Ranjit Hoskote
Hindustan Times
The outrageous arrest of Chandramohan, a final-year fine arts student
at the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda, on 9 May, 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), 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 M F 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.
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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.
