NEW DELHI, May 18 — It’s a heady time for Indian contemporary art. Never before has it fetched such extravagant prices and acclaim abroad. Never before have Indians at home been so prosperous as to support a proliferation of galleries, exhibitions and even investment funds devoted to art.
But art and its inevitable transgressions continue to provoke fury in Hindu nationalist quarters, leading stalwarts to shut down an exhibition, drive an artist out of the country or, in the latest case, send a young art student to jail for a final-exam project deemed offensive. The student’s arrest has prompted protests from prominent artists across the country and dominated newspaper headlines in recent days.
The tempest began on May 9 when a lawyer accompanied by police officers and television news crews marched into the art department at the respected Maharaja Sayajirao University, a state-run institution in Vadodara, in western Gujarat state. (Gujarat’s elected government is led by the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.)
The lawyer, Niraj Jain, based locally and affiliated with the party, said he was aggrieved by several works exhibited on a wall in the department library, including a painting — or rather a digital enlargement of a painted work — depicting a female form wielding weapons in her many arms, evoking a goddess from the Hindu pantheon, and giving birth. It was the final-year art project by Chandramohan, a graduate student who goes by one name.
The university, at the urging of Mr. Jain, persuaded the police to arrest the student and put him in jail. His crime, the city police commissioner, P. C. Thakur, said, was “deliberately offending religious sentiments.”
In response Chandramohan’s fellow students swiftly cobbled together material from the art history department archives and mounted an exhibition to underline the obvious: that even ancient Indian art is replete with explicitly erotic forms.
What came next seems to have startled the art world as much as the arrest did. The university’s vice chancellor, Manoj Soni, demanded an apology from the acting dean of the art department and ordered that the protest exhibition be closed.
The acting dean, Shivaji Panikkar, refused and was suspended. The administration took down the protest exhibition and then sealed the art history archives. “They want to control how we interpret our past,” said Parul Dave Mukherji, a former art history professor at the university who was on campus that week grading final exams.
Mr. Soni has offered no public explanation and has declined several requests for a comment. In a statement the university called the works “highly deplorable.”
Chandramohan was released on bail on Monday after five days’ imprisonment and has gone into hiding. He could not be reached for comment.
Mr. Jain, whose police complaint set off the art school crisis, said he was proud of his campaign. He described the student’s artwork as an attack on Indian culture. “I cannot tolerate any insult to our culture and to our god and goddesses,” he said in a telephone interview. He said he was also offended by a student painting in which a figure of Jesus was placed before a toilet.
It is not the first time artistic expression in this country has been squelched by state institutions. In Mumbai, India’s commercial capital, a court charged M. F. Husain, perhaps India’s most famous contemporary painter, with obscenity because of a painting he made of a goddess in the nude. Mr. Husain now lives in self-imposed exile in Dubai. Because he had not appeared for court hearings, the court recently issued a notice directing that his property in Mumbai be seized. (The Supreme Court has issued a stay.)
India is rarely lacking for paradox, and one of the most striking is that the puritanism of today’s Hindu radicals coexists with a long tradition of graphic sexual iconography. Hindu temple carvings often feature elaborate scenes of copulation. Among the best-known examples, at Khajuraho, in central India, was invoked this week in newspaper commentaries skewering what was referred to as the moral police brigade.
Writing in the Tuesday issue of The Indian Express, a national daily, Peter Ronald de Souza, a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of Developing Societies, a research organization here, said of the Hindu activists who forced the student’s arrest:
“It tells us not just they do not fear the wrath of the law, and that they believe censorship is acceptable in the service of a cause, but also they are certain that their actions would meet with social approval. So did the Taliban.”
His commentary was headlined, “Will They Blow Up Khajuraho?”
In a protest on Monday night here in New Delhi, prominent artists, curators and art teachers condemned the attack on the student’s work as a violation of basic freedom. “India is descending into a dark prison of the imagination,” warned Ram Rahman, a Delhi-based artist who took part.
Though not charged with any offense, Mr. Panikkar, the art department dean, has also gone into hiding. Friends have warned him that opposing Hindu radical groups in Gujarat state is inviting trouble — and not necessarily protection from the police — he explained in a cellphone interview on Tuesday night.
Wearily chronicling the chain of events, Mr. Panikkar said he had refused to apologize for the student’s artwork out of “principles and conviction.” He said he was “baffled” by the university administration’s crusade against a student project.
Asked how long he had taught on this campus, he suddenly broke down in tears. He said he was an alumnus of Maharaja Sayajirao University and had been a professor of art history there for 27 years. “I can’t bear it,” he said, weeping. “My life and blood is here. My institution, which I love so much.”
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