Abstract
In recent years, within the concept of the archive there has been an ever-increasing notion that points to a repository for classification, cultural production, a locus for keeping the records of history, a paying tribute to memory, whilst, simultaneously, registering as much as what is kept as what is lost. My paper is a work-in-progress, and, as such, an exploration of what I call a “living archive,” an archive in the making, where, by recourse to a culturally rich repository of images of Indian women as represented by Indian women artists along the twentieth century, I will address women’s invisibility from official history. Generationally arranged, my choice of painters includes Sunayani Devi (1875-1962), Amrita Sher-Gil (1913-1941) and Nalini Malani (1946-). Women artists in all these cases were privileged and educated, and developed a career in the Fine Arts. They all show a great interest and concern in the role of women within society, and they have portrayed and captured women and women’s relations and work with attention. In most cases, they exhibit a feminist or proto-feminist awareness. From the visual format of the canvas both in historical perspective and at present, I will attempt to discuss how their work and their valuable repository of images is certainly evidence of significant historical and cultural change.
Highlights
RESUMEN Un archivo viviente: La ausencia de las mujeres y la reinscripción del género en la nación a través de la pintura
This paper suggests that sexuality, as a category of analysis, is fundamental in unraveling the workings of nationalism in South Asia
My approach to the paintings in this paper aims at complementing how scholars of post-coloniality have theorized and understood women’s voices vis-à-vis discourses on nationalism
Summary
RESUMEN Un archivo viviente: La ausencia de las mujeres y la reinscripción del género en la nación a través de la pintura. PALABRAS CLAVE: archivo, representación, pintura, pintoras de la India, Sunayani Devi, Amrita Sher-Gil, Nalini Malani, nación India. In her seminal essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1983), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak raises critical questions about the way in which imperial, nationalist, and even anti-colonial and alternative theories have played a complicit role in maintaining the silence of the subaltern. I will consider the “Subaltern” as woman, today the inclusion of women within subalternity is a contested idea, considering that there are very many “categories” of subalterns Due to their absence, I view Indian women as occupying an important position in the archive, an “empty signifier” which can be filled by an exploited domestic worker, a tribal farm labourer, or even a bourgeois woman
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