There’s an exhibition which is currently showing at the Delhi Art Gallery featuring over 200 artworks from India and claims to be the first-ever to celebrate the presence of the naked body in modern Indian art. The exhibition is, unsurprisingly, called ‘The Naked and the Nude’.

Soon after its opening, the exhibition ran foul of the durga vahinis of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad who decided to descend upon the gallery to protest against the works displayed. Nilanjana S Roy in her article, The Voices of Enraged India, for Newslaundry gives a first-hand account of the event. Her article reveals that the protestors’ presence was initially prompted by the conjecture that the works displayed inside were of the recent Delhi gang-rape victim. The protest apparently changed its tone when they were told otherwise. Now instead of ire at the gangrape victim being exploited by artists, their ire was at how people could look at nudes – that too in a public place.

Why does nudity or pornography seem so far-fetched to us? We’re clearly not the race who abstains from sexual activity. I mean, look at our population, man! So if everyone, everywhere in the country is having rampant sex why does “the naked” or “the nude” make us so uncomfortable? Is it because the ideas of porn and the ideas of mainstream Indian culture are negative analogues of one another?

It then seems that art and obscenity are mutually exclusive. The real question is – who makes this distinction? Whose taste is it? Who sets these standards?

A nude photograph bought from an approved gallery is seen as buying art, but watching a film made in a drinking den with bad lighting and grotesque interiors is viewed as consuming porn. In the former, you’re an art connoisseur. In the latter, you’re a porn-loving pervert.

While some women will go to the ‘Naked and the Nude’ with their brothers/fathers/uncles and soak in the divinity the works exude with such confidence, they will not watch porn with the same set of men.

Eighteenth century enlightenment distinguished aesthetic experience as an elevated conversation with images quite distinct from the real world. It invented modern museums as playhouses for this conversation literally placing art in a world of its own.

So, it’s not art until it occupies a sacred space in a museum. When you see something at the Museum of Modern Art or more locally, at the National Gallery of Modern Art, it ceases to be porn and becomes art. It no longer needs to validate itself aesthetically. Take this very art from the revered walls of a museum and place it in a Sulabh Shauchalaya or give it to a bunch of adolescents with an infantile sexual life and you’ll see a marked change in perception.

The perceived aim of art is to engage its consumer in a philosophical, cultural discourse, to enrich the consumer’s vision. Whereas the sole ambition of pornography is to titillate, this perhaps renders it disposable for some. But what about the lot of awful nudes out there whose intention is never questioned merely because they are sanctified by the locus of their display. What is the basis for saying that something that is exclusively sexual or aimed at sexual arousal cannot be artistic or insightful?

Our natural instinct is neither to turn away nor to stare when we see two people canoodling at a bus stop. We are not born with an irrational aversion to the naked or the nude. It is something that is ingrained in us through a very careful process of socialisation. And it is this process that forces us to uphold values of mainstream culture, and if your process of socialisation is not so mainstream, then you’re forced to uphold the not-so-mainstream values. But in both cases, you are abiding by standards you didn’t set for yourself.

These questions of art, vulgarity and line-drawing have been the calling cards of groups such as the VHP. The stubbornness of regressive culture which the Durga Vahinis have turned themselves into ambassadors of, needs to be shattered. What also needs to be delved into is the lack of tolerance that leaves no room for emancipatory work – including adult, consensual pornography that has for long been a part of our visual culture.

Image Source: [http://www.flickr.com/photos/zepfanman/4894657027/]