Beginning with the protest and ending with the loo

I returned from the protest late last night. In Hyderabad, it was a bit of a damp squib, because the more prominent members of the art and intellectual community had registered their protest a day earlier. There was no press, no large gathering, no slogan shouting; no one, in fact, to witness or report that this was one more city that had ranged itself firmly on the side of Chandra Mohan.

But for the dozen or so of us who did turn up, there was enough to discuss. We agreed that 14th May was not the ‘real’ protest; that something more had to happen to make our voices heard.

I found that the meeting had set off several thoughts in my mind, which I’m sharing here. For a start, one of the people there yesterday was a teacher, and an external examiner at the offending exhibition. She was in a better position to tell us what had happened there. And though it was clear that the attack was cynical and planned (how on earth were the cops so readily available? Don’t they know they’re supposed to arrive only once everything has been done with? They upheld this tradition at Khairlanji, at every riot in the last few decades. Now they’re ready and waiting?) – and though it was clear the attack was planned, she felt that the real reason Chandra Mohan should have been let off was because he was a student, only learning, not in a position to take responsibility for what he had done, because he did not mean to offend.

I emphatically disagree. I think that if his painting – whatever it was (I’ve read descriptions of a cross with a commode under the painting) offended, the problem is with the person who got offended and not with him. While it’s true that it was an internal assessment and that this Jain person had no business there, I think that even had this been a public exhibition, and the painting was deemed by some viewer to be offensive, it is her job to say why it was offensive and to engage with the whole issue of offence instead of putting the whole thing under the rubric of ‘religious sentiment’. I mean, I could say that depicting Krishna in a bilious shade of blue offends my sensibilities because I dislike blue skin. I could pass off prejudice as offence. But would anyone support me?

While watching the news last night, I saw one woman saying that ‘religious sensibilities cannot be offended’. I wondered if she had seen the painting at all, or could even describe it by hearsay. (Of course she couldn’t).

Now, for all the people whose sentiments are offended, I would suggest that the prurience of their imagination in which they construct the offending work – in the absence of having actually seen it – far exceeds the alleged offensiveness of any work actually produced or viewed. Let’s assume that there’s a painting of a cross with a commode. Or a goddess being violated by a linga. If these paintings offend, it is not because they are offensive in themselves – Indians routinely worship the linga, which is supposed to be joined to the antaryoni. We get an inside view, so to speak). If they offend, it is because it requires the viewer to accommodate an idea that is so revolutionary that it cannot be easily accepted: the sex in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the language of Ulysses; the idea that the son of God would want to imagine living an ordinary life, in The Last Temptation of Christ; issues of caste in Samskara…the list is endless.

When we were discussing what we ought to do to show our support for Chandra Mohan at the meeting last evening, I suggested that one of the long-term things we ought to do was have discussions around what it means to offend: what offends and how? Show films that have been banned; read from books, plays, songs that sent ripples of indignation through entire populations. In fact, offend again and again, as often as possible and wherever you can. Create a hydra-headed monster.

Show re-runs of saas-bahu serials, I said to myself. What could be more offensive to good taste than the regressive attitudes depicted in these serials, where women are chattels and incubators, and the men are promiscuous and hypocritical. Children watch these serials with their parents. Is no one worried?

In Luis Buñuel’s The Phantom of Liberty, people sit at a table strewn with magazines and chat while they crap, but go to the loo to eat in extreme, silent privacy. This is shocking and, no doubt to Mr. Jain will be extremely offensive. But the power of a simple reversal such as Buñuel frequently employed, lay precisely in questioning the sanctity that we assign to some acts and the profanity we assign to others.

In the extremely Brahminical villages that my grandparents used to live in some decades ago, the houses ran the length of a street; rooms led to other rooms and there were many unexplored and exciting nooks. But if you wanted to go to the loo, you had to hike right to the other end of the house, where you would find one tiny, dingy (and smelly) room lit at night with a zero watt bulb, usually red in colour. There, you did you business and did not refer to it under any circumstances. Someone in the infrared areas of our varna spectrum came and shovelled the products of your body away and you were peaceful the knowledge of your purity. If there was a way to hang up your soul on the way to the loo, in one of those convenient rooms along the way, so that it was completely uncontaminated by contact with the body that insisted on producing filth, it had not yet been invented.

For that generation, our bathroom in Hyderabad was shocking enough. Someone actually takes pleasure in this unspeakable room? But – but – that means that bathing, sitting on the pot and reading a magazine…all of these things are ok, even (swoon) great?

Tied up intimately with the idea of offence is the idea of taboo. If something is forbidden, then bringing that out into the open causes offence. Of late, in our country, religion is the ultimate taboo. Which is why, how Rakhi Sawant decorates her bathroom becomes a matter of public debate. No one considers the offence they caused to Rakhi Sawant by making public her very private space and what she chooses to do with or in it.

But those who take offence easily would die before they admit that these events give them nourishment. What would happen in a world where nothing and nobody slapped their delicate sensibilities awake? I suspect it gives them a sense of involvement that is as false as it is exciting. What we need to do is dull those sensibilities and provide them with an excess of offending material so that ennui is inevitable.