The Double Life of Dissent: Art,Politics and the Predicaments of Democracy in India

Introduction

In this article, I ask two questions by juxtaposing two moments in India’s political history, in which out-rightly expressed dissent underlines analytical shifts in the nature and course of the country’s democracy. The first question is: What does a self-proclaimed, democratic state do with peaceful dissenting artists? The answer to this is that the state generally responds in one of two ways: either it tolerates and listens, and at its best, gives the impression of correcting its course. Or it ignores, and at its worst, finds ways to repress that dissent, increasingly by criminalizing it. My second question follows from this. If indeed the state stigmatizes and suppresses that dissent, what does the artist do? The answer to this is less straightforward. The artist may find still more creative ways to express dissent, reaping its benefits or suffering the consequences of repression, or may look for avenues and allies other than the state, which might be equally, if not more powerful, the market, for instance. When dissent is sold and made profitable, it keeps the artist, the artwork and dissent alive. But this nevertheless brings out the increasingly complex nature of the democratic state, the role of the market therein and the dynamic patterns of dissent itself.

My focus is less on discussing the normative or foundational values of dissent than exploring its complicated life history. Similarly, instead of the debate of state versus the market, my approach follows a suggestion made by Bruno Latour (2007): to regard them as ‘organizations in plural’. While this plurality, on the one hand, suggests an equivalence, on the other hand, it brings to fore the most basic but pertinent difference between the two, in the nature of their accountability to the ‘public’ at large. It is this factor that alters the meanings, implications and forms of dissent, providing a useful lens to explore its new practices, which in turn generate new possibilities and perversions for democratic theory and practice.

Let me also explain the methodological reasons for focusing on artists in the Indian context, evidently in an exploratory, not exhaustive manner, which underpin the main thesis of this article. This is not simply because as an economic-cultural subgroup they remain remarkably understudied within social sciences, particularly within political science. More glaring is the observation that over last three decades, artists in India (and elsewhere) have increasingly been targets of vicious, violent attacks by individuals and groups. ² Correspondingly, they have become visible as political embodiments of the elemental democratic capacity that ensures (or not) the right to free speech, justice and security to its citizens (Kaur & Mazarella, 2009; Maheshwari, 2019; Ramdev et al., 2016). In this regard, the political, historical and sociological connection between democracy and dissent becomes even more relevant when we take the relationship between violence and criminality into account on the one hand, and on the other, the political and administrative management of social, religious and economic diversity (Berenschot, 2011; Hansen, 2001; Jaffrelot, 1996; Vaishnav, 2017). With an alarming urgency while this has laid bare—both visually and violently—the manifestation and deepening of difference, it has also somewhat paradoxically shown how state processes both accommodate and frustrate the constitutional project of a liberal democracy. In the context of this article, difference does not refer only to the restriction of rights based on religion, gender or caste; it refers also to a clearer class stratification and consciousness, blatantly revealed, for instance, by the status of art as property, heightened by India’s relatively recent entry in the ‘global’ art market scene. I do not mean this simply in the sense of exchange and trade of Indian art works at renowned festivals, auctions and private sales managed by Western organizations that existed. But more importantly, it is in the sense of Indian art and artists appearing as ‘emerging’ actors, playing an increasingly prominent role in the setting of aesthetic and economic agendas at the global level (Velthuis & Curioni, 2015). While indeed this has occurred on the back of India’s economic liberalization heralded in 1991 resulted in the acceleration of corporate capitalism, where art markets experienced massive changes not just domestically, with conversations and interest in it expanding beyond urban centres of Delhi, Mumbai or Kolkata and from elite circles into the burgeoning middle classes. But corresponding to the changes in the domestic market, conversations and attitudes also changed internationally, even if its potential has remained largely diaspora driven.

To ground an analysis from this wide frame of reference, the empirical focus of this article is on artists who remain central to any consideration of democratic rule and have had an impact on the staging of peaceful protests against excessive abuses of state power and whose artworks have been regularly and publicly exhibited. I refer here to playwright and theatre artist Safdar Hashmi and the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust’s organization of protests against attacks on artist M. F. Husain’s works. Much has been written about the two, and much of the discussion on them deals with Hashmi’s murder, and the diversity of Sahmat’s creative engagements that ‘unified’ and ‘allowed’ artists across the country to express their anger, and ‘collectively resist’ machinations of various governments and political parties. This literature shows the tensions surrounding artists and the state, standing in opposite directions. I want to approach the question of artists’ dissent from a different angle. I want to first focus on state’s association with dissenting artists like Hashmi, and then examine the role of contemporary art markets with dissent, which has tended to be overlooked, and is far more problematic than what appears at first sight. This is important, given that since the 1990s’ policies of economic liberalization shifted the emphasis from ‘state patronage’ to the ‘business’ of art, which became over time increasingly ‘dealer-mediated’. The consolidation of this dealer-mediated market—with its characteristic emphasis on promoting the careers of the artists they represent as opposed to simply selling individual artworks (Velthuis, 2005)—in turn coincided with both the rise of religious majoritarianism and the accompanying rise of violent attacks on artists. It is the mapping of these shifts that informs the choice of case studies.

Indeed, this focus on Safdar Hashmi and Sahmat’s initiatives in defence of Husain can easily be brushed aside as the most ‘obvious’ examples to understand the relationship between art, state and the market in India. However, their dissent itself (as practice, not material object) existed only as defined by the state, protected by legal institutions and rendered accessible by the evolving terrain of modern political economy. The avenue of financial dependence and the achievement of financial security of artists—through the state or the market—is only one example among many that has a very direct influence on the nature of dissent and in the exercise of basic rights. Theorists have rarely focused on these basic forms of state provisions. Therefore, viewed through this lens, the analysis of the two case studies and the temporal lag between them, underlines the alluring contrast between latitudes and entitlements, showing the way dissent and democracy have evolved in India.

Finally, in this regard, the approach taken in the article is to juxtapose two moments of political– cultural significance, that is, to place them side by side, as opposed to arranging them one after the other, which tends to signal a ‘dependent construction’ (Gefin, 1982, p. xii). In doing this, I hope to move away from tracking a forced causality or simply presenting historical depth of contemporary problems. Rather, the comparisons not only augment the relevance and specificities of each moment, but temporality also clearly underlines the problematic shifts in governance and dissent. The article shows that if, for any artist in India, dissent in the 1970s and 1980s meant the freedom to resist exploitative political and market systems, to express disagreement in an organized and ideologically committed way, and yet be aided by a resourceful state, today it is not that. Since the 1990s, dissent has become more and more discursive because of political power—its representatives and private armies, their threats and abuses, their resources and scale—all have greatly multiplied and diversified.

The research that forms the basis of this article integrates archival and ethnographic methods (interviews, discourse analysis, etc.) conducted since 2008, in cities across India. Conversations with artists are complemented by meetings with integrated professionals of the ‘art world’: art critics, gallery owners, event organizers, collectors and so on (Becker, 2008). While the study of political behaviour has for long been done by applying qualitative research methodology, markets, on the other hand, have tended to be regarded as the ‘antithesis of social and cultural life’. Following Velthuis’ proposition—to instead observe markets, particularly art markets, as ‘cultural constellations’, wherein, like politics, the ‘interactions are highly ritualized’, with ‘symbols that transfer rich meaning between people who exchange goods with each other’ (Velthuis, 2005, p. 3)—not only enables methodological parity in observing art’s relation with politics, but also allows us to explore nuances of the art market’s relation with dissent, which has until now remained largely obscure.

The Dissenting Artist and the State

In the Indian cultural context, the acclaim and repute of playwright and theatre artist Safdar Hashmi is such that any commentary on his life and work substantially augments our understanding of dissent. While this is one reason for focusing on him here, the other is that despite the innumerable pages written on him, something always remains overlooked. The ironical reason for this is that although there is an abundance of literature on Hashmi—much of it anecdotal and biographical—there is sparse comprehensive, and analytical work on the subject (Deshpande, 2007, 2020; Ghosh, 2012). ³ Consequently, the less explanatory this literature is, the more fable-like his life seems to be; and the critical nature of dissent remains somewhat obscure.

The tragedy of Hashmi is not only his untimely death. His brutal murder rendered his life sacred and inviolable, and as a result, any attempt to understand him has been limited by, and to, the nature of his passing. It is true that the brutal daylight attack on 34-year-old Hashmi and his theatre troupe Jana Natya Manch (Janam), in Sahibabad, on the industrial outskirts of Delhi, in January 1989, underlined the irreversible processes that now constitute the practices of the Indian state: the entrenchment of criminalized politics, and a view of the right to free speech as threatening, rather than promising, by politicians who make ‘democratic’ claims. It is also true that it was Hashmi’s murder which made him recognizable in unimaginable ways; in a sense his death became the measure of his commitment to street theatre, to the revolution of the working classes and to the opposition of all forms of ‘oppressive’ state structures. The most immediate and enduring form of this recognizability occurred through the creation of the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (Sahmat): a platform set up by his friends, family and colleagues ‘to carry forward the ideals for which [Hashmi] sacrificed his life’, a platform ‘to articulate dissent especially in the cultural field, whenever the accepted democratic norms were found to be violated’. One outcome of this singular articulation was that from a multifaceted person, Hashmi became an idea, in ways reminiscent of what John Berger (2003, p. 112) wrote of Che Guevara’s death: ‘[that] which would seem to be so definitive an end, is for him a means, a treatment to which he submits for the sake of some aftermath’.

From this perspective, the relevant question is not whether Sahmat successfully emerged as a dissenting platform for artists and cultural workers, and if it remained committed to Hashmi’s ideals. Rather, the question is a preceding matter. What were the specific characteristics of Hashmi’s dissent, which made the promise of dissent attractive to his peers and successor generations? The focus of this section, therefore, is not on the aftermath of Hashmi’s death but on his dissenting life.

To comprehend Hashmi’s dissent, it is important to recognize, above all, his skill and commitment to organization. The endlessly repeated argument that Hashmi’s genius and his dissent lay in the art he created (plays, songs, documentaries, etc.) and/or in his unswerving commitment to left-wing politics, is quite misleading. He was not the first or the only artist of his time to speak up against the ruling dispensation or of progressive ideology. Similarly, in theatre, there were equally (or more) talented writers, actors and singers than him. Moreover, many of Janam’s acclaimed plays were a result of collaborative work done by the group. Nor do the recollections of Hashmi’s genius subscribe to the clichés of the artist misunderstood and mysterious. In fact, those who knew him remember him as joyful and affable, as ‘one of us’. Rather, what made Hashmi stand out, as a dissenting artist, was his initiative and ability to organize.

This focus on organization explains the core and success of Hashmi’s dissent and can be understood in at least two interrelated ways. In one sense it is the ideological heritage of revolutionary Marxism: in organization was rooted the doctrine of the working class revolution. But organization, as it comes about, implies another critical, though far more mundane, feature—to make things happen every day. Dissent requires language and expression, and Hashmi chose primarily street theatre for this. But the choice itself required vision, skill, commitment and momentum. From the beginning, for Hashmi, it was not simply a group of youngsters coming together to do theatre. Instead, it had to be an organization, with a name, Janam (which means birth), with a clearly identifiable will and a vision, even if it was composed of only five people to start with. Though a ‘movement’ did not yet exist, it was only through organization that it could eventually emerge. From being amateurs, organization was the way, according to Hashmi, to becoming ‘professionals’. To organize meant to formulate and reformulate Janam’s working techniques, to improvise, despite material and political limitations, which made Janam’s plays, for instance, ‘inexpensive’, ‘mobile and portable’ (Erven, 2007, p. 38). To organize meant to harmonize, to keep members of the group motivated and single-minded, and find ways of recruiting new ones (affability, thus became a critical professional quality). But most of all, organization for Hashmi entailed making present decisions with the future in mind (creation of an institution and a repertory, maintenance of archives, making notes after performances, etc.). ⁴ In other words, in the objectives of Hashmi’s street theatre were embedded the fundamental demands of dissent itself: consistency, improvisation and a single-mindedness, achievable only through a focus on organization.

Here we are faced with a fundamental aspect of Hashmi’s of dissent: on the one hand, of being primarily driven by a class-oriented ideology of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), but on the other hand, of being in a context where the scaffolding of the liberal state was the essential and historically specific apparatus for the achievement of his goals. So while the roots of Hashmi’s practice can be traced back to the organized communist movement in India, particularly from the mid-1940s onwards—Janam itself arose out of the bones of groups like the Indian People’s Theatre Association—indicating the ‘language of his protest’ (Steyerl, 2007, p. 332), it’s organizational form demonstrates in fact a combination of appeals from both communist radicalism and of modern liberal politics, particularly its concern for abuses of accumulated political power. Instead of simply arguing that Marxism provides the dominant template for Hashmi’s, or more generally for artists’ dissent in India, the wider historical and political context, particularly since the 1970s and 1980s reveals that a medley of Marxist tenets and favoured liberal practices appear as the best starting point for understanding both the semantic trajectory of dissent in India, and Hashmi’s contribution therein. ⁵

Following from this, a critical facet—often overlooked—that dominated Hashmi’s endeavours, which not only creates a similar sense of inextricable entwinement of his art and dissent, but also emphasizes his influence on the development of dissent in India was his close, ‘intimate’, and long association with the Indian state; the work he did within its different institutions, not always without or against it. He began his career, in the 1970s, by teaching English literature at state universities in Garhwal, Kashmir and Delhi. For a brief period he joined the West Bengal Government’s Information Centre in the early 1980s. Following his decision to devote himself ‘full time’ to theatre, arts and the party, through the decade of the 1980s he worked as a freelancer, writing scripts and songs for short films, primarily for the state-run television network Doordarshan, and occasionally doing voice-overs and commentaries for programmes on All India Radio, among other things. Moreover, grants offered by state institutions like the Sangeet Natak Akademi sometimes facilitated Janam’s tours across the country; spaces offered by central and state universities came in handy for their rehearsals. It is true, by Hashmi’s own admission, this work allowed him ‘to earn his livelihood’, and helped support his interest in theatre, wherein he could devote the rest of the time ‘to reading and writing and doing organizational work for the group and outside of it also’.

This strikingly illustrates two critical issues. First, the professionalism of the Indian state in the 1980s: flawed as it was, it was still capable of employing and supporting those who were skilful at the task required, notwithstanding their opposition or ideology. Second was its heterogeneity: the government may have been corrupt, capricious and oppressive, but there were institutions, administrators and artists who could still function independently, against cultural and political homogenization, sustaining both, democracy and artists like Hashmi. ⁶ It is this decisive aspect that underlines Hashmi’s legacy: to dissent effectively, one must know the nature of power intimately. The more reworked and refined the critique is, the more possibilities there are of being taken seriously by the powers that be. While dissent straddles the troubled dialectic of everyday and extraordinary confrontations, of domination and emancipation, what interests me conceptually is how ultimately, the state and the dissenters find themselves placed side by side, in ambition, when all other apparent differences have been allowed for. Dissenters and the state hold a similar idea of the ‘public’—which, following John Coetzee (1996, p. 41) is ‘literate, integrated and receptive to direction’—as ultimately holding the power to undermine the other. It is this idea that connects them. The resulting relationship implies an inescapable intimacy between the state and the dissenters, unparalleled in the history of political association: an intimacy aimed at undermining the others’ persuasive and political potential. It is not surprising, thus, that after Hashmi’s murder—though it was carried out by a Congress-supported candidate, and despite the failure of the justice system wherein more than 30 years later there has been no conviction in the case—members of the very same Congress-led government accepted, in 1989–1990, Sahmat’s proposal to rename ‘College Street’ in the cultural centre of New Delhi as ‘Safdar Hashmi Marg’. ⁷ This is not the place for an analysis of what might have changed in the stance of the Congress-led government. Enough to say that, as in life, it aligned in death, with Hashmi, it is this intimacy of opposition, which in fact, constitutes their adversarial relationship.

Hashmi’s dissent was deeply marked by the political and economic context of his time: the Emergency, increasing corruption of the political class, a growing reliance on free-market mechanisms for resource allocation, and the concomitant consolidation of the labour movement, particularly in urban areas, among other issues. It is true, a certain rapport with context underlines the work of all artists and dissenters, whatever the sensibilities or content might be. But there is a different sense of time that is relevant here, other than saying that Hashmi was truly an artist of his time. In a way, it was also his time. Hashmi’s vision and zeal, his complete self-identification as a comrade in arms, was of a man in tune with his youth, so easily ignited and relatable that he could become almost synonymous with dissent that promised hope, as gay and fearless as youth. His death at 34 then, in a sense, reiterates his idealism and struggle, creating a political legend as a consequence. As futile as it is to imagine what his dissent might have been like had he lived longer, it is critical to acknowledge that during the last few years of Hashmi’s life difficulties arose, which were less on account of direct political pressures but more intrinsic to Janam’s working and maturation: bitterness and resentment among members, creative lethargy, frustrating financial pressures of living by art alone; difficulties that were both individual and collective. Hashmi’s dissent and death concern the distinctive historical relation, which existed between him and the time he lived in. To say, this is not to diminish his contribution but to recognize his singularity.

Dissenting Artists and the Market

On the heels of Hashmi’s murder in 1989 came at least three major developments in Indian politics and society, which inaugurated the decade of the 1990s: economic liberalization, rise of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and, with the destruction of the Babri Masjid, the massive outbreak of public and private forms of violence across the country, including an unending cycle of violent suppression of free speech. Particularly striking were attacks on artists and artworks, though different from Hashmi’s killing, both analytically and in action. For one, if Hashmi’s murder underlined the deepening of criminalized electoral politics, these attacks brought forth even further the complexities of democratic rule once the criminalized political sphere found an ally in communalism, transforming a one-off instance of attack on an artist into a highly formalized phenomenon. ⁸ In this section, I shall focus on the sustained attacks on artist M. F. Husain’s paintings and property, and the unceasing threats to his life, which began to take place from the mid-1990s onwards. ⁹ The reason for focusing on Husain, often hailed as ‘India’s Picasso’, is not simply because the recurring great number of attacks on him, and in his name, for over a decade that eventually drove him to exile in 2005, is illustrative of the acute stress on free speech in India, artistic freedom in particular. It is also not only because these attacks on him provoked the most sustained, collective and creative protests by the art world, particularly led by Sahmat. But most importantly because Husain was amongst those few artists whose extraordinary status within the art world and outside was deeply entwined with the consistently delirious prices his artworks fetched. This in turn helps us explain why focusing on the art market is critical to understand the shifts that have taken place in the nature of dissent and democracy in India.

We must, however, first penetrate deeper into the historical and political logic underlining these attacks on Husain, wherein every mobilization against him (and many others) began with the use of a particular kind of language, where the justification for destroying artworks and the threats depended upon the robustness and repetition of this language. ‘Offensive’, ‘anti-national’, ‘anti-Hindu’ and ‘hurtful’ were used as kind of labels for his paintings of unclothed Hindu goddesses, prescribed to heighten every political, social and economic difference. First, scholars seem to agree on the decisive role of ‘religious fundamentalism’, ‘intolerance’ and the rise of ‘anti-liberal’ tendencies on account of the homogenizing discourses of the Hindu nationalists in establishing a general sense of vulnerability among artists. Accordingly, most conventional accounts chronicling the responses of the art world to this violence have focused on issues like self-censorship, the mounting of protests and the concerns about the loss of lives and property. However, as I have argued elsewhere, the explanation of this ‘destructive outrage’ is a little more complicated than this. Such recurring claims of being offended are in fact ‘equally born of democracy’s violent proclivities’, which includes the criminalization of the political sphere. These attacks cannot simply be regarded as ‘anti-liberal’, as much they show the very ‘perversion of liberalism itself’. In the face of political weakness, liberalism emerged as an attractive ideology in the ‘auctioneering’ of hurt sentiments, to gain social attention and political power. Second, such orchestration of violence has elicited a range and variety of responses from the art world, which reveal the immense convolution of context and scale rather than the single idea of artists-as-only-victims (Maheshwari, 2019). In this regard, the emergence and role of contemporary art markets has been as problematic as the behaviour of various state institutions, which has tended to be overlooked.

This section of the article shows that the centrality of art market in such attacks lay in the deliberate effect of the duality it achieved: emerging as a crucial platform enabling artists’ dissent, and in the absence of robust state support, transforming protest sites into crucial spaces for art’s marketability. This centrality of the art market has indeed been in the political, economic and creative sense, yet its relevance is seldom mentioned. If cataclysmic conflagrations like wars create war profiteers (Bazargan, 2018), if studies on riots show the benefits amassed by political entrepreneurs (Berenschot, 2011; Horowitz, 2002; Wilkinson, 2005)—what Montaigne famously called ‘profitable disasters’—then quotidian forms of violence, enduring and belligerent as they may be, like attacks on artists, beget a moral ambiguity in strategic market systems. While they extract profit through popular violence, by bowing to strenuous disciplining processes and catering to the polarization of social and political discourses, in the face of social and political polarizations, robust structures of the art market have also helped produce various forms of public participation, periodic accountability and artistic creativity. In this regard, my intent is not so much to simply show the straightforward cunning within sections of the art world that preach up attacks for profit through a large diffusion of the allegedly ‘offensive’ expressions and tactics of a similar vein, but more critically to underline the cyclical nature of this violence. Husain’s towering status ensured that later attacks and the responses to them all contained implicit and direct references of some sort to his predicament and notoriety.

There are at least two issues of critical relevance, which place the art market at the centre not only of the phenomenon of violent attacks on artists and artworks but also simultaneously of altering the nature of dissent. First, besides the changes that were occurring in the political sphere in India, the widespread and dramatic increase in these attacks corresponded with the onslaught of economic liberalization of the 1990s, the aggressive surge of the art market and the globalized media regime. The excesses of wealth and poverty—both imagined and real—born of this surge in neoliberal consumer culture, an aspect of which was the burgeoning art world and the mind-boggling price tags that now began accompanying artworks, also became a measure of the socio-cultural crisis in society. Not only did the bourgeois art world appear as the most potent amalgam of exclusions, privilege and vanity, it also began to invite frustrations and suspicion from the everyman. Aided by political opportunism and malice, destruction of art became a way to destroy mysteries that envelope art—most of all, to borrow John Berger’s phrase, ‘the mystery of its unaccountable wealth’ (Berger, 2008, p. 17). As I have argued earlier (Maheshwari, 2019), in complicated ways, attacks themselves thus became an integral, though perverse, aspect of the larger contests for redistribution of power and dignity, aided by a favourable media network and its striking spectacles of ‘public debates’.

The second way in which the art market is central to this story lies in the passionate concern and anger that has been expressed—both creatively and strategically—by members of the art world against the increase in violence. While collective action undertaken by concerned artists, for instance, came to be hinged on a broad and fundamental opposition to the violent curtailment of the right to free speech and expression, it also led to the generation of ‘a fabulous population of new images, rejuvenated mediators, and more powerful ideas and stronger idols’, to use Bruno Latour’s phrase (Latour, 2002, pp. 16–17). It is this second aspect that underlines the most striking and paradoxical facet of art attacks: the more the artists responded to attackers (through images and words), the more opportunities they offered the offence takers to strike.

Let me ground this analysis through a more focused discussion on Husain and Sahmat. Since October 1996, Sahmat regularly issued protest statements demanding from the government of India protection for Husain and his family, protection for galleries showcasing his works and withdrawal of criminal and communal charges against him. Two years later, after the vandalism at the Academy of Fine Arts and Literature in Delhi, Sahmat additionally appealed to all political parties to raise the matter in the parliament. As such instances of physical assaults and threats against Husain, other artists and minorities multiplied across the country, it regularly began to organize conventions, dharnas, issued press releases, pamphlets and literature. However, if, on the one hand, a miscellany of artists under the umbrella of Sahmat, for instance, came together to ‘collectively resist’ the violent onslaught of communal propaganda, this violence also concurrently informed caution and fear amongst those who extracted the most profits from the business of buying and selling Husain’s artworks: private galleries, dealers and collectors, from most experienced to the most gullible. While they separately responded by temporarily removing Husain’s paintings from their walls, brochures and auctions, or hiring private security to protect their premises and property, the most acute collective representation of the art market’s self-interested disposition was the decision taken by organizers of the first India Art Summit in 2008 to exclude Husain’s works from being displayed by participating galleries. Notably, though until now Sahmat’s protests were directed against state authorities and the systematic advancement of communalism, one of their most tangible and creative demonstrations was mounted against this decision of the Summit, emphasizing the ballooning of private, market-induced insecurities. Coinciding with the Summit’s India Art Fair in Delhi, Sahmat organized a parallel exhibition of reproductions and photographs of solely Husain’s works, responding in an appropriately radical and creative way to their decision to not show Husain’s works. The main reason for recounting this instance is to show how argument made above stands in this regard. Therefore, as it happened, not only was Sahmat’s protest-exhibition vandalized—with the destruction of Husain’s prints and photographs, television set and furniture—Sahmat extended the vandalized exhibition by another day, in its ‘as-is’ condition, generating even more foot fall and attention.

Press conferences, press releases and art exhibitions like these were regularly organized by Sahmat, which very often found their wherewithal through the sale of artworks in auctions, private sales, opening of private foundations and through the sale and production of catalogues and ‘protest literature’. By keeping the sale and exchange mechanisms well-oiled, these attacks helped fashion a certain kind of market: a market providing serviceable mechanisms of democratic accountability and defiance. Focusing on the political economy of Sahmat’s creative protests, Arindam Dutta has shown that these initiatives allowed established collectors to reserve and buy art at discounted prices, and at the same time, elicited political participation from artists, where their politics was expressed not so much in the ‘message’ of the artwork as much as in expressing solidarity by ‘gifting’ their works for these sales (Dutta, 2005). Thus not just for dealers and collectors, but over time, for attackers too, art becomes an investment. I do not mean investment only in the monetary sense here, even though there were pecuniary incentives involved. I mean that the attacks on art—by generating counter images and protests—constantly open newer possibilities and prospects for those predisposed to combative attitudes, which keeps the cycle going. It is this aspect that makes art unique as a space for offence-taking, different from strikes on historical monuments or history textbooks: art has the simultaneous capacity to be in service for power as well as to constantly dissent against its abuses. The increase in attacks is a consequence of this situation. To borrow Laurent Gayer’s (2014, p. 12) understanding of the propagation of disorder and violence, ‘this metamorphoses of effect into cause is the key to endogenous reproduction and escalation of collective violence’. In this sense, attacks on artists and artworks, and the responses of the art market, represent both new problems and old patterns in how to think about the relationship between art, markets and democracy. For one thing, as Sahmat’s popular reputation as a ‘dissenting platform for artists’ spread, its reputation as dissenting heirs of Hashmi, declined. If Sahmat emerged as a broad coalition of artists and intellectuals, demonstrably ₹left-liberal’, modern, urban, secular and progressive cultural elites, much of the criticism it has received has been on account of its move away from the working class movement. While this underlines a fundamental shift from Hashmi’s life in dissent (Deshpande, 1996), it is reminiscent of Ashis Nandy’s suggestion of asking not so much the ₹why’ of dissent, but ₹what we can do with it,’ that is, a critical awareness of dissent’s arrangement and implications (Nandy, 1989, p. 1).

But there is another sense in which dissent, expressed through a robust culture of creative, non-violent protests by the art world—though ostensibly attempting to deepen a genuine commitment to democratic principles—has emerged as a discursive space for marketability of art and artists. The increasing frequency of attacks meant an increase in the number of rallies, protest marches, sit-ins, etc., organized by Sahmat and various other cultural groups. These became occasions for gathering artists, art critics, dealers, promoters, intellectuals and art lovers from across the country, generating conversations and creative energies, meetings and petitions for addressing common problems. For many, these gatherings became informal, though strategic, occasions for entering into business: to meet those otherwise inaccessible, to follow-up, to make contracts, to launch and showcase, to buy and sell, to exchange goods and services, or simply to be ‘seen’. For instance, echoing a sentiment I often heard during my field research, a Delhi-based gallerist stated that even though Husain was not ‘a favourite’, but ‘for business sake’, she ‘simply had to show face and attend these meetings’. Similarly, many younger artists found that these occasions ‘greatly helped’ because the underlying ‘feeling of solidarity’ made ‘introductions and conversations easier’, particularly with senior artists and influential art critics. The question therefore is not so much the ‘why’ of dissent, but what we can do with our ‘dissent’. Exploration of this question is precisely, which allows dissent its fluidity, making it less taut. If dissenters do indeed share an intimacy with the state, in their intent to undermine the other, do they not also share what their opponents might construe as their institutional and intellectual lapses?

My argument also derives its semantic potential from the transformation that occurred in the Burtian sense, from ‘real regulation’ to ‘regulation that is merely staged’, when integrated professionals of the art world such as gallery owners, event managers and indeed artists themselves, create controversy ‘to capture the market’, which may consequently generate greater publicity for the work and a likely increase in profits (Burt, 1994). I do not mean this simply in the sense that ‘controversy sells’. ¹⁰ Besides the belief that financial benefits can be yielded by publicizing art events as ‘controversial’, artists or artwork that have been targeted and threatened also transform into accessible symbols that can be traded in the market through a medley of terms such as ‘cutting-edge’, ‘oppressed’, and ‘innovative’, exploiting the abstract power underlying the discourse on suppression of free speech. The attacks on Husain were a particularly potent force shaping both socio-political and speculative hypothesis about the value of artworks and artists’ careers. For instance, the joint manipulative strategy of a Gurgaon-based gallery owner and a seasoned art critic to promote the career of a young, up and coming artist included mentioning the details of a verbal assault that took place at his exhibition in Bhopal a few months earlier in the artists’ curriculum vitae, and more brazenly, making this as the ultimate selling point, by labelling him as the ‘next Husain’ of India. Another recurring example that has been for many dealers and gallerists representing well-established artists, paintings with nudity in them, particularly of divine figures, is enough to emphasize what these artists had in common with Husain, and to consider this as an opportunity to push their sales internationally. By stating, for instance, that ‘very soon, such paintings would be rare to find’, or ‘they would no longer be in circulation’, because artists are now ‘too scared to touch religion’, while they accurately revealed the stages of self-censorship and fear in the art world, such statements equally disguised their main intent of ensuring the maximization of profit from reality. To this end, any publicity—negative or positive—that might come in the way, was welcomed, justified by numerous dealers as a business risk worth taking.

Another aspect, although similar in combining the forces of censorship and profit, is worth mentioning. Wealthy gallery owners, particularly in Mumbai and Delhi, spoke of approaching the local police thana for protection for their exhibitions against possible attacks. It is true, such responses clearly underline that public attitudes to art, since the mid-1990s, became increasingly disruptionist. Yet, further conversations with them revealed that by simply having the police or even hordes of private security guards present outside the gallery generated attention and perversely underscored the condition of seriousness or unconventional iconography. Such responses, although seemingly trivial, among other issues, underline a profound shift in the relationship between artists and the state. Unlike the trends in the 1970s and 1980s, this relationship, with the added variable of the market, is no longer intimate, or born out of either mutual respect or out of respect for constitutional values. Rather for both sides, if it tends to be cautious and functional, it is equally callous.

Theoretically, there are at least two ways in which this phenomenon can be understood. First, there is an analytical distinction between this new form of offence-taking and the age-old making of scandals for the art market, though they share certain procedural and substantive premises. Like offence-taking, scandals are socially and politically constructed; in a sense, they can be managed, lengthened and rearranged. Their focus on alleged transgressions—deliberate or unintentional—need not be new, they need only to be newly publicized in a way that ‘negatively orients’ their public. The nature of scandals, like offence-taking, is also acutely determined by the status of the offender, which in turn plays a role in transforming the status of the denouncer. The norms of entrepreneurship are worth keeping in mind: keeping low the costs of mounting a spectacle (done on their behalf by media networks), alongside hopes of reaping profits after having fomented strife. Yet, unlike scandals, characterized by the transformation of common knowledge into public knowledge (Adut, 2009), offence-taking, while it tends to generate dramatic public attention, almost always has its basis on false polarities and deliberate misinterpretation, however much festooned with notions of religiosity or hurt sentiments. But the most critical difference may be this: that violence of offence-taking is born out of criminality in politics; it is a symptom not just of mal-intent or intolerance, but the weakening, if not complete breakdown, of the political-legal order and the liberal commitment to consensus generation over conflict.

The second theoretical issue relates to our understanding of the art market. Elaborating on the economic concept of ‘circuits of commerce’, Olav Velthuis (2005, p. 6), in his seminal work on art markets, writes that ‘rather than being solely motivated by utility maximization, members of these circuits may be inspired by concerns of status, care, pride or power’. In the 15 odd years since the publication of this thesis, there has, however, been a widespread normalization of politics based on ascriptive identities, with corresponding widespread suppression of free speech and violent offence-taking. This has occurred not just in India, but in many large and robust democracies such as France, the United States, the United Kingdom and elsewhere, even if not at a similar scale. While these changes have implications for the theoretical and practical understanding of the political system of democracy, they equally have implications for the behaviour of markets, with offence-taking emerging as a significant additional variable in the ‘circuits of commerce’. No other variable over the last decade or so has been so intense, so widespread or so influential in determining the dynamic course of the conservative, the exploitative, the exclusionary and the free nature of the market. ¹¹

Conclusion

In a fascinating account of the ‘moral limits of markets’, political theorist Michael Sandel (1998) has shown the dangers that accompany the drift of democracies having a market economy to them becoming a market economy. Because markets do not simply allocate goods, but also promote attitudes towards those goods, a result of this, he argues, is the corruption of the goods themselves. This argument is pertinent to our discussion of democracy and art markets above, because dissents’ diminishment or corruption has precisely been that it has become a way to profit, in purely material terms, not as civic responsibility, not for democratic purposes. If what we can do with our dissent, is to sell and buy it for money, it underlines the basic existential predicaments facing not just artists, but also Indian democracy today, given that to differ, and to express that disagreement, is a necessary, if it is not a sufficient condition for the endurance of a liberal-democratic regime.

While the increasingly criminalized and communalized politics and the massive inequalities in the face of expanding private capital and media regimes, among other issues, have cumulatively informed the violent curtailment of free speech, the role played by art markets in artists’ dissent can itself be understood as a protest against the increasing homogenization of cultural and political discourses and state institutions, with its brutality, its exclusion of those who differ and dissent, its reduction of everything and everybody to ‘nationals’ and ‘anti-nationals’. The recognition of this shift is what renders the analytical separation of the artist and state as being on opposite sides unsustainable.

What makes the art market’s centrality in dissent so relevant in understanding India’s democratic fabric and future is that when suppression of democratic freedoms go far enough, and individual potentialities are denied with adequate ruthlessness, both the attacked and the attackers risk an easy transformation: from being citizens of a democratic state to commodities of trade in the market.