My Grandmother’s lessons in Ontology

I was very intrigued by golden rods blooming in the fall. One morning in late October 2023, I stopped by the side of the road to investigate closely and was taking a few bunches. A Caucasian lady came up to me and asked me if I had permission from the city. I was baffled by this and amazed that “the city” would have the bandwidth to process such “plant permits” instead of working on the housing crises or just anything else. That made me think of my grandmother. 

When I was a child, I used to sleep with my Dadi [दादी] (paternal grandmother) at night and she would take me with her to the temple in the early mornings. On our way to the temple, carrying our little baskets, we would collect flowers from wild bushes. She would say, “Hold the flower, if it wants to come with you, it will fall over with very little effort.”; If you need more strength to break it, you need to leave it alone.” That was my first lesson in asking for consent from plants. 

In my very Indian upbringing in the nineties in post-independence India, religion was not a choice, but it was not a prescription either. There was an unsaid and highly suggestive ethical code that the adults in my life lived by. This kind of upbringing has formulated my material canon much like Robert Kimmerer’s upbringing was formed by strawberries (Kimmerer, The Gift of Strawberries 22-32). As an observant child, I learned quickly to talk to trees to wish for unachievable things by tying a red thread around them.1 To move swiftly but carefully through the world without stepping on any ants or life-forms beneath my feet. To feed a part of my roti [bread] to the crows so they can take my messages to other worlds where my ancestors are. Philosophical theories about ontology like the presence of consciousness or prana in all that exists is a way of life in my culture.2 Living and studying in Canada now, I find it challenging to not bring in my Indian grandmother’s teachings while parsing through Western critical thinkers like Deleuze and Spinoza when thinking about “being,” transcendence and ontology especially because my art practice is situated in materiality.3 

In western education systems a truth becomes a truth through observable and verifiable evidence or laboratory experiments. From the world I am from, a truth is a truth if it feels right in your gut. I never questioned giving a bite of my bread to the crows, because they seemed to love it and would grab it quickly. This is very far from blind faith or being religious or superstitious. It is a belief system that everyone and everything is connected and is part of the same whole. Even if the crows don’t take my wishes to the world of my ancestors, I still feel joy from being useful to another being by sharing my privilege of having access to food. That was a sufficient reason to do it and also because crows are very intelligent. Isn’t this the more-than-human agency and making kin with critters that Donna Harraway often writes about?4 I do not need a Western thinker to reify that animals, birds, bees, plants and even rocks can have agency. 

In 2020, on one of my visits back home in Delhi, many years after I had gotten married and had a child, my grandmother asked me what I would like her to cook for me. She is 86 years old and after much of my refusal and throwing up my hands, I gave in and asked her for her famous chickpea flour rotis (flatbread). I carefully observed her as she mixed flour with ghee (clarified butter) generously, without measuring. I asked her, how does she know when the salt is right and when the ghee is enough. She told me you must listen to the dough and feel it. I did not understand this at first, what was I listening to? But, as I cooked many things over the years and started listening actively and deeply, to the crumbs, to the textures, to the smell and dish after dish turned out to be perfectly balanced without having measured anything ever.  

Growing up in a huge family with many uncles, aunts and cousins, imagining yourself to be part of the greater good was not revolutionary or one that is difficult to comprehend. While sitting down for family meals, it was easy to gauge how much to take from the bowl so everyone can have some of it. Relationality was not taught, it was felt and practiced. You learn to respect that you are not an individual but a part of the whole and you take what you need, not what you want.5  

My secondary advisor, Derek Sullivan asked me, when does my installation become the work it is. When is it finished? The work becomes work when various components of my assemblage feel like they are having a conversation beyond my intervention and come alive. While reflecting on what is alive and what is not. What does it mean to exist? I often think about stories from the Bhagwat Gita my Dadi would tell me about the river rising to protect Krishna or the sky bursting with lightning when there was an atrocity at play. We would talk about rivers, trees, ground and earth as just other beings and never not having agency in what was unfolding in the stories. These were my first lessons in forming theories on Object-oriented ontologies. I believe the materials I am working with, the gelatine, algae and dead flowers - are alive and interact with the environment and me. All I must do is listen to the crumbs as they tell me things and my gut knows that language. Deep listening into materials has become my methodology. The answers might not come to me within the scale of human time, and one might need to alter pace and expectations. But asking questions and staying with that uncomfortable trouble might be one of the ways we do not reproduce colonial and extractive ways of thinking. 

I was at an artist residency in the middle of November 2023 called Mothra, which was meant for artist mothers and parents. One evening, Sarah Cullen, the founder of the Mothra artist parent residency invited us to gather around the fire pit to discuss Virginia Wolf’s Room of One’s Own and ponder on the importance of such a proverbial room for artist parents.  Somehow a group of seven women artists got stuck on the idea of the “artistic genius” as a very obsolete term and probably patriarchal in the way it was thought about in older times. As someone who grew up with magical recipes and home remedies, I would define genius almost as magical resourcefulness. I believe that the generational wisdom handed down to me by my grandmother who always did so much with, so little is the ingenuity I bring to my art practice. Whether it was making the best chickpea roti in the world or curing excruciating ear pain with burnt garlic, I learnt to lean into the healing powers of what is around us, what’s at hand and what is being given easily, early on in life.  

[Insert excerpt about Place-thought from Indigenizing the Anthropocene Zoe Todd] 

While using mothering as a methodology Mothering is a lens I developed as I took part in  caring for someone beyond myself. My mortality and importance in my child’s life makes me live better in many ways. It makes me question my legacy and what I leave behind when I am gone. Is it an idea? Is it microplastics? I find almost the same people at the parenting round table and at the seminars about sustainability and alternative materials. I am beginning to form the opinion that being responsible for another being makes you want to think critically about the kind of world you would leave behind for them. Artist parents are a special species and niche subsection of that group of people. These people are actively conjuring up ways to make their surroundings better, safe, and habitable. As artists, we often have no control over the policy for single-use plastics, but we do control the materials we make art with and the processes we adapt. These materials spark conversations that can go a long way in forming and shifting public opinion.  

In How to Not Exclude Artist Mothers and Other Parents, Hettie Judah writes about mommy work. Who gets to decide what is acceptable professional art? By fully integrating domestic ways of making into professional spheres instead of accepting infantilizing terms like “woman artist” or “mother artist” while male artists just being referred to as artists, we might be able to find ways of existing beyond the conditioned confines of patriarchy. Why is Heidegger a philosopher on ontology but not my grandmother?