Charge of the morality brigade

It was supposed to be an exhibit depicting the moral decline in today’s society. And as it turned out, it became the target of the moral police who swooped down on it, citing pretty much the same reason for their action as the topic of the exhibit!

Apparently, the police acted on a complaint by a Mumbai psychologist, Pushpa Vitula who was apparently outraged by the exhibit imaginatively titled, “Tits, clits n Elephant dicks” and had this to say,

“I agree that this may be art. But there is art that comes from heaven, and then there is art that comes from hell. It’s obscene to even utter the title of the exhibition”

Err… if this is what an educated person (I am assuming she really is a psychologist) thinks like, there is something seriously lacking in the education we receive! Education, they say, opens the mind, broadens one’s horizons and all that jazz. Surely they who say this are terribly wrong!

If this Pushpa Vitula was outraged by even the title of the exhibition, why on earth did she make the conscious choice to enter a private gallery and view the exhibit? Even then, she could’ve conveyed her distress to the artists. Apparently, the artist was apparently not averse to putting up a signboard, restricting the entry to above-18s. But according to the artist, the lady wasn’t too interested in this.

If everyone thought like this lady, most of our classical art (from the erotic sculptures of Khajuraho to Michaelangelo’s David) would have to be covered by a black cloth to prevent the corruption of ‘gullible’ minds!

In a 1954 case involving artist, Akbar Padamsee, the courts had passed a law which stated that an artist’s work cannot be deemed obscene or pornographic if it was exhibited within the walls of a gallery. The police who acted on Pushpa Vitula’s complaint should have known this. Now they face a possible contempt of court lawsuit. Moreover, even if we discount the 1954 ruling, Jehangir Art Gallery is a private property and the state (acting through the police) has no business interfering with anything that happens within the confines of a private property. A private space with free entry/access to public surely does not become a public place. By going against this principle, we will set a dangerous precedent. Tomorrow, we may get a case where a person catching a glimpse, through a window, of a couple having sex inside their own bedroom, may complain that his/her modesty has been outraged by seeing the act of copulation!!

Having said that, I think artists and the gallery should be responsible for putting up a signboard clearly informing about the mature content of the exhibit and barring entry to minors. It did not happen in this case and this calls for a slap on the wrists of the gallery and the artists in question. Going on a tangent, I would not even think it beyond the realms of possibility that the artists, in this case, may have stage-managed the controversy to extract maximum publicity for an exhibit that would’ve gone unnoticed had it not been for the complaint by Pushpa Vitula.

However, the spirit of censorship is alive and kicking in India. Rights defined within the constitution are not sacrosanct if one goes by the ‘mai-baap sarkar‘ attitude shown by the state on numerous occasions in trying to decide what’s right or wrong for the people.