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But what is actually happening? Chandramohan Srilamantula, a final-year student with a brilliant track record and a humble background -- his parents are daily laborers -- displayed some paintings he had done for his post-graduate examination at Maharaja Sayajirao University in Vadodara, Gujarat. They were put on display not only for the examiners to view, but also for the art gallery owners and patrons. These paintings consisted of some very disturbing religious scenes, to say the least. They involved Christian as well as Hindu images.
Interestingly, one of the earliest protestors against the exhibition of these paintings was not a Hindu nationalist but a Christian priest named Rev. Emmanuel Kant. Later the cause was taken up by BJP legislator Niraj Jain. In happier times those leftists who today charge Niraj Jain with being a Hindu fundamentalist would have called him a non-Hindu, for he actually follows Jainism. While Hindu nationalists have traditionally claimed Jainism as part of Hinduism, leftists have vehemently denied it. Now at least Hindu nationalists have a reason to cheer -- for despite the bad press they have got, they have it from the leftists that a Jain is a Hindu.
Now let us come back to the art examination cum quasi-exhibition. Niraj Jain demanded that the pictures be withdrawn. Dean of the Fine Arts School Prof. Shivaji Panikkar hotly declined the request, explaining to the agitated protestors that the department was like his personal bedroom and they had no place in it. As the arguments became heated, Niraj and his supporters decided to take legal action and complained to the police. Chandramohan was frisked away by the police and jailed. He was later released.
There were no violent attacks on Chandramohan, nor were his paintings destroyed. They still exist as safe as the artist who painted them. It could have ended then and there. Hindu nationalists were not about to take this issue street after street and town after town and state after state as in the case of the Mohammed cartoons that aroused Muslim anger worldwide last year.
Then the dean announced as retaliation an art exhibition which would display select nude paintings of Indian tradition, Tantric and otherwise. The university administration did not want any further trouble and suspended the dean. Media all over the nation burst into a great protest over artistic freedom.
The usual defense against such crude depiction of deities, particularly Hindu deities, is that the Hindu art tradition has been extremely tolerant and has always allowed nude depictions even in temples. Personally I have had my own experience with temple erotica. Documenting the neglected pillar sculptures of Kanyakumari district -- the southernmost district in India -- for a government fellowship project in cultural economics, I came across such sculptures. One sculpture showed a sage kneeling before a semi-clad woman, standing in a pose that suggested rejection of his offer. It is in a village temple and the sculpture is definitely within the last three centuries, roughly coinciding with the regime of Pope Pius IX, who hacked the male genitals off sculptures by Michelangelo, Bramante and Bernini and had them covered with plaster fig leaves.
Indian society has the inner strength to tease and depict erotically its own holy men in the very temples where they worship. But the same temple sculpture also shows sages and yogis who overcame such temptations and realized ultimate liberation. Thus temple erotica is not an obsession of pathological proportions with sexuality and obscenity, but a healthy approach to sexuality, transforming it into spirituality and fitting it in its rightful place in the larger web of existence.
Osho, the eminent Tantric guru of our times, explains the erotica of the Khajuraho Sun Temple in his book "Sex to Super Consciousness." He says: "The makers of this temple were very sensible people. This was a meditation center. Sexuality is on the surface of all around, placidity is at the core, at the center. They used to tell the aspirants to meditate on sex...when one had thoroughly understood it and was sure that the mind was free from sex, then he may enter inside."
Placidity beyond the erotic is what makes temple erotica acceptable to all sections of society, from lay persons to great spiritual masters. There is no need for art plaintiffs to defend temple erotica to the common Indian peasants. It is exactly this placidity at the core that is lacking in Chandramohan's paintings, and the void shows. Hence the pseudo-secular charlatanism in defending pathological obsessions with the Tantric symbolism and temple erotica falls on its face -- unable to defend with conviction what it sets out to defend.
There is another aspect to the whole drama. Getting paintings, films and books banned has become a sort of power-trip for political and communal groups in India. In 2001 when "Taurus," a film by Russian director Alexander Sukorov on the last few years of Lenin's life, was to be screened at the West Bengal International film festival, the ruling Communist Party's youth wing staged an unruly demonstration and Marxist patriarch Jyothi Basu demanded that the film be withdrawn. With no editorial condemning this blatant anti-democratic assault on the freedom of expression and art, the film was silently withdrawn.
Indian states competed with each other to ban the "Da Vinci Code" film and the northeast states upped the ante by banning the novel as well. No editorial and definitely no eminent leftist intellectual sermonized on the freedom of artistic expression being curbed. Then when courts lifted the ban on the film, peace-loving Christians peacefully attacked the cinema halls. Again no outrage from the intellectual leftists. Discovery Channel was made to cancel the "Jesus Tomb" documentary, and again no outrage. When violent protests erupted and public properties were damaged by protestors against the Danish cartoons of Mohammed, the Communist Party's official magazine, "People's Democracy," empathized with the protestors and their "genuine anger against the cartoons."
Now let us compare the behavior of Gujarat Hindus with such unruly overtly violent behavior of other political and religious groups against their detractors. Given the quantum of obscenity heaped on their deities, the Gujarat Hindus -- Jains included -- behaved extremely well and extremely patiently. They did not release any Fatwas. They sought only legal remedy. Is that fascism?
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(S. Aravindan Neelakandan is a social scientist working with an ecological NGO called Vivekananda Kendra -- Natural Resources Development Project in Nagercoil, India. He is also a freelance writer and author of the Tamil-language "God and 40 Hz.")
