Geeta Kapur J. Swaminathan: the artist the ideologue the man his persona Swaminathan's persona will haunt Indian art, and he made it so that it should: he was brilliant at masquerade. Which is to say at presenting his subjectivity in a manner so as to provoke to charm to elude. And he did this as much to engage attention towards his singular self as to allegorize the subjectivity of "the artist7. For if in the present age commodification is inevitable, one way of dealing with it is to produce a counter fetish from your own flesh as it were: your persona. A persona that is a shield to the vulnerable, sentimental, lazy and dedicated anti-hero. And a persona that is a tantalizing mirror image of everyone's desire to see the artist as something of an anarchist hero. The one and the other, a self-in-contradiction, that makes up the very man we lovingly mourn today. Indeed Swaminathan's contribution to the Indian art world is as much his art, his ideas and his institutional vision, concretely available to us for evaluation, as it is his construction of an artist-self. There is a valorization of subjectivity in the manner of the high modernists, especially the surrealists along the Breton-Paz axis. But there is also a parrying of it in a manner gained from being in India at a particular time in history. Following the communists7 choice of the proletarian figure (and he was a communist before he was an artist) and, perhaps more enduringly, Gandhi's choice of the harijan, Swaminathan chooses a clone identity in the tribal figure: a seemingly untranslatable and to that extent idealized other. To the adivasi (marked with connotations of the primitive and the noble savage; also marked by a more peculiar 'redundancy7 value in the caste hierarchy of orthodox hindu society which is carried over to the Indian nation-state), Swaminathan transfers the entire legacy of innocence. He achieves in that existential affinity a political doubling as well. This is what gives him an avant-garde position, a word that only Swaminathan among the Indian artists dared to use, even as he opposed the use of it by others in his typically strategic discourse! For we must remember that Swaminathan, ^tiBIfe^ quite contrary to the innocent identity he glorified, was an ideologue to the last. Thus while he held on to the convention of the artist as outsider, giving art a trans-historic past, he jf^ also simultaneously plotted the artist in an interven- J|r tionist role in the future. Reading between the lines, ^ he might still be heard to say that the voice from the periphery, the voice of the minority, the voice of the dispossessed, the voice of the victim, carry the gift of plenitude in the realm of the imaginary. This is J. Swaminathan/ Dik-Nntya, 1974, oil. Coll.: Aruna Dalmia, New Delhi.