How protesters are ruining art

Tamil author Perumal Murugan recently announced his "death" in a Facebook post. He wrote: "Author Perumal Murugan has died. He is no God, so he is not going to resurrect himself. Nor does he believe in reincarnation. From now on P Murugan will merely survive as the teacher he has been." What led to the author committing "suicide"? He wrote a novel, Madhorubhangan (first published in 2010), which tells the story of a childless couple. The wife takes part in an ancient temple ritual where, on a designated night, consensual sex between any man and woman is permitted.

Intolerance

Penguin published an English translation of the novel, One-Part Woman, last year. Right-wing and caste-based groups have been up in arms (the RSS burnt copies of the book), so much so that Murugan and his wife have been forced to leave the town where they have both taught for years.

In another incident, the comedy collective AIB was forced to take down its Bollywood 'roast' from YouTube. Their attempt at bringing the US brand of 'insult comedy' to India was a mega-success. It clocked more than eight million views on YouTube. Those who liked the video outnumbered those who didn't like it by ten times to one. The live show generated Rs 40 lakhs in revenue, all of which was donated to charities.

Yet it had to be taken down, mostly because of protests by the right-wing party, the MNS. FIRs have been lodged against those who participated in the roast. The AIB roast is, even by our low standards of tolerance, a case most peculiar.

In most cases, protests are made by those who claim their 'sentiments have been hurt'. In the AIB show, all those who were being made fun of, were present either on the stage (Ranveer Singh, Arjun Kapoor, Karan Johar), or in the audience (Alia Bhatt, Deepika Padukone, Anurag Kashyap).

The very people who were being sent up were happily laughing at themselves. So why did a third party take offence? In both the above cases, the protests came from right-wing outfits. But clamping down on free speech is not just a right-wing or an Indian affliction. It can come from the left as well. Last year, when Sahitya Academy winner Joe D' Cruz professed support for Modi on his Facebook page, his publisher Navayana, cancelled the translation of his book.

In other parts of the world, left-liberal intolerance has been on the rise. Last November, spiked editor Brendan O'Neill was to speak at Christ Church College, Oxford, at an event organised by the pro-life group Oxford Students for Life. In fact, he was going to argue in favour of abortion and bodily autonomy. And yet, the event was forced to shut down because of pressure from feminist groups.

A theatre group at Mount Holyoake College said they wouldn't be performing The Vagina Monologues anymore because the play excludes women without vaginas. Protesters at Smith College demanded the cancellation of an address by Christine Lagaarde of the IMF, blaming the organisation for "patriarchal practices" that "oppress women worldwide".

Ideology

The difference between liberal democracies in the West and here is that there the intolerance is ideological, and comes mostly from left-feminist quarters. Art is usually left alone. Art lost the power to shock a long time ago. The case is different in countries like Russia and India. Here, art still has the power to shock; it still has the power to dismantle ruling ideologies. When the band Pussy Riot confronted Putin's language of lies with the "holy-fool aesthetic of punk performance", they were put in jail. When AIB tries to show a mirror to phony Bollywood with its brave new brand of stand-up, it finds itself facing a looming legal battle. It's simplistic to dismiss "shock art" as a juvenile publicity stunt.

Outrage

Take the case of Manet's Olympia, which caused much outrage in 1865. This painting of a working class prostitute was attacked by the public and critics alike. But, as George Bataille has written, the source of bourgeois outrage was "disappointed expectation". Instead of showing them what they expected, Manet offered the starkness of "what we see". The "shock", as Adam Thirwell points out in The Guardian, created a "failure of criticism".

The critic felt 'blankly frustrated' by the newness of what he was witnessing. Stand-up too is an art form, albeit a relatively young one. AIB, in an open letter, defends its right to shock: "Our job is to raid the newspapers, pop culture and life for observations…it's okay if you think we're juvenile or unfunny…There's a larger cultural conversation going on here, where we're at the very edges of what it's okay to say. And it's a conversation we need to have now because the world we live in is too complicated to be run by silences." AIB's approach might be edgy but it is at the heart of this cultural conversation. It's the censor board and the MNS who are the odd ones out, lurking on the fringes. As Ram Gopal Varma tweeted: "The sheer popularity of the AIB also shud b a call to the censor board to wake up smell the coffee nd look out the window at a new India."