Can Art Be Secular?

The question in the title – ‘how secular is art?’ – bears the historical assumption that art with capital A, especially Art of our times, should be somewhat Secular, if not very. Meanwhile the subtitle – ‘On the Politics of Art, History and Religion in South Asia’ – stage-whispers that in South Asia, it might not be so; read the book to know.

Such ricocheting between the title and the subtitle is par for the course for academic books, but here it also signifies a time lapse.

These essays, originating from a 2018 Brown University (USA) Symposium titled ‘How Secular is Art? On the Art of Art History in South Asia’,  started taking book shape in 2020, during COVID time, while India was in the throes of a countrywide pro-Muslim and pro-minority resistance. The rage was against the clear and present danger of active Hindu Rashtra-building by the Indian state.

Much ink, blood, spit and water has flown under the bridge of ‘Secular’ between 2018 and 2020. The editorial question ‘How Secular is Art?’ has invisibly turned into ‘How Secular is India and what’s the role of its Art in it?’

The art historical had turned historical.

Otherwise, ‘How Secular is Art?’ is widely a non-question to begin with for non-Art History-inclined and non-academic readers. And yet, ‘Art History ..as a humanist discipline…shares the same intellectual horizon with Secularism’ as Santhi Kavuri-Bauer writes.

Despite having ‘South Asia’ (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and arguably Afghanistan) in its subtitle, India looms the largest here. Ten out of the 13 essays are confined to the national, historical and temporal boundaries of India. In the remaining three, two of them specifically engage with Pakistan and Bangladesh, but are simultaneously located in pre-Partition India. Vazira Zamindar juxtaposes artist Sadequain’s (1930-1987) art against the history of secularism in postcolonial West Pakistan. Sanjukta Sunderason does so with Zainul Abedin (1914-1976) and East Pakistan turned Bangladesh. These turn out to be anything but mirroring ‘others’ of their Indian counterpart in ‘Secular Art’. In the third, Santhi Kavuri-Bauer, through the art of contemporary Muslim artists inspects the de-Islamifiaction of Islamic architecture in post-independence India. 

This nation-counting is not mere representational bean-counting. As co-editor of the volume Vazira Zamindar (along with Tapati Guha-Thakurta) reminds us from her dual location in Pakistan and the USA:

“The locational, I will argue, is neither a (simply) spatial nor a rhetorical marker; it is both temporal and epistemological; and as such an agent of the historical itself. While the locational tends to be subsumed within the nation (particularly so in conversations on postcolonial modernities and artistic modernisms), it sustains a critical traffic with transnational and transregional currents (or the often-used scale of the ‘global’), which needs more critical attention in South Asian art/historiography.”

As is customary, in the introductory essay (‘Indian Secularism and Art in a Time of Crisis’)  Akeel Bilgrami clears ground and rears trenches by lucid theorising. He clarifies the ties between ‘Secular’ and ‘Art’  in an elementary way, for us, Watsons.

“…[T]hree commitments…first, a commitment to freedom of religion (freedom of both religious belief and practice); and second, a commitment to certain fundamental constitutional rights that neither mention religion nor in opposition to religion…a third, higher-order commitment, a meta-commitment…declares a lexicographical ordering which has it that, were there to be a clash between the deliverances of the first commitment…and the second commitment…then the latter must be placed first. That is it.”

He further writes, if art is a mode of self-expression, and partially protected as free speech legally and constitutionally, how far can it be rid of religion – whether it comes to religious politics, symbologies, intents and ideals – is the matter. The western binary of religious versus secular prevails here, despite its South Asian-isation via Indian-isation.

Simultaneously defined as an already-inherent cultural substrate (‘Indians were historically and culturally Secular-Tolerant. Alas! then came the British’) and an ever-unattainable Enlightenment ideal (‘Post-1947 Indians are not very secular-tolerant anymore but they should be and will be’), ‘Indian Secularism’ remains majorly axiological, i.e.; value-centric. At the two ends of the spectrum – the value of Indian secularism is either unquestioningly upheld (Bhargava, 2009) or negated as a state-manufactured grand narrative (Nigam, 2006). Or even more radically, it’s told to be willed into symbolic existence by the significant assumption of the collective elite: “The modern European idiom of secularism…appropriated to assert what in substance turned out to be just an updated version of the same old principle of ascription.” (Aloysius, 1997).

Indian secularism is always defined by its ‘other’ (Tejani , 2007) – earlier by minority ‘communalism’ (Islamic separatism and intolerance) and later by majority ‘communalism’ (Hindu nationalism and intolerance). In short, it is defined as a Hindu-Muslim issue rather than a religion-and-its-other issue. Rajiv Bhargava, the most cited scholar on Indian secularism, for example, conflates its contradictory political and cultural formulations (Bhargava, 2009). Neither the legal and constitutional, (Jacobsohn 2005) nor the political, nor the inter-religion conflictual history (Engineer, 1997) of Indian secularism in post-independent India offer any credence to the ‘already-inherent cultural substrate’ thesis, but the ‘ever-unattainable Enlightenment ideal’ thesis remains endlessly malleable and fecund. 

Beyond the pages of the Indian Constitution (adorned with the images of Hindu gods and freedom-fighting human deities), if the contemporary ‘other’ of secularism, Hindutva – a politically weaponised faux-Hinduism – runs wild and scot-free, by calling itself ‘culture’, can ‘secularism’ in India call itself the same, merely in Art or Visual Culture (all visually prominent artefacts including but not limited to art) even?

Yes, says three essays – ‘Art and the Secular in Contemporary India: A Question of Method’ by Karin Zitzewitz, ‘Making Place for People? Geeta Kapur, Secular Nationalism, and ‘Indian’ Art’ by Zehra Jumabhoy and ‘Can a Festival of a Goddess Be ‘Secular’?’ by Tapati Guha-Thakurta.

The three are firmly located (with a few quibbles, quakes and shivers) in the secular-nationalist historiography of India, where the fall of  the flawed yet flowering era of secular India had begun with the rise of Hindutva in the 1990s. The vast and prolonged harassment and banishment of the prime secular iconographic artist Maqbool Fida Husain (1915-2011) by the Hindu right-wing is the prime art historical signifier of this fall, whose historical counterpart would be the demolition of Babri Masjid in December 1992.

The post-independence modernist pantheon of Indian art is its visual field. From there to the visual culture of the Shaheen Bagh protests (2019-2020) via pro-secularism visual activism of SAHMAT (1989-2009 and onwards) are seen as an unbroken and representative visual tradition of Indian secularism. In Akeel Bilgrami’s passage above, the nebulous subject of the sentence, the one who makes the three lexicographical commitments happens to be: ‘India’s pronouncements as well as practice’. It is also the presumed active subject in these three essays.

It takes Kajri Jain (‘In Which Contemporary Indian Iconopraxis Devours Some Sacred Cows of Art History’) to raise a firestorm which not only  devours the sacred cows of Indian art history but also the entrenched binarisms of art versus visual culture, secular versus religious, ‘West’ versus South Asia and and postcolonial versus decolonial. Truly the keynote essay of the book (without being marked thus), it sums up and opens up so much with seven theses involving red herrings, sacred cows, possessed zombies and most importantly, the following theses:

• Religion and the Secular in Art Are Both Mutually Opposed and Form Circuits with Each Other 
• Heterochrony Includes Linear Temporality (‘Culture’ Is Spirit by Another Name), and
• Art and Art History May Be Secular, but Art History’s ‘Objects’ Need Not Be.

Possession is also the analytic device in Sumathi Ramaswamy’s ‘A Historian among the Goddesses of Modern India’ that looks back at her long visual scholarly career of serial engagements with the goddess of Tamil, the goddess of English, Mother India, Bhudevi, and finally Corona Mata. The mother/goddess ‘symbolic fiction’ of modern secular India, with its ‘own specific history of secularity’ muddles the neat history and theory of the fragile social achievement of secular India.

Vazira Zamindar quotes Sudipta Kaviraj to remind us that the aforementioned ‘sharing’ of intellectual horizon between secularism and art history in India might be putting it too mildly. “…[S]tealth of secularity is perhaps most profoundly embedded in transformations of the subcontinent’s ritual and material past into an ‘Indian’ art history…”

In the remaining three essays, art history of that stealth is mapped out meticulously and brilliantly, not amongst the  bang of the bazaar protests but amidst the whimper of museums, homes, streets, and shrines – especially modern temples and ‘timeless’ nationalist iconic images. In ‘Shivaji’s Portrait and the Practice of Art History’, Holly Shaffer unwraps how Shivaji came to look like how he looks like now. With ‘Rebuilding Konarak in the Twentieth Century: Legacies of Colonial Archaeology and Discourses of Inclusivity in Gwalior’s Birla Temple’, Tamara Sears trods the fascinating sites of secularised modern Indian temples, a ground well trodden earlier by Kajri Jain. In ‘For the Love of God: Conservation as Devotion in Tamil Nadu’, Kavita Singh (deceased in the same year this book was published) delineates a contemporary temple conservation initiative that stands the middle ground between keeping it as an active site of devotion as well as a museumised site for the secular public. 

On December 18, 1976, during the ‘Emergency’ crisis of Indian parliamentary democracy, the 42nd amendment to the Indian constitution was passed. It changed the description of India in the preamble from “sovereign, democratic republic’ to a ‘sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic.” Petitioned since November 15, 1948 and much deliberated upon since, the inclusion of ‘secular’ as a qualifier for Indian republic has thus far been rejected by the august constitutional committees. It has been on the grounds that ‘secularism’ as a Western ideal is a misfit to the Indian religio-cultural ethos and the natural pluralism of Indian culture along with judicial and moral proscriptions are enough (Constituent Assembly Of India Debates Proceedings). Therefore, the facilitation of secular spirit without the ‘secular’ signification was the recommended way.  

The 22 illustrations (click to see all illustrations and see index of illustrations below) in the same constitution have the ‘spiritual’ presence of Hindu Deities, Buddha and Mahavir, one Muslim ruler (Akbar), ‘nationalist’ Hindu rulers, Gandhiji (twice) and Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose among others. It comes across as a secular-modern Islamicate illuminated manuscript, but has an iconographical programme not much unlike the secular-modern Hindu temple-museums mentioned above. 

Even the prime and premier-most visual archive of post-independence Indian secularism can only be unlocked with the question this review began with: How secular is art?

Sourav Roy is a visual studies research scholar, writer, translator and editor. His Mphil thesis  (2022, School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University) titled ”Official’ Secularism in India: Diversified Unity?’ parses the associated visual cultures of ‘official’ Indian secularism for its Hindu, liberal and Left political orientations.