THE POLITICS OF THE SELF:
NASREEN MOHAMEDI AND HANSA WADKAR
The problematic relationship between global modernity and national identity were the dominant theme of Indian artist of all genre’s may it be visual art, literature or cinema to some extend through the 20th century as indeed of arts of the Third World in general. Modernity, associated with western capitalism and colonial expansion, has involved international communication on an unprecedented scale, giving artists unlimited access to art from all ages and lands. The Industrial Revolution, which ushered in the modern age in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, uprooted communities and undermined social cohesion. In the 1920s, India was still an essentially non- industrial country in which social cohesion had not yet broken down. While colonial rule gave rise to a crisis in cultural identity, this did not necessarily lead to the western sense of alienation of the self. Paradoxically, de- colonization made Indian artist more, rather than less, conscious of their Indian identity as they confronted global modernity. Indeed, the tensions generated by the conflicting demands of global modernity and national specificity became a major preoccupation of Third World artists [1]. The subcontinent’s independence was achieved in 1947 at the cost of the partitioning the country into two separate states, India and Pakistan [2]. The historian Gyanendra Pandey suggests that the 1947 Partition of India appears even more “unhistorical” and inexplicable. Partition, indeed, did not involve industrialized slaughter commanded at distance but “a hand-to-hand, face to-face destruction, frequently involving neighbor against neighbor.” The drawing of the Partition line, while heralding the birth of two nation-states, unleashed a history of war and confrontation unresolved to the present. To recover Partition as a moment of nationalization remains a deeply contested task [3]. With such political turmoil and with an upsurge need of a national identity one makes an even more censorious political choice to work on accounts of one’s life and cater to the needs of domesticity of oneself and immediate surrounding.
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