Artists’ Exemption-Section 292 (Introduction text)

 Akbar Padamsee returned from Paris to Mumbai in 1954, after four years to have his first solo exhibition. On May 2, 1954, Padamsee was arrested under Section 292 of the Indian Penal Code for not complying with the orders of the Vigilance Department of the CID to remove the two “obscene” paintings Lovers I and Lovers II from his exhibition.

The Progressive Artists’ Salon – including K.H. Ara, Ebrahim Alkazi, V.V. Oak, Nissim Ezekiel, V.R. Amberkar, and Freny Taleyarkhan, held a meeting at which, they elected six members to form a Committee for the Protection of Artists, which aimed to protect artists’ rights and inspire public debate on what constituted art, since the main objection against the two paintings was that they were “allegedly obscene” and “against public morals”.

Padamsee was accused of exhibiting obscenity through his paintings of nudes. The artist did not succumb under pressure and won his case in both the Sessions Court and the High Court. The vindicating verdict of the Bombay High Court in favour of the artist became a benchmark for censorship cases and continues to be cited as a reference in debates. Ever since, all artists exhibiting their works in private spaces and galleries are today exempt from all charges of obscenity under Section 292 of the Indian Penal Code.

In August 2006, Sanjeev Khandekar and Vaishali Narkar were booked by psychiatrist Pushap Vijula under Section 292 of the Indian Penal Code for obscenity in their exhibition ‘Tits Clits n Elephant Dick’. Protecting an artist’s right to freedom of expression, Narkar referred to “the 1954 high court judgment in the case against Akbar Padamsee.” Expressing his views on this case, Padamsee had in fact urged Khandekar and Narkar to file a case against Vhijula and the Colaba police for contempt of court.

When arguing his case in 1954, Padamsee referred to artists such as Picasso, Modigliani, Rodin and the art of ancient India from the sculptures in the Khajuraho temples to the paintings in Ajanta. Today, artists refer to Akbar Padamsee’s case as a watershed judgment in the history of modern art in India. All artists are exempt under Section 292, as long as their works are being exhibited in a gallery or a private space.

Adib: Life and Letters – Chasing Shadows

Times of India, June 18, 1954

Van Gogh’s sunflower and the sunflower at the florist’s. The Khajuraho and the Konark nudes, Modigliani’s and Van Dongen’s women and the picture post-cards sold on the sly. Toulouse Lautrec’s circus posters and the shrieking, garish things that covers cinema bill-boards in the city. To the philistine they are all the same. If anything, the sunflower at the florist’s, the post-cards and the billboards are by far the more attractive.

But even in Bombay, thank God, it is not the philistines who have always the last word. At least the philistine view of what is offensive and what is not does not inhibit the artist. It need not. The acquittal of the young painter Akbar Padamsee charged with exhibiting in the Jehangir Art Gallery two pictures considered obscene by the police should make even the police hesitate to invade unfamiliar territory in future. If they must invade it, they would have to learn to distinguish between real sunflower and the sunflowers that exist in the artist’s imagination, between the orange and blue nudes in the pictures and the nudes in real life.

Ambiguity

Padamsee’s acquittal is reassuring. But is the law under which he was prosecuted an absolute guarantee against harassment of the artist? Is it so ambiguous as to leave no margin for a grievous error of judgment on the part of many of whom may have as a muddled a notion of what is obscene and what is not as the police? The very fact that a talented artist can be hauled up before a court in the manner in which Padamsee was, shows that the existing safeguards against a police inspection of the artist’s conscience are by no means adequate. His freedom is still subject to the erratic judgment of individuals who may prefer a magazine cover to a Modigliani. With philistine judges the philistine view of art can still prevail. In the present case, the judge came to the right conclusion more by right exercise of personal discretion than by application of a well defined norm in distinguishing works of art from those which are not.

Can obscenity be defined? The very question assumes an agreement on what people mean by obscenity. But the fact that in the present case the police considered the two pictures obscene while the judge didn’t think them to be so shows that what appears offensive to one person need not to appear so to another. The prosecution’s plea that the pictures would “arouse passions in immature minds” begs the question. Is a thing to be condemned as obscene merely because it arouses passion in immature minds” begs the question. Is a thing to be condemned as obscene merely because it arouses passion or stimulates the feeling of sex? If this is to be the official criterion in eliminating threats to the integrity of or moral life, why chase mere pictures and those too highly stylised? What about the more tangible temptations in the streets, the college and the club? If so called immature minds are going to be aroused on so slight a pretext as a Modigliani or a Padamsee, one can only blame their adolescence. If one have to banish even such poor temptation from the world, one will have to scour it clean of every trace of beauty, real, or imagined.

What is really obscene is not the stimulation of sex feeling but the deliberate exploitation of it. The philistines are looking for obscenity in the wrong place. Nobody has ever been filled with lascivious feeling by looking at the nudes of Picasso and Modigliani, but many are by looking at the sleek and hot pin ups that fill the pages of the magazines with the glossy covers. One has only to thumb through a few stray issues of one of these magazines to see that nudes like Padamsee’s will not help to sell one soap-cake against the sexy wild creatures who in their snug dresses, their tight red slacks, their tropical wear “as exotic as a pomegranate” help to sell a million copies of the magazine as also ten thousand limousines in the bargain. Padamsee’s abstract nude, looking sad and grim could never compete with any of those sultry sirens stretching their legs for masculine inspection or doing a voodoo act or a strip-tease.

Why strain at poor gnats of sex stimuli while swallowing whole camel of sex exploitation? In a society in which you cannot sell a packet of cigarettes or a measly dress without attracting the customer’s attention to a model photographed from a provocative angle, why pretend that there is a danger of corrupting young minds? Why explore the recesses of the mind of some poor, bedevilled artist for his intent when the desire to exploit men’s lust, and women’s too, is written all over the tons of reading material sold every week?

Secrecy

 Obscenity consist in what Judge Woolsey in his judgment in the Ulysses case called “dirt for dirt’s sake” and in secrecy. The remedy is to come out in open. “The real pornographer”, D.H. Lawrence wrote, “truly dislike Boccaccio because the fresh natural healthiness of the Italian story-teller makes the modern pornographical shrimp show up as ‘the dirty worm he is”. Pornography thrives on the “dirty little secret” – and “the sex excitement of the secretive, furtive sort”. “It is a kind of hidden sore of inflammation which, when rubbed or scratched, gives off sharp thrills that seem delicious – so the dirty little secret is rubbed more and more”. The philistines who search for obscenity in the wrong place apparently hug the dirty secret as much as the pornographers. Looking for pornography in works of art they ignore the pornography of the films and the best-selling love novels which tickle the secret.

To compare authentic works of art with photographs of advertisement models or the aphrodisiacs of the popular film is however, fatuous. The difference between them is one of degree – of mild stimuli as against strong – or of something open as something against secretive. There is a basic difference of quality. What engages he artist drawing, painting and sculpting a nude is not the model but his own or her inner life. He is obsessed not by thought of sex but by the truth of his own emotions. He does not funk its implication, however disturbing they may be to those who go about their daily business with blinkers not only on their eyes, but also on their feelings. By embodying that truth in line and colour on a bit of canvas, in stone or in words he makes us re-examine our attitude towards such basic facts of life as death and love as well as towards the ugly social realities .it is not a bowdlerised sex appeal he is after. He judges the life he sees and experiences.

This does not mean that there is profound meaning in every nude of Picasso or Modigliani. All that is meant is that even their simplest figure has to be judged by a criterion different from that applied to say the photographers of Miss Argentine 1951 or Miss Brazil 1952. They have to be seen in the context of the artist’s whole work, of what he has been trying to express through it, and as a symbol, not as a mere description of reality but as a judgment on reality.

As the Marathi poet, B. S. Mardhekar, explained in his defence against a charge of obscenity similar to the one for which Akbar Padamsee was tried, “it is not words which are obscene; it is the context in which they are used that can be obscene”. In literature words are not static and the words in a poem can be judged only in the context of its mood which expresses the writer’s intention. But for such a criterion much of Jayadeva’s Gita-Govinda and even Kalidasa’s Kumar -Sambhava will have to be dismissed as obscene. What is more, the poet is a myth-maker. His language is essentially that of simile and metaphor. “It must be interpreted not literally but symbolically”.

Symbols

One may not agree with Mardhekar’s formulation but one can dispense with the two-fold criteria of context and symbolism in judging works of art. One may violently disagree with the meaning the artist is striving to express, but the very understanding of his meaning demands a prior examination of his context and his symbolism. This is as true of painting as of poetry. The sun-flowers are not just sun-flowers. They maybe symbols of faded hopes or an all-consuming passion. The glass of absinthe is not a mere glass of drink. It may be symbol of man’s loneliness or despair. The nudes are never just nudes. They may be tragic symbols of a passion that has been spent of a life drained of its meaning. Or they may be just whimsical experiments in form and colour meant to relieve the greyness of the walls.

NOTE:  The images are not the ones mentioned in the article. They are only used to illustrate the article.

Article Courtesy: Veeranganakumari Solanki and Bhanumati Padamsee.