Alisha Sett
Alisha Sett is a writer from Bombay. She is currently pursuing an MA History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. She received an Inlaks Shivdasani scholarship for 2017-2018 to pursue her postgraduate education and research on the history of documentary photography and photographic archives in South Asia. She co-founded the Kashmir Photo Collective in 2014; a digital photo archive preserving images across the Kashmir Valley. She was awarded an Edmond J. Safra Network Fellowship by Harvard University for 2013- 2014 for her work in Kashmir. She holds a BA in Political Science and English Literature from Tufts University where she was also a student of the Program in Narrative and Documentary Practice.
Modernity gets to be what it is because it has its others, and the same goes for art history. Enlightenment and the Enlightenment subject could only be formulated in comparison with the other: the colonized, the heathen, the unenlightened, the superstitious, the slave.
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I spoke with Kajri Jain over Zoom during the early days of the pandemic in 2020. Our conversation began with a discussion of her early fieldwork in the bazaars in India, probing into Jain’s own education and formative experiences. It then detoured into a critical unpacking of art history’s “sacred cows’, the need to fundamentally rethink the discipline’s deep intertwining with colonialism, and the many forms of baggage that non-Western art historians must carry on their shoulders. Jain’s suspicion of medium specific approaches led to a productive dialogue about anthropologist Michael Taussig’s work, theory fetishism, and several facets of contemporary photography in South Asia. We agreed about the need to continue to critique an elitist discourse that misunderstands the importance of religion, and the embedded nature of caste, in any reading of aesthetics and mass culture in the subcontinent. Ending with the question of how to decolonize, provincialize and globalize when engaged in pedagogy, Jain left us with much to contemplate.
- Keywords: art history and decolonialization, Indian aesthetics, secularism and religion, visual anthropology
Alisha Sett is a writer, curator, and educator. She is Course Director for Aesthetics, Criticism and Theory at Jnanapravaha Mumbai and is the initiator of Guncotton and Kashmir Photo Collective. Sett is on the editorial board of Membrana.
Kajri Jain is Professor of Indian Visual Culture and Contemporary Art at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on images at the interface between religion, politics, art, and vernacular business cultures in India; she also writes on contemporary art. Jain’s recent monograph, Gods in the Time of Democracy (Duke University Press, 2021), traces the emergence of monumental iconic sculptures in post-liberalization India; the earlier Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art (Duke University Press, 2007) is about printed icons. Her writing has appeared in Art History, Third Text, Current Anthropology, The Immanent Frame, the Cambridge Companion to Modern Indian Culture, and New Cultural Histories of India.
- Jain, Kajri. 2021a. Gods in the Time of Democracy. Durham: Duke University Press.
- _________. 2021b. “Go Away Closer: Photography, Intermediality, Unevenness.” In Capitalism and the Camera, edited by Kevin Coleman and Daniel James. New York: Verso.
- _________. 2018. “In Which Contemporary Indian Iconopraxis Devours Some Sacred Cows of Art History.” Paper presented at How Secular Is Art? On the Art of Art History in South Asia, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta Cogut Institute for the Humanities Brown University, October 27, 2018. Available online here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=le0IIlwldLE
- _________. 2013. “Pause.” In Here Art Grows on Trees: Simryn Gill, edited by Catherine de Zegher. Gent: Australia Council for the Arts/MER Paper Kunsthalle.
- _________. 2007. Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art. Durham: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822389736
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The pedagogical practices that can be undertaken through photographs can only be imagined on a mass scale when access to images to images is made easy, and when publishers and editors begin to give them weight. This is where the open archive,
the bottom up archive, the archive for all becomes a beginning.
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This is a short history of the Nepal Picture Library (NPL), Nepal’s first large-scale digital photo archive encompassing over 50,000 photographs collected in less than a decade. It is a rare institution; a catalogued visual resource open to the public with scores of intimate family collections, the historic and the mundane captured over decades by photojournalists, and portraits made in photo studios across the country. The essay provides insight into the strength, scope and potential of this community-created archive. Founded and managed by Photo Circle, a platform for photography in Kathmandu, NPL has published books, done several exhibitions in museums and public spaces across Nepal, and exhibited their collections internationally. Tracing the origins and the impact of NPL through a series of interviews, the essays reveals not only the transformative power of their methods of public engagement but also the deep concern for visual culture fostered in their volunteers particularly among photographers serving as amateur archivists.
- Keywords: archive, Kathmandu, Nepal, oral history, public history
Alisha Sett is a writer from Bombay. She is currently pursuing an MA History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. She received an Inlaks Shivdasani scholarship for 2017-2018 to pursue her postgraduate education and research on the history of documentary photography and photographic archives in South Asia. She co-founded the Kashmir Photo Collective in 2014; a digital photo archive preserving images across the Kashmir Valley. She was awarded an Edmond J. Safra Network Fellowship by Harvard University for 2013- 2014 for her work in Kashmir. She holds a BA in Political Science and English Literature from Tufts University where she was also a student of the Program in Narrative and Documentary Practice.
- Acharya, Anurag, 2017. Cheated and silenced, the voters in the Terai will go to the polls with a heavy heart. In: The Record. Available online here. [24.9.2017]
- Adhikari, A., 2014. The Bullet and the Ballot Box. New Delhi: Aleph Book Company.
- Farge, A., 2013. The Allure of the Archives. USA: Yale University.
- Hirsch, J., 1981. Family Photographs: Content, Meaning and Effect. UK: Oxford University Press.
- History for Peace Conference 2015.Teaching History, 2017. Calcutta: Seagull Foundation for the Arts.
- Hutt and Onta, 2017. Political Change and Public Culture in Post-1990 Nepal. USA: Cambridge University Press.
- Jha, P., 2014. Battles of the New Republic. New Delhi: Aleph Book Company.
- Kunreuther, L., 2017. Publics of Heritage and Domestic Archives among Urban Nepalis of the Valley. In: Political Change and Public Culture in Post 1990-Nepal. USA: Cambridge University Press.
- Leichty, M., 2010. Out Here in Kathmandu: Modernity on the Global Periphery. Kathmandu: Martin Chautari Press.
- Nepal Picture Library and Srijnalaya, 2016. Teacher’s Manual for Retelling Histories: Arts Education Program. Kathmandu: Photo Circle and Nepal Picture Library.
- Nepal Picture Library, 2016. Magic Days. Kathmandu: Photo Circle and Nepal Picture Library.
- Nepal Picture Library, 2016. Juju Bhai Dhakwa: Keeper of Memories. Kathmandu: Photo Circle and Nepal Picture Library.
- Onta, P., 1998. A Suggestive History of the First Century of Photographic Consumption in Kathmandu. SINHAS Vol. 3 No. 1.
- Ranciere, J., 2015. The Politics of Aesthetics. USA: Bloomsbury Academic.
- Steedman, C., 2002. Dust: The Archive and Cultural History. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.
PDF format files of individual articles are priced at 6.00EUR. If you are subscribed to Membrana Online, you may purchase PDF access to all content on our site: Membrana PDF
(Online subscription is required!)
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