Indialogs: Spanish Journal of India Studies (Apr 2019)

A Living Archive: Women’s Absences and the Painterly (Re)inscriptions of the Gendered Nation

  • Miranda Imperial

DOI
https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/indialogs.127
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 6, no. 0
pp. 115 – 131

Abstract

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In recent years, within the concept of the archive there has been an ever-increasing notion that points to a repository for classification, cultural production, a locus for keeping the records of history, a paying tribute to memory, whilst, simultaneously, registering as much as what is kept as what is lost. My paper is a work-in-progress, and, as such, an exploration of what I call a “living archive,” an archive in the making, where, by recourse to a culturally rich repository of images of Indian women as represented by Indian women artists along the twentieth century, I will address women’s invisibility from official history. Generationally arranged, my choice of painters includes Sunayani Devi (1875-1962), Amrita Sher-Gil (1913-1941) and Nalini Malani (1946-). Women artists in all these cases were privileged and educated, and developed a career in the Fine Arts. They all show a great interest and concern in the role of women within society, and they have portrayed and captured women and women’s relations and work with attention. In most cases, they exhibit a feminist or proto-feminist awareness. From the visual format of the canvas both in historical perspective and at present, I will attempt to discuss how their work and their valuable repository of images is certainly evidence of significant historical and cultural change.

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