A poster made by Architecture students from a Mumbai college hanging at the pavement gallery outside Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai, during the protests against the assault on free expression at the F.F.A.,M.S.U. IMAGE COURTESY SHAINA A / CHITRAKARKHANA.NET

WE ALL KNOW THAT THE PUBLIC SPHERE IN INDIA IS FAR FROM being the angelic space of exchange that Habermas had visualised early in his career as a philosopher of intersubjective communication. Nor does it correspond to Nehru’s dream of a liberal social space of conversation. Rather than being a domain where individuals can freely express their ideas and opinions, as the voices of a society refining itself through self-reflection, India’s public sphere is today veined with intolerance, a refusal to engage with ideas alien to oneself, a prickly right to take offence at the slightest difference from one’s own position, and the need of aggressive political actors to control the production of discourse and the course of cultural activity.

This is the most urgent crisis that we face today, as cultural practitioners, because this is the setting in which we conduct all our work: painting our paintings, writing our texts, staging our plays, making our films, dancing our choreographies, phrasing our new-media interventions.

In this context, I am amazed at the political naïveté that many visual artists display. This may result from the fact that campus radicalisation has never been a major feature of the process of art pedagogy. The art student is typically someone who has resisted family pressure and social disapproval – this was before the boom in the art market sanctioned art as a respectable choice in the eyes of anxious middle-class parents – to follow his passion. As such, the art student is fixated on acquiring the techniques that will equip him for a career, and on making the connections necessary to forging that career. And so the academy precinct and the gallery system become the circuits within which he is socialised and in which his efforts are focused. There is little surplus energy to spend on the state of the world, and sensitisation to political issues comes later in life, especially through the often softened and diluted medium of NGO enthusiasm.

Little wonder, then, that much so-called political art in India yields pictures of noble intentions and token gestures rather than substantial and moving gestures of empathy, critique, and illumination. By the same logic, it is significant that the most politically nuanced art in India is made by artists who never went to art school, or who were exposed to political activity overseas, or who come into the visual arts from disciplines like documentary cinema, intermedia practice, or architecture, where naïveté would be suicidal.