American avatars, part 2: Walton Ford’s birds
02/25/2010 · Alexander Keefe
"Avatars- The Birds of India" 1996 Watercolor, gouache and pencil on paper, 59 3/4 x 40 inches
Next stop on the desultory voyage a l’avatar Americain is this huge watercolor by Walton Ford. I was flipping through his recently published super-deluxe Taschen coffeetable raisonné the other day at the public library and was especially struck by Ford’s Indophillic early 90s series “Avatars–The Birds of India.” The style of the series is the same as what you see elsewhere–retro Audubon-esque, done large on paper, with lots of ersatz marginalia scrawled across it in various scripts and media–and the theme is one he apparently returned to a lot in that decade, a theme I will loosely term: the scourge of Westernization in India. I may be oversimplifying but basically, in this bestiary of his, the allegory runs something like this: the nasty identical-looking starlings who arrive in hordes and fuck, eat, peck at and otherwise exploit beautiful, unique-looking native South Asian birds? Those are either lame tourists or even lamer old Orientalists. The beautiful ones getting ravaged? Well, those would be the natives. (It should be noted that NRIs don’t exactly get a free pass–they tend to hang out with starlings, let’s put it that way, as do parrot-collaborators.) Where he really nails the theme, however, is in the words: on one side you get the straight native dope (in this one I see some tantric symbols, some Sanskrit, and some earnest-looking all-caps wisdom: what pros in the Indophilia biz simply call “the classic”) and on the other, a bit of reductive western claptrap (here a nasty-looking blue jay–allegorically speaking, this is a tour-guide from Minnesota–squawks out bullshit explanatory texts sampled, it would seem, from various outdated surveys of Indian art, culture and society). The vulture and the stork? Don’t worry: both authentic natives. Both abound in ancient Sanskrit stories. But that little pink piece of flesh they are fighting over? That’s on you, West! Stay home!
Addendum: I almost forgot to add that I came across another Walton Ford recently, not at the library this time, but as the infographic to this Financial Times piece on the Indian art market called “Indians in Trouble.” Is this not a weird choice?
Sahib, HPB aur Ghulam: Khandala’s verdant and perfumed abyss
01/24/2010 · Alexander Keefe
Rani Mukherjee wants to know what there is to do in Khandala. H.P. Blavatsky has some advice for her, in From the caves and jungles of Hindostan, a sensationalist post-spiritualist travelogue of India, written during 1879 and 1880 for the pages of the Russki Vyestnik and translated into English in 1902. In this excerpt, HPB and her entourage are sitting out on their bungalow’s veranda in the famed hill station, trading stories about Atlantis and discussing Dayanand Saraswati’s theory that the Sanskrit word pātāla (i.e. “hell”) originally was used for the Americas (i.e. underworld), which were visited by ancient Indians via the Bering Strait. Suddenly, their innkeeper issues an ominous warning:
It was long past midnight, but we still sat listening to this legend and others of a similar kind. At length the innkeeper sent a servant to warn us of the dangers that threatened us if we lingered too long on the verandah on a moonlit night. The programme of these dangers was divided into three sections—snakes, beasts of prey, and dacoits. Besides the cobra and the “rock-snake,” the surrounding mountains are full of a kind of very small mountain snake, called furzen, the most dangerous of all. Their poison kills with the swiftness of lightning. The moonlight attracts them, and whole parties of these uninvited guests crawl up to the verandahs of houses, in order to warm themselves. Here they are more snug than on the wet ground. The verdant and perfumed abyss below our verandah happened, too, to be the favourite resort of tigers and leopards, who come thither to quench their thirst at the broad brook which runs along the bottom, and then wander until daybreak under the windows of the bungalow. Lastly, there were the mad dacoits, whose dens are scattered in mountains inaccessible to the police, who often shoot Europeans simply to afford themselves the pleasure of sending ad patres one of the hateful bellatis (foreigners). Three days before our arrival the wife of a Brahman disappeared, carried off by a tiger, and two favourite dogs of the commandant were killed by snakes. We declined to wait for further explanations, but hurried to our rooms. At daybreak we were to start for Karli, six miles from this place.
Aur kya?
The plant hunters: or, Adventures among the Himalaya mountains (1859)
01/20/2010 · Alexander Keefe
Illustrations from The plant hunters: or, Adventures among the Himalaya mountains, written in 1859 by Irish-American writer Mayne Reid, who specialized in pulpy adventure novels. On a side note, the young Vladimir Nabokov was a big fan of Reid, especially of a book called The Headless Horseman (1866), which Nabokov later remembered as his favorite childhood adventure novel…
A Mysterious Monster
Lost in the Cave
The Fishing-Birds
The Death of the Man-Eater
Ossaroo Chased by Wild Dogs
Typical Pictures of Indian Natives
03/04/2009 · Mansi Shah
Coleman, F. M. Typical Pictures of Indian Natives Bombay
“Time of India” Office, and Thacker & Co. 1903