Despite enormous threats to their life and work, the writer and the artist remain steadfastly courageous and optimistic. Here’s why we need more like them

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Art is a nail in the eye, a spike in the £esh.” When Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei wrote this in his autobiography

Sorrows (2021), he was referring to the idea that art can be used as serious provocation, ‘a deliberate disruption that destabilizes the settled and the secure’.

On August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie received a knife in his right eye. It was not the act of artistic courage alluded to by Weiwei, but a cowardly act of a self-proclaimed assassin on an intellectual warpath with his now one-eyed victim. Rushdie had come to the Upstate New York town of Chautauqua to give a talk on the freedom to speak and write freely. His assailant had come 33 years after the infamous fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini and — after the attack — left with blood on his hands and a more

mperative idarity divides gue. of titut in nessed compelling book on the stands.

Knife (2024) was not the line of expected literature from Rushdie, and unlike the author’s numerous imaginary retellings of the Arabian Nights, it carried a sharp personal recall of his recent dying moment — a moment that lasted 27 seconds.

Out of the thousands of well-known and established artists in the world, why do these two, Rushdie and Weiwei, stand apart? Why is their work so critical to life today? For two reasons. First, despite enormous threats to their life, they remain steadfastly courageous. Rushdie had been in protective house arrest in England how digitisation has opened new ways to bring unheard voices into cultural discussions and improved upon channels for listening and sharing information. Despite limitations, such as the exclusion of groups that do not have access to these mediums of communication, overall digital platforms have served as an important tool to advance inclusivity. For instance, Goethe-Institut set up a platform called ‘Goethe-Institut im Exil’, both a physical meeting place in Berlin and a digital network that serves as refuge for artists unable to pursue work in their native countries due to censorship or war.

Around the world, nation-states dealing with the experience of colonialism have had to develop historical narratives and practices of remembering that support their independence and foment national unity. Memory deals with past events but always responds to agendas and exigencies in the present. This is why memories are repeatedly revised and adapted to emerging needs. At new political conjunctures, such as decolonisation and nation-building, for instance, memory makers reconsider who the heroes of their resistance are; which foundational ƒgures are given place in the national pantheon; or what gets highlighted as precursors of independence for a nation-state. Obviously, all remembering is partial and incomplete. However, narrow or selective interpretations censor and even erase the multiple dimensions of remembrance. By contrast, encouraging a broad range of historical experiences to be remembered may help unlock a shared understanding of histories, integrating local, regional, national, and even global perspectives.

Wider perspectives

for a decade, and now, 23 years after his release, was attacked while delivering a talk on the importance of writers’ safety. Conversely, for long periods, China’s totalitarian regime had beaten, arrested and imprisoned Weiwei for defying their authority in his art, something that pushed him instead into a new reckless boldness. Second, and more importantly, the two are among a miniscule minority that uses art not as a medium of self-satisfaction, but as an instrument of politics and opinion. What gives strength to Rushdie’s writing, or to Weiwei’s sculpture or installation, is its capacity to breach political borders, thus creating new benchmarks that enlarge the public

imagination.

Cultural institutions today, more than ever, need to safeguard against monolithic narratives. This is why in Mumbai it was reassuring for me to experience the ongoing transcontinental exhibition Ancient Sculptures: India Egypt Assyria Greece Rome, at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, which brings to the Indian public the great and magniƒcent works of other cultures that were also witnesses to human history. This helps us to gain wider perspectives on the past.

Similarly, the myriad expressions and movements at the closing choreography of the exhibition Critical Zones: In Search of a Common Ground at Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan in New Delhi recently, and an artists’ showcase at the contemporary dance festival March Dance 2024 organised by the Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan in Chennai, reminded me how artistic production and cultural work from di€erent backgrounds can contribute to exciting and mutually enriching exchanges. Such experiences inspire the creative potential of societies and create avenues of cooperation.

As a cultural institution, the Goethe-Institut will continue to support cultural projects and exchanges that are relevant and impactful because they are developed meaningfully with local communities and trusted partners through collaborative and participatory processes. With a bottom-up focus on creativity, friendship, and innovation, we wish to contribute to a positive and resilient future for all.

The writer is an internationally acclaimed anthropologist, and since 2020, the president of the Goethe-Institut.

My country — my bane, my muse

Parallels between the two are ƒlled with curious storylines, and unusual ironies. In all the years of their individual practices in writing and art, both

Rushdie and Weiwei have lived according to their own rules. Both have been critical of their homeland for precisely the same reason: the opaque Communist regime in China, and the growing repression in India.

Yet despite their long association with the West (Rushdie now lives in New York and Weiwei in Portugal), both draw immense creative sustenance from their country of origin. In fact, both have done their best work as an indirect correlation with national and childhood memories. Rushdie protects freedom of speech in a country that allows him to speak freely and write stories with wild and unencumbered imagination. But he also talks of an India that once was, and has now reshaped and sti£ed itself.

Weiwei confronts the most feared and repressive tendencies of China with an equally carefree and deliberate political directness. Like Rushdie’s Knife, there are no two ways to interpret his work. In 2010, Weiwei dropped a valuable historic vase, and ƒlmed its shattering, thus making an artistic reference to the values of the Cultural Revolution; then, as western commerce made inroads into China, he painted the familiar Coca Cola sign on another Han Dynasty urn. Later, at a German exhibition, he displayed school bags collected from students who died in the Sichuan earthquake. More recently, struck by the plights of refugees, he sculpted a massive boatload of immobile strangers, also making a personal ƒlm of Syrian migrants.

There is no denying the sheer optimism that emerges in the work of these two unconnected artists. That fear has not driven them either mad, or somewhere deep underground, is the test of a resilience that keeps them both feverishly active, yet deeply secretive. Intensely political, intensely humane, every work that emerges from the studio or the study is also wholly new, exceptional and experimental.

Yet, it is a strange paradox that by far the most valuable work of art for either Rushdie or Weiwei is, in fact, their own life.

Sorrows is as much Weiwei’s story as China’s. A childhood in desolate exile spent with his poet father in little Siberia. “Disdain is a chasm no

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Ai Weiwei and (bottom) Salman Rushdie.

power can cross,” said the artist, referring to his Chinese experience.

Rushdie’s Knife is an instrument that cuts skin, but gives new meaning to life and language.

“Living was my victory,” he wrote, “but the meaning the knife had given my life was my defeat.” Rushdie’s non-ƒction is as direct and cutting as his ƒction is imaginative and surreal, often with storylines cloaked in biting satire.

Why middle India is afraid

In much of the western world, and even in our overly protected and insular middle Indian society, art merely functions as a brief and £eeting departure from reality. Public writing, public comedy, and public art address a minuscule minority. Closeted and often remarkable only as visual experience, most writers and artists are afraid of provocation. So, the essential call to big and bold artistic freedom disappears, and submerges into muted applause in closed galleries, government-approved and stamped. Art remains a livelihood rather than an act of liberation.

As a society, middle India is now afraid. Not because of the current state of politics, not for the absence of intellectual debate and academic discourse. There are enough journalists in the media to remind us of our rights; enough lawyers and judges to connect us to the Constitution. No, middle India is afraid because the real artists — the writer, the painter, the sculptor, the comedian — are missing. Missing above ground and underground. The country is poorer for the lack of a Rushdie or a Weiwei.

New Improved Punjabi Baroque, to be released soon. manifesto is suggesting! Why? It’s simple: they want to ƒll the hearts and minds of the poor with resentments against the rich.

Obsession with unemployment

This whole rich-poor rhetoric is so 1960s, it’s ridiculous. Same goes for the Congress campaign’s obsession with unemployment. Who in their right mind talks about jobs in the age of AI and entrepreneurship? Today, every Indian, be they rich or poor, aspires to be a wealth creator, not a job-seeker. That’s why the Congress banging on about so-called joblessness is despicable. It’s nothing but a desperate bid to garner votes by polarising the electorate into employment-seekers and employment-deniers. If this is not a clear-cut case of hate speech against the nation’s wealthy minority, I don’t know what is.

And yet, the EC is reluctant to stop politicians from making incendiary references to redistribution and jobs. Let’s hope better sense prevails soon and it clamps down on this phenomenon with the same alacrity with which it has cracked down on communal

rhetoric.

At new political conjunctures, memory makers reconsider who the heroes of their resistance are; which foundational gures are given place in the national pantheon; or what gets highlighted as precursors of independence for a nation-state... narrow or selective interpretations can censor and even erase the multiple dimensions of remembrance

the author of this satire, is Social A airs Editor, The Hindu.

G. Sampath,