Daily Times

“…That our reason is the difference of discourses, our history the difference of time, our selves the difference of masks” — Michel Foucault on archaeological analysis of history.

The unconscious and conscious scripts that run our lives come embedded in intricate ways in everyday reality. The discourse that sustains our worldview is not in any one place that is easily located. It is pervasive. It is in the people you see around you. It is in the significant others who introduce you to it. It is in those that reinforce it through ever so subtle systems of reward and disapproval. It is in our books, in our mores, customs and beliefs, in the laws that we live by and in the moral code by which we judge ourselves and others. It is also in our politics, in our conflicts, in our debate and discussions. Its ubiquity is such that most of us forget it is even there! This discourse is sustained by an equally pervasive power structure that both creates and evolves with the discourse — be it the power of the sate, the education system, religion, personal influence, whatever — each reinforcing the other.

If art is disruptive it is so because it challenges the power that backs the discourse as much as the discourse itself. When M F Husain rendered the gods in the buff, he hit upon a singularity in our discourse that exposed multiple fault lines.

Husain showed our discourse is flawed. We could not fully accept that an artist has the right to inspect the metaphor in which we represent our mythology. We treat our gods as near human but cannot accept their humanity. He showed our basic social contract embodied in the constitution is flawed. His art was banned on grounds of a religiosity that has no place under a secular constitution. He showed our fundamental right to expression wanting. We were unable to honour his right to free expression. He showed our commitment to rule of law wanting. We were unable to protect his fundamental right to liberty and property. He showed we were a flawed state that could be subverted by a handful of people who did not care either for our system or laws. Above all, he showed us up as an effete state that lacked the gumption to stand up to its professed ideals. The list could go on. Did he intend all this? One does not know and in the final analysis it does not matter. What matter is the reality of the fault lines he exposed with and through his art.

How do we discover and map a discourse? We are a part of the discourse, an object that itself is created by the discourse and known to us only through that discourse. How do we then rise above it or make it accessible to ourselves? Why is the point of singularity, where our discourse dissolves in face of its own logic and inconsistency that important? Singularities in a sense are gaps in the fabric of the discourse where the discourse reveals itself to us by its sheer absence — through it lack of logical consistency. It is at these points we realise that the invisible hand of an unseen master is no longer available to guide us through the maze. These are points at which we are forced to think about our options and possibilities. It is at these points of discontinuity that we not only meet our discourse but also become aware of the ubiquity and pervasiveness of the power that backs the discourse. It is here that we face the power which was all along there but of which we were blissfully unaware. A few individuals in a given population have the mental make-up to rise above the discourse, to get a bird’s eye of the entire discourse and to identify which strands of it have got hopelessly entangled as we learn more and more about reality that the discourse represents to us. For the discourse is not the reality; nor is it the only possible representation of it. Indeed there is no reality independent of our discourse. But we can experience reality only through our discourse and when we do, it is our discourse that parses and organises reality for us.

Those few that are able to spot the singularities we call intellectuals. Artists, writer, journalists, scientists, philosophers other individuals who can, and do, point out these anomalies in our worldview and look at how we may modify our discourse or stitch together a new one. Over the recorded history of the past 6,500 years, our discourse has changed profoundly, not once but many times over. Nor has it been a case of continuous development of the same set of ideas — a sort of orderly evolution. Far from it. Changes in discourse have been exceedingly disruptive; they have been accompanied by many wars and revolutions. They have turned existing paradigms on their head, rubbished prevailing wisdom and but invariably led us to a richer, more subtle appreciation of what makes up our world. And those who made this possible are these very people — the intellectuals — who in their own lifetime were rarely understood in totality because at any given time the totality of our discourse or archive of knowledge remains inaccessible to us by its sheer ubiquity and imbeddedness. Husain was one such artist who rose well above circumstance and discourse to bring us another perspective on who we are as a society. His art is important because it not only holds up a mirror but also points to something in and beyond the mirror that we cannot see on our own!

The difference between the episteme of the Greeks circa 450 BC and that of ours that took hold circa 1800 AD, and many in between as yet unexplored, is reason and a willingness to use it when faced with a problematic in our discourse. That difference was made by intellectuals. The reason we do not kill sheep to read their liver to divine the future is reason itself. There is no discourse without power just as there is no power without a discourse that grounds it. Every little thing that we have discarded as wrong involved a struggle not only with discourse itself but also the ubiquitous power that backed the discourse. Very little change was openly welcomed. It took generations before even a manifestly beneficial practice was adopted. Such is the hold of the prevalent discourse and the powers that back it. Good art must necessarily spill over into politics. That we find MF Husain as disruptive and offensive should therefore not surprise us.

M F Husain challenged us. As a people, as a nation, as a person. And found us profoundly wanting. How we deal with this challenge creatively going forward will make or mar the national project that we launched at independence. In his death he leaves us with legacy resolving, which will take years if not decades. That is the hallmark of a true artist.

The writer is a trader. She can be reached at sonali.ranade@hotmail.com