The artist Jasper Johns’ (b. 1930) painting of the US flags (starting in 1954- 55) series, an abstract expressionist creative work that has an ambivalent political message, can also be read as a powerful critique of the hyper-nationalistic and unbridled patriotic fervour during the height of the Cold War and McCarthyist political persecution in America. Like the flag in the US, so in Pakistan, the flag and other objects of national pride (perhaps the residence of the military elite or a retired military aircraft that serves as public art) become conduits to create group identity and national cohesion and are used to define boundaries between self and other. However, these symbols of unity are fraught with inherent contradictions. Most societies, like Pakistan, have class, ethnic, religious, sectarian, and gendered differences. Such symbols and representations are mobilised to create indoctrination programs that seek to bring the entire population on the same page. The nationalistic impulse works best when it’s mobilised against an external security threat or an outside enemy, but time and again, it also serves the purpose where certain groups claim the discursive power to exclude others within the polity.

In invoking Johns’ portrayal of the US flag, I want to raise the issue of how art in its popular form can provide a deep critique of existing social and political relations. Similarly, the artist Andy Warhol (1928-1987) in the 1960s depicted the everyday and the mundane (Campbell soup cans) to implicitly critique the pressures and consumption patterns of modern life. Art scholars like Thomas Crow have further reminded us how Warhol’s images of Marilyn Monroe not only acknowledged her commodified status in US culture but also commented on the prevalence and sad reality of anonymous suicides in society (Warhol also created a series titled Tunafish Disaster, which depicts cans of toxic tuna fish and portraits of the dead who ate this poisoned food. These victims were from among the working class, the major consumers of cheap and readily available canned food. Warhol is remembered as one of the pioneers of Western Pop Art (along with artists such as Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) and his comic book imagery.

Undoubtedly, apart from providing a social critique, Pop was also a revolt against the more traditional approaches to art and culture. Its inspiration was partly from the consolidation of an industrialised visual culture, which included movies, advertising, and popular music. It may also be understood as emerging out of the industrial revolution in Euro-American society during the 19^th and 20^th century. This transition brought an influx of rural migrants into the expanding cities in the global north. Over time, these urbanised populations, upwardly mobile and now literate, became aspirants for new forms of leisure, which more traditional cultural forms could not always provide.

To bring this discussion closer to home, let me share a partial review of the recent exhibition that I saw in Sharjah in December 2022. Pop South Asia: Artistic Explorations in the Popular was a collaborative initiative between the Sharjah Art Foundation (September – December 2022) and the Kiran Nadar Museum, New Delhi (February – May 2023). This pioneering exhibition was curated by Iftikhar Dadi, who teaches art history at Cornell University, in collaboration with Robina Karode, the director and chief curator of the Kiran Nadar Museum in New Delhi. Dadi is among the artists who, during the 1990s in Karachi, pioneered Pop approaches in contemporary art. His early work on the production of plastic toys and urban craft helped us critically understand informal artisanal practice and its intersection with new materials and technology, and the way urban poor households in Pakistan consume objects of fun and leisure. This, along with his work on TV images and poster art, introduced a new form of engagement with aesthetics and art in Pakistan.

Understandably, while the Pop South Asia exhibition did not include this or subsequent work by Dadi (to avoid any conflict of interest), his catalogue essay helps us historically place the emergence of South Asian Pop Art in dialogue with, and yet distinct from, its trajectory in the Euro-America. While acknowledging the changes in South Asian societies in the past century, Dadi, in his essay, argues how during the colonial and post-colonial periods, bazaars, transforming religious practices, new political groups, urbanisation processes, and informal living experiences in relation to the realm of law, citizenship and the engagement with formal and vernacular capitalism become influences for popular art practice in South Asia. Further, the heterogeneity of lived experience of South Asian societies enabled artists to reflect on and produce Pop Art that engages with a culture that is now intrinsically linked to cinema, media images, and new soundscapes. Hence, while the artists included in the exhibition are in conversation with the history of Pop Art in the West, they also represent the specific experiences of various regional and national histories through association with the introduction of chromolithograph prints, cinema, cassette culture, VCR, and satellite TV, as these expressive forms emerge over the long twentieth century into the present.

This exhibition was the first cross-generational engagement with Pop Art encompassing the South Asian region. It brought together works by 43 artists from Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, and their diasporas, to make a broad assessment of transregional artistic production. Its historic depth was evident by the inclusion of the work by the late 19th-century artist Raja Ravi Varma (1848-1906), who made mythological art in an academic register. In his later years, due to the availability of new technology, he mass-produced his images of the divine on inexpensive colour lithographic prints to make them available to the common person. These images remain in circulation even today in the form of poster and calendar art.

By focusing on a range of art forms and practices, the exhibition and its curators remind us of how the vocabulary of art, especially in relation to the popular, can be an incisive voice against rising intolerance.

Both curators, in their catalogue essays, strongly suggest that contemporary Pop Art in South Asia developed regionally. It owes much to the creative energy of artists like Bhupen Khakhar (1934-2004) and the affiliated Baroda group of artists (some of their work is also part of this exhibition; Vivan Sundaram, K.G. Subramanyan). Robina Karode’s essay helps us understand Khakhar’s provincial (small town) urbanism, exemplified by the mundane activities of shopkeepers and consumers in the bazaar (the artist M.F. Husain’s, whose work is also in this exhibition, partly reflects the cinema culture of the streets). Khakhar’s early artwork depicts watch repair shops, tailor shops, barber shops, tea stalls, and paan shops (places of gathering, of gossip and of community formation outside the surveillance of the elite and nationalist agendas). He explores the interiors of ordinary spaces where the common person labours to earn a modicum of respect and a living. The walls of these spaces are adorned with cheap film posters and calendar prints, the way the underprivileged create a sense of aesthetics and culture. Karode notes that Khakhar was in dialogue with the urban street life, the gully (alleyway), nukad (the corner) and the footpath where the life of the discarded, the disenfranchised and the vulgar is played out in the emergent modernist and bourgeois nationalist narratives of post-colonial South Asia. Both Karode and Dadi argue that Khakhar’s attention to the multiplicity of social groups and their aspirations, desires and conflicts was important to foreground erased histories and struggles and turned both ‘history’ and ‘people’ away from nationalist appropriations. The tension with the process of nationalism, as mentioned in the opening paragraphs of this essay, emerges from the political potentialities of the peoples in their multiplicity and diversity being constrained within a singular community of identity and sentiment.

The multiplicity of ideas and approaches was also evident in the works of the Pakistani artists in the exhibition. In the very first gallery of the Al Mureijah Art Spaces at the Sharjah Art Foundation, we find a major work by Ijaz ul Hassan (b. 1940), the painting Thah (1973-74). Ijaz ul Hassan is a Lahore-based artist, teacher, writer, and art critic of progressive political views. In the early 1970s, his art, among other issues, addressed the violence in East Bengal and the suppression of the labour movement in the country. Thah depicts the iconic image of a crouching female fighter of the North Vietnamese Army holding a child, a book, and a gun (based on a woodcut print by the Chinese artist Lin Jun) on the left side. In the foreground on the right is a seductive portrait of Firdous (1947-2020), the famous Pakistani cinema actress. The title of the painting is drawn from a song by Noor Jehan in the Punjabi film, Thah (1972), implying both the blast of gunfire and the sound of the anticipated embrace. The juxtaposition of female characters, one fighting for the liberation of her homeland while affirming the culturally acceptable role as mother aware of her responsibility to nurture the next generation, is positioned in contrast to Firdous’s sexualized depiction in contemporary cinema in Pakistan.

This work was contemporaneous to the cinematic era of Blaxploitation films from Hollywood, which had problematic (violent and hyper-sexualized) depictions of African American life and experience. Yet, these same films have become a major source of Pop references for film-makers in later years (Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, 1997). Hence irrespective of Ijaz ul Hassan’s own politics, the artwork reminds one of not only the national liberation struggle of Vietnamese people but also a moment in Pakistan’s cinematic history when lax censors and more liberal social norms permitted sites for multiple and contrasting representations of female agency and sexuality. The seventies are also the era when the film Aurat Raj (1979), with cross-dressing and queer connotations, is commercially released. Hence viewing the painting Thah in 2022 offers us a way to engage with a complex history of progressive struggle, gendered representation, depiction of sexuality, and social censorship. Such works do far more than circumvent censorship. They also make possible the articulation and circulation of non-canonical political ideas and vocabularies and contests, in my opinion, elite and nation-state linked histories.

It is against such social restrictions and usurpation of civic and democratic rights during the dictatorship of Zia ul Haq (1977-1988), that we see the emergence of a very strong women’s movement in Pakistan. The Hudood Ordinance and the curbs on women’s roles in the public sphere created the struggle for women’s rights. The artist Lala Rukh (1948-2017) worked in different modalities, but also organized training sessions to teach creative techniques in an atelier format. Lala Rukh’s poster, Masawi Huqooq (1983-84) reflects her commitment to the struggle for social justice as a founder member of the Women’s Action Forum. It exemplifies her response to Zia ul Haq’s systemic violence against women and the state-led political project of cultural hegemony to reduce, marginalise and diminish the capacity of women as political subjects. Works by Lala Rukh and her comrades during the 1980s give us a historical sense of the modalities and practices of activism that challenged the production of cultural hegemony in demonstrating the capacity, actions, and desires of women who, through reclaiming public space, responded to rules of exclusion, producing new kinds of arguments that exceeded the mere assertion of rights. Again, this message resonates today with a new and younger set of actors that are at the forefront of women’s rights, participating in various forums and representational and political practices (e.g., the annual Aurat March). Lala Rukh’s legacy also resonates in Naiza Khan’s (b. 1968) new work that was part of the exhibit, Henna Hands and its Afterlives (2022), created as a dialogue with Khan’s older work as she revisits the same urban sites using drawing, sculpture, video, and sound to emphasise the changing nature of the urban, the place of gender in public life, the issue of social memory, and contemporary cultural politics.

The urban was also depicted in the work of a younger group of Karachi-based artists, Seher Naveed (b. 1984) and Seema Nusrat (b. 1980), as they playfully yet critically comment on urban space in Karachi, which has been transformed in the recent decades due to the prevalence of political and social violence. This has deeply impacted life in the megacity, leading to the rise of innumerable barricades and obstructions that have now become an integral part of city life and its architecture. Naveed’s work draws from the disruptive presence of the shipping container that is frequently used as a barrier but also as a stage for political theatre (the work by the Sri Lankan artist Chandraguptha Thenuwara (b. 1960), Barrelscape provided a similar critique of militarised barriers in Colombo during the civil war in that country). Nusrat deploys alternating yellow and black bands to create architectural ensembles, which reference the colours of security barriers as well as modern minimalist designs that recall ‘pop’ patterns. These artists provide a critical engagement with the securitisation and surveillance infrastructure of urban Pakistan and South Asia.

One hopes that such an exhibition could also be organised in Pakistan and other cities in the region (in addition to New Delhi). Such critical engagements are important to create a dialogue between the public and the artists who speak back to the process of exclusion and deprivation faced by most who call South Asia home. I have presented only very few of the excellent works of art that were very carefully curated together for the first time as a conversation across South Asia. In closing, let me applaud the political vision of the curators who, through this exhibition, have shown us how similar social and political colonial and post-colonial history and the disruptions due to the rise of industrialisation and the consolidation of capital in South Asia have also given rise to specific forms of art practices. The artists contest hard borders and boundaries by using the medium of Pop Art to critique the exclusionary practices of the nation-state form and the concomitant violence that the political elite has inscribed on its population. By focusing on a range of art forms and practices, the exhibition and its curators remind us of how the vocabulary of art, especially in relation to the popular, can be an incisive voice against rising intolerance and like Johns’ work discussed above, can, create a space to critique and reflect on the challenges of modern life and political formations in the region.

The writer teaches anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin