Book review: Malvika Maheshwari,Art Attacks: Violence and Offense-taking in India

Discussions on attacks on artistic freedom veer towards a fairytale-like simplicity with the heroic martyr of free speech on one side and vicious trolls and monsters threatening to overrun the kingdom of liberalism on the other. As with all fairy tales there is generally a kernel of truth in the narrative but the repeatedly telling of the story flattens out the moral complexities underlying the tale. The flourishing business of art vandalism in India over the decades is one such story that has been reduced to a cyclical narrative of illiberal outrage at creative expression followed by a liberal disavowal of violence and intolerance as being repugnant to democratic and constitutional values.

An analytical refusal to succumb to this one-dimensional account is what motivates Malvika Maheshwari’s timely and layered engagement with art, violence and offence-taking in India. With an understatement reminiscent of Avery Gordon’s famous opening lines in ghostly matters (‘That life is complicated may seem a banal expression of the obvious, but it is nonetheless a profound theoretical statement—perhaps the most important theoretical statement of our time’), Maheshwari begins her third chapter with the assertion that ‘right to freedom of speech and expression has been a complicated issue throughout the life of the independent Indian state’. The book responds to this complexity by layering—palimpsest like—a descriptive, conceptual and political re-examination of the affect intensive game of free speech and hurt sentiment. At a descriptive level it does so through an ethnographic engagement with various actors involved in vandalism. The figure of the vandal is a spectral form, and in most accounts these foot soldiers of vandalism emerge as automatons of indignation who merely follow orders from higher-ups. Maheshwari’s painstaking engagement with a spectrum of ‘intolerant subjects’ and their motivations reveal not a straightforward picture of intolerance pitted against liberal values, but rather a distorted image of liberalism itself. Through their claims on constitutional guarantees of equality and dignity, and the assertion that the state has failed to secure them these rights, these groups participate using violence in ‘a manipulation of the complex arrangement of liberal values’ (p. 281). For Maheshwari, a serious engagement with vandalism allows us to reframe the question of free speech conflicts away from an account of exceptionalism (‘vandalism as the other of democracy’) towards the recognition of ‘the capacity of democracy to both birth and nurture violence as a norm rather than as an exception’ (p. 5).

This descriptive shift away from a generic account of lumpen subjectivity is what enables the author to undertake a conceptual shift as well. Vandalism then is not just illiberalism which has to be taken at face value but is instead symptomatic of the ‘tensions inherent in the arrangement of liberalism’, where competing values are not merely differently privileged, but also differently distributed between those perceived to possess privilege (such as artists and intellectuals) and those who feel side-lined by the state. Resorting to violence against artists involves a curious doubling of sovereignty at a vertical and horizontal level. At the vertical level, vandal groups attempt to mimic and usurp the sovereign provision of the state to allow or disallow forms of expression, while at the horizontal level, they ironically crave the ‘enhanced sovereignty’ of the artists as citizen-subjects that they seek to censor. Maheshwari’s central problematic lies in framing this foundational tension between the vertical and horizontal dimensions violence as a continuum, rather than as a rupture of the liberal democratic consensus. Thus, even as groups alleging hurt sentiments use violence to reclaim their wounded attachments, they do so through a performative invocation of liberal claim making. A political account of censorship and offence taking will necessarily have to account for the rhizomatic and shape shifting nature of sovereignty with simultaneously acts outside of the ambit of liberal legality even as it mobilizes the state and the legal system towards it ends.

Rejecting the commonplace assertion that vandalism is primarily a creature of the political right and the favour child of Hindu nationalism, Maheshwari outlines the historical mutation of vandalism from the early stages of the postcolonial state to the contemporary. In her detailed chapter on the killing of Safdar Hashmi and the violent clashes over Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, Maheshwari identifies the 1980s as the crucial turning point where we see the emergence of a template which thrives till date. In this template, violence emerges as a tenuous public–private partnership between the state and political society with art and artists emerging as the blank slate upon which real and imaginary harms can be written. This enables vandalism to simultaneously call upon the state to suppress art, even as it exercises a license to exempt itself from the ambit of the law when it perceives its interests to be unfulfilled.

One of the prevailing tensions in the book lies in its normative ambivalence. Having provided us with a strong political reformulation backed by rich ethnographic accounts, the book necessarily demands the suspension of knee-jerk judgements and yet at the same time the moral odiousness of incessant art attacks from all religious and political hues demands a response, which till now has been shouldered by a relatively straightforward version of liberalism. The author herself, in the second half of the book, exhibits a similar ambivalence when she echoes some of the classical liberal arguments in her critique of incidents of vandalism and violence. Rather than seeing this as a contradiction, I see it as a productive aporia demanding of us even more rigorous and analytical formulations building on the insights of this book. One such productive conversation that this book could have is with Jacque Ranciere’s conception of aesthetics as the distribution of the sensible, and politics as the contested terrain which arranges and rearranges participation and exclusion in the realm of the senses. Thus, if politics pivots around what can be seen or heard, what can be said about it and who has the right to say anything about it, free speech and censorship emerge as structures that do not just participate in the distribution of speech, but also in its definition of what counts as speech. Art Attacks is a significant contribution that alerts us to the fact that the story of vandalism, when reduced to a story of censorship, dilutes rather than foregrounds this complicated question.