The curious case of Vadfest
Gujarat is in celebratory mode the whole of January. The celebrations started with the mega RSS shibir from January 2-4 at Dastan farm outside Ahmedabad city, held after a 15-year-gap. This is just before the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas, the NRI meet from 7-9, and the Vibrant Gujarat Summit between 11-13 in Gandhinagar. January ends with Vadfest, a four day art and culture extravaganza held to promote Vadodara/Baroda as the cultural hub of Gujarat.
I put Vadfest in context as part of a series of events, because I am appalled that my art school, the Baroda Faculty of Fine Arts, is hosting and curating a series of art exhibitions for Vadfest, as a showcase for a government that has tried repeatedly to undermine the autonomy of the art school and violently attack art and artists. Disappointingly, some senior artists are also part of the shows, giving it credibility. It would have been better if our friends, the same teachers who stood together just a few years ago to resist the attacks by the VHP on Chandramohan in 2007, and to defend the faculty in 2002, had thought more about the larger implications of lending their expertise. Classes have been disrupted over two months for renovation/beautification of the campus (swachh)bang in the middle of the winter semester. Lawns laid everywhere give it an all-new corporate look.
A justification has been put forth that Vadfest is not a state event, but a private festival conceived by a group of 200 Baroda citizens as a bi-annual city festival. The Vadfest website has no mention of this group. It has pictures of the Gujarat chief minister and Minister Saurabh Patel with the logos of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, the Gujarat government, and Gujarat Tourism, at its head. However newspaper reports say that prominent "Barodians" are organising the event jointly with the state government and that state finance minister Saurabh Patel is the chairman of the group. It is obvious that this group of businessmen has remarkable clout if they have taken over an entire school of an independent university to the extent of disrupting academics for two months. I think this is unprecedented. Talk about university autonomy!
There's a depressing air of secrecy in all this. Students say they have not been involved or taken into confidence. There seems to be a hovering miasma of passivity and helplessness - or is it protest fatigue? The larger artist community in Baroda seems to have done no serious questioning about the nature of the festival, its politics or its finances.
It appears artists were invited informally by the curator-teachers and many have agreed to participate thinking it is a faculty initiative. Many artists had also declined the invitation or ignored it, and some others have withdrawn their works after we sent out a protest letter. Others decided to be in, but do "subversive" works.
I wonder though how subversion would work in this context. The curators say that they had "utmost freedom" to select works. However, post 2007 the State/University has actually set up a committee to screen all the exhibitions in the campus for damage control. An internalised spontaneous censorship has been going on for a while now with the increasing conservatism within the school. (Breaking news:In fact, some submitted works have been censored out).
First comes the lumpen aggression and then comes the seduction. Past and present problems are then swept away. Through this corporate festival the state, known as the Hindutva laboratory of India, is cheekily co-opting this premier liberal institution to be its brand ambassador, projecting it as an iconic place. See the website. For my friends who exclaim over the new "international" look of the campus, I want to say that the art school's international reputation did not depend on its looks, but was formed on its profound intellectual and artistic contribution, its openness, and its tradition of critical thinking and social engagement.