Innovation in Pre Modern Archittecture

INTRODUCTION

An attempt to recontextualize the concept and practice of Ð''innovation' in

pre-modern Indian art.

"Ð'... there is an analytical power in this narrative construction of power: it illuminates an aspect of things. Problems develop when one term of the metaphor Ð'-power- becomes the dominant term, the master concept that absorbs everything into it. This metaphoric keying of human life and culture to power is not mere hoary Nietzscheism, vulgar Marxism, or fashionable Foucaultism, but a cultural legacy taken up again and again, the key term of a very Western mode of thought. Demystification achieves a kind of hegemony, replacing the richness and variety of cultural worlds with a monologue proclaiming that power, exhausting, monotonous power, is all there is."

This can be one severe criticism that maybe applied to my work. However, I am at a juncture of my studentship where I feel the need to grasp the tools with which to study the operation of power in pre-modern south Asian visual culture. This work is an articulation of the quest. However interspersed throughout the text are attempts to subvert the overarching importance of power in the narrative. Hope it works.

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When one attempts to engage in a project, which seeks to relocate/recontextualize notions of progress or innovation to a non Euro-American context, the project does get framed by the politics of representation, and threatens to get caught up in the Ð''Identity-Difference' questions. Though I do not wish to shy away from any engagement with the politics of representation, I definitely do not want to be caught up in the Ð''Identity- Difference' questions. The only option left for me is to bypass the rhetoric of the Self and Other, and refuse any parochial fixity of my subject position. This project could also get entangled in the politics of comparison. In a certain sense this is unavoidable, the best that I can do is to clarify my intentions behind initiating the comparison and to spell out why Ð''innovation' as a phenomenon is important enough to be stressed. The comparative value of Ð''innovation' comes from the prestige it enjoys in post-industrial Capitalism, and it is through this that the location of this project is best understood.

For a long time, this project kept slipping back into the realm of cultural relativism, and this I dearly wanted to avoid. Seriously we have had enough of Ð''Indian Art is this versus Western Art is that'. I am not afraid of being essentialist because post modernism has rendered essentialism unfashionable. Indeed Spivak and Radhakrishnan show us that strategic essentialism can be a useful tool for counter hegemonic representation. Ð''Innovation' and progress as they are applied in the discipline of Art History are still rooted in Euro American notions of history as sequentially progressive, moving from point A to point B and attacking point C. Any tradition that does not follow this model seems comparatively stagnant and unmoving.

Over the last two hundred years or so, there has been a growing hegemonization of this notion of time/history/progress. This has played a major role in forming the ideology of Capitalism and strengthening the growth of neo-colonialism. Any attempt to rub this notion of progress Ð''against the grain' is counter hegemonic.

A profound western Marxist critique of the modernist notion of history is already present in Walter Benjamin's Ð''Theses on the Philosophy of History' , which opens up possibilities for counter hegemonic theorizations on progress. Post colonial critique of progress from various locations are essential to give momentum and add dimensions to the movement in order to challenge the domination of neo-colonialism and post industrial capitalism. My endeavor to do so from within the discipline of Art History in the context of pre-modern India is counter hegemonic and subaltern enough to theoretically allow myself to put forward an essentialist representation. However one can't ignore Spivak's advocacy of Ð''double consciousness' while representing the subaltern . Exercising Spivakian double consciousness is not easy and I don't know how far I shall be successful. Nonetheless working within binaries and yet dismantling binaries is crucial if I have to avoid lapsing into a homogenous straitjacketing of India and Ð''Indian innovation' in the cause of global heterogeneity.

There seems to be an already existing theorization about an allegedly Ð''Indian understanding' of innovation. Prof. Ratan Parimoo in his class lectures and private discussions has been proposing that Ð''improvisation' as it is allowed and practiced in the rendering of Hindustani Classical music, offers us a framework for understanding the practice of Ð''innovation' in Ð''pre modern India'. In his Ð''Space and Time in Representation and Design', Thomas R. Metcalf uses Vishaka Desai's study of 18th century painters to theorize that through the act of copying and recopying an Ð''artist' was encouraged to digest tradition and then rearticulate it in terms of contemporary taste . There has been (almost too much of) an easy understanding on this regard. As a new entrant into this concern I realized that the consensus regarding an Indian version of Ð''innovation' was near commonsensical. It seemed that the only work possible was a substantiation of these floating but accepted articulations. My discomfort with the un-problematised pan Indianness (both vertical and horizontal) straitjacketing of Indian culture inherent in Metcalf and Ratan Parimoo's formulations has enabled this intervention.

For the moment let me suspend my interest in heterogeneity, and suppose that knowledge did circulate in Ð''pre-modern India' in a particular way, which lead to innovation and progress being understood in a particular way. Surely no one will argue that this was racially or otherwise intrinsic. Thus the only option is to assume that such an idea of innovation was culturally constructed and hegemonized. This opens up possibilities of inquiring into various ideologies that might have played roles in the process. Thus the notion of progress/innovation must have been a site for contestation between the Ð''dominant', Ð''residual' and the Ð''emergent' . Now we come to a juncture where it becomes logically