CHAOS AND CULTURE
“What does it mean to be Indian?” The brief for the project was to design a poster series that would provide a unified identity to Indians.
Any symbol or image that speaks only of the sentiment of national unity, a singular identity, unfortunately, becomes political and aligned to one particular school of thought. The fact about India is that as a people, we are so diverse that giving us one identity will seem like forcing down one image that the billions may or may not agree with.
As a nation, we are diverse, but what makes us stand out is the choice we have to be diverse, and still be a part of the nation. Giving a nation one image to stand by, seems like a far-right approach to me, one that could, unintentionally, take away from the choice of being represented by a different image.
To visualize my ideas about what it means to be Indian, I have used the metaphor of a kaleidoscope. As each colourful piece inside a kaleidoscope doesn’t hold a true identity individually, but forms an integral part of a larger whole, contributing to its structure and beauty, I feel India too is a working large-scale model of a kaleidoscope. All of our diversity, the themes, the various languages, cultures, traditions, cannot individually define India. It is only when we put all of these together, that we can discern a structure that, however complicated, defines our identity as a whole. We become the intricately woven fabric of cultural interaction, and that is precisely what I have wished to communicate through my artwork.
