Photographic Retakes: Reconsidering Representations of Rural Workers in India

Abstract

This paper explores the photographs of rural workers created by Tamil Nadu-based photographer and filmmaker Binu Bhaskar and the Delhi/Karnataka-based artist and activist Arunkumar HG. In turning their attention to the contemporary rural crisis in India, these artists address how farmers and rural workers are facing an existential crisis. In recent decades the policies of economic neoliberalism have challenged the sustainability of rural life and as a consequence, many farmers have taken their own lives. The images created by Bhaskar and Arunkumar intersect with the thick record of rural India, but strategically recode the visual and textual tactics of many journalistic, ethnological, and sociological antecedents. By considering their photographic engagements alongside Chantal Mouffe’s theory of agonistic art practices, I argue that these artists carefully constructed portraits of rural workers confer dignity on the individual and the spaces they inhabit and, in doing so, encourage an active engagement with social identity rather than definitions of selfhood determined by occupation. Their work plays with the visual idioms of documentary photography, however the epistemological drive of this genre is undermined by Bhaskar and Arunkumar’s production, presentation, and reception of their photographs as art objects. Positioned within the precincts of the art gallery or museum, their work innovatively encourages new ways to evaluate the narrowly defined productive function of the occupants of rural India in the contemporary moment