[Reader-list] Documenta in Delhi

[Rana Dasgupta]

Just wanted to build on Shuddha’s last point about the
‘Asymmetry of Ignorance’ at Documenta.

Like him I was somewhat dismayed at the general
ignorance about India on the part of the visiting
artists and scholars, particularly given the title:
"Experiments with Truth: Transitional Justice and The
Process of Truth and Reconciliation".  

Partition, an event that fell squarely under this
rubric, was something they had little conception of
("I never knew it was such a big deal" said one
visitor) and the Babri Masjid events, equally relevant
to 'Reconciliation', had to be explained from scratch.
 In the light of this, the determination to discuss
"Truth and Reconciliation" in "New Delhi" "because of
Gandhi" seemed a bit Hollywood.  There seemed to have
been no briefing on any of these issues by Documenta
themselves and very few gestures were made in
presentations towards things South Asian.  They wanted
to talk about 'global' cases such as Rwanda and South
Africa - and Delhi was just a place to do so.  On the
whole there was not enough shared ground between
locals and globals for much flow of knowledge back
into Documenta’s own thinking.  

For me this demonstrated well the imperviousness of
the agenda of the imperial academic/artistic network
to the truly local.  The imperial agenda might be
deeply concerned with – I hate this word but anyway –
the Other – as an object of concern and suspicion, as
a bleeding object of melancholic and self-righteous
contemplation, or as a receptacle for charitable
feelings.  But that Other has already been constitued
by certain iconic places and personalities by the
imperial meaning system (from CNN to university
departments), and one should not mistake the
fascination for these things for a bucolic curiosity
in just anything faraway.  In fact this
always-already-constituted nature of the Other makes
the voice of the local almost unheard in the imperial
fanfare.

The claim of some exceptional artists and academics to
‘authentic’ knowledge based on their courageous
journey from far-off places to NYU or Columbia gives
them a special platform within this complex; but as
NYU professor Manthia Diawara made clear at Documenta,
even these people must make highly strategic
compromises with the structures they work within in
order to be listened to (“if I print a book in Africa,
no one’s going to read it, but if I print a book
through NYU Press it’s a masterpiece”).  It is clearly
not enough to say intelligent things for one’s thought
to impact at the global level.  When Partition or the
Babri Masjid are so clearly not an important part of
the imperial meaning system it’s difficult to imagine
what language could be employed here in Delhi that
would have an impact on the work, concerns or
self-conception of Documenta.

Given one’s inevitable involvement in a global space
as soon as the Internet becomes one’s platform, I
think these questions of how one communicates across
this divide and speaks meaningfully to audiences that
have already written the script for the speaking other
(the pathos of inequality, the pathos of disappearing
traditions, the high drama of competing imperial
philosophies etc etc) become important for us all.

Of course at some level this inability to communicate
arises out of simpler stories of gaps of language and
wealth.  One New York academic I was speaking to on
the last evening handed her card to a local Delhiite
with a sincere though unschooled interest in the
issues of the conference, asking him 'Are you often in
New York?'  Even before his incredulous ‘No’ she must
have known the answer, but maybe it’s easier for the
jetsetting academic to pretend she thinks that
everyone is a jetsetter.  Otherwise the inequality of
the discourses that purport to address equality and
reconciliation becomes too obvious.




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