FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION
HIGH NOON. The culture wars of the last month are going to escalate: the intelligentsia will fight back. An email from the Delhi Art Gallery the night before appealed to all right thinking individuals to show up and join a “peaceful protest group… against fundamentalist groups asking for the closure of its historic show on the human body in Indian modern art”. The fundamentalist groups in question are the Durga Vahini and Matri Shakti, the two women’s wings (for women below and above the age of 35, respectively) of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), which forced the gallery on 4 February to temporarily shut down their exhibition, The Naked and the Nude that features almost 260 paintings by 60 artists, including MF Husain, FN Souza, KH Ara and K Laxma Goud. Their argument is that the exhibition is an immoral act, which depicts women as sex objects, and that it should not be allowed so soon after the brutal Delhi gangrape.
The gallery in New Delhi’s Hauz Khas Village — easy to find because of the number of OB vans parked outside — is preparing itself for a siege: the police has set up barricades, while security guards crowd the entrance to keep people without press cards or the right connections out. There are no fundamentalists in sight. Inside, a dozen or so culture warriors have shown up in solidarity, and are already outnumbered by journalists seeking sound bites. “If the Naga sadhus can be naked in front of 100 million people, why can’t we artists portray nudity in art?” asks artist Veer Munshi. “(The protesters) need an agenda to be radical, and this is just a pretext to get media attention.”
“This is a one-sided debate,” says Nilanjana Roy, a journalist and literary critic, who was among those rallying the troops. “We may argue freedom of expression, how nudes are part of our heritage, but all they need to do to win is show up. There is always the threat of violence against the artworks, or worse, against people.” Indeed, the threat of violence has been key to this ‘cultural emergency’, subverting all chances for an informed debate on the issues, and allowing the Tamil Nadu government, for instance, to ignore a Censor Board clearance and cancel screenings of Kamal Haasan’s Vishwaroopam in the state.
In one corner of the gallery, facing a bevy of cameras, is the man at the centre of this particular storm. Kishore Singh is the head of exhibitions at the gallery, and is “shocked and appalled” by the fact that his serious academic exercise of mapping the depiction of the human body in modern Indian art has been hijacked by politics. “Why are they protesting an art show?” he asks, incredulously. “They should be reacting to the Khap panchayats, to bride burning, to female foeticide. They should be incensed by the lack of development in this country.” He finds the contention that the exhibition objectifies women to be especially preposterous, pointing out how the modern masters he has featured use the nude form to feed a narrative about their subject, precisely the opposite of objectification.
Our conversation is interrupted by a phone call: a busload of protesters has arrived. The TV crews have already left to meet them. Chanting slogans against the gallery, a group of around 50 women marches on the barricades. Leading them are Simi Ahuja, the convenor of Matri Shakti, and Kusum Chauhan, vicepresident of the Durga Vahini. As the angry protesters chant, the television cameras surround Ahuja and Chauhan. No, they’re not against freedom of expression, they say, but the timing of the show is atrocious. Someone yells Khajuraho, the default argument in this longrunning debate. “Khajuraho was a different era,” says Ahuja. “It was the era of the Ramayana, where Laxman would not look above Sita’s ankles. Now, every woman, whether she is 16 or 60, is objectified by men. How can you then have an exhibition of naked women?” The running TV cameras stop me from pointing out that the Khajuraho temples were built some 1,000 years after the Ramayana was written, but horological concerns aside, the appropriation of the language of misogyny seems curious. Barely an hour ago, Kanchan Chander — a female painter known for her nudes — had told me, “I’m over 50, but even I get harassed on the road. These painters, through their sensitive treatment of the female form, have battled the objectification that women face.” Ahuja, who says she saw the exhibition earlier and was disgusted, says that her organisation is working for gender sensitisation of the youth. But what about painters like Jogen Chowdhury, whose paintings depicting women and the violence they face have been lauded by viewers and critics alike, I ask her. “Is the youth ready to appreciate the meaning of such art?” she replies. A fellow scribe asks her if she can name a few artists who have been exhibited. “I don’t want to comment on that,” she says.
Ahuja insists on camera that they will protest the exhibition every day until it is shut down, and that the protests will be non-violent. I ask Chauhan if that is indeed the case. She agrees, but a man standing next to her says that if peaceful protests do not work, they will turn to violence. He identifies himself as Vishnu Gupta, president of the Hindu Sena. I ask Chauhan for her reaction. “The Durga Vahini will not get violent,” she says. “Lekin agar seedhi ungli se ghee nahin nikalti to ungli tedhi karni hoti hai. We might get our brothers in the Bajrang Dal to intervene.” I put this statement to Ahuja, who dismisses it as the recklessness of youth. She calls over a pot-bellied man, who she says is her legal adviser, to confirm to me that they will not turn violent. “You can’t get much with non-violence,” he says, shaking his head, but refuses to comment further. Another man comes by, and they take Ahuja aside. Five minutes later, another journalist asks her the same question. “I will only be able to comment on our future plans after consulting our legal advisers,” she says. The ‘legal adviser’, who repeatedly directs the two leaders on how to manage the protesters, refuses to give his name or affiliation, saying only that he is here to make sure the women don’t have to face the police alone.
As minor scuffles break out, the protesters shift their ire to the police. “Why don’t you take off your clothes and stand nude?” one woman asks the policewomen, who, to their credit, do not react. “Even your mother would make similar statements if she was here,” says Ahuja, when I point it out to her. We eventually agree to leave my mother out of it, but the belligerence does not stop.
THE DEPICTION of nudity in art has a chequered history in India. The case of MF Husain, forced to leave the country because Hindu fundamentalists objected to his nude paintings of goddesses, has been well documented. Last year, artist Pranava Prakash was attac ked by a small group of protesters during an exhibition in Noida, where he had displayed nude paintings of the rather more secular Vidya Balan and Poonam Pandey. Nor, however much they use the rhetoric of female objectification, is the indignant right restricted to protesting only female nudity. Last January, Balbir Krishnan, a double-amputee, was brutally assaulted by an activist offended by his new series of male nudes.
It was the case brought against Akbar Padamsee — one of the artists exhibited here — that provided legal cover for painters to display nudes in galleries. “In 1954, I had an exhibition at the Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai, where I showed a painting with nude figures, called Lovers,” he recalls. “A police inspector saw it and asked me to take it down. I refused, telling him that only a judge could order that. I got a notice and was taken to the Small Causes Court. The judge there ruled in my favour.” The High Court, which heard the appeal, ruled that the police had no right to enter galleries.
“Nudes are part of our cultural tradition,” says artist Anjolie Ela Menon. “I have a Chola bronze statuette of Parvati in the nude. Kali is traditionally stark naked. Gods and goddesses have historically appeared naked in our art. And this is not just limited to the carvings at the Khajuraho temple.” Singh, however, refuses to make the Khajuraho argument to justify his exhibition. “This is a defensive argument,” he says. “I don’t need that validation. Why go back 1,000 years to defend what is happening now?” Choosing to focus on modern Indian art, he says that learning to draw nudes is — and has been for over a century in this country — an essential part of an artist’s education as it helps one grasp how to draw the human form. (He does say, however, that places like Khajuraho are some of the most wonderful classrooms for all artists.) Indeed, the oldest paintings in the exhibition are a pair of 1900 studies of male nudes by AP Bagchi, part of explorations in ethnography by British and Indian artists at the time. A number of artists not known for their nudes, or, for that matter, painting the human form, have works exhibited, such as Jamini Roy, known more for his ethnic prints, and the landscape painter Chittaprosad, whose nudes, Singh says, have a Reubenesque quality.
“The nude began as a study,” says Singh, “before artists developed it as something sensuous. Later, they realised that they could use the naked form to create a narrative. It did not matter whether the body was clothed or not. Apparel became a distraction at this point.” Menon says she doesn’t like clothing her figures because she doesn’t want to situate them historically or geographically. “There is something very universal about a nude figure,” she says. The exhibition shows how various artists use the naked form in different ways to make different points. Souza, for instance, has a complicated relationship with his nudes; a result, Singh says, of his complicated relationship with women. Many of his pieces are virile and angry (to the extent that a publicity manager for the gallery requested journalists not to publish them for fear that they might mischaracterise the entire exhibition as misogynist), but there are also more sensuous, respectful works. Husain’s works, meanwhile, are tamer, more sober, with amazing iconography, which makes it doubly perplexing that of all 60 artists, the VHP would demand most vehemently that his pieces be removed.
Nudity is also used to make a political statement, to show human degradation, as Munshi puts it. An untitled piece by B Prabha shows a half-naked woman with her dead son on her lap, looking askance at the heavens. Then there are works by Jogen Chowdhury and Bikash Bhatta charjee showing the humiliations faced by women. Bhattacharjee’s Ceremony, for instance, shows the shame of a woman whose hair has been shorn as part of an initiation, while Chowdhury, who Singh says saw the human as a corrupt being, shows a woman butchered to pieces in Yellow Flower.
The various artists TEHELKA spoke to had various interpretations of why artists use nudity and how nudity came to be used in Indian art, but show no ambiguity on whether the nude in mainstream Indian art is vulgar. “It is the people who make charges of obscenity and vulgarity who have the worst minds,” Padamsee says. If only such a debate could have taken place between the two sides. That was not to be, however. “Yes, we can have a debate,” said Ahuja. “But first, they should close the exhibition, and if they win, they can reopen it.” She relented, it seems, for a police officer made his way to the gallery and told the authorities that the protesters wished an audience. Singh refused. “Let them withdraw their protest first; only then will I entertain them.”
An hour later, the crowd had disper – sed. Did the protesters leave first or the TV cameras, I asked a policeman. “They left together,” he said with a chuckle.
With inputs from Aradhna Wal
ajachi@tehelka.com
Clinical Trials: Storm in the Medicine Chest
In 2005, Rajkumar Tiwari, a clerk at a transport company in Indore, had a son. The mother and child were doing well, and Tiwari was happy. At the end of the first month, his wife took the baby to Chacha Nehru Bal Chikitsalaya, a children’s hospital attached to Indore’s largest public hospital, for what they thought was a routine inoculation. She was made to sign a few papers, after which the baby was given two injections on his heel by paediatrician Dr Hemant Jain. Within 24 hours, their child was dead.
Ashish Jatav was luckier. A day after his son was born, the embroidery worker received a call from the same hospital asking him to bring the child. His wife and mother took the child there, where he was given what Jatav thinks was “some kind of polio vaccine” by Dr Jain. In all, the child received “either three or four” doses. That was in 2008.
Tiwari put his son’s death down to fate. “I didn’t even try to contact the hospital,” he says. And Jatav didn’t make any further enquiries about the vaccine his son had received.
That’s where matters would have rested had it not been for a question on clinical trials that cropped up in the Madhya Pradesh Assembly in late 2010. In response, the health department submitted a list of 81 people who had been enrolled in clinical trials between 2006 and 2010. That, shockingly, is how Tiwari and Jatav realised that their children had been used as guinea pigs in clinical trials.
The papers their illiterate wives had been made to sign had been passed off as the ‘informed consent’ that is required from participants in clinical trials. They had been given no verbal explanations, nor were they given copies of the documents they had signed. They had trusted the doctors of Chacha Nehru Bal Chikitsalaya, the city’s largest public children’s hospital.
Investigations by the state government and RTI requests from activists revealed that Dr Jain was conducting these trials for Panacea Biotec, a large Delhi-based pharmaceutical company. Jatav’s son was given drops of an untested polio vaccine, and according to PD Karan of Panacea, Tiwari’s son got the Haemophilus influenzae type B conjugate vaccine.
In its defence, Panacea claims that all participants in their trials were given consent forms in Hindi, which were subsequently approved by the hospital’s ethics committee.
The company says that of the 640 children involved, three died during the trials. Panacea claims that none of the deaths was related directly to the trials.
However, Panacea was not the only company for which Dr Jain was running trials. According to a report by the Madhya Pradesh government’s Economic Offences Wing, he conducted clinical trials on 2,500 patients for a number of different companies between 2006 and 2010. There were 18 deaths during the course of these trials, none of which was investigated by any independent agency.
Dr Jain, a government doctor, was paid Rs 1.7 crore for the trials. Not a penny of that went to the hospital. Dr Jain says he is “not interested in answering any questions”.
“We might be poor,” says Tiwari angrily, “but even the poorest wouldn’t subject their children to a trial vaccine.”
India emerged as a global pharma destination in 2005 when it amended patent laws to recognise product patents. Also amended were the rules that required foreign companies to conduct clinical trials in India only after they had successfully completed trials abroad. Now, companies could conduct trials in India concurrently and use clinical trial data generated in India for their patent applications abroad.
The clinical trial market burgeoned, growing from almost non-existent to one that the Boston Consulting Group estimates is now worth $400 million a year.
However, India’s regulatory infrastructure and the laws governing the pharma sector had not changed significantly. They were completely inadequate to control an industry that had been growing at over 20 percent every year.
As new details emerged in Madhya Pradesh, the issue simmered. Anand Rai of Indore-based NGO Swasth Samarpan Seva Samiti tried to get in touch with all the 81 participants, and filed RTI requests to unearth more details about the trials.
Then, last January, Swasthya Adhikar Manch, another Indore-based NGO, filed a case in the Supreme Court alleging that the Madhya Pradesh government had allowed completely unregulated, large-scale clinical trials of a whole array of drugs. In a writ petition, it alleged that many other states had done the same. It wanted the Union health ministry to provide details about the number of people enrolled in clinical trials, the number of deaths and the compensation given.
And that cracked open the anarchic can of worms that the pharma establishment in India (both government and private) had become. It was going to be a year of more revelations and indictments. What happened in Madhya Pradesh had also happened in Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and many other states.
The chaos in clinical trials, it emerged, was mirrored by regulatory laxity in drug control and the government’s tacit submission to various vested interests on intellectual property issues.
The blowback was swift. The furore on clinical trials was followed by a scathing Parliamentary Committee report on the functioning of the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO), the apex body for drug approval and the regulation of clinical trials in the country.
At the same time, the Indian Patent Office rejected a number of major patent applications of pharma MNCs, and issued the first compulsory licence for the manufacture of a drug in India. This lead to a drastic reduction in the prices of critical drugs used to treat diseases like cancer.
The government also took a conservative stand on FDI in pharma, unlike what it was doing in most other sectors. The Department of Pharmaceuticals introduced a new drug price control system, the first amendment since 1994.
In the meantime, the Planning Commission was working on a broader canvas, suggesting changes that would refocus India’s health policy in the 12th Five Year Plan period (2012-17) on public health. The individual regulatory processes had started earlier, but in 2012, the strands coalesced into what will hopefully become a comprehensive net.
Everyone in the pharma industry has been affected. In a departure from the norm, the three government departments that handle pharma issues — the ministries of health; chemicals and fertilisers; and commerce — have spurred into action.
Pressure from civil society and the SC’s intervention has set into motion a series of regulatory changes in the pharma establishment that will have far-reaching consequences, determining the path of the industry over the next decade.
“It was the year when drugs took centrestage,” says Dr Ranjit Roy Chaudhury, who has worked with the government, the WHO and a number of private research organisations on health policy. “Public consciousness has been raised, and today more than ever before, there is demand for better control and availability of medicines and the rational use of drugs.”
But greater government regulation has meant reduced profits for the pharma industry, and that has not gone down well. So rattled is the industry that Tapan Ray, the head of the Organisation of Pharmaceutical Producers of India, hopes that “what happened in 2012 will not be a general trend in the future”.
Unfortunately for him, the ball has already been set rolling. What started last year is gathering pace, and will be refined by a series of reports and court orders that are expected. It’s leading to greater transparency and accountability in the government’s health regulation and in the private medical and pharma industry.
When Rai filed an RTI request with the Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) asking for data on clinical trials, he was first stonewalled. Then emerged a smorgasbord of conflicting data. All of it seemed to point in one direction.
Not only did the apex drug control body (of which the DCGI is the head) not maintain a central database of clinical trial deaths, but there was little monitoring of trials or the compensation paid to victims who suffered serious adverse drug reactions. This was despite the fact that all clinical trials post 2009 are required to be registered on the Clinical Trials Registry.
That the monitoring of clinical trials had been almost non-existent became obvious by the end of 2012, as the government pulled out different, often conflicting data.
According to the DCGI, there had been 2,031 deaths during clinical trials between 2008 and 2011. 668 of these had taken place in 2010, of which 22 were directly related to clinical trials. In these cases, the companies conducting the trials had paid varying compensations, but the DCGI was not aware of the amounts.
The ethics committees overseeing clinical trials were responsible for deciding whether a death was related directly to it. In a clear conflict of interest, these committees were, according to Rai, “composed of members from the institutions where the trials were being held”.
The DCGI did not furnish data for the other years. “The data of respective trial sites and their respective states is not maintained by this directorate,” it averred. No action has been taken against the drug companies, clinical trial research organisations or the hospitals involved.
In the meantime, other data emerged in an answer given by Union Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad in response to a question in Parliament. According to him, there were 16 deaths each in 2009 and 2011. Compensation had been paid in all cases that occurred in 2011.
The government had no rules on compensation to the victims of clinical trails, therefore the money doled out by the companies in all these cases had been at their discretion.
Yet more data emerged from the case filed by Swasthya Adhikar Manch in the SC. In an affidavit filed on 3 January by R Chandarashekar of CDSCO, the government claimed that between 1 January 2005 and 30 June 2012, there had been 2,644 deaths during clinical trials. Of these, 80 were directly due to the trials. Compensation had been paid in the 40 cases that occurred in 2008-11; and the agency was “now ascertaining the status of such cases pertaining to the year 2005 onwards”.
The figures from all the sources above were at variance. Azad’s reply in Parliament put the deaths in 2009-11 at 54, whereas the CDSCO affidavit put it at 40 for a longer period!
A similar state of confusion prevailed when it came to the number of patients enrolled in clinical trials across India.
Those who had suffered serious adverse reactions were completely ignored. The CDSCO affidavit put their numbers at 11,972 (for the same period), of which it stated that 506 were related to clinical trials. The CDSCO was not aware if any compensation had been paid in these cases.
Matters only got murkier.
Not only did the drug controller not have any reliable data on clinical trials, Azad’s reply revealed that it had conducted only 23 inspections of trial sites and companies in 2008-12. Shockingly, during this period, the same agency had allowed the clinical trials of 1,544 drugs.
All this had worked in favour of the growing clinical trial industry with clinical trials of drugs that Mira Shiva of the All India Drug Action Network says are “largely irrelevant to India”.
India was a cheap destination for pharma MNCs to conduct clinical trials (for drugs to be marketed abroad), and there was a huge pool of people to be used.
Ironically, while on the one hand these clinical trials were growing, the drug control agency was increasingly letting pharma firms introduce new drugs in India without conducting mandatory clinical trials.
In a May 2012 report, which Dr Chaudhury calls “remarkable” and “unprecedented” for its brutal honesty, a Parliamentary Standing Committee pointed out these glaring violations.
Randomly scrutinising the approval of 42 new drugs given by CDSCO, the committee found that files for three controversial drugs were untraceable.
Of the remaining 39 for which the files did exist, 11 drugs were not put through mandatory phase III trials. Thirteen drugs were not approved for sale in any major developed country (including Buclizine, a controversial appetite stimulant for children) and had no “special relevance to India”. For 25 drugs, approval had not been taken from medical experts.
In all, the regulator had waived the mandatory clinical trial requirement for 31 drugs between January 2008 and October 2010. This included Ambrisentan, a hypertension medication manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline, and Colistimethate, an antibiotic made by Cipla, which were likely to be used widely.
More worryingly, it pointed out that most of “expert opinions” justifying the waivers were “written by the invisible hands of drug manufacturers and experts merely obliged by putting their signatures”.
“The clinical trial system was a complete mess,” says Sakthivel Selvaraj, a health economist at the New Delhi-based Public Health Foundation of India.
AS THESE revelations emerged, the government was forced to act. The CDSCO put out guidelines regulating the ethics committees overseeing clinical trials. The guidelines stipulate that the committees should have at least seven members, including some who are independent of the institution conducting the trial, besides one layperson (not from the medical establishment). It also required the committees to be registered with the state or central licensing authority.
There were also guidelines for the compensation for injuries and deaths related to clinical trials. These took into account the patient’s age, earning capacity and the extent of injury.
The onus of proving that an injury or death was not due to the clinical trial was transferred to the sponsor, and a time frame stipulated within which the victim was to be compensated. Ethics committees were now required to report all adverse reactions to the regulator.
A whole slew of New Drug Advisory Committees were also constituted to advise the CDSCO on the approval of clinical trials and new drugs. Clinical trials of new drugs would now have to be approved by a separate committee controlled by the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR).
In its order on 3 January, the SC was even more restrictive, directing that all clinical trial applications be temporarily approved by the health ministry secretary.
A government panel set up to look into the Parliamentary Standing Committee’s allegations on the approval of new drugs has submitted its report, which is yet to be made public. VM Katoch, head of this committee and director-general of ICMR, did not respond to emails and phone calls.
Predictably, the pharma and clinical trial industry is worried. Anil Raghavan, head of the Indian operations of Quintiles, a large MNC contract research and clinical trial company, finds these changes disturbing. “These are knee-jerk solutions to societal concerns,” he says. “They have caused confusion and concern in the industry about the intent and direction of government policy.”
A report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Confederation of Indian Industries reiterates this stating that as a result of these changes and the consequent delays in clinical trial approvals “some contract research organisations are looking to increase focus on other geographies”.
That wouldn’t be cause for concern in the case of clinical trials of drugs that are not relevant to India, but it could lead to significant delays in the introduction of important drugs manufactured by MNCs.
In the long run, this regulatory churn seems inevitable, almost overdue. It’s the first step to a more radical and comprehensive overhaul. “Making these changes in our system is very difficult,” says Chaudhury, “this is the start of a process that will play out across the next decade.”
akshai@tehelka.com
‘Secular historians have to see religious texts in human terms’
Photo: Shailendra Pandey
As a historian, how much scope is there for treating religious texts as ancient documents, rather than the word of God?
It goes without saying that if you are a historian, you are going to presume that religious texts are of human origin and products of human civilisation, and you are obliged to treat them that way. I think that there is a problem, because the tradition of looking at scripture as an ancient text like any other rather than as imbued with the language of God, is ultimately a Christian one, because there are four versions of Jesus’ life. So, right from the early church fathers, they have looked at the Bible in a textual way, trying to make sense of it as a text that has originated from different people at different times. That goes all the way through into the Enlightenment. Essentially, what happens in the Enlightenment and the 19th century is that in most traditions of scholarly investigation of the text, God is bled away from it. It becomes a purely secular activity. That is then applied to the fabric of the Bible. The image that has been used to describe this process is always that of termites (destroying the house of Christianity), and there was a German scholar in the 19th century who said that if we carry on with it, then essentially all that will be left of the traditions about Moses would be “airy nothings”. Now, obviously, that was and continues to be very upsetting for Jews and Christians, to have their scriptures taken to pieces like that. It is even more upsetting for people of other faiths when Western scholars start applying that methodology to their texts. So, there is an inherent degree of offense there. But I think, ultimately, the secular historian just has to say, “Well, you believe it. As someone who is not a believer, I have no choice but to explain it in human terms.” I think that is perfectly acceptable.
Is there a motivation to free the text from the self-appointed authorities of the scripture?
It is an attempt to place the text in the context of the culture in which it emerged. What all religions do is that they reach a point of canonisation, where the scholars who are controlling what becomes orthodox rewrite the back story. The rabbis recalibrate the Bible as a record of rabbis, so Moses becomes a rabbi, Adam becomes a rabbi, God becomes a rabbi. This is very ahistorical, but that is what they do. When the Christian canon is solidified in the fourth century, the church fathers write out all the gospels that didn’t make it into the canon, and they make it seem as though there has been a seamless progression from the time of St Paul up to the Council of Nicaea (325 AD). Likewise, with Muslims, we have no records of the life of Mohammed, no textual analysis of the Quran for about 200 years after the death of Mohammed. And the reason for that simply is that the explanation for how the Quran came into being is only arrived at that late. So, it constructs a model which basically rewrites how it was created. What’s required of the historian, as opposed to the believer, is to attempt to work out what actually happened. The irony is, of course, that this is exactly what the Salafists are trying to do. It’s just that they arrive at radically different conclusions.
I suppose that it’s also very important to be respectful in reading these texts.
I think that what is disrespectful is to presume that if you look at someone’s religion sceptically, the adherents of that religion are so intolerant that they will come and kill you. I think that that is the really intolerant attitude. You should rely on the good sense and tolerance of the people you are studying. But that doesn’t mean you go around sneering and mocking the religion.
Someone like Richard Dawkins, for example…
I think he overdoes it. I can see why he overdoes it. I suppose as an evolutionary biologist, I can absolutely understand that it must be infuriating to have people tell him that it’s nonsense. He really does have a dog in the fight. But I’m not as confident about my conclusions as Dawkins is about his. I think, by their nature, the origins of religion are puzzling, because, as I said, the back stories have been rewritten. And who knows? Maybe God does exist.
Holland is a novelist and popular historian, whose controversial book In the Shadow of the Sword was made into the documentary Islam: An Untold Story
‘Elements in each religion nourish violence’
Photo: Shailendra Pandey
What would someone who is decidedly atheistic gain from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata?
The epics have been religious texts, but their essence and narrative capacities lie not in invoking religious sentiments. They are aimed at making you understand what life is all about and raising questions about modern conduct, what the human world is impacted by. I think the two great epics tell you how to live. I have been very fond of saying that we not only live in Bharat but also, simultaneously, live in the Mahabharata. It is full of violence and betrayals, what we have in human life today. Ultimately, the lesson of the Mahabharata is that war not only defeats the vanquished, but also the victor; that war cannot achieve anything, even if it is a dharmayuddha. So, these epics are full of insight, wisdom, questions and doubt, which, I think, makes them very modern. This is unlike the epics in the West, which now exist only in textbooks, libraries, academic circles, but not in life. Homer is no longer relevant in people’s lives, The Iliad is not talked about today. But there will be 5,000 performances taking place all over India related to the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. These are living epics, which is a very unusual phenomenon.
You say that the Mahabharata is more relevant today than Homer’s works. How much of this is because of the divinity we assign to it, which is, after all, not attached to The Iliad?
I am a non-believer; I don’t have the gift of belief. But I read the two epics as great literary epics. I am not concerned with the divinity of it, and there are many others who aren’t either. The element of divinity that is assigned to them has not prevented them from being used for secular purposes. The Ramayana, for instance, was translated by Akbar into Persian, and he called painters from Gwalior, Kashmir and parts of Rajasthan to come and illustrate it. Rahim Khan-e-Khana, who was his senapati as well as a great Urdu poet, commissioned another translation. Now surely, these people did not do so for religious reasons; they wanted to find out what India was all about, what India thinks. This has happened over centuries. So, the epics have a quality of abiding, a quality of assistance, a quality of permeating. There are any number of things in them that are objectionable today, but they survive all that. A classic is one that survives. You do not have to keep or remove the divinity: just read them. These are texts which can be read with a very secular mind and without any ritualistic apparatus. They speak to both the religious and the secular.
In a number of the sessions here, religions have been criticised for flaws in their founding texts. For instance, we had a session on sharia law, and another where Kancha Ilaiah and Ajay Navaria got into a debate on the Buddha’s misogyny. There was also a recent controversy over misogyny in the Mahabharata, which Bibek Debroy addressed in an essay for TEHELKA. How do you reconcile these readings, many of them stemming from changes in attitudes after these texts were written?
I think the problem is different. No religion is perfect, and no religion is without problems and infirmities. While all religions aspire to the condition of the absolute, none of them in fact is, nor could be, in the first place. Now, there have been things in all religions, without exception, that one can find fault with. Recently, when the Delhi rape took place, some of the religious leaders made atrocious comments. I wrote a piece in which I said that what should have happened is that all religions in a democracy can be allowed to exist and grow only if they accept the basic concept of democracy, that is equality between man and woman. And I would have imagined, ideally, that all religious leaders should have come out in support of this equality.
Also, all religions today, without exception, are violent. And a lot of the violence today is because of religious strife. But the violence of religions does not necessarily emanate from misinterpretation. There are elements within each religion that nourish some kind of violence. That’s what they must be held accountable for. They cannot get away by saying this is misinterpretation. This is like saying that Marx had nothing to do with the atrocities associated with communism, that this was a misinterpretation of Marx by Lenin and Stalin, which is absurd. There is something in Marxism which allows such homicide. So religions cannot be absolved; they are not the havens of peace that each one of them would like to believe. Religion must allow doubt, must allow questions, enquiry and knowledge. But, by that same token, they must also be allowed to have the notion that their existence itself is sacred.
Vajpeyi is a poet and cultural commentator
‘We have to learn from each other, or we are doomed’
Photo: Shailendra Pandey
As a human rights lawyer, you have studied sharia law. What is your reading of sharia?
There’s a very important distinction between certain concepts, which needs to be understood from the outset. The word ‘sharia’ in Arabic means ‘path’, and, more specifically, a path towards water. In the seventh century, that was understood to be the best path that you would take. To a desert people, it was very important to find a way to water, and metaphorically, it means the route you will take towards salvation. The English equivalent, I would say, is the straight and narrow. So, it’s a general notion of the right thing to do. Justice, if you will. And that’s how most Muslims understand the sharia. Even many liberal Muslims. I was listening to an Egyptian opposition figure, who was talking about “our sharia”, and how it must not involve compulsion, must not involve violence. So, the word ‘sharia’ to a Muslim is the right thing to do by God, and that is inviolable. You don’t argue against the sharia, no matter what your beliefs are about liberalism or conservatism.
But there’s another word — fiqh — which means understanding, and that has been understood for centuries by Muslims to be the human attempt to understand God’s purpose and to understand how to achieve this ‘justice’ that is the sharia. Muslims have always understood that fiqh is open to discussion, and it took the collection of the hadiths, the statements about what the Prophet said and did, 250 years to be written down, and there are a number of versions, both Sunni and Shia, which all led to different schools of law coalescing. They all approach the question of how to interpret the sharia in different ways. I don’t think it’s very controversial to say that this is my interpretation. This is actually how it has operated for more than a thousand years. If you look around the world today, I think you would be crazy to believe that there is one understanding of sharia. There are many, and it is that chaos that’s part of the problem. But another way of looking at it is the diversity and richness of the tradition. And this richness of tradition is also a great source of strength; it’s the reason why sharia is still so important 1,400 years after the death of the Prophet.
In the session on sharia, Asghar Ali Engineer talked about there being two types of verses in the Quran: normative and contextual. Could you explain the distinction?
What he’s argued is effectively a similar thing to what I’m saying, that there are certain verses in the Quran, which must be understood as being absolute for all time. There’s a word in Arabic for that called nas, which means that they are inviolable obligations. Then there are certain verses which are clearly revealed in the seventh century for a specific aspect of the Prophet’s life. For example, there are verses which relate to his relations with his wives. Engineer referred to the permission that is given to men to marry up to four times, but the Quran does say that you have to be in a position to keep them, and if you can’t, then you shouldn’t marry more than once. If one wants to look at them in a contextual way, this was a time when everyone was going to war very often, and the number of war widows and orphans was very large. So, polygamy performed a valuable social function. But that valuable social function doesn’t apply in the same way in advanced industrial societies, and it does hold a potential for being greatly abused. So, if one puts that into the historical context, the verses supporting polygamy may have had relevance then, but do not have relevance today.
But who decides whether a verse is normative or contextual?
Well, this is the huge problem. It’s a strength and a weakness of Islam, because Islam obviously does not have a Pope. It doesn’t have a central figure who decides that this is the way that it is. Obviously, some hardliners will say that of course it’s got a central figure — God — and that God has told us what is what. But then, they’re the people who are interpreting what God is saying, and they’re making that decision by cloaking themselves with the authority of God. The reality is that there isn’t a central figure, and I think in this context one has to fall back on the notion of humility. One can’t simply state that one knows what is best for all of humanity. So there isn’t an answer to your question. There’s no point in claiming that Asghar Ali Engineer knows the answer and that his interpretation is absolutely correct. I happen to agree, obviously, with his interpretation about polygamy, and a large number of Muslims would. But when you’re talking about who has the ultimate spiritual authority to decide that, there isn’t anyone.
Is the prescriptive nature of Islam a weakness?
No, I don’t think it is a weakness at all. I think there are certain prescriptions which no longer should be applied. I’m a human rights lawyer; I’m not going to justify amputations of hands for the act of theft. And I’m not alone. The number of Muslim countries which actually carry out these penalties is minimal. That is precisely because people are contextualising this and recognising that one has to take account of economic and social factors as well as the fact that we have moved 1,400 years, and certain standards and expectations of justice have changed in that time.
How important is it to read the texts of other religions in order to enrich your own?
There are many people who would say that it isn’t important at all, because the Quran is entire in itself. My personal view is that it is very important, in fact, to read other texts, because texts don’t exist in isolation, just as human beings don’t. A text only has meaning because of what you bring to it and the society you come from. That is precisely why the interpretations of the Quran will differ from place to place. Because these interpretations differ, I think it is important to recognise that one is a product of one’s influences. There is a famous hadith where the Prophet said, “Seek knowledge even unto China.” One has to be open to experiences. We are living in a world where there are huge amounts of dangers, and there are also huge amounts of opportunities. We have to learn from each other, and if we don’t, we’re doomed. There are people in all other religions who are open to dialogue, and so are Muslims. Anybody who says that Muslims uniquely are not or should not be open to dialogue is wrong in my opinion.
Kadri is a human rights lawyer and author of Heaven on Earth, an examination of sharia law
‘You have to translate religious language into ‘secularese’
Photo: Shailendra Pandey
How would you suggest someone read religious texts in a secular manner?
I would not dream of prescribing to anyone how they read a religious text. I think they should read it however they want to. What I would insist upon, about the nature of every religious text known to me, is that they have multiple interpretations, and the person I distrust is a person, be they a devout believer or total atheist, who says this is the one true interpretation of a holy text. The other point, which is very important, particularly for us in Europe, is to have a way of understanding the message of a religious text in a secular society. In a way, you have to translate this religious transcendental language into what I would call ‘secularese’, into a language that others can understand.
Someone once quite rightly said that the Quran, or indeed the Bible or the Torah, is not an automobile instruction manual. It’s not a precise set of instructions. The Quran, like many holy texts, has multiple, not obviously consistent, messages. Let me give you an example. We have on our Oxford University website an interpretation by a very learned Iranian scholar, Mohsen Kadivar, who says on a very scholarly reading of Islamic law that the Quran prescribes no earthly punishment for apostasy. In the afterlife, yes, you’re going to have a tough time, but no earthly punishment. I think that’s an important statement, and to be quite frank, I have a slightly pragmatic attitude to this. Since I’m in no position to judge what is a correct reading, I favour the interpretation which makes being a Muslim more compatible with a free and open society.
What are some of the pitfalls you guard against?
I think there are two equal and opposite pitfalls. One is the essentialist fallacy, where you make a superficial reading of the holy texts and say, “So the essential message of Hinduism is this…” The opposite danger is what I called raisin picking, where you just take out a few choice quotations that fit comfortably with your liberal convictions. That won’t do either. In other words, we have to have a real interpretation, which sets up some proper historical and literary context on which to build.
In the Anglican church, for instance, there is a General Synod that decides the extent to which the church adapts to modern times. In Buddhism, the decision to allow women into the clergy was made through democratic means when the Buddha’s resistance was overruled by the members of the sangha. How important is the exercise of the followers of a religion democratically deciding the interpretation of its foundational texts, rather than one man — and it generally is a man — making pronouncements?
This, I think, is a question of authority or representation. Who speaks for Catholicism or Islam? It is a complicated question, because people like to say Islam needs its reformation. And Islam can’t have its reformation because it has no central authority. So that makes the matter actually more difficult, paradoxically. It’s easier if you have a clear structure of authority, even if it is undemocratic, to make the reformation. On the other hand, in Shia Islam, it’s fascinating to see the marketplace of ideas between competing Grand Ayatollahs, which is not a democracy, but it’s certainly pluralism. So, I would say that a centralised authority and a decentralised free-for- all each have their advantages and disadvantages. By the way, even in the Catholic church, which clearly is the largest single centralised authority in religious history and is certainly not democratic, many people will disagree with what Pope Benedict XVI says as the last word on their religion.
Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies at Oxford University and a regular columnist with The Guardian
Killing the novel – Review of Midnight's Children
Director Deepa Mehta
Starring Satya Bhabha,
Siddharth Narayan,
Shriya Saran,
Shabana Azmi
WHILE THE commonest observation — to the extent that repeating it is slightly intellectually lazy — on watching a film based on a book is that it is not as good as the original, there are some films that make one re-examine why they liked the book in the first place. Deepa Mehta’s Midnight’s Children, based as it is on a book that was adjudged the greatest to come out of the Commonwealth in 40 years, is one such film.
Rushdie has said that the film is not an adaptation, but a “first cousin” to his masterpiece. If so, it is the dolled-up but incredibly shallow first cousin you smile at in family reunions, may even have a slight crush on, but with whom you cannot sustain a conversation beyond a few pleasantries. When it came out in 1981, Midnight’s Children was unlike anything that had been written before, indulgently playing around with language, narration and the nature of truth and breaking almost every rule of narrative fiction. Although it dealt with a weighty theme — the intertwined histories of its protagonist and postcolonial India — there was a refreshing, almost necessary, lightness that allowed the reader room to breathe and take it all in, and a complete lack of sentimentality. Mehta’s treatment is almost diametrically opposite. It discards almost all of Rushdie’s subtlety and replaces it with a badly written “love letter to India”, finishing with the cringeinducing spectacle of the end credits being played against a backdrop of the Indian map in sepia. Moreover, deprived of Rushdie’s biting social commentary, it becomes a series of events that occur to no particular end, quite like Les Misérables was hamstrung as a musical and film.
Last week, TEHELKA’s literary editor Shougat Dasgupta wrote in his piece on Deepa Mehta that it would be unfair not to acknowledge the “artistic risk Rushdie is taking to reduce a novel that is iconic, without question the great Indian novel (in English), to a screenplay… It is also unfair to Mehta, a considerable filmmaker who infuses the film with her own teeming, emotional style.” True, the fact that an attempt has been made to adapt a novel of this scale into a film is commendable, as is Rushdie’s gumption to roll up his sleeves and help with the unenviable task. But it is baffling that the dynamic duo refused to take the artistic risks that Rushdie took in writing the book.
“What’s real and what’s true aren’t necessarily the same,” Rushdie wrote in the novel, which is told through a notoriously unreliable narrator, whose version of the story is repeatedly challenged by his wife-to-be, Padma (who, sadly, is missing from the film). Mehta, however, presents the story as unimpeachably true, narrated not by a 30-year-old fearing the imminent disintegration of his body, but by an eminent Rushdie narrating his life story for no particular reason (it is telling that Rushdie’s narration is the best part of the film, allowing him to use some of his most memorable lines from the novel). This, of course, has its inevitable pitfalls: the question of Saleem’s nose, for instance. We know he was switched at birth, so cannot possibly be related to Aadam Aziz, whose exceptionally large nose he is said to have inherited. By not acknowledging, like Rushdie did, that the story has imperfections, Mehta leaves the question unanswered for viewers who notice the flaw.
This abandonment of imperfection is, with no little irony, possibly the most glaring flaw in the film. Mehta infuses every frame with a forced lyricism, attempting to get the perfect lighting, camera angles and background music. This works at places; the darkness of the Emergency, with the image of Shiva watching over the destruction of the magicians’ ghetto is, if not entirely subtle, beautiful. But it makes the film a typical Deepa Mehta work, robbing this most unique of books of its very personality.
Ajachi Chakrabarti is a Correspondent with Tehelka.
ajachi@tehelka.com
The ‘I’ of the beholder
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WHY DO we look at art? How do artists satisfy viewers? Do they intuitively know what is beautiful? Peak Shift Effect, a show marking 25 years of Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, tries to answer these questions.
In neuroaesthetics, peak shift effect signifies that an artist can magnify visual stimulus to peak a viewer’s response. An artist picks on the “principle of beauty”, says curator Gayatri Sinha. “Science is recognising now the artist’s natural talent that practitioners have long known. Why do generations of people visit museums to see art objects? Because beauty has a universal quality.” Sinha has tried to adapt the theme to this group show, the first of the three in the Gallery’s roster this year, that hunts for an aesthetic in all aspects of life — domestic, public, death and history. The idea is to see the three floors of the Gallery as an evolving space — the ground floor houses works that play with domesticity, the second floor asks questions of one’s identity in the city, the third has works drawn from history. Yet, what is intriguing in theory fails to transform into practice.
On the ground floor, Hema Upadhyay’s Pedestrian continues with her signature theme of placing her body in her art. The figures running across a carpetsize canvas on the ground are of the artist herself. If you remove them from their patterns, the work fades away. “It questions the elevated status of art. The audience, which at first is a spectator, goes on to become an important part in disintegrating it,” says Upadhyay.
On the walls, there are breathtaking pictures by Sunil Gupta, a photographer known for shooting the LGBT community in the most candid manner. Here, the life of two gay men is documented through hats, formal tuxedoes, close-ups and a classic noir setting. One of the finest shots is Film Noir Angels, where halfnaked men look down in a queenly manner from a balcony. Says artist Atul Bhalla, “The objects in the room are intimate. You have to approach them to interact.” The two frames of his diptych Two Chairs in Johannesburg show the same chair with small differences. Bhalla calls this “an exaggeration of still life”.
Exaggeration takes a different form in Shilpa Gupta’s print-on-mirror work I Look At Things With Eyes Different From Yours, which is meant to be an anchor for the room. However, it fails to impact. Placing a mirror right at the centre of the room seems too literal an exercise to blur the lines between the viewer and the viewed, and does not raise questions of audience participation in art.
The first floor opens up thematically to city spaces. Praneet Soi’s acrylic on canvas Sliding Ground poses questions — are the displayed bodies male or female? Is the concern gender, sex or violence? “I collect my images from media reports. I talk about how the city stamps out the identity of a fallen body,” says Soi. Abir Karmakar’s Porno Painting series looks at a hotel room from different angles. Exquisitely detailed, it is unsettling in its implied voyeurism. Ordinary urban haunts bec ome murky spaces threatening identity and privacy. Karmakar’s skill as a painter is absolute. “It evokes a mix of vertigo and voyeurism,” says Sinha.
The second floor’s centrepiece is Riyas Komu’s intricately detailed wood sculpture Safe to Light. On one end is a handpump and on the other, a world map carving, evoking scientific progress through history. Komu has recreated an ancient Iranian apparatus used to draw oil, while the map gives it a contemporary context of oil wars. Jagannath Panda’s references to Indian history, though, get lost in their minimalism. Why is a Mughal astride a horse kicking a pig? What does a collage of a butterfly, a lamp-post and an Aladdin-esque lamp mean? It is frus tratingly spare, as if the artist forgot to leave in the next clue.
The works range from stunning to baffling, but there is no significant departure from trends in contemporary Indian art. Critic Meera Menezes says that Atul Bhalla’s works are “poetic” and Mithu Sen’s installation Cannibal Lullaby gives “beauty to macabre”, but “I can’t seem to join the dots of the larger curatorial concept”. As a curator, Sinha asks: “How do artists respond to our turbulent tim es?” Most contemporary artists already engage with social realities on canvas. This show, though enjoyable and at times challenging, fails to go beyond.
On till 2 March at the Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi
Aradhna Wal is a Sub Editor with Tehelka.
aradhna@tehelka.com
Vanityfair
The Jedi Return
The Stars Unite
In celluloid outer space there existed two camps: Star Wars and Star Trek. Each had its own universe, people and cult. But George Lucas ripped the space-time continuum, announcing that the director of the next Star Wars movie will be JJ Abrams, who directed the 2009 hit Star Trek. Never before has one person inherited the legacy of both franchises. Fans are speculating on how Abrams will bring back the Skywalkers and the Solos. But they’re united on one thing; the force is strong with this one.
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Close Encounters
Is the grapevine always ripe with hyperbole? For instance, when they say of Ram Leela that Sanjay Leela Bhansali has shot sizzling love scenes with Deepika Padukone and Ranveer Singh of the kind that neither the director nor his lead pair has ever done, it does leave us pleading for sanity. Does ‘never-before’ in these particular scenes mean scaling up of the risqué factor, or does Bhansali simply want our jaws to drop at the money he spent shooting them? A source said it’s akin to the ‘sizzling’ chemistry of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Someone tell him even soggy analogies can turn a playwright in his grave.
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Call of Duty
Game Plan
Call of Duty and Medal of Honour, two popular video games, have been banned by the Pakistani government for depicting the country in a poor light. In one, it is required that you decimate ISI forces by slitting their throats. The other, which shows Pakistan as a hotbed for terrorists, was developed with the help of US Navy SEALs who assassinated Bin Laden. Perhaps it would have helped to let videogames remain means of mass entertainment rather than turning them into instruments of mass propaganda.
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‘There’s no need for the next Farooq-Deepti’
Farooq Shaikh (The retro couple of Bollywood isn’t done just yet)
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The Goddess of all things
AT THE canvas’ centre is the goddess. All life emanates from her. The colours are vibrant yellow, red and green. The detailing is intricate, with smaller female figures dancing, praying and painting in abandon, around her. This is Shakti, a painting from Seema Kohli’s upcoming exhibition Parikrama, to be shown at the India Art Fair, 31 January to 3 February 2013.
Seema Kohli, 52, is a Delhi-based artist famous for her depiction of female strength, sexuality and divinity. Winner of the 2008 Lalit Kala Akademi National Award for Women, Parikrama is in continuation with these recurring themes. It is her interpretation of the Saptmatrikas, the seven divine mothers, the manifestation of feminine energy that created the universe. Kohli uses paintings, sculptures, a video installation and a film — It Was a Summer Afternoon— to talk about the abuse of nature, womanhood and humanity.
“The goddess and the demons embody us,” says Kohli, who spent 10 years training at the Triveni Kala Sangam, “Divinity has to come from within us to fight our demons. We are responsible for disconnecting ourselves from nature and leaving behind our tribal space. We see the violation of the environment and women as a personal right.”
In It Was a Summer Afternoon, the abused young girl wonders, “Does she feel the same? … Am I as divine as her?” She addresses nature, which has been raped like her. The film is less about the act, more about the shame in the aftermath. Kohli confesses that it took years to gather the courage to film it. Her turning point, she says, came in 2002, when she left her home and no longer found herself answerable to the family name or bound to traditional familial roles.
Writer Charty Dugdale, who wrote the concept note for Parikrama, feels that this is Kohli’s most direct engagement with rape culture. Her paintings and sculptures are more “oblique”; they use mythology to talk about social realities. However, her evocation of myths from Vedic, Sikh and other cultures attracts viewers. They are hooked by a familiar symbol and fixated by the new story it tells. Kohli makes mythology her own. For example, she sees Maya as the divine feminine. Maya becomes not just the illusion but also the creator of the illusion that gives birth to the universe. “There is no religious iconography,” says Kishore Singh, a prominent art critic. “Instead there is freedom, creativity, a personal spirituality and a certain heroism in how every woman can be a goddess.”
“Kohli’s art might not be quite fashionable in terms of trends dictated by contemporary art. She isn’t the highest selling artist. But her works move fast through the market, with a 2×2 ft canvas going for Rs 2.5 lakh and a large canvas for Rs 6 lakh. She has ready buyers,” explains critic Rahul Bhattacharya. Popular Prakashan publisher Harsh Bhatkal, a long time collector of Kohli’s works, attributes that to the joy stemming from her art. People relate to it more than they would to highly abstract works, he says.
Kohli’s work is not about anger and hostility. Neither is it an overtly political, aggressive feminism. Her goddess is a serene and joyful embodiment of the role of the nurturer and life giver.
Parikrama will be exhibited at the India Art Fair, 31 January to 3 February 2013, New Delhi
