By All Means Necessary

(Abul Azad, photographer. Picture courtesy TSL Nadar)

Summer winds get caught by the crowns of tall palm trees that line the flat landscape of Palakkadu (Palghat), one of the northern districts of Kerala. On the north eastern edge of this place Malayalam mixes with Tamil, the ancient language of philosophy, literature and music. These palm trees run backwards during the day turn into illusionary palaces at night where beautiful vampires allure men, take them on the top of these trees, enjoy their virility, then like spiders eat them up leaving only nails and hairs for the kith and kin to collect. The land is as real as a myth or vice versa. Sultans had come here looking for establishing kingdoms and leaving Muslim barons behind who started living amicably, intermingling with the local populace. Vedic and musical Brahmin streets never despised the Ravutars (Muslim Barons) who came by Arabian horses, like northern winds. Like the Brahmins, they too spoke in a Tamil mixed with Malayalam or vice versa. In Palakkad, everyone was a magical being. Some created music, some created literature, some others made wonderful cartoons and yet another lot created images.

(from War Widows series by Abul Azad)

Abul Azad, one of the most important photography artists in our times thought that he was one of the descendants of the Ravutars who came on horseback to Kerala via Palakkadu, in those good old days. He still believes so. Moving from Mattanchery, Kochi to Thiruvannamalai in Tamil Nadu in 2010 was a sort of going back to the roots. Azad speaks Tamil fluently and even many years before he started living in Thiruvannamalai, especially while living in Delhi as a PTI photographer, Azad still spoke Tamil, as if he was trying to remember the language of his ancestors. In fact, as a photography artist, then, Azad was a man of no languages. As he did not have any language of his own, he could speak the language that was presently given to him or rather in a language he found himself to be in. Hence, he spoke in Hindi when he was among the local populace in the northern parts of India. He spoke in English and laughed in Malayalam and mocked in Tamil when he was among his peer group. When he went to Paris to do a residency program in 1996-97 period he was rumored to have spoken in French. I still wonder in which language had he spoken to the djinns and malaks when he was caught within the Hazrat Bal shrine in Srinagar in 1993, photographing the actions of Indian army and the resistance of the Kashmir rebels.

(from War Widow series by Abul Azad)

Two decades back when Abul Azad showed his independent works to many including me, they all thought that his works were a bit ambitious therefore unconvincing. He was not showing the ‘Raghu Rai School’ of photography. Nor was he making his images in the mode of Kishore Parikh. His photographs were different and disturbing at once. Ram Rahman, in his typical style of black humor and understatement was documenting the underbelly of the North Indian politics and also he was keen on capturing the chance homo-erotic manifestations in the conservative North India’s public domain. With some kind of passion (unlike that of Pablo Bartholomew), both Ram Rahman and Abul Azad were documenting the last patches of an elegant secularism that stemmed from the heartlands of Uttar Pradesh and Delhi. Abul Azad was doing something more; he was making a private body of images that defied the image quality as well as surface quality of the generic documentary photographs. There were too many deliberate interpolations and deliberate erasures. The image was almost non-existent in his works; in its place there appeared graffiti like scratches and scars, consciously inflicted on them as if the artist was doing some sort of self flagellation.

(Photo by Abul Azad)

The starkness of the underlying images was either provoking questions or utter disappointment among the viewers and friends. Azad was nonchalant and was not explaining them away. He was just showing the images those were scarred and scratched. One day he showed a series of post card size prints and photographic prints of Indian gods and goddesses, pasted upside down on the walls of his two room set flat in Mayur Vihar Phase III. A shudder passed through the spines of all those who saw them. The reason was simple; our political climate had already changed. The socio-political discourse had already been in a new path after the Post-Mandal years of late 1980s and the historical and unfortunate year 1992, when the Babri Masjid was demolished on the 6^th December. Azad was still trying to be a normal press photographer. But something had changed in him. A staunch secularist, he faced the double bind of his name; Azad was at once a Hindu name that connoted revolutionaries like Chandrasekhar Azad and a Muslim name in the southern part of India. His friend Ram Rahman, by virtue of his birth had problematized his religious existence via his parents’ deliberate choice of his name. Here was Abul Kalam Azad, definitely the name coming from the famous Muslim leader of Indian Independence, carrying a name, which is obviously Islamic yet ringing a bit of Hindu in it. Azad was a secularist; neither a Muslim nor a Hindu. If Din Ilahi was there, Azad would have been one in the pack. Otherwise, he remains more like a Sufi, who leans more towards the asceticism and liberalism of Hindu religion than being a Muslim.

(photo by Abul Azad)

Azad’s works of 1990s, however were disturbing for he was documenting the ugly side of Indian politics and religions though an unprecedented image repertoire. None would have exhibited those works in the controversial decade of 1990s. There were incidents in Delhi in which works were brought down from shows and at times even the show itself was pulled down. M.F.Husain was being haunted and hunted down. Galleries and curators were playing it safe. The only organization that stood the pressure was SAHMAT in Delhi and they were making periodical efforts to showcase counter images and counter voices. Yet, Azad’s works were not shown in Delhi even in these venues. It was a time to say good bye to a safe job and a safe life. Azad left Delhi towards the new millennium and settled down in Mattanchery, Kochi, where he was instrumental in developing a style of photography, which I once called the ‘Mattanchery School of Photography’. The years went on and Azad was photographing the locale, the immediate and the self in different image complexes. He photographed the political graffiti of Kerala, without any pretensions of being theoretical or political. He captured the images of local tea shops and toddy shops and much before the new gen films in Kerala started narrating stories from the point of view of ‘insignificant people’, Azad was already narrating the life of Kerala through the perception of the ‘insignificant people’. Poignantly and pointedly, Azad was documenting himself by creating visual diaries. Even a toy or a pebble became a narrative point of Azad.

(Photo by Abul Azad)

In ‘Ishka’ Gallery, Kochi, Azad exhibited a series of large scale photographs sometime in 2007. Joseph Chakola, a photographer, print maker, musician and artist based in Kochi was behind the initiative and Chakola was ready to take the risk of exhibiting Azad’s works. Those works showed a series of images of cows and their locations, as if they were direct print of tinted negatives. Azad was very perceptive though many did not know the implications of those images then. Years later we saw how cow became a defining factor in the development of new nationalism in the changed political discourse of our country. Azad could see it coming and portrayal of cows in their various manifestations was a silent cry and a strong critique about the emerging political scenario. Even if these works were shown in Delhi or any other part of the cow belt of that time, none would have taken objection because these images were not really showing any agitated state of mind of the artist. The iconizing of the cows was subtle and infused with irony and black humor.

(Photo by Abul Azad)

Turning his attention to the mother goddess worship in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, Azad started taking ‘feminist rituals’ within the subaltern Hindu contexts as his point of departure. A series titled ‘Black Mothers’ came out of this engagement. Interestingly, as Azad does not make any claim about his theoretical or political leaning based on his images or interests, these works are not taken by the literary inclined feminist theoreticians for further studies but I am sure that is going to happen in the coming years. At the same time, Azad also started doing chromo-lomography, an old low end technique of photography which produced something similar to the instagram photograph. In fact Azad started posting lomographic images much before instagram came as a photographic app in the social media. Subverting the idea of making images using high end technology, Azad uses basic photographic equipments to make his stunning images.

(Photo by Abul Azad)

Koovagam is a place of worship in Tamil Nadu where in the month of April every year, transgenders from all over India (especially from South India) gather and become the brides of their God, Iravan. In this fifteen to twenty day ritual, these transgenders become brides of God and then become the widows of the same god. Then they are free to choose their partners and within a religious context they hold the pride parade without attracting much of the urban middle class theoretical paraphernalia. Azad who is interested in the lives of the subaltern people as well as those of the people with different sexual orientations, has been documenting the lives of the transgenders in Koovagam for the last few years. The images that we see in this series ‘War Wedding Widows, Sex, Desire, Love and Erotica’ (2016), these transgenders are captured with a lot of sensitivity without compromising their identity for male or female chauvinistic gaze. Azad uses two methods to click their images. He uses a traditional box camera and a white backdrop so that he could get these people to pose for him, which they happily oblige. In the second method, he clicks their pictures in their natural locales; including their public bath. As Azad has been a regular visitor to the festival, most of the transgenders are not offended by his presence. Without much praises to accompany, Azad does this ‘making of image’ as a very devoted ritual every year.

(Photo by Abul Azad)

A silent revolution has been going on for the last two years in Thiruvannamalai. Azad, supported by his daughter Dr.Mahima Azad and his partner Tulsi Suvarna Laxmi, has been documenting the day to day history of Thiruvannamalai in an ambitious photographic project that runs for 365 days in a year. With no funding agencies to support, Azad has been taking the help of the friends and local people, and a lot of enthusiastic young photography artists and doing this for the last two years. He set up an organization named ‘Ekaloka Trust for Photography’ (ETP) and the documenting of Thiruvannamalai and its fourteen kilometer Girivalam has already been done by different set of artists, in residency programs. In 2015, Azad initiated a project called ‘Mathilakam Rekhakal’ in order to document the ancient port cities in Tindys, Calicut and Muziris. He periodically posts the progress of ETP works in the social media and Tulsi does all the administrative works including the co-ordination of international photography projects. ETP has already done a Indo-Polish collaborative work as well as a Photography junket with a visiting Russian photographer.

(Photo by Abul Azad)

Azad rides around Thiruvannamalai on his TVS 50 motor cycle. The whole town of Thiruvannamalai knows him and for many he is ‘anna’ and for many others he is ‘photo swamy’. Azad gives free photography lessons for all who are interested. His students include high profile city people to street urchins. What ETP needs today is support; financial and material support. The huge archive that has been growing in the small premises of ETP should be supported by both the national and international funding agencies. Azad does not belong to any group or faction. As a photography artist, what he makes is not an image worth looking at, but the possible positioning of the subject forcefully in the given context. His trained eyes and hands do not need deliberations to see what is relevant and what is irrelevant. The huge archive of his own works also needs support. Abul Azad is a Ravutar turned Sufi Swamy with a camera around his neck. He speaks in Tamil exactly the way his ancestors used to speak to people. But I believe, Azad does not speak in any language. He speaks the language of images. He is a laughing photographer who could perhaps speak all the known and unknown languages in the world.

(The Tweet in Urdu, as a part of the Thomas Ellis''Dilli I love you' Project)

Yesterday Prime Minister Modi was thankful to the people of India for choosing the BJP in Assam and helping to make a ‘Congress Free’ India. Amit Shah, the President of the BJP exuded confidence that the Hindu consolidation was already happening for the general elections slated to take place in 2019. Prime Minister reiterated that the ‘ideology’ of the present government has gone down well with the people of this country. Definitely, the mandate of yesterday was not for the BJP though the vote share has increased and there are reasons for both Mr.Modi and Mr.Shah to imagine this increase in vote share is for their developmental agenda. Despite this optimism and public posture of goodness of the top leaders, the fringe elements of the Hindutva party seem to have not got the ‘right’ message. They are still on a rampage to iron out cultural and aesthetical differences by intimidating and threatening artists. The latest incident has just taken place a few hours back in East Delhi’s Shahdra area.

(The vandalized street art in Shahdra)

Two Spanish artists and an Indian artist were painting a wall that belonged to the Delhi Jal Board (Delhi Water Authority) in Shahdra as a part of the much talked about ‘Dilli I love You’ project by the French Television journalist and film maker, Thomas Ellis. While at it, they were stopped and abused by a mob of around hundred people who claimed themselves as the protectors of Hindu religion. The artists were taken to the police station and were released once the Aam Aadmi Party leader and Law Minister in the Delhi Cabinet, Kapil Misra intervened on their behalf. According to one of the artists, Akhlaq Ahmed, the ‘incident was shocking’ because the intention of the artists was to spread the message of love. What provoked the crowd, which was deliberately gathered through phone calls and whatsapp messages, was the language in which the artists were trying to put the message across. The language that they chose to write was ‘Urdu’.

(One could see the Urdu line over painted)

‘Delhi had fallen down once but it got up and regained its dignity. This city is unparalleled’ is the rough translation of the Urdu ‘tweet’ that the artists painted against the backdrop of Delhi’s Lotus Temple. “What provoked them was the language,” says Akhlaq. They were demanding to change it into Hindi. “They were just abusing the foreign artists and I requested them to abuse me and spare them as they don’t understand Hindi expletives,” says a soft spoken Akhlaq. “They turned to me and started patronizing me. They said that I was an Indian and I should have stopped them from using Urdu,” Akhlaq says. The crowd grew within minutes and they forcefully over painted the Urdu writing and literally white washed the tweet. “They were liberally throwing colors on the wall and spoiling what we had done.” In the meanwhile someone dialed 100 and Police came and took the artists to the station.

(permission granted certificate by the Delhi Jal Board for the street art project)

A lover of Delhi, Ellis initiated this project earlier this year and his idea is to capture the lives and times of Delhi, its people’s narratives, faces, life styles through various mediums including street art. Forty walls were chosen and Akhlaq Ahmed, celebrated young street artist was selected to lead the team of artists including the visiting foreign artists. Their idea is to paint forty ‘tweet messages’ on Delhi’s prominent walls. “The permission was already given in official writing. We showed it to the mob. But they were determined to spoil our work,” says Akhlaq. The police were however polite to the artists, perhaps because of the political intervention by the Minister himself. “The policemen offered us cold drinks and insisted that we should lunch with them, which we refused,” Akhlaq smiles. May be in the larger scheme of things, this incident is a passable one, but the implications are too strong to neglect. Monopolizing and steamrolling of culture starts with censorship by the violent mobs unchecked by the law and order systems. Systemic ruining of culture takes place first in streets and it may not take much time to reach the gates of our Museums and other cultural establishments. We need to be aware and alert on this.

(The new Ravi Varma book by the Piramal Art Foundation, Mumbai)

In Indian modern art history, Raja Ravi Varma stands more as a problem than a solution. Today his works command very high prices and even the most commercial of his artistic productions, the oleographs and the products that came out in the market several decades after his death too have become precious artifacts generating not only values for themselves but also new avenues of art historical interpretations, anthropological enquiries and aesthetic comparisons. Modern art history in India, often envisioned as a linear stream of events with individual and collective milestones coming up along the path, illuminated by erudition and darkened by deliberate obfuscation of truths regarding art production and consumption, still finds it difficult to accommodate Raja Ravi Varma as the pioneer of Indian modernism in art. In the art historical narratives produced even today play the dilemma safely by saying that Ravi Varma was a pioneer in employing western naturalism in Indian ethos but not really the father of Indian modernism. By pushing both Ravi Varma and his detractors of Bengal School in early 20^th century into the common category of ‘pre-modernism’, some historians have conveniently put the cap (Mother of Indian Modern Art) on to Amrita Shergill without explaining clearly how she was not using early 20^th century western modernism in Indian ethos. The only safe route for this people is that western naturalism unfortunately is not equated with western modernism. So by virtue of style and technique Ravi Varma remains technically pre-modern than theoretically and practically modern.

A condemned Ravi Varma is as problematic as a lauded Ravi Varma. Without dealing with a ‘mythical’ Ravi Varma, the real Ravi Varma cannot be logically located within the modern art history. There are several texts both in Malayalam and English that talk about Ravi Varma as a painter, a visionary and above all a human being. Interestingly, except for a few foreign researchers, most of the Indian chroniclers and historiographers, despite their depth of research and erudition, have sprinkled a fair amount of suppositions and attributions on to the biography of Ravi Varma so that today he stands like an enigma for a contemporary scholar. When a contemporary scholar tries to crack the Ravi Varma myth, he/she too, quite ironically tends to generate his/her ‘imaginaries’ about Ravi Varma. To see him and his works based on his own milieu of the second half of the 19^th century and emerging nationalist ideas and ideals of that time, one has to have tremendous amount of detachment both from the critique of Ravi Varma by the Bengal School and also from the historians who have applauded him for being the first ‘popular’ painter in India. Ravi Varma was not only popular but also populist. He had all the intentions to make his works popular.

(an oleograph portrait of Ravi Varma)

A new book about Raja Ravi Varma becomes all the more important and interesting because it is always curious to know what the contemporary scholars are thinking about the master artist. Piramal Art Foundation has brought out an interesting collection of essays and images in a book titled ‘Pages of a Mind- Raja Ravi Varma- Life and Expressions’. This books has come out as a catalogue (though it is more than a catalogue) during the exhibition early this year with the same name that has featured original paintings by Ravi Varma, his brother C.Raja Raja Varma, photographic prints based on Ravi Varma’s works, oleographs, embellished oleographs, advertising materials that used Ravi Varma imageries and the painted porcelains statuettes made out of the artist’s images. The temporality of the exhibition however is overcome by this book edited by Vaishnavi Ramanathan of the Piramal Foundation. The book has six interesting essays namely, Raja Ravi Varma: Life and Expressions by Farah Siddiqui, The Painters, The Printer and a Diary by Dr.Erwin Neumayer and Dr.Christine Schelberger, Ravi Varma and his Patrons by Vaishnavi Ramanathan, From Maharajas to the Masses: Ravi Varma, the Maker of Multiples by Lina Vincent Sunish, Idealizing the Real, Realizing the Ideal : Jewellery in the Paintings of Raja Ravi Varma by Dr.Usha R.Balakrishnan and Culturing Indian Cinema and Interdisciplinary Advents by H.A.Anil Kumar. The book also has an ‘image’ section where all the exhibits are presented with verifiable provenance.

Before I delve more into the nuances of the essays, I should say that many of the images presented in the book are not afore seen (at least I have not seen them before) and each time my eyes hovered over them, I start thinking about the kind of silent role reversal that Ravi Varma had brought into his profession of making royal and secular portraits, besides making large scale paintings based on mythological subjects, commissioned by the kings and rich patrons. Ravi Varma did not paint ordinary women; he painted the likeness of the women of the patron’s family. Otherwise Ravi Varma painted goddesses. (He also painted men and gods but that’s a different point). The role reversal happened in the case of portraying women as well as female characters. He made sacred into profane and profane into sacred without much public hue and cry. Royal women were ‘sacred’ members of the family and were not supposed to be seen outside. But their portraits, though made for familial registration only, would come out of the palace premises and would be subjected to the public gaze, exactly the way the profane women are looked at. Almost at the same time, Ravi Varma created goddesses out of the ‘profane’ women (professional models) who went into the palaces and drawing rooms, assuming the quality of sacred, respectable and adorable women (of the palaces). There are no conclusive evidences to substantiate my views and I am not sure whether Ravi Varma himself was aware of this role reversal done by him. Whether he knew it or not, it remains as a (art) historical irony.

(a portrait by Raja Ravi Varma)

However, while reading an essay written by Vaishnavi Ramanathan, I came across her quoting G.Arunima from her text where she said, “G.Arunima writing on the portraiture in Ravi Varma’s works speaks of the erasure of the notion of portraiture as a form that confers a specific identity, since in Ravi Varma’s portraits there is minimal suggestion of personality.” Ramanathan goes on to say the following: “However it can be argued that by erasing the specificity of the sitter, he opened up the image, offering a space for the viewer to locate himself/herself. (……) In other cases, it was the space of the sitter where the viewer could aspire towards the status and virtues that the sitter symbolized.” (I seriously doubt any sitter would aspire to be a part of the portrait or the portrait itself. This is a forced reading, I should say). Ramanathan’s whole point is to say this: “Ravi Varma painted for people.” What happens here is that Ramanathan repeats and unqualified statement of G.Arunima and goes by the thread of that argument. Anybody who likes to look at a portrait painting, he/she would definitely appreciate the ‘personality’ of the ‘sitter’ created by Ravi Varma. His portraits are not open ended as the writer says. They are definite and conclusive personality portraits that emphasis the ‘difference’ of the sitter from the viewer.

The distance created between the subjects that Ravi Varma chose to paint and the people who lapped it up including both the royal patrons and later the masses who bought his oleographs is one pivotal point that many historians have overlooked. This distance, gap, even we could say the rupture, is what makes Ravi Varma’s paintings more enigmatic and alluring. When he exhibited ten works commissioned by the Baroda King in Mumbai and Madras people queued up to see the works and those were the talk of the town. (Had it been the selfie days we would have had innumerable visual registrations for the events). In the west it is called block buster exhibitions. Such exhibitions are the dynamics of a particular historical time and developed out of personality cult. People queue up to see blockbuster exhibitions (or they make them blockbusters by queuing up patiently) because they are in awe of the artist and the works of art. It is not the inter-changeability that the viewers see with the works of art. I have never heard a visitor in the Louvre Museum telling that he wished to be the sitter for Mona Lisa! Ravi Varma maintained the mystique of being a painter that too a very popular one. The more popular you are, the more your personal details are in the public domain, your physical absence always makes you mystical and Ravi Varma knew how it should have been maintained.

(an oleograph based on Ravi Varma's painting)

There are two things that demystify Ravi Varma; the photographic reference visuals that Ravi Varma used for creating his secular as well as divine paintings and the diary entries of his younger brother, manager, studio assistant and fellow painter, Raja Raja Varma. Though these evidences have been out there for public scrutiny for long thanks to our special interest in protecting the Ravi Varma myths, these are not often addressed. Thankfully, this book has an essay titled ‘The Printer and a Diary’ by Dr.Erwin Neumayer and Dr.Christine Schelberger, which has all the details to demystify Ravi Varma. The photographic evidences that they give from their book do not make us condescend Ravi Varma but to appreciate him as someone who knew the world had moved fast and decided to move along with it. He arranged models and photographers in his studio and took the desired pose of the model from all the angles so that he could make any alterations if needed. The advent of mirror and lens was the prime reason for the development of perspective and illusionism in western paintings. The arrival of camera and printable images changed the very way of making paintings. However, photography was not seen as a creative medium; it was treated as a mechanical mode of registration and taking a photographic reference for making a painting was looked down upon as the lack of skill or genius of the artist. This must be one reason why Ravi Varma kept his photographic references as a highly guarded secret. The dairy entries by his brother register the artist’s frustrations as well as calculations, bringing the artist from his ‘divine’ position to a clever creative person who knew the value of his ‘product’.

I have found a small discrepancy in the book as the contradictory historical information clashes with each other in two different essays. Vaishnavi Ramanathan says that we should see the ‘Raja’ in ‘Ravi Varma alongside his thematic preferences.’ According to the writer, “By reinterpreting divinity, imaging them as flesh and blood entities, doubly for his own artistic desire and on behalf of his patrons one may say that Ravi Varma was in a way reaffirming the divine status of himself and his royal patrons.” We all are trained to call Ravi Varma with a prefix Raja only because he too was born in a royal household. It has been taken for granted. However, in the first essay written by Farah Siddiqui titled ‘Raja Ravi Varma- Life and Expressions’, she digs out a different historical evidence. She writes: “In 1904, the Viceroy, on behalf of the King Emperor bestowed upon Raja Ravi Varma the Kaiser –I –Hind Gold Medal. At this time Varma’s name was mentioned as “Raja Ravi Varma” for the first time, raising objections from Maharajah Moolam Thirunal of Travancore. Thereafter, he was always referred to as ‘Raja Ravi Varma’. The artist passed away in 1906. He hardly lived for two years after getting the status ‘Raja’. If that is the truth how Ramanathan’s suggestion regarding the reiteration of the divinity of Ravi Varma by the prefix ‘Raja’ would become an acceptable fact, as the statement almost suggests that the prefix ‘Raja’ was always there?

(a painted porcelain inspired by Damayanti by Ravi Varma)

The essay by Dr.Usha R Balakrishnan sheds a lot of light on Ravi Varma’s study on the ornaments that he discerningly painted on various subjects depending on their secular and mythical relevance. H.A.Anil Kumar’s article on Ravi Varma’s impact on Indian cinema is a densely packed essay of observations and suggestions. Lina Vincent Sunish, in her article ‘Maker of Multiples’ traces the history of Ravi Varma as an entrepreneur who produced millions of oleographs. Though a good amount of research has gone into it, her thorough adherence to a conventional research essay style repulses the reader a bit. The aspect that she could have developed the point, ‘the defining point of 19^th century Indian renaissance is Hindu civilization’ as stated by Geeta Kapur further in order to take the stress from ‘Hindu Civilization’ to ‘Hindu Nationalism’. The attempts that Lina makes peters out as she takes the research line of Patricia Oberoi, Kajri Jain and Sucharita Sarkar. If it was an attempt to define the growing nationalistic tendencies in today’s socio-cultural and political scenario in India and its comparison with the then emergent (Hindu) nationalistic milieu and Ravi Varma’s non-commitment to both, the essay would have been much more interesting.

(an advertisement inspired by Ravi Varma- All images are from the book. Poor image quality regretted)

I grew up in a village where most of the Hindu houses had the Ravi Varma oleographs. In my grandmother’s home there was a big oleograph that showed the image of a baby Krishna stealing butter from a pot. I used to get into this small household temple that smelled camphor, incense sticks, flowers, sacred ash and sandal paste whenever I could escape the watchful eyes of the elders and used to keep on looking at this bubbly baby boy with shiny large eyes, curly hairs and a peacock feather fitted above the forehead. That baby boy looked more like a cherub than a boy like me. I used to wonder why the gods were not looking like the people around me. As I grew up, I understood that Ravi Varma also had a colonial view on nobility and sophistication. It was his birth, upbringing and training. He subverted this colonial view indirectly by transforming ‘public’ women into private goddesses. However, in his pan Indian imagination as we see in the galaxy of women, he did not paint a woman who looked like a typical woman who worked in his home or in the fields. Ravi Varma had made exclusions; histories written about him also have made exclusions. We do come across court painters like Alagiri Naidu and Ramaswamy Naickar as Ravi Varma’s contemporaries. They were court painters. But we do not see any other individual painters from outside the court. Blame it on patronage. But immediately after Ravi Varma’s death, we see in Travancore, so many individual artists painting in Ravi Varma style, most of them trained by Ravi Varma’s son and his disciples. Till a couple of decades back we could come across Ravi Varma school painters in Trivandrum. However, most of them are excluded from art history. I strongly believe that Ravi Varma’s history will become scientific history only when the histories of his contemporaries and successors are also included in the narratives. Otherwise we will have to depend on a lot of legends and myths, just to satisfy our own lack of interest. This book is a worth reading one and definitely a collectible.

(pics for representative purpose only)

This is the story of a boy whose name is Munna. I hardly know him but I know his name because I have heard his friends calling him by that name.

I live in South Delhi. As you know the south side of any city is rich in any part of the world. But that does not mean that South Delhi is full of ‘only rich’ people. You could say it is ‘for rich people only’. Even if it is only for them, the rich people have a problem; they cannot live without poor people around. There are two reasons for this.

I heard Munna telling his friends one day: “Rich people want poor people around them because only the presence of poor people gives them the feeling of richness. What is the point in being rich in a place where only rich people live? They need some poor people around so that they could feel important. Haven’t you seen my father jumping up and saluting the ‘malik’ when he comes out of the ‘kothi’? Malik does not acknowledge my papa’s salute. But I am sure internally he must be feeling very good.”

I was really impressed by Munna’s clarity of perception. I have been a pen pusher in a newspaper desk for almost two decades and till that day when I heard him speak to his friends, I never thought in those lines. Now you must be curious what reason Munna has next for rich people wanting poor people around.

“Who will carry their filth?” Munna asks his friends. “Who will hoard those abuses they spit here and there randomly? Do you what my mother told me the other day? She gets abused for doing her job well and if she does not do her job well then too she gets abused. So poor people like my mother have developed a new technique. Make sure that everything is done in such a way that they look perfect, yet not perfect. She cleans bibiji’s and her college going son’s underpants in the same bucket. Then she curses under her breath while doing it.”

“How do you know all this?” questions one of the urchins.

“I overhear mother telling all these to Papa at night,” Munna says in a boastful voice.

“Then you must be seeing your Papa mounting your mother,” says a wily one with an intention to provoke Munna.

“Oh, mother fucker, you must be helping them in that too,” Munna retorts. All the children laugh.

I am not particularly offended when kids in the streets talk in such a filthy language, especially when they are around filth. I live between the posh colony and the slum behind it. It is almost a no man’s land of lower middle class tenements in which I have a one room set, which they call one BHK, means one Bed room, Hall, Kitchen. In my case, I could simply say I have something that could sound like that for a South Delhi address but the truth is there is no different ones; one room makes all these three things; bedroom, hall and kitchen. The bathroom-toilet facilities are on a share basis. Early bird relieves itself without tension. In such places unfortunately there are a no late birds. There is no problem in believing in an adage. But there is a problem when everyone lives it to the dot.

Munna and his friends do not have a problem. One misshapen plastic bottle and some dirty water in it is enough for a royal morning ablution. All the male folk in the slums could squat inside the ridge area which should have been a beautiful public park had it not been deliberately maintained as a dumping pit, and share their life which generally they feel is in the download slide. Those constipated Richie riches would salivate if they see the variety of turds ejected by those scrawny bums. One or two splashes from the bottle, a day’s job is done.

“Do you know why our shit is not the problem but their filth is?” one day Munna asks this question to his bewildered friends. I am a witness; a passerby, a rubber necked enthusiast for scandal. But I am impressed by that eleven year old boy’s intelligence and I wonder from where he gets these questions.

As nobody answers Munna answers himself, “We shit and the suvars, pigs come and eat them up. But the filth that these rich people produce, my God, that is not eaten by anybody. Yes, cows eat and die. They feed cows but rotten rotis. The fight is now between cows and us. Cows also want plastic and we also want. Cows get a temporary fill and a long term illness, we get a some money from the junk shop. But look at the filth here. None is produced by us. We are filth sorters, they are the real filth creators.”

“Why then,” the other urchin pitches in, “they roll their glasses up, cover their noses with fresh hand kerchief, put on goggles and jump to the other side when they pass by it?”

Munna laughs, “You are a stupid, Murda. Who will claim leftover food, used plates and their own shit?”

They all laugh.

“I have always tried to see what lies in their homes, just to see how this much filth is created by these people?” Munna ruminates.

“Ask your Papa and Mummy, they work there, don’t they?” Murda says.

“Papa does not get beyond the gate, and Mummy does not get beyond kitchen,” says Munna. “Both these places bring filth out but I want to know where exactly it is created?”

“If it is not in the kitchen, it must be in the bedroom,” says the wily one.

“If not in the bedroom, will it be in the hall?” asks Murda.

“Can there be a place within those reflecting window panes and gloomy doors and menacing gates other than kitchen, bedroom and hall, a third place where they create so much of filth,” Munna looks at his friends. They all wear the thinking cap.

Such perspective on life, such clarity on thought and such forthrightness of expression, I just cannot believe it.

I think about Munna and his future. What would become of him? Will he become a gatekeeper like his Papa and marry another girl whose future is already written as a housemaid? Will he become a gangster or a local goon protected by some local politician? Or a politician himself?

The best future I can conjure up for him is the role of a politician, compassionate, visionary and pragmatic. Munna could become one. I smile unto myself.

Next day I see him again. This time I see him washing a truck parked just next to the dump yard which grows into the road like a living organism at night and recoils back in the day when the Municipality cleaners come with their shovels and push carts often surrounded by crows, cows, official rag pickers and rag pickers for fun like Munna and Murda.

Munna asks for ten rupees from the sleepy truck driver and he wins in the bargain. He gets a ten rupees note from the dirty driver who has just thrown a squishy condom out of his cabin at the wily one. He picks it up, smells and throws it back into the cabin. The driver does not seem to notice it. He has already gone back to sleep.

“What will we buy?” asks Munna. They huddle together.

A cricket ball? An ice-cream? A cricket bat? A football? A pair of sneakers? A plate of puri and subzi? Three bananas? Three eggs?

Suddenly they find that nothing could come in that ten rupee note.

“What about a top up card?” Munna says gleefully.

“Of what?” Murda asks.

“Of Airtel,” says the wily one dispassionately.

“Do we have a mobile phone for that?” asks Murda.

“Why don’t we snatch it from him?” Munna points to some distance.

Suddenly I see his finger coming to my direction and the boys taking to their heels.

I run to the nearest Metro station. To my office and to my good for nothing life.

(the Damsels of Avignon by Picasso)

Every day I pass by these metro rail pillars. When I reach Pillar number 42 I slow down.

Oh, I forgot to tell you about myself. I am Ramlal Sharma. Nice to meet you. I am forty two years old and that’s why I am so fond of this pillar. You may ask whether I was in love with the pillar number 41 last year or not. Not really, because this metro line became operational this year only. Till recently these pillars were inconspicuous behind the large blue metal boards that marked out metro work along the road.

When you hear my name, Ramlal Sharma and when I talk about slowing down at the pillar number 42, you may have already made a mental picture of me. A successful and happy gentleman in his car, with a tie around his neck, a pair of goggles to give shade to his eyes and a glowing Bluetooth ear phone fitted just behind his left ear.

I too imagine myself like that. I wish I was that. But things are a little bit different here in my case.

I go to my work place in Gurgaon by my rickety cycle. This cycle was given to me by a cycle workshop person for a sum of Rs.250/- a couple of years back. Before I got the cycle I used to travel by buses, often ticketless. I travelled ticketless not because of the thrill that it gave me but I really did not have much money for bus tickets.

Tell me can you survive in this city with three thousand rupees? I have a wife and three children. The rent is Rs.1200/-. As poor people we are always in need of money. Borrowing has broken our back. My children do not go to school regularly and whenever they go to the local government school the teachers ask them to get text books and uniforms. What to do? Shamed by everyday questioning by the teachers my kids have stopped going to school.

I am an office boy. A man of forty two remains a boy till his death because his earning gets him only that respect. If he is paid poorly he remains a boy always. They call me ‘chottu’ and some people give me a little bit respect by calling me Chottulal. That’s good enough. But many in my office call me ‘Sharma ji’. It sounds like an insult.

The lean tuft of hair hanging from the back of my scalp tells it to the world even if I want to hide it. I am Brahmin. May be that’s why I am proud and I do not want to send my wife to work as a housemaid. Back home, farming had ceased. Old memories were felt like shackles.

For sometime in the village I tried to be a temple priest. But as an illiterate Brahmin I could not convince the devotees that I was capable of mediating their issues with the God. And what to say, those who came to appease the God were also suffering like me. They wanted prosperity and I too wanted the same. I knew whenever I prayed for them, I prayed for myself.

When I came to Delhi years back, travelling with a low caste farmer from the same village as mine, huddled near the railway compartment’s latrine with my wife and my elder child who was then hardly two years old, without thinking much about the idea of ‘pollution’, the place was completely different.

I did not know what to do. We slept under bridges for many days before settling down in a slum. I started off as a helper to a tea maker and it was a sheer waste of time. All those rickshaw pullers and officer goers who came to drink tea and dry bread called me chottu. For some time I struggled with a rickshaw. My body was not fit for doing hard work. ‘Why don’t you join the metro work? I know a contractor,” someone said. But what I would do in a construction site? I couldn’t lift a brick.

I slow down at the 42^nd pillar every day and at times I get down and stare into the thickets. I am not alone. There are many like me who stand and stare into the thickets. It was curiosity that brought me to the pillar in the beginning because I had noticed a few men like me standing there and watching something. One day I mustered courage, got down from the cycle and stared into the wild shrubs growing all over. Then I saw them; the objects of their collective curiosity. Three women.

I do not know their age, their names and their whereabouts. I just know that they are three women. I have not even seen their faces. What I see is the movement of clothes; a sari, a churidar, a pair of jeans? Do I see full red lips, inviting smiles and winking? Do I hear muffled moans?

There is a thrill in standing here and looking at them. They are sex workers. Nobody needs to tell me what they are doing there. Their clients came from the other side, jumping over the ledge, away from public eyes. But from this side, we could see movements. May be that was enough for me and people like me.

Policemen come and pester us. They shoo us away. So I have found out a way for not attracting the keepers of law and order. I put my cycle on stand and take out my sacred thread and pull up it to my ear. That’s how we keep pollution away while peeing. It is a safe stance and I could stand for a long time like that and see what’s going on inside the thickets.

During one of the initial days of this voyeurism, I had asked one fellow voyeur about the details. He did not tell me much. But he looked at me with some strange enthusiasm and said, “They say, hand job fifty, blowjob hundred and a full fuck hundred and fifty.”

I slow down there every day and pretend to pee. What do I want? I just can’t tell myself that I want a blowjob because I have never experienced it. In fact what is sex for people like me? We make love as if we were doing something wrong, in hurry and in shame. I am sure there are people who prowl in the slums to see couples making love. Fearing them we had made love in darkness. Each time we did it, for her and for me it was like smothering each other to death. To make love is easy in a shanty but to hold the noise is the real struggle.

A hundred rupees. Then I can have what I want. But I can never have it because each time I take a hundred rupees note out and day dream sitting inside the fuming hole of a kitchenette in the office suddenly I remember everything. The sad faces of my parents in some distant village. I have started forgetting them. The fields where I had worked as a guard. The temple where I was a part time priest. The face of my wife. I feel how the plumpness of her body parts has squeezed itself out in the years to make her a living skeleton whose very look evokes no other response than revulsion. The faces of the children.

I slow down every day there at the forty second pillar and look at the movements of clothes and faces inside the thickets. It has become a ritual. I feel like peeing when I reach here.

I do not know whether I will love the 43^rd pillar or not by my next birthday. But definitely I will stop by the 42^ndpillar.

Saffron colour in India is often seen as a part of renunciation, an age old concept of leaving materialistic world in order to sublimate life, attain wisdom and ultimately deliverance from the entanglements of life. With the demolition of Babri Masjid, this colour however has come to be seen as a part of the Hindutva ideology. The transition of the Hindu religion to the ideology of Hindutva takes place when the fundamental principles of Hinduism are pushed aside for aggressively bringing out a violent nationalism in the lines of religion and hatred for other religions. There is a symbiotic relationship with the perpetrators of Hindutva and the dominant right wing political ideology; one results into the other and they mutually support for the perpetuation of political as well as religious ideologies. With this transition, the calm and collected faces of the Hindu Gods and Goddesses are replaced with the divinities that have ferocious faces, muscled bodies and too many weapons of mass or selective destruction. Now we have a set of avenging gods and goddesses. In the political scenario we see the leaders are welcomed by giving the replicas of the weapons like tridents, clubs, bows and swords. Unfortunately, the colour saffron remains a backdrop of all these events.

The saffron, soft brown, orange and kavi (an Indian variation of saffron with a muddy effect) are the variation of the same colour. Depending on the situation the meanings of these colours change. In the national flag of India, we see the saffron colour at the top layer. It connotes tolerance, courage and strength. While the middle layer white and the lower level green have universal meanings like ‘purity’ and ‘fertility’ respectively, saffron does not have any such universal meanings. It is entirely an Indian colour. It has more to do with the kind of saffron or Kavi worn by the Indian mendicants and sages. There is an indirect connotation that India is predominantly a Hindu nation because the meanings attributed to saffron colour or kavi (courage, strength and tolerance) are not seen elsewhere in the world. In the global scenario, orange colour has got the meaning of being ‘distinct’ or distinctively seen. But this meaning is not exclusive to orange colour. It is applicable to green, yellow and red too. That’s why these colours are universally used in traffic regulations.

In Indian psyche, saffron has got a lot of authority and respectability. When someone leaves the worldly pleasures, possessions and the very desire to possess anything, in the Indian context he or she prefers to wear saffron clothes. There is a vast history to it. Before we go into that history, it is pertinent to understand the relevance of this colour or the meanings that it has gained over a period of time. We have seen it in the rallies of all the right wing parties including the ruling BJP. Leaders like Sakhshi Maharaj, Uma Bharati, Swadhi Prachi, Adityanath, Baba Ramdev and so on wear saffron clothes when they appear in the public domain. The founder leader of Shiv Sena in Maharashtra, late Bal Thakaray used to wear silk saffron robes to assert his political as well as spiritual authority over the Marathi populace. At times, even our Prime Minister Mr.Narendra Modi appears in public meetings wearing semi saffron shirts, which are specially designed for him. This indirectly and subconsciously establishes the fact that political authority has got the same sacrificial authority and right of the spiritual sages and monks who have sacrificed their worldly lives for a life beyond. What Khadi was for Congress is today saffron is for the right wing forces.

It is not necessary that all those people who wear Khadi (a coarse cotton cloth believed to be hand spun) are automatically Congress members. If so do we have to believe that all those who wear saffron or kavi are right wing or Hindutva people? If ‘yes’ is the answer, then we will have to believe that most of the youngsters in Kerala are right wing or Hindutva followers. It is true that in Kerala the number of youngsters who wear saffron dhotis, tie ritual bands around the wrists and wear sandal paste marks on the foreheads (all underlining their membership/belongingness to the Hindu religion) is on the increase. But we cannot make a blanket assumption that all of them belong to the Hindutva fold. Anybody who lives in Kerala or has travelled to Kerala knows it for sure that youngsters of such religious markings are not often seen in the temple premises or such religious places but in the auto rickshaw stands and market junction, the places that are considered to be liberal political and socio-cultural discursive spaces in Kerala. This extends to the other controlled public spaces like barber shops, teashops, reading rooms, tailoring shops, evening addas, clubs, junctions and so on. The youngsters (and old people too) who gather in these places belong to different religions, castes and political denominations. Wearing these religious marks, they without any qualms or ideological differences share gossip, news, spicy jokes and above all hottest video clips via whatsapp. These are the same people in Kerala who despite having all the so called Hindutva marks on them, go to the local restaurants and relish ‘beef and parotta’ without feeling any guilt as their counterparts would in the northern parts of our country.

If we analyze further, this dress code gravitates to the temple premises when there are some festivals that enhance the youthful energies at various levels. It is not always religions, I should say. In Kerala most of the temple festivals are related to the harvest that happens by the month of March. The months that follow before Monsoon, that means the months of April and May are full of festivals in Kerala. During these festival days, the youngsters go to these temples wearing these religious marks but that does not mean that all of them have hardcore Hindutva ideology. I have seen the local communist party offices open every day by some party workers after lighting a lamp or incense sticks. It is not necessary that they do it before the photographs of the gods. But one could miss the photographs of Karl Marx, Engels, EMS Namboothirippadu, P.Krishna Pillai and so on not far from the invisible altar. There are two types of dhotis in Kerala; white and colourful ones. The latter is called Kaili or lungi or pesa. White dhotis are always worn by people who have a stable income or are generally rich. It exudes some kind of social dignity. An average Malayali boy establishes his social dignity and maturity by wearing a white dhoti. He has to practice how to wear it folded right up to the knee but not by obscenely flaunting the thighs. Also he has to learn (to prove his social worth) to ride a cycle without folding a white dhoti. These cultural trappings are extremely important to a Kerala youngster. The second category of dhoti, which is kaili is not gender specific. It could be worn by both men and women. There used to be kailis only with horizontal and vertical lines. Gulf returnees brought liberally designed lungis with big flowers blooming at odd places. With the folding of a lungi and the measures of thighs exposed could determine the cultural upbringing of a youth in Kerala.

It was in this socio-cultural landscape, K.J.Yesudas, the well known singer came with his set of Ayyappa devotional songs. He had established his music studio in Trivandrum called Tharangini and it was pertinent for him to churn out devotional songs of various kinds depending on the season to satisfy the audio culture of the god fearing Malayalis. One of the songs that became a huge hit went like this: ‘River Ganges takes birth in Himalayas while the River Pamap takes birth in Sabarimala’. The second stanza of the same song goes like this: ‘Devotees wear saffron and go to Varanasi and they wear black when they go to Sabarimala’. Sabarimala being the most famous pilgrim centres in Kerala and Lord Ayyappa, the residing deity of this forest temple, most of the people irrespective of religion went to this place wearing whatever clothes they wanted. It was not necessary that one should wear black clothes when they went to Sabarimala. Devotees from Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu chose to wear black because their preference black had a lot of do with the anti-Brahminical stance of the Dravidian parties. Also legends said that Lord Ayyappa was a Buddhist deity who was later got co-opted by the Brahminical Hinduism. The Dravidian lineage of Lord Ayyappa must be a reason for the devotees’ choice of black clothes, though it was not underlined till 1980s. Famous actor Amitabh Bacchan visited Sabarimal after his life threatening accident, wearing black. So many celebrities started visiting the place followed by this famous visit of the super star. We should also see the possibility of black becoming an official dress of Sabarimal thanks to the arrival of the colour television in 1980s, with them beaming the visuals from the temple to thousands of households in Kerala, which influenced the visual thinking of the devotees.

There was a time in Kerala when people asked anybody who grew beard or wore saffron clothes whether they were going for pilgrimage or had renounced the world. Beard and saffron clothes, as I mentioned elsewhere, are still etched in the minds of the Indian people as part and parcel of detachment from the worldly affairs. However, with the recent release of the movie titled ‘Premam’ (Love), and also with the heroes in this move wearing black clothes, white dhotis and sporting thick beards have brought in a new situation in Kerala that nobody any longer asks someone about their worldly detachment upon seeing a beard or black or saffron dhoti. Initially the saffron coloured dhoti was worn by the people who used to work in and around the temples. With a new market opening for the coloured lungis, youngsters started wearing multi coloured lungis. They predominantly chose to wear saffron lungis because it gave some nascent sense of authority and piety. Without being a hardcore Hindu (Hindutva ideologue), one could get an ‘identity’ which is at once confirming and rebelling, in the social sphere. It was something similar to the Kerala women ‘virally’ choosing to wear a gown called ‘nightie’ as their ‘power dressing’. Availability, affordability and convenience were the reasons that made women to choose this cloth. Same was the case with the saffron dhotis. The design was/is simple and is convenient to do any kind of daily chores. The advantage of both the nighties and saffron lungies is this that both of them remain or look ‘clean’ despite the layers of grime, soot and dirt collected on them. Even if someone sees that it is dirty, one could easily pass it off as a part of the daily grind.

Many centuries before India became today’s India, our sages had worn saffron clothes. They too understood the fact that it remained clean despite the gathering of dust and dirt. They could wash it on the river banks and dry it in the field winds. A pair of saffron clothes could take them to the whole of the world if they wanted to do so. Gandhiji in a sense emulated this saintly way of clothing when he joined India’s independence struggle. The sages need not have thought about the ‘beauty’ of their clothes as they wandered along the hills, valleys, jungles, hamlets, towns and cities. Even if they had worn white clothes initially, as they went along and as these clothes gathered dust they automatically understood that they dusty and muddy colour would make it less ‘dirty’. They started using plants, petals, roots and stones to make dyes to colour their clothes into saffron. As the Hindu religion evolved mainly because of the sagacious interventions in terms of making codes and rules for the society, and general philosophies for life, the colour saffron came to have the meanings of detachment and wisdom. When Hinduism moved towards the four tier system of caste oppression and when it became more and more oppressively ritualistic, Buddha, the enlightened, quarreled with it and established a new order. He too, however chose to wear saffron clothes.

Hardcore Buddhist followers as well as Buddhist monks these days wear different variants of saffron colour and also colours like orange, yellow, brown, white and so on. In fact Buddha had chosen saffron/kavi as his robe. The reason for this choice was not really a ‘Hindu’ one. In those days, saffron was the robe given to the people like outcastes, orphans, criminals, diseased people with contagious illnesses, insane people and so on so that they could be identified within the mainstream society and be kept at bay. Buddha in his rebellious way of approaching things adopted the robes of the outcastes as his own dress as well as for his own congregation. The meaning of saffron/kavi that Buddha saw or rather prevalent in those days was ‘something which was not pure’. This could be interpreted as something ‘dirty’, ‘bad’, ‘not good looking’, ‘not in style’ and ‘for wiping things clean including excrement’. What for the mainstream society was not good and clean was good and clean for Buddha. He chose this because a Buddhist monk could be identified from a distance itself. He was in fact declaring his allegiance with the outcastes of the society by choosing their dress code. However, as the ironical twists of history that always happen, Buddhism became a predominant religion in India and in South East Asia. With this Buddha’s saffron robe also got respectability. It is another historical irony that it was another saffron wearer who defeated Buddhism by arguing well for Hinduism and united it from the four corners of India, Adi Shankara. Another irony of it was that he was from Kerala. Slowly, the robes of the dispossessed became the garments of the authorities. To this we could see the slow entry of saffron and saffron silk.

In the 21^st century, the century of naked globalization and imperialism sans adequate resistance, saffron/Kavi got new meanings. When the Iraqi revolutionaries who were the collaborators and followers of Saddam Hussein’s regime were arrested by the United States of America, they were taken to the infamous detention centre at Guantanamo Bay near Cuba and were forced to wear saffron/Orange jumpsuits. The meaning of the colour of social outcasts was once again brought to it in Guantanamo Bay prisons. That’s why it is said that when the ISIS captures white journalists and soldiers, before beheading them on camera, they are forced to wear orange jumpsuits; a sort of revenge using the cryptic symbolism of the orange/saffron/kavi colour. Most of the geniuses of the last century also had seen the potential of the saffron/kavi colour. Sree Narayana Guru, the late 19^th century and early 20^th century social reformer, poet and philosopher in Kerala chose to wear white and later yellow instead of saffron because he knew that the extreme sense of Brahminical Hinduism was being attributed to the saffron colour then itself. Gandhiji could have opted for saffron but he preferred to go for home spun cotton’s white because he knew that the choice of saffron would have terribly polarized the country along religious lines. The move was already on in Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s sort of Hinduism within the Congress fold. Rabindranath Tagore was called Gurudev and had all the possibilities of being seen in saffron but he resisted using saffron at all. Instead he used exotic clothes to design his own robes that reflected his position in the universe as an Eastern mystic. Dr.B.R.Ambedkar resisted the onslaught of Brahminical Hinduism by making a sartorial revolution within the Mahar community by preferring to be seen in blue three piece suits. He would later convert to Buddhism. But there too he did not choose saffron. I wish the alternative meaning of saffron/Kavi once again came back to our discourse so that we could actively resist the aggressive posture of saffron in the public domain of India.

Post script: I have opted saffron/kavi khadi dhotis into my daily wear. I am still negotiating whether I should wear it outside or not.

(Images are taken from the internet for Illustrative purposes only)

Fight for capital is tedious and painful but fighting against capitalism is romantic and dangerous. Revolutions also need some sort of financial investment. Unfortunate thing these days is that the very revolutionaries, who are called dissenters or terrorists depending on the side that you prefer to take and see/read them, are funded by the capitalists because disruption and war always give opportunity for disaster capitalism to flourish. A photograph that shows the ghost towns in Syria where now the ISIS rules the roost, with dilapidated structures and perforated walls definitely help the building contractors of the capital market salivate seeing rich prospects of developing properties. So it is sure that nothing can function in this world without capital. Imagination could, but then when not translated into reality any daring imagination would not fly beyond the walls of day dreams. Artists are imaginative people who dream of a world where people live in love and peace, creating beauty and celebrate the force of life incessantly. Boring it may sound as we are too used to conflicts and contradictions, yet such a scenario is good for the longevity of life and happiness but the problem is art too needs capital to flourish. Artists are those double headed people who lives a life criticality in which they find themselves travelling in two different boats, if not vehicles one heading towards a forest for guerrillas and the other speeding towards a city of glass buildings that reflect fast moving stock exchange tickers.

Artists make capital for their lives by selling their works. However they try, there is not escape from this fact. The way a labourer sells his labour or ability to work, the artists also sell their ability to ‘work’. The ability that they have need not necessarily be converted into labour always; that is the only difference between a labourer and an artist. If an artist does not want to sell but only wants to work for the sake of creating art works this dilemma is never a problem as faced by a professional artist who totally depends on his work to perpetuate not only his art but also his life. That means, a professional artist is one who dies out (of his work) when he does not generate money out his works and reinvest it in the perpetuation of his artistic abilities along with his materialistic life. A professional artist makes his capital, which is creative and materialistic at once. But that is not automatically transformed into wealth. Wealth creators are those people who ‘sell’ the works of art and get capital back for the artists. Wealth creators work on the idea of profit making so the creative capital that they give back for the artist is a minute part of the wealth that they create. The amount of money that an artist makes out of the sales of his works really does not become a way to create wealth unless and until he not only reinvests it in his art and life but also in other avenues where the money could be multiplied and turned into profit, adding up to the mode of wealth creation. That means, if a rich artist is not indulging in other business practices, he cannot be called a person who generates wealth. He just makes money, that too some money.

If one looks at the gallerists, museum owners, dealers, auctioneers, collectors, investors and so on, one could see that their investment in art is a little part of their total profit. The ways in which they create wealth is not solely out of buying or selling art. Art is always a part of their money dealings. So if anyone nourishes this hope or idea that the art investors are art lovers then there would be some amount of disillusionment at some point when they come to know about truth. The art investors, including the gallerists are like the famous husbands or wives in a family. When they are within the family, they are husbands and wives. But just outside of the family, they are successful corporate leaders, entrepreneurs, business people, banking heads, bankers, lawyers, chartered accountants, developers, jewellers, contractors, exporters, industrialists, shipping agents, transporters and what not. They are never one role players. The artists see only one side of these people and definitely they do not generate their wealth from that one side. Like they do in the family or feel inside it, they are just emotionally happy and secure in those avenues. But the important thing in the art dealing is that the artists remain the same people in and out of the family, doing their work and expecting someone to buy it. What will happen if the investors no longer find it lucrative or they feel that the art is not giving enough worth symbolically for the real money that they spend on them? Are the professional artists going to die out due to the lack of patronage?

How long the artists would expect the wheelers and dealers of the art scene to make money for them and in turn create wealth for themselves? It would be a never ending wait if the cultural scenario of the world is going to be like as we see it today where the rich and powerful art patrons move more towards the political and ideological right therefore find the radical and left leaning thoughts and expressions of the artists more or less degenerated, defunct or rather too romantic to be real hence fashionable. The flair and success of the contemporary art all over the world was mainly because of the kind of art generated within the temporary genre of contemporary art was less romantic and less nostalgic. Those works of art were/are overtly of here and now and most of the subject matters were comfortably familiar and liberally different. They worked upon this ‘difference’ and felt that they were buying something radical but non-explosive. Contemporary art shocked but did not disturb. It worked along the lines of ambiguities evoking some sort of disguised eroticism and titillating the buyer and the possessor for longer duration of time within the given temporality. Contemporary art was spectacular and made everyone drop their jaws in awe not in terms of epiphanies and apotheosis, instead of their sheer size, volume and abject strangeness. Rest of the art, that looked for evoking critique and intended to criticise, meaningful to the extent of the artists’ life blood and had the traits of romanticism, dream and nostalgia was condemned to suffer along with the producers of it. Though such producers were less in number, those who suffered, underwent it intensely. And still they do.

There is a great reverse exodus to this arena of meaningful art. The right leaning of the capitalist world has made the artists to declare their positions, politically and socio-culturally. But the problem is that the wealth creators are not going to look at this kind of art for the fear that any shift towards the middle or off the middle or to the left and more dangerously to the extreme left would cause great dent in their business interests therefore cause the drying up of their abilities to create wealth. The only way left before the artists today is to under sell. When the artists were making money by selling their works and letting their dealers create wealth for themselves, they were not really looking at the kind of prices they were commanding and the logic of their pricing. Most of them today know for sure that the prices were hugely unrealistic therefore unsustainable. The reality has finally dawned upon them. Except those senior artists who can command the prices as they wish the rest of the artists should undersell; that means all of them should sell their works for a very marginal profit. A work of art that had been sold for a lakh could now be sold for thirty thousand. This could cut the middlemen from the scene. If artists could sell their works for 1000, 2000.3000, 4000, ..in that progression, and make the fellow citizen feel that art is an integral part of their lives and by buying a piece of art, one partakes in the grand cultural history of one’s own country. If demand increases, proportionately increase the price. One day, the profiteers would come back to the market and make wealth out of the same wares. But then one need not worry because artists are those people who could make money but never could generate wealth for their reinvestment is never on other money making project but in their lives and art. Are you ready to undersell your works? Or to put in other words, can you sell your works in such a price so that the buyer never feels smaller in front of you? It is possible. People have done it. Just try.

(all images from web. only for illustrative purpose)

Man proposes, god disposes. If you don’t like the word ‘god’, say something else disposes. It is not necessary that life progresses the way we want. Seen in its totality, life is a series of prioritizations of choices of which some may find fruition and some may not. When it comes to priority, there cannot be steadfast rules. A staunch business professional could put everything down, risk millions of dollars and cancel high profile meetings and fly back home to attend his daughter’s pet dog’s imaginary birthday. Another one could even ask his relatives to keep his mother’s dead body in freezer for a few days till he finishes a series of high worth engagements. It all depends on priority. Hence, when a gallerist decides to wind up his operations in the art scene and prioritizes some other things for whatever sake, we can neither object nor ridicule such a decision. Life does not treat people well always. Facing the rough edges of life could change the course of one’s philosophy and action. It could even change the nature of one’s remaining life.

However, winding up a business or shutting down an establishment based on prioritization of life’s demands could also affect a series other lives directly or indirectly depending on the longevity of the said establishments. The laying off of a work force all of a sudden could change the complexion of the society itself. It has happened before. But the character of the working class is this that they learn to adjust. They could move from middle class neighbourhoods to slums in order to survive. They could take their kids out of the good schools and put them into badly run government schools. Human beings generally adjust to the changing situations and they too prioritize life. Like human body, human minds also take pain and suffering with equanimity, provided it is given in slow doses over a prolonged period time. Though too many galleries have not shut down so far, the shutting down of a few of them has impacted the lives of the artists and their families indirectly and in some cases directly. Hence, the question that arises here is this: who is going to take care of the artists who have been depending on the sales prospectus of the galleries that one or the other day call it quits?

The famous film actor Kamal Haasan, when asked why he does a few bad movies (aesthetically bad but commercially successful ones) in between the masterpieces that he brings out at regular intervals, he replied with a lot of humility and pride that he runs a film production studio, Raj Kamal International, and so many technicians and their families are depended on the functioning of the studio. A film studio’s function is to make movies. Making of movies, whether they are commercially successful or not, assures food in the plates of these technicians and their families. As an actor and as a producer, Kamal Haasan says that he has the responsibility of those people who have been working with him for a long time and who have shaped their lives completely depending on the ‘life’ of this one man called Kamal Haasan. He also says that it is not just the technicians and their families suffer if he stops producing movies but the extended range of people who even stick the posters of his films all over the place.

What the ace actor tells here is the ethics of entrepreneurship. Vijay Mallya who has been cheating the Indian banks thereby robbing the hard earned monies of the people of India did not care much about the people in his enterprises when he shut them down without ever caring to compensate for their works or even once thinking about their lives. Kamal and Vijay stand apart in their work and life ethics. Against this backdrop, if I view the shutting down of the galleries and also the ways in which the galleries drop the artists from its ‘list’ of artists, I am forced to say that some kind of unethical practice is forced upon the artists by these galleries. Kamal speaks of accountability of work. If he shuts down his studio, he is answerable even to his light boy’s child who has just got into kindergarten. That is a great accountability that a person could show. But what about our galleries when it comes to accountability? Does anybody ask them to be accountable?

Prioritizing things in life is absolutely personal when the life led so far is personal, not public. A gallerist is not just a private person. He or she has a public responsibility even if the gallery business is a private venture. As it is a part of the larger economy and it brings the artists as makers of aesthetics in it as its work force in order to generate wealth via business deals, the privacy of the gallery enterprises becomes public. So there should be some kind of accountability and there should be arrangements with the ‘resident artists’ so that their lives post-closure of the gallery remain smooth and carefree. Now looking at the lives of the artists in India, who were once a part of the gallery system, now out of it due to choice or expulsion or exclusion, one cannot help say that their conditions are really bad. The artists now are scrambling here and there in order to eke out a living. Most of them have taken up advertising agency jobs or teaching assignments. Many of them, including the mid career artists are going to cheap camps or doing assembly line commission works, pawing their dignities for the lowest price available in the market as well as in the society. This according to one of the serious observers of Indian art scene, has given birth to ‘a traumatic generation’ of artists.

When a gallery shuts down or a gallery drops some of its artists from their lists of ‘resident artists,’ what kind of assurance do these galleries give to such offloaded artists about their works and their future? When an artist agrees to work with a particular gallery, whether there is a written agreement between them or not, a word of trust is exchanged between the artist and the gallery owner on the pivotal issue regarding the security of the artist’s life. While some of the galleries assure a steady income to the artists by selling at least one work in a month from the gallery’s inventory, some other galleries give a regular stipend to the artists against the procurement of their monthly ‘produce’. This is an ideal situation possible when there is a steady market for art in general. But today the situation is different. Many galleries do not have regular shows. They are unable to sell works from their inventories. Most of the galleries have stopped working with the artists who used to sell but do not sell currently at all. They are simply pushed out of the bus right in the middle of a desert. And there is no agency to complaint to because there is no legal validity to the kind of agreements that they have together entered into. I personally know a lot of artists off loaded like this, suffering terribly these days.

Who should be made accountable for this? When a big player like Amit Judge exited from the Indian art market, there was confusion for the time being but it recovered itself by following the chaos of the speculative art market. What Mr.Judge had started was taken further by the other galleries whether they were capable enough to carry such weight or not. Once the market collapsed in late 2008 and then onwards, galleries put up a brave face and did things that everyone thought would make things better, but in vain because the larger economic realities were different and the art market all over the world was just a big bubble. It did burst. One of the majors, though not a procurer of mid career artists’ works nor those of the youngsters, when the Devi Art Foundation shifted its gear from contemporary art to the folk and tribal art, none dared to raise the question of accountability. Perhaps it was not required then. But then there were a spate of closures. The artists were humbled and bundled out. None was made accountable for such closures of the galleries. Before closing, they did not give a plan B to the artists who worked with them. Nor did they do the same to the in house artists who had signed contracts with them. To tell you the truth, so many careers in art have been killed by none other than the galleries.

Another important thing several galleries that had been working with the artists who did painting, sculpting, print making and traditional art practices like that, side stepped those artists all of a sudden in order to promote conceptual artists, video artists, performance artists, digital artists and so on without giving any clear explanation why they stopped promoting those artists who worked in traditional mediums. None took the responsibility of explaining it to the artists. What was that which provoked the galleries to demote the artists who worked in traditional mediums? There is no accountability. Artists also have to be blamed to a certain extent for this. When they were making money through the business deals with these galleries, they entered into deals those were not really professional. The blurring of the personal and professional relationships, in terms of making home visits, attending parties, foreign travels, camps, introducing to the curators, lobbying for international fairs and shows for these artists, made the artists susceptible to the unprofessional dealings of the galleries. When they dropped the artists, they did not have the ethical right to question their practices. So today most of them nurse their hurt pride, deeper wounds in the egos and lead a life doing commission works or doing odd jobs.

This is not a fair situation because artists are not wealth creators as I said in one of my recent articles. They can just make money enough to live a good life. But wealth makers are the galleries. Hence they need to take the responsibility of the artists who were helping them to create wealth via their works of art. Unfortunately it is not happening and we do not have any public or government forum to express the deeper concerns of the artists who have been grounded by the galleries. Artists are not unionised people as in the former soviet countries. Artists are not a force at all these days. Look at the book ‘Words Matter’ edited by the famous poet Satchidanandan. There are at least five articles that refer to the forty plus writers who had returned their Central Literary Academy awards based on their conscience and their right to rebel and respond to the atrocities committed by the right wing government at the centre within its first two years, including the murder of three eminent rationalists and writers. All these articles sweepingly say that the artists were also there in the protest. But no name (except the names of Siddharth Kararwal in an article regarding the cow flying during the 2016 Jaipur Art Summit and M.F.Husain) was mentioned in the whole book. The reason is that the artists in India are not even connected in spirit and conscience the way the writers are. If some atrocities happen against the artists, more than the artists’ community, the intellectuals and writers respond. I do not say that the artists should have unions but they need unity, especially in the times when they are just removed like dispensable ingredients in a very expensive dish.

(all images from net. illustration purpose only)

(One of the most revered symbols in India....will it be the same?)

When two Indian artists meet, now on wards, they should be asking each other which category they belong, O,P or W? For the beginners, this is the new way of categorizing India’s artists (that includes fine artists, writers, dancers and so on with their contemporary and folk categories) by the Cultural Ministry headed by Mr.Mahesh Sharma. According to this, the artists from all over India could make an online application to the cultural ministry, a committee comprised of bureaucrats would judge them and put them into different categories, O,P and W. And this will be a benchmark for the selection of the artists to represent India in the major cultural festivals conducted or sponsored by the government of India, in abroad as well as in India. Now, for the anxious ones, the alphabets O,P and W stand for ‘Outstanding’, ‘Promising’ and ‘Waiting’.

The justification for this move is simple: most of the artists who are representing India abroad on the cultural platforms are not up to the mark. With this cultural ministry’s certification, ‘the right kind’ of artists would travel and represent India, making the true gold of Indian democracy shine phenomenally in the foreign shores. Nepotism, which has been rampant in the government sponsorships (for the artists, dancers, musicians, writers etc.) is one of the reasons cited for this move by the cultural ministry. Apparently, the move and the reasons behind it sound too good and ideal but a deeper look simply reveals the nefarious agenda. All of us know that the artists who get to exhibit abroad or travel and perform in the international platforms generally are hand in glove with different authorities who sanction these trips. Many ‘artists’ (of different genres) travel quite regularly and showcase their talents abroad. Though there have been private complaints, sort of gossiping, bickering and salacious understatements pertaining to gender and sex, none with some sense of public dignity does bother to make these complaints obvious for the nepotism in such avenues are by now taken for granted.

(How to apply for creative permit)

However, fighting nepotism cannot result into the creation of a much more organized and fortified structure of favours, which would eventually shame the license-quota raj prevalent in Indira Gandhi’s time and has been percolating in various forms till date. The move of the present cultural ministry to certify or categorise the creative people of this country as ‘Outstanding’, ‘Promising’ and ‘Waiting’ is in fact is never a suitable way to do away with such favouritism and nepotism in the cultural field. On the contrary, this move would bring back the licence quota raj in its fiercest forms and would divide the creative community along ideologies. True, that artists in any country, as they too are citizens of these countries, have their ideologies, often expressed covertly and at times overtly. Only the changes in socio-political climates make them come out with their ideologies. Such times of crisis and conflicts bring out the true nature of the artists and intellectuals. It has recently happened in India with the large number of the members of artistic and intellectual communities coming out in hoards against the right wing ideas of the present political regime at the centre.

An analysis of the move of the government to create three categories of artists is in fact a sort of census or stock taking of the ideological partners of the government from amongst the creative communities of the country which is going through the terrible times both in politics and social engineering in terms of handling sensitive issues of political inclusion and exclusion of states within the confederacy of Indian republic. The Cultural Ministry says that the artists in this country could apply online CCRT website and simply fill in their applications to be assessed by a group of bureaucrats who would eventually put the creative people in different baskets. The ministry claims that it has already processed 185 applications and out of that 112 are in the P (promising category)m 46 got O (Outstanding) and 27 are put in the W (waiting category). Those who are in the O and P categories are eligible to ‘represent’ India abroad. The 27 waiting in wings should do that till the bureaucrats take their applications up for review. How? We could see that against a renewal application. The ministry says that it is ready to process another one crore applications which have already come in. It is going to be real creation of mediocrity, for sure.

(Culture Minister Mr.Mahesh Sharma)

Interestingly we have two scenarios developing here; one, the artists who have been kept outside the ‘nepotistic’ circuits now can apply to prove their worth by open application. Two, those who do not apply and get categorized by the government could, at best operate for themselves and exist or die. The former set of artists who would apply would naturally be those people who agree with the categorization process; that means, their creativity could be assessed and marked by the nameless and faceless panel of judges comprising of the ministry’s bureaucrats who definitely agree with the ideological stance of the government. That means, the artists who apply for certification to exist and work and even exhibit in this country as well as elsewhere prove themselves to be the fellow travellers of the government’s ideology. The second set of artists who do not apply is then seen as the renegades and rebels who do not want to agree with the government ideology. That means those who do not apply could be seen as anti-national (for they do not want to go with the norms of the ministry), anarchic (for the same reason) and even seditious (for the refuse a chance to represent India in global platforms). To put it simply, eventually you need a certificate from the cultural ministry to read, write, paint, sculpt, sing, dance and do anything creative. It is a new way of licensing creativity. If you do not apply and not get categorized by the government, then the government (at least the ministry of culture) do not virtually take any responsibility of your creativity. If someone barges into your studio and heckles for the art work that you are doing or a novel or poem that you are writing, the government could say that you were doing a work without license that’s why people attacked you. This is the time of moral policing. If the food in your fridge could cost your life, what about your poems, paintings and all which are not kept within the fridge?

The Cultural Minister of India, Mr.Mahesh Kumar means well when he says that this certification is purely for letting the real talent have its exposure nationally and internationally, on the platforms legitimized by the government. Considering the kind of nepotism existing in this country, we would tend to say that such a move is welcome. But there are always trap doors. How can you rate or categorize a work of art or poem or a song etc without enough expertise or critical authority and historical knowledge on those areas? How could bureaucrats judge works of art and literature, even if they are writers and painters in their own rights? Now, if at all the ministry appoints a high level committee comprising of experts from the respective fields, how could they be the ultimate authority in rating the works of art by the artists? A work of art or literature is adjudged by critical as well as mass communities together and separately. At times, what a critical community acclaims as best may not go well with the public judgement. Some liked by the majority of population are disliked by the critical community. But the good thing is that through pertaining cultural studies both these views are accommodated in writing the critical histories not only of those creative forms but also of the country in general. Licensing is a way of killing such pluralistic and critical approach. It monopolized opinion and it is a fascistic move.

(A ticket wending establishment)

All the fascist countries have tried to curb creativity or they have tried their best to bring the critical community to their side either by buying out or by coercion. Those who don’t are simply eliminated. Unfortunately in any country we have millions of creative people who simply walk into the traps of the governments without knowing the implications of the ideologies upon which they build the governance or simply walking to this willingly because they belong to such oppressive ideologies. Soviet Union had done this. So was Mao in China during the Cultural Revolution. This was how creativity was curbed and disparaged in the Nazi Germany. So many countries where fascistic regimes still hold power create government literature. There will be a huge exodus as a result, of the creative people leaving such countries barren in intellectual activism. The histories of those periods will go down in the drains only come back as nightmares in the hands of the strong creative people enriching the worlds once again.

Thanks to the growing intolerance in India, many creative people had given back their awards to the academies. They are still fighting their case and we know who stands where. Mr.Mahesh Sharma had admonished and rebuked the writers of this country, telling them to ‘stop writing’ instead of making noises and gestures of resistance against intolerance. There is no wonder the same minister is now bringing this move to ‘rate’ the artists in this country. Licensing of creativity is as severe as silencing of creativity. It is time that once again the creative forces in the country gravitate against such moves. Our artists have been surreptitiously enjoying the perks of the previous governments. They should also come out clean to fight this case. The private sector has been aiding many of our artists in this country to travel and exhibit abroad and gain international acclamation. They are known as Indian artists, whereas the artists who are sent to other international platforms on behalf of India are often not taken seriously, for the nepotistic moves that they have been resorting to. Mr.Mahesh Sharma is recruiting for mediocrity. At the same time, the talented ones should not just sit silently only because they are supported by private agencies. Silence is a way of participation. Licensing is a coercion to participate in their ideologies. It is high time that we all realize it.

Now everyone could sleep

If not, talk sweet nothingness

If interested you could gossip

On the sex lives of your female colleagues

In titillating whispers.

Women could speak endlessly

Of their men’s escapades.

In summer, after lunch

Without moving an inch

From the air of air conditioners

And coolers, like rag dolls

You could push your

Government branded bottoms and legs

Under the tables where

Heaps of files decay slowly and steadily

In winters, out there in the lawns

You could eat salted fruits

Knit woollen gloves and socks

Speak so high of the diseases you have

And those are eagerly anticipated.

Play cards, spit expletives, chew tobacco

Smoke cigarettes, crack jokes, fart

Belch and go back to your seats.

‘We are in those good old days,’

You could exclaim each other

And go back to your free cells

And mine sweepers, till you drop dead.

You could forget all pains

No need to chat with faceless people

No need to cheat your partners

No politics, no opinion.

If you have anything good to say, say

About the cow protectors, anti-beef eaters

Soldiers at the borders and nationalism

Please, go ahead, we are all ears here.

Please clean up all your opinions

With ample sprinkling of Ganga water.

No need to have an opinion on anything.

Be faithful to the ones who give you

Your subsistence, or get ready to bite bullets.

Why do you still carry those smart phones?

When you do not have any opinion,

Nothing to say, nothing to share

Nothing to like or nothing to emote

Why should you have a smart phone?

Please give it here in this counter

We could supply you those clever phones

That could make calls and take calls.

After some months

One fake id asked the other fake id:

“Did your boss sanction the arrears?”

When the news of that death was broken to me suddenly I broke into tears. I did not know where to keep the knife.

Don’t mistake me. I was just trying to balance the phone between my shoulder and ear, a feat that I am yet to excel. As a man living alone without a cook and someone to sleep with, I was cutting onion to make an omelette.

Then this friend’s phone call came. I was surprised. Generally, he sends me memes, picture trolls, jokes, limericks and porn-cartoons. We laugh sending emote-icons to each other. He rarely makes a call. As he does with his digital messages, in this call also he did not fail to amuse me.

Some deaths are awaited like an unbroken pimple on your cheek. It stays there for a long time, full of puss but refuse to burst. People avert their eyes while talking to you during those pimple seasons. But they do talk to you, appreciate you and congratulate you for the contributions that you have made.

I am a sports reporter, who is currently jobless due to the arrogance that I had showed towards my editor. I was with one of the biggest dailies in the city. Sports lovers took my words for truth; players, instead of looking at their as well as their opponents’ games in slow motion to learn strengths and weaknesses of the other, read my incisive reports, word to word, word by word.

I used to be like one of those much revered music critics. Even the best of maestros would shiver when the critic who had become a comma in his physical stature due to age, wrote a few lines in his celebrated column in the same newspaper where I worked as the senior sports reporter.

Death put an end to the veteran music critic’s stint as a critic as arrogance did to mine.

However, when the news of the death of a yesteryear tennis star came, I felt like laughing. He had been around for decades, playing some good games both in the national and international level. I grew up looking at his black and white photographs in action along with those of Mike Belkin and Pierre Barthes in the sports pages of newspapers.

He was a clay court specialist. But he loved to play in grass courts too. His tennis academy drew so many young boys and girls. Some of them made it to the national level and a couple of them made their mark in the international grand slams, under his tutelage.

It was in 1990s. I was transferred from Mumbai to Delhi. 22^ndWorld Tennis Association Tournament was going to take place in Delhi. I was happy for the transfer.

In one of those hectic days, I came to know about the story of a young tennis player who committed suicide in her hotel room while on a tour. This man was the head coach of the team. Everyone knew what had happened. But he was very powerful; politically connected and wealthy. There was no media trial in those days and channel wars were yet to start.

I was the one trailed the story despite the opposition from the editorial. I met many. So many sob stories I heard. But none of them saw the light of the day. He was powerful. And everybody respected him as a person and his contribution as a player.

I stood staring at the flames of the gas stove. The man is dead and gone.

My cell phone pinged once again: “the bastard is dead.”

I did not know who it was and I did not care to know. I knew many felt the same.

Then I cried, this time I shed real tears.

(image for illustration purpose only. Image courtesy net)

How does my death come, I do not know

(All poems that are meant to go wrong

Perhaps start with invoking death.)

I would like to do die seeing snow

Falling into the wintry white nights

Where birds sing songs of redemption.

If not, eating dried meat and sipping vodka

Near a dim lantern light, like a Russian character.

Perhaps, I would like to die like Hamlet

Who keeps chanting ‘to be or not to be’

Or else like Ravi who was bitten by a snake;

But I am not sure about any of these deaths.

Death could come by anything else

So mundane like a stray bullet

Or by pellets that make designs of darkness

And blood in eyes and raw flesh.

Death could be by severing tongues

And fingers, one by one.

It could happen while four men

Hold you like a hammock and the rest

Beat you into pulp; broken bones and teeth

You could die rotten in dungeons

Carrying the burden of being an anti-nationalist.

You could invite death by writing

You just need to write.

It would come by motor bikes.

It would knock at your door

Instead of a good morning or a packet of milk

It would simply pump a couple of bullets into your chest

At times, it could come to you

When you are in a jogging track.

Death is a great tempter

It could help you prepare your own gallows

If not, it would help you to severe

Your own tongues and fingers.

It gives fire to torch your library

And lead you gloriously into that pyre.

Death could come at any time

That is a sort of surety

But today it is a deed signed and sealed

‘Shut the fuck up’, says death, ‘if you want to live’

I do not have any weapon to fight death

However, I wield the whip against the

Wholesalers of death, sometimes stones

And some other times words and tears.

It is better to have the curves of words to death

Than to live the life in a prescribed straight line.

(Francesco Bonami, Italian Curtaor)

I do not know the renowned Italian curator Francesco Bonami exactly the way he does not know me. But not knowing mutually does not make any difference to the world, politically as well as culturally. However, the views on curatorial practice that he had recently expressed in the online magazine ‘artnet’ make me think about him and many like him in the world because I too belong to their tribe; the tribe of curators. According to Bonami, curators have ‘become self delusional characters and at the same time totally irrelevant in relation to the market and the artist’s career.’ The context of this interview is the growing involvement of the artists, artists’ collectives and even non-artists taking up the curatorial reins of many a project in the global visual art scenario. Bomani, considering his unshaken position in the international curatorial circuit, is a bit sarcastic and condescending while he speaks of the curators’ role in today’s world. His sarcasm is accepted for he has earned the right to be so. But the pointers that his views leading to, are not so funny as it seems.

The platitude that the curators ‘validate some kind of intellectual content that even the most callous dealer seems to need in order to maintain some kind of credibility’ in the context of Bomani’s interview assumes a deeper significance because even if he does not say that the new age curators or even the star curators or the non-curators curating the shows internationally lack in such authority to validate the works of art that they curate, the case is so. The danger of non-curators curating exhibitions all over the world today, pushing the trained and traditional curators behind the scenes or almost rendering them jobless is futurist in many ways. First of all, the future markets need validation for the works of art irrespective of the star value of the curator who has exhibited these works. His /her star value does not count because the intrinsic meanings of a work of art are not context specific of its exhibition but invariably a continuity in time and space (in other words within the frame of the work). If that is the case, the star curators devoid of academic abilities to ‘validate’ these works of art would eventually supply nothing to these works in the future market. It would be pushed into the columns where provenance of a work of art is printed in micro fonts whereas an academically trained curator’s words would remain a permanent vehicle of validation for the particular work of art in the future market. The presence of star curators is good to grab eyeballs and some page 3 spaces and maximum innumerable shares in the social media. Beyond that no additional value will be given to a work of art with the attachment of a star curator’s name to it.

(JohnyML, Indian art historian and curator)

I am not an apologist for the academic trained curators for I do not have too much of regard for all the academically trained curators. At the same time I respect a lot of curators academically trained in certain disciplines but with eclectic interests in visual arts and have this particular ability to interlink his/her expertise in the academic field and the visual art forms that he/she fancies. No issues if such academics come to the curatorial scene even without a degree in curatorial practice. I generally do not approve the curatorial practices of non-curators in the field of curatorial practice. However, I have a great respect and regard for those non-curators who have in-depth knowledge in the subjects that they take for curation. For example there are a few artist-curators who have very close relationship with their subjects both personally and academically and are capable of doing wonderful curatorial projects. There are also non-curators who would curate certain exhibition only because they have a first-hand knowledge about the subject.

Post-modernism allows anything to be taken seriously; that is good to certain extent. But at the same time post modernism has its own emphasis on human discretion because permissibility of anything anywhere in the name of culture and politics could be counter-productive. Hence, we cannot say that non-curators should not curate or non-art historians should not write art history. But there should be a discretion why certain people or celebrities are chosen as curators or given prominence as curators, almost discarding the academically trained curators. This preference is pre-meditated because the presence of a celebrity as curator or a non-artist celebrity as curator or a famous artist as curator could liquidate many a work of art into money besides the exhibition getting a lot of press mileage wherever the celebrity curator’s name is familiar. That means the employment of celebrity curators or star curators or celebrity artist curators is not basically for validating works of art for the future markets but for its immediate currency in the national or international art market. In that sense, the celebrity curators here function as trade representatives than intellectual mediators who validate the works for future markets. A celebrity’s dumbness could bring attention to the exhibition while the works of art would be permanently dumped by history for the very lack of ‘history’ around it. Our market has been failing to see it.

(a curated show- image for illustration purpose only)

Bomani points out that the young and academically trained curators are now almost pushed out of the market. And in their place the market has propped up celebrity curators, celebrity artist curators and non-curators. Perhaps, this is trendy for the sheer fun of it. While the market celebrates these new arrivals, it does not have a basic work ethics to see what the trained curators including the art historians are doing. Many years before I had pointed out that the potential curators, art critics and would be art historians are campus recruited by the gallery system in India and made all of them back room researchers or the front desk personalities curbing their urge to become potential curators. Either they cease to become art professionals or they remain permanently as assistants in the galleries, with frustration growing, which eventually makes them cynical and prematurely retired from the art scene. This is the great injustice that most of the galleries have done to the practicing curators in India too. Their frantic search for quick liquidation, media attention and selective footfall they all started employing celebrities or artist curators to add value to their shows. I would never say that artists are bad curators because artists while thinking about their own works they self curate often. But when a few artists are brought together and their works are displayed in a curated show, the artist curators job become that of the display strategists. I have seen artists curating while the historical validation is done by other writers in the same catalogue. I would say the most celebrated artists curators in this country are basically socialites with some sense of design. Where the content of the show is shallow, they make it more lucrative by conjuring up quirky titles.

I insist that celebrity artist curators or collectives-curators, despite their celebrity quotient are bad curators always fearing about their reputation as celebrities and to protect it making their projects more and more spectacular and facile devoid of deep intellectual content and as a result of it their statements about the shows would always be contradicting with the statements that they have made just a minute back. We have seen it in front of our eyes. To understand the shallowness of such huge projects curated by celebrity artist curators, one should just try to remember the number of works or the names of the artists who had participated in their shows. We would only remember the names of the celebrity curators. It is like the build up of a movie and the star who acts in it. The discussions are about the fan clubs, the distributors, the money that it would make in the box office, the overseas frenzy of the fans and so on, without heeding much to the real movie which gives a context for all these madness possible. The exhibitions curated by celebrities therefore become celebrity affairs with no emphasis on works of art or the artists. For the future markets photographs in the page 3 really do not make a good provenance.

(a curated exhibition- for illustration purpose only)

The worst thing that Indian art scene could do to its artists and to its curators is this that either the galleries started employing celebrity curators or the gallerists themselves becoming curators. The logic is simple for the latter. “It’s my gallery, my idea, my money, my artists, my people displaying, my friend writing the catalogue, I am paying for the publicity, I am even controlling the number of bottles of wines to be distributed on the opening day, I am sitting at the reception desk, I am socialising with the guests, I am going to sell the works....if so why should I need a curator?” This is a typical way of thinking many gallerists did immediately after the collapse of Indian art market. Then came a hoard of untrained people from the rich class who started calling themselves as curators. Even the two articles old art writers started printing their visiting cards with the tag line, ‘curator’. The hierarchy created within Brahminical structure of the art scene also created Brahminical structures for curatorial practices. Girls and boys coming from rich backgrounds, and those boys and girls who are willing to accept some kind of trends in the scene are always trained by the so called curators in certain curators’ hubs, which in my opinion are largely unproductive but they do it because it gives the people behind it a tremendous amount of credibility in the international circuits as they want the colonial left over still remaining intact in the future market called India so that they could perpetuate their kind of art and related practices into the Indian sub-continent. I have never seen curators coming up such hubs and doing shows elsewhere. Getting married to foreign curators could be one short cut to become cross over international curators or even organizing large scale events and self appointing as curators. But none of them would make future markets. The future markets are entrusted in the writings and curatorial practices of the academically trained, diligent and self innovating curators. The earlier the market sees their potential the better their chances of making money out of ‘validated’ works by valid curators.

(picture for illustration purpose only)

“What all could be bought”, I think

“In fifteen rupees?”

Maximum a quarter of lady fingers

Or one kilo rice or potato

But I can’t feed a family

With a quarter of lady fingers or potato.

They say I could get mobile recharge coupon

For ten rupees, but I do not have a mobile.

They also say I could buy fifty grams of peanuts for ten.

But what would I get for rupees five?

“Will give you a banana,” someone says.

We, myself and my wife went to the shop

To buy some poison to end it all.

But a packet of poison they sell for twenty.

None gives poison on credit.

In the next shop they have

Rice, wheat, kerosene and all what we want

But we owe the owner fifteen rupees

Lucky we are, he hacked us to death

With each measured cut.

What if we are dead?

Think of that five rupees gain.

(Aadi Sanakaracharya- Controversial forever)

Over assessment and over reading of the meaning of a work of art could land a progressive political party in soup. That’s what exactly happened with a section of the students’ and teachers’ unions belonging to the ruling Left Front in Kerala. In Sri Sankaracharya University, a university established in the name of the Aadi Sankaracharya, a 9^thcentury scholar who is said to have defeated the prominence of Buddhism using the scholarly interpretations of the Vedic scriptures and paved the way for establishing Hinduism as we know it today, the installation of a sculptural icon of Sri Sankaracharya at the newly inaugurated arched gate has provoked the left leaning students and teachers. The opposition which has by now snowballed into a large scale controversy involving political as well as religious factions seems to have put the left parties into a spot. While the right wing political factions have found a stick to beat the ruling left parties, even the left leaning intellectuals and artists have found the move of their political fellow travelers ill-timed, insensitive and irresponsible to certain extent.

A section of the left wing students’ and teachers’ unions opposes it because they say that the installation of a ‘Hindu idol’ would eventually turn a university into a temple by replacing the academic stake holders slowly but steadily with the religious stake holders (read right wing political and religious parties organizations). They allege that there have already been moves from the right wing forces to take over the university and convert it into a Hindu religious establishment. There had been certain moves in the yesteryears to rename the university as ‘Kaladi Sanskrit University’ but it was shot down by both the public and the members of the academic communities. While the general consensus on the nomenclatural logic of the university remains intact, those who oppose the installation of the Sankaracharya ‘Icon’ assert that the university’s name is commemorative but it is definitely not established for teaching Hindu religion or Sanskrit. The opposition also reads the whole issue from a Dalit perspective saying that the move (to establish an icon) is to underline the Hindu leaning of the university.

(Sri Sankaracharya University, Kaladi)

Most of the people from the art community who have responded to the issue see it as a non-issue made into a controversy. One could see how the opposition has brought the right wing forces as the protectors of artistic freedom. Unfortunately, the opposing sections have failed to understand the artistic side of this Sankaracharya icon. Once the university decided to have a sculpture at the new gate, the Vice Chancellor of the University decided that the sculpture could be made by the faculty members of the Sculpture Department in the university. T.G.Jyotilal, an acclaimed sculptor who heads the department took the responsibility of sculpting the image of Sankaracharya which is ‘radically different’ but ‘not provokingly away from the norms’. Jyotilal made a collective effort by holding workshops with the students of the faculty, bringing technical expertise from outside. The work of the sculpture in cement cast has been on for the last two months and is nearing completion.

“There is a major difference between an idol and an icon. An idol is made for worship and an icon is made for larger cultural consumption,” says Jyotilal. According to him the moment the agitators used the word ‘idol’ in the public memory it suddenly got attached as a religious idol. “It is so unfortunate that the agitators could not see that we are all modern sculptors and we do not make idols for worship, which is a different ball game altogether. We were attempting to create a sculptural icon of Sankaracharya, who was a religious personality but never a god in himself,” says Jyotilal. Sankaracharya was a commentator of religious texts and was an able debater who could convince the opponents about the virtues of Hinduism. He used both secular and religious logic.

(Sculptor Jyotilal TG)

As Sankaracharya lived in the late 8^th and early 9^th century CE (some attribute his time between 5^th c and 12^th c), none of us know what he looked like. There are no photographic evidences to prove the likeness of Sankaracharya. The idols we already have in parlance in different parts of India come from the common understanding about the Bhakti poets and saints of the 13^th to 15^th centuries. If one looks at the idols of these poets even in Kerala (like those of Melpathur Bhattathirippadu, Poonthanam, Thunchathu Ramanujan Ezhuthachan and so on), one could see they do not considerably differ from the likeness of Sankaracharya’s idols. The interesting fact is that though Sankaracharya lived a few centuries before the Bhakti poets, the idols of all these personalities were made almost during the same time; the time frame could be fixed somewhere between late 19^thcentury to the late 20^th century. Hence, even for Jyotilal the point of reference is the available image of Sankaracharya to which he could take some poetic and artistic licenses, perhaps even removing a few stark religious iconographies.

The photograph of the sculptures made available to me by the sculptor himself tells me beyond doubt that the artist has not re-created the popular image of Sankaracharya, instead he has created a Sankara who is more like a saintly scholar, more like a Buddha or Jain Teerthankaras in our mind. This semblance does not mean that Jyotilal and team were trying to deliberately subvert the ‘Hindu’ version of Sankaracharya and to make a Buddhist one. Here, the Sankaracharya sculpture is more serene but not cinematic; it is more sculptural than idol like. Generally speaking if at all people remember Sankaracharya they must be doing it via book covers, CD covers, calendars and popular flex boards. Ironically, Kerala is a place which had produced the first Jagadguru Adi Sankarcharya movie in 1977. Directed by the leftist poet P.Bhaskaran, this film had closely followed the ‘myth’ of Sankaracharya. This had not created any controversy in Kerala in those days. Similarly in 1983, G.V.Iyer had directed the most famous Aadi Sankaracharya film in Sanskrit language which had reaped National Awards. This film too had not created any controversy.

(Jyotilal and students at work)

The times were different and works of art were taken for their aesthetic finesse and interpretational values. No one, including the Dalits, had got sentimentally hurt by watching these films. Today, the time has changed and we see the right wing bigotry on the rise. This has also necessitated the Dalit uprising all over the country. Hence, a Sankaracharya sculpture in front of a university can become a point of debate. But the debate should have some space for the voices of the artist. The irony is that the same left parties who opposed the right wing forces for seeing religious figures in the works of M.F.Husain are now seeing religious meanings in a creative sculpture done by a group of academically qualified sculptors with clear left wing politics. The counter actions of the right wing parties to protect the interests of the sculpture (thereby sculptors too) have hijacked the issue to their side forcing the ‘progressive left parties’ into defence. Till now they have been behaving exactly like the right wing forces baying for the blood of independent artists.

“Unfortunately, the agitators are not seeing us as artists and academics,” says a dejected Jyotilal. “For them academic practice means reading and writing. Sculpting or making a work of art is not an academic work for them. They think that we are workers who execute others’ plans. It is unfortunate,” Jyotilal continues. When the University authorities asked the sculpture department to take up the job, it came forward thinking that it was an opportunity even for the students to do a large scale sculpture whose theme would give them a lot of scope for artistic interpretations. But the left parties somehow have misread it. They projected certain internal fears saying that once the ‘idol’ is installed, the right wing parties would come to do the ‘worship’ and they would eventually turn the university into a temple. Right wingers are capable of doing it. But now, they have become the protectors of a sculpture by default. The agitators could have ‘protected’ the secular nature of the sculpture exactly the way they had done in Trissur Kerala Varma College.

(Mahatma Gandhi by Ramkinkar Baij and students of Santiniketan)

Ram Kinkar Baij made Gandhi sculpture and his students decided to make it into a monumental concrete sculpture, which they did. The sculpture is still in the Santiniketan campus. When it was installed, the Naxalites of the time did not like it. They wanted to destroy it using crude bombs. After a few failed attempts they left it there. But Baij conveyed to them that he would be happy to make a Mao the way they wanted provided they met the expenses. He said that it was just a sculpture and they should just leave it alone. May be in the case of Sankaracharya sculpture in Kaladi too, the leftists should take a Baij-ian approach; just think about it as a Sankaracharya sculpture and if they need an EMS sculpture next to it, they should commission the artists to make it and obtain permission from the university authorities. Still, if some people come and start lighting lamps and conducting pooja, don’t we have a government there? Haven’t we learned a lot from Nilakkal and Babri Masjid?

From the kitchen window I could see these bunches of berries, half pinkish red and half white hanging from high branches of the tree that grows over a fifteen feet tall boundary wall. Little humming birds hover around the bell like white flowers, butterflies flit all over, occasionally a monkey jumps over it never touching the berries that make my eyes widen with happiness each morning as I enter the kitchen. Children don’t find any devices around to climb over the wall and pluck the berries. Necessity has made them small inventors; they tie a little bottle or stone at the end of a kite string and throw it over the branches. The stone goes over the tree, covers the intended branch and comes down. Holding both the ends of the string, the kids pull it down, slowly but meticulously, plucking the sour berries (someone told me about its taste. If slice it and rub it with salt, chilli powder and a shot of lemon, it would taste heaven, they say) and make way before the gardener sees the unnaturally shaking tree, comes rushing and chases away the truant boys.

Looking at these berries I think of their purpose of being there. They are the making of a wondrous hand. The berries are here to carry the seed and perpetuate the species of that tree on the earth. But others find different purposes for it. Some berries are tasty; some are sour and some are even poisonous. Some cause various kinds of allergies; some are good to look at but are never to be consumed. Each has a purpose of perpetuating its species. Rest of their uses are found out by others, including birds and human beings. Depending on the quality of looks and taste, human beings judge the berries as edible, poisonous, decorative etc. The meaning of a berry is its berry-ness. When it is brought to another situation, suddenly it acquires metaphorical values; some meaning which is not intrinsic but added to it by associations. Apple is one of the innocent edible fruits in the market but even the staunch Christians would not think of the original sin when they buy a kilogram of it for themselves. None laughs at a woman who goes around biting into an apple. Yet, when the apple is painted on a canvas or displaced from the tree or fruit stall and placed it in a gallery or museum, suddenly the meaning changes; everyone suddenly sees the ‘history’ of apple both in mythology/ theology and aesthetics. People have found out the ways in which they could see purpose of anything and everything including an apple.

(Subodh Gupta with his Absolut bottle)

When depicted in art objects and subjects come to have meaning and purposes though such connotations are not the intention of the artists. Like berries art that comes from the minds of the artists too does not have any particular purpose. If at all there is a purpose for art that is just the perpetuation of the artistic abilities of the artist himself/herself. Each work of art is an intention as well as a decision. The tree has an intention and decision in producing a bunch of berries. It does not see the birds as primary consumers. Perhaps, it may be seeing the birds as primary carriers so that the seeds could be delivered elsewhere. An artist is also like a tree; he/she has an intention and a decision. Any work of art produced therefore carries an artistic intention and a decision, both of which do not have anything to do with its further perpetuation in the minds of the people or in the market. The intention is often simple; that ‘I want to make a work of art’ or ‘I want to make something out of something’ or ‘I want to make something that makes me happy’. The decision part is also equally simple: ‘I want to do it in this way’ or ‘I am doing it in this way’ or ‘this is the way that I do it’ or ‘this is what I do with it’.

Real artists are those people who create works of art with pure intention and strong decision. When the intention is adulterated or the decision is weakened, the resultant work of art would have weaker genes to survive the times. This statement invites another discussion; one could say that all the artists have good intentions when they do art and all of them have stronger decisions too. I am nobody to question their intentions or decisions. But works of art are such things that once perceived or tasted with heightened sense of aesthetical understanding, their intentions and decisions are revealed to the trained eyes. This self revelatory aspect of a work of art often puts the artists into trouble; those who have done with impure intentions and weaker decisions are exposed sooner than later. As I said before, artistic intention is all about a self justification of making a work of art, decision is nothing but executing it the way one wants it to be. Each artist makes a self justification for doing a work of art and the way it is done automatically explains the artistic decision behind it.

(from Dutch Renaissance, Entombment)

This is a dangerous proposition. When we accept that each artist has an intention, we should also accept that whatever the artist intends is exposed in the given work of art; what seen is not just the representation or non-representation and style but it is also the mind of the artist. An artist who paints the glamour and glitter of an urban space is either celebrating it or critiquing it. He/she cannot say that urban space is a metaphor for the celebration of life. This could be a naive argument from the artist’s side, however that naivety itself is then an intention of the artist. And the way he has painted, sculpted, photographed, videoed and so on shows the decision of the artist vis-a-vis the medium, the perspective, the time and the positioning of him/herself within or without the work of art. That means, a work of art which is produced by an artist often gives away the artistic intention and decision. Art history says that most of the Renaissance and Pre-Renaissance artists hid a lot of secret meanings, scientific findings, agnostic scepticism and so on in their works without offending the patrons. One needs a deep understanding of the history, theology, sociology and political make up of the times to understand those works in the right perspective. However, what comes to fore is that those complicated works too revealed artistic intentions and decisions at some stage of historical analysis.

Compared to those days, today we live in much shallower times with short attention spans and peripheral understanding of things. Artists too have fallen to the follies of our times. Instant fame, name and riches have come to define artistic success in our contemporary times. Fame and fortune also could come via being different and creating complicated art deliberately. But surprisingly, if complexity is the hallmark of a particular work of art today, then we also understand that it is not the complexity of the minds of the artists but their intention to make the work of art complicated than lucid. It is an intention as well as a decision. I do not want to say that whether it is right or wrong. But I would say that it gives away the ways in which an artist tries to make his/her work complex and comprehensive. The decisions within those works are crystal clear. Only way to deflect artistic intentions and decisions is to attribute metaphorical values to these images and objects. But unfortunately we live in such times that everything is either a metaphor or a self revealing platitude. The metaphorical lack of our times has made the job of an art critic much tougher for only he could rely on his deeper or shallow understanding about the world and nature in order to dredge out meanings as well as befitting metaphors. The self revealing nature of the images is because of the over exposed ways of our lives these days. We even know the background score of our wrist watch. When we consume anything we know everything about it via advertisements. So the consumption is a sort of sharing the experience that one already has known virtually; consumption of it is a reaffirmation of the same experience in the real time. This renders the works of art and experiences/decisions revealed/expressed in there an underlining rather than an exciting first time experience.

(work by Jan Van Kessel, 1659)

The question then is what could be the right kind of art that protects the intention and the decision of the artists? In my opinion contemporary art has been overtly depending upon the immediate incidents and experiences, memories, images, texts related to them. Over identification with/of the experiential quotes within the art or as art has reduced the artistic intention to some sort of cleverness of cajoling the viewer to a turn of surprise exposition/s. The decision is already visible because the styles that the artists have chosen are self revelatory and resonate with what the viewers have already seen around them. The political intentions and decisions of the artists are too palpable to be real or serious because they flit around the berries and flowers like butterflies, moving from one flower to other at a time but around a variety of flowers and berries over a period of time. So we see artists working on migration at one point of time and in the coming season we see them celebrating nationalism confined within the geographical boundaries. At times we see them working against the fascistic political ideologies and other times hailing militaristic moves as paramount gestures of patriotism. Such works of art are passing fancies, like the moths that come to die in the light of the truth and simplicity.

Can art do anything to change the society if that is the case? Art, being one of the ultimate expressions of human potential, it has the ability to create empathetic responses amongst the viewers/listeners. It comes as a natural a spontaneous thing for both the artist and the viewer. It is not necessary that we would like to go out and change the world the moment we see a work of art. A work of art does not ask us to change the world or society. It fundamentally asks one to change oneself. A good piece of music is the right intentions and decision of a musician so is a good work of art is that of a painter or sculptor or any other fine artist. It moves the viewer not to change the world but towards the innards of one’s own self. Today, a propagandist work of art could ‘inform’ people of political turns and twists in a country but it can never change the people who view it. Had it been so, India should have been without religious conflicts or without garbage everywhere for we see a lot of propaganda for keeping the society clean of religious conflict as well as littering. A work of art stands for the artist’s expression of the simple truths that he finds around him/her. A proper reading of it would reveal his/her intention and decision too. Once those are understood, people would marvel at the work of art and would move towards the sublime zone of existence. One need not necessarily be dealing with the social realities or political realities of the time directly. The secret is lies in the capturing of simple truths of life which are capable enough to turn potential metaphors and could reveal not only the artistic intentions and decisions but also many things more provided if one has the eyes to see simple truths and their abilities to expand and contain the times and beyond.

(self portrait by Shibu Natesan)

“Death does not talk about death,” says Shibu Natesan. Death, then definitely talks about life; each death subtly, if not violently, reminds us of life, the preciousness of it and above all the need to love each other for our time on the earth is limited though each of us is invested with the potential to become immortal. Death, for Shibu is not the end of a living organism but an inevitable transformation through which both the higher organisms and the lower ones have to pass. From being, one moves to the zone of becoming. We do not feel like seeing dead bodies because it reminds us of past and physically it does not show the possibility of a future other than the purest form of decaying, cell by cell, releasing all what has been once fragrance, now a revolting stench. Dead bodies do not talk about death but our revulsion for it. Death is neutral and impartial; the decay depends on degree though death does not have any degree. A dead thing could remind one, of the futility of life’s vanity as well. It is not the negation of life but a soulful call to discard vanity. Humans like any other beings on the earth have the capacity for apotheosis; they could become gods, provided they realise the god potential in them. It is a journey, a practice and a penance.

(work by Shibu Natesan)

Shibu’s recent works are of transience; bodies die and the death is not instantaneous. It is a process that progresses moment by moment and he believes that if one could see death as a ‘living process’, then the final revulsion for the dead bodies does not occur in the minds of human beings. We do not know whether rats feel dejection when they witness a human being lying dead, but as human beings we do feel revulsion at the sight of a decaying rat’s body. This revulsion is caused by the reluctance of human beings to accept dead as a living process. An unblemished skin is worshipped but when the same skin is seen torn by rashes we turn our faces. As a painter Shibu has accepted death as a living process, exactly the way Kumaranasan had accepted it in his poems like ‘Veena Poovu’ and ‘Karuna’. Between Kumaranasan and Shibu Natesan there lies a river of time which has the width of a century. But in his own way, Shibu too has reached that exalted philosophical positioning of an artist who ultimately sees death as a living process. Great artists have always addressed death while the superficial ones have always celebrated life. The great ones have always found out that death is a threshold to immortality and to rejoice in death one needs that awareness of life being a preparation for a grand death.

(work by Shibu Natesan)

Cemeteries and human skulls have evoked more sublime thoughts than fear amongst the weaklings and shallow beings. Hamlet was looking at a skull when he had faced with a dilemma and our own Raja Harischandra had realized the deeper truths about life when he was working as a cemetery attendant. Shibu is in a Hamletian phase in his career, not really in terms of the ‘to be or not to be’ sort of dilemma, where deeper inquiries into the transitory nature of life and it as slow progression to death take over the mere celebrations of contemporaenity. Artists who are bracketed within the word ‘contemporary’ either celebrate or problematize whatever is contemporary. They exclude the larger dimension of life and death by preferring life over death. Art has been a way of pointing out socio-political problems through aesthetical modes for many. It is not a bad thing to do, however, when we see most of the activities in the society are meant to flag out as well as to tackle the problems of various kinds, seeing art jumping into the same bandwagon makes it almost redundant an activity for often it fails in creating larger repercussions other than controversies or monetary celebrations. In one of my articles before this, I had mentioned that art need not necessarily be carrying out a social role or purpose other than being art which has the capacity to move people’s mind causing fundamental changes in the life philosophy. I had also argued that only by turning the artistic eyes towards simpler things around us could bring about that ‘moving’ of minds.

(work by Shibu Natesan)

A political speech or an inspirational speech moves our minds. But the effect of it is not expected to be long lasting provided if we are not keeping the vibrations that we have received from those speeches in a separate box in our minds. As we have the tendency to mix up everything in our minds and make a mess out of our life and its philosophical clarity, we tend to go back to our previous state of mind after listening to the political speech capable of moving us. The slogan ‘azadi’ may linger on for a few days or weeks only to fade away when newer slogans catch our attention. A tune that is pumped into our consciousness by the electronic and new media, moves us for while until it is replaced by another equally moving tune. All slogans are meant to die, so are all the exhortations however aesthetical they may be. But certain things remain and keep moving us to moments of sublimation that lead us to the thresholds of apotheosis. Call it nostalgia or by any other name, certain smells, certain sounds, certain pictures, certain faces, certain voices, certain feelings, certain contexts, certain occasions, certain climates, certain atmospheres, certain terrains, certain travels, certain shores, certain forests, certain breezes, certain songs, certain albums, certain soils, certain waters, certain smiles, certain tears, certain mumblings, certain whisperings, certain prayers, certain memories, certain forgetting, certain follies, certain sins, certain acts of piety, certain falling of feathers, certain birds, certain thunders, certain lightning, certain tastes, certain touches and certain what nots sublimate us as nothing else does. May be your child’s first cry or your mother’s voice in the phone, simple.

(work by Shibu Natesan)

Try to capture these in your works. Let me tell you, if you are not a good artist you will fail. Thousands of them have failed in depicting these emotions. But similar emotions could be evoked via subconscious selection of other objects and subjects. In monsoon, at night, under the white lamp, the insects that he does not know living around him in small thickets, at the top of the coconut trees, under the leaves in his lovingly tendered garden, come one by one as if they were curious about the lonely painter in a white mansion sitting alone in his white robes, completely lost in depicting his own self on the papers. His nimble fingers move and the contours of his face appear on the paper. From the ceiling, from behind the book shelf, from the ledge, from the back of the chair, these creatures of insignificance keep looking at the artist at work. They are many and in different varieties. Their eyes shine but not visible in the blaring white light around which moths do their death dance to the silent tunes of their limitless universe. Their antennas are up, their blue shells and rainbow wings vibrate. Here is their last performance. They submit their lives to a creator who is capable of leading them to immortality.

(work by Shibu Natesan)

Shibu finds them in the morning; at the book shelf, under the table, near the half opened book, near the sketch book, near the palette. They are just there, motionless, weightless and in a trance; he finds them dead. How alive they look in their death. Shibu has been painting them meticulously, the way a modern painter would do to his female nude model. The insects are captured in their ultimate perfection; they are like machine parts, bullets and some of them even look like mummies from Egypt. Shibu paints their death and their life after death. In his sketchbooks they have started a new journey into immortality. Their apotheosis has happened. Through the depiction Shibu has also transcended his own mortality; he finds no difference between him and a bug. It is not a Kafkesque transformation. There is no existential dilemma here. Here is a wiling entry into the bugdom and their immortal heavens. Shibu finds no difference between what he does and the bugs do. They have been looking at him and he has been looking at them, in their different incarnations. (When I first saw them I suggested that the title ‘The Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’, the famous title of Damien Hirst’s pickled shark, more suitable to these humble drawings than that ambitious work of Hirst).

(work by Shibu Natesan)

“These are not dead bugs, they are transformed bugs,” says Shibu. I could see the drawings and the artistic intention and decision behind it. Each time Shibu paints a dead bug he sees it from one perspective. Then he touches it, turns it, sees it, observes it and sketches it from different angles. “In death they model for me or rather their death compels me to paint them; in their death they have become more powerful than they were alive. Now they could move an artist,” says Shibu. When an artist moves his mind beyond the physical purposes of his artistic production, he just does not need an end of/to his works. Great poets have reached that sensibility of seeing a flowery branch, a blade of grass, an ant and all alike. Great artists too have reached that level. North European Renaissance artists have painted bugs and creatures, the humblest beings on earth with great attention and detail. They were not making scientific classification or doing anatomical studies. It was a state of being to be one with the greater and larger truth of universe; one life and one love. Shibu is in that path. Hence he paints what he sees through the window of his study room. Same scene, painted in different times, in different lights. Neo-impressionism, you tend to ask. “No,” says Shibu, “Pleasure of seeing,” he concludes. Yes, exactly the way bugs look at us from wherever they are- with no purpose but for pure pleasure. Who said bugs don’t have the pleasure of seeing?

(picture from net, illustration purpose only)

Dear Zakir Khan,

Good that you asked me this question; why many people in India love to hate Muslims? You, in fact, did not use these words, instead you asked, ‘why our acquaintances have contemptuous perception about Muslims?’ I can feel your pain and I share it. Contempt for anything comes, as the old adage goes, from familiarity. We need to tweak it a bit to make it suitable for our times. It makes sense and sounds feasible when we change it by saying, strangeness also brings contempt. Muslims as a generic religious group, despite its innate sects and factions, and liberal, moderate and extreme ideological anchors, has come to have become the strange ‘other’ for anybody who hails from other religious groups. In India, this contempt and hatred for Muslims have become all the more pronounced these days.

The historical reasons for pitching Muslims against Hindus vary depending on the historical time that we consider in order to analyse this hatred. The Hindu-Muslim strife in India, if seen in the right perspective never had religion as its fundamental reason. More than religious differences it was the politico-economic power differences that had created strife amongst these two religious groups. The geographical conception and imagination of India as an undivided subcontinent is first of all a religious imagination which was a result of the geographical conception and imagination created by the British colonialism in the Indian subcontinent. Till then, India was never the ‘female’ (Bharat Mata) form as we imagine today literally (visually) along the geographical boundaries of our country. Innumerable chieftains and local kings were making adjustments with the dominant powers including the Mughal power and it simply continued under the British rule too. Most of the rebellions till 1857 were basically for ‘tax money’ based on the land and agriculture and commerce within and without it. Religion was a subtext in the discourse of power in the Indian subcontinent.

By the mid 19^th century, consolidation of the British power in India had evoked political resistances against the British and those movements had to be based on a common cultural ideology in order milk out political unity amongst the local kings and chieftains who enjoyed the support of both the Hindus and Muslims. Political unity of India could not have been possible without imagining a geographical nation which was a unified India. Common heritages and cultures had to be dug out, unified and re-codified for the purpose of imagining that physical nation and the available historical research was leading to the Vedic Hinduism, travelling over Mughal and Sultanate periods, rise and fall of Hindu kingdoms and Buddhist kingdoms, the resurgence of Hinduism with the arrival of Sankaracharya in the 8^th century and so on. Importantly, when the imagination of a large Hindu nation was taking place here the Indian Muslims were also a part of the nationalistic risings against the British. However, sooner than later they realized that the dominant groups that led the anti-British movements by and large were having Hindu leanings which obviously had forced the Indian Muslims to have their own socio-political organizations not only for being a part of the nationalist struggle for Indian Independence but also for reforming the Muslims communities spread all over India from its own trappings of tradition and religious orthodoxy.

This history is known to us and also the aftermath of it. When the British left, they had already divided India into two; almost half a century before the British had divided Indian Hindus and Muslims into two mutually opposing factions by dividing Bengal into East and West Bengal, which later we would see once again becoming the arena of political contention between India and Pakistan. Partition in 1947 and the pogroms that ensued further created emotional ruptures between the Muslims and Hindus in India. Surprisingly, the Sikh community which had been bearing the brunt of partition patched up emotionally and culturally not only with the Indian Muslims but also with the international Muslims. However, an imaginary nation has been still in the minds of the those people who keep on believing that an undivided India could be realized through outnumbering Muslims in socio-cultural and politico-economic spheres by periodical attacks for flimsy or concocted reasons.

Over imagining a nation with expanded political boundaries only because it was imagined so at some point of history is the present problem that India is going through. We all know that India has to have a world supreme military power as well as fascistic political will to destroy all other nations spread all over this region and bring them under the so called undivided India. Indian political leadership including the present one in power with dominant Hindutva ideology knows it well. Yet, both the Indian Muslims and Hindus imagine their country as Bharat Mata, a lady standing with her iconographical attributes filling in the physical contours of the geographical map of India which all of us had learnt to draw when we were in school. The recent evocation of Gilgit and Balochistan by our Prime Minister in order to checkmate Pakistan in the Kashmir issue, despite all its political, militaristic and social implications, inadvertently has also brought something which the Hindutva ideologues have been not wanting to come to the fore; the real geographical map of India. In a worst case scenario if India is forced to cede Kashmir and PoK, then our Indian Map will be seen without that part that stands for the head of our Map/Bharat Mata. Suddenly, the stark truth stares back at our face. Our cultural imagination which has always cemented the political imaginations lay in tatters, which our Prime Minister had not thought of doing.

Suddenly, the Indian Muslim has become Kashmiri Muslim. Kashmiri Muslims are those people who want to take Kashmir to Pakistan, they say. In the din of Hindutva, we forget the fact that the constitutional provision had given them the right to self determine, which India fears that given a chance would prove detrimental to the larger imagination of the Hindutva ideology. Hence, now within India, Indian Muslims are no longer the real other; the real other are those people who stands for Kashmiris’ right to live peacefully and determine their future political course. Today, Indian Muslim is all those people who stand against the Hindutva. Within the Indian Muslims, the Indian state has found two different types of extremists; one, those who support Kashmiris and two, those who support the ISIS. The beef eating Muslim is no longer a threat as the Indian people have exposed the hypocrisy of the Gau Rakshaks. Today Indian Muslim has taken a new identity; they are one with Dalits, social activists and all those media people who are called the Presstitutes.

India’s political and cultural leaders always knew that the rupture between Hindus and Muslims would worsen as time went. Hence, all their efforts have been to appease both the religious groups without giving a chance for the other to attack the political establishments. This tightrope walking done by most of the central and regional governments in a way paved way for the negative consolidation of politics based on religious fundamentalisms. Today, without addressing the Hindu terrorism we cannot address Muslim terrorism, at least in India, and vice versa. One has begotten the other. Social media is one place where one could see bigots from both the religious groups making rampant attacks on each other based on falsehood and blind faith. These avenues of politico-cultural discourses have never helped in patching up differences. The more the Hindu fundamentalists quote from ill digested knowledge of Vedas and other religious scriptures, Muslim fundamentalists counter them with their equally ill digested understanding of Islam. Religion has become a footnote in the war of egos than providing an avenue for informed socio-political and cultural critique.

The efforts of Indian cultural producers to create a nationalist Muslim in the mainstream novels and films also have taken a backseat knowing well that such attempts would no longer serve any purpose. The other has been created and in turn it has created further others. The only problem is that many of the Indian Hindus laugh at the Muslim ways (I have heard someone saying that Muslims wear elder brother’s kurta and younger brother’s pyjama) but they fail to see that they are also being laughed at for carrying the obvious religious marks all over their bodies; look at the Indian Hindu males and females wearing reams of threads around their wrists, rings of various effects in fingers and the Brahminical tuft on their heads even when they wear three piece suit and speak both King’s and Queen’s English. A progressive society always laughs at itself. When it starts laughing at others and forget to laugh at itself, remember that it has started degenerating and it has revived some kind of orthodoxy which is fundamentally against human refinement. Ability to laugh at and laughed at is a symptom of social refinement. India has lost it. That’s why a stand up comedian is arrested for spoofing the mannerisms of some cultural icons. A society that becomes largely intolerant towards the others forgets the fact that it has already become a laughing stock before the world.

So dear friend, when you are laughed at, just reassure yourself that those who laugh at you have already drawn their boundaries and have declared to the world that they have stunted themselves and have become socio-cultural and political dwarfs and their laughs do not eke out fear and revulsion but pure sympathy for their gigantic ignorance that needs clinical support than logical retort or debate.

Yours sincerely

JohnyML

One day a young artist was showing some of his works to me. Well versed in Kangra miniature style, this artist held out some future promises though his answer to one of my questions made me doubtful about his future promise. It was not really his answer but the way he answered had put me off for my question was as simple as a query about the medium of his works. Externalizing his hesitation and moral trepidation by scratching the back of his head and by shuttling his eyes restively around my face he said, “Poster colours on mount board.” I was sad, to say the least. I told him, “Never hesitate in answering a question regarding your work. Do not be apologetic about your work at all. The moment you are apologetic about your own creation people grow suspicious about your intentions. If you know what you are doing or rather what you have done, and also if you know the medium that you have chosen to do the work, be confident and say it straight for no medium is a bad medium for an artist. And above all, doing a work of art never amounts to committing a crime.”

This chance encounter on a discussion table in an art promoter’s office forced me wear my thinking cap for a while. I thought of the other extreme of this young artist; the ‘over confident’ young artist. Such artists are aplenty and in the market place they are seen as happening and successful. These artists say whatever comes to their tongues. Sometimes they know their answers for sure and they do not have any hesitation to say it out. They know their subject matter and also they know their mediums. Ironically, such overconfidence of the artists also has put me into a state of inexplicable grief. Experience has taught me that those young artists too sure of their works have somehow matured before time and their works appear as close ended. There is a feeling of ‘that’s it’. And when you have that feeling it is followed by this line, ‘so, let’s look somewhere else for something interesting.’ Early bloomers have always presented this sense of dejection amongst the viewers. Each time they make an extremely confident and conclusive work of art, they are posed with another gigantic challenge either to maintain the present momentum or to go beyond it to present something new. Slowly, such artists give us dettol washed, sanitized works of art with predictable or predicated narratives around it. The smarter ones amongst these overconfident early bloomers, when they face with far more intelligent questions or even confront their own weak moments in public spaces of presentation, they shrug their shoulders and say, ‘well, I don’t know.’ Call it height of arrogance or height of ignorance, I think such artists sell their confidence, definitely not their art for their art fail to impress seasoned minds like mine.

Why does this happen? Or how does it happen? What makes a young artist mumble incoherently and sound apologetic about his or her works? What makes another young artist say things confidently by tying up the loose ends or just leave the ends completely opened so that anybody could say anything without holding the artist responsible for their conclusions? Till recently we used to think that the disparity was created by the language. English being the language of political as well as economic power, being conversant in that language gives an artist a natural passport to recognition if not stardom. If both evade the artist then he/she could at least float in the right kind of circles and make right kind of connections which would eventually take him/her to materialistic success. Those who do not speak English (who are known amongst the English speaking crowd as vernies, a condescending abbreviation for vernacular) are destined to be second class citizens in the hierarchic structure of the art scene in India. However, I have come to understand that it is not the language alone that determines the confidence level of the artist. For an artist, say from Tamil Nadu does not need fluency in English to tell someone that his medium is either ‘oil on canvas’ or ‘poster colour on paper’. He/she just needs to understand what is being asked. If someone wants to know further about the works or about the artist who is not conversant in English, he would definitely find an interlocutor; that’s the way we watch movies with subtitles and read international literature in translation.

The confidence level of an artist lies in elsewhere; his/her understanding of the world. The smarter ones use a lot of art historical name droppings. The more you drop names from contemporary art scene of certain countries or from remote art historical annals which are not regularly visited even by the art people, the more security rings will be created around you. People use art history as a weapon to intimidate the inquisitive minds, which perhaps is a legitimate way because a scientist upon questioning would definitely drop theorems beyond our grasping power to save his skin or a pandit would drop some Sanskrit or Arabic couplets to floor the opponent or the general enthusiast. But the smarter ones amongst the young contemporary artists function not really based on art history, which is too academic for them to handle. Selecting a special area of knowledge and information which are currently in parlance but not among the generic crowds but only in the specialized groups of people helps these artists to remain special and invincible for the time being. Look at those artists including the Raqs Media group and the artists who are enamoured by such art or artists collective. They operate in special intellectuals zones and claim that only those people who are intellectually at the same wave length could understand their art. It is almost like saying that only a botanist could understand a flower. A poet is a fool because what he says about a flower is not ‘the flower’.

Seeing such kind of art and artists flourishing or getting recognition and fortune, many youngsters who are still using conventional mediums like painting, sculpting, print making , photography with focus and so on think that they are some kind of sinners who are simply gate crashers in an elite scene and any act of theirs caught under the light should be explained apologetically and talked about with a lot of hesitation. To remove this disparity and injustice from the art scene, I would suggest that there should be a fundamental change in the art curriculum of our fine arts academies. With periodical syllabus revisions and academic assessment and so on, the fine arts faculties in India try to be abreast with the times but they are not seeing the truth yet. We have a vertically divided teaching practice; on the one side we have practical training (polishing skills) and the other side we have art history and theory. As they say, East and West never meet, skills, history and theory never gel, however the teachers try to create bridges between these two or three disciplines. Another interesting factor is that there is also a horizontal division in our art teaching systems. In this horizontal division theory tries to cut across both conventional practices and conventional art history, and tries to bring them in the same line without emphasising either practice or history. Such hybrid educational systems are followed by the prime institutions like Arts and Aesthetics Department of the Jawaharlal Nehru University and Ambedkar University and so on.

It is important to take stock of the output of these institutions. UGC is the only constitutional agency to which these institutions are accountable and answerable. They cannot be made accountable to any other agency for their academic nature. But when we check the output we understand that these institutions have not produced neither artists nor art historians or art experts. These institutions do not give any course curatorial practices; but the graduates from these schools become automatically curators. This alchemy happens because of the horizontal entry of theory into the art scene in India. A majority of the teachers who teach in these institutions are not qualified to teach contemporary art for their specializations are in ancient arts. Does anyone sign a consent form for heart surgery if the doctor is an MD in Orthopaedics? We don’t But in art we do. That’s why someone who is a doctorate in Mughal miniatures could give lectures on performance art. It happens only in India.

Unfortunately, in India we have created a Brahminical division among the students of art by these vertical and horizontal divisions. We have students who call Sri Rama Pattabhishekam or Coronation of Rama by Raja Ravi Varma as the ‘wedding photo of Rama’ when their visual sense is tested during the entrance interview. We also have students who have just spent a couple of summers in Paris visiting museums and have come back to join a course in art. So who is going to survive in this? Students with artistic determination mostly come from middle and lower middle classes. Their confidence to survive is shattered either by this imbalances in the educational system or by the disparities that they face later on in their practical lives. In my view, these disparities could be done away with to a large extent provided if we change the way we teach art history and theory to students. We have just changed some cosmetic changes; JNU does not call art history, art history. They call it something else because art history is old fashioned. We have incorporated film studies, theatre studies, Dalit studies, Feminism and so on in the curriculum, but I say to no effect. Students are not to be taught or informed. They are to be made live art history, theory and other branches of knowledge.

How is it possible? Let me introduce my way of looking at it and suggest certain changes in the academic learning. First of all, we need to weed out all confusions pertaining to the art teaching and practicing within the academies. No art faculty in this country should tell their students that they could become artists if they have a knowledge base but no skills. The post-modern liberalism has approved that anybody is an artist. It is a false theory. This false theory is created by the capitalists in the world so that they could make the rich and powerful to do things the way they want. A singer is a singer when he sings well. Anybody is not a singer only because one has some theoretical know how of singing. Also our academic curriculum for artists should give a lot of stress to skill, imagination and design. These sessions should be soulful than mechanical. Art history teaching should create links between what is taught and what is practiced. The theories, if not leading students anywhere should be discarded. Art should be taught with professional precision. Art history should break its linear tendencies and should go for reverse methodologies, leading students from contemporary history to the histories of yester years. And above all, the students should be given lectures on socio-political and cultural histories of India. Academies that call their fine arts as liberal arts these days create courses and produce graduates with specializations that none needs particularly for any use. Instead, the liberal histories should be incorporated as an integral part of art course. When a student comes of the college as a fresh graduate, he or she should be ready to face the world like an artist who is unapologetic about what he or she does. To face this world, one needs not just artistic skills but the knowledge of politics, economics, ecology, society and the ways in which it works and culture. They should be prepared to understand that art does not happen in vacuum. They also should be made to learn that artists are the last people standing even when the world goes down on its knees before avarice and philistinism. Artists should be taught to become the greatest humanitarians in the world. When artist learns to stands for the universe, he gains all the confidence and to stand for the universe needs to the backing of an integrated understanding of his or her world. Today our academies are incapable of producing such graduates. It is high time that they change their course.

In our art scene I have a lot of interesting friends. Some of them mean well to me and some of them do not. But that does not make much difference because after all what I do in the art scene is more important than what others think about me or what I think about others. Yet, I can’t help recounting an incident. One of my artist friends, a few years back, suddenly started saying very good things about me. He was in fact reporting about a party that he had attended on the previous night. He said that all our artist friends were of very high opinion about me. “You know, they say in India there is only one art critic who has the guts to say things as it is; that’s JohnyML,” he said. As I knew him well, I took two pinches of salt from the air before relishing the words of praise. But he had not finished and he added, “But you know X?” I knew who X was; a noted artist. “She says you are a number one bastard.” He grinned. I could peel a layer of satisfaction from his face.

There is a reason why I recounted this incident which in fact had amused me a lot than hurting me in any manner. These days, I come across some art people who profess themselves to be hardcore secularists but somewhere harbouring this idea that whatever the present government at the centre with a firmly placed and unapologetically declared ideology of Hindutva as its anchoring force, does is good for not only the society in general but also a lot good for the culture of our country. Their arguments go something like this: “What if they replace the institutional heads with their own people? Till now the previous governments were keeping their people in those positions. But you see, this government is doing horrible things. But let’s hope something would happen for good. I believe, things are going in the right direction.” I am at a loss for figuring these statements out in the right perspective. Are they forwarding a critique or are they saying it’s fine? These fence sitters are everywhere, especially when a majoritarian government takes the reins of a country.

Majority of the people would tend to support the policies of the government using filtered down propagandist ideas and untested as well as unqualified pedestrian wisdom. They believe that being with the government policies despite its anti people stances in several other fronts would help them to progress materialistically in life. While a section of people ululates the government policies regarding social engineering and manufacturing of culture and consent, another section keeps a studied silence or ambiguous hems and haws which could interpreted as yes or no depending on their strategies of survival in a given time and context. Those who critically approach the government policies without taking hardcore oppositional views and yet provide logical and constructive criticism are lampooned at various levels by calling names or throwing gender, religious and racial expletives at them. I am pained at the fact that the art communities which are supposed to be functioning away from the dominant ideologies and mainstream societies too somehow has succumbed to the pressures of the time. They have gone back to the basic Darwinian theory; survival of the fittest. And unfortunately today the fittest amongst the artists are those who keep silence or remain ambiguous about the anti-people government policies.

I don't say that the artists should come out and make political speeches or do some chest thumping on behalf of the suffering humanity, Dalit oppression or anti-Muslim rhetoric. Nor do I insist that the artists should make works of art with overt political implications, messages, suggestions or underpinnings. Artists could live in seclusion and seclusion is one of the political stances. But we should not say that artists living in seclusion are silent. Silence and seclusion are two different things. Keeping silence and yet trying to be present in the political as well as socio-cultural mainstream is a choicest crime. But retreating in a secluded life and still working without fussing about in the social realm is a chosen political stance. It is a sort of committing social suicide as the Buddist monks do via self immolation. They decimate their being and make their final act painfully strong before the watchful eyes of the oppressive government. It is also like Perumal Murugan’s ‘murder’ of his writerly self (though he called a suicide of the writer in him, in my view it is a murder, a sort of violent immolation of the self by splitting it into two spiritual and physical. While allowing the physical self to live on Perumal Murugan killed his spiritual and creative self which was definitely a political act; an act of symbolic resistance against the right wing moral policing against his art and research). Artists could retreat into nothingness, means no social presence at all for years on and still they could work and when the good climes come back they could resurface and show the world what they have been doing all these years in seclusion.

Many have forgotten this art of seclusion. They all want to show their good selves in the mainstream society so that they could be seen, heard and recognized and even awarded as artists. This situation has created the surfacing of degenerate art in India. Look around. Most of the galleries have stopped doing shows. Those artists still want to show are going to the public galleries. The important art platforms have already divested or even surrendered their founding philosophies in order to get funds, political favour or presence. The art of the alternative has come to take the mainstream position these days. Graffiti art which was started off as an art/act of rebellion has now been absorbed, co-opted and castrated by the mainstream society by helping it to appear in the public as well as private funded walls. The self serving middle class invites artists to their housing colonies to decorate their walls and the newspapers hail them as the part of city’s aesthetical resurgence or city beautification. Even the people’s political parties like the one that rules the partial state of Delhi also promote graffiti culture taking some sort of social integration as its medium and purpose. These self defeating acts of aestheticisation of rebellion into domesticated city beautification also have brought in a different kind of degeneration to our art scene. Our major art institutions have almost stopped having good shows, instead they have started presenting projects all of which have the rightward tilt, towards an imaginary nationalism.

One of friends recently surprised me by saying that none cares even if the prime art institutions in the country function well or not. Whether they are opened for the public or are closed forever, none bothers. He is a devoted apostle of free market and right wing liberalism but as he operates partly in the art scene he has to speak out against the illogical acts of cultural twisting undertaken either by the government or its agencies in order to survive as a radical, cutting edge and ‘different’ sort of an art enthusiast for the age old belief that the art scene has people who are unrealistically romantic and impractically left leaning. So it is still imperative for many to wear the mask of social progress against social development. One clearly knows what one means by progress and by development. Progress is a fundamental principle of the left leaning ideologues and believers because through the overthrowing of orthodoxy, they believe they could usher in a new world of mentally liberated people. Development on the other hand means the materialistic development of the infrastructure for easing commerce and industry making the global economic flow channels hindrance free without heeding to the socio-cultural and politico-religious disparities and imbalances that such developments would cause while sticking to tradition and orthodox practices of socio-moral and religious practices. Somehow, people believe that artists are for progress and they are against development. My friend has not have seen the fact yet; in these days of degeneration, many of the artists have become the apologists for development.

My friend religiously underlines the fact that he is educated and liberal so he cannot accept the fact that human beings are different based on caste, gender or race. But at the same breath he adds that life is such a bitch. It has to be imbalanced. Everyone cannot be rich. He quotes his servants who say that in their villages there are people who believe that the present prime minister of the country is an avatar of Lord Vishnu who has taken birth to change this world and alleviate the poor from their grievances and elevate them to the perpetual heaven of luxury, comfort and security. They however do not see that to get passage to those heavens one has to be from a higher caste, follow right wing ideologies, stick to orthodoxy, be gender biased and definitely think that cow and country are better than anything else in the world. Mother and motherland are better than heavens, they say. While we are over conscious of our motherland, mothers are generally ignored the moment we put gender bias as our guiding principle. Surprisingly, my educated artistic friend believes that India is not of the educated and the urban people like ‘us’ but it belongs to the people like ‘them’ who come from village and blindly believe that the Prime Minister is god’s incarnation. For a moment, you would think that the friend is really progressive and believes in democracy by taking an inclusive stance. But the truth is that my friend is actually reflecting himself or his basic faith in the government by shrouding it in the ignorance of the servants who come from the villages. He says that ‘you and I’ are different and ‘you and I’ do not agree with beating up the Dalits in Una or elsewhere for skinning cows or killing cows. But he adds, “But see, 90% of the Indian citizens believe that the Dalits should be treated like that.”

I do not know from where my friend got this statics that 90% Indians believe in beating up the Dalits. I am sure that he is speaking his mind by covering it up with the 90%. My friend is not the only one. I have come across so many people who have become uncritical of the government policies regarding social engineering while extolling its contributions towards the economic and militaristic growth. These are the artists who are seen these days in the mainstream art platforms. My friend is just a tip of the ice berg. I remembered my other friend who quoted another artist saying that JohnyML is a big bastard when this friend of mine said that though beating up of Dalits is a bad thing to happen in India, ninety per cent of the Indians believe that Dalits should be beaten up. I am vary of such friends. They speak their mind using the ignorance of servants and other artists as a cover. Such double speak is more dangerous than the pellet guns currently used by the Indian military for curbing Kashmiri rebels.

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