[Reader-list] Documenta again

[Rana Dasgupta]

Dear All

I am responding to some of the recent postings on the
Documenta 11 Platform in Delhi.  

Firstly I would like to correct what I regard as a
couple of factual and interpretive errors.  Most
obvious and easy to rectify is Okwui Enwezor’s
attribution of my email about the conference to Monica
Narula.  (This email was re-posted by Ms Narula to the
Nettime list as part of a digest of Sarai postings on
the subject, which is how the misunderstanding may
have arisen.)  Since my mail was perhaps the most
critical of the conference from among those based in
Delhi, the majority of Mr Enwezor’s comments should
have been addressed to me, not to Ms Narula.  I
address some of these comments below.

Next, I think it is important to restore to this
debate the context of the place in which this
discussion has appeared.  The Sarai reader list is
relatively new and the most active contributors are
still those associated with Sarai itself in Delhi
(this was particularly the case up to the time of the
Documenta conference).  Within such a community one
assumes a certain set of shared experiences and
meanings which disappear when the raw words are
exported.  

I would cite as illustration Ms Narula’s comment about
the inaccessibility of the Habitat Centre where the
conference was hosted.  This was in the context of an
email publicising the event to the Sarai community and
exhorting its members to attend (“The more
interesting, and i think for some readers of the list,
more pertinent event - is the series of talks that are
happening in an Auditorium”).  In my reading of the
mail, it encouraged readers to attend the conference
in spite of any misgivings they may have had about the
elite character of its location (which she also
described as a “pleasantly designed office and
cultural complex”).  This elite character is
manifested less in active exclusion than in a rather
intangible configuration of architecture, city
location, dress, behavioural norms etc, but is still
relevant information for those planning to attend. 
But when such local notes become part of a
metanarrative of “colonial exoticism” (to quote Philip
Pocock) they have rather lost their sense.  

My own comments about the conference on which much of
Mr Enwezor’s response focused also needed to be seen
in the context of a multitude of local offline
discussions which arose as a result of the sessions,
and in which it was taken for granted (as Raqs Media
Collective made clear in their response to Philip
Pocock’s last mail) (1) that the platform was a
stimulating and welcome intervention in Delhi’s
intellectual and cultural life, and (2) that holding
discussions in places such as this was infinitely
preferable to not doing so.  (I had begun my mail with
an account of this context when a posting appeared
from Shuddhabrata Sengupta which made my introduction
superfluous.)  This context was again completely lost
when they became part of Mr Pocock’s agenda, which
seemed to come dangerously close to the colonial
condescension he is so critical of (e.g. his concern
for the apparently supine Indians who would be
defenceless if he were not present to stand up to the
colonial invaders – “the truthseekers are reconciling
to import all the talent for the documenta dehli
platform like coloniasts and i have no way of
participating from here”.  Although I did appreciate
his exceptionally evil-sounding coinage, “coloniast”,
which I imagine is analogous to “pederast”.)

Within this context I would stand by the basic point I
was making in my posting, which had to do with the
problems of communication that existed between local
and visiting attendees.  The desire that visiting
scholars engage more closely with local issues is not
based on an assumption that, as Mr Enwezor puts it,
intellectuals must be exhaustively “knowing, worldly,
and in full possession of knowledge of all places on
this planet”, nor, I think, is it an example of what
he calls “Indocentrism”.  Rather it is to state that
if Documenta is to seek to establish a “platform” for
meaningful communication between international
scholars and a diverse audience in a place like Delhi
it must not only acknowledge the divergent access to
information, travel etc that broadly separates the two
groups (with exceptions on both sides, naturally) but
also take upon itself the responsibility for closing
the resultant communication gap.  It would be tedious
to enumerate all the forms of power enjoyed by the
formal discourse of western-based artists and scholars
presenting in Delhi.  Nevertheless, this power has
certain implications for how local audiences assess
the relative authority of their own discourse and that
of the visitors.  It is in the hands of those that
possess this power, rather than of those that do not,
to find ways in which any obstacle it might present to
true communication can be defused.  One way that this
can be done is by seeking to understand the local
context in which discussions about “truth and
reconciliation” might take place.  

The intention of my comment about the “jetsetting
academic from New York” was not to make a personal
attack or to score easy points.  I apologise if that
was the effect.  However, I think it should be
remembered that this authority enjoyed by – for
instance – an American academic visiting Delhi rests
very significantly on his/her mobility and that the
actual ordeals of economy class travel do nothing to
diminish this.  

Let me finish by admitting that I was indeed unable to
attend the whole conference, so Mr Enwezor’s “In fact,
if she [Monica Narula] had cared to stay through the
course of the conference” is completely apt.  I wrote
in a spirit of discussion and made no claims of
finality.  But such discussions sometimes go much
further than one imagined.  When I see the ways in
which Mr Pocock deploys my words, I cannot help
thinking that this discussion has admirably dramatised
some of the problems of meaning and location that are
its subject.  

R


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