MAURITIUS: A Green Drop in a Green Ocean

Sep 13, 2009 Features / Columnists, The Arts Forum

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By Bernadette Persaud

The Mahatma Gandhi Institute (MGI)—on the tiny island state of Mauritius—recently hosted a major international art event. Artists from the USA, Australia, Malaysia, France, Guyana, South Africa and Trinidad, responded positively to the MGI’s invitation to create a work of art, at an historic Workshop-Exhibition, focused on the visual arts of the Indian Diaspora.
In the words of Mala Ramyead, Project Coordinator and Head of the Institute’s Fine Arts Department, this “unique” undertaking was aimed at:
Organizing a point of meeting where artists belonging to the Indian Diaspora, could interact and exchange their experience of sharing a common ancestral culture, while at the same time, belonging to different local cultures …
Participation in the Workshop, she added, would allow artists to contribute their knowledge and skills in art-making and share their ideas with Mauritian artists, students and other professionals in the field. More specifically, she indicated that since there was much interest in our common history, “we would appreciate if you could present a paper on Art in Guyana”.
I must admit that when this invitation first popped up in my e-mail, I was puzzled. How could any major International art event take place on a speck in the ocean on the other side of the planet? In fact, many of us in this part of the world have only vague Naipaullian notions about this little island, somewhere in the Indian Ocean.
It is the place, according to Naipaul, where the Dodo, that mythical bird, lost its ability to fly, because it had no enemies and soon became extinct…. In The Overcrowded Barracoon (1972) he points out with mischievous humour:
The Dutch, sometime in the 17th century, attempted to settle in Mauritius, but were driven out by rats … then the French came and continued to flourish after the British conquest in the early 19th century … they grew sugarcane, depending for labour first on slaves from Madagascar and Africa, and then when slavery was abolished, on indentured immigrants from India …
In a few sweeping strokes, Naipaul dismisses the entire history of this “manufactured” outpost of empire. In a more serious vein he points out, that sugar was the main crop and virtually the sole export:
“Sugarcane covers nearly half of the island, so that from the air this island of disaster looks empty and green, dotted with half-pyramids of stone, that are like relics of a vanished civilization … the visitor who keeps to these main highways sees an island as well kept as a lawn, monotonous except for the jagged volcanic hills … an island roughly oval in shape, 720 square miles in the Indian Ocean far from anywhere, colonized like those West Indian islands on the other side of the world, only for sugar, part of the great human engineering of recent empires …”
But back to the Workshop at the Mahatma Gandhi Insitute and the reality of Mauritius —more than 30 years later. It was certainly a far cry from Naipaul’s gloomy prognosis: the view from the MGI campus buildings, perched on the slopes of the Moka Mountain is idyllic. Behind the generously spaced out campus buildings, the jagged, volcanic mountains rise steeply, clothed in dappled sunlight and feathery mists; in front, past the manicured lawns, a panoramic view stretches out, from the bottom of the slope, where a busy intersection of roads and speeding traffic leads, perhaps, to the bustling towns and sleepy villages of Port Louis, Curepipe, Rosehill, Petit Raffray, Grand Baie and others.
Given the location of the MGI—aloof from the fray of the market-place and the clutter of narrow streets – it was not surprising that such an ambience could inspire the large ideas and the creation of ephemeral, adventurous, playful, even affluent forms of post-modernist art—so abundantly evident at the exhibition.
Unambiguously entitled Ties: Indian Diaspora, the exhibition quietly ushered in a new awareness and visibility—in the globalized art-world—of diasporic Indian art.
The exhibits, most of them produced during the course of the Workshop, were mounted in the Fine Arts Gallery of the MGI, where they inevitably spilled over (given the large scale of most of the conceptual and installation art) into the spacious studios of the Fine Arts and Printmaking Departments. Twenty-five artists, the majority of whom were Mauritian women artists/lecturers attached to the Institute, participated fully in the Project—giving it a somewhat feminist edge. Some artists, like Mala Ramyead and Nalini Treebhoobun, I had met before in New Delhi, at India’s largest exposition of the Fine Arts—the Triennale—where we had shared exhibition space. In fact, Vijay Kowshik, Director of Triennale IX (1997) and an internationally well-respected sculptor in the field of Glass and Ceramics, had traveled from India to contribute to the MGI Project
Both Workshop and Exhibition were meticulously documented in all possible media – for circulation nationally and internationally. A lavishly illustrated catalogue captures, not only the art and artists but also the memorable moments and debates during the Workshop. Of greater importance, the catalogue essay written by Dr. Parul Mukerji – noted specialist in contemporary art-historical practice and Professor of Comparative Aesthetics at the School of Art and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University of New Delhi — added a significantly scholarly dimension to an impressive, well-designed production. Parul’s presence at the Workshop, informally interviewing, chatting, laughing with artists underscored the far-reaching strategies and implications of the Project.
Titled simply, Navigating Difference: Indian Diaspora Art Today, Professor Mukerji’s essay, scrupulously examines the work of every participating artist and acknowledges the common ties and concerns – the “shared semiotics of mythology”, the “cultural memory”, the “thematics of liberation, transcendence, redemption,” the sacred iconography and consciousness of Hindu metaphysics. Yet, in the final analysis, her discourse becomes a dispassionate interrogation of the politics of identity and a disavowal of “an essentialist identity, internal to diaspora artists.” The “common ties”, she posits, “stem from a common location in history, colonialism and the struggle to negotiate with the new post-colonial condition.”
Interestingly, though most of the work on display asserted the primacy of “ties”, there were conspicuous interventions that also critiqued the concept of “Indian” diaspora and, by implication, the raison d’etre of the very exhibition of which they were a part.
Professor Mukerji notes:
In the works by Manjoola Appadoo and Ismet Ganti, one encounters a disillusionment with cultural exchange and a shift from a culture of ties to “a culture of lies”. They draw attention to the failed transactions and misunderstandings that accompany the movement of people, goods and ideas…
It was perhaps, the huge, explosive canvas of Mauritian artist, Krishna Luchoomun – Human Diaspora – hitting the eye at the entrance of the gallery that more bluntly interrogated the politics of identity. The painting, representing a flaming, molten ‘big bang’, spilling over the edge of the canvas, though seemingly devoid of any culturally specific references and more reminiscent of Jackson Pollock, seemed entirely at one with the quiescent volcanic landscape of Mauritius. Its post-modernist texts, written on children’s slates which hung at the base of the painting, spoke of the beginning of time, when “you and me came into being, we existed as lava, as mineral, as rocks …”
On a cold windy day, just after the opening of the exhibition, two Mauritian gentlemen wended their way up Moka to the Institute’s Gallery; they had heard on the TV and read in the local newspapers about the exhibition and the “meeting” of the Diaspora.
It turned out that they were more interested in viewing the descendants of the jahajis—who had continued on the journey across the Kala Pani far beyond the Horn of Africa—rather than their artistic outpourings. They plied us with quick, excited questions: what kind of people lived in Guyana? What part of India did they come from? Did they still practice caste?
“Where exactly is your country on the map?”
“In the back yard of the USA. On the continent of South America, next to Venezuela, the country of Mr. Chavez.”
“What is your President’s name?” (They had heard of Cheddi Jagan).
“During our elections campaigns, your country’s name always crops up and we are warned by our politicians not to allow our country to become like Fiji or Guyana.”
“What kind of language do the people speak?”
“A coarse version of English—not as melodious as your French-Mauritian dialect.”
The conversation became more intense and shifted gear, as Nithi Loka graciously served us steaming cups of mild Mauritian tea.
Was the buoyant state of art at the Institute and the number of art galleries a symptom of the state of the economy? (Impressive glossy productions of Art in Mauritius and monographs of Moorthy Nagalingum, piled high on Mala’s desk had caught my attention.) They spoke modestly: the economy had ‘diversified’, the Tourist Industry was developing; many tourists were coming to enjoy the green ocean, lapping peacefully on the shaded beaches, and the landscape – more lush than Gauguin’s Tahiti.
The conversation abruptly shifted to the exhibition.
“But why do you want to be a drop when you can be the ocean?”
I looked at their eager, questing faces; it was not a rhetorical question. I hesitated. I could not find an answer. Parul’s convincing polemics had undermined my convictions while at the Gallery Krishna’s canvas cast a phosphorescent, eerie light and the frogs and lizards and dinosaurs embedded in the paint spoke eloquently of their affinities with the human family….
On the way to the airport I thought uneasily about the ‘drop’ and the ‘ocean’. As the plane rose in the air, I looked down and saw a green island in a green ocean: a drop, like a tear, in the ocean. It was a Mauritian question, after all … The sweet-sad voices of Sharmilla, Mala, Chandra, Jayshilla, Nirmala and Nithi Loka, crooning a farewell song kept singing in my ear, drowning out the drone of the aeroplane:
“Ye-e-ellow bird/Wish that I was a yellow bird/I’d fly far away with you …”
. . . . indelible images flying all the way with me to Dubai, to Toronto, to Guyana – like the sacred images which were wrapped in our great-grandmothers’ jahaji bundles – Mala, limping – running – limping around the campus with determined steps; Jayshilla’s tears as she looked up at the towering statue of Lord Shiva at the sacred Lake . . . Ah! Thank God Shiva for Mandela . . . and Ashok donning his red beret of anger . . . and Antonio lamenting the departure of his Rakhi sister, “O Parul, Parul, tomorrow you’ll be gone” . . . and Chandra painfully, patiently, assembling the dead leaves and twigs — the detritus of an island into a diasporic mosaic of subtle, infinite browns — and the sun shining through!
I peered through the window at the boundless ocean below and suddenly the clouds parted: even the drop could be as boundless as the ocean.

Bernadette Persaud is an artist and art editor of The Arts Journal. She is also a Director of The Arts Forum Inc.

The editor of this Column can be reached at: [email protected].,gy or Telephone: 227 6825.

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