85out of focus · booksFEBRUARY 2018fact that these women’s perspectives
have been disregarded. Again, a simple
comparison with the United States is
instructive. Can we imagine a white
artist taking such a photograph of black
maids—and being lauded for it?
Pilgrims on Trichy Hill (1996), thank-
fully not included in the show, lays out
the matter more starkly. The pleasing,
blurred background of this image de-
picts rolling hills that speak to tourist
fantasies. But blocking the view, lit by
a harsh flash, is a family of barefoot
pilgrims. This picture is less a portrait
than an impasse. Singh has made little
effort to tease out the pilgrims’ state
of mind, or even put them at ease.
Their features have been recorded, not
observed. Police mug shots are more
tender.
There are several similar images on
display at the museum, and countless
others in Singh’s photo books (those are
usually more formally sophisticated).
Together, they comprise a sort of
mythopoetic version of India: a country
of patterns and landscapes and colours
and tropes, but very little human per-
sonality, or rather, with many humans
whose personalities have been muted.
This muting is what critics variously
interpret as a turn away from represen-
tation, or celebration of India’s colour.
The matter is really more simple. Singh
came of age at a difficult moment in
Indian history. By the 1960s, the hopes
sparked by Independence had given
way to a sense of crisis, or rather a feel-
ing that the country—with colonial
levels of inequity, mired by corruption,
and still largely casteist in its outlook—
was drifting from crisis to crisis. VS
Naipaul captured this period in India: A
Wounded Civilization (1976).
In the book’s third section, which
broadly focusses on culture, Naipaul
diagnoses a peculiar neurosis among
the country’s middle-class artists and
intellectuals; they had grown obsessed
with half-baked notions of Indian cul-
ture and antiquity. Naipaul correctly
felt that this was a coping mechanism.
As a cultural abstraction, India was
marvellous and comforting, whereas
the country’s social reality was over-
whelming and wretched. By fixating on
the country’s past, then, the artists andintellectuals could ignore the challenge
of developing empathy for people out-
side their class and caste.
Such cultural myths deform the ar-
tistic imagination. You cannot describe
a society when you only see a tiny part
of it. RK Narayan—who later wrote an
admiring introduction to Singh’s photo
book Tamil Nadu (1996)—is a good ex-
ample. In a telling passage, Naipaul dis-
cusses reading Narayan’s comic novel
Mr. Sampath before and during his visit
to India. The book is about a journal-
ist, who, failing to bring about change
through his newspaper, rejects political
engagement for a sort of enlightened
pseudo-Hindu passiveness.
The story, charming when read in
England, felt terribly escapist in local
conditions. In India, Naipaul saw that
the journalist’s inner retreat was not,
or not only, silly, but a reflection of Na-
rayan’s own temperament and belief.
“But India will go on,” Narayan once
told Naipaul, a phrase the latter returns
to again and again in his book.
Narayan’s logic was that India eter-
nally renews itself after defeats and
destruction; in this cosmic scheme, the
individual has a minor role to play and
is, in fact, absolved of all responsibility.
Singh, who belonged to a younger gen-
eration, did not entirely reject change.
And in his later work, especially his
books Calcutta: The Home and The
Street (1988) and Bombay: Gateway of
India (1994), he even acutely registers
transformations: such as the rise of
Dalit political organising and globalisa-
tion. However, he never managed to
develop a genuine interest in individu-
als outside his social class. Up until his
death, he imagined his countrymen as a
backdrop for cultural ideas.
Sometimes they were equated with
colour, as when he claimed, in an intro-
duction to his photobook River of Color
(1998), that “The fundamental condi-
tion of India is the cycle of rebirth,
in which color is not just an essential
element but also a deep inner source,
reaching into the subcontinent’s long
and rich past.” At other times, his
thinking took on an animistic dimen-
sion. For example, in a 1989 essay, he
wrote that his overarching ambition
was to chart “the geographical culturesuccession raghubir singh