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Candid camera
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Mahendra Sinh, in his suite of `Parsi Photographs', exhibited in Bangalore earlier this season, dismantles the near-caricatural stereotypes with which this community is popularly associated. A comment by RANJIT HOSKOTE.
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MAHENDRA SINH
Undoing the cliche of the affluent Parsl...
CONTEMPORARY photographers who set out to record the life of a community know they tread on ground fraught with risk. This is the ground that colonial ethnographers traversed a century and a half ago, deploying the newly invented photographic process to document, for posterity, the features, traits and customs of marginal groups being driven to extinction by the advancing machine of colonial modernity. It was a genre of imaging that enshrined a power asymmetry: the recording eye captured the subject it framed, held the power of interpretation over its symbolic and material life.
Having survived the stigma of its colonial associations, this genre resurrected itself from the 1950s onwards in a more benign avatar, as anthropological documentation, celebrating endangered groups and their vanishing environments. In both its earlier and later forms, the genre has been premised on the fundamentally different, basically unchanging nature of the subject: while colonial ethnography essentialised the Other as native or savage superseded by modernity, anthropological documentation tends to offer uncritical homage to the Other as Noble Savage or Victim of Progress, a defiant parallel to modernity.
In recent decades, therefore, practitioners of the genre have had to reassess their commitment, to recognise that their subject is subject to change.
While communities have not necessarily remained distinctive, neither have their cultural institutions and ceremonials always been erased by the impact of modernity, the planet-wide homogeneity of globalisation. Rather, collective mythologies and activities now reappear in forms woven uneasily from heritage and novelty. Accordingly, any contemporary photographic account of a community must capture collective life in the moment of transition; indeed, transition itself must provide the theme of such a project. Among the very few practitioners who have grasped this is the noted Mumbai-based photographer, Mahendra Sinh.
Sinh's suite of "Parsi Photographs", exhibited at the newly opened Gallery SKE in Bangalore earlier this season, is a significant, singularly perceptive record of the lifeworld of Mumbai's Parsi community. Noted for its entrepreneurial energies, philanthropy and contribution to scholarship and the arts, this community is descended from the Persian Zoroastrian immigrants who settled along India's western coast between the Ninth and 11th Centuries A.D., having escaped the political and religious upheavals that marred the resplendent, but volatile, Abbasid Caliphate.
Black-and-white frames shot from middle to close range, these photographs embrace a plenitude of gestural detail and are rich in event, recording as they do the close-packed honeycomb realm of human relationships in a micro-minority that is now centred mainly on the megalopolis of Mumbai, but which has dispersed globally, mainly towards Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States. While ostensibly documenting the established collective life of the Parsis, Sinh actually probes beneath the surfaces and occasions for the deeper currents of self-definition, uncertainty, disquietude and transformation that inform this collective life.
...a portrait of two survivors
This project has engaged Sinh's attention since the early 1980s, a private preoccupation continuing alongside his professional assignments, which have appeared internationally in publications such as Time, Newsweek, GEO, Paris Match, and the New York Times Magazine. In addressing himself to the textures of a community's experience, Sinh also negotiates the problems that attend such an artistic enterprise. Set midway between documentary and portraiture, this body of work confronts the perils of stereotype and sweeping historical narrative, places self-fulfilment fantasies under the X-ray, yet is sensitive to the dignity of the subject.
Weaving through the crowd, his eye alighting on a jewelled detail, Sinh recovers for his viewers the many shades of modernity to which the Parsi community has subscribed during the 300-year passage from its traditional position, as a largely artisanal-mercantile caste, to its current identity as a cosmopolitan reference group. We find shades of Victorian and Edwardian influences in this kaleidoscope of expressions, costumes, artefacts, manners and interiors, but also the more contemporary nuances of Americanisation, all articulating a transitive social selfhood that balances between the veneration of the past and the pursuit of the future.
Since every group constructs its own special conceptions of the past and the future, the Parsi versions of these do not simply convey recorded facts and point realistically to evolving possibilities; rather, they testify to the particularity of the community's cultural self-imagination.
Sinh discloses the operation of this particular cultural self-imagination in his images of solemn observance and joyous festivity: he taps the pulse of a community that has attempted to consolidate its sense of a special identity against the pressures of change in the post-colonial period and the globalisation era. He demonstrates both the innovative self-renewal and the pathos of fossilisation that such a manoeuvre can involve, as when his lens memorialises the sudden self-consciousness and momentary self-estrangement of a boy costumed for the traditional ceremony of initiation.
Through his unobtrusive scrutiny, Sinh dismantles the near-caricatural stereotypes with which the Parsi community is popularly associated. He peels away the genial eccentric of ethnic humour and the epicurean bourgeois of the society columns, to reveal figures beset, like most other members of the middle classes, by the ordinary uncertainties and small tragedies of life. And, in the midst of collective performances, Sinh never loses sight of the singular human being.
Within the armature of rites of passage, rituals of homage and seasonal festivals, he sets acute individual portraits of pensive old men, arthritic old women, bewildered children, an effervescent bride and groom. In a terrifying yet profoundly compassionate image, he undoes the cliché of the affluent Parsi, as embodied by the Tatas and Wadias: at the prayer gates by the sea, we come face-to-face with an aged woman, shielding her eyes from the glare, and her son, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses. The viewer is hypnotised, in this portrait of two survivors, by the woman's gnarled, emaciated hands, and her son's long-fingered ones, raised in prayer: this is a rare glimpse of the Parsi lower middle class, clutching at the edge of respectability, its savings wiped out by reduced interest rates, its pensions swallowed up by the expenses of metropolitan living.
While his art derives strength from the methods of ethnographic study, Sinh is not constrained by the obsessively regimenting and descriptive norms of this discipline. Similarly, while playing dexterously with the genre of portraiture, he rejects the conventions that commit the portraitist to emphasising the personality and inner reality of individual sitters. Avoiding these extremes, Sinh remains attentive to the aspirations of individuals within the larger predicament of a community that must negotiate with an increasingly difficult economic and cultural environment. Mahendra Sinh thus accomplishes a social portraiture that illuminates the process by which self, time and place are constantly produced and re-made in the churn of history.
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