Exam Warriors Festival: Using Art Not for Creativity but to Programme Young Minds

On most days, the vast expanse of the lawns abutting Shanti Path, the traffic artery running through the heart of Delhi’s diplomatic enclave, wears a deserted look. However, on January 4, 2025, city commuters encountered an altogether contrasting and somewhat incongruous sight. Lined up along the edge of the green belt, and facing the road, were painting easels with canvases, on which ‘artists’ were demonstrating their skills, under the gaze of cameras. Their every gesture was being relayed onto strategically displayed LED screens and the one that caught the eye was that of Padma Bhushan Jatin Das painting a pink flamingo, wearing his signature beret, a signifier of his artistic credentials.

Surrounded by a police cordon and under the gaze of their teachers and artists as chief guests, thousands of students squatted on orange and green carpets. A portable table loaded with art materials was placed in front of them. Each youngster had a copy of a book authored by Prime Minister Narendra Modi titled Exam Warriors. Its cover was adorned with bubbly cartoons.

Multiple sound amplifiers punctuated the carefully orchestrated space, augmenting the vocal instructions of the chief guests on a specially erected stage, positioned some distance away from the students.  The most important guest, though, was the prime minister himself, who, at one point, marked his ‘appearance’ through a recorded message as well as a cartoon representation on an LED screen.

The students, who were dressed in identical white, sleeveless battle-jackets, also adorned with cartoons, had been assembled from schools run by the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC), which is a Union government-controlled local body. Neatly grouped into rows, with placards announcing their school’s location in the city, the students had been brought to Shanti Path to participate in the Exam Warriors Art Festival. They were there to learn the “mantras” of destressing when faced with the prospect of a school exam that could then also be extended to the trials one faces in life.

The first edition of the annual festival, organised in 2022, was held in the  confines of the Talkatora Stadium, a venue earmarked for competitive sporting events. This year’s move to make a visible statement was perhaps less about exposing the youngsters to an afternoon of sunshine and more about turning it into a parade ground for parliamentarians to enact their fondness for children. Even though it was outdoors, the festival was  certainly not an engagement with plein-air painting (taking the act of painting out of the studio, with the landscape as the subject) – everyone involved was expected to paint in response to the ostensibly spellbinding content of the book Exam Warriors and its online world, accessible through a QR Code.

The book that is the fulcrum of the Exam Warriors art festivals and its online world, is now into its second edition. It  was first published in 2018. Declared a best seller and available in multiple Indian languages, its second edition has a newly designed cover.

While the old cover showed the prime minister flagging off a race, led by the proverbial hare speeding ahead on a hoverboard-like contraption, the new cover is a little different. The front cover shows the hare (or is it a white rabbit, popular in the domestic pet industry, bred for its albinism and unable to survive in the rough and tumble of a jungle?) morphed into a Pied-Piper playing a flute, as youngsters with backpacks twirl a football and carry giant replicas of writing instruments as they follow the hare. They are waved on by what looks like a cartoon representation of the prime minister.

The book cover also has an image of a girl in the background, twiddling a remote control set as if she is manipulating a flying drone. It is a nod to the Union government’s newly launched “drone didi” scheme. The scheme, we are told, aims to train women’s Self Help Groups in drone technology so that they can provide services in the field of agriculture, such as crop monitoring, among others.

Clearly, the message of reckless over-confidence leading to failure that Aesop’s fable of the hare and tortoise gives, or the Brothers Grimm story of a Pied Piper from Hamelin leading children into a perilous situation, has been lost in translation. In fact, the back cover of the book shows what looks like a caricature of the prime minister, with his arm around the shoulder of the hare/rabbit/Pied Piper, leaving one wondering if there are any real-life parallels there.

The book illustrations offer more specious images – youngsters can be seen using an array of spiffy personal mobility devices that one is more likely to come across on a Hawaiian beach getaway than in India’s congested streets or rural environs with their rundown roads. Presupposing a certain class location of students and a complete ignorance of ground realities, the images show children rollerblading, skateboarding and scuba diving or else diving into a swimming pool, rock-climbing using state of the art safety gear, and using a play-station to interact with screen-based entertainment forms.

Every section of the book, titled “mantra”, has an activity page appended to it and invites written responses by scanning an impassive QR code.

What is not transparent is how this data so gathered will eventually be used. In a scenario where elections are won based on data-driven messaging, tapping into Google Analytics and other tools that track scans from QR codes, engagement time with websites and even networked screen interfaces used to access information, this art festival positioned around a book, requires greater scrutiny. The dispersed geometric abstraction of a QR code is, after all, also the sieve  of an ideological project that enables data collection in a user-friendly manner, from an age group that will form a large voting block in the next election cycle.

“Art” as a recognisable cultural category, it seems, needs to be mobilised for what it has come to signify, namely creativity and autonomy, so it can obfuscate how young minds can, in fact, be programmed.

The book’s promotional activities since its first edition have  always involved art-related activities, be it the Pariksha Pe Charcha – On The Spot Art and Painting Competitions that have been organised for several years across the country, or the roping in of recognisable names from the creative field to embellish such events. The total lack of self-reflexivity by participating artists only shows how easy it is today to be co-opted into projects where publicity of the self becomes the singular life goal, as a paid for ‘influencer’ culture becomes a widespread phenomenon.

Publicised widely through social media platforms, the strategy to channelise “art” to capture the minds of the young has been a particularly well-funded project of the current political dispensation. Vast budgets are being set aside to use the National Gallery of Modern Art and the Lalit Kala Akademi as propaganda machines, to enhance the Modi personality cult through exhibitions, conferences and workshops. A relentless barrage of information is put out, while captive audiences of government employees and school students are routinely herded to such events to make up the numbers to create an impression of widespread and willing participation in these otherwise ennui inducing occasions.

Not much critical attention is being paid to the programming of these institutional spaces, that are otherwise being hollowed out from the inside. The National Gallery of Modern Art, for instance, has not had a functioning library for years.  Closed during the pandemic, and then for renovations, it has been shut down again after reopening. The renovations were so shoddy that the floorboards came off within a short span of the library’s reopening. This despite the fact that cultural organisations in Delhi are the second biggest beneficiaries of funding after the Rama Krishna Mission, Kolkata from the Union government as indicated by official data available online.

Discussions on remaking of society through art abound in art historical discourse. The term avant-garde associated with artistic rebellion and resistance, after all, has its origins in the military formation of the advanced guard of an army, except that it refers to an aesthetic or intellectual breakthrough. Now thoroughly domesticated by the advertising industry, a political formation like the one currently in power at the centre, which thrives through its mastery of publicity, uses the word “warrior” frequently, wherein every social project is a cleverly disguised, belligerent majoritarian confrontation, to obtain ‘consensual’ domination.

Shukla Sawant teaches art history and visual studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.