The Diaspora is too Hauntological: Breaking My Art Writing Hiatus with Talkin’ Bout a Revolution by Pyaari Azaadi
On deities sporting animals from their privates and mysticism for Jackson Heights
The Backdrop, The Introduction, The Show, The Setting, The Scene - Lemme Paint You A Picture After Pyaari Azaadi Has Painted You One
On a late September evening, where an A/C was needed more than ever, sweating through every last pleat of a lime green sari with my mouth seasoned with the acerbic grime of wine with too much sweating and not enough water, I saw the exhibit broke my art writing hiatus, broke my heart open instead of breaking me, and moved around every last puzzle piece that affirmed my relationship with visual art.
The solo show, titled Talkin’ Bout a Revolution: Pyaari Azaadi after the song by Black lesbian singer Tracy Chapman, pieces, spans sculptures, paintings, fiber arts, poetry, and mixed media collages, and is an entire jewelry box fastened to the navel of the non-profit Pen + Brush Gallery in Manhattan’s gastronomic Flatiron district. The organization of an exhibit is important to an artist’s storytelling, and this show was rganized to guide the reader a tract of lovers, mothers, leaders, and disgraced oppressors so that the guest of the space can read Pyaari’s statement like a divine circumambulation.
Deep underneath the muscle of the exhibit, the many working parts that give it the strength and attributes to carry you in the basin of its pelvis, is a stomach full of swathes of saree-clad and beweled opening night attendees, with an unmistakable figure in her Prussian Blue sari sporting a foliage of gray ringlets introducing the drag performer for the night, LaWhore Vagistan. Pyaari Azaadi, formerly known as Jaishri Abichandani, has graced continents and the oceans in between them with her wit and moxie by way of London, New York City, and Mumbai, subverting narratives about feminism and folklore silenced by diasporic dominant narratives on Brahminical Hinduism and imperialist iterations of queerness.
Pyaari Azaadi, “Beloved Freedom” in Hindi and Urdu, expressed the sentiment of her moniker through the creation of her own folklore, each moving piece of her solo show, which involved ten years of her work. A blanket-sized tapestry, titled “Portrait of The GOAT Palestinian poet Suheir Hammad”, festooned with rosettes, bleeds thread from its text, exasperating the horror of the U.S., Israeli, and U.S.-backed imperialist use of white phosphorus in Iraq and Palestine, as the letters of the Suheir Hammad poem bleed and bleed for a travesty language barely has the scope to hold.
"TELL THEM
WHITE PHOSPHORUS SMOKE
AN ATMOSPHERE CHOKE
PEOPLE GASP HORROR
GRASP FOR EACH OTHER
AND THE CHILDREN DIED HUNGRY
THEIR FATHERS SURVIVED ALL THAT
IMPOSSIBLE ONLY TO LIVE THIS
THEIR BABIES IN PIECES
THEIR MOTHERS SAY I RETURN THEM
WAILING I AM WILLING
THEM WHOLLY
TO GOD HOLY I RETURN
THROUGH BABY’S BREATH AFIRE
RUN AND TELL THEM"
On another wall, there is a painted portrait on a gold charmeuse fabric, tilted “Yashica Dutt in the Age of Ambedkar”, of prolific Dalit author and caste activist Yashica Dutt in front of the bust statue and framed portrait of the anti-caste visionary B.R. Ambedkar. Through her posture and the golden fabric illuminating both caste abolitionist figures like a halo, Dutt and Ambedkar stand immortalized and highlighted, commanding the attention of the gallery viewer, for their meritorious labor after being violently silenced by the global phenomenon of caste stratification. In another painting, titled “Seema As Blue Tara in the Time of the Parables”, a trance-like collage of the caste abolitionist and artist Seema Hari commands the viewer into the center of the piece with its bright cobalt tones and sewn-on droplets, with the wispy corners reminiscent of kalamkari art from Andhra Pradesh, an art style known for depicting mythologies.
In another mixed-media textile painting, titled “Mrs. Modi”, the estranged wife of far-right Indian Prime Minister and genocidaire Narendra Modi, salutes an unseen power-hungry crowd, surrounded by the embroidered symbols of the Bharatiya Janata Party, with a hand bleeding thread blood drops from the BJP’s orange lotus emblem to highlight the unwavering role of fascism by Indian women in allegiance to Hindutva. A kaleidoscopic portrait of pioneering bhangra DJ Rekha, titled “Rekha and Anjali”, wearing a pro-Palestinian watermelon shirt is one of the many paintings that immortalize South Asian diasporic queer elders and cultural elders through the precision of Pyaari’s layered brushstrokes, astute technical attention to detail, and stylistically high-contrast perspectives.
Her epoxy sculptures retell mythology in their pealrescent painted sheens, tassels and ornate stories as chimeric deities sharing the deeply gendered and power-imbalanced subtexts of their own folk and written source materials through Pyaari Azaadi’s stimulating statements: a bull’s head pulled from the vagina of a bewildered figure; a miniature golden temple to B.R. Ambedkar flocked to by many-hued multi-religious devotees and survivors of gender-based violence; two queer lovers embrace covered in pink flowers on an oonjal; and a blue immolated figure of a goddess covered in eyes from her face to her breasts like an arachnid clutches the severed head of a woman in bridal makeup. The figures take life in the Rubenesque bodies and hook-nosed side profiles found in ancient granite idols across South Asia. In my favorite sculptural installation, titled “Kamala’s Inheritance”, a flower emerges from the torso of a skull necklace-clad, a la Kali ma, next to a matching Lajja Gauri with injured eagle wings. The name is an ode to the casteist and carceral imperialist feminist rhetoric employed by Kamala Harris, but this installation is also evocative of a physical manifestation for deities of strength and sexuality, including out of the Vedic Hindu pantheon, and as an allegory to violence against women.
Pyaari’s art is so evocative because its purpose, through her intent of using the Rasa Theory, a meditative aesthetics movement commonly used as an artistic lens commonly used in ancient Indian dramas and poetry, is to transmute the memory of effervescence. Her pieces, besides their shimmering and colorful visual character, like a light hitting a prism and bouncing off the walls of the gallery in many different artworks, reference a theory focused on the transference of emotions and desires collectively, akin to a “taste” or a devotional sensation that is meant to transcend language, visual cues, and a singular organism itself.
It makes sense that as soon as I entered the exhibit, I felt like I was past the tasting process of an organism bigger than just my vessel or a singular entity in the room, but in the midst of its digestive process, I was left with more questions than definitive answers. That’s what I like to see.
The Politics of Diaspora and Diaspora Art
I am a little disillusioned with the art world as of late and the purpose of art within the South Asian diaspora, to be honest. In further honesty, the scope of “South Asia” often doesn’t even apply most times to the seven (or so) agreed-upon modern-day regional states, occupied Kashmir, the Caribbean diasporas, and other global ancestral diasporas born through the displacement of colonial indentured labor. It’s a label reduced down to the national demarcations of India (and that, a Hindu Brahmin, Indo-Aryan ethnolinguistic Indian as the handy dandy propaganda work of Vishwa Hindu Parishad nation-building projects - I’ll leave you with this as some post-Substack reading).
The purpose of the gallery space is a marketplace, on top of being an exhibition space, and even though curation serves as a statement and thesis, those well-crafted 200-word sentiments that pair press releases often get muddled when the objective of a coveted solo show slot is for both the artist and the gallery space to keep their lights on. The state of South Asian-American art, the hyphen unnecessarily assimilationist outside of the already exclusive regional definitions of its borders, is furthermore tricky.
Most postcolonial nations hold a concept of a national bourgeois and brain drains; the national elite, by way of many power-imbalanced forces, pack up after two university degrees to settle down in a McMansion outside of a major city in a global north nation so that their children can study art in one of the top ten private universities in the country. However, the South Asian conception of casteism, varied legacies of colonial extraction backed by many post-colonial puppet forces, and lineages of many imperially-backed genocides (like the Bangladesh genocide), has carved a very unique breadth of class-based disparities and social capital exclusivities that have left the South Asian diaspora in the U.S. in disparate factions.
Painting South Asianness as a monolith, one that can be bought and sold, one with some kind of recognizable homogeneity for a region with thousands of official languages and bewilderingly diverse amount of cultures to match, one recognized by Bollywood kitsch and Hindi/Urdu, one marked by chunky henna and knowing the vague TV accent but not the language, one marked by browning mangoes with worms in the pit and no lower-caste lower-class maids in this story to tend their grandfather’s compound’s trees - is embarrassingly stupid. Not only does it serve the mobility of diasporic fascist movements and the financier relationship of the diaspora in those movements, but it just doesn’t make sense. This transcends the visual arts and births many of the trite phenomena like “mango poetry”, the crude appropriation of Black art forms with faux Atlanta-accented pastiche, and lots of TV shows where brown girls humiliate themselves to be noticed by the white boy.
The diasporic longing to represent a homeland as retrospective, a type of grieving in an assimilationist milieu that envisions a past, where the present is occupied by a gauche hyphen, is a thin line that directs diaspora towards a future that can only take place as part of the ghastly progression of whatever imperialist nation their parents settled in. This poses the question of whether it is a privilege to be guaranteed of a future, and who gets to shape said future? One could even call this particular relationship between diaspora and the tantalizations of nostalgia as anchored in a reproduction of what your parents and kinfolk on the same class and caste status over organic as hauntological. Hauntology, defined by philosopher Jacques Derrida in his book Spectres of Marx, is better applied in a cultural criticism context in the article by Mark Fisher. Hauntology, simply put, is the “failure of the future.” The collective refuses or loses its ability to envision a future evolved by radical change, and thus is doomed to reiterate sentimental copies of copies until exhaustion.
Writer Pranay Somayajula elaborated more on this concept of diasporic nostalgia as a treacherous fantasy, toeing the line of an out-of-vogue lehenga silhouette and political indoctrination in trying to heal a mother-wound with a motherland. He states,
“To give into nostalgia’s seductive draw is to risk being consumed by that seduction altogether—when we immerse ourselves too readily in the idealized, quasi-illusory images of the past that nostalgia offers us, we all too often lose the ability to discern between illusion and reality.”
Poet Momtaza Mehri states that “diaspora is witnessing a murder without getting blood on your shirt”. Sometimes in the South Asian diaspora, that can mean someone who inhabits the same racial categories as you is holding the gun, upset that their shirt is still left bloodless.
Everything as a Metaphor and Rasa
So, where does this leave Pyaari Azaadi’s exhibit in this discourse? If anything, this leads us back to the purpose and value of art in the diaspora. When decolonization can be taken for a metaphor, like in the seminal essay, so can the terms “community” and “organizing”. Is the gallery marketplace the next meeting place of the vanguard party? Is the $45 ticketed queer rave a radical community-building organization? Is that your coat or mine? Is my phone my girlfriend?
Any South Asian person based in one of the West’s many metropoles can point to at least one instance of an art event attached to mismatched jargon that imagines a future inside brand partnerships, returns on investments, hauntological representations of culture, and kiddie pool-deep sentiments. This puts the role of artists in a complicated position in the imperial core, where, again, the lights have to stay on, but where the extraction of profit either becomes a cover for a greater conflation over what material organizing looks like or becomes a forfeiture of having a political backbone. Outside of material support, that’s direct infrastructure and assistance in basic needs shaped by history and the politics around a person, what is the role of art in a revolutionary society as we’re talkin’ bout a revolution?
Pyaari Azaadi’s exhibit will remain on my mind, haunt me but not be hauntological, because it does exactly what it came to do and what the purpose of art always has been in a revolutionary way. Art is the wound, the sword, and the hand all in one. Art is the sound and its echo. Art is always the catalyst, but not always the chemical or explosion. Art is the memory and act of memory-keeping all at once. Art asks and answers the same questions about the purpose of an archive. Art is the counter-propaganda and the megaphone. Art is a tool: one of protest, conversation, communing, and expression.
The purpose of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry was to document Palestinian heritage and resistance on a so-called “land without people” and communicate that message, leading to his arrest. In his poetry book titled Unfortunately It Was Paradise, he states that
“The essential thing for me is that I have found a greater lyrical capacity, a passage from the relative to the absolute, an opening for me to inscribe the national within the universal, for Palestine not to be limited to Palestine, but to establish its aesthetic legitimacy in a greater human sphere”.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, the distinguished diasporic Haitian and Puerto Rican graffiti artist and painter, exploited by white men even in his death, used art as a way to document the multilayered injustices of antiblackness, drug addiction, and homophobia while resisting the systems of power that dictate them. Frida Kahlo’s art is inseparable from Mexican Marxism, her paintings a surrealist amalgamation documenting her experiences of disability, reproductive trauma, queerness, and indigeneity through her mixed heritage in the backdrop of the politics around her. Tamil Dalit artist Chandru Guruswamy’s art is a documentation of Dalit life and culture when there was none outside of the imperialist and brahminical gaze. Noormah Jamal’s art, featured in an exhibit I had the opportunity to write about, is a statement on the nature of young Pakistani girls experiencing the anxieties and tribulations of navigating the politics of desirability while also facing the adultification of reality in the imperialized world around them.
Pyaari’s artworks play with time, posing a solution to the many questions of diaspora by envisioning a future and nostalgia that is situated in a present, not a propaganda. Even history is subjective and can be misrepresented by those in power, and Pyaari Azaadi’s pieces root themselves in comprehensive mythological and political research. Through her theory of Rasa, her pieces behold a transference that invites you into the effulgence, gratitude, and strength of her real and fantastical muses, who come from caste-marginalized, survivor, queer, and trans backgrounds.
She doesn’t shy from discussing imperialism, Hindutva fascism as a global phenomenon, and Zionism in her work, as many artists and writers censor themselves in fear of the drying up of their dollars. Instead of mourning culture as an abandoned elsewhere, Pyaari measures loss through the grief from genocide, gender-based violence, and structural violence, as culture is a dynamic and robust, inseparable part of being that the people will always be able to pass down and be part of. She reimagines mythology outside of Brahminism, a power structure that gatekept and appropriated many folk and minority cultural practices as a form of purification.
There’s an exactness, a synthesis and not an amalgamated rendering of technique that Pyaari uses that I love, a studied retrospective look at futurism rather than a hauntological one. Her work reimagines a future captured by the intrepidness, eroticism, and whimsy of her exhibit, where the Rasa is a liminal space that bridges a well-researched past and what is to come in the only way that something like that can be imagined; thus, her work uses Rasa in the tradition of surrealism mixed with some traditional diverse artistic techniques, like the possible references to kalamkari, mirrorwork, and ancient granite-like physiqes.
Sure, there are some questions I still have, namely about the scope of using “South Asia” (no one builds statues of critics, but Pyaari surely can build a great goddess statue, we’ve seen) for this exhibit. As the artist, the audience is always one of your choosing. It would be wrong to say that her work isn’t just truly, unabashedly, fully her. The rosettes, the choice of fabrics, the flashy colors, and the garlands preserve her solo show as a surreal mysticism in Jackson Heights and all of her colors. Her show is a document of a diaspora not clinging to a dominant positionality nostalgia but of the most marginalized surviving despite it all, existing in the collective memory through bold colors, Rasa, and the sweet heat of that room.
It Ends with Opening Night
It was opening day at Pen + Brush again, and I was furiously reapplying parts of my lip liner that had been taken off by my own teeth and nail beds in anticipation of getting to speak with the artist. As per the artist’s request, most of the people in attendance, regardless of wear they are on the gender spectrum, are wearing a saree. I spotted a sea of moving colors like bouquets decorating her exhibit, a chikkankari one, a mysore silk, a banarsi - an entire garden of laughter, gasping conversations, and amazed murmuring. I spotted a blue one walking in my direction, with my friend and her studio assistant Ananya, to introduce us both, and I gathered my armful of green gathered around my body like a melting puddle.
I remembered the last South Asian woman artist whose show forced me to confront even myself: Bhasha Chakrabarti. Her solo show spanned my own exploration of her saree textile research, vulnerability, the erotic, the boundaries of softness and vulgarity being the same, and what brown women do alone in their rooms when shame is still a specter that spanned into knowing more about the textile history and innate eroticism of the saree. My place as an art writer is to interact with art in a way that reminds me that I occupy something bigger than my body, to engage with other artistic mediums in an ekphrastic and meaningful way that bridges a shared statement between myself and the artist, and Pyaari’s show, in Rasa transference, demanded to be spoken for and not spoken about. Back in that room, there seemed to be nothing that would be too uncouth, the bold, reflective, and surreal imagery around us in the gallery speaking a million sentences of their own, none of them asking us to be demure or puritanical.
This time, I was curious about how Pyaari Azaadi ended up here, by the way of many cities and many years of learning, and how she sees the many years in between as memory. I can’t reminisce anymore without seeing the surreal as a better depiction of what I felt and have been hyperaware of the richness, tenderness, and multiplicity of my own memory, all mine, ever since.
I moved in closer with my friends after our conversation, one where I admittedly blacked out from a mix of excitement and shock and could not remember a single word of it, a sea of saris with Pyaari in the middle underneath a painting of big Pyaari and her list of demands for a future. We all grinned from ear to ear as Pyaari held two tools, like art and revolution, above us.
Anyways, you have about two weeks to see the show still (until December 13, 2025)! Don’t miss it now!
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