For almost half a decade I was actively involved in the development sector at the governmental level and it is my personal experience that we have several policies and programmes in place which if actually implemented, in both letter and spirit, can bring about a revolution of sorts and impact lives positively forever.

There is enough money going around and even if the NGOs who get governmental grants really do the work they claim to do we will make significant progress both as a nation and our people will be able to live with dignity and happiness.
Be it the health, education and literacy sector, agriculture and environment, micro banking, women’s empowerment, rural employment, folk and traditional culture et al, I have myself created and curated a large number of exhibitions and publications using posters, paintings and photographs that highlighted the plight of the people at the grassroot level. Thanks to actually travelling to the deep interiors of the country for writing and photographic documentation that I got first-hand experience how most of India lives and how much work actually needs to be done by the various stakeholders.
Given this background, when I received an invite for a photographic exhibition on the plight of manual scavengers, I was filled with rage. Even after six decades of political independence, every day, two million people in India (of which 97 per cent are Dalit women and children) are forced to clean human excrement with their bare hands in a practice known as manual scavenging. Despite the law against manually removing human excreta or night soil, mostly by Dalit women, the Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act, 1993 has failed to have a decisive impact.
It is shocking that not even a single successful prosecution has happened under the Act till today. Even as we speak a new bill prohibiting non-flushing toilets with a one-year jail term and/or a fine of up to `50,000 for anyone who employs a manual scavenger awaits approval by the Parliament. On June 17, 2011, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in a moment of historical precedent, called manual scavenging “one of the darkest blots on [India’s] development process,” and asked all state ministers in the country to pledge to eliminate this “abominable practice” from every corner of India.
There is a need to raise a hue and cry to break the silence around this caste-based social exclusion that keeps slipping down the national agenda because it finds few takers at the national level. Besides advocacy, the show will hopefully bring to the fore the struggles and successes of women and men from the community and have fought against the worst kind of stigma that holds back thousands of families in a socially ostracised and slavery-like condition. The show organised by PACS (The Poorest Areas Civil Society) and the British Council brings stories and visual narratives punctuated by community perspectives through 30 images and will open on the occasion of UN Human Rights Day on December 10.
Another show that is not so stark visually, but still has the power to haunt with its imagery that has permeated at a very deep level of the psyche is Narratives of Resistance a painting exhibition by three Sri Lankan artists Jagath Weerasinghe, Anura Krishantha and Pala Pothupitiye at the Gallerie Espace. The artists unveil narratives of a community redefined by transgressions and traumas. They advance diverse narratives of resistance developed in a society and a country that has for the last 30 years witnessed multiple crises, the most visible of them being a highly destructive civil war that ended in 2009. Particular narrative strategies range from cartographic representations of collective memory to the critique of consumerism through a thoughtful foregrounding of kitsch. Notions of nationhood, citizenry and humanity are problematised in these narratives, painted, drawn and constructed to be read without compromising either the meanings or the aesthetics. Their art crucially avoids banality or naivety, the usual pitfalls of politically explicit art, but navigates a potent expressive trail that is deeply and consciously political.
Among the three artists, Jagath Weerasinghe is the most senior and a mentor to the others. A seminal figure in Sri Lankan contemporary art, Weerasinghe successfully dislodged the milieu from its excessive affinity with an orientalist sensibility focused on ‘“exoticising” the “village” as the essence of the island. Through this deconstructive process, he introduced the current socio-cultural experiences of urban and rural life as central concerns of artistic expression. He became one of the main catalysts for the so-called 90s trend, which ruptured all established premises of Sri Lankan visual art.
Across the media of installation, performance and object art, these artworks drew upon the personal experiences and anxieties, and socio-cultural and political critiques of society and politics informed by discourses such as feminism, identity politics, and colonialism. Weerasinghe's art initiated an entirely new take on local art insisting a social meaning as opposed to a spiritual meaning, and redefining the role of the artist in society within this equation. This thematic turn, as well as reform or pedagogy and institutions, has had an unparalleled influence on a subsequent generation of politically engaged artists
Pala Pothupitiye, a student of Weerasinghe during his stint as teacher at the Institute of Aesthetic Studies, represents the second generation of artists that continues the legacy of the 90s art. Pothupitiye’s current works executed on maps cast a profound gaze upon the land and its people as victims of geopolitical agendas of states and dissenting groups. Pothupitiye has a long-term preoccupation with interpretations of identity within a discourse of ancestry, tradition, and sensibilities of authenticity. His attention on the politics of cartography and the emotions that overwhelm communities, nations and individuals on the basis of mythical and historical claims for ownership over land that fuel wars, domination and victimisation has produced a significant array of layered artworks in the form of maps.
Anura Krishantha represents the most recent generation of artists whose art-making playfully absorbs the youthful preoccupations of urbanity and its globalised visuals and consumerist aspects of life; it discontents are presented as a fantasy imbued with power, illusion and danger. Krishantha, who has been working with the visual motif of chairs for over five years, predominantly bases his aesthetics on a mixture of pop and kitsch. He successfully combines the “expressive” and the “kitsch”, a culmination of what Weerasinghe appropriately refers to as “political kitsch” sub-trend of Sri Lankan art of the 1990s.
The artists created their major body of work during the last two decades which saw much upheaval and radical transformations in the society they
lived in. They were also part of the art movement that changed the art discourse from “modern” to “contemporary” allowing criticality and a certain sense of subversion to enter into their work. Autobiographical in many senses, their work traces these transformations through a process of placing themselves in the centre of the work; they are part of the anguished as well as part of the society responsible for this anguish. Therefore, their works bear the anxieties and tensions of being in this conflicting position and this also makes their work cathartic in nature.
Narratives of Resistance is on at Gallery Espace in New Friends Colony from December 10 to January 9.