In August this year, London-based Malaysian artist Rajinder Singh staged the exhibition Saffron Surrender at Kuala Lumpur’s Wei-Ling Gallery, and presented a new volume of poetry entitled Pale in Saffron.
Why saffron, you might ask? For one, the vibrant yellow-orange colour — often used for turbans and religious robes — is religiously significant and considered auspicious by Sikhs, Buddhists, and Jains. It can symbolise purity, piety, and, for Sikhs, courage and sacrifice. In a recent interview with Options, Singh described the colour as “allud[ing] to the weight of an idea … the overflow of the infinite through the fabric of a turban.”
Saffron, then, is “the stain of a prayer or a blessing, or the connection to the infinite” — in some ways, it is representative of Singh’s artistic practice. In Saffron Surrender, however, Singh deals not only with the spiritual or metaphysical, but also the personal and historical — specifically, the legacy of British colonialism, from the perspective of an artist raised in a Sikh household in Malaysia.
Inheriting history
In the 1870s, the British sent Sikh soldiers to Malaysia (then known as British Malaya) as enforcers over the local population, to maintain order and guard the tin mines. Although the Sikhs were themselves colonial subjects, the locals perceived them as part of the colonial power, placing them in a complex and unsettling position.
Such complexities surface in Singh’s work, which spans various mediums including painting, installation, photography, video, and performance. For over 20 years, the artist has addressed themes of decolonisation, societal power dynamics, and the vulnerable human body, using religious and symbolic imagery such as the turban. In Saffron Songs (2022), his previous show with Wei-Ling Gallery, he exhibited work linked to his grandfather’s experiences of British and Japanese colonisation.
Through the retelling of three stories from childhood, Saffron Surrender expands Singh’s exploration of how the body inherits colonial legacies. The stories also served as inspiration for his poetry collection, with the eponymous poem “Saffron Surrender” displayed as part of the exhibition’s wall text.
An ambiguous battle
The exhibition features nine large paintings heavily influenced by the Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens, known for his dynamic compositions, vibrant use of colour, and dramatic depictions of mythological, religious, and historical scenes. In this series, Singh depicts fictional war scenes starring heroically masculine, turban-wearing Sikh soldiers in all-out battle.
One of Saffron Surrender’s highlights is an imposing hinged triptych (three-panel painting) depicting a battle scene, which reinterprets the well-established Western visual tradition of history painting for an Asian context. Full of intense movement and colour, the artwork centres on two main figures: a soldier in a turban with his chest bared, and another in British military dress. They both appear to be riding the same horse — perhaps a deliberately playful twist of perception on Singh’s part.
A similar ambivalence can be found in the backdrop, where turban-wearing soldiers, whom we might expect to be on the same side, engage in combat against each other. A prominent Union Jack waving in the background adds further ambiguity to the scene — are the tussling soldiers part of the colonial power, or opposed to it?
Blurring the distinctions between enemy and ally, Singh builds ambiguity into the painting, thus visualising the Sikhs’ awkward position in relation to the colonisers.
The heroic body
Besides the paintings, Saffron Surrender also includes two light sculptures. Each features a dome-shaped floor lamp in deep reddish-orange hues, covered in gold ornaments and attached to a curved metal leg. Under each structure lies a screen displaying a looped, single-channel video work, as well as a small bamboo stool, illuminated by the lamp, for visitors to rest and contemplate. Singh thinks of these sculptures as turban proxies, the turban being a recurring element in his sculptural practice and a key object in the performance of prayer and faith.
From each bamboo stool, you can view one of the two video works. Both works showcase a pale, muscular body performing the movement of turban tying. We can also connect this to the great emphasis Singh places on the heroic and martial Sikh body in his paintings. On the one hand, these are colonised bodies, as the British promoted the ideal of the masculine and martial Sikh soldier when recruiting for their army. On the other, a heroic male ideal did already exist in the Sikh cultural context, particularly in the case of the Khalsa warriors, who have a longstanding reputation for bravery, discipline, and prowess in physical combat.
Throughout Saffron Surrender, there threads a complex conflation of the bodies of coloniser and colonised, powerful and powerless, Global North and Global South.
Looking at ourselves
Many of the paintings in the exhibition are triptychs, referencing devotional panels from the Christian tradition. Opening outwards on hinges, the two flanking paintings jut into the visitor’s space. Each triptych thus forms a “private viewing” space for visitors, like a window allowing them to peek into intriguing narratives. With the works hung on dark green walls and bathed in warm, dim lighting, the scene recalls the exhibition halls of a European museum.
After all, for Singh, the most crucial first step in the process of decolonisation is recognising the colonial inheritance within ourselves. His subtly unsettling paintings, featuring South Asian subjects rendered in a Western painting style, contain an unavoidable tension — suggesting that whatever we inherit from colonisation will never blend into our culture entirely, nor be wiped out completely. Even as we critically examine and denounce the legacies of coloniality, they remain, uncomfortably and awkwardly, all around us.
Rather than the possibility of decolonisation, perhaps what is crucial in Saffron Surrender, is, first, the realisation of the colonial forces within ourselves — to avoid being, in Malay terms, a babi buta (blind pig) who blindly follows.
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Saffron Surrender runs at Wei-Ling Gallery (Kuala Lumpur) until 14 September 2024 (by appointment only). Find out more at weiling-gallery.com.
Zhen Feng Ang is an employee of Wei-Ling Gallery, but, for the avoidance of doubt, this is not a paid partnership or advertorial.
Header image: Rajinder Singh, detail of Saffron Surrender (2024), oil on canvas, 120 x 250.5 cm.
