Of cities, symbols and spaces

What are cultural symbols? How are they shaped, used and reused? What do they stand for? How do these symbols express ideologies, social structures and represent specific aspects of a culture? What happens when these symbols are used in an urban public space? What role does heritage play in shaping culture of a community/communities? These questions popped up in my mind while participating in the art events in the city last week as part of the second edition of Pune Biennale which is planned to open in February 2015. The theme for this year's biennale is 'Heritage'. A city's heritage. In this case, Pune's heritage. The Biennale was formally inaugurated by the mayor of thecity on November 22, 2014 which was followed by an illustrated talk by Bose Krishnamachari, the founder director of Kochi Muziris Biennale.

Since the focus of the Biennale is on site specific art practices, a day prior to the formal inauguration of this mega-event in Pune, a street art intervention was carried out by art students under the mentorship of four artists: Raju Sutar, Popat Mane, Rucha Kulkarni and Rupesh Hirugade. The intervention took place in the central part of the city and the site that was chosen was the outer wall of the girls' hostel of thegovernment engineering college near Shivajinagar. Five teams worked together to come up with narratives that were to capture the essence of the city. While representing the everyday life and culture ofPune, the narratives employed familiar symbols such as eminent structures, roads, hills, vehicles, attires etc. There were five such panels, each panel had a separate story to tell. A panel depicting superheros with traditional headgears is a humorous take on Puneri attitude that can not be surpassed by any other cultural community! Another panel showcases the traffic of Pune in the backdrop of historical structures and modern apartments while paying an ode to Puneri patis (boards that give weird instructions to customers, pedestrians and people in general outside their houses). The next panel portrayed a common city dweller with symbols such as PMT bus, cycle and autorickshaw and image of a carved wooden window reminding of old wadas (old mansion like residential structures) in Pune. Juxtaposing with that there was a city, uprooted, almost floating but with a series of solid blocks of high towers covering flattened hills. The work that was included at the last moment captured the divided self of the city; animal world, environment and the creative power of the nature on one hand and skull and guns depicting the destructive force and violence existing in the society.

Photo courtesy: Abhay Varpe

The process was laborious, in many ways. Initially, the Biennale team contacted different art colleges across Pune, interacted with the students and the faculty, called for entries for this specific art work. Students from Abhinav Kala Mahavidyalay, Vishwakarma Creative-i Institute and Bharati Vidyapeeth Fine Arts College submitted their drawings and sketches around the theme of 'Heritage' and five drawings were selected out of some 60 odd applications by the selection committee of the artists. It is exciting to see that students whose drawings did not reach the final stage, teamed up with the finalists in order to be part of the final act. Around hundred students from these three art colleges and Akanksha Foundation were present on the site. The site, a road side compound wall in stone, had to be cleaned off layers of dirt, washed and whitewashed to be prepared for the actual paintings. The participating students finished this task with unparalleled enthusiasm and then immersed into painting the walls with splashes of bright colours following the final drawings and instructions from the artists. It took them almost two days to complete the paintings and was taken note of by the artists community, general public and the media. Through this project, the students received a live experience of working in a public space which helped them formulate their thoughts on art practice as well as interact about their ideas, inspirations and thought processes with the artists, writers and general public. 

Photo courtesy: Abhay Varpe


Photo courtesy: Abhay Varpe


Given this context, it would be important to inquire into the impressions that this street art intervention had on the minds of the people. An art intervention refers to an act of entering into a location, situation or artwork in an attempt to alter the existing understanding of art practice and stir the present state of affairs in the art field. Therefore, such projects could have the potential of questioning the traditional boundaries of art practice but in this case what it brings forth are contestations and ideological positionings. Located in today's context, all these narratives dealt with a sense of loss,memory, in certain cases even nostalgia. But what happens in the process is that one realizes that this memory is selective in nature. The symbols that keep appearing and re-appearing in all these wall paintings represent a certain cultural imagination. There are some symbols which are universally accepted and acquired but there are many that carry meanings which are culture specific. The images of Shaniwarwada, Puneri pagadi or headgear, old wada windows evoke the memory of historical past of Brahmanical rulers, the Peshwas. The Peshwas, Chittapavan brahmins and the de facto administrators of Maratha kingdom, ruled for less than hundred years and have influenced the psyche of Pune city for more than three hundred years. It is, therefore, pertinent to see here what happens when these cultural symbols are placed in a public space like a citystreet and what roles do they play. For example, in one of the paintings, a PMT bus is shown with a reflection of Shaniwarwada onthe right side of the window and in the left side, a bus driver wearing Peshwai headgear. The image completely negates the caste identity of the bus driver who would mostly be from a bahujan caste. At the same time, the image of Shaniwarwada, residential and official quarters of the Peshwas, re-appears on the Shaniwarwada-bound bus,again as an architectural symbol of brahmanical rule and dominance. Historically, their caste status assured their supremacy over the institutions of religion, administration and landed aristocracy recruited from Brahmin caste and as a result they became the 'custodians' of religion, culture and power. The most perturbing fact is that even today the entire city revolves around these cultural symbols and it still captures the imagination of young artists. Why still this one-sided view of cultural heritage is preserved, practiced and passed on in the art field as well as art education system is the moot question. 

In this process, the dominant upper caste ideology appropriates the public space and popular imagination about the heritage of a city. A public space articulates complex dialogues of power, culture and social fabric while contributing to the discourse around the cultural history of the city. The way these predominantly brahmanical cultural symbols are produced and circulated also gets reflected in the works of art by these participating students. It tends to homogenize the cultural experience for a society with complex and unequal structures. This also raises the question why there are no other symbols that are considered to be representing the majority in the city and their culture/s. When the city has a rich history of different social and cultural movements, why can't we have/create new cultural symbols? The majority of the art students come from bahujan castes/communities so would it not be possible to go beyond these dominant cultural symbols? What are the alternatives available to us? Are there symbols which are more inclusive, representative and democratic?

(A longer version of this article was published in The Baroda Pamphlet, November-December 2014, Vadodara)