The Dancer in the Tomb:
Jehangir Jani's Transgressive Gesture


Jehangir Jani's recent installation strikes us with decisive emphasis; despite assuming the form of sophisticated theatre, it conveys the charge of raw affront. Unlike many installations produced in India - which serve as illustrations of political intent, rather than as provocations making visible the totems and taboos of society, its invisible access codes and oppressive hierarchies - here is an art-work that exposes the artist to a genuine measure of risk. In what does the specific risk of Jani's work reside? Not only does it oblige us to face the discomfiting reality of death and the uncertainty of resurrection, but it also throws our pieties into confusion by interweaving death with beauty, the elegiac with the sensuous. Above all, as I will argue in this brief reflection, Jani enters the extraordinarily fraught territory of religious belief.

In this public demonstration, he deploys gestures associated with burial rituals normally conducted in privacy. He draws on elements of Shi'ite ceremonial to create an iconography, defying the interdict against graven images in Islam. And so he comes, in several ways, into conflict with the mandates of the ethnic group and religion to which he belongs by birth. In
contemporary India, its public life strained by civil dissension and unrest generated by politicised religiosity, only the mad or the brave would adopt such a position - or perhaps the Sufi, who knows that the paths of revelation are often mapped through the terrain of seeming lunacy.

As we part the blinds and step into the installation, we find ourselves in an environment suggestive of a mausoleum: a body lies shrouded on a table; columns of severed hands mount guard near it; bare torsos address us, skewered on stands; and we are struck by a grid of 92 pink, glowing night-lamps that resemble miniature TV screens. We attune ourselves to the beat of drums; gradually, we realise that they are the rhythmic sounds of ritual breast-beating. Jani's installation is dramatised between two intimately related but opposed figures: Lazarus and anarkali, the mummy-wrapped corpse waiting in the tomb to be delivered back to life, and the vivacious court dancer chained inside a tomb, watching as the mason lays the last bricks that will choke off her breath. We never meet the rotting corpse and the gilt-spangled dancer as Exhibits A and B: they are implied presences, tropes, allusions traced through colour, sound and body-cast.

Our eyes get used to the subtleties of Jani's light arrangements. The tomb reveals itself as a site of meditation signed with the flourish of the carnival. The trophies of mortality are everywhere, but held in counterpoint by the seductive. We turn, and find that the blinds through which we entered are studded with multiple casts of the artist's ear: by implication, Jani
extends our awareness of the sensorium beyond eye and touch; he also encodes a playful reference to the mythology of the artist legislating violence on himself. Jani's focus is the body subjected to the violence of mutilation and betrayal: the vulnerability of this sacred token of existence is tragically echoed by the fragmentation of the invocation to God, written in
Gujarati rather than Arabic calligraphy, in the 92 components of the light piece, which can be switched on and off, by viewers. Again, these fragments are simulacra, details photographed from a watercolour inscribed with the prayer.

Jani's installation demands nothing less than that we abandon our aesthetic preconceptions about the universality of art. His installation derives its special, unnerving subversive power, not from its aspiration to universality of meaning, but precisely because it rejects the vacuity of generic abstractions. It insists on the import of a specific religious and ethnic milieu, and the history of the development of a private self in such an ethos. In the aftermath of the genocidal violence enacted against the Muslim minority in Gujarat, during March 2002, by Hindu pogromists, the portents of Jani's installation are unmistakeable. He invests the art-work with his pain
and sense of betrayal as an Indian of Gujarati Dawoodi Bohra ethnicity; he layers it with the realisation of outsiderness forced upon him. And yet, in another swift slippage, the various elements of his work are threaded together by the joyous shade of pink, a reference to Jani's gay orientation.

Jehangir Jani takes up his place in an adversarial isolation; but this is not the melodramatic stance of the romantic. Rather, Jani's is the transgressive gesture of continuous resistance, which invites others to share in the opposition to the various aggressions promoted in the cause of pure religious, regional and sexual identities.


Ranjit Hoskote
Bombay, Autumn 2002