Luminescence: In Situ with Dissent

It was an extraordinary winter of protest in India, as the year 2019 rolled to its end. The background was set by a series of undemocratic bills that became acts in parliament without debate and consensus, culminating in the most explosive and divisive Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in December that year, leading to a surge of civil demonstrations, rallies, and protests across the country on a scale that had not been seen before. Directly triggered by the state crackdown on a student protest within the Jamia Millia Islamia University in the heart of New Delhi, made worse by arrests and vandalization of the campus, a group of Muslim women of all ages—grandmothers, mothers, daughters, and grand-daughters—came out to occupy the streets of Shaheen Bagh, a neighbourhood flanking the university. With that began a historic day and night, peaceful, immovable sit-in by the Muslim women of this locality against a conglomeration of laws that they feared threatened their citizenship, and the guarantees of secularism enshrined in the Indian Constitution (Image 1.1).

During the ensuing weeks of the defiant sit-in, artists, along with activists and students, transformed the by-lanes of the neighbourhood with murals, pavement paintings, and installations that guided visitors to the scene of protest. A month into the event, scaffoldings, ephemera, and improvisations became part of ‘the art of resistance’, transforming Shaheen Bagh into ‘an open-air art gallery’. As one student visiting the venue wrote, ‘Even before reaching Shaheen Bagh, where the women sat with their daughters and grand-daughters in silent, powerful defiance … one is introduced to Shaheen Bagh through the numerous murals. The street art guides you….’ Opening up a space for daily congregations of activists and citizens, for singing and poetry reading, for speeches and book discussions, for the setting up of a library, as well as for a profusion of murals, drawings, posters, and installations, Shaheen Bagh was both a site of contestation and experiments in democratic practice (Images 1.2 and 1.3). Particularly significant was the way art and artists became constitutive of the site of protest, alongside community elders and student activists, to together conjure visions that had to be created to be fought for.

What defines the secular in a cultural festival in Bengal that centres on the annual homecoming of Goddess Durga? How may we read the rhetoric of secularization of this event that has a long historical background and has become crucial to its contemporary identity? In keeping with the title of this volume, a question mark necessarily hovers around the nomenclature of the ‘secular’ and the extent to which it may lend itself to the profile of a festival that has well outstripped its religiosity and willed its transformation into Kolkata’s biggest public art event. Defying any easy placement within an institutionally secure realm of either religion or art, and never fully measuring up to the criterion of the secular, the Durga Pujas provide a powerful site for the interrogation of each of these conceptual categories. I will be arguing that the contemporary festival of Durga in Kolkata (and the ideas and forms it exports to Durga Puja celebrations across Bengal and other big cities of India) offers itself not just as a case study but as a constitutive ground in the dismantling of boundaries between artistic, religious, and secular practices, allowing each of these to freely trespass into each other’s domains. This sense of trespass is not one that comes from within the field of festival art and its creative protagonists. It erupts more within the fields of scholarship and disciplines such as art history and religious studies. It is in the spaces of these disciplines that the need to redefine the normative domains of art, religion, and secularity has gone hand-in-hand with the urgency of maintaining their separate jurisdictions and their different rights and prerogatives. It is important, in this context, to mark the coming of age of the field of South Asian visual studies and its tendentious criss-crossing of the disciplines of art history, visual anthropology, and the study of ritual, religion, and material cultures; and to situate my turn to the changed artistic contemporary proclivities of Kolkata’s Durga Pujas within this shifting disciplinary confluence in the initial decades of the twenty-first century.

As a mega urban spectacle that has been engaging with a spectacular array of art and craft productions, new visual technologies, and social media, the city festival holds out an invitation to the field of visual studies that is hard to resist.