All (Mansaram’s) roads lead to ROM
Sitting across from Mansaram in the local Indian restaurants he’s introduced me to over the years, I’d sometimes forget, such is his ease at the contemporary Canadian table, how different it once was.
I’d forget how little precedent there was here in 1966 (years prior to the great wave) for an East Indian immigrant, much less one like him who practised a wildly experimental form of ethnically-tinged media art. The kind of art that would not likely be reflected then in the holdings of major “serious” institutions.
But it was the ’60s, and small cracks were starting to form in the starchy Canadian veneer. And as Leonard Cohen said of cracks: “That’s how the light gets in.” And a small opening was all Mansaram needed.
In late November, I watched Mansaram deliver the first South Asia lecture in the auditorium at the Royal Ontario Museum, before hundreds of people. The ROM invited him to speak because that night they were premièring a film they (Aruna Panday) made about him, celebrating his 52-year career in Canada.
(I’ve written about Mansaram and his art over the years and I was flattered to be interviewed for that film, and more than a little proud of him as he delivered his words.)
They were also marking the ROM’s acquisition of more than 700 pieces by the Hamilton/Burlington artist/educator renowned for a sprawling and varied half-century oeuvre, including an early collaboration (and lifelong friendship) with legendary communications theorist Marshall McLuhan.
The ROM is now the largest repository of Mansaram’s work anywhere in the world, including India where he was born. Having his work and materials housed at an institution of the ROM’s stature represents for Mansaram, 83, a wonderful, gratifying consummation of his achievement, as an artist and a “Canadian,” in the denouement of his career. It also further enforces the ROM’s commitment to the presence of South Asian-related art and culture in Canada.
In 1966 when he got here, from India via Amsterdam and London, there were no Indian restaurants, Mansaram says with a reminiscent chuckle. Nor was there much vogue for the kind of art he was doing. Avant-garde collage, using xerography and other multimedia effects.
Mansaram really was a pioneer, not only artistically, but in terms of socio-cultural reconnaissance and example-modelling. He paddled through decidedly unpluralistic Ontario waters (that was all to change rapidly) in advance of the great sub-continent diaspora that he preceded by several years.
Mansaram and his family (he came with his wife Tarunika and then three-month-old daughter Mila) were in some ways very alone, as new Canadians of East Indian origin.
But Mansaram, as I’ve come to know him, was and is a citizen of the human, with the confidence to be at home anywhere. Before Canada he studied in Amsterdam, then London. Still, whatever his natural aptitudes in that regard, nothing can diminish the challenge. I was simply born in Canada; he had to create himself here, in the forge of experiment, hammering together the elements of belonging.
Both his curiosity and his instinct for adaptation led him presciently, as an artist, to “find” the ideas of McLuhan, who was one of those chipping cracks in the Canadian veneer.
Mansaram and McLuhan seemed to have common creative tuning. They collaborated. McLuhan was interested in transfusions of East with West as, of course, was Mansaram. Mansaram loved new media, new tech and non-traditional form, often to give new voicings to traditional content, including traditional Indian images, torched up with digital colour and juxtaposed against Western pop culture fagments.
This approach to art has persisted in him to this day, through his move to Hamilton/Burlington where he had a career teaching art in high schools such as Sir John A. Macdonald. He also was a member of Hamilton Artists Inc. and helped start the India Canada Association at McMaster.
Into his 80s he is still creating, using computers, collage, colour xerography, laser and digital means.
The light has come in. There’s been a liberation of our palates and palettes. Indian restaurants abound now. And there’s a chicken tikka masala in every second pot, so to speak, even in the kitchens of those with names like Jones and O’Brien. Even I know the difference between paneer and pakora (thanks to Mansaram).
And Mansaram and his art are in their rightful place.