Discussing ‘Trace Retrace: Paintings Nilima Sheikh’-
a significant intervention in Indian art historiography
Aparna Roy Baliga
The book ‘Trace Retrace: Paintings Nilima Sheikh’- is in all probabilities the first magnum opus on any woman artist in India. Though there had been important essays like Geeta Kapoor’s’ ‘Body as Gesture’ and other seminal works like ‘Expression and Evocations’,and collected letters of Amrita Shergill edited by Yashodhara Dalmia the term women artist is still not discussed and even encouraged much in curatorial practices.The word women artist as a different category needs to be theorised more ,just as the women writers have been. The term in the Indian context had been multipunctal just like the word feminism with its nuanced and varied understandings or defining moments. This book as Kumkum Sangari says brings out the visual and the discursive.It is a very important work in Indian art historiography. Kumkum herself mentions that ‘feminism(s) became a terrain of rewriting history.’ All the three essays have been layered well with the nuanced understanding of Nilima Sheikhs work. The editor, Kumkum Sangari with her previous experience of editing another very important book “Recasting Gender” and her continuous engagement with discourses on feminism has played a very important role in forming this anthology. In her essay-‘Ruptures, Junctures, Returns(un)lived histo-ries, feminist propositions and Nilima Sheikh talks about rupture and return, the disjointedness of time woven into the pictorial matrix to re-invoke the past, to define the present.
There is always this question which is a conundrum when did the women artist appear in the Indian art scene? At
what time did feminism have its affect on Indian art. As can be seen and read through the discussions in the journal like Arts and Ideas ,gender surfaces ,the context becomes the crucible for the birthing of feminism and is aligned with the structural movement which questions class,caste and other social issues like dowry deaths. Kumkum says ‘Feminist cultural politics,neither unified or mainstream but often part of wider political formations and confront active movements, we’re aligned to differing formulations of the modern.’The traces of the anti-colonial art practice the craftsmanship and the conceptual space, the textual references are well brought out and weaved into the text very carefully and well.
The uniqueness and the singularity of modernist language dotted by histories of exclusions are in rupture by the plurality in Nilima’s works. Kumkumrefers to the multidirectional diffusion and brings forth intricacies of the practice,tracing traditions,the complexities of traditions and the art practice. She mentions -“Indian artist emerged not directly from a gharana or karkhana but col-laborationist intersections of the quasi artisanal,popular,commercial and volatile bazaar, early bourgeoisie, landed rentier and urban professional groups,the circuit of British art school education from the mid-nineteenth century.”Hence one finds quotations not only from different textual references but varied stylistic sources of crafts ranging from pichhvais, thankas,brocades and patas and the very repetitive process of stencil. She writes-“The familiarity and repetition of a motif/pattern invokes the artisanal labour of near faithful replication of a design with an unsigned origin,a copying that encodesand arrests the labour-time of reproduction’’.She puts forth the relation between the craftsmanship and the narration.
