Selective Sacrilege

Kerala’s biennale outrage exposes how artistic freedom is invoked selectively and cloaked in liberal sophistry.

Kerala

Good art provokes. Bad arguments excuse. The controversy around artist Tom Vattakuzhy’s reappearance at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale where he reworked the iconic Last Supper painting to replace Christ with a half-naked dancer flanked by nuns has produced both. The artist and the defenders of his painting have reached reflexively for the vocabulary of modern piety – namely that interpretation is ‘subjective’ and that his intent was benign and that art must be free. The objectors, notably the Syro-Malabar Church and Catholic associations, are speaking the older language of reverence and hurt. Between them stands Kerala’s self-image as India’s most literate, most liberal state, which is now revealed as a place where freedom is proclaimed loudly and applied unevenly.

The painting had sparked outrage in 2016 when a leading Malayalam literary magazine withdrew it after protests. The Biennale’s organisers insist the venue was closed temporarily only for crowd control. The artist says he intended no offence and sees Christ in suffering humanity. But art does not float free of context. A motif that believers hold sacred, when reassembled to shock, cannot plead innocence simply because the shock was anticipated and rehearsed.

Nor is this merely a Christian quarrel. Kerala’s cultural politics have long treated Hindu iconography as fair game to be parodied in theatre, caricatured in cartoons and inverted in gallery pieces often to applause as the ruling Communists and the Congress party bosses turned a blind eye to such antics. And yet, when a Christian symbol is reimagined with erotic charge, the tone noticeably shifts. Vattakuzhy’s painting has triggered a temporary police closure of the festival.

The larger point here is that liberals respond with their favourite manoeuvre of ‘moral equivalence.’ All religions, they argue, have been mocked; therefore no religion may complain. This syllogism collapses under scrutiny. In practice, not all faiths are treated alike by cultural gatekeepers. Hinduism, which is diffuse and lacking a single clerical veto, has become the default canvas for transgression. Christianity, with institutions capable of sustained protest, is tested more cautiously; Islam, hedged by fear and law, is often avoided altogether. To insist these asymmetries do not exist is to confuse theory with practice. Freedom that operates by calculating who will object least is not freedom; it is opportunism.

There is a second equivalence at work: between criticism and ridicule. Art that interrogates power, exposes hypocrisy or reconsiders myth can be bracing. Art that swaps sacred figures for sexualised bodies to signal daring is a thinner achievement. The Biennale’s defenders say interpretation lies with the viewer. True enough. But artists, curators and institutions choose which interpretations they invite and which communities they repeatedly dare to absorb the blow in the name of progress.

Kerala’s liberals like to imagine themselves besieged by prudery. In fact, they enjoy a long indulgence. They speak for pluralism while narrowing its terms; they preach tolerance while demanding that some believers practise it more than others. When Hindus protest, they are scolded for majoritarian fragility. When Christians protest, the system pauses and reassures. When Muslims are involved, silence often prevails. This is not secularism. It is a hierarchy of sensitivity.

None of this requires censorship. The case for artistic freedom remains strong precisely because faiths are not museums. Symbols live, meanings shift. But freedom earns its legitimacy by consistency. If ridicule is allowed, allow it without favour. If hurt matters, let it matter across the board. And if institutions insist on provocation, they should at least drop the pretence that they are innocent bystanders to its consequences.

Kerala’s Biennale aspires to be global. Global standards cut both ways. In mature cultural spaces, artists defend their work on its merits, not by outsourcing accountability to abstraction. Curators accept that daring choices bring real disagreement. And liberals resist the lazy comfort of false equivalence. Until then, the state’s art wars will keep rehearsing the same drama of selective sacrilege dressed up as courage.