The shocking incident involving the young artist, Chandramohan Srilamantula—mentioned in the editorial for this issue—and his work as a student at the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University, Baroda, merits special attention. Such acts keep recurring in India’s cultural landscape.

Since this episode is connected to similar incidents (eg. the ongoing persecution of M.F. Hussain), and thus has broad and serious implications for civil liberties in India, I’d like to quote from responses that appeared in the press, and offer some comment. The voices are varied but most of them share the same anguish over the future of individual freedom and tolerance in India—a republic which upholds the values of secularism and pluralism, and will soon be observing its 60th anniversary of independence.  

Concerted support was expressed by artists and concerned citizens in several spontaneously-arranged public meetings in the days that followed. Strong protests were registered in Vadodara, Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Pune.

The bare facts of this incident and its aftermath have been widely publicized in the media, so they need not be detailed here. But the statement made by the Free Chandramohan Committee, which held a public meeting in Mumbai on May 14, 2007 is pointed and revealing:

An intolerable violation of cultural and academic freedom by communal forces took place in Baroda on Wednesday, May 9, 2007, when a group of Vishwa Hindu Parishad goons led by local BJP leader Niraj Jain stormed into the campus of the Faculty of Fine Arts, M S University, Baroda. Breaking into the annual display of the final year students, the goons abused and attacked a student, Chandramohan, claiming that they found his works obscene and offensive to religious sentiments. The police, entering the campus, arrested Chandramohan without a proper warrant and without consulting the Faculty of Fine Arts, while allowing the inflammatory Jain and his goons to go free. Later, Jain was cordially received by the Vice-Chancellor of the University. This august functionary has not only refused to register a First Information Report against Jain, but has also refused to extend any assistance to Chandramohan. Indeed, the Vice-Chancellor has demanded that the student and the Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts should apologise to Jain.

It would be an understatement to say that this complicity of the University authorities with the attackers is disturbing. Shortly after, the Dean, Shivaji K. Panikkar, was also arbitrarily suspended.

The Committee goes on, mincing no words: “Had such an incident taken place in Dhaka or Islamabad, we would all have been protesting against the dictatorial ways of authority…The Baroda outrage raises serious questions about the State's ability, or even desire, to protect the cultural freedoms of individuals…Can we allow India to become an illiberal democracy, guided by competing populisms?” Regarding the portrayal of religious icons, it makes clear that “Iconography is not the preserve of a few self-appointed custodians of religion alone.”

Bina Srinivasan (People’s Union for Civil Liberties) describes what provoked this adverse reaction. “They roughed up Chandramohan and accused him of offending their religious sentiments, saying that he had portrayed Durga Mata in an obscene way. Not by any stretch of the imagination did the prints actually portray any goddess.” She also draws attention to the Christian angle. “After he was arrested, charged under various sections and jailed, Christian fundamentalists joined hands with the Hindutvavadis. Along with the crowds supporting the VHP and BJP, there were, reportedly, at least 40 priests in the court when Chandramohan's bail application came up for hearing. The priests were objecting to a painting related to the cross, which they thought offended their religious feelings.”

In an insightful piece, “Painting the art world red” (Hindustan Times, May 14), Ranjit Hoskote describes the works of art that were attacked:

The images … show a woman, perhaps a goddess, birthing a man (which is no more fearful than the Lajja-gouri of Hindu sacred art), and a crucifix with a penis (this, an obvious homage to Robert Mapplethorpe). Both images retrieve the passionate human dramas that lie at the core of sacred narratives. Both images insist upon the artist's right to revisit inherited lore, to reinvent images and narratives, to integrate the sacred as an element of secular experience.

In a related comment (“Hindu Sacred Art Offends Self-appointed Custodians of Hindu Culture”) Hoskote emphasizes the “vital role of the erotic in Hindu sacred art”, and puts things in perspective:

In a silent protest against the brutality with which their fellow student, Chandramohan, has been treated … the students put up pictures of the Gudimallam Shiva, perhaps the earliest known Shiva image, which combines the lingam with an anthropomorphic form; a Kushan mukha-linga or masked lingam; Lajja-gouris from Ellora and Orissa, resplendent in their fecund nakedness; erotic statuary from Modhera, Konark and Khajuraho; as well as Raga-mala paintings from Rajasthan. All these images, among the finest produced through the centuries in the subcontinent, celebrate the sensuous and the passionate dimensions of existence – which, in the Hindu world-view, are inseparably twined with the austere and the contemplative.

The dancer, Mallika Sarabhai, has herself been a target of the fundamentalists. She observed that the attackers seem to ignore the obvious fact that not a single sculpture in our ancient temples is clothed: “I want to challenge them to show me a single sculpture which is clothed.”

Pragya Paramita reported—in her comment “Art In Arms” (expressindia.com, May 15)—that “through their protest, artists and academicians in Kolkata also attempted to bring to focus the position of nudes in Indian art. Nudes, they emphasized, have been an intrinsic part of Indian paintings since ancient times and the recent hoopla over it does not have any historical basis. Artist Jogen Chowdhury felt that the clampdown on artistic creativity being experienced in India has less to do with safeguarding religious sentiments, and more to do with ‘pleasing governments’.” Chowdhury lamented: “The protestors don’t understand art or, for that matter, the Hindu religion. I think there was more freedom 20-30 years ago, when there were fewer such cases of forceful censorship.”

An art gallery owner, Ashish Balram Nagpal, who was present with a group of artists in Baroda quickly drew ominous parallels. “It seems that we're living in Hitler's Third Reich,” adding, “Why is the government not doing anything at all? Are they afraid?” He also informed the Mumbai paper “Afternoon” that clampdown orders had been issued on any kind of protest in the city.

Free expression and any subsequent protest were stifled by local authorities, both in academia and in the public administration—this amounts to a suspension of civil liberties that would normally have been taken for granted in a constitutional democracy like India. Clearly, such rights have been deliberately infringed upon by self-appointed, politically motivated guardians of public morality. Judging from the reporting in the press, the public at large seems unmoved, conspicuous by its mute acquiescence. Do they choose to ignore the whole episode, thinking it doesn’t really apply to them since they’re not artists? Their silence is disturbing, since only condemnation by the vast public of this country—which includes the common man, educated and uneducated—and demand for punitive action against these barbaric perpetrators will bring about a proper defense of the Constitution of India. For such attacks are not only unconstitutional, but in the broader political sense, they’re also anti-constitutional. In short, enemies of the Constitution. Such groups not only begin to claim valuable political space through their nefarious alliances, but in effect they regard the Constitution as an obstacle that gets in their way. Hence it becomes their victim—a subordinate, not their rightful master. What could be more ominous for a democracy that cannot protect individual rights in a civil society? A local act of censorship and arrest (not sanctioned by law) could conceivably lead to coordinated attacks of this kind throughout the country if citizens voluntarily surrender their basic liberties out of fear.

In the world of consumer capitalism we have this warning: Buyer Beware. In an intolerant society (with the connivance of those in power), where the rule of law falls short, we can imagine its counterpart: Citizen Beware—lest you be attacked and arrested by self-appointed guardians of morality for merely ‘hurting the sentiments’ of or ‘giving offence’ to some group or other through your actions.

Drawing parallels with Hitler’s Germany, where fascism took root in the 1930s, suddenly doesn’t seem so far-fetched. We’ve witnessed the tragic consequences when a political culture (like Hitler’s Nazism) adopts and becomes its own aesthetic—the aesthetic of destruction. In “Painting the art world red”, Hoskote bemoans the rise of Hindutva, which in perverted minds is equated with Hinduism—to the latter’s detriment. He notes how the right to ‘take’ offence, by any group or individual, virtually eclipses the right to speak out, even if it may ‘give’ offence to some group or individual. Hoskote writes thus of the art on display at the Fine Arts Faculty, and points at the true nature of Hindutva.

This treasure of Hindu sacred art did not win the favour of the establishment, which ordered the exhibition hall to be sealed. It appears that the champions of a resurgent Hindu identity are acutely embarrassed by the presence of the erotic at the centre of Hindu sacred art. As they may well be, for the roots of Hindutva do not lie in Hinduism. Rather, they lie in a crude mixture of German romanticism, Victorian puritanism and Nazi methodology. What happens next, we wonder? Will the champions of Hindutva go around the country chipping away at temple murals, breaking down monuments, whitewashing wall paintings, and burning manuscripts and folios? Perhaps they will not stop until they have forced the unpredictable richness of Hindu culture to conform to their own tunnel vision of life, art, image and narrative.

In a facetious spirit, and a rhetorical tone, someone asked whether traditional Hindus, as opposed to followers of ‘Hindutva’, should proclaim that their sentiments have been hurt by these fanatics who propagate the intolerance of Hindutva—with their fascist attitudes, they’ve effectively maligned and discredited the true tenets of the Hindu faith.