Cover Story - JohnyML

Details from Tetuan Dabaa Do

Tetuan Dabaa Do- Strangulate It

Will they change? Will this village mend its ways? Will it stop killing the female foetus and the new born female infants? Will this work generate that much moral angst amongst the village folk so that they would all convert into a state of pity and piousness? Chintan did not vocalize the issues verbally. He was a mute actor/creator/arranger, as if he were sampling the very product of the society for its own consumption. Aesthetics was only in its arrangement. It is the aesthetics of war; a war generated, facilitated, nurtured and nourished by the people. But it goes beyond social realism. He is not reflecting reality as reality. He takes away the pain of reality and transports it into the plane of contemplation so that everyone can face it with shame. This is the aesthetics of himsa.

Let us go back to my initial concerns. If someone accommodates ‘Tetuan Dabaa Do’ in a sanitized space of mediation, would it hold its mute sense of communication? Would the repressed cries ingrained in the work translate itself into palatable aesthetics within its newly found homes? Can the treatises made on the subject of female infanticide in India or in Rajasthan interpret this work for a different audience? Will it be taken with the same shame and verve by the audience which is detached and studious? Questions hesitate to go down the water weighed by the led of skepticism. They come out and cry ‘Tetuan Mat Dabaoo’ (Please don’t strangulate).

It should be fallacious and limiting to say that the site specific art should be done by culturally integrated artists. There are artists who can integrate themselves theoretically and pragmatically into new situations. And there are, of course, certain situations that resist any kind of integration. Female foeticide and infanticide are such problems that resist cultural intervention. Academic interventions are always permitted for they limit themselves in data and case studies, which are never known to those who gave away the data and cases. Aesthetics of himsa needs socio-cultural integration and Chintan has proved it in Tetuan Dabaa Do.