Goons as Critics

Another ‘provocative’ art show, another right-wing attack. And the themes that draw their ire only seem to widen every year

Last Thursday, 38-year-old artist Balbir Krishan, openly gay and a double-amputee, was giving a speech about his new collection of paintings—male nudes with erumpent organs, in marbled primary colours—while a friend filmed him on a handheld camera. As he leaned forward on his cane, saying, “Log kehte hain ki homoerotic hai (People say it’s homoerotic),” the camera unsteadily zoomed in and out, and a tall masked man ambled in through the doorway behind him. The man proceeded to swing at a painting with a flat, white implement. Glass shattered, the camera cartwheeled, showing a pair of feet, the floor, as Krishan is heard crying out, “Arre, pakdo! Arre (Somebody catch him)!” before the screen blacks out.

A few hours later, Krishan is sitting by his exhibition in the Lalit Kala Akademi gallery in New Delhi, dazed and smelling of pain balm. He has worn prosthetic limbs since a train accident in 1996, and after the attack, he can barely draw himself up—for his photograph, two friends have to lift his chair and set him in front of a painting. He describes how the assailant knocked him to the floor, kicked him a few times, and then ran out. “I chased him round the corner,” adds Vivek Sharma, the friend who was filming the event, “but he escaped.”

“The trouble began from the first day of my show,” Krishan says. “Some people came to me and told me I shouldn’t show this ‘ganda kaam’ (dirty work), that I was ruining society.” One outraged man stormed out, he says, yelling that nobody ought to see the “dirtiness upstairs”. Krishan started to get late-night phone calls from STD booths, saying “badtaamez (rude)” things and raging at him for “promoting filth”. “They said, ‘We got MF Husain out of the country, and you’re an ant next to him,’” says Krishan. “They said: ‘Don’t think no one will stop you. We will.’ If they had a problem with my work, they could have discussed it with me, criticised it on TV, in magazines, or gone to court. If they wanted to make their point,” he adds, “they didn’t have to hit me, and then kick me when I fell. Aren’t they human?”

Whoever they are, they have still not claimed responsibility for the attack, which, some observe, is a little unusual because the purpose of such attacks is usually publicity.

The Hindu Janajagruti Samiti, the moveon.org of India’s indignant right, might put up the occasional post on how myths illustrate the ‘demonic aspect’ of homosexuality, but, for now at least, reserve their ire for ‘denigrations of Sri Ganesha’ on the packages of milk products and in advertisements showing him seated on a vada pav or dancing to Bollywood tunes.

The art world has had a relatively subdued reaction to the attack; perhaps numbed by the now-routine cycle of assault, protest and media hand-wringing that follows periodic demonstrations of such intolerance.

These expressions of moral outrage are not new. In 1954, Akbar Padamsee had to fend off an obscenity charge in the Bombay High Court for his painting The Lovers. Critics and historians say that while the art world’s freedoms are routinely compromised, conservative groups continue to seize the right to take offence, emboldened as they are by political backing, particularly in Maharashtra and Gujarat. The case of Chandramohan, a final year art student at MS University, Baroda, in Gujarat, is a case in point. In 2007, a VHP/Bajrang Dal party worker got wind of his somewhat explicit paintings of Hindu goddesses, on view only for an internal assessment, and stormed in to vandalise the exhibition with a gang of fellow activists. The young student found himself arrested and charged with inciting communal violence. When the students organised an exhibition of ancient Indian erotic art in protest, and the dean, Shivaji Panikkar, refused to shut it down, he found himself suspended and chargesheeted for defying orders. Nearly five years later, no enquiry has taken place, but the lack of institutional support and many intimidating phone calls he’s received have driven him to take refuge in Delhi. Last June, he accepted a teaching position at Ambedkar University, but still hasn’t received his dues for his 24 years as permanent faculty at MSU.

Despite all it has cost him, Panikkar retains his strong belief in ‘absolute’ freedom of expression, but adds, soberly, “There are limits. [Krishan’s] paintings, from a distance, look like male nudes, but the smaller details show that porn videos are the source for the imagery. That, obviously, is going to invite trouble.” He is quick to add, “I’m not making a moral judgment, but this sort of artwork is usually shown in private galleries or sold directly to collectors.” Just as Chandramohan’s teachers ought to have cautioned him of the adverse reaction his paintings might attract, he says, Krishan ought to have been told that his ecstatically entwined male nudes might “cause problems—when you know the public is intolerant of certain imagery”.

It doesn’t help that the art world is seen as an easy target by rampaging goons. “Artists are lone rangers,” says Chennai-based cultural critic Sadanand Menon. “It’s just the nature of the work they do. If you attacked autorickshaw drivers, 20,000 of them would come and hit you. But you can attack an artist with impunity; no community of artists is likely to go on strike.”  

Sanjeev Khandekar would agree. In 2006, a very irate lady stormed out of his show, Tits Clits and Elephant Dicks, at the Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai. Though the title was the most provocative thing about the show, Khandekar observes that the lady “had a problem with a huge sculpture of a nude male figure”. She filed a complaint at a police station, which made the police pay his show a visit. “They turned art critics,” he says, “asking me what the message was. I told them to help themselves to a catalogue.” He was told to wind up the show, else his work would be confiscated. When he defied orders, he was charged with obscenity. He was only acquitted a few years later.

In such a climate, even private galleries operate with circumspection. Attendance, especially when sensitive artwork is on show, is by invitation only. And the select few who come have to be buzzed in. Many curators admit to exercising extra caution in assessing—and often excluding—work of a potentially inflammatory nature. That encompasses a wide swathe of themes: sex, violence, and above all, religion.

“When I moved here over a year ago,” says Susan Hapgood, director of the Mumbai Art Room, “I asked someone in Delhi what’s taboo in India, and she said, ‘Don’t mess with our gods.’” Hapgood has kept that in mind with every show she curates, though she prefers to call it cultural sensitivity rather than self-censorship. She says, “Each culture has its taboos, and there are a lot more taboos in India than I’m accustomed to.” She recently held a screening of Swedish video artist Natalie Djurberg’s work, and chose not to show the more macabre, sexual work, which, she concluded, would alienate her audience.

Krishan, meanwhile, might just have expanded his. The first day of his exhibition, which continues unmolested at the nearby Triveni gallery, was thronged by activists and well-wishers. He’s also been granted police protection throughout its duration. As for the hectoring nocturnal phone calls that kept him awake, he says those have ceased too, for now.

art showBalbir Krishanright-wing attack