Women and their world

Just as in life, so in art, why do women choose as their subject issues that impact them most? Not politics in a general sense, nor society in the larger ambit, but subjects that feed off these but are almost always closer to home? Take Arpita Singh, whose sense of displaced dissonance and unreality is captured in the manner in which she uses the female body in a corporeal manner - diseased, aged, non-reproductive - as the final bastion in the homestead offering resistance to the male domination of a world of horror and violence. There is the cold glint of steel from guns and low-flying planes that threaten the familiar, but the intimacy with which she weaves these alien objects in a domestic space brings home the impact of a botched up world turned topsy-turvy. As a commenter who uses art as her medium of expression, Singh is at the top of her class.

Gender issues and those related to it through class, discrimination and race are the subjects, often, of women artists such as Nalini Malani who refers to abuse often in her videos and shadow installations. Her heroines come from the culture of mythology but she portrays them through an inverted lens, mixing the popular with the alternate - Sita and Medea, Radha and Cassandra and what they actually represent to her. It is the same issues, in vastly different ways, that Navjot Altaf, or Bharti Kher, or Anju Dodiya, reflect over. Zarina Hashmi's narrative of geographies is mapped through homes and neighbourhoods where the loss is most poignant and quiet - mappings not of shifting powers but heartbreaking forfeitures, of the small as opposed to the great.

The female narrative has always played second fiddle to the male point of view, which has tended to be patriarchal and dominative. Whether in writings, cinema or theatre, women have tended to offer an alternate perspective that is the more surprising for its absence over the years. As in literature, so in art too, these resonances question assumptions. This ability to add voices to a narrative has added a fresh dimension to perspectives in art not just nationally but internationally. While the male gaze has tended to celebrate the feminine form while eliminating its mind, the female gaze is an all encompassing one, even when it is angry. It is not marked by the absence of one gender, but in bringing the discourse closer to home, inevitably it culminates in troublesome debates.

To an extent, what occurs in the studio is also reflected in external platforms - fewer female authoritative figures as curators, writers and promoters and, in these days of calls for parity, a continuing weak fiscal presence. Yet, changes are in the making and the female voice, though not yet strident - nor, I am reminded often, desirous of such stridency - is beginning to be more strongly seen and felt, and our own Shilpa Gupta, Anita Dube, Sheba Chhachhi, Pushpamala N and Dayanita Singh are adding to a discourse in ways that might not have been feasible in the time of Sunayani Devi or, even, Amrita Sher-Gil - remember, she sold not at all at a time when patronage was strictly manipulated by and restricted to the male comptroller of purse strings.

Pablo Picasso gave us the incomparable Guernica about war and loss, and A Ramachandran depicted the same subject in his Kalinga War, but it took a Meera Mukherjee to depict Ashoka as a dejected victor, represented in one of the greatest Indian sculptures of the 20th century - fortunately accessible to us in New Delhi's ITC Maurya, where it triumphs over its Nandiya Gardens. It is the result of an artist's sensitivity to life's immediacy, and that understanding could only have come from a woman artist.

Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic. These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated