Shirking Tradition

Upon entering the art gallery of the Government Museum in Chennai, visitors are greeted by enormous portraits of various officers, presumably painted in India. I say presumably because British artists painted the portraits in British style. The people portrayed in these works all wear British clothing. Probably because they’re British. Apart from a vaguely Indian script in the corner of one painting and a barely visible Indian servant in the background of another, there is no reference to India at all whatsoever in this section of the museum.

The next portion of the exhibit consists largely of works by Raja Ravi Varma. A late 19th-century painter, Varma is easily the most famous artist in India. He used European techniques to illustrate Indian subject matter: various sari-clad women, figures from Hindu mythology, and scenes from everyday Indian life.

In the summer of 2005, my parents and I traveled to India for one month to visit the host of grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins they’d left behind. At one point during the trip, a police officer asked us to pull over our car. My dad was fully prepared to bribe him, the modus operandi when dealing with any uniformed Indian. But our American accents were enough to promptly dismiss the official, after offering to provide us with any assistance we might need. I giggled smugly along with the rest of my family, but I pitied the policeman. I had always viewed my heritage as a burden because I grew up in a nation that was foreign to my parents. What an unpleasant surprise for my teenage self to find an entire country of people similarly stifled by their Indianness, even in their native land.

Months after my return to the States, I encountered my first Varma painting while flipping through my high-school art-history textbook. (My class never got to the section on Indian art, which wasn’t covered on the AP Exam.) I would come to blame artists like Varma for the exaggerated deference I’d witnessed firsthand in India. In a country with such a rich artistic tradition, I found myself asking: What compelled a Keralite to adopt a European vocabulary to produce something meaningful and aesthetically pleasing?

The last section of the Government Museum consists of pieces from the past few years. Contemporary Indian artists have begun using archetypal Indian techniques in new and interesting ways. This trend is unsurprising in a nation whose potential growth rate is expected to average 8.4 percent until the year 2020, with a GDP set to surpass that of the United States by 2050. As the nation grows and develops economically, its people are discovering a newfound pride in their heritage. They needn’t look to the West for expressions of their modernized selves but can instead draw from their nation’s past. When Indians hear American accents in shopping malls and hotel bars, they no longer accommodate and kowtow. Instead, they ask how Americans are responding to the downturn after causing worldwide economic collapse. My high-school self would certainly have been pleased.

I returned to India this past summer, four years after my first, fleeting glance at a Varma painting, in a cliched attempt to reconnect with my roots. (The journey of self-discovery included a trip to the Government Museum.) At the same time, New York Times columnist and similarly second-generation immigrant Anand Giridharadas was completing a four-year tour of the country. Determined to steal my thunder, Giridharadas wrote about a transformation of the Indian population’s psyche. “They don’t crave our mayonnaise and khakis anymore... Indian accents are now cooler than British ones... How fortunate to live in a land you needn’t leave to become your fullest possible self.” How fortunate to possess a rich and vibrant culture, one whose allure fascinates yet eludes a generation of Indian-Americans who return to the land of their parents to remind them of a history they never truly knew.

If I learned anything during this time in the motherland, it is that true cultural progress cannot be measured by a nation’s willingness to abandon Hellman’s and Gap. It’s perfectly reasonable for Indians to be proud of how far they’ve come, particularly in a third-world country that is emerging as a strong player in the global economy. Still, a retreat inward is not only fundamentally flawed, but also ultimately futile. (Exports of goods and services as a share of India’s economy have practically quadrupled in the past two decades.) What better triumph for Indians, what better act of empowerment, than to adopt the vocabulary of their oppressors to enhance and enrich their tradition?

India can’t go back to what it was before colonization. Arguments about whether the country would be better off today if globalization hadn’t been forcefully thrust upon it are ultimately pointless. The real show of strength for India is not, as I once believed, to pretend that Western influence doesn’t exist, but to incorporate that influence, as Varma did, into a distinctly Indian story. For the first time in modern history, the world is listening.


Silpa Kovvali ’10 is a computer science concentrator in Eliot House. Her column appears on alternate Wednesdays.