'Painting the Art World Red'

[Guest guest]

[This extremely insightful and powerful editorial by art critic and

curator Ranjit Hoskote was published May 14, 2007, in the Hindustan

Times. Definitely a recommended read, idenitifying the roots of

the " offensive " artwork firmly in Indian history, and the roots of

its " fundamentalist Hindu " detractors in European puritanism and

fascism. I would be interested in any reactions, pro or con. Thanks -

DB]

 

PAINTING THE ART WORLD RED

 

MUMBAI (May 14, 2007): The outrageous arrest of Chandramohan, a final-

year fine arts student at the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda,

on May 9, has confirmed that the only right that is taken seriously

in India today is the right to take offence.

 

The right to take offence is not a fundamental right guaranteed by

the Constitution, but all the same, it is the most easily enforced of

all rights. All you need is a local demagogue with a taste for

publicity, a few rampaging goons, policemen who favour the violent

over the reasonable, and a lower judiciary that is reluctant to defy

the mob.

 

Chandramohan, who was taken into custody by the Baroda police without

a proper warrant, after he had been roughed up by a gang of Vishwa

Hindu Parishad (VHP) activists, has been charged with public

obscenity and an attempt to incite communal disharmony.

 

The images to which such turbulent opposition has been mounted show a

woman, perhaps a goddess, birthing a man (which is no more fearful

than the Lajja-Gouri of Hindu sacred art [see

http://tinyurl.com/ywpx2x ]), and a crucifix with a penis (this, an

obvious homage to Robert Mapplethorpe). Both images retrieve the

passionate human dramas that lie at the core of sacred narratives.

Both images insist upon the artist's right to revisit inherited lore,

to reinvent images and narratives, to integrate the sacred as an

element of secular experience.

 

The treatment meted out to this young artist follows a pattern of

violations against cultural freedom in India over the last two

decades. The programmatic persecution of MF Husain is the most

visible of these violations. But many artists, writers, film-makers,

scholars and other cultural practitioners have suffered the

attentions of the State, of pressure groups, and of informal

alliances between these forces: Anand Patwardhan, Surendran Nair,

Sheba Chhachhi, Rekha Rodwittiya, to name just four. Galleries,

research institutes and bookstores have been attacked, paintings and

manuscripts have been burned, concerts have been disrupted, and films

refused screenings, all in the name of the right to take offence.

 

The group is everything, even if it is a fiction or a fraction; the

individual is nothing. Paradoxically, in a Republic built to

safeguard individual rights, one can bargain with the State and even

force State action (or secure State inaction) by citing the

sensitivities of a group. But one cannot make the same effective

claim on behalf of an individual's cultural freedom. Thus, for

example, Laine's study of Shivaji was banned instantly when Maratha

organisations agitated against it. But Anand Patwardhan must fight

legal battles for years before Doordarshan agrees to screen one of

his critical documentaries.

 

Champions of the right to take offence assume that they alone have

the right to speak of certain issues, that their imagination has

primacy over that of others. Thus, for instance, the VHP assumes that

Hindu icons can exist only as objects in a Hindutva discourse. This

explicitly denies the right of other discourses to construct them in

different ways, as the objects of scholarship, of art, of good-

natured humour, or of open-ended faith.

 

This explains the grimly ironic turn of events following

Chandramohan's arrest, when the self-appointed custodians of Hindu

culture demanded the closure of an exhibition showing the vital role

of the erotic in Hindu sacred art. On 11 May, in silent protest, some

of Chandramohan's fellow students put up an exhibition of

reproductions of images drawn from across 2500 years of Indian art.

These included the Gudimallam Shiva, perhaps the earliest known Shiva

image, which combines the lingam with an anthropomorphic form of the

deity; a Kushan mukha-linga or masked lingam; Lajja-Gouris from

Ellora and Orissa, resplendent in their fecund nakedness; erotic

statuary from Modhera, Konark and Khajuraho; as well as Raga-mala

paintings from Rajasthan. All these images, which rank among the

finest produced through the centuries in the subcontinent, celebrate

the sensuous and the passionate dimensions of existence — which, in

the Hindu world-view, are inseparably twinned with the austere and

the contemplative.

 

This treasure of Hindu sacred art did not win the favour of the

establishment, which ordered the exhibition hall to be sealed. It

appears that the champions of a resurgent Hindu identity are acutely

embarrassed by the presence of the erotic at the centre of Hindu

sacred art. As they may well be, for the roots of Hindutva do not lie

in Hinduism. Rather, they lie in a crude mixture of German

romanticism, Victorian puritanism and Nazi methodology.

 

What happens next, we wonder? Will the champions of Hindutva go

around the country chipping away at temple murals, breaking down

monuments, whitewashing wall paintings, and burning manuscripts and

folios? Perhaps they will not stop until they have forced the

unpredictable richness of Hindu culture to conform to their own

tunnel vision of life, art, image and narrative.

 

The first move in the establishment of a fascist system is thought-

policing, the curtailment of the liberal imagination. We see this in

the breaching of the sanctity of academia, with goons ransacking the

Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune, in January 2004, or

police entering the M S University campus last week.

 

And physical attack or arrest has become the first response to any

criticism or departure from convention. If anyone had a problem with

Chandramohan's images, for instance, surely they could have resorted

to the old-fashioned option of talking to the artist? But

conversation has long ago vanished from the menu of problem-solving

devices, as India turns into an illiberal democracy.

 

Periodic elections do not, by themselves guarantee a liberal

democracy; they only guarantee periodic changes of government. A true

democracy demands constant revitalisation of the spirit of openness,

generosity and liberality of opinion. Democracy is not an achieved

set of laws or a manual of instructions; it is a work in progress. It

is a space that allows diverse imaginations to interact, it is a

community of conversations.

 

Given the direction in which we are heading, can we recover democracy

as a community of conversations, rather than as a space segmented and

partitioned by communitarian claims? Can we allow for the interplay

of diverse imaginations, with none exerting a monopolistic claim on

experience? Can we productively reconstitute the same objects in

different discourses, without inviting assault on our civic and

cultural freedoms? Can we preserve nuance, detail and polychromy in

our accounts of ourselves – as complex selves in a complex society –

without being coerced into subscription towards one group identity or

another by colour-blind demagogues? Can we protect the right to

artistic truth and the right to critique?

 

And indeed, why must the artist be called upon to defend his or her

work, while the agitator goes free? The legal onus of proving that an

art-work can cause offence should weigh down the agitator. After all,

there is a strong structural similarity among all these incidents:

while the great public has no problem, a lunatic fringe that claims

to speak for the majority monopolises public space, and claims the

right to scrutinise the work of cultural practitioners. The crisis is

manufactured, not from spontaneous feeling, but in a motivated and

well-planned fashion.

 

In the Chandramohan case, the VHP activists knew exactly what they

were looking for, entering the display and heading straight for his

work. Perhaps it is time to add another minority to India's social

fabric: the vulnerable minority of cultural practitioners.

 

SOURCE: The Hindustan Times

URL: http://tinyurl.com/28ne76