Gestures speak (Gallery Sumukha, 2007)
What does the hand stand for within the big frame, Shantamani wonders. In an age of bodyshopping, has it become a mere appendage? Have we outsourced our bodies, our minds, our spirits, our culture, in the incessant 24/7/365 rat-race that is the new face of our globalized city? These issues are the raison d’etre of Gestures Speak, contextualizing the individual within the city. As we celebrate the economic boom, are we neglecting a vital angle - that former strategic colonial pawns today provide cheap brainpower to big first-world players? Why is IT the most visible face of Bangalore today? Within the multinational marketplace, have we been reduced to invisible working hands, shadowy presences often unacknowledged? Questions of identity surge beneath the rippled cityscape. Is Bangalore in danger of losing its past inheritance as it speeds towards modernization and westernization? Why does it so seldom glance back at the riches that migrants have brought into its cosmopolitan domain over the past 350 years, including their living skills, rituals, crafts, cuisines and languages? Such as the Tigalas from Tamil Nadu who set up Lalbagh for Haider Ali, the Devangas from Andhra Pradesh at the heart of the silk industry, the Bengali karigars who are the mainstay of gold craft. Or even the Anglo-Indians, the cantonment culture, and missionary schools at the core of the city’s skill in a global tongue now outsourced. Or the brilliant scientists who were behind the Bangalore torpedo or India’s first indigenous helicopter. Other facts, other faces, call for equal attention. On an average, over 2,500 white-collar IT workers, often with partners in the same industry, have flocked to Bangalore every month since the early Nineties. This youth brigade, often dubbed Gen-Next by the media, heralds new consumer trends, crisscrossing culture, food and housing, bypassing traditions and local habits. Their lifestyles are buttressed by invisible lives - those of construction labourers from north Karnataka and Tamilnadu, carpenters from Kerala, Rajasthan and Bihar, and marble workers from Rajasthan and UP. These migrants, of a transient mindset, identify with little of Bangalore’s culture. Are they a malaise or migratory beings of benefit to the city, whose population has multiplied five-fold in just a decade-plus? How do these citizens identify with Kempe Gowda or the Roman coins once found in the Cauvery? Shanthamani brings her concentrated gaze to bear on these inner city issues in Gestures Speak. Migrant-centric lives need multiple narratives within a city that lives in different time zones simultaneously. Within the digital landscape, the hand has assumed the role of a giant cultural element. Growing beyond her earlier conceptual and metaphorical work, facts and human stories assume a new centrality. For instance, the fact that in 2004, Bangalore’s 200,000 textile workers contributed approximately a tenth of India’s textile exports of $13.5 billion. The tension between these cities, old and new, underline her explorations. Beyond these conflicting cities, past cultural nuances and social conditioning, she once observed, “At Baroda, I realized I was a very tactile person. My central reference point is always my body. I believe in doing things with my hands. I want to project myself as a worker, maybe a painting worker. I like to smear paint with my hands, mould things.”