Column

There is a dangerous disconnect between the liberal elite in this country and ordinary people, most conspicuously in the arena of the arts. Now that Chandramohan, the student at the Faculty of Fine Arts in the MS University, Vadodara is out on bail, and the nonagenarian icon MF Husain has got judicial relief through the Supreme Court, we can now talk about the issues with a little more candour than we usually do in these matters.

The liberals have dutifully rallied to defend the personal liberties of Chandramohan and Husain. They have made the right noises about freedom of expression, about creativity and erotic temple art. But they feel that there is no need to debate about norms, about good art and bad art. The reason behind the reluctance is that it requires intellectual labour to grapple with these issues, and the liberals do not like the idea of hard work.

The reluctance is understandable because these are troubling questions, and there are no simple answers. If some one were to raise them, they are frowned upon, with the silent admonition that these are issues that lie beyond the intellectual ken of ordinary people.But the ordinary people did seem to have an opinion, and a very sensible one at that, about the questions at hand. Many of them objected to the vandals entering the university premises and attacking the artist and his works in Vadodara. They also objected to an old man like Husain being harassed.

They also had something more to say. They felt that the denigration of religious symbols is not a good thing. It is to be noted that they did not say that it is not acceptable. They did not say this with any fanatical vehemence like the lumpen elements of the Bajrang Dal and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. And they are open to debate the issue.

The liberal elite, including the media, however does not think that ordinary people are of any consequence when it comes to debating the issue of contemporary art. Neither the liberals nor the lumpen elements are interested in a discussion. It is this no-debate zone which turns out to be the scene of acts of vandalism and the protests against those acts of vandalism. In a manner of speaking, this is the only form of art criticism that plays itself out in our public spaces.

Contemporary Indian art is a greenhouse product because only artists, art teachers and so-called art critics are part of the inner circle. The liberal elite play the role of patron and connoisseur. It buys some of the paintings, attends the art shows, and speaks uneducated inanities about the virtues of the art-works. The liberal elite are highly literate and deeply uneducated. They have no sense of art history.

When Marcel Duchamp placed the Urinal, and propagated the idea of artefact as art-work at an exhibition nearly a century ago, it was dismissed as another prank of the modernist artists of the day. Despite a Frenchman’s anticlerical flair, Duchamp left religious motifs alone. He must have thought indulging in a profanity is not such a profound way of critiquing the sacred. Chandramohan’s teachers had an obligation to discuss these issues with the innocent student.

Husain’s religious motifs do not betray the desire of a rebel to pull down the sacred. He was in his own way trying to capture the exuberance of the forms of gods and goddesses. The nudity question is a peripheral one. What is of greater importance in dealing with the work of a reputed artist like Husain is to see whether he has produced something compellingly beautiful as Michelangelo’s Pieta. He has not, and the liberal elite does not have the critical sensibility and authority to pronounce the verdict. Michelangelo and other Renaissance artists of Europe were deeply humanist and secular. It is the same humanist spirit that shines through the temple sculptures of ancient and medieval India.

Husain, like many other contemporary Indian artists, is not rooted either in humanism or in religiosity. His work shows the fluency of an able draughtsman but there is neither vision nor thought. This is a judgment that can be contested. The problem is that we have abandoned judgment altogether, and that too in the name of liberalism, leaving the field open to the fascists to deliver the verdict.

Email: r_parsa@dnaindia.net