"Shared Threads and Savage Beauty" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (23 August 2015)

At its close, earlier this month, “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty”, a retrospective of the late fashion designer’s works, broke records at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), by becoming the London institution’s most visited exhibition ever. The visual spectacle of McQueen’s creations were worth the trouble of acquiring a ticket to the popular event, especially since I had been unlucky on my first try as the exhibition had sold out for the day. Yet, what was also interesting was the manner in which the V&A had attempted to manage the Scottish designer’s critique of British imperialist history as manifested through his creativity.

In one of the first rooms of the exhibition, viewers saw pieces from McQueen’s Autumn/Winter 1995 collection titled “Highland Rape”. Controversial not only for its title, the clothes were inspired by the designer’s ethnic heritage, particularly in regard to the atrocities meted out to Scots during the Highland Clearances in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. On a runway symbolically littered with heather and bracken to represent the Scottish highlands, McQueen’s models appeared to be visibly distressed, a feeling echoed in the deliberately revealing garments, some in tartan and with shapes mirroring bodice designs of the previous century. Sometimes described as an example of ethnic cleansing, the clearances saw a dramatic change in the pastoral lives of many Scots, with relocation to other parts of the world being a related outcome. The theme of this legacy of the struggles of the Highlanders would also be echoed in the Scotsman’s collection just over a decade later. His 2006 collection, titled “Widows of Culloden”, also made use of tartan, and specifically the MacQueen (sometimes referred to as McQueen) Clan tartan. But where the previous “Highland Rape” appeared to epitomise the victimisation of women as representative of Scottish history, “Widows of Culloden” would instead exemplify women as survivors.

At the V&A exhibition, pieces from McQueen’s 21^st century collections were showcased in a section titled “Romantic Nationalism”, with a note on the wall explaining the designer’s cathartic evolution from the “anti-romanticism” of the “Highland Rape” ensembles, in which he voiced his “defiantly political” view that “[w]hat the British did [in Scotland] was nothing short of genocide”. As evidence of McQueen taking a different approach to his designs later in his career, the description went on to cite his 2008 collection, “The Girl who Lived in the Tree”, as proof that “[d]espite [his] heartfelt declarations of his Scottish national identity, McQueen also had a deep interest in the history of England…” This, the note went on to state, could be gleaned from the designer’s influences drawn from legacies of the British Empire and a trip to India, which had resulted in “The Girl who Lived in the Tree” being his “most romantically nationalistic” collection.

Clearly, the V&A had attempted to seek in McQueen’s use of Indian elements in his 2008 collection a nationalist tone that would serve as a salve to the rawness of Scottish history as evoked in the designer’s previous collections; this, because he could also look beyond his own ethnic background and bask in the glory of empire past as a Briton who then called England home. But it is rather difficult to see McQueen’s employment of Indian design traditions as testament of nationalistic pride given his vehemence against British overlordship in Scottish history. For example, a silk crepe, jacquard, and tulle dress from “The Girl who Lived in the Tree” collection makes vivid use of Indian embroidery and a style of draping synonymous with the way a sari is worn. However, the deep red of the fabric used in the dress bears visual continuity with the MacQueen tartan seen in the garments of the “Widows of Culloden” collection. The sanguine colour choice functions not only as a shared visual cue across collections, but also as a marker of shared histories of colonisation, and sometimes of bloodshed due to empire, across continents.

Even as his fashion provided commentary about the history of empire and its effects on women, McQueen’s clothing of women’s bodies was neither devoid of the objectifying of those bodies nor an indulgence of orientalism. While one of the final sections of the exhibition, titled “Romantic Exoticism” quotes McQueen as musing about how “[f]ashion can be really racist”, not least because it “[looks] at the clothes of other cultures as costumes”, it also lauds his exoticism as being “a form of creative translation”. Quoting the designer again, an exhibition note chronicles how he would “[take] elements of traditional embroidery, filigree and craftsmanship from countries all over the world … and interpret them in [his] own way”. Offered with no irony about the apparent co-optation, nor any awareness of the colonial elements inherent in such claims of cultural knowledge, the note was a reminder of how the exhibition both explored McQueen’s genius while being uncertain about how to manage the unwieldy afterlife of imperial and colonial influence. 

From The Goan.

"She Sings Again" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (9 August 2015)

While in England, it was wonderful to hear news of Bardroy Barreto’s film Nachom-ia Kumpasar (2015) winning the Lebara Play Audience Award at this year’s edition of the London Indian Film Festival. Just a few weeks prior, I had the pleasure of watching the movie with my parents at Panjim’s Maquinez Palace. The experience was memorable for many reasons, not least of which was that the film recalls the yesteryear soundtrack of my parents’ generation, as evidenced by the fact that I could hear my mother and others of similar age in the audience singing along to some of the songs. But as further proof of the cultural legacy of the music popularised by Lorna and Chris Perry, whose lives are fictionalised in Barreto’s film, I was additionally struck by how the twenty-somethings seated in the row in front of me would also lend chorus to the songs, many of which still play on Goan radio stations, today. It was quite the tribute to Konkani music of the 1960s, as is indeed the film Nachom-ia itself. While mainly telling the story of the relationship between its main characters, the musician Lawrence Vaz and younger singer Donna Pereira, their affair unfolds against the backdrop of the Indian film industry and its relationship with Goan musicians half a century ago.

In Nachom-ia, the highs and lows of Lawry and Donna’s relationship seem to function as a barometer of the fortunes of Goans in early Bollywood. Set primarily in Bombay, with a few scenes taking place in Goa, the film chronicles the lives of Goans in newly independent India, featuring such locations as the kudds set up by village associations in the big city. Generally bachelor societies, the kudds served as homes away from home for Goan men, and continue to function as stops for travellers to this day. And though the film has a largely male cast, it is clearly Donna’s trajectory as a singer and a woman that is the impetus of this movie. Over the course of Nachom-ia, we see Donna become more independent even as her romance with Lawry ebbs and flows. Coming from a sheltered home, Donna’s mother is epitomised as being an overly protective Catholic woman who chastises her daughter about cavorting with musicians and skipping church choir practise. It comes as much as a surprise to the audience as it does to Donna that her love interest, Lawry, is married and is soon to be a father. All of Mrs. Pereira’s concerns about her daughter’s future appear to now be warranted, for how is Donna to be a marriageable prospect if she does not matriculate, hold a serious job, or keep up with her churchly duties, leave alone stop seeing Lawry?

Yet, Barreto’s film is not a tale of failed morality, or solely one of failed love. When Donna declares to her quietly sympathetic father that the only thing she will ever be married to in this lifetime is music, Nachom-ia bears witness to a woman’s ambition apart from her relationship to men. It also foregrounds the possibility of cultural production as being a field that is viable professionally; in looking at the recent past of Goan artistry, the movie enquires of Goans how they regard the arts and artists today, and especially Goan women who are involved in such pursuits. Interestingly, the film also subverts gender roles when, for instance, it portrays men as gossips; this is the case with three men who have recurring appearances in the film as the village tell-tales who gather by a cross to share the latest information about goings-on in the community. Nonetheless, the film does not entirely demonstrate the empowerment of its women characters. More could have been done with the role of Lawry’s wife, who appears to be wilfully ignorant of her husband’s affair. Another trope in the film is that of the long-suffering woman, as is borne out in the later disappearance of Donna from the music world, and life itself.

On the one hand, Donna’s withdrawal from performing is meant to signal the poor hand dealt to Goan musicians who were once the lifeblood of Indian cinema. Even though she parts ways with Lawry, Donna continues to be successful, her pain fuelling her simultaneous descent into alcoholism but also her spirited performances. It is further proof that despite Donna’s turbulent relationship, the entertainment industry provided her with opportunities to support herself. But the change in the industry and its lack of recognition of Goan talent, in turn, affected the professional and personal lives of people like Donna and Lawry. But even within this exploration of filmic history and its impact on Goan musicians and singers, Donna’s suffering, as manifested in her self-exile from the thing she loved most in life, is over-emphasised especially because she is a woman who loses out on the love of a man. The film does ends on a note of hopefulness, and one hopes it signals a new wave of Goan cinema that has many fine stories to tell.

From The Goan.

"The Past, Presently" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (26 July 2015)

On a recent visit to Singapore, I was reminded that the Portuguese had forayed into the region some years after their Malaccan encounter in the sixteenth century. In 1587, the Portuguese, led by Paulo de Lima Pereira, destroyed Johor Lama, the royal administrative centre of Temasek or Singapura, as it was then known. Returning to the present, 2015 is the year that the city-state of Singapore celebrates its 50^th anniversary as a modern nation, giving rise to many cultural programmes. Among them is the Singapore International Festival of Arts which will take place in August, and as a precursor to its main exhibition, the organisers hosted “The Open Participate Engage Negotiate” (O.P.E.N.) programme from 16 June to 4 July. According to the event brochure, since art festivals are so fleeting, the planners created O.P.E.N. to serve “as a popular academy … to transform attitudes, mindsets, knowledge and emotions…” To this end, the pre-festival included the work of Bangalore-based visual artist Pushpamala N. Using José Veloso Salgado’s 1898 painting “Vasco da Gama perante o Samorim” as her inspiration, Pushpamala N. recreates the orientalist canvas depicting the Portuguese navigator’s first meeting with the Zamorin of Calicut, in 1498, as a photograph. While nearly identical to Salgado’s portrayal of the historic moment, Pushpamala N.’s remake, titled “The Arrival of Vasco da Gama”, departs significantly in that not only are all the figures in her image, including the Portuguese, ‘played’ by South Asians, but also in that it is a self-portrait. The artist herself occupies the role of da Gama.

Painted four centuries after da Gama’s audience with the Zamorin, Salgado’s painting conveys the significance of the incident, not least because of the Portuguese discovery of the sea route to the Indies. Yet, rendered at a point in history when Portuguese colonial power had rapidly been declining, Salgado’s representation of the legendary episode was meant to function nostalgically as a reminder of past glory. In so doing, the picture also reimagines the past, for the Zamorin is said to have been less than impressed with the goods da Gama brought along for the purposes of trade. As for Pushpamala N.’s recasting of Salgado’s depiction, the artist’s use of South Asian bodies, including her own, to people the tableau, strives to centre the colonised, postcolonially. By cross-dressing as da Gama, Pushpamala N. deliberately genders the colonial past, and asks how women, while absent from Salgado’s memorialisation of historical events, might be returned to the scene. Replacing da Gama’s body with her own, Pushpamala N. enquires into the impact colonisation had on those subjects who were part of the milieu in which Salgado’s painting is set, even as their presence is erased.

However, in noting the “feminist commentary” Pushpamala N. offers through her photograph, critic Mayo Martin remains wary of how successful the artist is at dismantling “the original painting’s politics”, given that “[w]hile an Indian cast … take on the roles of the ‘Portuguese’, the ‘Indians’ are, well, still Indians. And it’s still a face-off” (Today, 26 June, 2015). What Martin zeroes in on is an excess of identity in the artwork – an overdetermined ‘Indianness'. But it is precisely because the Indianness in the tableau still settles into a dichotomy that one must question why this is so. A postcolonial rendition of an allegedly successful endeavour, as put on display at a programme hosted in conjunction with the 50^th anniversary of a nation, Pushpamala N.’s meta-image at O.P.E.N. links oceanic histories and places nationalism in tandem with historical fiction. Nevertheless, how effective is the piece in deconstructing the replication of power hierarchies even when the coloniser is removed from the picture?

To answer this query, I turn to the Indian politician Shashi Tharoor's speech last week at the Oxford Union. In it, Tharoor, who hails from Kerala – coincidentally the coast upon which da Gama met the Zamorin – argued that Britain owed India reparations for having impoverished the region which, prior to the arrival of the English, had been on the rise economically. Apart from retroactively imagining a precolonial Indian ‘nation’, Tharoor, much like Salgado's painting, conjures up a mythical past worthy of celebration. For Tharoor, therefore, the problem is solely colonisation, with no mind paid to such matters as caste divisions that not only predated the colonial era, but also continued on and still exist even after the exit of the Europeans. The parallel with Pushpamala N.’s installation, then, and its inability to erase difference in postcolonially representing oppression, is that both Tharoor and the artist fail to see how Indianness is quite capable of sustaining its own hierarchies with little to no assistance from elsewhere. Colonisation may have added other shades of oppression, but the canvas of the past was never pristine to begin with.

From The Goan.

"He Plays Herself" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (12 July 2015)

On seeing the billboards for Francis de Tuem’s Reporter, one would be forgiven for thinking that the title character of the currently running tiatr was meant to be a man, or the writer-director himself. Indeed, de Tuem and several other men feature prominently on the advertising materials. This notwithstanding, it is women who play the most important roles in the play that pulls no punches in remarking on present-day politics in Goa. One could make the obvious comment about gender hierarchies and portrayals in the genre and, undoubtedly, Reporter does participate in the usual relegation of women to traditional roles, especially “in the context of the construction of community identity,” as Rowena Robinson observes in “Interrogating Modernity, Gendering ‘Tradition’: Teatr Tales from Goa” (2009: 508). Yet, de Tuem’s tiatr employs gender in other ways, too, as I shall point out.

A political satirist, de Tuem is no stranger to controversy. In August 2009, the tiatrist found himself to be the subject of political drama, offstage, when he was arrested following a complaint lodged against him by MLA Francis ‘Mickky’ Pacheco. That the artist shares a name with the politician is the least of the coincidences as echoed in that oft-repeated adage about life, art, and imitation, one made even more curious by the fact that Pacheco is himself now in prison. Focusing on the machinations of a political family headed by a wily matriarch, de Tuem’s Reporter mines the recent political histories of Goa and India to deliver a drama that brings to mind the Churchill and Nehru-Gandhi dynasties among others. It is not only within the main plot that incumbent politicians find themselves parodied, but they are also directly skewered in several sub-plots and cantaram or songs, which make up the episodic nature of the tiatr form. The counterpart to Aplonia Rodrigues, the conniving matriarchal politician, is the reporter Anita – the chief protagonist whose foremost commitment is to journalistic integrity.

Even so, it is no stretch to say that the character of Anita is under conceived, for she has no developmental arc within the play and often comes across as being a bit one-note in her professional ardour, even as Anita, the actress playing the eponymous role, acquits herself marvellously. Instead, it is the director himself who takes centre stage. His many appearances between scenes to deliver politically observant cantaram about caste, the beef-ban, the ghar wapsi debacle, and various other current issues, serve as a transgression of the fourth wall and bear testimony to the astuteness of the vibrant Konkani art form in engaging with all things au courant. Considering the asides as part of the larger performance, and the use of contemporary phenomena as fodder for the play’s script and songs, de Tuem evidently stages himself as a reporter commenting on politics in Goa. Therein, the otherwise underdeveloped character of the female reporter functions as an extension of the performative writer-director himself, and the motif of the reporter bridges the asides with the main plot by emphasising political commentary as theatrical subject matter. 

 

 Despite this transgender continuity through reportage, there is no doubt that while sometimes disrupting traditional gender roles, Reporter perpetuates patriarchy. If de Tuem locates himself more prominently than his female complement, Anita’s characterisation as an independent professional woman is at odds, for example, with a song about live-in relationships where an unmarried woman is chastised for living immorally with her boyfriend. As Robinson notes, tiatr regards women as the lynchpin to “[t]he familial domain [which] is perceived as the only anchor in an unstable world …, [primarily] in the face of the disturbing forces of the modern” (535).

But if the title character is female and I read de Tuem as one side of her, am I merely suggesting his feminisation? While much more could be said about the gender-queer elements of tiatr, the larger discussion to be had about such possibilities is in how de Tuem’s own theatrical gendering serves to represent the status of Goan Catholics in society today. As the late Pramod Kale argues in his study of tiatr, “[i]t is a form which is rooted in the working class and lower middle class Goan Catholic[s] …, expressing their trials and tribulations, hopes and aspirations” (1986: 2054). If Robinson detects how tiatr positions women traditionally as the counterbalance to modernity’s onslaught, then de Tuem’s play meditates on the othering of a minority community in relation to the masculinist Hindu nationalist state as signified by its policing of morality and dietary practices among other restrictive legislations. As Reporter reveals, the very audience it caters to is the vote bank that is patronised even as other agendas play out behind the scenes. That the political family around which the tiatr revolves is a Catholic one headed by a woman only further demonstrates how nationalist and familial patriarchy metamorphose to suit circumstance. Similarly, Reporter’s ostensible use of a female lead who is overshadowed by her director is no less emblematic of patriarchy’s persistence, even as it offers a critique of the domineering state. 

From The Goan.