We Come in Peace: MET rooftop display by Huma Bhabha

Source. Press release:  https://www.metmuseum.org/press/exhibitions/2018/huma-bhabha

On July 13^th, 2018,  I went to see “We Come in Peace”, the roof top display of a Pakistani American artist Huma Bhabha at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Huma is a Pakistani born artist from Karachi, who had studied in USA and settled in NY. Her interview on the display is at the end of this post.

There are two larger than life figures, like aliens occupying the roof of MET. On first glance, one seems god like, standing erect. The face looks like a sphinx and torso has large breasts. The other is prostate, like in sajda, almost in the direction of the standing figure. The face of the prostate figure is hidden in the ground, the whole body covered by what seems like a large black garbage bag. Only the clay-made hands on the ground in the front and a line of excreta in the back, looking like a tail, are evident otherwise.

What seems like one prostrating to the other, gradually look different. They both, it turns out, are expressions of death, suffering, exhausted by defiance, exploitation and being out of this world. They are somehow in this experience together, not one at the expense of the other. 

More on that, later---,

It was part of a tour one take with the artist. The series is called 'Artists on Artworks'. The artist takes you to various artifacts in the museum of her interest. Here Huma took us to four statutes, all influencing her own roof top display. She was accompanied by Shanay Jhaveri, the curator of the display at MET, who gave in depth details of the artifacts and their relationship to Huma's work.  He interviews her in the link at the bottom of this post.

The first one was a marble statue of 6^th century BC, It is a standing figure from Attica ,Greece. Influenced by Egyptian art, it is a young slender male figure with one step forward, as he is about to move. He is very symmetrical and face is poised. The statue marks the grave of a young Athenian aristocrat.

The second was a Togu Na female figure from Mali, carved out of wood. Here the bosom is exaggerated perhaps to emphasize the nurturing or the resolute power of a woman. These forked sculptured elements support a roof beam of Togu Na open-sided shelters where elder Dogan males sat and discussed important matters of the community.

The third is a crest Tsesah from Cameroon on Bamileke people. Made of wood, these were the larger than life face masks used at the time of coronation of a new king Fon, when the older one dies. One extraordinary feature of these collection of figures where the eyes are placed on the cheeks facing the heavens in the sky. It was perhaps used in the coronation rites.

The fourth was the bronze 'Head of a Woman', 1909 by Picasso. His signature cubism is displayed in the face. Walking around you realize that each angle gives you a different shape and meaning to the statute. It is claimed to be the likeness of his partner, Fernande Olivier.

And then we went to the roof top and see the work of the artist.

In her own words it is an expression of militarism and exploitation. Seeing these two figures, one erect and the other prostrating, in the backdrop of Central Park and the high-rises of the metropolis beyond that, gives it an out of this world experience; as if you are in a distant place, like a desert, looking at these images and the civilization is at the horizon, too far away.

Looking at these images again, the erect one, named 'We Come in Peace', perhaps taken from the first dialogue between aliens and humans, "We come to you in peace" in "The day the Earth stood still" by Robert Wise, is non-binary, a hermaphrodite, carrying physical manifestations of both genders. They have one step forward, as if in motion. The breasts are enlarged, making it as obvious as another part of the body. The face, in fact five faces, has the typical element of cubism and walking all around, you see the different Picasso influences. It also reminds of the all seeing Vishnu with multiple heads.

The prostate figure, Benaam, Urdu for nameless, perhaps depicts the nameless masses, who are in the process of dying, falling prostate, hands down and excreta is coming out the other end. One could not thing of a worse condition one can be in.

As a viewer one is entitled to derive one own interpretation of art. To me, it was the foreignness and out of place-ness of these two. They may have landed separately but are now here together. Benaam could be the nameless dying in the present day global wars, or could be the undocumented. They may be in a process of dying, but refuse to be invisible. The erect figure is mutilated, violated, but still stands tall and stands with five faces looking all around, as if bearing witness to what has happened and is happening. They brought their sufferings and stories to the house of power. There is a cry to be heard. The reference of the title implies as if these 'aliens' want to have a dialogue, but may still communicate in other ways. Their defiance and refusal to go away with the backdrop of Manhattan skyline, the ultimate symbol of the powerful is very striking. Could not think of a better contrast.

It was a trip worth taking on a Friday evening.

Artist's interview:

https://www.metmuseum.org/metmedia/video/collections/modern/huma-bhabha-roof-garden-interview

Silsila-i-Jogiyan by Sital Singh Bikhwud

سلسلہ جوگیاں

سیتل سنگھ بےخود

Anglo-Persian Taxonomy of Indian Religions

The Annemarie Schimmel Memorial Lecture

by

Carl Ernst

This is not about the book. I have not read the book. I attended a lecture on the book and this is my take on the information I learned.

Sital Singh Bikhwud was a Munshi for the Raja of Banaras in early 19th century. Later he was asked by an East India Company officer to catalogue the various mystic religious  sects of Banaras.

These Munshis, the learned Hindu secretaries, were well versed in Persian and Arabic and were employed by the Kings and Rajas to document; mostly for tax and revenue purposes but at the same time wrote and experimented in philosophy, art and mysticism.

So he was asked to write a treatise of mystics.  What he did was much more than that. He identified many sects, wrote about their belief systems and practices and commented widely on their lives. 

As the language of his work and higher thoughts was Islamasized Persian, that is the language and terms he used to describe his subject. His nomenclature was Islamic and not Indian. For example, the sects are mentioned as mazahib and firqas. The relationship between master and the disciple is termed as Pir and Mureed and so forth.

It implied that the language of ones choice does influence once outlook. These munshis, many of them had written much about mysticism, where the line between a dervish or faqir (Muslim terms) and a jogi or sadhu (Hindu term) becomes blurred.

Perhaps the origin of the Indian mysticism was older than Islam's advent, but development and progression of various Indian orders were heavily influenced by Muslim mystics. These munshis  themselves became spiritually and intellectually involved in the viewing all this through an Islamic prism.

Of the various sects, firqa's he describes, the more notables are

vanisha, shiva, shakti, akashwasi's, sabwasi, nanakshahi and jain.
They include those mystics who would go out in the wilderness, or worship a certain deity, or exist as couples, or get involved in certain rituals like looking at the skies or having the hands up in the air for extended period of times  (months), or various other ascetic practices.

It was in fact the enormous emphasis of British to put people, their languages and belief systems into boxes, that Indians of today identify themselves as Hindus. In Satal Singh's book for example, there is no mention of the word Hindu at all. And this is as late as early 1800's.

According to Carl Ernst, the lecturer, Satal Singh is not the first one to write such a classification. There has been many attempts in the past to categorize the religions of India before this.

In Arabic, the earliest is by Ibn Khordadbih 820-912 in his kitabe masalik wa malamik in which he explains the different people of Abbasid Caliphate including Indian sub continent.

Later al-Idrisi who born in Muslim Spain under Almoravids and later was at the court of King Roger II in Sicily wrote in 1154. The Book of pleasant journeys in the faraway lands mentions 42 religions of India. He had never been to India but learned about East from Muslim merchants.  He was a famous geographer and , it is known that Columbus had used his maps. The modern integrated integrated geographic information system (GIS) and remote sensing software has its acronym IDRISI named after him.

Later in Persian, the first description of Indian religions is by Abu Fazal in Aine Akbari in 1602. He used the criterion of philosophy to separate Indian religious thoughts from one another.  He had a philosophical way of describing the religions, and for example he thought if Islam as a 'sect of Muhammad' and not more than that. He does not mention Sikhs at all, even as they existed at that time.

Then there was a Modeb Shah, who actually was a Zoroastrian but pretended to be a Shia. He wrote in 1656? Dabistan e mazahib and used the criterion of Belief to classify different religions.

And there was a Hindu Rai Chatar Man Kayath in Chahar Gulshan 1759. describing the ascetic practices of various religions. This is the first book of the above which mentions Sikhs. 

Sital Singh seems to be an interesting character. Apart from being a munshi, he had been a mystic philosopher and had written a book Khayal e Bekhudi in 1857, Bekhud being his takh'alus. 
 

 http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101076496478;view=1up;seq=4

He was quite close to an Greek Indophile  Dimitros Galanos who lived and died in Benaras in 1833 whose epitaph was penned by Sital Singh stating that :

 Woe, a hundred times! Dimitrios Galanos departed from this world to the eternal nomads. Woe me! Weeping and wailing have I said it. I am out of myself. Ah, he has gone away, the Plato of this century
Written in Persian and Greek. 

Carl Ernst is a professor of Religious Studies at University of North Carolina in Chapel Hills.  He has written much about eastern religions and edited a book on Islamophobia. One interesting book is How to read Quran.http://uncpress.unc.edu/browse/book_detail?title_id=2202
. http://www.unc.edu/~cernst/index.html

The lecture was a part of series of Metropolitan Museum of Arts lectures, carrying the name of Annemarie Schimmel Memorial Lecture. Hers was a household name during my days in Pakistan.