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364 / Sarai Reader 2006: Turbulence
The Sand of the Coliseum, the Glare of
Television, and the Hope of Emancipation
I.
Milan Kundera once observed that every Utopia secures the purity of its goals by consigningits undesirables to a septic tank. And so, in tyrannies that are able to enforce Utopia, wehave the concentration camp, the death camp, the gulag and the holding area. But what ofsome of the republics we know: those more humane drafts towards Utopia that have comedangerously close to failure, and whose septic tanks are not occasional aberrations, buteveryday horror zones to which the marginal are consigned? In this essay I will reflect on the Indian republic, which was established in 1950 as the outcome of an epic anti-colonial struggle for liberation; and which committed itself toserving the welfare of the greatest number, to securing the good of the oppressed and thedispossessed, the starving and the marginal. In actuality, through the six decades of itsexistence, it has increasingly become characterised by swollen margins – it leaves itssubjects naked, exposed, leading a vita nuda, a ‘bare life’, protected neither by divinesanction nor by the rule of law, easy game for any predator.
The philosopher Giorgio Agamben has examined the condition of ‘bare life’ and its embodiment, the homo sacer, or ‘sacred man’: a paradoxically-named figure in Roman law,who is excluded from all civil rights and may be killed with impunity by anybody.1 Agambencites the examples of the Nazi camps and Guantanamo Bay as sites where the homo sacerhas been incarcerated, suffering torture, grotesque violations of body and mind, and facingcertain death. In the context of a Western democratic order that broadly upholds the ruleof law, such aberrations tend to be dramatised as flagrant violations. But in the Indiancontext, the homo sacer is not an aberration who is invisible, a tear in the fabric ofnormality. He is everywhere. He is normality.
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The Indian situation is complicated by the fact that this ubiquitous homo sacer is made a subject of melodrama and entertainment by a media that has abandoned ethical self-restraint while exploiting its potential as a powerful and responsible mode of representation.
This has brought into being a coliseum scenario reminiscent of the gladiatorial ‘realityshows’ of imperial Rome. Except that these are televisually disseminated rather thanorganised in a stadium for a physically present audience. But the structural principle is thesame: the State and the media collude to compose a spectacle, for a popular audience,from the sordid materials of power asymmetry.
For what is the coliseum – whether stadial or televisual – if not the spectacular dramatisation of oppression and injustice, of the complex relationship that binds thetyrannised to the tyrant? The gladiators – those who were forced to act in the coliseum’sreality shows – were slaves, de-selved, taken by force from home and hearth, cut away fromfamily, livelihood and country, and guaranteed only the right to die while providingentertainment for Rome’s multitudes. It was Caesar’s prerogative to decide whether thedispossessed would live or die.
When the State and the media collude to produce such grand spectacles, their subjects are cast into a juridical wasteland where no laws apply and no rights are guaranteed. In theTV discussion fora (which often blur into reality shows) that top the viewership charts inpresent-day India, for instance, the subject of the discussion is degraded into a theme forgladiatorial exercise. It is voted upon raucously, the anchor yelling and egging the debaterson to ever more flamboyant expressions of rage and mutual contempt. And if the debateshould revolve around a real-life issue involving members of the subaltern classes, theperson or persons at the heart of the controversy are given virtually no agency. The homosacer – and I will soon pass on to the specific cases of a subaltern child and a Muslimwoman – is brought into public view forcibly, virtually kidnapped into the show.
I would interpret this situation through the model of competence and performance proposed by J. L. Austin, the philosopher of language, to account for speech-acts: languagein its social context, language as it creates or cannot create a ground of social being. AllIndian citizens are in theory guaranteed basic freedoms of suffrage, expression, belief andso on by the Constitution, and therefore are formally invested with a civil competence thatequips them to enact their political rights. But in reality, the contextual distortions ofhierarchy, illiteracy, corruption, violence and so forth are so immense that this civilcompetence cannot translate into performative acts of political participation.
Reading these symptoms correctly, the televisual media have factored this crisis of alienated citizenship into a system of illusions that already includes a mass communicationtechnology, an aesthetic of theatrical entertainment, and a commercial mandate tomaximise popularity ratings. As a result, what they offer is the political performative throughplay at the level of melodramatic spectacle and participatory illusionism. These strategicunderpinnings are revealed most dramatically by those TV talk shows on which citizen-viewers, seated in the studio as a ‘representative sample’ of the People, are symbolicallyjoined by those watching the programme at home. These latter are allowed to feel 366 / Sarai Reader 2006: Turbulence
empowered when they respond, via phone, SMS or email, to opinion polls announced bythe TV anchor.
During the last ten years, the Indian televisual media have begun to assert a para-statal role in offering representative and participatory alternatives, basing this role on arecognition and publicising of the State’s inadequacies. This shift from democraticparticipation to televisual spectacle has had baneful consequences. Television hastransformed the shape of participatory experience by playing several simultaneous roles,while appealing to the public imagination. First, that of political opposition, throughinterrogative patterns of reporting and comment; second, that of a clearing house ofopinion, by inviting all shades of opinion, even extreme; and third, that of a court of appeal,in which ‘trials by media’ are conducted in parallel with, and often improperly appropriating,the roles correctly to be played by investigative agencies and the judiciary.
Since no one has challenged this ‘court of appeal’ role of television – perhaps for fear of appearing to muzzle the newly emergent Fifth Estate, or of generating a precedent fordraconian censorship – this habit of appropriation has become greatly inflated.2 In recentyears, television has even asserted a mimesis of the deliberative prerogatives of the politicalprocess. Consider, for instance, the manner in which various satellite TV channels havestrategically named their discussion programmes – which seek to manufacture public opinion– in significant ways that mimic the established structure: ‘We the People’ (which echoes theopening line of the preamble of the Constitution of India), Aap ki Adalat (Your Court of Law)and Satyameva Jayate (Truth Alone Shall Triumph, which is the motto of the Republic). Thesetelevisual assemblies, as I have described them elsewhere, began as surrogates formainstream democratic assemblies, and now almost claim to have displaced them.3 The topics chosen for discussion are never rigorously debated from a nuanced perspective of the polity, society, economy and culture. All shades of opinion are welcomed– with an eye to staging as explosive a spectacle as possible – but the responses of citizen-viewers as well as invited experts are edited in such a way that they cancel each other out.
And on taboo or sensitive subjects such as national territoriality, sub-national aspirations orthe uniform civil code, all TV discussion programmes – however ‘independently’ they claimto function – maintain the official line of the State.
One of the most shocking instances of this tendency took place in 2004, when a panchayat (village or ethnic ‘council of elders’) was conducted live on the sets of Zee TV.
The programme was titled Kiski Gudiya? (Whose Gudiya?; also, by a cruel irony, Whose Doll?)and subtitled Yeh Kaisa Bandhan? (What Kind of Bond Is This?).4 At the centre of thecontroversy was Gudiya, an underprivileged Muslim woman from a village in northern Indiawho was confronted with a terrifying perplexity. Her first husband, a soldier who was calledup for the 1999 Kargil war soon after their marriage, had gone missing. Officially declareda deserter and thought by his community to have died, he reappeared five years later afterhaving served time as a prisoner-of-war in a Pakistani jail.
Meanwhile Gudiya, under pressure from her family, had remarried and was pregnant by her second husband. She clearly did not want to return to her first husband, but he was Signal Disturbance / 367
adamant and so were some members of the village panchayat. The televisual media sensedgreat potential in this tragic story: a battle over a woman and her unborn child, that toobelonging to the Muslim minority, which offered vistas of controversy involving Muslimpersonal law. The channel Zee News simulated, in its studios, a panchayat that includedGudiya, her two husbands, elders from their village, Muslim religious jurists and, as tokenparticipants, members of the All India Muslim Women’s Forum.
Thus, a young woman in the eighth month of her pregnancy sat captive while she was put under trial in the mediatic coliseum, turned into an object for the bloodlust of prurient viewers.
Abetted and urged on by the ringmaster, a wily female anchor, the terms were set in place:all decisions regarding Gudiya would be taken according to the Sharia (Islamic law), becauseshe happened to be Muslim. In one swoop, they had constructed the subject as a ‘Muslim’woman rather than as the citizen of a secular republic, with recourse to secular laws.5 Theanchor kept reminding the audience that the decisions regarding Gudiya would be takenstrictly within the framework of the Sharia – a statement suggesting that the studios of ZeeTV had temporarily seceded from the Republic of India to become an Islamic state. Gudiya’swide forehead was branded with slave status. She was forced to return to her first husband.
Death was foretold in those eyes, drained of blood. Putting a woman in an advanced stage of pregnancy under such intense pressure is criminal under any country’s law, but thetelevisual media had already usurped the role of the State and the judiciary. Gudiya hadbecome a homo sacer, stripped of her rights as a citizen without the cover of a legalframework. She could be killed with impunity, even if the weapon was media excess. Gudiyadied of multiple organ failure in early 2006, leaving behind a baby boy. She was 26 years old.
Gudiya’s volition or desire was definitely of no concern to the TV producers, the religious experts, or the programme audience. Her fate was already sealed by the mediacorporation, intoxicated by its gluttonous appetite for rising TRPs. No one told her that,under Sharia law, she could opt for a separation from her first husband, or that he coulddivorce her. Members of the women’s forum were not allowed to guide her about her rightsand privileges under Islamic law. Reality TV shows, it seems, cannot deal with too muchreality. What had started as a mock panchayat was menacingly transformed into anoppressive reality, an invidious social injustice: the mock court became a kangaroo court. Many ‘real’ panchayats behave in an equally, if not more, unconstitutional manner – and are gender- and caste-biased – than their mediatic counterparts. It is not surprising, then,that modern media technology deploys a forum like a village council, with all its regressivevalues, to make a ‘decision’ about the fate of a vulnerable woman. With the Gudiya case,TV tribalism was born. The programme may have been set up to look like a televisualassembly, but it was a coliseum nonetheless: a coliseum organised to parody and mock thevalues and methods of judicial due process. The Gudiya case is an unholy precedent: thiswas the first time that a legal issue pertaining to a personal matter had been ‘decided’ inreality-TV style in India. Unfortunately, not even the otherwise vocal leftist women’sorganisations raised a suitably loud protest against this travesty of justice, this blatantsubversion of the rule of law.
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It is not coincidental that Gudiya was brought like a slave from the peripheries to entertain middle-class city audiences, when very few homes in her husband’s village haveelectricity, leave alone a TV set.
Another homo sacer recently entered this scenario of deafening cheerleaders and scrambling TRP-watchers: Budhia Singh, a four-year-old boy from the eastern Indian stateof Orissa, who had been prepared for the kill both by the televisual and the print media.6 InMay 2006, we watched this frail child in an oversize T-shirt and fairytale red shoes runninga marathon sponsored by the Central Police Reserve Force. He found mention in the LimcaBook of Records for running 65 km in 7.02 hours. His coach, a man possessed byambition, would have run him to the ground, had he not finally slowed down, gasped inbreathlessness and vomited. With his limbs thrashing helplessly, the boy was whisked awayinto a car.
Budhia soon became a national sensation, with the Chief Minister of Orissa, the state’s Governor, and its Sports and Youth Services Minister supporting his feat. The only protestcame from the head of the Ministry of Woman and Child Development, who opposed thecoach for exploiting the child so cynically. But with such high-profile support for the coach,this voice of sanity was easily drowned.
Most TV channels presented the Budhia story as a debate on whether a child so talented should be allowed to run a marathon or not, at his age. Important issues such asthe fact that the coach had bought Budhia from a vendor, who in turn had bought him forRs 800 from his impoverished mother who had three other children to feed, wereunderplayed. That Budhia was a child slave who was too young to be aware of his rightswas not even raised as a niggling doubt on any of the channels. That Budhia could die ofheart failure or suffer growth retardation if forced to continue to run unbearably longdistances was dismissed as a side issue. People, interviewed off the street by various TVchannels, expressed the noble sentiment that the boy should “run for India”, and that histalent “should not be snuffed out”. That runners below an acceptable age do not qualify forthe physically demanding, marathon-length race has escaped these citizens. That the boyis not a free agent, but a freak on show, has similarly escaped them. What makes it worseis that Budhia, who is said to be sprinting towards modernity, is in truth a victim of the mostfeudal relationship of oppression that is being reissued in contemporary form.
Thus, the political surrogacy that televisual assemblies offer is operative only at the level of cathartic wish-fulfilment. It may at best articulate the feelings of an alienatedcitizenship that is mainly urban and middle-class; but it certainly cannot express the wishesof the vast, disenfranchised multitudes that occupy the swollen margins. Nor can suchtelevisual assemblies propose a serious alternative to the established – even if fossilised ordistorted – processes of democracy. A truly vibrant alternative would have to base itself ona sustained systemic critique of the polity, and a consequent activation of the public sphereby more critical and inclusive means. Media corporations and their programming expertscannot possibly deliver this mandate – it has no commercial resonance for them.
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I .
I now move on to the possibility of transforming the figure of the homo sacer, who isconstructed as an object by other people’s discourses, into a self-empowered subject, anautonomous agent who can express her/his needs and wishes. For this, we have to movefrom the mediatic coliseum to those points of intersection where contemporary Indianartists have formed solidarities with colleagues active in disciplines such as new media,documentary filmmaking and activism.
Some Indian artists have attempted, through efforts of collaboration, to probe and disclose systemic hegemonies and distortions; they have made interventions in areaswhere citizens are not in a position to perform their citizenship. They have deployed avocabulary that plays across a spectrum of modes ranging from irony to radical critique,through methods that are oblique and allusive but never lose sight of their objective. I will concentrate on two collaborative projects: namely Sarai-CSDS + Ankur’s Cybermohalla, where young adults in urban slums interact with new media practitioners tocreate ongoing streams of expression, and the interventions initiated by the artist NavjotAltaf with local art practitioners in rural areas. Both projects are concerned withsubjectivities that emerge from below the line of visibility, both in socio-political and art-historical terms. Both projects propose an art outside the conventional parameters of arthistory; they also point to a recovery of the public sphere by possibly utopian means, bythe use of novel forms of dialogic pedagogy and democratic communication. These arevibrant examples of material empowerment and imaginative emancipation throughcollaborative processes across the lines of class and cultural assumptions.
Significantly, in these projects, the device of intervention does not replay the donor- recipient relationship enshrined in conventional NGO activity. Both in Cybermohalla and inNavjot’s project, communication is lateral rather than hierarchical; and the specificity oflocation is not emphasised to entrench victimhood or oppression, but instead serves as abasis for a synergistic exploration. The basis of interaction is a mutuality of commitment. The Cybermohalla project (http://www.sarai.net/cybermohalla/cybermohalla.htm) can be seen as a process of self-empowerment generated through the socialisation oftechnology in a particular ethos. Five years ago, Sarai, a new media initiative and aprogramme of CSDS (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies) along with the NGOAnkur/Society for Alternatives in Education, set up five media labs in Delhi’s urban slumclusters. In these media labs, young practitioners belonging to different social andeducational backgrounds have been exploring the phenomenology of the technological act,as performed in the interstices between pedagogy and creativity. Through their variousexpressions – computer animations, digital photography, sound recordings, onlinediscussion lists and texts, broadsheets, collages and posters – they examine the web ofeveryday life in urban neighbourhoods (mohalla, in Urdu), creating a richly detailedarchitecture of the colloquial. Their online and offline conversations are presented not asneutral information describing urban Indian reality, but as technologically-enabled culturalproduction that is inventive and idiosyncratic.
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Imagine a mohalla, a neighbourhood where news filters in at different velocities and frequencies, where rumours are artworks, where secrets are shared, where intimacy is bothcloying and comforting, where communitarian identities are maintained yet creativelybent… The cellular structure of a mohalla would be an instructive metaphor for thevariousness of the conversations that take place among these practitioners. How does oneenter into this meta-site, a ‘place’ that is invisible both to the mainstream art world and toquick-fix NGOs working on issues related to the digital divide? As if anticipating this question, a set of texts by the practitioners is titled, “Before Coming Here Had You Thought of a Place Like This?” Here, Yashoda writes: “But what canbe said of glances that are not from strangers, but well-wishers? They seem unfamiliarsometimes. What are these looks? They leave a trace of suffocation in my life whichotherwise seems to be going on just right. Even if I want to tell others about these looks, Ican’t. Because I don’t understand them myself. Because in the courthouse of glances, thereare no eyewitnesses”7.
Yashoda’s poetic take on the “eyewitnesses” of urban anthropology proposes a scenario where the glance is itself under investigation. Indeed, whose testimony can betrusted when every eye is culpable? Where no glance can be judged or vindicated, privilegedor debarred, a conversation among equals takes place: a samvad. But even in such aconversation, “Sometimes things flow in relationships, and sometimes they become still.
Many relationships don’t even have a name…”8 The tone of these texts or broadsheets is reflective, never forced or contrived. The literary pace is one of teasing out the nuances of a situation by intuitive means. The subjectspeaks with pride, dignity, heartbreak, humour and folk wisdom, but never as a supplicantor a victim waiting to be heard. The writers of the Cybermohalla speak for themselves, andnot for some imaginary public that may or may not listen to them. This is a far cry from thepredetermined framing of the subject in a mediatic coliseum. These speech-acts are veinedwith the responsive and responsible tonality of confidence that only a participant can bringto a conversation – as against a passive consumer, or a deluded monologist, or a puppetplayacting to a script. These speech-acts have the unmistakable quality of the performativeas it thinks itself into the critical mass and specific gravity of existence. The quality ofobservation, inquiry and phrasing in these texts is remarkably fresh: it avoids the aridity ofthe statistical, the sloganeering of newly raised consciousness and the baroque flourishesof literary excess. As Shamsher Ali writes: “…to go into the depths of thinking, we need apass, and the name of that permit is QUESTION…”9 This project produces an archive of knowledge and insight, a primer of recall and foresight. Local histories are unlocked, street maps are redrawn from memory, desire andaccident. The young practitioners enter the subjectivity of the survivor – whether it is thecable operator or a sewage cleaner or a girl about to be married, all of whom are trying tocrack the code of the urban condition, walking the tightrope of systemic imbalances.
Apart from becoming available as the residue of internal communication among the locality media labs, this project material has also found avatars in the world beyond the Signal Disturbance / 371
project’s sociality. It has been deployed in artworks, in multimedia installations where thearchive becomes the found material. Consider the digital photographs of mirroredreflections, portraits and inanimate objects in the neighbourhood. By zooming deep into theimage, the boundaries of legibility are pushed until the pixilated squares of differing tonescreate a definitional blur, an abstraction. This dodge in representation holds a parable forthe viewer: by moving closer into an image or a life-world, we do not necessarilycomprehend it better. Distance and discernment are equally important tools towardsunderstanding.
The creativity of the Cybermohalla project is in a very material and immediate sense an act of resistance in the face of oppression. Even as texts are written and circulated in themedia labs, we hear the grinding jaws of bulldozers and see the build-up of policeformations. Delhi’s squatter settlements are being destroyed, families are being uprooted;bricks are being recycled for a handful of coins. And yet, the Cybermohalla practitionerscontinue to write, make images, dream and resist.
Indeed, in times of crisis, the participants in the Cybermohalla project speak in voices that are sure and certain, not allusive or hesitant. During the recent slum demolitions inDelhi, one of Cybermohalla’s media labs at Nangla Maanchi was demolished. The youngpractitioners began to share information about this crisis through broadsheets and ongoingblogs. They became, in that much-favoured term of today’s TV journalism, ‘citizenjournalists’. They questioned the role of the State and its agencies, the judiciary and thepolice; they have created a series of powerful vignettes describing the losses incurred bythe inhabitants.
One of the blog entries records the statement made by Justice Ruma Pal, while dismissing the stay petition in the Supreme Court against the demolitions at NanglaMaanchi: “Desperation does not mean they will do something illegal… In India we have threeweather conditions – heat, rain and winter. If we accept your argument, there will be noappropriate time to demolish illegal structures… nobody forced you to come to Delhi…Stay where you can. If encroachments on public land are to be allowed, there will beanarchy”.
When the rural hinterland is submerged in debt traps and crop failures, when the urban future has been mortgaged to the big real estate and housing developers, where are themarginal to find a home – the makaan in the trilogic promise of ‘roti, kapda aur makaan(food, clothing and shelter)’ that the ruling Congress Party has held out like a talisman tothe poor in its election manifestos through the decades? The poor leave their village homesbecause the countryside has been destroyed by rapacity and indifference; to send themback there is to push them into the blasted heath where Lear’s unaccommodated man musttake his chances.
As against the judge’s summary reduction of citizens to the condition of homo sacer, Shamsher writes movingly in the blog, discussing the legal/illegal status of the slum-dwellers: “Inside all those places, which are termed illegal by the government, is a differentstory. The government plants the stake of its stamp on a place – ‘This is government 372 / Sarai Reader 2006: Turbulence
property’. And in response, we place our small bundles of receipts and papers gatheredfrom past time till today. But still, we are shunned, because the world moves on the basisof documents…”10 Such mature, authentic articulations of performative citizenship are far more valuable than the tokenistic posturing of the mediatic coliseum or the lazy and irresponsible rhetoricof blogger’s parks, as the now-technologised battle to renew the foundational pledges ofthe republic continues.
I I.
Cybermohalla symbolises a politics of belonging, of finding purchase – a foothold, howeversmall – for oneself in the polity, or of vocalising one’s position in a collective conversation.
In interpreting this phenomenon, I would stress that the coalitions represented by theCybermohalla project and Navjot’s activities have in different ways ‘emplaced’ themselvesin relation to the coalitions of the powerful, which maraud and encroach upon the rights ofthe marginal. These projects have demonstrated that, instead of retreating into the charity-seeking modes of victimology, those in resistance can transform the circumstances of theirmarginality into a coign of vantage.
This is achieved when the more privileged collaborators in the project assist their marginal, subaltern, hitherto voiceless and unheard colleagues to position themselves in alocation of articulate engagement – one that takes them outside the circumscribed politicaland cultural possibilities attendant on their ‘normal’ location in the social configuration. Thusemplaced, these newly empowered agents can forge strategic alliances with newdisciplines and renew the frameworks by which they are viewed; they can also re-negotiatethe terms by which their role is read, by which value is assigned to them, and by which thehistory of their old and newly chosen positions is represented.11 Navjot Altaf’s art is not founded on the creation of individual masterpieces. It has been premised, instead, on the act of searching, plotting and re-structuring the course of meaningthrough a life of projects – where her riskiest wager is placed not on achieved style or finishedproduct, but on that tricky shape-shifter, the self. Over the last 30 years, Navjot has workedin a diverse and impressive array of media ranging from painting and sculpture to inter-mediainstallations comprising elements of sculpture, video, sound and text. During the 1970s, sheplayed her role as a member of the first generation of artists who sought out a viewershipbeyond the art world, in mill-worker neighbourhoods, mining towns and railway stations. Sincethe early 1990s, she has worked in collaboration with artists from other disciplines and othermilieus; these experiments have resulted in gallery-based sculpture and also in site-specificcooperative or collaborative installations with artists of rural background.
The consistent updating of her ideological stand has been reflected in periodic alterations in her choice of media and form. Her changing relationship with Marxist praxisillustrates this theme. While the leftist imperative to demonstrate solidarity with the workingclass impelled her to show art in public spaces in proletarian neighbourhoods in the 1970s,she gradually came to realise that orthodox Marxism constrains its exponents with certain Signal Disturbance / 373
limitations. Operating from a consciousness of her womanhood through the 1980s, sheoutgrew her orthodox Marxist orientation, which privileged questions of class while denyingthe equal significance of caste, ethnicity and gender.
Navjot’s engagement with rural reality and artists of tribal background in the 1990s marks yet another interrogation of her early Marxist position, which had foregrounded urbanproletarian reality over other subaltern lifeworlds, and situated the vanguard of resistancein the metropolis rather than the village. This constant political alertness has sensitisedNavjot greatly to the problems of working together: while working on projects with artistsof subaltern background, she always remains aware of the asymmetries of entitlement andopportunity that inform all such relationships. In the late 1990s, Navjot initiated a project to interact with artists of tribal background in Kondagaon, in Central India’s Bastar district, where she was concerned with “theproblematics of collaboration, not its celebration”12. She did not immediately push for acollaboration with them; instead, she tried to locate their practices of stone, metal andwood carving against the larger contexts of State patronage for the crafts, socialhierarchies and patriarchal biases, as well as the possibility of an intervention made by ametropolitan artist (with a fine-arts background like herself) who had been taught to dismissthe crafts as a hereditary skill. The project began with the “redefining the terminology ofart/craft and artist/craftsperson in the context of art history”13.
The tribal artists have made individual sculptures at the workshops facilitated by Navjot, while site-specific projects between her and her colleagues have resulted in cooperativeworks such as Pilla Gudis, (Temples for Children), and Nalpar, the redesigning of publicutility spaces from women at hand-pump sites. The Pilla Gudis, designed by Shantibai,Rajkumar, Gessuram and Navjot, became extra-curricular spaces where children couldinteract with one other, and with visiting musicians and artists. Rajkumar designed one atKusma in 2000. A structure based on the wooden temple form, without the omnipresentdivinities, it has mirrors placed between the rafters. The children have only to look up, toamuse themselves with their own multiple reflections. Apart from the sheer pleasure itprovides, this structure is, metaphorically, a way of opening oneself to unexpected stimuliwhile retaining one’s cultural balance.
One of the strongest works to emerge from this project is Shantibai’s sculptural self- portrait, posing as a sculptor, holding a hammer close to her heart. Shantibai graduallyvacated the socially ascribed identity of a pushover wife or underprivileged tribal woman,and won for herself a position of artistic agency. But Shantibai’s personal growth does notregister easily in the Indian art world, which still sees her as a puppet of destiny rather thanas an agent impelled by her own will. This has not dejected her; their dialogue was nevermeant to be limited to the sale of artworks. Such solidarity has already achieved amovement away from the circumscribed art world, and towards a more engaging lifeworld.
Neither a user nor a do-gooder, Navjot has entered into a symbiotic relationship with therural community and its environment and emplaces herself as artist-activist in the fullawareness of the differences that are inherent in all such collaborations.
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When the sculptures of Navjot’s colleagues were first shown in mainstream art galleries, some viewers ridiculed them for copying Navjot’s style of sculpture-making. To which Navjothad responded, “but my own work takes from Adivasi, Mayan and African sources”. It isstrange that, after a considerable passage of time and Navjot’s courageous struggle infiguring the conceptual abstractions inherent in the representation of the ‘other’, her ownvideo installations seem to be exploring a poetics of abstraction. Her videos are layered,blurred testimonies of many beleaguered voices, but they are also contained inmathematically precise rhythmic structures. In this tense, vulnerable moment – mappingher own long-unspoken interests as an artist, interests that do not necessarily coincide withher more overtly political concerns – a new poetics has emerged in Navjot’s work. Thisrecords the triumph of a genuinely dialogic process, in the course of which Navjot hasemancipated herself as an image-maker from the dominance of the political – withoutcompromising her commitment to the mutuality and solidarity that sustain her project inBastar. The connection between the artist-as-interventionist and the homo sacer comes fullcircle; emancipation is a feedback loop, it transforms all who perform and participate in it. Giorgio Agamben. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Transl. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford See Barkha Dutt, “Remote Control” (The Hindustan Times, Mumbai, 8 July 2006, p. 8). Dutt, managing editor of the channel NDTV 24 x 7, comments on the proposed Broadcasting Services Regulation Bill (2006). A draft of the legislation was scheduled to be tabled in Parliament at the time of writing this essay.
See Nancy Adajania, “Anchored Illusions, Floating Realities: Two Mediatic Claims on the Public Sphere” (text of lecture presented at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin, September 2003). “In an electoral setting where conventional political mobilisation has degenerated into the securing of a mass base by appeal to retrograde ethnic/religious/regional sentiments, an ambiguous proposal is made through the programming of media corporations – they propose what I will read as forms of ‘televisual assembly’, in which media corporations assert their ability to provide a true representation of the public will and therefore set themselves up as an alternative to the constituted fora of a democratic discussion and governance. In fact, what is brashly offered as an alternative is a surrogate”. See T.K. Rajalakshmi, “Televised Trauma”, Frontline, 22 October 2004; see also Poornima Joshi, “The Media’s Toy”,Outlook, 4 October 2004. In this context, see Vikhar Ahmed Sayeed, “The Fatwa in Journalism”, Sarai Reader-list posting, 3 July 2006. https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/ See Prafulla Das, “A Step Too Far”, Frontline, 2 June 2006. Yashoda. “Dilli Gate”. In If We Were to Stand in Front of a Crowd, What Would the Eyes of the Crowd http://www.sarai.net/community/cybermohalla/book02/pages/pdfs/eyescrowd.pdf Neelofar. “Relationships”. In Conversations in Questions and Answers and Conversations without Questions and Answers. Cybermohalla booklet (2003).
http://www.sarai.net/community/cybermohalla/book02/pages/pdfs/conversation.pdf Signal Disturbance / 375
Shamsher Ali. “The Edges of Questions”. In Method Is That Heavy Thing Which Makes Everything Light? http://www.sarai.net/community/cybermohalla/book02/pages/pdfs/questions/pdf 10. Shamsher Ali. “A Place to Dwell” [The Journey After]. Blog entry, 10 June 2006. http://nangla.freeflux.net/ (English); http://nangla-maachi.freeflux.net (Hindi) 11. See Nancy Adajania, “Another look at Displacement: Emplacement versus Emplasures”. Catalogue essay for Navjot Altaf’s exhibition ‘Displaced Self’, Sakshi Gal ery, Mumbai, 2003.
12. Nancy Adajania. “Dialogues on Representation”. In The Hindu, 16 February 2003.

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