Forward march, moral brigade BY SADANAND MENON Get alert, folks. It's that time of the year when you need to pickle your testosterones, drop your hemlines and watch out for exposed parts. The moral police and the khaki po­lice are out practising their deadly pas des deux all over again. Like good Victorians, they will discover obscenity even in an exposed piano leg. Yet another tedious round of debate on art, obscenity and censor­ship is ready to be played out. The fate of the Tits, Clits 'n Ele­phant Dicks exhibition, in which, by order from local police, subsequent to a private complaint, artists San-jeev Khandekar and Vaishali Narkar 'covered' some of the ex­hibits at the Jehangir Art Gallery for being obscene and prurient-is, obviously, not an isolated instance. It reminded me, on a different scale altogether, of the famous Sen­sations exhibition a few years ago, of young British artists, which was forced to close down in London due to public uproar at its irreverent and scatological exhibits displaying hu­man foetuses and human turd. Soon it shifted to Brooklyn, New York, and within days of opening, faced both public and media-driven moralistic flak, pushing it once again to the brink of closure. Until The Nation's luminous art critic Arthur Danto wrote about how he went to see the exhibition with his eight-year-old nephew, and the child's sheer inno­cent excitement and wonder at all that he saw, totally devoid of censo­rious moral baggage. Danto's point was, how come we lose the child in each one of us so easily? The exhibi­tion went on to be a major hit. Over the past decade or so, India seems to have produced more 'art critics' than artists. They come in many shades. Some distort facts with consummate skill, some push the bogey of obscenity or homo- erotica, some file complaints and cases, some go out with their knives to cut and slash, and some indulge in well-practised pyromania. An emotional plague seems to have beset us that makes us look suspiciously at our artists, filmmak-ers, dancers and poets, as if artistic freedom poses a grave threat to the nation's morality. We display an am­bivalent attitude to our open sexual past. On the one hand, we suffer some deeper national shame at the sexuality of a society that made a Khajuraho or Konarak possible; on the other hand, we seem deeply sus­picious of the idea that an open so­ciety is only possible where there is an open mind. One can almost trace the career of this plague bacillus since the time the Babri domes were pick-axed to rubble. There has been a concerted effort since then to construct a mono-dimensional cultural and aesthetic environment. First, there were the astounding stirrings around the Ravi Varma retrospec­tive in 1993, when an appreciation of the artist's work was split along communal lines. Then the SAHMAT exhibition Hum SabAyodhya, which tried to project the plural history of the Ramayana, was vandalised in Faizabad and confiscated in Delhi. Soon Advani was playing 'super crit­ic' by trying to use some public com­ments opf Satish Gujral against fel­low artists MF Husain and SH Raza. Then Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal, was commandeered by the newly-in­stalled BJP ministry to be used as a bhajan mandali. In the same breath, Habib Tanveer's Ponga Pandit, con­tinues to be attacked whenever per­formed in Madhya Pradesh. But they found other ways to get to Husain - that famous charge of painting goddess Saraswati nude. It was a tragic moment in Indian art history where the profound distinc­tion between the naked and the nude was sought to be abolished. Husain, too, since that shameful episode in 1996 - when he was per­sonally attacked, his exhibition in Ahmedabad pulled down and his life threatened till he apologised - has continued to remain a soft, but high profile, target for those who need to earn a quick newspaper headline. Institutions as exalted as the Na­tional Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi, have thought nothing of asking ; Bhupen Khakhar to remove his ex-« plicitly homo-erotic paintings from a group exhibition. And then contemporary choreographer Chan-dralekha, after she received her Kalidas Samman, had to face the wrath of a communalised media in Bhopal, which interpreted her work to be simultaneously, both homo- erotic and hetero-erotic. Suren-dran Nair was another victim of the moral brigade at the NGMA. The commotion around Deepa Mehta's Fire on charges of exhibiting 'un- Indian' lesbianism still rages. As the psychotherapist Wilhelm Reich indicated so many years ago, in the context of the Nazi attitudes to sexual freedom, these 'art at­tacks' can simply be interpreted as the attempt of a sexually frustrated population to restore its libidinal self-confidence. The writer is a commentator on cultural issues. DNA