#rustom bharucha

[absurdlakefront]

What is needed are not better ‘‘maps of the future’’ but more ‘‘adequate maps of the present,’’ which can inspire the most effective means of activating the desire for a more humane world.

Rustom Bharucha,  ‘‘Contextualizing Utopias: Reflections on Remapping the Present,’’ Theater 26, 1995

[imageswithoutbodies-blog]

If museums are repositories of the past, they risk being redundant in countries like India, where the past is alive in any number of unprecedented ways. Mutating, hybridising, and getting juxtaposed with modern and postmodern incursions in our public sphere, the past is less a repository of seemingly eternal resources than a dynamic, even interruptive element in the shaping of new narratives. The 'pre-modern' can catalyse conflicting modernities, as indeed, the 'folk' can defy the nomenclature of 'folklore' by assuming, if not asserting, a contemporary significance.

The 'Indian past', I would argue, challenges the very grammatology of the Euro-American museum structure (and its non-western derivations), which continue to rely on the periodisation, classification, and categorisation of its artefacts...

The 'new Asian museum', it seems to me, will need to dismantle this projection of a factitious 'past' by exploring new imaginaries, in which multiple times - indeed, multiple pasts - can be staggered rather than juxtaposed through discrete combinations. New principles of visualising 'Asia' could also be explored by drawing on the ecological principles that are embedded in traditional forms - principles relating to erasure, renewal and impermanence, as can be discerned in the rich gamut of ritual and cultural practices like kolams (traditional floor-drawings).

- Rustom Bharucha, 'Beyond the Box', Third Text, 14:52, pp 11-19. 

Ravi Varma (1848-1906), Gallery of Musicians, 1889, oil on canvas, 57.2 x 71.1cm, Jayachamarajendra Art Gallery (Mysore)