Forthcoming Art and Activism in India - Tulika Books, New Delhi Edited by Shivaji K Panikkar and Deeptha Achar
This paper is an account of a set of events that occurred at the Fine Arts Fair at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda in 2003. As the paper will make clear, these events were tied to questions of sexuality generally and minority sexuality in particular. The ubiquitous question of identity dictated by sexuality has consistently been a subject of debate. It is often presented as a personal choice located within the private lives of individuals. This account, however, is about public expression of minority sexuality choices and the implications it had within that space. The need for this public expression seemed to go against its acceptability, its sheer existence as an acceptable norm; these events in a sense mirror formations that are persistent in the larger society itself. Students have often arrogated to themselves the power to introduce radical thought and newer awareness amongst the larger public. In doing so they set up an interface between that larger world and the world of the University; in this relationship, the space of the University gets marked as the site of freedom, new thought, exploration. What happens when the accepted space for such expression of freedom gets restricted through external and internal pressures?
A university space is posited as an institutional site structured by the growth and functioning of democratic principles; it lays tenets for its student community functioning within this space and brackets itself away from the State. Yet, the university is not a secluded body operating independently but a part of the societal norms and regulations functioning in the larger State democracy, the processes and the power structures that the State operates through restricts and modulates its performance. However, there have been consistently proven instances where the university and the student body initiated revolutionary radical movements or were part of movements that enforced changes the world over. This, perhaps, is largely related to the efforts of students who have been able to support, initiate and provide the force for such changes. Despite this radical potential, historical contingency and the cultural specificity of its location, normative standards and its interpretation within power structures of the university, the manner in which issues are articulated and ‘resolved’ in this space can be reactionary.
The Faculty of Fine Arts at the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda is a place which has a long history of radical thought and where creative thought is celebrated by the student and teaching community alike.[1] Students certainly believe they occupy a space where creative expression is their raison d’ etre, and that the Faculty is a home for free expression. Located in a politically active state of Gujarat, the Faculty is an island that has conspicuously shaped a remarkable free academic space. The Faculty, sporadically, organizes the Fine Arts Fair, usually in the month of December. The Fine Arts Fair, initiated by KG Subramanyam in the early 1960s, along the lines of the Nandanmela at Santiniketan, had been an interface between the Faculty and the elite and middleclass public of Baroda. The Fair as such purports a levelling out of the colonial inheritance of art-craft binary as it undercut an exclusivist ‘high art’ understanding of the visual. Further, in this, the creative spirit of the students gets celebrated.
In 2003, the MA students’ Department of Art History and Aesthetics’ contribution to the Fair was to have a mock-tail bar with a few performances fashioned around the Hindi film Chandni Bar. In fact, the Department of Art History and Aesthetics have consistently set up restaurants based on art historical themes during these fairs. The idea of setting up the mock-tail bar came from the students of the Department. More sedate ideas for having a DADA restaurant on the lines of earlier themes such as 19th century Paris and the Mughal, which came from the staff were rejected by the student body during the planning process. Indeed, the idea of a restaurant based on popular culture was linked to disciplinary shifts away from traditional themes of art history towards newer approaches that could include the popular visual culture in the disciplinary ambit within the Department.[2] Thus the plan of having a Hindi film based ‘bar’ was also regarded as an academic exercise in understanding popular culture.
The plan was have a living installation in the form of a mock tail bar bringing in elements of popular Hindi cinema and its visual culture to engage in a popular culture project. The idea of fashioning a mock-tail bar in the purview of popular culture made us decide to work around the theme of critically acclaimed Hindi film ‘Chandni Bar’, which develops around the story set in Mumbai of a dancer in a bar, her traumas and existentialist angst and its immanent consequences. The dance bar having performances by female dancers was at the core of the narrative. Performances in the cinema were woven around popular Hindi film songs. Appropriating this structure became essential to our project. Hence dancers and their performance to popular Hindi songs was an essential part of the venture. Since the Fair was open to the public, any performance at the bar was for their viewing gaze. This posed a restriction on any popular dance form to be performed at the Fair by the female students; resistance to the idea of female dancers came from women students who argued that the structure and logic of the ‘bar’ context would turn the (female) performers into objects of the male gaze. The decision, therefore, was taken to have male performers. The essence of the performance could be maintained and also achieve a certain level of authenticity if the performers emulated the dancers in the cinema. Further, the idea of male performers subverting the original image by cross-dressing was viewed as an excellent idea as it would problematize the male gaze that consumes the female body. At this point, the decision to work with male dancers willing to cross dress was taken. This made us approach Lakshya, a gay community based organisation working for AIDS awareness. Some of their members were adept dancers. The students decided to collaborate with Lakshya; it was decided that dancers from Lakshya would perform at the bar and that the bar would also feature an information kiosk on AIDS by Lakshya. Moreover, the performances would be interspersed with public awareness messages about AIDS. At this juncture, the deliberations around the project Chandni Ba(ha)ar and the decision to collaborate with Lakshya set off the core debate discussed in this paper.
The theme of popular culture in this context drew on Stuart Hall’s definition of the Popular. Hall defines ‘Popular Culture’ as “what is essential to the definition of the popular culture is the relations which define popular culture in continuing tension (relationship, influence and antagonism) with the dominant culture. It is the conception of culture which is polarised around this cultural dialectic”[3] the dominant here is poised around the heterosexual, acceptable norms. Appropriating the idea of the popular based on the enactment of a theme bar founded on the Hindi film ‘Chandni Bar’ which was performed in a subversive mode created tension within the dominant (read heterosexual, patriarchal) ideology of the institution. Moreover, the opposition to this project also drew on notions about the exclusivity of art that is bracketed away from the popular; when the popular was placed alongside ‘high’ art, the class dimension of ‘art’ also surfaced.
As opposition to our project mounted, our understanding of the need for the University (or at least, the Faculty) to be a democratic place in a larger sense was challenged. Our view of the Faculty of Fine Arts where alternatives for expanding mainstream educational boundaries were addressed everyday began getting constricted. We had understood the University and its space along the lines of what Edward Said had observed. While asserting the need for humanism to return to the society, he argues that one of the means of making this possible was through the university; he states “the university is a kind of a utopian place, and I would like to preserve it as a place where certain kinds of things are made possible. The idea that the class room is a place where certain subjects are studied according to prescriptions other than the investigation of knowledge or truth strikes me as betrayal of academic freedom”[4] The University was clearly demarcated as a public space not only through the logic of the Fine Arts Fair but also through the stand taken by authorities and by a certain section of students as well. The open portrayal of minority sexuality issues, they said, would not be acceptable to a largely heterosexual audience. There was a perception that the public at large is uninformed about such issues and was assumed to be incapable of negotiating such realities. The arguments made in the name of the public was a method of limiting options of (cultural) portrayal; in fact, the categories of ‘the public’ and ‘the authorities’ seemed to overlap with the result that a mode of censorship was put into place.
Hall has argued that “Cultural domination has real effects- even if these are neither all-powerful nor all-inclusive. If we argue that these imposed forms have no influence, it would be tantamount to arguing that the culture of the people can exist as a separate enclave, outside the distribution of cultural power and the relations of cultural force. I do not believe that. Rather, I think there is a continuous and necessarily uneven and unequal struggle, by the dominant culture constantly to disorganise and reorganise popular culture; to enclose and confine its definitions and forms within a more inclusive range of dominant forms. There are points of resistance; there are also moments of suppression. This is the dialectic of cultural struggle.”[5] We believe that the events around the Chandni Ba(ha)ar project can be usefully read as a struggle over culture. This was most apparent when the Chandni Ba(ha)ar team had to negotiate, and also compromise with the University authorities for the project to transpire at all. Clearly, what was at stake was the redefinition of a dominant idea of culture, the constitution of public space as also, the re-imagining of the contours of the discipline of art history.
The issue was beyond just the terming of the whole project as popular. In a sense, there was always an acceptability of ‘popular culture’. But the levels of such acceptability were directly proportionate to whether such cultural displays were in direct accordance to the dominant ideology of the institute and the people who held the power of moulding that space and presenting it to the outside in a particular way. Chandni Ba(ha)ar did not subscribe to the dominant heterosexist ideologies that structured the institution particularly in the manner in which minority sexuality was portrayed as a legitimate way of living. Since sexuality with its long history of disciplinary policing perhaps occupies an ever-present discursive locale, it was easy for the authorities to argue that the project could have serious implications and that this would reflect on the university and what it stood for and so on. Paradoxically, the curriculum that the Faculty generally, and the Department of Art History specifically followed covered issue based studies where minority issues were openly discussed in the classrooms. Historical and Art Historical studies have always dealt with ancient and contemporary documents which show us that cross dressing, same sex representations in texts and visuals are aplenty. What is regarded even today as part of ‘high culture’ and occupying a continuous discursive locale, such subject matter depictions can be seen in scriptures like the Mahabharata where Krishna, Arjuna and Bhima have dressed as women on various occasions in different circumstances. Such representations have been reflected in miniature paintings from Rajasthan among others. Further classical and folk dance forms like Kathakali and Yakshagana have men enacting women’s roles. Moreover, contemporary art has celebrated artists like Bhupen Khakhar who was an open gay and who worked around representations of homosexuality, cross dressing and such the experience of same sex desires. While on one hand these issues were part of the theoretical studies, when it came to the practice and presentation of related project works there was a need for sanitized and muted version of the issue.
The question of the levels of acceptability of ‘popular culture’ would have indicated that this category is not fixed and is constantly being negotiated. This was forcefully brought home to us when we were deciding on the décor of the bar. The interior of the bar had film posters on display. The posters that were chosen were of contemporary films which we thought merged with the general set up of the bar. However posters of films like ‘Market’(2003) where the protagonist is a sex worker and of the film ‘Bruce Almighty’ (2003) with actor Jimcarrey emulating ‘Adam’ in the Sistine Chapel fresco of Michelangelo’s ‘The Creation of Adam’ were seen as provocative and hence either not to be used or positioned in places where there was no chance of a direct gaze. There was a conscious effort to think about the placement of these images; we had to negotiate among ourselves ideas of what would be acceptable at the entrance and what would not be used. In the process ‘popular culture’ was understood as a negotiable location rather than a fixed category. In recognizing the heterosexist paradigms that structured most of these posters, it somehow seemed that the dominant and the popular had overlapped here. In this case the sexual identity could be seen as an analytical tool, which analysed the dominant ideology of the larger community and this role reversal that the project proposed probably had the chances of threatening the identity of the institution itself.
The codes of acceptability of this space were drastically transformed by the visibility of minority sexuality when it entered the realm of the public. Individual female and group dancing to popular Hindi music, with the same style of choreography proposed for Chandni Ba(ha)ar were welcomed at the Faculty gatherings whereas arguments against the role reversal proposed by the project drew on codes of morality that structured the institution itself but which were made in the name of an ‘unsophisticated’ and ‘uncultured’ public. The Chandni Ba(ha)ar performance was not acceptable any more. Sanitizing became a necessity. The authorities took a stance against the performance; it was suggested that the performance should not be allowed. The strength of authority lay in the claim of empirical knowledge ***and the experience of having been a part of such gatherings over a period of time, thus being conversant with the rules that governed the institution on one hand and other rules *** regarding police permission for performances on the other. There hence was a need for a collective will to work against such authority to make the project possible. To what extent could this work? Internal power structures interpreting the institutional ideology in a manner that was underwritten by their own personal ideology policed this venture.
Connotations of the ‘vulgar’ surfaced. Interestingly, the contradiction here was the around the question of gay sexual identity that was revealed in self-confession*** rather than the male body emulating female dance movements per se that was considered problematic. In fact, the authorities seemed to suggest that the reflection of sexual identity in the performance would create unease amongst the audience. The assumption, drawing on stereotypical representations of gays, appeared to be that cross dressing would accentuate what was considered as the abnormal state of such identity. Perhaps if there was no ‘gay’ tag attached to these performers, cross dressing would have been acceptable. The issue was clearly not just about female performances or their parodies. At the same fair, girls performed to a dance ballet. The dance had to its credit a majority of female performers and the only two men appeared as props. This was seen as a classical, (muted) dance form, which did not attract the kind of attention that a popular Hindi film version of a dance would. ‘Normal’ in the sense of acceptability, probably an elitist construct, was perhaps the only category that was allowed. Interestingly the bodies stood as markers of progressive western thought, a guise under which the performance worked due to which it did not have any restrictions as the concept of ballet was already acceptable as a classical western notion. The tension between the dominant culture and the popular translated the idea and notion of normalcy. The western white classical forms or the classical traditions of Indian dance forms which are associated with the evolution of ‘culture’ and the cultured society in a very large way a creation of the elites were even today, in an institution that fights such stereotyping regarded as ‘the acceptable’ forms. Mass associations which the popular culture normally is the essence of were seen as suspect.
On the other hand, in the case of Chandni Ba(ha)ar, the male body’s enactment is used as a replacement of the female, hence there was no apparent imitation. This turned out to be simulacrum in a Platonic sense. The politics of representation here was of utmost importance in that it threatened the theories of realist representation that have been firmly understood and followed this long. What we can see here is a simulacrum; this can not understood in a ‘naturalistic’ sense. Realist representation itself was subverted. The male body supposedly embodying the ‘maleness’ and ‘masculinity’ was now turned into a parody by taking a form of a female and emulating female gestures as seen in the original dance performance. This resultant parody was deemed unacceptable since it threatened the ‘norm’ of realist representation itself though if the body that parodied was not naturally gay such subversion could have been seen as a clear effort at a parody. An excellent example of this can be seen in the Aamir Khan advertisement for Coca Cola where the obvious heterosexual masculine stereotype cross-dresses resulting in an apparent situational parody. Fundamentally, the performance challenged essentialist understandings of gender. The subversion of a body wrapped in a different identity (that of gay) stood unacceptable.
There were questions with specific relation to the inadvertent negative attention that a show like this would attract the moment the audience is exposed to the sexual identity of the gay cross dressers. Quite clearly, what was at issue was not cross dressing but the **sexual orientation itself. Moreover there was another point that was highlighted about the performers being from outside of the faculty (the norm for all these years barring a few exceptions was that, it was a Faculty show; all performers, organisers and the things that were put up for sale had to be of the faculty.) Till this particular moment the outside participation was not an issue. This was under constant negotiation since a commitment was already made to Lakshya and the practice sessions were underway for over a week.
There was a conciliation reached with the authorities on the condition that some amount of censorship will be introduced. At this point the question of sexuality was the key issue for censorship; the show was on the verge of being banned. The gay community was here seen as the ‘other’, the ‘outside’ of the dominant heterosexual male community that was part of the Faculty and society at large. By imposing norms and disallowing their entry into the campus was a very obvious way to exert control and support of the dominant ideology of the institution (authorities). Perhaps the authorities assumed that the allowing of the ‘other’s’ entry can be read as a mark of the acceptance and openness of the institution, this gesture would in a way leave room for the acceptance of ‘other’. Masculinity, as defined and understood by the institutional authorities, was itself under attack here; a homosexual cross dresser would threaten the very existence of this dominant existing structure.
The performance was now tailored carefully to satisfy everybody (these included individual opinions. A project for a Fair started turning out to be very political. The name Chandni Bar was changed to Chandni Ba(ha)ar fearing a negative reaction from the public since ‘bar’ may suggest supply of alcoholic beverages and this suggestion would be inappropriate and attract undue attention in the dry state of Gujarat. The mock-tail bar was named Chandni Ba(ha)ar that literally translates to ‘Spring Moon’ instead of a ‘Moonlight Bar’ in the case of the original. There was a conscious effort to subvert the choice of the name and henceforth. Sexual identities of the performers, the members of Lakshya, were to be kept under cover. It was generally implied that the notion of homosexuality and its very mention had perverse undertones. During the final few sessions of practice this was clearly stated by the institutional authorities and a decision was taken that there was to be no cross-dressing. We bargained for permission to at least have ‘unisex’ dressing for the performances which when worn by men would definitely be male clothing; the overtly sexual gestures and choreography of the original dance performances needed to be muted since the songs chosen were thought appropriate only to female dance numbers (like in the film Chandni Bar) Female mannerisms and movements, which were replicated from the original act, were termed vulgar and since the whole project came under threat when there were just two days left for the final act, these regulations were accepted.
The timing of such interventions by the authorities had left us with no alternative except to negotiate. Institutional authorities, we were told had to abide by the rules laid down by higher authorities in this case the police, lest the permission given for the whole fair is withdrawn. One of the written documents we were referred to was a letter from the Police Commissioner’s office that due to imminent security lapse that may occur in case of certain performances; ‘vulgar’ performances were disallowed. The whole notion of what was vulgar and the decision of such a classification was open for interpretation. Songs such as ‘kaanta lagaa’ and ‘choli ke peeche’ that we were told were already considered vulgar by the larger public, were banned. Depiction of these songs by male performers gave them an even more vulgar connotation, we were told. Renegotiation based on arguments that the female body was commodified in the original dances and the male depiction of the same turned this subversion into a parody, hence did not allow vulgarity, stood no ground. Even as we were negotiating normative notions of the vulgar, what was brought home to us was that that these notions of what can be termed vulgar when the performance is live is different from what one sees in the virtual mode. The immediate accessibility of a live performance gives it an extra edge. We ourselves set restrictions on the clothing of the performers; in that sense we curtailed suggestions for costume made by the performers on the basis of a norm of vulgarity. One can say that across negotiations around the question of vulgarity, different modes of censorship at different levels and through different modes of authority were put in place. Finally, the primary act was mainly solo or group of three people performing to various Hindi film songs. The act took a break after every performance. The show was scheduled to have one act in every half hour. The whole evening’s show had approximately six acts. The final event had dancers dressed in black trousers and shirts with limited collar additions and jewellery to add to the performance value.
Initially, the tie up with Lakshya was to generate an audience through professional performance, thus creating a market for the bar. Item numbers of Bollywood were the instant choice. The dancers gave solo performances wearing costumes of their choice. Lakshya came up with a list of songs, randomly picking from those which were famous and of their favourite stars. Costumes were our subject as cross dressing made the performance more exciting as it subverted the normal bar version. These choices (least to our expectations) had cultural and political consequences. As regulations were imposed, the dancers were not allowed to wear clothes that the original performers wore since the virtual could never translate into the real or be turned into practice. Performers wore clothes that made them appear more ‘decent’. In a certain way the members of Lakshya hence were commodified, and were being used to create laughter as caricatures of female representation. With the progress of the project and several practice sessions and interactions with members of Lakshya which grew into hesitant friendships, the importance of this collaborative effort took a better definition. The thrust gradually came to be on the cause, providing a platform for a minority sexual community and also for raising awareness of AIDS.
Lakshya, a community based organization works for awareness of AIDS amongst homosexuals. Lakshya operates with funds from the government to promote AIDS awareness amongst the homosexual community and commercial sex workers in and around Vadodara. Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code terms homosexual practices as illegal. AIDS here is used, as a metaphor, since the funding of a homosexual organization by the government, would have otherwise not been possible. The Trust seemed to be the best access to an otherwise closed AIDS sensitive homosexual community. Collaborating with the University for an Event such as this gave Lakshya a platform to reach out for the first time, in an educational institution. The performance for Lakshya was an opening and admittance into a larger progressive heterosexual space, where they did not feel their sexuality would be a constraint. Members of the organisation had agreed to this collaboration when they were introduced to the original concept. The practice sessions were conducted in the Faculty and these sessions were constantly monitored not only by the authorities but also by us. In a sense, we too were implicated in the processes of censorship. The choice of songs and the choreography of dances were initially left to Lakshya. However, later they were told that certain movements would be termed objectionable and hence needed to be avoided. During our interviews post Chandni Ba(ha)ar with Lakshya and student audiences we gathered various responses and interpretations.
Lakshya considered the show a success in spreading awareness about AIDS and taking a first step towards creating a platform for them. However regulations laid down regarding clothes they were to wear and their mannerisms during the performance they felt were not necessary. They believed that the show would have been more authentic if such regulations were not imposed. They wondered why Hindi popular music which dominates the virtual world, accessed by millions needed to be censored to be acceptable by a much smaller audience when they performed live. To that extent they did not give much credence to the difference that was posed between a live performance and a virtual performance. Sexuality they realized was an issue here. Very interestingly, they questioned the reason for the audience knowing that they were homosexuals; they said that the audience could not know this unless they were told so. A member and performer noted in the interview that followed “Audiences were the best. There were no vulgar questions or comments posed to anybody. If we had dressed in drag too I do not think there would have been any comments from their end since they were not aware that we were gay. We were associated with an organization and it is not necessary that if we are associated with a gay organization that we are gay. Not all members who worked with such organizations are homosexuals.” The perception of the combination of the corporeal anatomy, the identity of the individual and the method of performance especially in this case where there was an apparent subversion could hardly denote the sexuality of a person. If it did so there was no reason for that to become an issue since the performance itself was a parody. As the performer stated above there was no apparent mention of this by the audience.
Foucault states in The History of Sexuality, “If repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power knowledge and sexuality, since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it, except at considerable cost.”[6] Abiding by the norms of institutional power structures, we stood to question the concept of an institutional space being democratic. Our space was diminishing. When we tried to address in praxis an education rich in theory of minority issues, unconventional sexualities and artistic identities, we faced with the question of whether all theory can be praxis. After the show, when our faculty and student audience as well as collaborators were interviewed, these arguments were countered. It was a revealing session since those who had quietly gone along with the consensus and were supportive during the whole debate and the performance had different views on the issue. Some students voiced the opinions that the mimicking of female gesture is not necessarily parodic; others said that there was no apparent need for these gestures which were voluntarily put on since it created discomfort amongst the audience; some argued that expectations of a certain level of ‘gayness’ were absurd; yet others voiced the opinion that homosexuality and cross dressing was against nature’s order. Interestingly an otherwise unanimous view to do the Chandni Ba(ha)ar project became splintered when an authority first voiced an opinion on censoring certain parts of the show. Having to take sides on being for or against an authority silenced almost all of the members of the project initially.
During Chandni Ba(ha)ar, when we tried bringing together a project on popular culture in a democratic institutional space, we encountered debate and censorship where the issues of minority sexuality and identity were concerned. The events suggest that what is acceptable in the realm of the popular which at some level accommodates some of the issues of sexuality and related issues was not available within the elitist university space that represented the dominant (minor?) culture. Reiterating Said, are not universities platforms where investigations of knowledge and truth had to be conducted? What has to be the role of the student community in reasserting the university as a democratic space? Higher education that is of the university has to necessarily imply this. The student has an enormous role to play in consolidating the role and function of university as a democratic space within the larger democratic space of the nation as a whole. This is a right in itself that needs to be defended.
Minority sexuality and such issues cannot be left to remain a taboo. We end this paper asserting our right to explore, in multiple ways, these issues; as Foucault says: “Nothing less than transgression of laws, a lifting of prohibition an irruption of speech, a reinstating pleasure within reality, and a whole new economy in the mechanisms of power will be required. For the least glimmer of truth is conditioned by politics”[7]
[1] See Gulammohammed Sheikh (ed.), Contemporary Art in Baroda, Tulika, New Delhi, 1997 for an account of the vibrancy of the Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University through the decades.
[2] For an account of these disciplinary shifts as they took shape in the Department, see ‘Introduction’ in Towards a New Art History: Studies in Indian Art. Edited Shivaji K Panikkar, Parul Dave Mukherji and Deeptha Achar; New Delhi: DK Printworld, 2003
[3] ‘Notes On Deconstructing The Popular’ Stuart Hall, ‘People’s History and Socialist Theory’ Ed, Raphael Samuel, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1981
[4] An Interview with Edward Said, pg 434, ‘The Edward Said Reader’ Ed, Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin, Vintage Books, Random House, New York, 2000
[5] ‘Notes On Deconstructing The Popular’ Stuart Hall, ‘People’s History and Socialist Theory’ Ed, Raphael Samuel, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1981
[6] “The History of Sexuality, An Introduction” Volume 1, Michel Foucault, Vintage Books Edition; 1990
[7] “The History of Sexuality, An Introduction” Volume 1, Michel Foucault, Vintage Books Edition; 1990
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