Have you learnt your lesson?

Ketan Mehta’s Colours of Passion is the true story about the life of one of India’s great painters, Raja Ravi Verma (1848-1906 A.D), who constantly struggled to express his art. His paintings, especially a series depicting characters from Indian mythology in the nude, invited relentless opposition from society and from religious fundamentalists. Sound familiar?

Most of the period films that I have seen seem to have some sort of contemporary relevance. Of course, this may very well be intended (on the part of the writers and directors) so that we can relate and form immediate, emotional connections with different eras and with worlds that we may or may not understand.

But something tells me that human beings still deal with the same issues. We relate to cruelty, strangeness, beauty, suffering, to love, disease, natural wonders, to artistic creation, or to depraved violence because it is as ever present and relevant today as it was a 100 years ago.

Is not what Raja Ravi Verma faced equal to what M.F. Hussain, perhaps India’s most famous contemporary painter, is facing today? Ancient Indian art and architecture is replete with explicit, erotic forms and iconography and yet radical Hindus have lived with it for years. What’s next? A newspaper article titled, ‘Will They Blowup Khajuraho?’ comes to mind!

Mr. Hussain, poor man, now lives in a self-imposed exile in London.

People embrace the age of the internet like a long lost friend. It has opened new possibilities for freedom of speech. The very idea of freedom of expression has become so widespread but yet there is a strange paradox. People are still deciding what is right and what is wrong, what can and cannot be expressed.

I quote Noam Chomsky (author and political activist), ‘Goebbels, was in favour of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin! If you're in favour of free speech, then you're in favour of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise. Otherwise, you're not in favour of free speech.’

It takes a lot of courage to create something and then show it to the world or to stand up for what you believe. Can’t we just agree to disagree?

We pride ourselves on being the most intelligent species and yet we don’t give our intelligence enough credit. We look to others for approval and to tell us what’s right.

Don’t you trust yourselves to do what is right for your survival?

Can we not view someone’s art as men and women of heart and mind, with an awareness and knowledge of history? Even if its trash at least you will come away learning something about yourself and about what you enjoy. Maybe you enjoy trash. So what? At least, you will formulate your own, independent aesthetic.

They say that history repeats itself, but perhaps that’s because there are lessons that we have not learnt.