There Was A Brown Crow

"Bol Siyavar" and similar tributes to Sita's husband, Ram originated in the peasant rebellions of 1920s Awadh, one famously initiated by a Fiji returned indentured labourer. It was later adopted by Gandhians and the non-cooperation movement.

By the 90s Sita was entirely dropped by a Hindutva coalition headed by the BJP in the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. A greeting since has turned into a murder cry.

Characters from the Hog Plum Committee

Tried Linnea Sterte style inspired character on my peony geliprint. I love the line in Spring Coronal:

"still childless, seeing how a single bloom could overflow

Women's Swim Hour: Catch up

Illustration for short story "Fighting Elsewhere". Hybrid geliprint

Unexpected moments of life reached us in the car through the hollers of drunk students stumbling on roads, or halting in front of passing cars. Anil seemed to be a part of this life. I felt jealous and greedy.

New season, new visual direction at Numbi Arts!

Re-lettered a comic I made a decade ago about cornershops/newsagents in UK.

Now many of those humble traders (Tesco) have become invasive monopolies. The cornershops that survive are owned by refugees and migrants who find ways to exist among these Supermarkets.

Different kind of racialised female bodies, Africanist and Asiatic femininities:

While primitivism rehearses the rhetoric of ineluctable flesh, Orientalism, by contrast, relies on a decorative grammar, a fantasmatic corporeal syntax that is artificial and layered. Where black femininity is “vestibular”/bare flesh/weighted, Asiatic femininity is ornamental/surface/portable

Living museum tableaux: Sarah “Saartjie” Baartman & Afong Moy

This sumptuous collection rehearses for the twenty-first-century audience the basic tenets of nineteenth-century Orientalism: that opulence and sensuality are the signature components of Asiatic character; that Asia is always ancient, excessive, feminine, available, and decadent; that material consumption promises cultural possession; that there is no room in the Orientalist imagination for national, ethnic, or historical specificities.

"To me the Orient is a matter of indifference"-Roland Barthes

Orientalism vs Ornamentalism:

Ornamentalism is not a project about retrieving human agency, because the subject under discussion here (the yellow woman) is a seriously compromised subject and, in many instances, not a subject at all. Commodification and fetishization, the dominant critical paradigms we have for understanding representations of racialized femininity, simply do not ask the harder question of what being is at the interface of ontology and objectness. While Orientalism is about turning persons into things that can be possessed and dominated, ornamentalism is about a fantasy of turning things into persons through the conduit of racial meaning in order, paradoxically, to allow us to abandon our humanness.

To point to this enchantment of the inhuman is not to rehearse the problem of objectification or to downplay the issue of race but to point to a provocative dilemma about how the object preconditions, rather than being the product of, the human figure—a modern crisis that Asiatic femininity personifies. This is why ornamentalism is not only an object of feminist critique but can be also a vector of feminism. The to-be-used Chinese female body seems to have petrified into domestic and collectible things whose value now resides in their aggressive uselessness.