Body City Siting Contemporary Culture in India

Contemporary India may be said to be in the throes of a transitionality that defines itself in terms of a challenge to earlier paradigms of nationhood and developmentalism. Rapid political, economic, social and cultural transformations that have taken place over the last two decades impelled by a world order that has seen the collapse of socialism and, attendant upon it, a reversal of the decolonization process and a globalizing neo-imperialism have set in motion new ways of looking at the past and positioning the present. In the sphere of culture and the arts, these new reflections manifest themselves as a series of questions: about how to rediscover domestic/indigenous spaces without dis-engaging from the world system or rejecting internationalism; about the assimilative inclusiveness yet alienating exclusion that accompanies changing contours of identity formation; about the tension between the private and the public in the artist s dual role as practitioner and citizen; about creative strategies/reinventions that simultaneously negotiate older cognitive frames and seek to transform these into fresh certitudes. The questions surface in various modes: some-times reflectively, sometimes oppositionally, sometimes in deflected stances, but always with a sense of responsibility and as sited interrogations, conscious of where they come from. These are the questions that underline the conceptual grid of this book.The book is divided into three main sections exposition body.city , frames , body.city figures that lead into each other but not sequentially, relying instead on the inter-connectivity of their textual and visual thematic concerns. The opening section is a set of four essays that explore the specific themes of the body and the city as these translate into modes of representation, performativity and placement. Jyotindra Jain, in Morphing Identities: Reconfiguring the Divine and the Political , discusses the role played by an eclectic range of popular imagery in constructing cultural, social and national identities. In subTerrain: artists dig the contemporary , Geeta Kapur extends the pun in her title to a reasoned-out proposition for locating the subversion of art practice in the interstices of urban spaces, to be excavated through the force of interpretation. Ravi Vasudevan, in Selves Made Strange: Violent and Performative Bodies in the Cities of Indian Cinema, 1974 2003 , explores the body space articulations of screen personas and city environments in the narrative space of today s cinema. In Actors Prepare , Anuradha Kapur s focus is the actor s body, the body in performance. She discusses performance styles in terms of how actors move between the abstract and the tangible and enter into a contract with their audiences by using different modes and by locating the body in different registers. The images reproduced in the book constitute a parallel visual narrative that reinforces the central themes. Interspersed with the text in the first two sections and coming together in the third section, these have a representational value of their own in the scheme of the book. The second section, frames , sets up a vantage point from which to view contemporary cultural practice and provides points of theoretical departure. These include: the notion of civil society in the third world (Sudipta Kaviraj); unfolding forms of collaboration and resistance in the new Indian metropolis (Partha Chatterjee); the shift away from secular, inclusive nationalisms to anti-modern, patriarchal particularisms that parade as nationalism (Pradip Kumar Datta, Kumkum Sangari); the re-imaging of the nation s geo-body through popular cartographic endeavours; and a look at identity formation through an exploration of literary texts (Susie Tharu, Amitav Ghosh).Indira Chandrasekhar is Managing Editor of Tulika Books, New Delhi.Peter C. Seel is Deputy Director of the House of World Cultures, Berlin.The editors of the volume make it clear that the project . . . is a deliberate attempt at distancing the act of enquiry itself from any easy, misleading glibness. It firmly and deliberately locates the critiques it produces within select urban centres . . . that happen to reflect the myriad relations between globalization, local traditions and newly designed living spaces in a particular way, consciously choosing the interface where the social and political conflicts that are central concerns in the artists works are at their most virulent .The Arts News Magazine of India