The Mob Rules, The Artist Quails, The Government Laughs

How to react to news received by frantic e-mail alert from friends in Gujarat, India about yet another attack by a frenzied mob against an artist? The mob rules in Gujarat with increasing frequency, dancing crazily at the end of a leash tethered to the office of the state's grand pupeteer and chief minister Narendra Modi. No intellectual, artistic or cultural achievement is safe: paintings on canvas, a documentary series taking up essential social issues, or, earlier, a professor of physics cowering in his home -- it doesn't seem to matter. All are threats to the ideologues whose grim antics serve the bachelor leader.

With orgiastic zeal, the mob shatters the quiet of a gallery or a home, hoots its hate, screams its red-faced outrage. It is the aggressor who is wronged, can't you see? It is the attacker who is the injured party!

At the same time, on another front, funds are withdrawn with cold calculation from a worthy project for no other reason than that the creator has dared to question the absolute power of the Gujarat's right-wing Hindu nationalist leader. This is what is happening to Mallika Sarabhai's SAT-Television project. (See more at http://www.sattelevision.blogspot.com/) This is what is happening in "shining India" today, the same India that wants to be recognized as a great world power!

Make money, keep your mouth (and your canvas) zipped, and just toe the official line: This is Modi's fundamental message to the people of Gujarat as the state is systematically cleansed of its ethnic, religious and artistic diversity; as all freedom of expression and political dissent is wiped out of existence.

In 1985 and 1986, more than twenty years ago when I myself was in my twenties, I spent a year in Baroda, India where my first husband was a visiting student on a Fulbright at the Faculty of Fine Arts. At the end of the academic year, his work was included in the group student show. It all went off quite uneventfully.

I remember the campus as an oasis of calm after the crush and din of the old city where we rented a room. The crunch of leaves under feet bare in sandals was the only harsh sound. All the students ambled about in handloom kurtas and block-printed cotton salwar kameez. At that time, the Faculty of Fine Arts was the very epicenter of contemporary Indian art. Bhupen Khakhar was at the peak of his career, and we went over to his place a number of times. Ghulam Mohammad Sheikh was my husband's advisor. Photographer and artist Jyoti Bhatt, a family friend, was someone we met several times. We became friendly with Ramnik Kaneria, Raghav Kaneria's younger brother, whom we had met in Paris when he was at the Ecole de Beaux Arts and I was at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes.

If there was any threat to the utter peace and merrily bubbling artistic ferment at the Faculty of Fine Arts in those days, I was not aware of it. So, when desperate messages came across cyberspace a couple of weeks ago recounting the mob's invasion of the annual student show, the arrest of of student exhibitor Chandra Mohan on the grounds his work was obscene and offended the feelings of the mobsters, the brave protest and subsequent knuckle-rapping of the dean of the school of art, how to stop the sinking feeling of "no, not this"?

I am passionate about all that is fabulously, wonderfully India and it breaks my heart to see the mob set loose, yet again, under the protective umbrella of leaders too blinkered, too repressed, and too addicted to their small pond of power to see past their own nose to the big, rough ocean of a world in which India must now navigate come what may.

So, will India sink or swim?

Some of us had hoped that it might soar.