Exiles in The Imaginary Institution of India

Kaviraj’s memorable line that India ‘is not an object of discovery but of invention’ hums softly in the background as one tours the 56 artefacts on display. As you wind your way through the exhibition that is laid out broadly chronologically, an uncanny sense of history repeating itself envelops you like a light fog. Amongst other things, what these works of art attest to is how current prime minister Narendra Modi’s authoritarian rhetoric and religious chauvinism is not so much a new tune as it is a remix of an older classic.

Sunil Gupta’s Exiles series is perhaps one of the more well-known artefacts in the exhibition. These photos are set against a number of landmarks and cruising sites, and they document the lives of gay men at a time when Section 377, a colonial-era law that criminalized homosexuality, remained in force. Section 377 was retained in the Indian Penal Code until it was struck down by the Indian Supreme Court in 2018. Its maintenance and the ramifications it had on the lives of sexual minorities in delegitimising their lifeworlds echoed the situation in many other British colonies, where queer presence and desire were similarly treated with hostility and coded as less than normal.

Plenty in this section reminded me of the work I have been doing around nationalism and sexuality in postcolonial independent Singapore where the antisodomy law, Section 377A, was retained in the Singapore Penal Code until 2023. In Straight Nation, the book set to emerge out of this research project, I explore how this stance been instrumental in the state’s perpetuation of a style of heteronormative governance that makes it very difficult for sexual minorities to live their lives free of bother. Gupta’s photos are strikingly quotidian and, in some ways, their beauty lies in their banality as they show the lives of Indian gay men with an arresting range of vulnerability and complexity at a time when they were quite significantly othered.

As a whole, The Imaginary Institution of India is bookended by two significant events in India’s recent postcolonial history: the declaration of Emergency in 1975 when Indira Gandhi ignored a court ruling that barred her from holding public office and instead suspended the Constitution; and the nuclear tests in 1998 that marked a significant escalation in India’s military capacities, which famously moved the writer Arundhati Roy to comment that ‘there’s the unmistakeable stench of fascism on the breeze’.

Much of the art on display testifies to the systematic failures of the state, and the myriad ways in which various groups of people and minorities were let down by the Indian government in the difficult and tumultuous period between 1975 and 1998. Pablo Bartholomew’s series of photographs of the 1984 Bhopal catastrophe, for example, documents the tragic aftermaths of a huge gas leak at the Union Carbide pesticide factory in Madhya Pradesh. The amount of death and destruction it caused is laid bare in these photographs. It remains the world’s worst industrial disaster and water in the surrounding area continues to be unsafe for consumption today.

Tyeb Mehta’s Durga Mahisasura Mardini is the artist’s response to the demolition of the Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya by an organized mob of Hindu rioters in 1992 which sparked riots and resulted in nearly 2000 people losing their lives. Viewing it in the aftermath of the prime minister inaugurating a new Hindu temple on the razed site, the piece accumulates a new layer of meaning and spotlights the current government’s persistent failure to adequately protect religious minorities amidst the rising tide of Hindu nationalism.

Other artefacts, however, open different and more hopeful registers. They show how, in spite of the failures of political leadership, community, solidarity and fraternity continued to endure. Sudhir Patwardhan’s paintings, for example, centre working class folk with glimpses into their lives and struggles. Dhakka shows a worker straining the sinews of his body as he collects his shirt. It also highlights class struggle as a collective rather than individual project. After all, the worker – depicted as faceless and without much specification in the painting – could be anyone and thus everyone at the same time.

Whilst not the final piece of the exhibition, Arpita Singh’s The White Peacock is an appropriate one to close us out as it opens a distinctly speculative register. This painting, with its oversized floating armchairs on the same visual plane as a plane and with people levitating above transports the viewer away from the natural laws of reality. Its invocation of the white peacock, which symbolizes an absent lover, invites one to perhaps reimagine the nation. If, as Kaviraj and the title of the exhibition intimate, India is indeed an imaginary institution, Singh’s work is a reminder that the state does not necessarily have a monopoly on how it is imagined.

Plenty of scholars I think alongside have revealed the fiction that the nation has to be congruent with the political unit that governs it. Perhaps this is one reason I was drawn to this piece – showing the consequences of conceding community building to the state has been the main thrust of my work in the last few years. It was a point I was keen to stress when I was invited to deliver a TEDx talk in Oxford. Singh’s dreamlike work is a consonant reminder here that if India is indeed to be regarded an imaginary institution, then perhaps how it is imagined can be freed from the state.

The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975–1998 is on until 5 January 2025 at the Barbican