[Reader-list] Baroda, Immanel Kant and the Indian Penal Code: how do we read intentions
anil gupta
anilg at sristi.org
Sun May 13 10:59:55 IST 2007
*excellent issues Shuddha: in a conundrum of intention, action and
consequence, we can see the last two. The painting by Chandra mohan and
its ability to unite Christian and Hindu activists. We can also ee
consequence of jail for Chandra. But inferring intention of Chandra is a
task that can not left to Jurist alone. But then as you imply, they are
the one who will pass judgments. So what do we do, well, some petitions
could be files s citizen affected by the consequences of the art and
thus demonstrate the differential effect of the same art.
I wish some body will post his art work on this list so that we all can
see what he really painted. When Ram Guha infers the intentions of JP,
he does the same. When editor of Le Monde had to infer the intentions
the journalist who discovered Concentration camps in Russia ( read The
Mandarins ), he had to do the same. He had to evaluate the impact of
this discovery on the social agenda of the Left.
So Shuddha, issues you raise are very vital and i hope these will
trigger a wider debate in India about inferring intentions of those with
whom we do not agree and on whose actions we pass judgments, an
enterprise we all indulge in all the time.
Sherlock Holmes had a somewhat similar issue to face when he asked, Why
did Dog not bark? He had at least linked intention with inaction,
will we remember the lines of Dinkar:
pap ka bhagi nahin hai keval vyagh, jo tatastha hai, samaya likhega,
unka bhi apradh
anil
SOME MORE REFERENCES ON INFERRING INTENTIONS IN ART
*
Art and Intention: A Philosophical Study
Paisley Livingston, /Art and Intention: A Philosophical Study/, Oxford
University Press, 2005, 272 pp, $55.00 (hbk), ISBN 0199278067.
*
The Concept of Intention in Art Criticism*
Isabel C. Hungerland
/The Journal of Philosophy/, Vol. 52, No. 24, American Philosophical
Association Eastern
Division Symposium: Papers to be Presented at the Fifty-Second Annual
Meeting, Boston
University, December 27-29, 1955. (Nov. 24, 1955), pp. 733-742.
Shuddhabrata Sengupta wrote:
> (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
>
>
>
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>
>
--
Prof. Anil K Gupta
Professor, Indian Institute of Management
Ahmedabad 380015, India anilg at sristi.org or anilgb at gmail.com
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