The Decline of an Institution?

In this thought provoking essay, Baroda based artist Sathyanand Mohan traces out how the fundamentalists strategically chose an institution with a cosmopolitan outlook to further their nefarious causes. Also he raises questions on the randomly collapsing relationship between Fine Arts Faculty and the larger society outside of it, while doubting the ‘modernity’ of the Graphics Art Department of FAF, Baroda.

It is a telling irony that Chandramohan, the printmaking student who has the unfortunate distinction of being the first student from the Faculty of Fine arts to be incarcerated on account of his work, was penalized under Section 153A (Promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, etc., and doing acts prejudicial to maintenance of harmony), the petitioner in this case coming from a faction of our political universe that has shown a consistent and  thoroughgoing disregard for the already fraught secular fabric of the country and the  constitutional guarantees that safeguard it. Nothing succeeds like a scandal to put you in the center of the public imagination, and for those of us who had never heard of Niraj Jain before his timely (considering that the Assembly elections are just a few months away) intervention to save Indian society from the machinations of artists and pseudo-secularists, the Indian Express (May 16th 2007) lists some of his accomplishments: the disruption of a fashion show in 1998, saving 15 lakh cows from being taken to slaughter houses, ‘getting back’ some 300 odd Hindu girls who had married non-Hindus, as well taking part in the anti-conversion struggle. It also happens that he is an alumnus of M.S. University, Baroda.
           
One of the reasons that this incident acquired the significance it did can be attributed to the fact that it brings together two things in one place, -  a violation of creative freedom, as well as a trespass upon the sanctity of the institutional space; it was a calculated move on the part of Niraj Jain that this place had to be the Faculty of Fine Arts, for what he attacked has a symbolic resonance not just within the immediate limits of the town, but across the country as well, considering its reputation as a liberal institution that has played a pivotal role in the arts in the last fifty years. But in all the noise made over the assault on creative freedom, what was pushed to the sidelines is the perhaps larger issue of the institutional sovereignty of the Faculty of Fine Arts, and by extension, the M.S.University itself.

The Faculty of Fine Arts, with its easygoing liberalism embodies the constitutive principle of the University as a space of reasoned dialogue, as a space that not just admits differences, but actively pursues it. The curriculum here was designed in the spirit of enlightened educational reform for which this former princely state has been well known, keeping in mind the constructive role of the arts, crafts and design in society, - events like the Fine Arts Fair, the Fine Arts display, and more popularly the Faculty garba, bear this out,  all of which are predicated on a belief in the practice of art and culture as a shared pursuit of the good life, as something that has a vital role to play within the imaginative, intellectual and spiritual enrichment and development of the citizenry. These democratic traditions have been the pride of the institution and have been nurtured and kept alive in the Faculty to the present day, in spite of a resolute and protracted campaign by the Right to take over the campus in both overt (as this incident plainly demonstrates) and covert ways. Many factors have conspired on their behalf; - on the one hand, by the fact that the relationship of the institution to its environment is itself becoming tenuous, on account of the increasingly volatile communal atmosphere of the town and its polarization along the religious divide, in the context of which its liberal sympathies can only appear as a farcical throwback to a more inclusive time.  On the other hand, there is the market boom of the last few years and the corresponding specialization that has come into the field which have more or less effectively put art out the reach of the common public, a fact that goes against the foundational values of the institution itself but has succeeded in furthering a gradual decline in its relationship with the community and the town. That for all intents and purposes, the institution exists in a state of semi-autonomy from the main body of the University has been a mixed blessing of sorts, - although it appears that the authorities are now trying to tell us, through this incident, that this may soon be a thing of the past. From being at the heart of Baroda’s cultural life, participating actively in its ways of imagining itself and in its self-representations, it seems that the Fine Arts Faculty is becoming an appendage, barely tolerated, and increasingly finding itself without a meaningful role to play in the public sphere.
 
One wonders how long this has been going on, and whether it is too late to stem the tide; but what one can say for certain is that things have gone steadily downhill after the 2002 Gujarat ‘riots’. The populace live daily with the insecurities that one can expect to find in a society organized around a deadly cocktail of religious bigotry and caste antagonisms that threaten to blow up into a conflagration at any moment, and which is the flip side of the state-sponsored chauvinism and exclusivism of the last few years that translates into calls towards “Gujarati pride”. It also translates, in our more immediate context, into a deep-rooted anxiety regarding the Faculty’s liberalism among the University authorities (which also reflects the growing conservatism of Gujarati society at large), and which has been more recently construed as a threat to the fabric of ‘moral’ society.

 The articulation of this supposed threat turns predictably enough upon the familiar tropes of promiscuity and drug use, among other things, and is further compounded by a popular perception of the institution as a breeding ground for all sorts of ‘subversive tendencies’. The fact that Baroda is a University town does not help matters much; it means that there is at any given time a large and potentially disruptive, heterogeneous body of ‘outsiders’, many of whom come from ‘suspect’ backgrounds and places and often choose to stay on here, finding jobs, building families and ‘breeding’, thereby throwing a further element of disorder and latent anarchy into the mix. That these diverse social groupings are not organized into a cohesive political formation might ease their worries somewhat, but that potential is unfortunately always staring them in the face.  These are some of the unspoken subtexts of Dr. Shivaji Panikkar’s suspension from the institution and the department, which he has almost single-handedly and in the face of great odds raised to its current level of excellence; - poor rewards for a life’s work indeed. In his courageous and uncompromising stand in speaking truth to power, he has become an unlikely mascot and rallying point around which the Fine Arts struggle has organized itself.

It is to the credit of the University and its cosmopolitan traditions, and the centrality that these have had within the cultural self-image of the town that its citizens have so far resisted a wholesale buying-into the rhetoric of the state, and that it still retains in some measure its reputation for a generous catholicity, - which eventually comes from the presence of this ‘floating world’ that passes through its gates every year, bringing with it a polyglot cultural and political consciousness. It is this catholicism, this embracing of differences that the saffron experiment wants to undermine, and it has all but succeeded, overwhelmingly so, in large sections of the University in much the same way that it has succeeded in much of Gujarat; after all it is the crucible, by their own reckoning, where the new Hindutva is being forged. It must be fairly obvious by now that what happened at the Faculty was no spontaneous ignition of a city councilor’s righteous anger; it is part of a concerted campaign by a section of the polity to bring the last vestiges of a ‘resistance’ to its vision (or lack of it) under its heel.

 Whatever lingering doubts we may have had about Mr. Niraj Jain’s offended moral sensibility have been quickly disposed of by the alacrity with which the University authorities rushed in to seal their end of a suspicious bargain. That the University is directly affiliated to the State just makes it that much easier for the ruling dispensation to appoint its own stooges to key administrative posts, a process that has been going on with alarming regularity in the last few years. The atmosphere in the University itself has deteriorated so much on account of all these dubious  maneuvers that many of its brightest teachers have left, (or have been coerced into leaving) looking for more favorable environments in which they can conduct their work unimpeded by the ideological whims and fancies of a few Sangh Parivar apparatchiks.

It requires very little to trigger off a riot, - a fact that speaks volumes about the fragility of the peace that exists here. The unholy alliance of the University authorities and their political bosses has brought into the campus the pervasive sense of disquiet and violence that lurks behind everyday life on the streets of Baroda. The recent business of the ‘mysterious’ appearance, at the University campus, of provocative posters of Prophet Mohammed, which very nearly caused a riot and almost caused a few people to lose their lives, and which was no doubt engineered with malicious intent by someone who stands to gain from upsetting the fragile peace, is just one example in many that demonstrates the already fading membrane between the University and the streets,  as well as the way in which sensitive matters that should be resolved within the walls of the institution are channeled into the schizoid structure of the town’s existence.

 Coupled with the irresponsible and provocative comments made by a Senate member, Mr. Deepak Shah, who in the wake of the Faculty incident, offered  Rs. 1 Lakh to anyone who would draw ‘objectionable pictures’ of Prophet Mohammed (following which the posters appeared), what is being played out here is a dangerous adolescent game whose sole rationale is to draw the already beleaguered Muslim community into a violent confrontation; perhaps they believe that it might convert into further electoral gains in much the same way that the 2002 Gujarat Riots did.  The Vice-Chancellor is in the midst of all this gradually disappearing into his abject smile, - which seems to be his standard response to every crisis. One wonders how anyone holding the kind of high office he is holding today can get away with such derelictions of duty as we have seen through this incident. He seems to have done a great deal of smiling lately; perhaps the source of his mirth is the almost complete abrogation of his own authority in favor of his masters, in order to facilitate the faster takeover of whatever little still remains of the University not fully under their control.

What was most disheartening in this entire episode has been the reaction of the local media, that capitalized on this incident and made it out as a war between artists and Gujarati society, playing upon popular (mis)perceptions of art, as well as apprehensions of ‘what goes on’ at the Faculty. A typical example of it could be the reaction of my landlord, who told me, apologetically, and quite kindly, that “if he has insulted the gods, then he must be jailed”, as if it were a sort of reparation done unto oneself, if not to society. This may not be the right time to bring up the issue of Chandramohan’s works themselves and their bearing upon this incident, but from whatever little we have seen of it, it appears that he was working within an already institutionalized notion of creative freedom that is sanctioned by a Modernist avant-garde mode which uses provocation and confrontation to shock the bourgeoisie out of their common-sense understanding of things. Maybe one could venture the suggestion that it was not the ‘objectionable content’ per se that got Niraj Jain’s ire, but its coupling with the religious, for after all, we have been seeing, in almost every Display for the last five or six years at least, much nudity and sexuality being put on record, often in rather graphic terms; we have also observed the bourgeoisie perusing these objects without being unduly ruffled by it, - although one can’t say how far it will hold in future, now that the first stone has been cast.

Chandramohan himself seems to have hedged his bets somewhat by citing some of the mithuna sculptures at Khajuraho in one of his works; - the trump-card of the liberal intelligentsia to lay claim to a long history of eroticism in Indian art (no doubt justified, but alas, with increasingly few takers). Yet, whether it was his intention or not, some line was seen to have been crossed; Niraj Jain apart, there seems to be a genuine grievance here, as in many such instances, that we would do well to consider worthy of intellectual engagement even as we may have fundamental disagreements with it. There is a need for the debate to be opened up from within, out of the self-reinforcing circle of arguments centered around ‘creative freedom’ that can only work through a moral triumphalism which pits ‘us’ (virtuous, liberal, rational, articulate) against ‘them’ (unethical, fascist, unreasonable, inarticulate), and for which the mutual vilification and slander that we have seen is perhaps the only possible response.

One wonders what the teachers were doing; were they not aware of the potentially inflammatory nature of these works given the time and place in which we are operating, and given the long history of assaults on all kinds of art forms that have dealt with religion even tangentially in the last few years? I’m by no means suggesting here that this incident could have been  avoided had the teachers had a kind word with the student, rather it points to a myopia at the heart of the pedagogical apparatus employed at the institution itself, one that insists on treating practice as if it were a domain apart from, and which has no bearing on, or relationship with what goes on in the larger world, - as if the two inhabit hermetically sealed enclosures that sporadically interact and combust like fire and air, much to the bewilderment of all concerned. Nor am I blaming the teachers, but it necessitates laying down here that there has been some absence of informed dialogue in the Printmaking department. Being a product of it myself, and even as I have (and would like to register here) a great many debts to it, I unfortunately have to say that it is still being run somewhat along the lines of a medieval crafts guild. It is a department in which there exists a very deep schism between manual and intellectual labour, with the latter treated with outright suspicion if not disdain. The emphasis is on “production” to which of course the medium lends itself well and which is all the more a pity if one takes into consideration the centrality that the print aesthetic occupies in many forms of Contemporary art.

Perhaps in the final analysis, it augurs well that Niraj Jain chose just this institution and no other, for it has catalyzed the intelligentsia to close ranks in the justified anger over yet another assault on ‘creative freedom’; it is now up to the intellectual community to sustain that original impetus and energy and make sure that it does not run out of steam, if they want to turn this into something with more lasting gains. Otherwise we are just going to see history recurring as farce, - a re-enactment of the same crisis over and over again, the standard response to which is the predictable outrage over ‘assaults on creative freedom’ which is as quickly forgotten till the next scandal presents itself, whereupon everyone gets all worked up again, and so on, ad infinitum.