Bhupen Khakhar. Beauty is Skin Deep Only (Diptych). Oil on canvas. 177 cms x 352 cms. 2001.

IN DEFENCE OF THE SECULAR IDEAL

Amrit Gangar records the responses of artists to communal terror in Gujarat.

     "The Gujarat riots have unnerved me. I have seen such inhumanity. I realize that there is a spectre of genocide that faces one community. People don't realize it, but they have made violence fashionable. Every man is threatened by violence today" - Bhupen Khakhar

     Bhupen Khakhar lost no time in responding to the 'terror' that gripped Gujarat after the Godhra train tragedy in 2002. He expressed his agony and outrage through works that framed some of the most significant critiques of orchestrated violence. The last phase of his works, from 2001 onwards, was concerned with the travails of the human body as well as with the spectre of disfigurement, actual and metaphorical. Artists in Gujarat as well as from across the country rose in protest to flay the powers-that-were and to help the victims.

     The fear of communal terror however still lingers. B.V. Suresh's recent installation, Facilitating the Beast, at Vadehra Art Gallery, Delhi, took off from Baroda's gruesome Best Bakery case that has become the public face of the violence in Gujarat. The installation included a series of paintings, a video show called Retakes of the Shadow, and a performance by the eminent dancer-choreographer, Maya Rao. Rao's dance around the rows of burnt bread loaves was meant to shame us - our history, it seemed to suggest, was not a stranger to the dance of death. Living in Baroda, Suresh had witnessed the massacre himself, and for him, "forgetting the Gujarat episode and the Best Bakery case was just not possible." Facilitating the Beast had simple and direct imagery that also critiqued the role of the media. The local Gujarati media, as the world knows, was quite partisan in its reporting.