Suryanandini Narain

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA is tentatively titled Visualising Home: Domestic Visual Cultures in India, and will examine female agency in the visual production of everyday domestic objects in middle-class, urban India. The key figure of the project is the middle-class ‘housewife’ or ‘homemaker’ who is educated but not in full-time employment outside of the home, investing her skills within the domestic sphere of the DDA flats, a standard form of housing provided by the government for its residents across the city of Delhi. Suryanandini Narain is the Coordinator for this project. 

Suryanandini is an Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi.  She has written extensively on photography in India, especially around themes of women, the family, the home and the studio photography, in publications including Marg, Art India, Visual Anthropology Review, Trans Asia Photography Review and others. She is presently co-editing a book on family photographs in India for Zubaan Books, supported by the MurthyNayak Foundation and IFA. Given her vast experience, Suryanandini is best suited to be the Coordinator of this Foundation Project by IFA. 

The project will examine female agency in the visual production of everyday domestic objects in middle-class, urban India. It will explore the interconnections between the histories of hobbies, domestic sciences, and craft and arts practices in post-independence India and how talent, training and ideology have guided women to variously produce visual aesthetics of the home. The quotidian histories of needlework, knitting, painting, creatively presented food, home textiles, decorative items, and furniture will be analysed for the uncharted histories of everyday visual culture produced by women in the domestic sphere. The project hopes to enquire into the multivocalities embedded within the intersectional spaces of gender and class in urban India, critiquing the scholarly formulation of the ‘subaltern’ feminine figure in South Asia.  

The project will foreground visual forms of culture consisting of extant image-based archives in homes in the form of family photographs, magazines and media images, home science textbooks, manuals, mobile phone imagery, and internet videos that are part of the middle-class domestic visual scape. In addition, it will look at wider spheres such as craft and art school pedagogies, methods and materials available in a global environment, the phenomena of trade fairs and festival fetes, and curatorial and exhibitionary practices since the 1950s to the 2020s that have informed feminine identities embedded in ordinary urban Indian living. Finally, the project hopes to thread this work with interrogating spheres of domestic labour, ideological underpinnings and patriarchal claims on the lives of the female producers under question.

The outcomes of this project will be a monograph and audiovisual documentation from the field. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA, along with the final reports, will be the monograph and audiovisual documentation.

This project suitably addresses the framework of IFA’s Arts Research programme in the manner in which it attempts to examine a sphere of constructed visual culture within the domestic that is invisible in discourses, as well as critique the ways in which the subaltern feminine figure has been formulated in South Asia. 

IFA will ensure the timely implementation of this project and that funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the project’s progress at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is complete and deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation report to share with Trustees.

This project is made possible with support from BNP Paribas India.