Art Travels Before Time: Bhupen Khakhar and Salman Rushdie's Portrait

(The Moor by Bhupen Khakhar)

Recently, while watching Margaret Hoover’s Firing Line interview with Salman Rushdie, I was struck by something that had little to do, at first sight, with what Rushdie was saying. He spoke at length about Knife, the film and book dealing with the 2022 assassination attempt on his life, and also about the continuing tragedy of Israel and Palestine. But what held my attention was the camera angle.

Rushdie was shown in three-quarter profile. His damaged right eye was covered by a tinted lens, while his good left eye appeared behind an ordinary transparent lens. The effect was strangely theatrical. For a moment, he looked almost comically like a pirate. Yet that dark piece of glass was impossible to ignore. It became a constant visual reminder of the stabbing in 2022, of the eye he lost, and of the violence that had permanently altered his face.

And suddenly I thought of Bhupen Khakhar.

Khakhar, a close friend of Rushdie, painted the celebrated portrait Salman Rushdie (‘The Moor’) in 1995, around the time of the publication of Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh. The painting is now part of the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London. What struck me, looking back at it after seeing Rushdie on television, was the extraordinary prominence—and disappearance—of the right eye.

Khakhar paints Rushdie in left profile, almost like a Mughal prince. His body is frontal enough to give the painting presence, but his face is turned decisively to the left. He holds an obscure object in his right hand, folded across his chest, while wearing a waistcoat. The profile is conventional, almost courtly. The right eye is completely invisible.

At the time Khakhar painted it, this was simply a formal decision. But after the events of 2022, the absence acquires an uncanny charge.

Khakhar was perfectly capable of painting frontal faces. His paintings often contain eccentric, theatrical and deliberately constructed characters. In this work too, there is a peculiar figure on the right, almost clerical in appearance, holding a cat on a leash. The image has the absurdity characteristic of Khakhar: an animal as famously headstrong as a cat being subjected to the indignity of a leash. One could read the scene as a comic meditation on authority, discipline and religious power. The absurdity of attempting to control a cat has its own strange resonance when placed against the extraordinary attempt to control Rushdie's life through a religious decree.

But Khakhar hides something more in the painting.

On the right side, there is an artist apparently working on a portrait of Rushdie. We see the sitter in right profile on the small canvas. And here, too, the eye becomes interesting. From the distance at which the little painting is represented, the eye appears almost like a dark slit.

This creates a curious doubling. The large Rushdie in the centre is apparently the sitter, while the small Rushdie on the canvas is the portrait being made by the artist within the painting. The painting therefore becomes a meditation on the act of portraiture itself—a portrait containing another portrait, and a sitter who is simultaneously present and represented.

Art history has given us many such games of representation. Vermeer, Velázquez and Rembrandt, among others, repeatedly complicated the relationship between the person being represented, the artist making the representation and the viewer looking at both. Khakhar's device belongs to this larger history, but his version is unmistakably his own: theatrical, ironic and slightly unsettling.

What fascinates me is what happens to that little eye after 2022.

Was Khakhar unknowingly prophetic?

Of course, he could not have known that Rushdie would one day be attacked and lose his right eye. To claim otherwise would be to turn coincidence into clairvoyance. But perhaps a work of art can become prophetic without its artist having predicted anything. Perhaps prophecy can occur retrospectively.

The painting has not changed. Our knowledge has.

Before the attack, the invisible right eye was simply a consequence of profile. After the attack, that same absence becomes loaded with an entirely different meaning. We look at the painting knowing something that Khakhar could never have known. The old image begins to absorb the future.

This is what fascinates me about art. It sometimes seems to travel before time. It leaves behind forms and signs whose significance may not become apparent until history catches up with them.

Rushdie's own Knife, his autobiographical account of the attack, makes this connection even more uncanny. The book's visual language of the slit and incision recalls the brutal physical wound inflicted on his body. One cannot look at a slit in a painted surface after such an event without thinking of the vulnerability of the body beneath the surface.

This brings to mind Lucio Fontana, whose famous Concetto Spaziale paintings were violently cut and slashed. Fontana's cuts are not merely representations of wounds; they are actual wounds inflicted upon the canvas. The surface is opened. The painting becomes a body that has been violated.

Rushdie's damaged eye and Fontana's slashed canvas belong, of course, to completely different histories. Yet the visual metaphor is difficult to resist: the slit as wound, the wound as image, the image as a record of violence.

And this is where Khakhar's portrait becomes unexpectedly disturbing.

In 1995, the invisible eye was merely an invisible eye. In 2022, it became something else. We can now look backward and see in that absence a strange prefiguration of the damaged face Rushdie would eventually carry into the world.

Perhaps that is one of the mysteries of portraiture. A portrait does not merely preserve a person at a particular moment. It also preserves possibilities of looking that may not yet have occurred. The future can enter an old image without ever having been placed there by the artist.

The camera on Firing Line did something similar. By placing Rushdie in three-quarter profile, with one eye behind a dark lens and the other visible, it unintentionally produced a living counterpart to Khakhar's painted figure. The television image seemed to complete something that had been left unresolved in the painting decades earlier.

For a moment, the two Rushdies—one painted in 1995, one sitting before a television camera in 2026—seemed to look at each other across time.

The painter could not have foreseen the knife.

But perhaps art does not have to foresee the future to travel into it.

Sometimes we are forced to think.

Art travels before time.

JohnyML

 

Lady in Blue: Time to Celebrate and Ask a Few Questions

 (Tschabalala Self with her Lady in Blue)

Lady in Blue, a sculpture by Tschabalala Self installed on the fourth plinth of Trafalgar Square in London, has caught the imagination of the cultural world. She is a woman who breaks conventions simply by standing there. She is Black, she is plump, and she carries her body and her dress with complete confidence. Her stride is firm, her posture upright, her head held high. There is neither apology nor hesitation in her presence. According to the artist, the blue lady is stepping into the future, exercising her free will and professionalism.

Perhaps that is precisely what makes her presence on the fourth plinth so significant. Black women have so often been represented in subordinate positions: as workers, servants, objects of desire, or bodies upon which other people's ideas of race and gender are projected. Even in societies that speak endlessly about the dignity of labour, certain kinds of bodies and certain kinds of labour continue to be assigned lesser dignity. The body remains political, and complexion remains an uncomfortable currency.

In the Western world, colour has mattered for centuries. Even feminism has not escaped the fractures produced by race, class, body, and beauty. The supposedly universal woman has rarely been universal. She has usually had a particular colour, a particular body, a particular class position, and a particular relationship to beauty.

The Lady in Blue disrupts that order.

She stands on the plinth as if she has already arrived from the future. Her body is not asking permission to exist. Her clothes are not an apology for her size. Her stride suggests movement, ambition, and self-determination. She becomes a figure to whom others literally have to look up. And behind her, almost ironically, stands the colonial paraphernalia of history, reminding us of the structures that once decided whose bodies could occupy the centre and whose bodies had to remain at the margins.

There is, of course, a larger cultural movement behind this image. Representation has been changing, sometimes slowly and sometimes with startling speed. Christopher Nolan's recent portrayal of Helen of Troy as a Black woman is one example of how even ancient cultural icons can be reimagined through contemporary questions of race. Ryan Coogler's Black Panther offered another kind of rupture, placing an almost entirely Black cast at the centre of a global cinematic spectacle. The possibility of a Black James Bond has been debated for years. In television, popular culture, and politics, Black figures have moved increasingly into positions of visibility and influence, from Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama to Kamala Harris.

Blackness is no longer something the cultural mainstream can conveniently place at the margins and forget.

Even in a caste-ridden society like India, the aesthetics of Dalit existence have increasingly entered public discourse. The old hierarchies of beauty, purity, and cultural legitimacy are being questioned. Brahmanical ideas of whiteness, refinement, and superiority are encountering bodies and voices that refuse to remain invisible.

But what exactly is changing?

Is this a genuine transformation, or merely a sophisticated form of tokenism? When the attention is concentrated on the sculpture, the artist, the spectacle of representation, where do the deeper questions go? Is the West's social, political, cultural, and economic life mature enough to recognise Black existence not merely as a category of representation, but as an equal and constitutive part of the world?

Perhaps one thing has already changed: Black existence has become undeniable.

The elephant in the room is no longer something that can be politely ignored. It has acquired a body, a colour, a voice, and a place on the plinth. One has to address it. One has to negotiate with it.

Self's sculpture, however, does not feel tokenistic to me. It does something more complicated. It offers an image of possibility to women across racial boundaries. The Lady in Blue is not simply a Black woman being inserted into an established system of representation; she seems to question the system itself.

That is where the sculpture becomes particularly interesting.

Her body confronts the enormous machinery of the contemporary beauty industry: the multi-billion-dollar fashion business and its many satellites—cosmetics, healthcare, fitness, weight loss, body enhancement, beauty care, and the countless industries that teach us how a body ought to look. For decades, these industries have produced and circulated a narrow vocabulary of desirable bodies. Thinness, youth, symmetry, whiteness, smoothness, sexual availability, and discipline have been turned into commodities.

The Lady in Blue refuses to speak that language.

Her presence creates another vocabulary of beauty. She does not necessarily overthrow the existing system, but she rearranges its furniture. She makes it possible to imagine that beauty can inhabit another body, another colour, another scale, another posture.

She is not the demure, docile, complacent white woman of conventional representation. Nor is she the hypersexualised Black woman, the predator, the supposedly uncontrollable body, the stereotype that has so often accompanied the representation of Black female sexuality. She is neither saint nor seductress, neither victim nor object.

She is simply a character in herself.

And that may be her greatest act of rebellion.

She throws conventions to the wind and walks, almost whistling, towards a destiny she appears capable of creating for herself.

Yet there is another question lurking behind that confident stride.

What kind of future is she actually walking into?

We are entering a period in which artificial intelligence is beginning to challenge the very idea of human labour, intelligence, creativity, and professional identity. Industry leaders such as Elon Musk and Sam Altman, along with futurists and doomsday prophets of various kinds, have repeatedly speculated about the arrival of artificial general intelligence within the coming years. If machines eventually perform not only manual labour but intellectual, artistic, administrative, and even creative work, what happens to all our carefully constructed identities?

What happens to the professional woman?

What happens to the Black woman?

What happens to the white woman?

What happens to the human body itself when intelligence no longer needs a body?

Perhaps this is where the Lady in Blue becomes more than a sculpture about race, gender, or beauty. She becomes an image of the human being insisting on her presence at the very moment when the definition of the human is beginning to change.

She stands there, high above the square, surrounded by the monuments of empire and the traffic of contemporary civilisation. She is Black. She is large. She is confident. She is moving forward.

But forward into what?

Perhaps that is the question the sculpture leaves us with.

Not simply who gets to stand on the plinth today, but who will still be standing when the future arrives.

JohnyML

Collecting Baroda: Freedom, Form and the Making of a History

'Freedom to Form - Baroda Modern' at DAG, New Delhi, is an enthusiastic survey show of the 'Baroda School' of art, mainly culled from the vast collection of DAG itself. From N S Bendre to Rekha Rodwittiya and all those artists falling in between, one could see this exhibition not only as a cross-section of the kind of art that Baroda had produced during its formative years through to the maturing years of the 1980s, but also as evidence of the collector's taste, here, in the case of DAG, that of Mr. Ashish Anand.

When it comes to exclusive collections from one particular region, one cannot expect that the collector had meticulously collected the works during the times of their production/creation. A collector and a collection always work from the middle or end and then work in reverse order. He or she must have collected some interesting works in the 1980s, and that gives the prompt and inspiration to collect backwards. Hence, whether the collection be that of DAG or KNMA, one could see the collector's intention to connect the dots rather than to create a linear history. Definitely, armed with money and consultants, a good collector could work in a reverse fashion and comb other collections in order to fill in the blanks. In a sense, we see this 'collectorial' approach in this DAG exhibition.

An acrylic work of N N Rimzon, who had passed out from Baroda during the mid-80s, stands out in its subdued greenish graphic lines that together make three different landscapes with architectural suggestions that had defined the caste-regimented society of Kerala or India. This is comparatively a new work compared to the other works, such as the paintings of Vivan Sundaram from his 'narrative' period, something that he had discarded towards the end of the 80s to start off a journey of conceptual installations.

A silk scroll by the late Mrinalini Mukherjee seems to be a revelation, as she is often identified with her iconic Mother Goddess installations using hemp as the medium. One of the early feminists who chain-smoked her way to an assertive aesthetic, here she is seen at her playful best as she poses herself as a skimpily clad vamp, an innocent village belle whose curves are seen through her wet clothes - a take on the stereotypes of feminine representation. To complement this work, one could see two paintings from the next-generation artist Rekha Rodwittiya, depicting an iconic young woman ready to take on the world, boldly returning the gaze.

G R Santhosh is famous for his Neo-Tantric works, but he definitely had a narrative expressionist phase where he painted perhaps like Husain. There are Shanti Dave's works that we need the labels to identify, as many have not seen those works from those early days of his artistic journey. If you want to revel in eroticism, you just need to look at the works of Laxma Goud, the ace printmaker, sculptor and painter. In his works, the open vulvas and erect penises are abundant, as if the world is doing nothing but fornication. But when thinking of it, one could say that they were young and sex was in the air (perhaps only in the air, and painting it was one way of appeasing the hunger for it), and one couldn't have escaped depicting it.

The much-maligned artist, Latika Katt, seems to be getting her respect due posthumously, as in at least three shows currently in Delhi, her works are being exhibited. In DAG, there are a few paper-pulp casts of Katt, which tell us that she was one who walked ahead of her times. There are portraits and self-portraits of Himmat Shah, and interestingly, one could see a self-portrait in bronze, complete with the miniatures of his own works (abstract heads) flanking the bust. Jyoti Bhatt's prints are now abundant in the art market, but in this exhibition there are a few works that were done during the early days of his career.

This is a worth-visiting show for the historical nuances it carries; however, it has the collector's whims as the organising thread rather than the pursuance of a critical history, as it is internally curated with no acknowledgement of the experts involved in making the show. But this deficiency is compensated through a well-produced volume which has well-researched essays by scholars from different parts of the world. In the case of scholarship, the motto has always been the whiter the better. However, it must bring a whiff of fresh air, as the DAG productions had been literally written single-handedly in the previous years. DAG volumes always have a high production quality, and the price is also sky-high. Perhaps, that is one way of controlling knowledge from going all over and, in the process, getting vulgarised. That is a debatable issue, though.

JohnyML

Soliloquy or Ventriloquy?

 

Work by Rinku Choudhary

‘A Soliloquist’s Journal’ is a solo exhibition of paintings by Rinku Choudhary, curated by Prima Kurien at Shridharani Gallery, New Delhi. I have mixed views about the show in particular and its layout in general. At the same time, I do not want to be ruthless in my assessment of what is perhaps a young artist’s first solo exhibition.

There is a familiar puzzle: “The person who makes it, sells it. The person who buys it does not use it, and the person who uses it does not know that they are using it.” You know the answer: a coffin.

As mentioned at the beginning, Prima Kurien is the curator, but she has not written the catalogue text. Shankar Tripathy has. The text is dense enough to scatter visitors rather than draw them into the exhibition. To make matters worse, it is printed on a crimson-red background in terribly subdued greyish-brown type. The sharp light falling on the red wall nearly blinds the viewer.

The result is rather like the riddle: the person who writes it sells it (he must have been remunerated, after all); the people who buy it—the gallery and the curator—do not use it beyond the convention of displaying a wall text; and finally, the artist who is supposedly being interpreted by it does not seem to know much about it. I say this with some confidence because the Instagram reel in which the artist explains her work does not reflect what is written in the catalogue text. I agree that a critical text can, and often should, differ considerably from an artist’s own account of their work. But here the gap seems particularly pronounced.

Rinku’s large paintings are obviously ambitious. She speaks at length about the existential dilemmas she experiences while being confined to a room with her dog and the loneliness that accompanies it. The paintings do depict a confusion born of being simultaneously listless and restless. Her own figure is rendered in what might be called a haphazard manner, though the accompanying text itself qualifies her posture as “haphazard.” She appears in various states of sitting, lying down, or hovering somewhere in between. Her face is often submerged in a jumble of lines that conveys both the animation of her body and the turbulence of her thoughts.

The only concrete image that repeatedly emerges is that of a dog, responding in various ways to its human companion, perhaps sensing something of what is taking place within her existence. The protagonist of the paintings seems to yearn for a connection with the world outside while simultaneously feeling threatened by the very possibility of such encounters.

What could be suffocating her, one might ask?

There are not many things today that are soothing or consoling. The daily dose of news and reels seems to offer little beyond spine-chilling terror, fear, abjectness and an overwhelming sense of helplessness.

One could therefore say that Rinku submerges herself in the yarns of her own making, entangling her existence in the web of an invisible predatory creature. Its immanent presence—manifested through social injustice, gender disparity and political uncouthness—cannot easily be avoided or hoodwinked. Rinku becomes Chagall-esque on the one hand and Kafkaesque on the other. Her figures float, as though levitation were inevitable under such circumstances, and at times they stand before the system—represented here through domesticity—clueless and disoriented.

I could not find an artist’s statement, nor could I find anyone particularly helpful in the gallery who might offer some direction regarding the artist’s intentions. Although soliloquy—the externalisation of troubling internal thoughts through mumbling articulations—seems to be the dominant mode of the exhibition, I am tempted to call it ‘A Ventriloquist’s Journey’. I have little reason to believe that the artist is speaking entirely in her own voice through the texts that surround the works.

What amused me greatly was the presence of a ‘response canvas’, a sort of graffiti wall in the form of a large canvas that had already been filled by young viewers. A closer look revealed that Gen Z, carrying a considerable amount of political angst, had already visited the exhibition. They had expressed their minds through phrases such as ‘Free Palestine’, ‘Modi…’ and so on.

Perhaps that response canvas tells us something that the catalogue does not.

If you have a critical eye, you may still catch the exhibition before it closes tomorrow.

JohnyML

Beyond Paper: Dattatreya Apte’s Soft Stone

 

Dattatreya Apte’s The Soft Stone, presented by Aakriti Gallery and curated by Nanak Ganguly, is at once a surprise and a visual feast. Known for his sensitive prints—he is, after all, an accomplished printmaker—Apte has been quietly developing his paper-pulp works for years, occasionally showing them in group exhibitions and, consequently, inviting less attention than they deserve. Critics cannot really be faulted for overlooking this considerable body of work in the medium. Even I, an art critic who has known Apte for the last three decades and who shares Delhi as a base with him, was unaware of the existence of this remarkable body of work. The irony is that I had to travel to Kolkata to see it. My request to the gallery is that the exhibition be taken to all the major art centres in India, including Delhi and Mumbai.

Paper pulp, according to me, is a medium in permanent transition. It has left its “paper state” and assumed an intermediary status: it is neither rock-solid nor as brittle as a biscuit. Pulp can be made from anything that can be pulped, including books that run counter to hegemonic ideology. In their experimental fervour, artists often use pulp as a major medium while simultaneously concealing or transforming its “natural” appearance.

Apte began working with the medium like a modernist searching for a new material, a new form and a new vocabulary of images. But someone had already done something that seemed almost insurmountable. That artist was Somnath Hore, whose Wounds series in paper pulp had established an ultimate benchmark through its combination of pathos, poignancy and aesthetic minimalism.

Apte was aware of this when he began working with pulp in the 1980s. One therefore encounters a series of works with embossed images that oscillate between pure abstraction and semi-figuration. They are not wounds or incisions per se, but gestures that a printmaker could make within the possibilities offered by the medium: pressing objects into the surface of the pulp. The progression of Apte’s experiments becomes evident in the exhibited works, where he is seen pressing natural and found objects onto the surface to achieve desired effects.

His increasing felicity with the medium takes Apte to different heights as he moves from accidental discoveries and deliberate impressions towards a more uninhibited play with the material. The existential phase gradually gives way to a pleasurable articulation of larger vistas, offering glimpses of Impressionistic reflection. Apte creates symbolic narratives as well as a vocabulary of narrative symbolism. His works resemble analogue film excised from a spool of positive prints. The film in hand tells a story through frozen action, while allowing us to imagine the sequences that precede and follow it.

A modernist to the core, Apte makes his works speak in many tongues. One work, Deluge, evokes memories of The Sea of Ice (also known as The Wreck of Hope), the historic painting by the Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich. A similar sense of sublime Romanticism enters Apte’s works at regular intervals.

The Out of the Box series, meanwhile, presents broken pieces of imitation wooden structures made from paper pulp and mounted on painted canvases. They appear, at first, to be dismantled boxes. Seen from another perspective, however, they become faces of existential human beings whose identities have been pulverised by the competing ideologies that govern society.

Seen together in a solo exhibition—even though the curatorial intention is not to present the works in a linear chronology—Apte’s works begin to make sense in relation to one another. They virtually link their paths, enabling viewers to perceive the individual works within a broader artistic perspective. Apte allows his printmaker’s sensibility to leave its impression on most of the works while, at the same time, allowing each work to develop a personality of its own.

A must-see exhibition for Kolkatans.

JohnyML

The Symbolism of Backpacks in E. P. Unny and Ai Weiwei

Social revolutions often throw up symbols that remain fresh in the socio-cultural and political imagination, even though they may not play a direct role in revolutionary acts. In 1930, Mahatma Gandhi picked up a mundane object like salt and transformed it into a powerful political symbol through an unprecedented combination of creative imagination and practical philosophy. He made salt from seawater, openly defying the draconian British laws governing its production and sale.

In 2013, the Aam Aadmi Party picked up the broom as its election symbol, promising to clean society of bribery and other forms of corruption. Later, when the Chief Justice of India condescendingly described Indian youth as “cockroaches,” an Indian student, Abhijit Deepke, then studying at Boston University, created a satirical Instagram platform. The image of a creature that had hitherto been considered despicable was transformed into a lasting symbol of organisation, protest and agitation.

While the cockroach grew in stature through its many avatars, shaped by the imagination of millions of young Indian content creators, another mundane object emerged as a powerful symbol of the educated, rejected, frustrated, dispossessed, betrayed and job-seeking youth of India: the backpack.

Alongside the dominant cockroach symbol, the backpack became an enduring marker of the Gen-Z generation that spearheaded the agitation on the ground and brought about a series of changes in the government's attitude. A minister resigned, the Prime Minister began making reels, and parliamentarians started adopting Gen-Z expressions and language. Meanwhile, the cascading effect of the protests began to spread across the country.

Irrespective of gender or class—and regardless of the brand or price of the bag—most young people use backpacks for their convenience. They can carry their dreams as well as their worldly possessions in them. Unlike many other kinds of bags, backpacks leave the carrier's hands free, allowing greater freedom of movement. The shoulders and back together can support the weight while travelling, and most backpacks are relatively inexpensive and affordable.

For a young person, a backpack can contain a miniature version of their room, their work, their aspirations and, in a sense, their life.

When thousands of young people arrived at Jantar Mantar in July this year, demanding the resignation of the Union Education Minister, none of them knew how long the struggle would last. They came prepared with backpacks containing spare clothes, snacks, laptops, mobile chargers, books, water bottles, sanitary napkins and, above all, hope and determination.

The protest continued for a month, accompanied by the state's increasingly ruthless resistance, which went to the extent of using brutal pellet guns against unarmed students demanding their rights.

Backpacks were everywhere.

Today, I came across a cartoon by the veteran intellectual cartoonist E. P. Unny of The Indian Express. It contained nothing but the image of a backpack, complete with a water bottle tucked into the side net and a book and pen in the outer pocket. The caption simply read: “15 Aug 2026.”

What a befitting cartoon for the 80th anniversary of Indian Independence.

This minimalist cartoon transforms the Gen-Z symbol of an ordinary backpack into a lasting icon of an ongoing socio-cultural resistance. From Delhi, the Gen-Z protests have spread to different parts of India, and now even Gen-Alpha has begun raising its voice for better educational facilities and teaching. They are supported by Gen-Z leaders who have chosen to function as a pressure group rather than convert the momentum of the movement into a political party.

Unny is not alone in transforming the backpack into a cultural and political symbol.

In a very different context, the prominent Chinese conceptual artist Ai Weiwei created an installation using thousands of backpacks. Titled Remembering, the installation was a response to the devastating 2008 earthquake in Sichuan, China, in which more than 80,000 people lost their lives, many of them schoolchildren.

Weiwei investigated why the death toll among schoolchildren was so high. He discovered that many school buildings had collapsed because they had been constructed with cheap materials, amid rampant institutional corruption and the alleged siphoning of funds by politically influential building contractors.

For Remembering, Weiwei used 9,000 school backpacks. Arranged on the façade of the Haus der Kunst in Munich, the backpacks formed the sentence “She lived happily for seven years in this world” in Mandarin. The words were made up of backpacks, each associated with a child whose name his team of researchers had identified through grieving parents and government records.

The backpacks in Weiwei's installation carry the weight of children who are no longer there. Unny's backpack, on the other hand, carries the presence of a generation that refuses to disappear into silence.

E. P. Unny's untitled cartoon and Ai Weiwei's Remembering thus symbolise two different tragedies of our times. One speaks of a generation fighting to protect its future; the other remembers children whose future was brutally taken away.

Yet both works ultimately speak to the same human imperative: the fight against forgetting.

A backpack can carry books, clothes, food, technology and the small necessities of everyday life. But in the hands of an artist—or in the hands of a generation in revolt—it can carry something much larger: memory, resistance, grief, aspiration and hope.

JohnyML

 

Dimagee Naxals and the Orwellian Thought Police

 

“The other is hell,” said Albert Camus. It was quite an existential statement. But in the hands of Edward Said, the “Other” became the one who is forced into hell. For the survival of any ideology, there has to be an “Other”—someone against whom we define ourselves. It makes us believe that our survival depends on comparison. We other, therefore we are.

Yesterday, when the Prime Minister spoke to the nation on the occasion of the 80th Independence anniversary from the ramparts of the historic Red Fort, he once again created another “Other”: the Dimagee Naxal, or the “mentally Naxal.”

The Prime Minister, however, did not pinpoint who these Dimagee Naxals are. Nor, unlike an earlier infamous political remark, did he suggest that they could be identified by their clothes.

Dimagee Naxal is the latest contestable term to enter our political vocabulary. The Prime Minister could have meant several things by it. Perhaps he meant “Urban Naxals”—the so-called Naxals who live in cities. But these are not the gun-wielding, emaciated young men and women in the forests of Bastar or Dandakaranya who have taken Maoism as their political faith and way of life.

Urban Naxals, in the contemporary political imagination, are more likely to be intellectuals, academics, students, writers and citizens who think differently from the dominant ideology—in our case, the dominant right-wing Hindutva ideology. They have previously been described as “anti-nationals,” members of “tukde-tukde gangs,” and by many other labels.

In the immediate political context, however, Dimagee Naxal could mean something else altogether. It could refer to the educated, jobless and frustrated youth of India—the very people who can be easily identified because they think, speak sense and assert their logic.

They want democracy. They want fraternity. Their primary demand is remarkably ordinary: decent jobs that allow them to fulfil their dreams and take care of their families. The government has offered plenty of promises, but very little that addresses this immediate anxiety. And, interestingly, this particular goalpost cannot simply be pushed twenty years into the future, to 2047.

Ever since the BJP-led NDA government came to power at the Centre in 2014, its political rhetoric has relied heavily on hyper-nationalism. To maintain that rhetoric at the same intensity, it has required a constant production of “Others.”

First, it was Pakistan. Then Indian Muslims—an established “Other” in Indian majoritarian politics since the late nineteenth century. Then China and Chinese products. Then students raising slogans of “Azadi.” Then beef eaters. Then those who did not consider the cow their mother. Later came Maoists and “Urban Naxals.” Then anyone who appeared too sensible, too educated or too questioning.

The list went on.

But now the process of “othering” appears exhausted. There are only so many Others one can manufacture.

Pakistan does not seem interested in constantly providing the enemy image that Indian political rhetoric requires. China plays its own strategic game, intelligently combining military pressure, trade and diplomacy. Indian Muslims have been forced to negotiate with a political reality that has repeatedly diminished their sense of security and belonging. Intellectuals and professors have been intimidated. Beef politics has transformed what people eat into a political question. Urban Naxals continue to write autobiographies, essays and books to record their experiences.

So the ruling party needs a new category.

And like Hollywood, which periodically needs to invent an alien threat when terrestrial enemies become insufficient, our political imagination seems to have arrived at something even more abstract:

The Dimagee Naxal.

The term needs some qualification. “Dimagee” suggests someone with a brain—someone who thinks, questions and acts. “Naxal” suggests the perpetual disruptor, the person who asks uncomfortable questions about justice, equality and rights.

But how does one identify a Dimagee?

A man with a beard, or a woman with kohl-lined eyes and unconventional clothes, might be taken for an intellectual. But appearance does not make an intellectual. A thinking person could look completely ordinary, without sending out any visible signal that says: I am brainy.

And therein lies the problem.

If the “Dimagee Naxal” is defined by thought rather than appearance, then virtually anyone can become one.

Our governments have historically been uncomfortable with education and independent thinking because education teaches people to ask questions. And where there are questions, there is the possibility of dissent, resistance and, eventually, political change.

The old feudal order, codified through texts such as the Manusmriti, placed severe restrictions on who could access knowledge. In contemporary India, one can see echoes of this anxiety in the systematic politicisation, weakening and restructuring of schooling and higher education.

The Dimagee Naxal also resonates disturbingly with George Orwell’s idea of the Thought Police.

In 1984, Orwell imagined a totalitarian state in which the government does not merely police actions or words—it polices thought itself. Surveillance becomes permanent. Movements are monitored. Words are scrutinised. Rooms are bugged. Telephones are tapped. People are watched. And eventually, even an unexpressed thought can become evidence of a crime.

We seem to have arrived, rather smoothly, at the threshold of that Orwellian condition.

Perhaps the Dimagee Naxal is the final stage in the politics of “othering”: when there are no more convincing external enemies left, the enemy becomes thought itself.

Anybody can now potentially be accused of a thought crime.

Be ready for it.

What is the next stop? I do not know.

But history tells us that regimes built entirely on the production of enemies eventually begin to consume themselves. The politics of permanent othering ultimately turns inward; the regime starts devouring the very society it claims to protect.

So, beyond all the expected calamities, perhaps there is a small silver lining around the clouds.

The final Other may eventually become the regime itself.

JohnyML