At 6 pm on Tuesday, a call from Bikaner House told Raihan Vadra that parts of his forthcoming exhibition would have to be reconsidered. The written objection reached him at 3.30 pm on Wednesday, three hours before No Idea Is Final opened, leaving thirty minutes to remove or replace 74 of 105 images. He had shared the layout a week earlier and heard nothing. The proposal the venue approved on 30 June described a show built around choice, control and unity.
The works that came down document the protests and movements that have unfolded in New Delhi over the last six months. Every workaround Vadra offered met a refusal. Flipping the canvases was rejected, and so was piling them in a corner. Blank frames went up in their place until the venue said those had to be removed too. He drew his line at two photographs of the Tricolour, and refused to take them down. The national flag, in other words, appeared on the list of images a state-run venue judged unfit for its walls.
The official answer arrived on Thursday. The Bikaner House management society told PTI it had sought removal of certain photographs as inconsistent with its policy, and that works consistent with it remained on display. A policy is a rule, and rules have clauses. The sentence Vadra attributes to the administration belongs to another category altogether: that given the current context and political climate in India, this was not the right time to show those images. One standard concerns what a booking contract permits, the other concerns what power can tolerate at a given moment. As reported, the society's statement names no clause the Tricolour frames violated.
Fairness requires the complications. Vadra told ANI he does not know whether pressure came from elsewhere and that management made the decision. Former Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot calls it censorship and wants the BJP government, which owns Bikaner House, to explain. Because the photographer's mother is a Congress MP and the venue belongs to a BJP-run state, partisan readings arrived within hours, and both camps will use the story for their own ends. The principle survives either reading.
Priyanka Gandhi Vadra told PTI that "Today it's him, tomorrow it will be another artist." Kerala Chief Minister V D Satheesan has offered to host the work in his state without exclusions. Vadra says the exhibition continues in limited form while he searches for a venue for the full protest series.
India has watched this scene before, and the earlier instalments ended worse. A Hindi magazine resurfaced M.F. Husain's old sketches of nude Hindu deities in the mid-1990s, and vigilantes spent two decades hounding the painter. In 2006, a London exhibition of his work was cancelled after unknown assailants damaged paintings. He lived in self-imposed exile from 2006 until his death in 2011, and took Qatari citizenship in 2010. Last year Qatar opened a museum dedicated to his work, which means the permanent home of India's most celebrated modern painter sits in Doha. At Baroda, a student named Srilamanthula Chandramohan watched a party activist and police walk into his exhibition to demand paintings come down, and the arts community rallied behind him as an arrest followed. The ledger carries entries under every flag: the 1988 ban on The Satanic Verses came under a Congress government.
Art and politics have shared a wall for as long as walls have held art. A painter of deities, a student at an art school and a photographer of young marchers occupy different decades and different media, yet the flinch they provoked looks identical from one era to the next. Vadra puts the proposition in six words: "There is no art without politics."
So the question the gallery's management owes the public is whose peace the photographs threatened. A picture of young people walking through Delhi disturbs nothing that was not already moving through Delhi. If the images are accurate, the peace in danger is the comfort of not having been looked at, and a gallery that protects that comfort has chosen a side while calling it neutrality. Peace keeps its meaning only when it covers the people in the photographs, and it ought to cover the person holding the camera.
Seventy-four empty spaces now hang in a government-owned building, and they make their own record. The Bikaner House management society can close the matter in writing by publishing the policy, naming the clause, identifying who applied it and stating when. Until it does, the walls will keep answering for it.
TO BE CONTINUED, FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY.
This is where the surface ends and the reporting begins.
The complete piece, the full archive, and access to The French Press Circle. Reporting answerable only to its readers.
Already a subscriber ?
Login
Read these on the house, with our compliments.
A selection from the current issue, open to all readers. Read them in full. The rest is one decision away.
At 6 pm on Tuesday, a call from Bikaner House told Raihan Vadra that parts of his forthcoming exhibition would have to be reconsidered. The written objection reached him at 3.30 pm on Wednesday, three hours before No Idea Is Final opened, leaving thirty minutes to remove or replace 74 of 105 images. He had shared the layout a week earlier and heard nothing. The proposal the venue approved on 30 June described a show built around choice, control and unity.
The works that came down document the protests and movements that have unfolded in New Delhi over the last six months. Every workaround Vadra offered met a refusal. Flipping the canvases was rejected, and so was piling them in a corner. Blank frames went up in their place until the venue said those had to be removed too. He drew his line at two photographs of the Tricolour, and refused to take them down. The national flag, in other words, appeared on the list of images a state-run venue judged unfit for its walls.
The official answer arrived on Thursday. The Bikaner House management society told PTI it had sought removal of certain photographs as inconsistent with its policy, and that works consistent with it remained on display. A policy is a rule, and rules have clauses. The sentence Vadra attributes to the administration belongs to another category altogether: that given the current context and political climate in India, this was not the right time to show those images. One standard concerns what a booking contract permits, the other concerns what power can tolerate at a given moment. As reported, the society's statement names no clause the Tricolour frames violated.
Fairness requires the complications. Vadra told ANI he does not know whether pressure came from elsewhere and that management made the decision. Former Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot calls it censorship and wants the BJP government, which owns Bikaner House, to explain. Because the photographer's mother is a Congress MP and the venue belongs to a BJP-run state, partisan readings arrived within hours, and both camps will use the story for their own ends. The principle survives either reading.
Priyanka Gandhi Vadra told PTI that "Today it's him, tomorrow it will be another artist." Kerala Chief Minister V D Satheesan has offered to host the work in his state without exclusions. Vadra says the exhibition continues in limited form while he searches for a venue for the full protest series.
India has watched this scene before, and the earlier instalments ended worse. A Hindi magazine resurfaced M.F. Husain's old sketches of nude Hindu deities in the mid-1990s, and vigilantes spent two decades hounding the painter. In 2006, a London exhibition of his work was cancelled after unknown assailants damaged paintings. He lived in self-imposed exile from 2006 until his death in 2011, and took Qatari citizenship in 2010. Last year Qatar opened a museum dedicated to his work, which means the permanent home of India's most celebrated modern painter sits in Doha. At Baroda, a student named Srilamanthula Chandramohan watched a party activist and police walk into his exhibition to demand paintings come down, and the arts community rallied behind him as an arrest followed. The ledger carries entries under every flag: the 1988 ban on The Satanic Verses came under a Congress government.
Art and politics have shared a wall for as long as walls have held art. A painter of deities, a student at an art school and a photographer of young marchers occupy different decades and different media, yet the flinch they provoked looks identical from one era to the next. Vadra puts the proposition in six words: "There is no art without politics."
So the question the gallery's management owes the public is whose peace the photographs threatened. A picture of young people walking through Delhi disturbs nothing that was not already moving through Delhi. If the images are accurate, the peace in danger is the comfort of not having been looked at, and a gallery that protects that comfort has chosen a side while calling it neutrality. Peace keeps its meaning only when it covers the people in the photographs, and it ought to cover the person holding the camera.
Seventy-four empty spaces now hang in a government-owned building, and they make their own record. The Bikaner House management society can close the matter in writing by publishing the policy, naming the clause, identifying who applied it and stating when. Until it does, the walls will keep answering for it.
TO BE CONTINUED, FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY.
This is where the surface ends and the reporting begins.
The complete piece, the full archive, and access to The French Press Circle. Reporting answerable only to its readers.
Already a subscriber ?
Login
Read these on the house, with our compliments.
A selection from the current issue, open to all readers. Read them in full. The rest is one decision away.
