This weekend, India’s arts and culture community is raising a collective hand of protest
A series of hate crimes, allegedly by Hindutva-related right-wing elements against minorities, led to protests in different cities across India last year, under the broad umbrella of #NotInMyName. Many of the people leading or participating in these protests happened to be from the arts community, and over 2018, their conversations continued, as their worries about polarisation in the country increased.
Around September 2018, the murmur of worry coalesced into a loose collective, Artists Unite!, to discuss ways of acting against what seemed to be escalating efforts to create an atmosphere of hate and the taking over of cultural institutions.
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No to assault
Delhi-based filmmaker Saba Dewan, a member of the collective, says, “We felt that given the kind of assault we are witnessing against culture, the way culture is being reduced to one colour, we should be protesting. And that the way we should protest should be by using our cultural practices.” Over the next few months, cultural practitioners across the country joined in, discussing the form their protests should take.
The group issued a declaration in early December (it has over 700 signatures) that concluded with the resolution to defend the plurality of the country by countering hate with love, violence with peace, “through our images, speech, words, music and bodies”.
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Those protests are taking place on March 2 and 3, in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Kolkata, Bhubaneshwar, Pune, Ahmedabad, Nagpur, Dharwad, Chandigarh, Indore, Jamshedpur and a few other cities.
Two cities will witness multi-disciplinary and multiple stage events at a single venue: the 15 August Park in Red Fort in Delhi, and the Visthar campus, Bengaluru. In Mumbai on March 2, there will be a ‘participatory performance parade’ from Chaityabhoomi, Dadar, to the Carter Road seaface. Chennai will see a film festival in Panuval bookstore and an ‘inclusive playground’ at Santhome.
One of the Bengaluru organisers, actor and director Kirtana Kumar, says that while the event is in the city, an attempt has been to include all of Karnataka, “to represent ourselves, and also make space for the representation of all minorities”. A member of the 2020 Collective (who asked not to be named, as the group speaks only as the collective), who is coordinating the Mumbai walk, says the group is taking ideas from creative people, “in dance, poetry, spoken word, theatre, music, and transforming them into performance, keeping in mind that it is a parade”. 2020 has also created PostersUnite, which releases ‘copyleft’ (no ownership — creators are not even named — and free to reuse and distribute) posters every day.
Artists Unite! says that there is no attempt to curate things: creative people have come forward with their ideas, and resources like artworks are shared, but events are self-organised in each location.
For more details on the events, visit facebook.com/artistsuniteindia