About – Janeitasingh

But we must not forget that only a very few people are artists in life; that the art of life is the most distinguished and rarest of all the arts

Carl Jung, Modern man in search of a soul

My interests span a wide spectrum: literature and art, psychology and philosophy, consciousness studies and anthropology, art history, theology, science, music, and cinema. These disciplines constantly converse with one another in my work, enriching my perspective and allowing me to approach ideas with both sensitivity and intellectual rigor.

As an author I am excited to be on this journey with my book, FN Souza: The Archetypal Artist. I look forward to the many lives of my book, as the book returns to me, refracted through the reader’s mind. Each fresh pair of eyes codes new meanings and perspectives that expands my thought and generates enriching conversations.

The book began as a quest, seeking answers to cultural constructs of life, body and sexuality. Cutural theorist, Alfred Louis Kroeber, came out with the idea od culture as ‘superorganic’ that human beings are born naked and along the way add layers of culture which show up in their behviour and decisions.

In 2011 I was grappling with the remanants of my wounded postcolonial psyche, akin to Dr Ashis Nandy book, the Intimate Enemy: the loss and recovery of the Self, of how colonialism ruptured the psyche of the colonized and the colonialists and its long lasing repercussions. Also highlighted in George Orwell’s, the Burmese days…..where shooting of the Elephant has become an oft repeated example. The conditioned and structured lives of men and women in society troubled me. The hyper masculinity propagated by nationalism, had led to constricted women journeys, which affected me and my first family directly. I wanted to see my dwindled and denuded widowed mother for the primordial goddess she is, the beauty and power of the Devi, superior and potent in herself. Authoritarian narratives from religion and state thwarted attempts to attain autonomy at every step. The rationalism of enlightenment had marginalized alternative epistemic knowledge systems. Transpersonal psychology and free human consciousness was not recognized and given value. The nexus of capitalism, beaurocracy, and patriarchy was imposing and claustrophobic, leaving litle room for creativity and imagination. The Apollonian/Dionysian duality was polarized towards one extremity. East and West had been at loggerheads since centuries. A serious engagement with Souza’s art began in context of a search for sovereignity, and the connect was visceral, thought provoking and cathartic.

I would say that this was also made possible because by then I had been embedded in Carl Jung psychology for over a decade, and I began perceiving new insights in Souza’s body of work. Shadows and archetypes danced on his canvases. I came to believe that Souza’s art was an exercise in shadow work of the collective human consciousness. Souza mined images from his personal unconscious, ovinerlaying a grid of the collective unconscious. Everything we had suppressed, rejected and marginalized as a society stood glorfied on his canvas. Souza’s modernity mirrored a wounded psyche as he wrestled with post-war, postcolonial and post enlightenment paradigms.

I had often heard collectors of FN Souza’s works say that while Souza was the most brilliant Indian modernist, they couldn’t buy his artwork to hang it in their living rooms. Souza’s works mostly lie wrapped-up in attics. No public gallery displays them in Goa. Souza is well known in Bombay and Delhi, but the rest of India is unaware of his artistic legacy. The secondary markets in India, Europe and the US sustain his art, but more for its asset value. There is something very visceral and primaeval about his work; many people would like to engage with it, but an uncanny unease fills them whenever they try to and they shy away from it. The questions that drove me in the beginning were:

Why is Souza’s art uneasy on the eye?
What triggers and provokes us when we look at Souza’s art? Why?

For decades, even after the passing of the artist, the mainstream narrative is invested in his personality no. 1, his external life, and ego consciousness. This book is exclusively about his personality no. 2, his inner life, the conscious-unconscious process, his creative imagination and art on his canvas.

“I approached Souza as an ‘archetypal artist‘ — a take from Jungian psychology. ‘The fascination lies in the artist who obeys alien impulses, wielding him like a marionette.'” He was a compulsive artist; art is as important as bread. Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthrals and overpowers the world with this spiritual task, affecting epochs – Carl Jung

The ‘archetypal artist‘ framework also allowed me to understand Souza not just as a product of his time, but as someone grappling with forces – religious, erotic, and social – that are much older and deeper than modernity itself.

The chaos (messiness) of his life and creative imagination on the other side forced me to look at contradictions in a new light. The beauty of the complexity of human beings heralded a new dawn in my consciousness.

This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you
build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation,
but must repair the world around it and within it, so that the
larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and
more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in
the web of nature, as you make it……..

Christopher Alexander

In other words, an artist has not succeeded unless his work elicits an emotional response, Rasa, in the audience. This can be made possible when the audience is knowledgeable and sensitive to receive it ….in Souza’s words beauty does not lie in the eyes of the beholder but in a cultivated mind.

My work on Souza is a thrust towards that goal.

In the examination of Souza’s life through a Jungian lens, what intrigued me was that a 16-year young (boy) artist had arrived at such emancipated figures and heads on his canvas. The deeply mysterious feminine in masculine psychology, the Anima, seemed to have played a stellar role in Souza’s psychic life, actively guiding him to tap into the primordial imagery in his unconscious through dream work and active imagination. I was fascinated to see Jungian psychology at play in the artist’s creative life.

“I wasn’t aiming for a traditional biography. I wanted a critical form porous enough to accommodate literary thinking, historical depth, interdisciplinary research and personal stakes. The essay form offered that—it allowed for a voice that could be analytical but also up close and personal riding on cogent arguments. To contain the fugitive and fractured quality of the work, it allowed me to remain in that unsettled space, to write in fragments, rather than neat conclusions.

Since the book’s publication, I’ve been moved by the ways it’s been read: not only by scholars and critics, but also by artists, students, and also the general inquisitive reader outside the usual art-historical circuits. I am glad the book is a space for cross-disciplinary conversations.

In retrospect, I also wonder what I didn’t write—what felt too close, but was not yet ready. This book began as a conversation with Souza’s work—but I hope it can now be a conversation with yours.”

I’m excited to explore Souza not just as a historical figure, but as a contemporary presence

“Is Souza more relevant today than ever?”

in India & abroad