[Radha R is an alumnus 1990 B.(Fine) Painting, Faculty of Fine Arts , MSU, Baroda. In the piece below, she reflects on important issues of art and life in the wake of the recent happenings in Baroda. AN]
When I last left the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda where I was a painting student between 1985 and 1990 my heart was already heavy with the image of the saffron neo -Hindutva flag fluttering over what was to be my last Navrathri Garbha in a long time to come…
Post Godhra , I once stayed awake in a train that passed by Baroda station at 2a.m just to see how it felt to see once more the platforms upon which I had spent many a day sketching …There was a gloom to the light, an eeriness in the pools of shadows that were insomniac people squatting there perhaps holding in zones of impenetrably dark memories …Beneath the clock, those huddled up and sleeping resembled the dead…
In the same trip just a couple of months since the killings I walked restlessly through the crowds in the Old City around the Ahmedabad railway station … The roads were crowded …the markets were crowded…people of communities that were the murdering and the murdered thronged the centres where goods were exchanged with a briskness that bewildered the imagination …
In the midst of all this, where was history?
…Tucked out of sight under which fold of skin?
Where were the wounds that hemorrhaged their ways into our hearts?
Who was the expert plastic surgeon? Who wielded the Airbrush of erasure to such frightening perfection?
The skin before the TV was after all always correctly fair, almost, blemishless and perfect …save for a small blue vein that dammed up and spilt over the edges within which it was sought to be held and that stubbornly showed itself up from within the layers of the skin… History now calls it the Narmada Bachao Andolan…
… I have never ever felt like going back to a landscape where the scars of personal trauma now mingled inextricably with the suppurating welts of collective suffering…
FOR THE STUDENTS OF FACULTY OF FINE ARTS AND THEIR ACTING DEAN-
A friend of mine, a perfectly innocuous school teacher who performs all her roles extremely well and is distinguished by her genuine concern for her students happened to attend a ‘soft’ right wing meeting where there were their rightful indignant voices criticizing the misrepresentation of women in TV serials and where tarring billboards in the city that had models showcasing saris with minimalist blouses was being strongly considered.
Her passion for this cause was worrisome and I thought her zeal was misplaced. I suggested gently that it would be better to identify a producer with guts and money and work right away on an alternate script for a blockbuster T.V. Serial with a difference.
To my friend, who at another level also espouses peace and non-violence, I added that the tarring business was nothing but violence even if it did not involve bloodshed of any kind…For a ‘symbolic’ act is as violent or, I daresay, is even more violent than any pure, unmediated knee-jerk expression of violence that is not addressed against any symbol.
To verify, simply observe the expression and body language of protestors in any protest demonstration that involves destroying flags, effigies or other symbolic objects.
Symbols it seems are a purely human mode of apprehension and are quite like deltas of silt thrown up by the differential flows of power and which coming into being in turn influence the direction and intensities of these flows as well. The cores of the issues, more often than not then, lie not in the symbols as such but elsewhere. They call for more creative and mediated approaches whose conspicuous absence is in itself the surefire indicator of growing fascist tendencies in any organization.
It is necessary to recognize that the so called proponents of ‘Hindutva’ have nothing whatsoever to do with the amazingly resilient and highly pluralistic nature of flows that constitutes the perennial identity of this sub continent and whose uniqueness is precisely this – that it resists a single identity and is thereby so tremendously inspiring, live and creative.
In fact this new-found aggressive totalizing tendency that fuels the new Hindutvavaadis’ insistent self appointment as the custodians of a certain definition of moral values and a ‘parampara’ which they have edited together in accordance with their own limitations and selfish interests actually puts them bang amongst that against which they have traditionally positioned themselves – Semitism with its organised centralizing and Body/ Nature negating character
History has shown us time and again that iconoclasm (and genocide) is a fall out of the tendency towards centralization by which all that which falls outside the periphery of the newly defined centre is seen at best as ‘undesirable’… And at worst as a threat towards those within the centre in currency for which reason in a movement of ‘purification’, is required to be ‘purged’.
What is really worrisome is the possibility that this unchecked and uncontrollable game of simplistic symbol creating and symbol bashing that every single body of vested interests are engaging in under whatever name, could eventually result in the actual vandalism and destruction of our very real heritage of artistic expression that is unparalleled in the world and which unifying flesh and spirit, affirms with grand passion every aspect of Life experience…Be it Khajuraho or Modhera or in any of the countless lesser known temples scattered all over the sub-continent…
If left unchallenged, no one will be able to control the actions of groups as they splinter off into more and more sharply spiraling levels of bigotry and intolerance, including their own leaders who myopically hope to harness the current surge of ugly and uncivilised petty passions to vault into positions of power.
Not just Women but all that comprises the philosophical realm of the Feminine shall suffer and is in fact already suffering the world over…And this includes Art that holds in its ambit all the creative movements that comprise Life… Whose hallmark is its sheer multiplicity of constituents, its heterogeneity of expression, its audacious straddling of polarities, its vigorous celebration of difference that gifts it with an amazingly affirmative death-defying resilience…
What could be more important to Life than taking on the task of cherishing this?
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 
Radha R. says :’What is really worrisome is the possibility that this unchecked and uncontrollable game of simplistic symbol creating and symbol bashing that every single body of vested interests are engaging in under whatever name, could eventually result in the actual vandalism and destruction of our very real heritage of artistic expression that is unparalleled in the world and which unifying flesh and spirit, affirms with grand passion every aspect of Life experience…Be it Khajuraho or Modhera or in any of the countless lesser known temples scattered all over the sub-continent…’
Well, Symbols are not always created only by powers and forces which rule or have hegemony over society, its politics, economy and culture. Symbols are also created by the people and cultures which are oppressed by the weight of the mightier ‘symbols’ of the power-centers of their time as an act of defiance and resistance to it, through a long labyrinth of sufferings in time and history. Dominant power-centers can be politically defined simplistically ‘Right’ or ‘Left’, ‘Communal’ or ‘Secular’, ‘Liberal’ or ‘conservative’ and so on. These tags provide a most generalized comprehension of polarized powers in conflict to gain control over things and centralize their views throwing everything else to the periphery. However, the conflict and battle in the arena of ‘creating’ and ‘demolishing’ icons and symbols and that too in a multi-cultural, multi class and caste society, remains a most complex phenomenon not to be ‘umpired’ or ‘adjudicated’ in a hurry. For example, Narendra Modi, who, on the one hand symbolizes a communal ‘Hindutva’ power having potential to acquire the form of Nazism in India if not checked collectively by all the people, parties and groups who call themselves ‘secular’ or ‘humanitarian’, is also shares characteristics with his rivals and opponents when he symbolizes ‘development’, ‘modernization’ and ‘progress’ of Gujarat. Don’t forget, Modi is no way different in drowning and displacing thousands of poor tribals and dalits in the name of producing more electricity etc. for the state. Catastrophe and violence inherent in this ‘act of economic progress and development’ is far more dangerous than the apparent physical violence seen in communal riots and state sponsored genocides.
To make my point more comprehensible I cite just one example.
Arjun Singh, the HRD Minister, who is now symbolizing secularism in politics and culture and most courageously taking no hidden stand to come out thrashing and combating RSS/ BJP designs everywhere from history to school text books, one should recall that it was he, who was the CM in Bhopal when the biggest industrial tragedy in the history of mankind happened in 1984 leaving more than 10,000 people dead and around 75,000 more sick and affected by the poisonous gas in one night.
So, now if a simple civilian, ‘ek aam aadmi’ who looks at all these political power symbols and icons with skepticism does he commits a ‘wrong’? Same goes with the arts and life. Artist as an individual does confront against hegemonic symbols from both or all the power (collective, prevalent, accepted, political etc) poles and attempts to create another symbol through a process, ye to be decoded and defined forever, a mysterious process, termed as ‘creative process’. This ‘another symbol’, sometimes not known in the past and history does create a social-political ripple for some time as had happened in the recent case of Chandramohan.
However, to me, it always appears that the artist or the writer, who is held responsible for blasphemy or is accused of ‘hurting’ sentiments of others by creating another symbol through ‘dismantling’ or ‘altering’ an existing symbol, belongs to a much weaker social-political class in comparison to those who protest and organize rallies in his support in big cities and the capital.
I have not seen personally those two paintings by Chandramohan which are at the centre of all turbulence but as I read about the sketchy details by someone about them in a magazine, I have one question in my mind i.e. what after all artist wanted to communicate by writing ‘WC’ (Western Commode) under the feet of crucified Jesus? Was there any ‘Hindtutva’ element latent in his own subconscious self?
However, even if this is the case, violence and vandalism against him is still strongly deplorable.
One, last point. This is the high time when artists and writers should be given a different ‘identity’ (asmita) irrespective of their caste, community, race and other sociological or political traits. An artist should be treated as an artist and the whole community of artist must rise in defense of his freedom of expression and other rights given by the constitution.
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I can understand that Narendra Modi’s ill-concealed and pathological hatred of the Muslims, Christians and the secular political class as is clearly transparent in the rhetoric of much of his self-positioning had initially symbolic and eventually iconic possibilities. Modi is literally and figuratively inaccessible. Non-tactile. Unreal and therefore larger than life or, as is ‘proved’ (?) by the fake encounters in his home state, death.
What I cannot understand equally clearly is how Bhopal’s gas leak – am I hearing Uday Prakash to say that it was as hienously state-sponsored as the pogrom of Muslims in Gujarat – is in any way comparable to what happened in Modi’s Gujarat.
It is not as if Arjun Singh cannot be panned: after all getting a school and a road named after his own self by an obliging Mushir-ul-Hasan Cantab at a function where he himself was the guest of honour is too ludicrous an act for a person of his stature who obviously takes much pride in being almost sardonically self-righteous. But this sadly has no great symbolic or iconic value.
Symbols and icons are complex phenomena and not as easily explanable as either Radha or Uday or Maya Khanna or Parul Dave are making them out to be.
And finally, what do you mean by:
“Catastrophe and violence inherent in this ‘act of economic progress and development’ is far more dangerous than the apparent physical violence seen in communal riots and state sponsored genocides.”
This is most upsetting. How I wish you hadn’t made this statement!
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