[Reader-list] Baroda, Immanel Kant and the Indian Penal Code

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

(apologies for cross posting on the Reader List, Commons law and 
www.kafila.org)

Dear All,

This is in continuation of my earlier posting about the incident at the 
MS University at Vadodara and the relevant sections of the Indian Penal 
Code.

It is one of the wonderful properties of South Asian subcontinental life 
that reality is always better adorned than fiction would have it.

And so it is that along with Mr. Niraj Jain, (a purported Bajrang Dal 
leader who also contested the Vadodara civic body elections on a BJP 
ticket), the other guardian of public morality who protested against the 
art student Chandra Mohan's work in a departmental exhibition at the 
Fine Arts Faculty at MS University Baroda happens to be a pastor with 
the Methodist Church, most appropriately named the Rev. Emmaneul Kant.

See, a report on the Vadodara incident in the Vadodara City page of 
Indian Express 'BJP Men rough up fine arts student'(Express News 
Service, May 9) at
http://cities.expressindia.com/archivefullstory.php?newsid=235608&creation_date=2007-05-10

Apart from the fact that this incident shows a beautiful secular synergy 
between majoritarian and minoritarian interests (thereby confusing all 
those who spend most of their time worrying about majoritarian 
communalism, especially when it comes to the province of Gujarat), there 
has to be adequate recognition, I think of the magical facticity in 
knowing that a protest against a work of art is being led (at least in 
part) by an Emmanuel Kant.

For all those familiar with the Vadodara pastor's distinguished 
Konigsbergian philosopher namesake,  Emmanuel (or Immanuel) Kant's 
'Critique of Judgement' (a book that continues to be influential enough 
in discussions of contemporary aesthetic practice and thought to be seen 
hovering around the curatorial mandate of Documenta 12 and other serious 
matters like a spirit that got stuck in limbo after a mistimed seance), 
the delicate ironies of this haunting of the Vadodara controversy by the 
ghost of Kant cannot be escaped.

In his Critique of Judgement,(and I quote, for the sake of convenience, 
from the excellent, online entry in the Internet Encyclopaedia of 
Philosophy)  http://www.iep.utm.edu/k/kantaest.htm

Kant can be found paraphrased as saying :

"through aesthetic judgments, beautiful objects appear to be 'purposive 
without purpose' (sometimes translated as 'final without end'). An 
object's purpose is the concept according to which it was made (the 
concept of a vegetable soup in the mind of the cook, for example); an 
object is purposive if it appears to have such a purpose; if, in other 
words, it appears to have been made or designed. But it is part of the 
experience of beautiful objects, Kant argues, that they should affect us 
as if they had a purpose, although no particular purpose can be found."

Now a Kantian, confronted with Chandramohan's work, Jain & Kant led 
protests, and the sections 153 and 295 of the Indian Penal Code, would 
not be in any position to wriggle out of the problem of 'aesthetic 
intention'. If Chandramohan is an artist, his work would affect us as if 
they had a purpose, even if no particular purpose were to be found.

The only legal solution available under the Indian legal system, in my 
opinion, is for Chandramohan to say that he is not an artist, but a mere 
impostor, and that his work, is not purposive, or intentional, but the 
mere outpouring of a distracted, and demented mind. What I am 
suggesting, is the insanity defence, as used in a murder trial.

In other words  the - 'My Lord, my client was not of sound mind, he did 
not know what he was doing, when he shot the plaintiff's aged mother' 
maneouvre.

If Chandramohan is an artist, then the courts will look at intention. 
And as in a murder trial, the calibration of intention can lead to a 
degree of dimunition of a sentence from homicide to manslaughter, but 
cannot do away with the fact of the offence.

I say this neither to attack Chandramohan's work, nor to defend his 
practice (although I have no doubt in my mind that the freedome of 
expression is a higher good than artistic quality or religious 
sensibility). I say this only to underscore the problems of aesthetic 
intention, ethical conduct and legal judgement that this case seems to 
have thrown open, perhaps at the instance of the long neglected spectre 
of the venerable I(E)mmanel Kant