by Deeksha Nath, June 2008

In the colonial discourse the term ‘Hybridity’ was problematic, even offensive, referring to those who were products of miscegenation, mixed breeds. In contemporary times, characterized as ‘Global’, a term which touts the idea of one-ness and constructs a community that is intermingled and intricate, hybridity is an empowered term. It has been adopted and adapted by postcolonial cultures into an emancipative position thanks to its advantage of in-betweeness, the straddling of cultures and the consequent ability to negotiate the difference. Hybridity then provides an interesting idea on which to ponder about the future outcomes of the global discourse. Rajesh Ram’s imagination pushes this mingling and co-dependence to the extreme, he conjures up off-springs that are not just mixed racially but are mixed species – human, animal and vegetal. His creatures satisfy all needs and he sees a future where this may come to pass.

This essay traverses the complex patterns of Rajesh’s imagination and the ways in which they weave through contemporary concerns.

Food for thought

Stylistically Rajesh’s paintings may be characterized as neo-realistic, similar in style and spirit to the art of, for instance, Sudhir Patwardhan. Rajesh’s crowd scenes remind us of the precision and moral weight lent by Sudhir to his paintings. In the painting Cumin Seeds with People Rajesh’s forms are painted solidly; his composition is precise against a wallpaper of repetitive symbols (in this case piles of cumin) which together create a compelling and comprehensive commentary on the current focus of the global food crisis.

Through the repeated use of vegetables, the construction of bodies as lean from the lack of excess food Rajesh’s work addresses the world food crisis, which has seen record prices for most staple foods, has led to an 18% food price inflation in China, 13% in Indonesia and Pakistan, and 10% or more in Latin America, Russia and India (according to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization). The problem of the lack of food produce is fuelled by a dramatic increase in oil prices and compounded by increasing populations but also wealth which is drawing farmers away from being producers to consumers and lastly extreme weather and ecological stress (to put it simplistically). This has given rise to the specter of famine that has encouraged large scale hoarding (which hasn’t helped matters much), riots and mass suicides. There simply isn’t enough food to feed the world. And thus we see greater images in the media such as Rajesh’s paintings Child with Fly and Ganti. These are images of abject poverty and marginalization, images that speak of the lack of caring that allows a child to die of hunger, crying for food, surrounded by people who are incapable of help.

There is something almost obscene about the world’s fascination with the poor, the spectacle that is created by the media when reporting about the world food crisis. The media is a very powerful tool in shaping people's opinions and thinking. Armchair viewers of pain and plight of unknown communities across the world, in a sense, can arrive at two possible outcomes. Either they can empathize and be motivated to help, mostly economically by donating money to charity or aid organization. Or the images of malnourished children used by both aid agencies and newspapers and magazines in some ways achieve the opposite of the desired outcome. The morbid spectacle of the subject is removed from our reality and in a sense becomes fictionalized, a fiction then seen to be exploited to access our resources. Rather then generosity it may in fact create the opposite, greed and hoarding, or at its best indifference.

Rajesh’s art can be seen within the larger visual literacy project that places at the core the knowledge that images are not innocent and coded meanings need to be identified and understood in their multiplicity. His paintings regurgitate these oft-seen images and he positions himself as both the witness of dire world problems and also their spokesperson. For instance, Rajesh simultaneously identifies the problem and the solution in Dustbin. A rather beautiful painting of fresh lush produce discarded in a city garbage bin pointedly recognizes that the reason for lack is often excess waste. With availability have we begun to disrespect plentiful-ness? His work speaks also of the lack of foresight with which everyone from farmers to consumers to governments to international agencies is tackling the crisis in the world at large.

A crisis rarely just erupts. It is the outcome of years of blindness. And the causes and the outcomes are all rolled into each other. Population growths meant the need for large quantities of food quickly, which led to the use of pesticides which today is killing the same people it feeds. The rich have the benefit of both knowledge and money to eat organic produce and thus protect themselves to a certain degree from harm. The poor suffer and among those are the farmers, the very people using the pesticides and also growing the food. It is a vicious cycle that is hard to break, especially since now, more then ever, is the need for bulk production.

Buffalo Milk, a large sculpture, is a cleaved out buffalo from which pour out bags of pasteurized milk. Its teats are multiple rubber nipples to suck every last drop of milk dry. A buffalo provides sustenance to humans with every bit of its being, first by producing milk and secondly providing its meat for consumption. In our hunger this proud animal is simply a sum of the parts we can consume. While being critical of society’s rapacious appetite Rajesh valorizes those beings, animal and human, that provide our food. And yet with their essential role in society and with the rising prices of food why are the farmers not getting richer? Why are they still at the bottom of the economic scale? Why are the men in Six Pack Farmer, Secret of Market and the old vegetable seller in the Untitled painting still scrawny and dispossessed? Rajesh’s art begs the question, how is it that after years of pushing global trade and genetically modified seeds, instead of feeding the world we have created a food system that leaves more people hungry? This crisis is a reminder that the level of inequality that prevails in the world today is untenable.

Impossible Beauty

In the painting Daughter of a Vegetable Seller a young girl in a dress with her school bag is painted with an elaborate hairdo, resembling those created by women in parts of Africa, but rather then plaits and pins she has been given brinjals and pointed gourds. She is burdened by the dual task of studying and working, selling these vegetables in her spare time. Yet the beauty of the painting shines through. Rajesh is not one to cloak the world in even greater despair, he points gently, beautifully, imaginatively towards situations.

A more complicated work that makes us aware of the simultaneous aspects of sensual pleasure and revulsion is Germs of Body. A child is bent over (in hunger?), its hair a funnel of brinjals and kakadi, and the artist maps the areas of disease in the young body. This cartographic exercise is made vivid through a vibrant palette and fiery red surrounding the body. As the child stands helpless before our eyes we feel pain and empathetic pleasure at this construction, tenderness and a simultaneous desire for distance and self-protection.

Beauty may be considered as a mode of engagement, a function of a particular type of relationship between the subject and the object, rather then as a quality inherent in the subject or as a transcendental ideal. A feeling that emerges in the encounter between subject and object that acknowledges both as present at that singular moment. Meaning then is something that in created within the encounter and not apart from it. Beauty is grounded in the processes and structures of perception and experience. And it is this aspect of beauty that emerges in the neo-realism of Rajesh’s art.

I want to approach Rajesh’s art from the angle of the pain in responding to something that is beautiful, grounded in harsh reality and that addresses its viewer. It reaches beyond the confines of the canvas and also the impersonal to wrench an engagement. This is the other angle of the address, for instance, of Child with Fly and Ganti. They cause a radical de-centering in the subject (i.e. us the viewers) and grant us a fleeting experience of a dramatically altered relationship to the world around us. If we are to agree with Elaine Scarry, Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch that beauty requires us to give up our imaginary position at the center then beauty becomes our redemption, saving us from harmful and habitual egotism.

And while there is a sense of obligation and shame in the context within which Rajesh makes his art, the sort of dialogue initiated in this aesthetic confrontation requires independent agents, unable to control or contain the other and surprised by what the other says. In this case the de-centering is absolute in that it destroys the idea of one-ness, much touted by the discourse on globalization. The food crisis has made apparent that localized and specified difference and belonging are still relevant and that while we may speak of gaps and hybridities in the system it is still through difference and other-ing that we define each other.

Possibly the painting that firmly situates us as the ‘other’ is DNA of a New Generation. A young girl is bent over holding her ears in the childhood punishment of becoming a murga (hen, to identify the posture the body resembles). Her shadow, rather then being a dark monochrome contains images of brinjals and kakadi. The shadow in Jungian psychology is seen as that part of the unconscious mind consisting of repressed weaknesses, shortcomings, projections and instincts. It is in the shadow that meaning may be found and this child’s shadow speaks plainly of the artists’ intent. It is perhaps about the nature of truthful seeing, of how we hold reality, fantasy and knowledge in troubled tension.

The neo-realist movement, the legacy of which I am drawing here to Rajesh’s art, emerged around 1943 in Italian cinema. While its main characteristic was the representation of everyday life, often using non-professional actors, other salient features included a shift from the individual to collectivity, favoring an ensemble form of narration. The ‘new’ stresses the aspect of the current social context and a sense of historical actuality and immediacy. It differs slightly from social realism which depicts working class people and activities as heroic. Rajesh’s art is heroic, true, but it does not valorize his subjects’ suffering, which can have disturbing ideological undertones. What it does is show reality in all its honesty, despair but also beauty and gives us the simple path towards betterment. One the one hand the answers are very simple but on the other impossible to reach, because of the complicated negotiations between personal ambition and collective good.