Art Attacks C: Violence and Offence-Taking in India

Description

Since the end of the 1980s in India, self-styled representatives of a variety of ascriptive groups (religious, caste, regional, and linguistic among others) have come to routinely damage artwork, disrupt their exhibition, and threaten and assault artists and their supporters. Often, these acts are said to be a protest against the allegedly 'hurtful' or 'offensive' artworks. They are even claimed to be a prescient call to save the identity of the community, in a manner that makes the communal identities hinge entirely on that artistic (mis)representation. Yet, at the time of these attacks, many who indulge in this kind of violence have seldom heard of the artist before or even seen, read, watched, let alone engaged with the artwork. Such is the wrench on the right to freedom of speech and expression in general, and on the physical safety and security of artists in particular, that has inspired fear, anger, and discomfort within the art world, marked by ominous declarations of a 'cultural emergency' owing to the loss of lives and property, and without the due processes of law-a consequence that was hardly synonymous with art practice in India, at least until a few decades ago. This book tells the story of violence against artists in India, marked by the intensifying sense of insecurity, fear, frustration and anger within the art world. But to bring out its complexities-to build an analytical account for understanding what such destructive and, even competitive, attacks on artists convey about India's liberal democracy, given that violence in its many avatars has not so much been an aberration to the form of India's liberal democracy as much as its very condition-the book attempts to map the concrete political transformations that have informed its dynamic unfolding. In other words, as opposed to simply adding to the prevalent commentaries on violent regulation of free speech in India, this work focuses on the dynamics of violence in that regulation. Based on extensive interactions with assailants and artists, I argue that these attacks are not simply 'anti-democratic.' But are dependent in perverse ways on the very logics of democracy's functioning, as much they are contained by it, along with the wider material conditions that have prevented both free speech in India, and India at large, from being immutably locked in a downward spiral. oso-9780199488841-miscMatter-2 Title Pages Malvika Maheshwari Title Pages Malvika Maheshwari (p.iii) Art Attacks (p.iv) (p.v) Art Attacks Praise_for_the_Book oso-9780199488841-miscMatter-1.pdf 0_Frontmatter.indd oso-9780199488841-miscMatter-4 (p.vi) Copyright Page Malvika Maheshwari (p.vi) Copyright Page Malvika Maheshwari (p.vi) Copyright Page Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction The_Constitution_of_Free_SpeechCollective_Conservatism_and_Art_in_the_Debates_of_the_Constituent_Assembly_of_India Artists_in_CourtsLaw_and_the_Production_of_Violence From_a_Murder_to_Deaths_in_the_MorchaCongress_Criminalization_and_Freedom_of_Speech_by_the_End_of_1980s The_Rise_of_Hindu_Nationalism_and_the_Competitive_Politics_of_OffenceTaking 04_Chapter 04 MF_Husain_and_the_Making_of_a_Campaign 05_Chapter 05 The_Anatomy_of_an_Attack_and_Inspirations_of_Attackers Artists_and_Their_Repertoire_of_Responses 07_Chapter 07 Select_Bibliography 08_Bib Index About_the_Author 10_ATA