Beginning At Endings

 When does one decide that it is time for an institution to end? How does one imagine its dismantling, and what it leaves behind? In early 2016, as the Majlis Cultural and Legal Centres were about to celebrate its 25th year, Madhusree Dutta, the MCC’s director, resigned.  In an open letter that was widely circulated, she candidly and scathingly shared her concerns about the impossibility of producing or inspiring real political change through certain institutional forms, and of continuing in the role of collaborator of an increasingly fascistic state. She decried how the non-profit sector, in the neo-liberal context, is not only the site to which compassion is outsourced, but worse, seems to lend legitimacy to state’s violence, disguised as policy and care. The Majlis Cultural Centre thus could not continue. The Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party government, then in its first term, had just entered its second year, but already many of the worst fears about the regime’s casteist Hindutva ideology had been confirmed. Universities were severely under attack, with dissident students being arrested and branded seditious or “anti-national”, and mob-lynching of innocent Dalits and Muslims around the country were on the rise. The Modi government had also banned foreign funding to Indian NGOs, specifically targeting bodies such as the Ford Foundation, which had long supported organizations such as Majlis. At the same time, there seemed to an upswing in resistance movements against the government – in university campuses, by anguished farmers, and other quarters – and intellectuals, Dutta among them, returned national honors in protest of the government’s policies. In her letter Dutta advocated a need for cultural workers to turn their energies to these movements, to stand up and be counted, and to descend to the streets. Of course, we did not know at that time that things would get much worse, very quickly. 

 In many ways, Majlis and its activities mirrored the growth of fascism in India, constantly attempting to produce a counterbalance, right up until the moment where the mirror cracked and the forces of the other side rushed in to consume them. Started in 1990 by filmmaker and curator Madhusree Dutta and lawyer Agnes Flavin, Majlis started as an attempt to create a forum dedicated to cultural and legal activism, with the slogan “Culture Is Right; Right As Culture”. The slogan spoke both to a universalist notion of rights, that needed to be expanded, but more locally, to the right to certain cultures, against already growing communalism and Islamophobia. The name itself, ‘Majlis’, meaning a place of gathering,  a word that as Jo-lene Ong remarked exists in all contexts where Islam is present, was also a deliberate choice: it alluded to the long contribution of Islamic culture to the production of public spheres in India, and thus the act of naming itself became a gesture of inclusion. Over the 25 years of its existence, the Majlis Cultural Centre would engage with these seminal moments of the deepening of communal fractures, critically reframing its position with each turn, until such a reframing was no longer possible.

 Equally, Majlis was born out of the then-emergent women’s movement (not yet termed the feminist movement) in India, and thus many of its initial activities were structured around questions of gender and gender-based organizing. In 1990, they organized what would become the first arts festival of women’s art (a term they ascribed, which even at the time was controversial), titled EXPRESSION. The form of the festival, particularly in India, in differentiation from the exhibition, or the biennial, allows for certain encounters to occur, and maintains a relationship with popular forms of cultural happenings. This would be a form that Majlis would return to over and over again to engage with certain situations, in an attempt to produce a mode of fluidity between disciplines, and for the articulation of multiple political positions. EXPRESSION brought together the work of visual artists such as Nilima Sheikh, Nalini Malani, Pushpamala N., with that of writers such as Susie Tharu or choreographers such as Chandralekha. Drawing from Dutta’s own background in theatre at the National School of Drama, the festival also included works by directors such as Maya Rao and Anuradha Kapur. Significantly, while most of the works in the festival were by cis-het (middle or upper-middle class, though not always upper caste) women, Majlis’s engagement with popular forms broke this narrative, too, with presentations by tamashā artists (a traditional performance form in Western India, where women and men dressed as women sing and dance) and a Marathi traditional women’s theatre (which also involved, what for reasons of brevity, I must refer to as drag). The performances in the festival, thus, happened in multiple languages, including English, Gujarati, Marathi, Hindi, Malayalam and Kannada, producing encounters between otherwise linguistically-divided conversations and spheres of articulation. 

 In thinking about the centrality of theatre to this moment in Indian cultural practice: it could be argued that the last decade of the 20th Century began with the murder of theatre director and activist Safdar Hashmi, in 1989. Hashmi was a prominent voice during the Emergency (1975 -77) – India’s period of dictatorship under Indira Gandhi, when poor communities were sterilized en masse and Leftist students and activists were tortured and killed across the country. He established the Jana Natya Manch (the People’s Theatre Front) and was known for producing critical plays performed by often amateur actors in public spaces, as guerilla actions. He was performing Halla Bol in Ghaziabad, in the outskirts of Delhi, when union-busting activists affiliated with Gandhi’s Congress party attacked and killed him. Upon his death, the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (SAHMAT – which also means “to be in agreement with”) was established by his wife, Moloyshree. It became, and continues to be, a significant organizer of what we can now speak of as traditional Leftist political actions, centred around New Delhi. SAHMAT and Majlis, set up around the same time and linked through engagements and common practice – with theatre being a significant thread – provide us with two models of articulation in conceiving the nation, and the role of cultural organization in shaping it. 

Nation, City

 Majlis continued a certain trajectory of cultural practice as nation-building, of critiquing the State, but attempting to produce a nation, that may be traced to the then-radical pedagogies of institutions such as the Film and Television Institute of India, the National School of Drama, the Faculty of Fine Arts of Baroda, and to produce new audiences for these philosophies. However, in a gesture against both the Gandhian and the Naxalite politics of the previous decades, which advocated for intellectuals and cultural workers to “return to the villages” to work in the “real India”, Majlis emphasized the metropolis as its space of operation. It emphasized the contingent adjacencies, assemblages and fragments produced by the city – particularly Mumbai. The figure of the migrant, thus too, became an important node of engagement, speaking both to Dutta’s own position as an ‘immigrant’ to the city, as well as a counter-action against the particular brand of Marathi nationalism that was taking hold and gaining ground during this time. The city of Mumbai thus remained an active collaborator, a point of reference, and a space of engagement across Majlis’s activities. It is this intimacy, perhaps, that produced a deeper investment in Majlis’s discourse in Dalit politics – through figures such as Tharu or the poet Namdeo Dhasal – which remained largely outside of the framework of traditional leftist discourse in India, which preferred (and often still does) to reduce these questions to merely one of class analysis. 

 The 1992 demolition of the Babri Masjid, a significant moment for the emergence of contemporary Hindu nationalism, where members of far-right Hindu groups travelled from across the country to destroy a 16th Century mosque in Ayodhya was a turning point in Majlis’s practice, and indeed cultural practice in India in general. This incident led to anti-Muslim riots across the country, including in Mumbai in Behrampada, where around 900 people were killed. The decade between the Babri Masjid violence and the Gujarat riots at 2002 thus saw multiple experiments in producing discourse around imagining a nation otherwise. Thus, in 1994, Dutta and Agnes with Neera Adarkar co-edited the volume of essays entitled ‘The Nation, The State, and Indian Identity’, attempting to lay out the stakes of the current spates of violence, and to imagine another trajectory for these debates.

 In keeping with the tradition of radical pedagogy as a key element of cultural practice, Majlis began an ‘Annual Course’ program in 1996, which would take place during the Diwali vacations. Aimed at art, film and architecture students in the first or second year of their undergraduate degree, the program invited senior or mid-career practitioners to conduct courses on subjects outside of their immediate discipline. Here, for instance, filmmaker Kumar Shahani was invited to lecture architecture students, and environmentalist Vandana Shiva was invited to talk about language and literary practice. The aim was produce a space where radical inter-disciplinary thinking formed the foundations of practice, rather than becoming a late addition, and to provide a form of critical pedagogy that the state no longer could, or was unwilling to.
This program eventually evolved into the two-pronged fellowship program, where Majlis provided year-long fellowships to artists and to women lawyers from smaller towns, which ran from 1998 – 2007. Five fellowships were awarded each year to support research and production of art, performance and film works, which often had a public dimension to them. Projects supported included Shai Heredia and Shaina Anand’s travelogue project; Pushpamala N.’s work on food; Tushar Joag’s interventions into public space with impossible objects designed to help the user survive the city of Bombay, and Archana Hande’s arrange-your-own-marriage project, many of which became seminal works of Indian contemporary art. 

 When the 2002 riots Gujarat riots, which implicated now-Prime Minister Narendra Modi, occurred, Majlis returned again to the form of the festival, and to a wider call to imagine the nation otherwise. Combining the experiments of the annual course and the fellowship program, they initiated the India Sabka Festival (India for All). They involved 100 colleges in Bombay and nearby Pune, and invited proposals to create public interventions around the theme of inclusion. Here architecture students were invited to propose interventions in riot-ravaged slums for the benefit of the inhabitants, and painting students to design a giant hoarding outside Bombay’s historic Victoria Terminus train station. India Sabka was an attempt to create an investment in these processes of nation-and-community-building via the city in a new generation of practitioners. 

 Crucially, it must be said that the process of imagining the nation during this time was not an irredentist or nativist gesture, but rather a movement towards thinking of the nation as a space from which to produce and cultivate internationalist Third World solidarities. Thus is 2004, Majlis played a key role in the organization of the World Social Forum, which was being held outside of Brazil for the first time. The World Social Forum was an important node in the post-Seattle anti/alter-globalization movement, which attempted to create forms of international solidarity outside of neo-liberal capitalism. The late 90s and early 2000s in India, as elsewhere, was a period of intense “liberalization”, where the public sector was at every stage being dismantled and sold for parts. Anti-Iraq War sentiments were also a key concern of this WSF. In this moment, its convening in Mumbai produced a coming-together of many strands of energy, bringing together the traditional Left organizations in India such as the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or the Democratic Youth Federation of India with tribal rights organizations from India, Brazil and other places, with womens’ rights groups, with striking members of a Korean transport workers union, with farmers, with trans* and sex workers groups, with artists and performers. A mammoth gathering, meeting would include upto 130,000 people. Majlis organized performances, symposia, screenings, interventions, advocating strongly for the position of culture in Leftist activism, eventually producing a manifesto on the subject. The World Social Forum was, as Dutta put it, one of the last of last romantic initiatives, made possible by a particular moment in history. 

 Mumbai is a city whose long narrow railway system is its spine; responding to this urban formation, Dutta conceived of Majlis as a train station, a space of transit, where people and ideas could move freely. Transit, however, was not conceived in opposition to stopping or storing, and this represents a final strand in Majlis’s trajectory. 

Archiving A Vanishing Present

When the 2002 riots took place, Dutta realized that public interventionist tactics in the traditional sense were no longer an adequate response, and that interventions needed to be made in the production of public memory. Archiving, thus, would be political work. Already, a decade on in 2002, there was a public amnesia about the Babri Masjid demolition, and no public archive contained any footage of the incident – the only place Dutta was able to find such footage was in scene from her own film I Live In Behrampada. This film itself was born out of archival footage that the Majlis Cultural and Legal Centres were compiling for the investigation committee lead by Justice Srikrishna. Similarly, in the aftermath of the Gujarat riots, the Legal Centre produced a volume of first-person reports of the riots. From this impulse, Majlis initiated and produced a number of archival projects, such as Godaam (a colloquial term for a warehouse), the pad.ma archive and the Kashmir archive. Godaam compiled contemporary images pertaining to conflict zones and cities (from 1996-2007) to be used a resource for scholars, activists and legal professionals alike. Pad.ma (Public Access Digital Media Archive) was developed with CAMP, the Alternative Law Forum, Point of View and others, and consisted of heavily annotated film and video, including unfinished works, rushes and primary footage. The Kashmir archive compiled first-person videos, often taken by citizens and amateurs, pertaining to the violence in the ongoing occupation of Kashmir, which were deposited anonymously in drop-off boxes around the state, and then digitized by Majlis.
Cinema City was perhaps the largest project that emerged out of this archival moment, which began with an engagement with the particular working-class history of Bombay’s single-screen movie theatres, and developed into a larger inquiry into the entanglement between cinema and the city of Bombay, focusing on labour, neighbourhoods and theatres. It recorded narratives of extras, stunt persons, make-up artists, as well as studied architecture and urban space around the theatre. The project resulted in exhibitions, at the National Gallery of Modern Art, 3 publications – dates.sites; Project Cinema City; and Cinema Theatres Around Bombay/Mumbai, as well as an online archive and resource repository. The project also produced a number of artworks, most significantly the calendar project, where artists such as Archana Hande, Gulammohamed and Nilima Sheikh, Tushar Joag, Shilpa Gupta, Arpita Singh among others produced a calendar images (a popular form in India) for the preceeding 50 years, focusing on historic events for each year, often dealing with the rise of fascism. 

 To write about Majlis today is not to mourn or to indulge in nostalgia: it is to attempt to participate in this archiving of the recent past, as these pasts, and the futures that they hoped for, become rapidly distant. Majlis proposes to us certain models for action – many of which are no longer viable – but also maneuvers a space or a site of transit is able and unable to make.  On a Sunday afternoon, speaking to me over Skype from Cologne, where she has been the Artistic Director of the Akademie der Kunst der Welt for the last two years, Madhusree Dutta reflected on one of the key problematics of her practice with Majlis: “Ours was a nationalist generation, and today that has come back to haunt us. Ironically, before we die, today we are branded as anti-national, desh-drohi.”

This essay is available in Practice Space, Jo-Lene Ong and Rachael Rakes (eds) Co-published by [NAME] Publications (USA) and DeAppel (NL)

Practice Space brings together a series of forms and approaches from artistic spaces that operate outside of institutions. Featuring all new texts, this volume combines expansive essays and profiles of initiatives around the globe with original research and interviews that unfold discursive and practical methods of working and thinking in local or small scale environments. An array of styles and voices are organised around three terms—Local Time, Situated Infrastructure, Co-translations—that serve as examples of components to thinking anti- or para institutionally. Place and context are positioned here not only in terms of social, economic, political, and historical conditions, but as carriers of different conceptions of how a collective self relates to the world. In doing so, Practice Space hopes to provide possibilities for helping to shape an art world we want to see, iin support of all that is small, strange, practical, and nurturing.