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- Convenors:
-
Malvika Maheshwari
(Ashoka University)
Laetitia Zecchini (CNRS)
- Location:
- Room 212
- Start time:
- 27 July, 2016 at
Time zone: Europe/Warsaw
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
The panel turns to independent India's concern with artistic freedom of speech. The aim is not only to offer a critique of the reigning violent regulation of artistic speech but also to observe how political reasoning has constituted spaces and identities that are significant for artistic practice.
Long Abstract:
Since the end of 1980s in India, groups associated with various political parties, religions, regions and castes in India have come to regularly deface, damage and disrupt works of art, which has resulted in not just a violent suppression of freedom of speech but also in a loss of lives and property.
Paying attention to the critical mediation of state governments, art market and the media prompts two extreme readings of the state of artistic free speech in India: one view shows how free speech is immutably locked in a downward spiral where new medias, politics and liberalized markets have increased the 'visibility' of artists and thereby the probability of them becoming easy and recurrent targets for political and patriarchal agendas. The other is of course how media, markets and indeed politics, have enabled a discernible segment of artists to introduce non-conforming socio-political themes into their works in recent years, revealing in many stances a conscious emergence of not just marginalized voices of religious minorities, women, homosexuals or lower castes but also increasingly liberalized and 'alternative' social spaces. These differences necessitate a critical reading of the conditions that inform violence on artworks and artists.
The panel turns to independent India's concern with artistic freedom of speech and expression. The aim is not only to offer a critique of the reigning violent regulation of artistic speech but also to observe how political reasoning has constituted spaces and identities that are significant for artistic practice.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Titas De Sarkar (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores the extent of freedom enjoyed by the artists in post-colonial Calcutta, roughly between 1947-1977, through the raging debates on the writings of the 'Hungry Generation' poets.
Paper long abstract:
The year 1947 significantly transformed the identity of Calcutta. Partition and migration made Calcutta the densest city in the world. Politically, the city saw marked shifts to leftist ideologies. Socially, both the earlier residents and the refugees were experiencing an acute crisis in the job market, growing inflationary tendencies, and falling standard of living. A restive Calcutta became a site of radical protest - on the streets and in the cultural spaces. The current paper explores the politics of representation of these post-colonial experiences in Bengali literature, roughly between 1947-1977, and the vociferous debates that followed.
The 'Hungry' Movement arose from a section of the youth, disillusioned with the affairs of the state and the indifference of the literary environment to it. A self-proclaimed avant-garde movement, it faced charges of obscenity leading to a court case in 1964, where some of its leading poets were arrested on charges of obscenity. The paper traces the rise of this unprecedented radicalism in Bengali literature, the immediate context of their anguish, their infamous method of writing, other acts of resistance apart from the literary, their camaraderie with the poets of the Beat generation, and place them in the global context of the anti-establishment and countercultural movements in the UK and USA.
Looking at these multiple levels of representation in a post-colonial post-partitioned space, the paper explores the kind of morality expected and imposed on the artists and how the latter took up writing as a tool to resist and overcome it.
Sarunas Paunksnis (Kaunas University of Technology)
Paper short abstract:
By discussing some recent films the paper argues that the rise of politically engaged Hindi cinema in early 21st century produces a form of commodified dissent in cinema, and is the opposite of political critique.
Paper long abstract:
The first decade of 21st century saw a rise of a new wave of cinematic imagination - an alternative cinema signaling an aesthetic departure from the so-called "escapist" Bollywood, and focusing on topics relating to social, political and cultural problems. Such transformed images and transformed representations might signify a transgressive shift in representing social reality, as well as changes in the audience preferences in terms of interest in political problems. But the "return of the political" into a broad spectrum of films, ranging from mainstream films like Rang De Basanti (2006) to a more niche offbeat cinema is more complicated than it may seem. Despite the new films' appearance to interrogate political and social realities, they, and the oppositional aesthetic they evoke, become integrated into mass consumption. This paper, by discussing some recent films and by drawing upon critical theories of Marcuse and Deleuze & Guattari argues that this "return" must be viewed as integral process within the neoliberal order successfully manufacturing simulacra of free speech. This is a process that produces a form of commodified dissent in cinema, as commodification of transgressive aesthetics is an effective way to counter it. The paper argues that the rise of political critique in cinema signifies its opposite - deterritorialization of content to the point when it poses no threat to the system. Therefore, political critique evoked by cinema becomes one-dimensional commodity consumed by multiplex-going urban upper middle class - the main target audience of these films.
Malvika Maheshwari (Ashoka University)
Paper short abstract:
Free speech has been a complicated issue throughout the life of the state in India. I observe the impact of criminalization of Indian politics on free speech of artists during the decade of the eighties.
Paper long abstract:
Right to freedom of speech and expression has been a complicated issue throughout the life of the state in India. Since 1980s, in a significant transformation, authority determining the limits of speech became much more expansive, with the introduction of criminality. Its distinctive perspective lay not in the traditional adjudication of criminalizing speech (through defamation, libel or sedition) but rather through the entrenchment of criminality in politics. In this chapter I try to observe the impact of criminalization of Indian politics on free speech of artists during the decade of the eighties. I do not intend to give a chronology of instances of criminalization nor of the violent attacks on artists but to understand what happened to free speech in this period of 'corruption boom' and the related criminalization (Jaffrelot 2010; 620). Did criminalization of politics challenge, undermine or alter the limits laid down by the Constitution and the courts? How did it affect artists? What changes did it bring forth in the narrative of free speech? The chapter answers these questions by focusing on two exceptional cases of violence involving artists during this period: murder of playwright and theatre director Safdar Hashmi in January 1989 and the violence surrounding novelist Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses in 1988-89 despite the Indian government's announcement of its ban.
Laetitia Zecchini (CNRS)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the entanglement of the rhetoric of censorship with the language and performance of emotions, and the tangibility, topicality and vocabulary of ‘hurt’ or ‘injury’ in practices of cultural regulation in India.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the entanglement of the rhetoric of censorship with the language and performance of emotions, and the topicality of the vocabulary of 'hurt' or 'injury' in practices of cultural regulation in India. Arjun Appadurai's observation that the cultural field has become the main field where fantasies of purity, authenticity, borders and security can be enacted seems especially relevant in the Indian context, where cultural productions have increasingly come under attack, and what stands for 'Indian culture' is often sanctuarized in the name of the passionate - and vulnerable - sentiments it provokes. If the work of artists and writers are increasingly targeted in the name of the 'hurt sentiments' of certain communities, artists and writers can also stage their struggle against intimidation and censorship in those terms, and may construct themselves as 'communities of sentiment'. How are these competing claims to injury articulated? How does a group of subjects come to identify itself with an injury, to become a 'we'? How are these hurt sentiments mobilized and allocated in the political and in the cultural spheres? What does it mean, in India, to say that words can wound or that works of art hurt feelings and offend sensibilities? And what finally can be made of hurt besides a cry for war (J.Butler) ? These are some of the questions that I will address by looking closely at the discourses mobilised around the M. F. Husain controversy ('Is he an artist or a butcher?') and around the Delhi-based collective SAHMAT.