, which is their ability to describe a moment in time without trapping you in it. Snigdha is, among other things, a lore-keeper of the modern Indian hustle. Her subjects are frequently on the make, or being made, and her writing captures something about the process of the con that can be transcendent. I often sense that her interviewee is teetering on some edge of double or triple awareness, trying to decide whether, in fooling a third party, he can get away with fooling himself, or even Snigdha herself. To the extent that it’s true that the photograph is a form of disclosure — sorry to Susan Sontag — it shares that mode of revelation with how the most inimitable reporters do their work. She’s one of them.

Prarthna works on film, and that is her medium of truth. It shapes this show more fundamentally than any other choice she and Snigdha have made. I was watching the Japanese movie Radiance before I came here, and heard a character say: ‘The photographer is a hunter. His prey is time.’ I was taken out of the movie because at that precise moment I was also thinking of coming here and looking at Prarthna’s portraits. ‘Does she see time as prey? Is that how she works?’ If it is, then why do I feel that these portraits, and this curation of them, set their subjects free? They’re not made to be devoured, and they’re not made for anthropological reasons, though they might come off like that in a different context and in front of different viewers.  There’s an ageless quality to them that I would argue escapes even the exhibit and the definitions it has drawn for itself.

I sense that Prarthna’s work is about finding truth without competing with the methods of the documentarians. Her major work preceding this was made in Shaheen Bagh, during the anti-CAA protests, and while it obviously has something in common with the making of a journalistic record, that’s not its whole purpose. The book is called ‘Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh.’ Every evening is Shaheen Bagh. You could see in that an attempt to liberate the moment, and maybe even to immortalise it.

Immortalisation is one of the side-effects of portraiture. That brings me back to the question I started with. How do you define an era? The first time I came here I thought of the Films Division documentary that SNS Sastry made in 1967, called I Am Twenty, an anthology of interviews with 20 year olds born in 1947. To me the people in that film aren’t just people from my grandparents’ time, or my parents’ time. They are part of a time that also lives in me. So are these portraits of people born twenty years after me. But I don’t derive this sense from how they look, or what they say. When you listen to the audio loop, you’ll hear the sounds of the streets on which Snigdha and Prarthna captured them. You hear the animals, and the chatter of other people, and the passing vehicles honking. That is their country, and also mine. That is the dhara to which we all belong. 

What we think of our place in history matters much less than what those who come after us will think about it. As you proceed through this gallery, it is not just you who are looking at these irrepressible young people. Their portraits are looking back at you. They are navigating the same barriers to understanding what they are seeing as you are. When I go back to that soundscape in the audio booth, and I feel like being annoyed at these kids for sounding shallow and self-involved and writing poetry, I know that what I think of them matters less than whatever they are thinking of me. Whatever I believe of them will never be better or more acutely observed than what they will believe of me. I’ll leave you with that thought. Thank you once again.