COURTESY: THE WIRE I DELHI I NOV 25, 1.40 PM
BY MANASH BHATTACHARJEE
These imaginative techniques and moments which turn a
tale into an object of wonder do not offer us any scientific lessons, but
surely hold out lessons of “culture”. These are magical instances replete with
meanings that are not always rationally explained, but can be interpreted in
various social, psychological and aesthetic aspects. These are also signifiers
that are understood critically, even within the religious context, as within
every religious understanding of the world, there are methods of argument and
critique of human behaviour. To say that such methods of argument and critique
only favour the idea of faith is also not always correct. There can be
radically differing modes of belief within a heterogeneous faith. Today, under
the pathological compulsions of modernity, the fact that ‘secular’ art itself
has come to carry a singular, unidimensional meaning is deplorable. The
religious fundamentalist in today’s world is also the product of the same
pathology that he opposes with such violent vehemence. The Kannada writer HS
Shivaprakash puts his finger in the right place when he calls today’s religious
fundamentalism in India a problem of imposing “uni-culture” or monoculture,
into the social and cultural fabric of the nation. It is against this
singularity of culture that we should aim our protests and battles. The fact that a flying cow did not evoke wonder or
surprise but rather alarm and anger, shows the state and health of ‘Hindu’
culture.
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The Jaipur police cart away Siddhartha Kararwal’s ‘Bovine Divine’ on Saturday:
Credit: The artist
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BY MANASH BHATTACHARJEE
If those cave paintings where human beings drew
representations of life marked the beginning of human culture, this mob and
police intimidation of art is surely the death of it.
“Art is enchantment and artists have the right of
spells.”
– Jeanette Winterson
Art is our integral and spontaneous response to the
contradictions of life. This is what brings heterogeneity into our world.
On Saturday, two artists at the Jaipur Art Summit at the
Jawahar Kala Kendra, Anish Ahluwalia and Chitan Upadhyay, faced police
questioning, for a work of installation art, ‘The Bovine Divine’ by Siddhartha
Kararwal. The installation was of a cow made of styrofoam, suspended by a
balloon, to raise awareness about “how cows consume plastic and die due to its
consumption”. But the police acted at the behest of people complaining about
cows being displayed “inappropriately”. The artists, their protests coming to
no avail, were forced to bring down the cow, which was then forcibly taken away
by the police, duly garlanded and worshipped by the protestors.
The flying cow, used as an artistic symbol for spreading
awareness of an environmental problem concerning the health of the cow itself,
belies the angry sentiments of the protestors. The religious minded cow
protectors had got it wrong. To see the whole event, however, as a proof of the
difference between rational versus irrational mindsets would be missing the
deeper issue. It won’t be enough to read the flying cow as a symbol of ‘secular
art’, trying to draw attention to a problem that is ‘scientific’, pertaining to
the cow’s health.
Even if the artists have stated their “message” was
raising awareness, art is not simply its message, or to put it another way, art
cannot be reduced to the singularity of what it signifies. An object of art is
many things at once, and any good art will revel in the multiplicity of
interpretations. The title of the installation does not appear to be
necessarily ridiculing of the idea of the bovine as divine, though one can read
a satirical provocation intended in the phrase. In the context of the
installation’s attempt to point people’s attention to a material problem the
cow is ailing from, the title plays at irony.
The relationship (and difference) between art and
religion lies at this interface where the former can satirise the latter. If
art cannot take place, if artists cannot play with symbols and meanings that
some may consider ‘religious’, and if such gestures and events are open to
public harassment and intimidation by law, then the government should declare
that we are living under the diktats of a religious state.
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Siddhartha Kararwal, Bovine Divine.
Credit: The artist
|
But even this situation, where ‘secular’ art is being
hounded by religious sensibilities, aided by the paranoia and hypersensitivity
of the state, cannot be only read as a religious versus irreligious, or
rational versus irrational problem.
For there is another crucial aspect behind the whole
story that connects (secular) art and religion to what we understand as
“culture” in a much more intricate, open and redeeming sense. The most
interesting and ‘carnivalesque’ aspect of the art installation, ‘The Bovine
Divine’, is the flying cow. Why is the cow flying? Why make the cow fly?
I remember as a child, growing up in a small,
northeastern town of India during the 1970s, how any flying object would
immediately draw rapturous attention. The whole purpose and delight of visiting
a circus would be to see flying objects.
From balloons to kites, objects that fly are the stuff of
wonder and dreams. They are metaphors, symbols of the mind’s desires, conscious
and unconscious. There is even a ‘science’ about them, about the laws of
gravity and how things fly against gravity. But it is not all that alone. The
‘Pushpaka Vimana’, or flying chariot, in the story of the Ramayana, or the
image of the king, Trishanku, hanging in the sky as the sage Vishwamitra’s
efforts to send him to heaven in his physical body is thwarted by the gods, are
all moments of wonder.
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Trisanku from ascending to Heaven in physical form
1597-1605 Ghulam ‘Ali, (Indian, Mughal dynasty Opaque watercolour, ink, and gold on paper H: 27.1 W: 14.3 cm Northern India F1907.271.57 |
If artistic work is judged by the police and artists end
up in the police station, we can well imagine the state of art in the country.
If culture no longer exists as wonder, as provocation, as dream, what is this
culture that is being preserved? Culture is, without the need for any
sophisticated definition, simply curiosity. If there is no curiosity in
culture, if the culture of curiosity doesn’t exist, we are surely worse off
than those imaginative human beings who drew wonderful representations of life
on the walls of caves. If those cave paintings were the beginning of human
culture, this mob and police intimidation of art is surely the death of it.
This has nothing to do with even religion. This is a legal, modern farce,
playing cards with rationality. It is only when a culture is excessively
repressed by modern rationality that superstition gains the status of mass
hypnotism, where a Ganesha drinks milk.
Gabriel Garcia Márquez had once famously said in an
interview, “If you don’t believe in god, at least be superstitious.” Marquez, a
diehard communist, however knew the contradictions that allow the culture of human
imagination, to exist. When we read of the sage Vashistha’s magical cow,
Kamadhenu, which fed Vishwamitra’s army, we don’t necessarily believe in the
cow having such powers, but we still believe in the story. The believer who
looks at all cows as progeny of Kamadhenu has destroyed the wonder of the story
in the service of belief. To give social and legal sanction to such a belief
over others, and prevent beef eating for instance, is precisely the violence of
mono-culturalism.
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| Plucked from the sky on police orders, artist Siddhartha Kararwal’s styrofoam bovine becomes ‘divine’ |
Márquez also pointed out that an unbelievable event is
most likely to be believed when it is expressed in numbers. So if you say you
saw many elephants flying in the sky, everybody would laugh at you. But if you
said you saw twelve of them, even the most skeptical might pause for a second
and wonder. That is the secret, the secret trick if you will, at once divine
and secular, that lies behind all stories and all art. We have to recover and
grant the story – and art – its place in our culture. Or else there will be no
culture to talk about very soon except the ‘culture’ of hooliganism and the
‘culture’ of rubbish.
Manash Bhattacharjee is a poet, writer and political
science scholar. His first collection of poetry, Ghalib’s Tomb and Other Poems
(2013), was published by The London Magazine. He is currently Adjunct Professor
in the School of Culture and Creative Expressions at Ambedkar University, New
Delhi.
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