When the Faculty of Fine Arts at Baroda was attacked by fundamentalists and the then university head not only removed hastily the ‘offending’ works of art but even went ahead and suspended the esteemed professor and jailed the student, several issues raised their heads. The critical issues were ownership of the image and singular representation of the image. The actions of the university authority crushed the academic enquiry of image representation, down to perceiving an image with a single interpretation that can be thrust upon through aggression. It amounts to colonizing a particular image.
The act of subverting the academic process revealed the systems own lack of clarity in its beliefs and understanding of the imagery they were demanding to be removed. With their action, they rejected the existence of other languages and scripts as well. Their actions read that a particular image must be called only by one ‘name’ and written in just script and no other. So by their rationale, an apple must be called only by the name of an ‘apple’ written only in the roman script and by no other name in no other script. So an apple cannot be called ‘safarjan’ or ‘seb’ and cannot be written in gujarati or hindi or anyother language.
A layman will not interrogate these nuances of reading an image and understanding the interplay of words and images. As s/he only sees an image as s/he has been conditioned to interpret the image and any other interpretation is incomprehensible to her/him.
The academic process at the Faculty of Fine Arts is involved in viewing and interpreting a single image for it multiple interpretations. It is not necessary that every layman understand or appreciate the images created and is subject to their involvement and depth of their understanding in interpretations. The act of the university authorities has subjugated not only the image, but languages that represent those images and the enquiry that goes into creating new imagery.
