Remembering}. Swaminathan what puts him in tune with more recent radicalisms that interrogate the presence of the tribal against the discourse of the primitive and define the contemporary anew. But then if one brought up the question of the modern as a historical qualification of the contemporary, Swaminathan baulked. In such a moment he would give 158 over to this half-real half-mythical adivasi immediate recourse to some absolute imaginary. And he would suggest that this will transmute, this voice, or breath, or numen as he liked to call it, from the imaginary into the realm of form and that form of course was the very apotheosis.... Ironically/ that is the very reason for stressing that Swaminathan is a modernist: with his belief in form, in metaphor, in the transcendent features of the visual language. The black paintings of the early 1960s going on to the imprinted walls and to a colour geometry in that decade; and then in the 1970s to the sprung motifs of nature, devoid of meaning except through the very fact of the bright light fugitive colours and the vanishing effect of the imagery itself. From there back to the plastered wall surface and the graffiti of vegetal, mineral and tar pigment. All this, as you can see, keep him well within the modernist circle. And if he tries to slip out of the bind of modernist aestheticisms to hit the soul's target — the self-negation of the buddhist or vedantin vis-a-vis the affective thereness and sensuous production of the adivasi as archetypal artist (and he would not take one aspect without the other), you still came upon the paradox that spells modernity. At the end of it all, in whatever way one designates him in the history of art and ideologies, Swaminathan is an artist who rhymes the movement of the eye and the hand and turns it into the movement of the signifier through and beyond an iconic image; through a dissembling decodable language. Mourning him you might see the flight of the stormy petrel, as he unblushingly called himself, across an empty track in the sky, tracing a momentous life, revealing a strangely panicked heart. It reminds me of another image, a flying creature that is not his small bird but the angel of history which Walter Benjamin invoked after an image of Paul Klee and which I, in my intrepid stance vis-a-vis my friend and adversary, Swaminathan, will map over his death knowing well that he would, from a polemical reflex, accept and reject it at once. 'A Klee painting named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. The storm is what we call progress.' (Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History) (Courtesy The India Magazine, volume fourteen, number seven, June 1994.) Journal of Arts 6' Ideas