Alpana Kishore
My work explores the boundaries of identity and the self. How do they escape or embrace the physical, geographic, religious or temporal boundaries of the outer world they are placed in or the time that they are part of? Politics, class and religion are the levers to play these identity games.
My work explores the boundaries of identity and the self. How do they escape or embrace the physical, geographic, religious or temporal boundaries of the outer world they are placed in or the time that they are part of? Politics, class and religion are the levers to play these identity games.
The series How Did We Tolerate Them refers to the liberal age of Hindi cinema in the last century when talent came from Burma, Iraq or even Australia. It came as Muslims, Jews, Christians, Anglo-Indians and Hindus from all parts of vast, undivided India. The stories of this cinema, its narratives and their morals and values, reflected these relaxed, fluid notions of identity. Bombay, the freewheeling home of Hindi Cinema, welcomed their distinctive skills on screen and their colourful lives off it.
Helen and Para were two outstanding, glamorous figures of their time. Both blurred the boundaries of identity and lived life on their own terms. Para, a Muslim, migrated to Pakistan well after India's 1947 Partition, in the 1960s - then decided she felt too stifled in a Muslim-only country and returned to a secular India, to her home in Bombay.
Helen, an Anglo-Burmese Catholic who fled from war torn Rangoon, transformed the image of the vamp with her iconic and hugely loved cabaret dances and outré costumes in a conservative country. She later married an already married Muslim and co-exists in hard earned but incredible harmony with his first wife, a Hindu and their mixed family.
Both are metaphors for an era where identity was not exclusively tied to a single post but had the space to roam freely, make independent choices and even
their situations would not be welcome in the today's vastly narrower, more puritan environment where lines are drawn aggressively and identities are kept locked up in an era fearful of pollution or dilution.