SESSION: Gender and South Asian Visual Cultures in the Twentieth Century
This panel aims to explore the relationships between women and visual culture in twentieth century South Asia, challenging the oppressive structures that inform postcolonial subjectivities and engaging with practices that inaugurate new visual grammars. Scholarship on visual cultures of South Asia is dominated by discussions of coloniality; while an epistemic asymmetry towards the Global North shapes critical discussions on art and feminism.
Engaging with diverse cultures of visuality, we hope to foreground vernacular, subversive and dissident practices that contend with the limits and possibilities of feminisms in the Global South. The intersections of gender and identity with religion, caste, class and ethnicity produce layered narratives that challenge claims to ethnonationalist supremacy across South Asian communities (Mohanty, 1984; Rambukwella, 2018). Bringing into focus archives that disrupt hegemonic epistemologies, we intend to highlight repositories that are personal, fragmented, and affective, engaging with aspects of witnessing, autobiography, collective memory and oral histories.
The panel seeks to understand feminist methodologies at work including expanded and radical archival practices, accounts of memory, representation and autoethnography, feminist worldmaking and the reimagination of the public and postcolony. Consequently, we hope to posit new ways of thinking about South Asian visual cultures through the interventions of women as authors of counter-histories.
We use the term “women” as inclusive of all persons identifying as women and welcome submissions on transgender rights and representation, and sexually marginalised communities in South Asia.
Session Convenors:
Arushi Vats, University of Cambridge
Imaan Markar, University of Cambridge
Session Speakers:
Uzma Falak, University of Heidelberg
Unsettling the Visual: Sonic Insurrections and Refusal in Kashmir
The paper dwells in modes of listening and sounding that unsettle the visual in Kashmir, where a “scopic regime” is constitutive of the Indian state’s colonial and military logics. The Indian state asserts its presence as a pervasive visual matrix of control scarring Kashmir’s landscape and turning it into a zone of hypervisibility and hypersurveillance. It also constructs Kashmir as a national fetish — a romantic and idyllic landscape — through Bollywood and the tourism industry. The production and circulation of this colonial desire is linked to India’s territorial claims over the region, in both Hindu nationalist and secular liberal imaginaries. Further, India’s perception management — anchored in “visual biopolitics” — is not only marked by fetishisation, dehumanisation, pathologisation and victimisation but is also determinant of what lives are grievable. However, by attending to the “aural” and dwelling in sound’s capacity, in Brandon Labelle’s words, “to upset and reorient the politics of visibility,” I neither seek to reinforce a visual-aural binary, nor do I suggest that sound, on its own, is liberatory. Indeed, sound and silence have been used as technologies of terror in Kashmir. Based on my ethnographic fieldwork, this paper explores Kashmir women’s sonic practices as antiarchives, and foregrounds how they record countergeographies and attend to the ungrievable dead — upending logics of India’s visual regime. It dwells in the emergent formations of bodies and sounds — grounded in the praxis of witnessing and delves into the relationship between loss and history, inflected by ongoingness and incompleteness. Further, it foregrounds insurrectionary potentialities and insurgent modes of fugitivity, radical repetition and transience as well as forms of spatial, temporal, and epistemic refusals engendered by these sonic practices.
Nainvi Vora, Independent Scholar
Material Refusal and Feminist Worldmaking: Pilloo Pochkhanawala and the Gendered Politics of Sculpture
This paper investigates the sculptural practice of Pilloo Pochkhanawala (1923–1986), a pioneering modernist and one of the few female sculptors working in post-independence India. Refusing the conventions of carving and classical materials like marble, Pochkhanawala developed a sculptural language grounded in ecological sensitivity, material improvisation, and gendered dissidence. Drawing on institutional records from the First Triennale India (1968), British Council correspondence, and the artist’s unpublished writings, this paper examines how her sculptural choices—welded scrap, polystyrene, natural rocks—emerged as forms of aesthetic and political refusal.
Foregrounding her inclusion in international biennales (Tokyo, São Paulo), this paper situates Pochkhanawala’s work within a wider, transnational feminist network that challenged both nationalist paradigms of Indian modernism and masculinist traditions of sculptural authority. Her recurring refusal to conform to material hierarchies—famously resisting marble at the 1978 International Artist Colony at Strumica, Macedonia—becomes a feminist act of reclaiming space, process, and authorship.
The analysis draws from my broader research at Brown and my recent Delfina Residency on women sculptors in South Asia and engages feminist methodologies that centre marginal archives, institutional silences, and affective memory. Pochkhanawala’s practice, I argue, constitutes a radical feminist worldmaking—marked not by monumental visibility but by ephemeral, processual forms that resist closure. This paper contributes to ongoing efforts to reframe South Asian visual cultures by spotlighting women artists whose practices reconfigure gender, nationhood, and global art discourse from the peripheries.
Sevali Hukku, Independent Scholar
Bending the Gaze: Revisualizing P Sainath’s Visible Work, Invisible Women
P. Sainath’s seminal photography exhibition was shot from 1998 to 2002 across ten Indian states. It depicts rural Indian women in stooped positions while working in fields, quarries, and forests.
The exhibition, titled Visible Work, Invisible Women, is a photographic documentation of the unacknowledged contributions of women to the national economy. In Sainath’s words, “all this work is arbitrarily classified as ‘unskilled’ and hence gets no payment”. Sainath’s photographs reveal an intrinsic physical topology of the Indian woman, which can be expanded to include other internalised, day-to-day acts, such as eating over the kitchen sink, squatting to wash clothes, and sitting on door ledges. These activities, when documented, become lived experiences and not simple abstract categories.
My paper argues that photographic documentation, such as P. Sainath’s, creates a feminine archive that turns women’s invisible physicality (bending, squatting, sitting) into a visual act of resistance.
Rather than portraying these women through sentimental pity or as symbols of national productivity, Sainath’s lens resists the romanticisation of both resilience and suffering, recognising their physical labour itself as the source of their visibility. Their absorbed, task-oriented bodies assert a presence that is self-contained and unmediated by the viewer’s gaze and expectations of any aesthetic consumption or moral pity. Their presence in these photographs is defined by their actions, such as ploughing, squatting, and bending. Hence, my paper argues that visual depictions of women’s labour should prompt recognition rather than merely evoke an aesthetic response.
Mallika Leuzinger, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient
The Gift of the Camera: Experiments, Attachments and Unravelings
In 1931, the twelve-year old twins Debalina and Manobina Sen Roy were gifted an Agfa Brownie. They became enthusiastic photographers, experimenting with light and shadow and across the genres of landscape, still-life and portraiture before transitioning to more sophisticated cameras like the Rolleiflex and turning their lens on strangers and the street. Debalina later spoke of a recurring dream in which she “was going to London or somewhere, and then after going to the airport, on the plane”, discovered that she did not have her camera. She would “start to cry” and ask those around her, “what will I do without my camera?”. Her question yokes the photographic lives of Indian women to the development of postcolonial modernity and everyday media and technology. What did it mean for two girls in the provincial town of Ramnagar to participate in amateur photography clubs whose reach extended all the way up to Afghanistan and to be published in the illustrated press? Why did an elderly Kutchi Memon woman in the southern port city of Cochin disperse the albums and destroy the negatives she had compiled over decades? And what happens when her photographs are nonetheless retrieved by her great-grandson and circulate on the internet, where they get entangled in NGO projects championing the camera as a tool for women’s empowerment?
This paper engages these questions through case studies that interweave art history and ethnography and posits photography as a form of world-making in and well beyond twentieth century India.