[Reader-list] Public/Private

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Dear Arnab,

Thank you for raising again the important question of 'publicness' and 
'privacy' apropos of the past discussion on this list about whether 
religion is, or ought to be, in the public domain.

As you have rightly pointed out, I prefer making a plea for a private 
place for matters of faith (or, for that matter, doubt).


I am writing in the hope that my words tonight, might persuade you into 
conceding that my formulation of publicness and privateness is a little 
more complicated than the standard binary of 
"public-secular-reason-state" vs "private-sacred-emotion-subject" binary 
that I think you might be inadvertently transposing on to my mapping of 
the relationship between public and private matters.

As I have said before on this list, I have no religion to call my own, 
but I consider my doubt, my scepticism, my lack of faith to be a private 
matter and have no intention of imposing it on to the reasons and 
expreiences of others, just as I have no desire to have someone else's 
faith, or doub, imposed on to me.

(Let me say in passing that there are after all, as many kinds of doubt, 
as there are of faith, and there are many kinds of doubt that are far 
from my own, just as there are some kinds of faith that may be close to 
my doubts.)

Lest I be misunderstood, let me make it very clear that I do not see the 
relation between the categories 'public' and 'private' as constituing a 
hierarchy - with public, placed higher than private, or even with an 
exalted 'private sphere'.

My plea that religion, or the lack of it, faith, or doubt, be left alone 
in the private realm, and not be forced to account for itself in public 
has less to do with protecting the 'secular public realm' from the 
contagion of the turbulence of belief and heresy than it has to do with 
protecting the private turbulences of faith and heresy from the anodyne 
banality of always having to make things public.

Tangentially, I argue for a removal of subsidy to Haj pilgrims, not in 
order to protect the state from the contagion of having discriminated in 
favour of the Haj Pilgrim, but rather to protect the Haj Pilgrim from 
the attention of the state.

My objection to the mixing of faith and the political has to do with a 
concern against witnessing every aspect of one's existence, including 
those that I feel should not be accountable to anyone, being made 
subject to political or public considerations.

In our discussions of faith and doubt, it is often forgotten that a 
large amount of acts to do with faith have a ritually secret, 
confessional, even confidential aspect to them. In such cases, 
publicness would constitute a violation. I am trying to be attentive to 
the need to protect against such violations.

I am partial to that brand of Sufi thinking for instance, which is 
instinctively suspicious of acts of public piety. Here, the question of 
secrecy, of privacy has to do with the compacts that people as 
individuals make with their consciences, with their inner voices, with 
god or whatever takes god's place in the event of the absence of god in 
the inner life of an individual. Sometimes these are matters that can be 
shared within a circle of seekers who recognize the mutuality of their 
search. Sometimes even that concession to mutuality is unavaliable. They 
are rarely ever, if made 'public'. The pursuit of a Sufi 'style' in 
public, is taken by some Sufis as a mark of hypocrisy, and vanity. A 
true Sufi, from this point of view, is someone who can never be 
'recognized' as such. From this perspective, there is a worth in the 
paradoxical assertion that a true 'Sufi' is one who disguises himself as 
a 'non-sufi'.

Personally, I far prefer the very private company of those who either 
have faith, or those who are troubled by the lack of it, or those who 
celebrate the lack of it, to the banality of either secular, or 
ritualized public life.

I am enclosing below a recent text that I (re)wrote and presented for an 
audience of art students and curatorial researchers who had asked me to 
speak to them about art in the public realm. As it happens, this text 
does not refer much to art, but as you will see, it does refer a lot to 
religion, and religiosity, which I happen to take very seriousy. Readers 
may recognize that the last portion of this text is taken from a 
reader-list posting made by me some months ago. I apologize for the 
repetition of this material, but hope it will benefit from being framed 
in a new context.

I have tried in this text to make the words 'public' and 'private' 
somewhat difficult to use by pointing to how they can turn in upon 
themselves very often. Arnad, I hope this is of some interest to you.

Often, I find words used in a very loose manner, and consequently, part 
of my intellectual work consists in making words more difficult to use, 
by pointing to shades, striations and whirlpools of meaning, so that 
when one uses them, one does so with great care.

The ideas in this short essay are still being worked on, and should not 
be treated as finished. I would welcome any criticisms or comments

By the way, Arnab, I am aware that I still owe you a reply to your 
question about what you construe as my statement about a relationship 
between censorship and the idea of consent. It will come, in due time.

regards

Shuddha

-----------------------------------
Public Privations : Notes about Private Acts and Public Spaces

*The Public Private Conundrum*
The fifteenth century mausoleum of a dead Afghan monarch in a New Delhi 
public garden is perhaps the unlikeliest of private spaces. Here, along 
with an itinerant vendor of snacks and savories taking a breather on a 
hot summer afternoon and truant schoolboys, are a clutch of courting 
couples, a conspiracy of stolen intimacies, quiet seductions and secret 
trysts, ransomed from the grip of a heartless city. A collection of very 
private moments in very public spaces. They leave their inscriptions on 
the walls - defiant declarations of desire -  that annotate the 
ornamental and sacred stucco calligraphy on the arches - "Raju loves 
Sunita", "Miriam loves Nusrat", "I love you Ram Dhan", "Rani + Rana = 
Sweethearts Forever".

Privacy and affection, separately, or together never come cheap in the 
crowded city where I live. Public displays of affection are not 
necessarily encouraged in Delhi and only the well to do can afford the 
luxury of seclusion in love. Rooftop apartments with independent 
entrances in family owned town houses, love nests in hotels, the back 
seats of capacious SUVs, weekend getaways in hill station guest houses, 
or keys to the flats of pliant friends are conveniences that few can 
access. And those who can, can also go to clubs, bars and parties where 
public displays of affection do not lead to instant assault. The public 
that displays its affections to its own charmed circle finds ways to do 
so behind high walls, high cover charges and high gates with vigilant 
watchmen in attendance.

They do not carve love letters on the tombs of forgotten kings. They do 
not tarry at the milk booth to catch someone's eye, or make small talk 
across rooftops in a squatter settlement while hanging out clothes to 
dry. They do not take long rides on the afternoon bus that takes them 
nowhere close to where they live, or work, or study, because the space 
of the bus ride is also the only time in which to have a conversation, 
uninterrupted, veiled by  an invisible film of brave indifference, a 
duet of averted gazes that guards against the mocking stares of 
co-passengers.

The abandoned cenotaph, the river-front walkway, the downtown underpass, 
the ruined urban fortress, the crowded, or empty bus, the broken down 
playground, the shade of a generous tree, the derelict back street of a 
commercial complex, the corner seat in the cinema that only shows b 
movies, the street corner snack stall, the park bench, the dank 
corridors of public toilets and the steps of a public library - spaces 
rife with presences, riddled with curious gazes, awash with the traffic 
of millions of human beings, become theatres of urban intimacy for 
millions of people in cities like Delhi. Here, Public and Private Life 
become contagious, contiguous, continuous facets of the same messy 
reality. Public architecture, and the accidents of urban planning yield 
themselves to the steadfast pressure of private life.

*The Private Life of the Public Street*
People fall in love, have sex, are born, defecate, cook, eat, sleep, 
work, play, read, sing, dance, pray, curse, quarrel, fight, riot, go 
mad, get possessed, enter trance states, cry, laugh, fall sick, get 
drunk, get arrested, get shot, get run over, and die on the street. The 
street is heaven and hell, factory and prison, morgue and nursery, 
market and office, boutique and salon, club and bar, library and 
university,  high court and parliament, shrine and brothel, school and 
playground. The street is the city, the world, the bed you take your 
lover to. The street is the epic that people narrate their life into. 
The street is cruel and generous and indifferent and curious and 
concerned and hostile. The street is the hyphen that conjoins every 
public stance to every private longing. The street redeems every 
privation, hears every prayer and kicks every dream into the gutter.  It 
should come as no surprise then, that often the most intensely 
emotional, even melodramatic moments in Hindi cinema are precisely those 
that get to be staged on the street. Here, in full public view, the most 
intense desires, the most painful humiliations, the darkest anger, the 
greatest joy, the strongest love and the most profound loneliness find 
their fullest expression. The street is where the public act and the 
private motive get to know each other.

A phone tap of a conversation on a crowded Delhi street between Kasmiri 
lecturer in Arabic in Delhi University and his step brother in Kashmir 
about why his wife is not going back to her maternal home for a few days 
becomes evidence in a terrorism show-trial, and the cornerstone of proof 
of a so-called conspiracy to attack the Indian parliament that prompts 
the largest military mobilization since the second world war. Its words, 
which point to banal domestic issues are twisted and mistranslated to 
mean justifications of a terrorist attack. A very private conversation 
gets construed, retrospectively as a very public statement.

A call centre worker in India, when catering to North American 
customers, is often expected to take on a different 'private identity' – 
Sunita, becomes Susan, her place of work and residence, glide over time 
zones. The weather report on her computer tells her of the climate in 
another part of the world, which she makes her own as she slips into a 
different accent to deal with her client. In the course of her 
conversation, she invokes her clients credit history, purchase 
decisions, and other private information.

The shift between one private identity and another, and negotiating the 
contours of an 'other's' (the client) private life,  is the ground on 
which her public persona as a worker in the service sector of the global 
new economy is constructed.

*Different Histories, Different Publics*
The neat separation between public and private existence that is 
supposed to attend to the rise of the modern individual in the 
notionally European centre-stage of world history  has never quite been 
able to live up to its own premises in South Asian societies. It does 
not do so today.

Yet even in Europe, historically,  the distinction between public and 
private breaks has tended to break down the moment deviations from 
prescribed moral codes have occurred - thus behaviour outside the 
appropriate norms of marital heterosexuality has tended in the past to 
invite public punitive intervention even if it has occurred in private 
spaces, between consenting individuals. The division ordained by the law 
and by moral conventions between crimes and vices (which are offences 
without victims) in the nineteenth century, and which remained 
operational through much of the twentieth century, suggested that an 
individual's act in the privacy of his or her own presence, or in the 
presence of other individuals, is not devoid of public consequences, 
when it represents a deviation from marital heterosexuality.

It is one of the strange ironies of post colonial societies, that these 
European, (and deeply Judeo-Christian, or actually more specifically, 
Protestant), heteronormative injunctions regulating 'private' behaviour 
and sexuality through publicly laid down norms, which arrived in 
non-European cultures as 'innovations' have now become the mainstay of 
cultural conservatism in the same non-European societies. Hindu and 
Islamic fundamentalists both lead virulent campaigns against gays and 
lesbians in the name of tradition, neglecting to examine the actual 
historical record of permissiveness in South Asian and Islamicate 
societies. In a remarkable act of cultural amnesia, the traditional 
liberality in the realm of the erotic and the sexual is forgotten to 
make way for a recent prudery that is then apotheosized as a newly 
constituted mark of 'traditional' morality. This too has consequences on 
the relationship between private and public life in societies such as ours.

The terms 'Public' and 'Private' can then be seen more as place holders 
for concepts that change their content over time, than as actual 
descriptions of ways of inhabiting space.

Having said this, it is not altogether fruitless to explore how 
different societies have realized the distinction in spatial terms. If 
the post renaissance European model of the public square, the public 
institutional building, the public park, the public street and the very 
private homestead is an instance of a neat binary operation, then, other 
societies and cultures have found other methods of articulating the 
public-private relationship. The rise of modernity in non-western 
societies has seen an overlay between different models of publicness and 
privacy. It is possible, then, for an individual to simultaneously 
inhabit an exclusively 'public' realm as derived from a European 
heritage, and a 'public-private' continuum that is more porous and flexible.

Traditionally, South Asian cultures have tended to be arrange public and 
private aspects of life in a series of overlapping and concentric 
circles. Courtyards and kitchens, terraces and pavements, encroachments 
and annexes constantly re-position the line that separates public and 
private life by giving rise to permanently provisional zones of liminality.

*The Outsideness of Inside - Considerations on Domesticity*
The structure of a traditional North Indian 'big' house, with its 
different entrances and exits for different kinds of people, its 
'meeting room'  - the 'baithak' or 'majlis' - where menfolk do business 
and conduct public affairs, its inner and outer courtyards, its shrine, 
the 'andar mahal' - where the women of the household can go unveiled, 
the capacious beds that make room for more than a couple, the secret 
niches and hidden passages, or concealed staircases, godowns and attics 
that become playgrounds of intimacy, the roof that can be the bedchamber 
under the sky on summer nights and the backgarden overlooking a well or 
a pond is a complex zone where different articulations of publicness and 
privacy are bound by rigid rules. However, these rules are rigid not in 
terms of the separation between publicness and privacy, but in terms of 
which term is applicable to whom and in what context. Let us take for 
instance the example of the 'women's quarters' - here, the ritualized 
segregation of the sexes prohibits women from being exposed to adult men 
and the 'public realm' that such men inhabit. But in many ways, the 
'inner palace' or the 'andar mahal' is the most intense conduit of news 
and information from the outside world. Here, the gossip and rumours of 
the neighbourhood, of the court, of the city and the district, conveyed 
by servants, artisans, nurses, friends and relatives, circulated with 
remarkable felicity. The women of the harem and the traditional 
household, though veiled, in 'pardah', in notional seclusion from the 
world outside, would often be more 'conversant' with what went on in the 
world than even the busy public men who dabbled in the affairs of the 
world from their noisy 'baithaks' and meeting rooms. Often female power, 
excercised from the depths of private space, from within the innermost 
folds of domestic interiority was able to change the course of outer, 
public events because it had access to unofficial, informal channels of 
information and communication. The commerce between ostensibly public 
and officially private would often lead to subtle alterations of the 
balance of power between them, with private acts leading on occasion to 
very public consequences.

There is no archive, or history of private life. All that we glean of 
private moments come to us from lived experience, and from stories, from 
proverbs and songs, from myths and parables told by women, servants and 
old men to children. This is how many of us grow up to understand love 
and loss, longing and belonging, cunning and compassion, courage and 
discretion and all the things that you need to have a sense of to lead a 
life that constantly fluctuates between public and private registers.

If the public sphere is the realm of history, and private life the 
domain of interiority, then history and interiority get constantly 
dovetailed into each other in all sorts of complicated ways. Dreams, 
longings, revelations, instances of amazement and other intensely 
individuated instances become the foundations of public acts, 
performances, pronouncements and positions. Naturally, this leads to 
anxieties about propriety and appropriateness, and typically, disputes 
about behaviour in public spaces tend to be about the fact that the 
actors concerned were seen to be acting in a manner that demonstrated 
their lack of regard for the 'publicness' of the space. In other words, 
they were acting as if the 'street' were their 'bedroom'. This obection 
to the inappropriate transposition of modes of behaviour is complicated 
by the fact that often the 'street' is also the 'bedroom', but that 
apart, what it is also challenged by is the fact that the models of 
'public persona' and 'private self' that it is based on may not be 
consonant with the modes of living and acting of many people.

*Public Mourning and Private Grief*
Thus, the exhibition and display of grief, a very private emotion, 
through rituals of lament and self mortification in very public 
'Moharram' processions by Shia Muslims in India are often instances 
where the whole 'public-private' conundrum gets sharply foregrounded. 
Lucknow, a north Indian city with a large Shia population, frequently 
witnesses Shia-Sunnic clashes, as the Shia moharram procession, with 
'taaziyeh' being attacked, as it passes through Sunni neighbourhoods.

For the majority Sunni Muslim community, and many non muslims, the 
rituals of Shia Muslim mourning are seen as 'the private affair of that 
community'. For Shias the mourning is meaningless if it is not 
'performed' in public view. Rivulets of private grief mingle to form a 
very public lament, that reinforces the sense of identity of a people 
that sees itself as a beleaguered community, as a  minority within a 
minority. That the performances of mourning also often entail the making 
of ritualized accusations against important Sunni personages is a bone 
of contention that ignites Shia-Sunni friction with repetetive 
regularity. Here, the private grief, of Shia individuals, what Sunnis 
call the 'private affair' , of the Shia community, and the space of the 
street, where these are made public - come together explosively. 
Peculiarly, Shia Sunni riots in public spaces over Moharram are very 
modern phenomena, (though Shia-Sunni conflicts are not) and they date 
precisely to the moment where public spaces were seen as somehow 
separate and distinct from private life. The argument made by those who 
protest against Shia street rituals are as follows - 'if the street is a 
public space, then, it is inappropriate that it be used for private 
purposes. If private claims are made on that public space, however 
temporarily, then they are likely to come up against counter claims made 
by other private parties, thus it is best that no private claims 
whatsoever are made on public space or on public consciousness.'

The public space, public consciousness, public realm - is the domain of 
the secuarized, apparently un-marked bourgeoise citizen. The singular 
error in this operation however is that this being, actually generalizes 
his private claims, the very specific conditions of his very limited 
existence on to a universalizing claim of 'publicness'. It is this 
subject, everywhere a construct that relies on the tacit expression of 
majoritarian sentiment, which disguises its particularity under the garb 
of an ab initio ontological universality. In India, this is the abstract 
figure of the average 'Hindu' who consitutes the normative point of 
departure for both 'secular' as well as 'secterian' versions of the 
script of political citizenship. A variant of this same figure is the 
abstraction of the 'Indian Muslim' – who tends to conform to the 
criteria of mainstream 'Sunni' Islam. These are demographic accidents, 
the inverse could be possible in say, Iran, where the 'Shia' patina on 
the ritualization of citizenship would inflect differently say on 
Zorastrian or Jewish claims to action in public space, and in 
Scandinavia, where a raucous demonstration of indignant undifferentiated 
Muslim pietry may be seen as more disturbing of the public peace than 
even the carnivalesque celebrations of the Stockholm pride parade, which 
is now accepted and acceptable within the 'public realm' of contemporary 
Swedish society.

Quasi - Public renditions of acceptable figures are possible, though 
subject to qualifications, that quarantine them from the 'majority' of 
the public, in a space designated as temporarily 'public' but for a 
'large private purpose'. This is the stuff of negotiation and 
compromise, of give and take over claims to public space between 
community representatives and the officials of the law and order 
apparatus. But, events such as Moharram in North India regularly throw 
up anomalous figures, neither Hindu, nor Sunni Muslim, but loudly, 
lamentingly, embarrasingly Shia, and their claims to 'public space' 
suddenly constitutes a crisis of the secular realm, showing us how 
tenuous and fragile the foundations of acceptable 'publicness' are. 
Neither the machinery of the state, nor the 'leaders of the community', 
nor the written or unwritten norms of public behaviour are able to deal 
with such anomalies. Processions start and then deviate from the 
prescribed routes, the height of 'taaziyehs' exceeds that which is 
normally allowed, crowds of young men do things that they are not 
supposed to, like flagellate themselves more violently then they are 
expected to, and women keen their lament at the martyrdom of Husain and 
Hassan a pitch louder than necessary, and the narrator of the story of 
Karbala neglects to ask the Sunnis to politely leave the majlis when the 
turn in the narration necssitates the cursing of the oppressive caliphate.

In each of these cases, the minority, is seen at best as 'venting' its 
private business in public society, and at worst, challenging the 
(loaded) neutrality of public space with subversive performances of its 
'private' identity.

*'Unspeakablilty'*
The conditions of public life legislated through law and juridical 
convention are ultimately a code and a language unto themselves – 
acceptance of an utterance within the public realm is ultimately a 
matter of recognition that a speech act or an utterance is intelligible. 
Yet courts, and a variety of other constituted public spaces, routinely 
render different kinds of utterance as falling outside the circle of 
public intelligibility. Various kinds of utternace are processed into 
the 'unspeakable'. This forces these claims into a silence, an 
interiority, a privation that involves the stripping away of public 
status, and its reduction to a private and particular place. Thus, the 
claims of a group of tribals to their land, if expressed through myths 
and song is seen as un-intelligible ritual, unreadable in the domain of 
evidence and veracity, while the apparatus, staging, role play and 
paraphernalia of jurisprudence itself is not seen in ritualisitc terms. 
One ritual wins over another precisely by stating that it is not in fact 
a ritual. The public realm of the courtroom is then an arena where one 
'private agenda' (that of modernity and its institutional history) wins 
over another ( a traditional claim to land by a tribal group). Perhaps 
we would do well to be wary of the fact that many public claims are 
energized by a complex web of private agendas disguised to the point of 
invisibility.

*The Parable of Lions*
The symbolic apparatus of the modern Indian nation state borrows heavily 
from a re-purposed ancient Imperial past. The lion capital of Ashoka, a 
symbol of Imperial power is today the seal of the Indian state. It 
features four roaring lions standing in close proximity on a pillar. In 
conclusion, I would like to offer you a parable of another image of a 
lion. Sometime in the summer of 2001, while working on a project that 
would be realized as 'The Co Ordinates of Everyday Life' a multi screen 
and cross media installation on law, illegality and claims on urban 
space, we came across and recorded a broken down wall in what had been a 
central delhi squatter settlement. The demolition, which was recent and 
incomplete, had exposed the inner walls of many makeshift dwellings. One 
such wall was inscribed with a child's drawing - a large, happy, blue lion.

The lion on the seal of the state roars at the lion on the wall of the 
makeshift dwelling. The two lions emdody two ways in which a city can 
speak, and yet both speak of the way in which the hands of power 
transform a landscape. The Imperial Mauryan lion marks urban space with 
an official order, designating what is legal and what is illegal. This 
official order comes across a dwelling and demolishes its outer walls, 
revealing its innermost core, on which stands inscribed a child's happy 
lion. The broken interior back wall of an ‘illegal’ home becomes a 
public wall when the shell of the house is destroyed. An extant law 
forbids private inscriptions and acts of graffiti on public walls. The 
happy blue lion, hitherto the hero of a child's fantasy, expressed 
within the confines of a domestic space, becomes, post demolition, a 
private inscription on a public wall. A wall is destroyed, a drawing 
becomes a fugitive. Private niches yield to the onslaught of public 
laws, are transformed into public spaces, and then are subject to 
further scrutiny.In the civil war that rages between the master plan and 
the moment, the walls of the population must be more circumspect and 
reticent, in keeping with the urgencies of our times. The privations of 
the public realm have their own urgent ways of demanding our attention.

*Public/ Private/ Peer*
In closing, I would like to propose a possible way out of the 
relenteless public-private quandary - by way of urging a consideration 
of the category of the 'peer' as a counterpoint to the public-private 
binary. The 'peer group' is not an innocent category, it can be 
exclusionary towards those outside it, and deeply invasive towards those 
within it. But perhaps the one thing it does allow is to enable modes of 
being and acting that are more sympathetic to the demands of 
inter-subjectivity than the private-public binary can allow for. We 
know, at least notionally, what public spaces and private spaces are, or 
could be. What about 'spaces of peerage' - are they the commons of a 
transposed inter-subjectivity that allows for a greater porosity between 
public acts and private intents. Some designs of peerage seem 
discernible in the structure of online 'peer to peer' networks - how 
might these designs be translated into concrete and offline realms? How 
might we construct spaces where our private anxieties and public masks 
can on occasion be held in abeyance, while we construct other modes of 
interactive being? Perhaps some ideas might emerge in discussion. As I 
have no answers, but many questions about what 'peerage' might mean, I 
would love to learn from you, what you might think about the possibility 
of such spaces.

---

A small footnote

A few months earlier this year, an art student at a prestigious Art 
School in the University of Baroda in Western India got embroiled into a 
sad and strange controversy. He had made a series of not very 
interesting installations for the school's final year show, some of 
which, were seen as acts of deliberate insult to religious feelings - 
there were images of Hindu deities, and apparently an effigy of the 
crucified christ with water flowing out of the exposed penis of the effigy.

A mob of Hindu fundamentalist activists, later to be followed by 
Protestant christian zealots (and normally, in the state of Gujarat, 
these two kinds of groups act against each other, rather than in concert 
with each other) entered the University Art School's gallery, damaged 
the 'offending' art works, threatened the students and the faculty, and 
roughed up the student. Later, police came to protect the mob, and 
arrested the student under a series of laws, including disruption of 
public order, intention to cause enmity between different groups and 
section Section 295A: Deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage 
religious feelings

The problem is, Chandramohan's lawyers can at best argue that his 
actions are not evidence of his intentions. However, an artist is such 
only because his actions have deliberation. Thus, to save Chandramohan 
the person from a prison sentence, his lawyers might have to jettison 
Chandramohan's identity as an artist. Such an argument, given the 
circumstances that the images in question were made for an exam of the 
fine arts department, may be impossible, or at the very leas   difficult 
  to sustain,

  The reason that distinguishes between the scrawls made by a chimpanzee 
and an abstract expressionist has to do with the idea of intention. To 
protect Chandramohan's act as an instance of un-malicious behavious, it 
has to be freed from the matrix of artistic intention. We cannot really 
quarrel about the purport of the intention, because the onus of proving 
hurt, has to do not with the hurter, but with the hurtee.

Hurt, is a subjective feeling, and as long as the hurt say that they 
feel their pain, we are in no position to debate whether their pain or 
humiliation is real or imagined. There cannot, in fact be, imagined or 
feigned pain, because a court is in no position to measure the intensity 
of feeling on any given issue. Thus when a person says that their 
religious sensibilities are hurt,  a court has to listen, (if the injury 
  to sensibilities is mentioned as a cause of harm). Chandramohan cannot 
say that he intended to cause pain. He can only say that he intended to 
  cause meaning to be read into his actions. If someone says that they 
read meaning in his actions in a manner that caused them pain,there is 
very little that Chandramohan or his lawyers can say in defence against 
  such a charge

The only thing that can be debated is the question of whether or not 
there was 'intention'in the first place. As an artist, Chandramohan 
cannot run away from intention.

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.

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,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, in other words, to 
take refuge in the diginifed solitude of madness. 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 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. Our understanding of art, and our 
valorization of the public realm, must at times I think be striated with 
a few modest caveats that make us look at instances of tactical retreat 
from the publicness of our work as occasional necessities. Let us not be 
so condescending towards an occasional bout of hesitation with regard to 
making things public.