Why India's Likely Doomed to Become a Museum Culture

Prince of Wales Museum in Mumbai

Rupa Subramanya 

“Insensitive.” “Demeaning.” “Appalling.” “Glamorising rape.” “Too sensitive a subject to depict.” “Takes artistic freedom too far.”

This is typical of the social media outrage that erupted when Mumbai-based fashion photographer Raj Shetye put up on his website a fashion photo shoot that looked as if it was inspired by the December 16, 2012 gang-rape in Delhi.

After the adverse reaction, Shetye took down the images, but you can see some of them here.

My reaction when I saw the pictures: I didn’t find them especially interesting or inspired, but nor did I find anything offensive about them. In fact, as a stylised depiction of incipient or implied violence, they’re actually rather tame.

The over the top outrage on social media has now even inspired at least one politician to raise the issue in Parliament. 

Unfortunately, such reactions often tell us more about those protesting than what they’re protesting about. 

It’s perfectly fine for someone to say that they didn’t like these images or even that they found them crass or in poor taste. That’s an aesthetic judgement on their worth, and that’s OK. 

What’s not OK is when that negative judgement shifts over into saying things like the subject matter itself is too sensitive to be depicted, or saying that the work is illegitimate, worthless, or offensive merely because these images were not part of an “artistic” photography exhibit, say in a gallery, but were “commercial” photographs. 

Related to this second point are the many who claim that Shetye simply wanted to profit from the publicity that his photographs were sure to generate and therefore his motives again were somehow illegitimate. 

What surprised me the most was that critiques like these didn’t necessarily come from socially conservative religious types but from “liberal” people in creative fields themselves such as writers and artists. 

The art vs. commerce critique is the most nonsensical and is easily disposed of. It pre-supposes that a commercial motivation somehow delegitimises artistic creation, a proposition which is both illogical and flies in the face of the reality of the arts as they’ve been practiced for thousands of years. 

Artists, like other normal human beings, like to be paid for their work, and often they actually like to make lots of money. They also want publicity for their work.

Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Picasso weren’t creating what we now regard as universal masterpieces of their respective artistic media by sitting in a rarefied ivory tower thinking only noble thoughts.

They, and just about every major artist in any major field who’s lived or who ever will live in the future, were influenced by explicitly commercial factors such as the patrons they were dealing with and the market they were creating for.

Shakespeare, for instance, was keenly aware of the political significance of his history plays and tailored them to legitimise the seizure of the English crown by the Tudors. 

Does this make him a commercial hack? Of course not.

What made them geniuses is that these external pressures on them interacted with their own intrinsic creativity to produce great works of art, and not mediocre and disposable objects which served their market but had no lasting value.

How about the claim that a subject like rape is too sensitive to be depicted in a work of art? 

This again completely misses the point of what art at its greatest is able to do.

Some great art, for sure, depicts relatively “normal”, even bourgeois situations— think of the great novels of Jane Austen.

But other art directly challenges the cosy and comfortable world we live in and poses difficult, uncomfortable and unsettling questions that most definitely touch on “sensitive subjects”. 

Picasso’s “Guernica”, one of the great paintings of the twentieth century, reflects the agony and horror of the Spanish civil war — and by depicting that horror, creates one of the greatest anti-war works of art ever made.

War, murder and rape are a few of the subjects that show up throughout the history of literature and art and they most definitely raise “sensitive” issues. 

On rape specifically, the United States in particular has produced a number of very courageous and powerful artists who very vividly and graphically capture the horror of violence against women. 

The visual artist Keira Faber’ s 2012 series, “Completely Human”, depicts the artist herself, in a series of disturbing and provocative situations, nude, bound, restrained, and with the suggestion or threat of incipient violence. 

The late Ana Mendieta was powerfully affected by the rape and murder of a fellow student.

She created a work of performance art where people were invited to her apartment, and finding the door open, saw the artist stripped from the waist down.

Her body was covered with blood and was tied over a table, with objects in the apartment scattered, broken plates and cigarette butts, matching news reports of the state of Otten’s own apartment when her body was discovered.

It was the very “sensitivity” of the subject matter that was the point of these powerful works.

A slightly more sophisticated version of the same critique, superficially more plausible, is that an artistic depiction, say, of rape glamorises or exalts (or the opposite, trivialises) the subject matter and therefore is problematic. 

But this critique too misses the point.

Art by its nature distills the essence of the human experience and transforms the everyday into something of worth and of beauty  — even if that might be a terrible beauty. What’s more, a thoughtful viewer who’s provoked by a powerful work of art will inevitably think differently about the subject matter itself.

Far from “glamorising” rape, the work of Faber and Mendieta, among others, forces us to confront the evil reality of rape — with the intimacy and emotional power that art at its greatest carries.

Shetye’s work doesn’t carry (at least for me) the emotional charge of “great art” — but that doesn’t mean that it’s “non-art”, or that it’s OK to decry his motivations simply because he’s on the “commercial” rather than the “artistic” side of the street.

Yet this narrow-minded and dismissive attitude is what I hear from many artists and folks in creative fields.

Of course, these are sophisticated folks, and they won’t go and burn his studio down or threaten violence.

But they’ll close ranks and attempt to delegitimise and discredit him, and even suggest (as I’ve heard) that he shouldn’t get another assignment, and thereby hound him out of town as it were.

And others seeing this will take the hint and will refrain from approaching difficult subjects unless they do it in a way that’s approved by the “academy”.  

A country where everyone is quick to take instant offence is unlikely to become a centre for edgy, provocative, and progressive work in fields such as contemporary visual art, sculpture or performance art, all areas where artists who want to transgress the boundaries of what is considered “good taste” by the established cultural elite will find it difficult to obtain patronage, gallery space, or support of any kind. 

As I see it, India’s probably heading towards becoming another Greece, where our culture is ossified and lives in museums, and the small contemporary arts scene caters largely to a small, sybaritic urban elite whose tastes tend to be narrowly defined -- and is serviced by a small coterie of artists unable or unwilling to transgress the boundaries.

Whether you like Shetye’s work or not, he had the courage to tackle a difficult subject in the incongruous setting of a fashion shoot.

Unfortunately, when hounded by “liberals” who profess their love of free expression — except when they behave as arbiters of what is acceptable artistic expression —  he caved and took his works down. 

Built-in puritanism, coupled with a narrow-minded, judgemental, and sanctimonious attitude as to what is art and what is not and what is an acceptable subject and what is not, isn’t a formula for nurturing a thriving creative cultural scene. Nor does it do anything to deal with important social problems like violence against women. 

It’s a lose-lose situation all around.

Rupa Subramanya is co-author of Indianomix: Making Sense of Modern India (Random House 2012). She's on Twitter @rupasubramanya .