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.