BATHINDA: South Asia Peace Action Network (SAPAN) organised its monthly online event on peace initiatives themed on art ‘Resisting Together: Art and the Artist in South Asia’. The German playwright Bertolt Brecht’ words ‘in dark times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will be singing, about the dark times’, echoed as noted artists stressed the need to raise voice even during turbulent times.

Going by the visa granted to Sika Khan to visit Pakistan to meet his family separated 74 years ago, Sapan founder members Lalita Ramdas and former chief of Indian Navy Admiral L Ramdas gave a call for a visa-free South Asia.

The deliberations highlighted how political turmoil and violence have catalysed creativity with many artists grounding their work in response to the challenges, at the event moderated by economist and poetry aficionado Fahd Ali in Lahore.
“There is an artist in each one of us,” asserted human rights activist Kavita Srivastava.

Noted poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz’ daughter, educator Salima Hashmi in Lahore showcased a wide range of works by various artists, demonstrating how art is not about a product, but about engaging with and critiquing where we live, how we live and what we can do.

Her own evocative painting Poem for Zainab emerged in response to a horrific case of domestic violence in the 1990s in which a woman was violated in the most indescribable way possible by her cleric husband.

Hashmi’s presentation included several photographs from a public exhibition Hum Jo Tareek Rahon Main Mare Gaye (We who were killed in dark alleys) by the Awami Arts Collective.

“We are an old culture, but we are also new nations, and that comes with its own trials and tribulations”, asserted Sangeeta Thapa in Kathmandu, contextualising the development of Nepal’s art scene within the broader socio-political landscape.

Director of Siddhartha Art Gallery, she outlined the movement within the arts in Nepal, including artists’ resistance during the Rana regime, the promotion of arts and culture under King Mahendra and the disenchantment during King Birendra’s tenure catalysing dissent on the streets,

The ten-year long Maoist insurgency in Nepal, “a period of trial and tribulation and great sorrow”, also marked the beginning of a new age of artivism and collaboration, she said, referring to artists like Manuj Babu Mishra, Durga Baral, Ragini Upadhyay, Jyoti Duwadi, and Ashmina Ranjit, among others.

Sri Lankan artist Chandraguptha Thenuwara, founder director of Vibhavi Academy of Fine Arts and professor at the University of the Visual and Performing Arts talked about the challenges in his country. Sri Lanka’s 30-year long civil war has physically ended, but many issues remain unsolved and questions remain unanswered, he said.

The 1970s, a difficult period in Sri Lanka, also marked a new beginning within the art scene, distinct from the earlier times when artists worked without much interference. It was after 1978, that sanctions on artists, and bans on songs and films and theatre started. However, the visual arts remain relatively free compared to assault on other artforms – “politicians don’t visit art galleries”.

After 1978, “either you have to praise the government, or be silent, or do your so-called artistic things which are art for art’s sake,” said Thenuwara.

Artist and cultural activist Lubna Marium in Dhaka talked about the difficulties of surviving as an artist “without ever subscribing to any political party or any regime”. She has been engaged in this struggle for 50 years in Bangladesh, where she runs one of the largest dance companies in the country.

Marium, a Sanskrit scholar, is deeply involved in researching and understanding arts and aesthetics and is part of a Trust that manages Shodhona: A Center for Advancement of Southasian Culture. Her presentation titled the ‘infrapolitics of art as activism: beyond the binary of domination and resistance’ sought to differentiate between resilience and resistance. She shared a personal example of herself as being resilient, while her daughter’s expressions are more militant.resistant.

Vocalist TM Krishna in Chennai highlighted the problem with focusing only on resisting the state, often at the expense of important and difficult internal conversations. An exponent of the rigorous Carnatic tradition of India’s classical music and public intellectual who regularly engages on socio-cultural issues, he stressed the need to introspect and ask difficult questions. “We need to step back and look at the ugliness in society — whether it’s caste, gender, ethnic othering”.

“It’s the people who are on the margins who ask the difficult questions about social and political structures because their conditionality makes it difficult for them to remain silent.” Meanwhile, those who are privileged, the middle class and upper classes, aid and abet every form of violence in society “as we face one of the biggest challenges to our constitution and our morality.”

The link between art and resilience as well as resistance was highlighted by feminist activist and theatre, dance exponent Sheema Kermani who joined the session from Karachi. Simply performing classical Bharatanatyam and Odissi in Pakistan was “an act of defiance, an act of resistance, to the kind of suppression of these arts that we saw during Zia ul Haq’s regime”.

That was a time when classical dance was banned and many dancers left the country. “I was the only one who stayed because I thought it was my basic human right to perform,” she said.

In solidarity with the struggle of the Afghans, the event featured a brief clip from a poem by Ghani Khan, the late prominent Pushto poet, philosopher and artist and son of the highly regarded peace activist Abdul Gaffar Khan. Human rights activist and physician Dr Fauzia Deeba from Quetta introduced the musical rendition by the well known singer Sardar Ali Takkar.

Researcher Pragya Narang sang verses of Ghani Khan’s Reidi Gul in Pushto, a language she schooled herself in for this rendition.

Paying tribute to the exhilarating musical collaboration between Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and AR Rahman, young artists from Pakistan shared a video of their rendition of Gurus of Peace, with Nauman Ali, Omer Hayat and Husnain Jamil Faridi of the Progressive Students Collective.