Why should art and diaspora be thought about together?

Given the obvious diversity amongst them, it is probably inaccurate to say that South Asian artists can be considered as a coherent group under the diaspora heading, and this is equally true of the body of their art works, which diverges very widely indeed. It has not always been the case that these artists have chosen to communicate something of their South Asian identities through their art practices, or to agree that “Indian”, “Pakistani”, “Bengali” or “Ugandan-Asian” labels, for example, should be associated with their art.

But the idea of diaspora is still an important one since the written history of these individuals has often circled around this theme and other issues to do with diaspora identities; it helps us to understand something about their artistic choices, inspirations, beliefs, politics and so on.

The painting Journey by Amal Ghosh draws heavily on his author's experience of migration and travels between India and England. The themes of journey and transition are prevalent throughout Ghosh's works.

Amal Ghosh was born in Calcutta and came to England in the 1960s. Having been trained in European classical art in India, it was in the UK that, paradoxically, he became acquainted with his own cultural heritage.

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Journey, Amal Ghosh, 1994

At certain points in their impressive record of exhibitions, direct considerations about cultural difference and “Asianness” have often played a role. But even if these artists themselves have not directly used art to encourage us to think about their unique histories of migration and cultural continuity, the conditions in which they have been received, criticised, and responded to in modern Britain still place diaspora and cultural difference quite centrally in our view of this recent art history.

How did this history of art begin?

The forerunners to today’s practising artists mostly arrived in Britain in the late 1950s and 1960s, and came into a social and artistic climate much different from that of today. Although in all cases they didn’t want to stay in Britain for more than a few years, these earlier artists were intent on becoming an integral part of the exciting, exploding art “scene” centred around London, hoping to feature amongst white artists in the frequent international exhibitions that had come to make Britain a global centre for modern art. But this ambition would only be partly realised, for reasons historians and some of the artists would come to attribute to institutional racism, and due to attitudes that artists themselves later set out explicitly to confront.

Those early individuals were mostly painters and in many cases sojourners to this country, such as Francis Newton Souza (1923-2001) who arrived in 1949, Ivan Peries, Avinash Chandra (1931-1991), and Anwar Shemza. On the face of them, their paintings and sculpture looked much like those the art world was praising; in style and subject matter they were influenced by widely-admired artists whose art historical importance was firmly accepted. Souza’s expressionistic style and borrowings from Roman Catholic and Byzantine imagery were shown frequently in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and widely talked about. Avinash Chandra, a participant in the important 1958 Gallery One show, Seven Indian Painters , produced erotic, figurative images, scratched into impasto layers of paint on canvas, not entirely unlike those of Willem de Kooning, popular in mainstream art circles in the United States. Ivan Peries’ paintings featuring women bathers were not greatly dissimilar from those by the massively acclaimed Gauguin, whose paintings made on location in Tahiti were considered to be foundational in the development of modern art.

But the people who wrote about these artists at that time were keen to emphasise their South Asian background, or as the critic and artist Rasheed Araeen has put it, to invent an ethnicity for their art works, such as a “quality of Indianness”. For example, critics jumped to the conclusion that Chandra was trying to capture the same kind of celebration of sexuality found in temple sculpture at Khajuraho. It has been suggested that this had the effect of circumscribing their contribution to the history of modern art, to create a perception of them as less worthwhile, as secondary and derivative, and to place them at its margins.

Why and when did being a specifically South Asian artist in Britain become a hot topic?

By the time of the 1980s, artists found ways of contesting and confronting attitudes of racism, encouraging art historians, critics and the gallery-going public to find alternative ways to approach and understand their art works. In many cases this meant they placed references to their South Asian connections very boldly at the centre of their works. Certain artists had had enough of trying to skirt around the very visible fact of their difference in culture and colour from Britain’s white majority, and wanted the public to accept them and their art in ways they could choose for themselves. Interacting with those of other diasporas (namely of Caribbean and African descent) became significant at this time, and a string of exhibitions took place in which black and Asian artists displayed together – the most widely publicised and debated being The Other Story (Hayward Gallery, 1989) – claiming that social conditions had given rise to them experiencing their situation in the arts in roughly similar ways. Looking at this kind of sharing of artistic ideas, experiences and resources amongst people of various diasporas gives a strong background to knowing how certain artists chose to represent themselves as simultaneously British and South Asian.

For this reason, there were many similarities amongst what black and Asian people intended their art to mean. Asian artists pursued what became known as a “politics of identity” that mirrored what those artists of other diasporas had chosen to adopt. But alongside this, there are still important details linked with heritage and ethnicity which set Asian works aside generally from those by their black contemporaries.

Balraj Khanna’s paintings and drawings are typical in this regard, and the narrative, graphic works of Manjeet Lamba, and murals by Shanti Panchal. These re-state their artists’ ostensibly “Asian” origins, identities and influences by using the human figure as a focus for personal, collective and historical narratives. They have also used their art to make interesting, often quite critical and scathing comments on the ways Asian people have been unfairly represented in the European history of art. An array of explicit visual references to ritual, performance and religious art from South Asia has been used to make this both explicit and deeply interesting visually. Gurminder Sikand has recalled the gods and goddesses of Hindu mythology in her multi-headed, multi-limbed figures, as well as borrowing and reusing the decorative border designs made by women of the Mithila region of southern India. Much in the same way as the metallic, kinetic sculpture of Sokari Douglas-Camp has invoked Nigerian masquerade, the play of Hindu-derived signs, as well as Egyptian ones, in the sculpture of Dhruva Mistry, and of the Hindu deity, Kali, in the painting and collage of Sutapa Biswas are characteristic of this ongoing visual “conversation” with forms and meanings which are distinct from those of “Western” art. These and other art works, such as the cut-out collage and painted silhouettes by Salim Arif, offer instances of deep familiarity with historically, geographically and culturally distinctive visual materials and meanings.

It is also worth remembering that most of these artists have been playing with audiences, to confuse and confound the expectation that their work would somehow “speak” the fact of their maker being of the Asian diaspora. This might be less so with Dhruva Mistry say, who became the youngest ever member of the Royal Academy and has since resettled in India, than Chila Kumari Burman or Sutapa Biswas, who presented herself as a “black” artist from 1985 in the group exhibition The Thin Black Line – although like many of her immediate peers, Biswas developed a wide repertoire in the 1990s, moving away from anti-racist “art activism” as Eddie Chambers has termed it, to a more detailed questioning of identity, obvious in her photographic series “Synapse” (The Photographer’s Gallery, 1992). One artist who is still ambiguous in this regard is the sculptor Anish Kapoor, whose early organic and geological forms dusted in bright, primary pigment, emerged at the same time as overtly political artists, before his limestone, fibreglass and polished steel sculptures became progressively larger, yet more elusive, both physically and conceptually. After winning the Turner Prize in 1991, Kapoor has successfully negotiated public perceptions about the “Indianness” of his interests to form a huge international reputation.

An artist who perhaps treads more stealthily between anti-colonial politics, public demands for exotic or “primitive” art, and his own poetic and modernist concerns with the monumental, sculptural and textural qualities of wood carving, is Juginder Lamba. Although Lamba was partly responsible for the first work of documentation in which the grouping of artists of several diasporas was named as a “black arts movement”, in his later career he has become less directly concerned with a separatist politics, and more taken with a sophisticated exploration of Asian artistic heritage. Like Lamba, painter and graphic artist, Amal Ghosh, has explored the plural, non-prescriptive ways in which what he describes as “the universal story…of the mysterious depths of the human psyche” is taken to shape the narrative of his densely worked drawings and figurative schemes based on fields of deep colour, to contemplate subtle ways in which memories and myths of migration can become relevant for contemporary art practice.