Talk by Ayesha Matthan (History of Art, Cornell University)

This talk looks at a portrayal of the working classes in Bombay/Mumbai/Bambai between the 1970s and 1990s by pictorialist photographers such as Foy Nissen, Pablo Bartholomew, Raghubir Singh, Raghu Rai, Ketaki Sheth, Sooni Taraporevala, and Henning Stegmüller. It asks in what ways a photographic construction of a day in the life of the laboring population – “speculations on a shirt” relates to temporality, alienation, capitalism, religion and culture, class, and caste. This everyday photographic ecology of working-class life–of chawls, commuting, waiting, laboring, exhaustion, sleeping, and homelessness, to leisure, exhilaration, and expression occupies complex ground in a city that is seen as a “landscape of contradictions” (Preeti Chopra, 2011). These photographs were taken around a time when other artists -- painters Bhupen Khakhar, Gieve Patel, and Sudhir Patwardhan also painted everyday scenes featuring working-class migrants in the city. What happens when artists of different genres attempt to deprofessionalize and desacralize their art and document the working class populace and the everyday? (Sonal Khullar, 2018) It will situate these images at a time when the city was witness to the steady decline of the Communist stronghold among the working classes after the death of the Communist Party of India (CPI) leader Krishna Desai in Bombay, moving to embrace the Shiv Sena Party with its anti-migrant rhetoric, and liberalization and deindustrialization after the Great Textile Mill Strike of 1982. Finally, it will analyze these representations of the general, nameless working-class demographic in juxtaposition to the visual specifics in the individual photographs of the radical Dalit poet and co-founder of Dalit Panthers, Namdeo Dhasal (1949-2014).  *Title taken from Namdeo Dhasal’s eponymously titled poem (trans. Dilip Chitre from the Marathi)

Ayesha Matthan is a PhD candidate in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University. She has degrees in Literature in English, Journalism, and Visual Studies from St Stephen’s College, Delhi; Asian College of Journalism in Chennai; and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, respectively. She has worked with The Hindu as an arts journalist, The Alkazi Foundation for the Arts as a research scholar, and India Foundation for the Arts as a communications editor.  Her PhD dissertation is tentatively titled “Looking for Bombay/Mumbai/Bambai: Photography, Identity, and the City, 1970s-1990s.” She also works now and then at the Johnson Museum as a Curatorial Assistant to preserve her sanity from the PhD madness.

Image: Sooni Taraporevala, “Streetside Services, Palmist”, Bombay 1977