By Sarbajit Ghosh
Abstract
This article is an examination of a painting from Akbarnama, while engaging in an analytical hermeneutics of the aesthetic objects represented, and using the image as an architectonic to analyse the (emphasised hyphenation) theory-philosophy of then and now – the metaphysics and nature of Indian modernity, exploring proto-Deleuzian themes of deterritorialization, impermanence and narrativity vis a vis realism.
This miniature painting comes without a title at source. Its name is one of description, such as one given by an anthropologist, who is attempting to name a historical object with its physical description. We locate in this an act of agency, that involves a certain gaze, that is difficult to locate in the triptych of pre-colonial, then colonial and finally post-colonial Indian history. The “gaze” located here is of an indeterminate multiplicity. Even in theorising a gaze for this work, we are forced to read the Sufis, innocent children, the colonist, the war monger, the simple farmer, a grand wazir, a motorcade-adorned politician and the catamaran adorned fisherman.
In studying this multiple portraiture as an “Indian” painting, we read India as a metaphysical entity, because it is near impossible to read its nationhood through the West’s version of a nation, born out of an era of bloodshed, and the intrigues of Metternich, the Greek and French Revolutions, and the wars of Italian and German reunification. Indeed, the coherence and homogeneity that underlies the assumption of the nation – state is difficult to centralise. The multiplicity in the painting, and the description-generating gazes that touch it is merely the Deleuzian location of this painting in India. We read this painting as a milieu within a milieu, both producing descriptions that inflect on the Original Milieu of India, capitalised here in the manner of the Biblical Original sin (and not in the anthropological sense).
The presence of the Jahapanah is not merely transcendental. He is afforded a special, central place in the picture, but is not seen to be directing his fleet, an affirmation that the monarch may be touched by administrative affairs only of a certain kind. One may choose to read in this the artists’ need (or mandate perhaps?) to affirm Akbar’s divine right as monarch, but I figure my independence in reading by exercising it as such – the monarch affirms a position of labour, segmented away from one’s Essence, more objectively – leisure. This however is not a historically accurate reading. Perhaps one might remove the picture from its context, resulting in the formation of a timeless, spaceless object, of Schopenhauerian import, asymptotically close to something that is not touched by cultural and historical conditioning.
The presence of elephants creates a moment of aesthetic difference. This is created when the viewer first notices the darker, against the lighter shade, but then is struck by the realisation of scale that these vessels probably possessed. The ability to create a system that allows for such scale has been replicated in the past, but the nature of the Indian state at the time allowed for the banalization of these processes, far before the Dutch invented the modern corporation, and by extension, the philological footprint of early modernity. Whether or not this is a production process that holds up to the scrutiny of a solarpunkist is an open question, but the picture alone corroborates a more organic form of industry, at least on the banks of the Yamuna, where these boats have likely originated.
The picture also represents several smaller figures that are integral to our reading of this miniature. The entourage represents evidence of the “teeming millions” of India. This phrase, though coined by colonial forces, gives us a clue as to the motivation of the colonial apparatus. A radical claim we could make in this context is the following – subjugating the teeming millions was the primary motivation of the apparatus.
Influenced by nth order cybernetics and Benoit Mandelbrot’s chaos theory, modern philosophical discourse has fetishized the idea of emergence. Emergence, it seems, is a plausible explanatory framework for phenomena in a very general way. The colonial endeavour in India shifted its stance to one of subjugation and empire at some “inflection” point”, or a point of “emergence” as we read it today, that, read retroactively, became a collective phenomenon among the colonial class. One may claim, in the form of Nietzsche’s psychoanalysis-adjoined method, that the source of the colonial desire or drive specific to the subcontinent is placed in the need to subjugate the “teeming millions”, the achievement of which justifies the symbolic addition of the Indian Jewel in the British Crown. Africa and America were wilderness, but the wilderness of Delhi was of a different order, one that could be dealt with through a different, distinctly Indian colonialism and subjugation, influenced in greater effect by processes of hyperstition (a term popularised by members of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), pointing to objects that come into existence through some form of fiction) in the creation of colonial objects of desire, and its ontology of economization (take for example, indigo, or opium).
The East of Akbar’s kingdom probably denotes modern – day Bihar and Bengal. The ethereal backdrop of water is fitting both for aesthetic and economic reasons. The water superhighway of the Ganges was highly developed at the time and continued to be so far into the future. It is important to note that the sense of permanence that the emperor’s vessel and the entourage exude, despite the tumultuous aquatic medium, is a distinct posture of assumed transcendent stability found in most miniature paintings of the time. The tranquil Ganga that Tagore found often would have been upended by the riverine naval regalia of the royal train.
It seems that reading the painting makes us very aware of the dissonance between realism and a reconstructed historical record. We must remember that the picture comes from Akbarnama, a semi – historical record that is more a memoir than a history book. A narrative is distinct from an endeavour of description, the distinction lying in its respective treatment of temporal flow – which is far more forcefully linear in the case of historical description. In its context, the painting is a pictorial bridge between expositions, rather than a component of a historical montage.
Overarchingly, one gets a sense of flow within stability, a sense of permanence within a journey of impermanence. It is after all an “expedition”, a sense of grandeur within an episode that can easily be rendered banal through regimented history, and a posterity that is branded by the epistemology of the convent school. One wishes to take the view of a person on the bank, watching the party of Jahapanah go by, and breathe colour into both the fictionalisation and the realism, at the infancy of our national consciousness, and take the invitation of this fictional act of incarnation, to deconstruct the fetishized and off-kilter modernity of modern India. We do this not through reminiscences and revivalism, but as militant narrativists committed to the cause of civil society; that is painted, paints and paints itself.
About the Author: Sarbajit Ghosh is a researcher at COMPOST HEAP, a group involved in studying alternative imaginations and futures. He is a mathematician in training, focussing on abstract algebra as a research interest. He carries an intersecting interest in theory and philosophy, specifically Badiou, Deleuze and nascent curiosities in contemporary Marxism.
NICKELED AND DIMED 