| |
THE
ARTS: DEMELLO VADO
Eternity
in Monochrome
In Dayanita
Singh's black-and-white chronicle of life in Goa the photograph and the
photographed become one
By
Sonia Faleiro
 It's
5.55 p.m. In Saligao, Goa, the sky has turned a deep orange. The fairy
lights (a Christmas week frivolity) that curl around trees in gardens
slowly spring to life and the Star of Bethlehem that hangs from the roofs
of houses-Casa Bobo 1890, Villa Princessa-have been switched on. At the
end of the narrow road, a few steps ahead of which has the church, sits
photographer Dayanita Singh.
It may seem
incomprehensible to many why Singh, 39, should choose to spend her evenings
on the porch of the Saligao Institute, that amiable old building that
hosts tambola and bridge sessions every evening. It's easy to dismiss
Saligao as a one-horse town, to point to its football field, haunted by
clusters of crows and sleepy dogs, as just one indication of the vado's
(ward) extreme lethargy. Singh, who first visited Saligao last December
to stay with a friend, however has ample cause to say, "I love it.
I see no reason to return (to Delhi)."
|
|
| Singh
( top); her photos are an outsider's view of a Goan family, its people
and its religion |
If not followed
to the institute, the aforementioned road leads up a steep incline flanked
by fields. Higher still, a temple bathed in gleaming white paint is festooned
with ribbons. As the sun sets and the weather cools, Saligao's green,
light blue, orange and brown houses throw their shadows with a casual
shrug. A few minutes later at 6 p.m., "Demello Vado", Singh's
photo exhibition of 44 black and white images of Saligao (with a clutch
from Rachol, Chandor, Margao and Loutolim) is open to the public.
"Demello
Vado", as photographer Pablo Bartholomew who was at its December
16 opening observed, is not about "Old Goa". It is also not,
as Singh suggests, so dramatic as to be in danger of attracting "curious
busloads". It is instead an outsider's inside view of a Goan family-of
the people, their rituals and their religion. As Rosarina Cordeiro sits
straight-backed on a swing, hands crossed on her lap, a mantilla covering
her graceful silver hair, and the windows throw their shadows on to the
wall behind her, one acquires a startling glimpse of the dignity of age.
Her grandchildren, a pre-teen boy and girl, sit side by side in the parlour
of the same house, the boy displaying all the ease of one thrown headlong
into the Dudsagar Falls, the girl, as composed as young ladies are wont
to be. The plump seats, the fading photos, the delicate curios, tell of
youth in age, of the present in a room built on the past.
 A
graduate of the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, Singh initially
distinguished herself as a photojournalist. Published prominently in the
US and UK, her content-sex workers in Mumbai, eunuchs and their place
in Indian society, women industrialists in Delhi-and style have been described
as an "object lesson in the way fantasy and everyday life interact
(The New York Times). "Work of a gone century," she says, reading
aloud from a copy of a 1999 india today profile of her photos (Issue dated
Dec 20, 1999, Inside Eye). Cigarette in hand, brow furrowed, Singh says,
"They asked me where I would be when my work was no longer contemporary."
"This," she looks around, "is the answer."
Visitors
exclaim in delight as they recognise family and friends in the 2 ft by
2 ft laminated pictures. Several swoop over Singh, engulfing her petite
frame. "This would be considered sacrilege anywhere else," she
says, of her art being prodded by Saligao's collective hands. "But
as a photographer you take so much from your subjects, it's only fair
to give something back." So the exhibition that opened with feasting
and festivity (think 60 people dancing the mando) will close on January
16, with the presentation of the photographs to the subjects. "As
a photographer I'm forever feeding off people," she insists.
Singh's transition
from documentative to interpretive photography is subtly illustrated in
"Demello Vado". It seems only just, therefore, that Demello
be a name she conjured up and that her favourite photo of the collection
be a rack of cups, their delicate china surfaces embroidered with a confection
of flowers. "One can only imagine what's behind them," says
Singh. Another photo, all white lace and molten eyes, is of bride Rowena
Kapparath standing by the priest on her wedding day (her husband has been
spliced out of the photo with delightful cheek).
There are
homes too, Singh's first step towards focusing only on the inanimate.
"You don't have to have people in your photos to say something,"
she says. Hence, a church facade bathed in night-light. And as a suggestion
for introspection, a stall selling "Chinese and Tandoori" sports
the bright red of Coca-Cola and dwarfs the magnificent Saligao Church
behind it. In another, illustrator Mario Miranda's altar in his ancestral
home gives off the heady smell of incense, and writer Mario Cabral e Sa's
house is all calm and cold floors. "You bring out the colours in
black and white," a visitor says to Singh. She is intrigued. "Your
pictures are devastating," says a journalist.
Back in
Delhi, Singh's base, the congratulations are more subdued. Photographer
Raghu Rai's praise ("she's very dedicated") is thrown aside.
His observation that "She is yet to discover new spaces and new energies
in her work", spat at. "It's an irresponsible thing to say,"
says Singh, "I am very offended." She gets fidgety. "I
get printed all over the world," she says. "But one wants so
much to get recognition in one's own country." Geetanjali Sinha,
currently curating "Vilaas" in Mumbai, where Singh's are the
only photographs among art depicting pleasure, is unequivocal. "Her
photographs have the quality of suggestion," she says. "She
represents photography as an art." Singh is unappeased.
Singh's
itinerary for 2001 includes an exhibition of her work at the Tate Modern,
London, in February, as part of "Century City: Art and Culture in
the Modern Metropolis". She is also working on a portfolio of museum
or "display" pictures. The piece de resistance though, is a
10-year retrospective of her work, to be published in October by Scalo
Publishers, Switzerland. Four hundred pages, 250 photographs. Not bad
for someone who, when she was starting out on her career, was told by
India's then numero uno lensman, "Why do you want to be a photographer?
You're a woman. You should get married." As the exhibition closes
at 8 p.m., Dayanita Singh can introduce you to at least three score people
who are terribly glad she didn't take the advice.
Top
|
|
METRO TODAY
As
the Government brings in more people and mops more money in taxes, it
must be seen to be rewarding those who come forth and pay up, writes India
Today Associate Editor V. Shankar Aiyar in 
