[Commons-Law] Baroda, Immanuel Kant and the Indian Penal Code: how do we read intentions

Sun May 13 11:02:34 IST 2007


anil gupta wrote:
>
>
> *excellent issues Shuddha: in a conundrum of intention, action and 
> consequence, we can see the last two:  The painting by Chandra mohan 
> and its ability to unite Christian and Hindu activists. We can also 
> See THE consequence of jail for Chandra. But inferring intention of 
> Chandra is a task that can not left to Jurist alone. But then as you 
> imply, they are the one who will pass judgments. So what do we do, 
> well, some petitions could be fileby the  citizens affected by the 
> consequences of the art and thus demonstrate the differential effect 
> of the same art.
>
> I wish some body will post his art work on this list so that we all 
> can see what he really painted. When Ram Guha infers the intentions of 
> JP, he does the same. When editor of Le Monde had to infer the 
> intentions the journalist who discovered Concentration camps in Russia 
> ( read The Mandarins ), he had to do the same. He had to evaluate the 
> impact of this discovery on the social agenda of the Left.
>
> So Shuddha, issues you raise are very vital and i hope these will 
> trigger a wider debate in India about inferring intentions of those 
> with whom we do not agree and on whose actions we pass judgments, an 
> enterprise we all indulge in all the time.
> Sherlock Holmes had a somewhat similar issue to face when he asked, 
> Why did Dog not bark? He had at least linked intention with inaction,
>
> will we remember the lines of Dinkar:
> pap ka bhagi nahin hai keval vyagh, jo tatastha hai, samaya likhega, 
> unka bhi apradh
>
> anil
>
> SOME MORE REFERENCES ON INFERRING INTENTIONS IN ART
>
>
>
>
>
> *
>
>
>    Art and Intention: A Philosophical Study
>
> Paisley Livingston, /Art and Intention: A Philosophical Study/, Oxford 
> University Press, 2005, 272 pp, $55.00 (hbk), ISBN 0199278067.
>
> *
> The Concept of Intention in Art Criticism*
>
> Isabel C. Hungerland
>
> /The Journal of Philosophy/, Vol. 52, No. 24, American Philosophical 
> Association Eastern
>
> Division Symposium: Papers to be Presented at the Fifty-Second Annual 
> Meeting, Boston
>
> University, December 27-29, 1955. (Nov. 24, 1955), pp. 733-742.
>
> Shuddhabrata Sengupta wrote:
>> (apologies for cross posting on the Reader List, Commons law and 
>> www.kafila.org)
>>
>> Dear All,
>>
>> This is in continuation of my earlier posting about the incident at 
>> the MS University at Vadodara and the relevant sections of the Indian 
>> Penal Code.
>>
>> It is one of the wonderful properties of South Asian subcontinental 
>> life that reality is always better adorned than fiction would have it.
>>
>> And so it is that along with Mr. Niraj Jain, (a purported Bajrang Dal 
>> leader who also contested the Vadodara civic body elections on a BJP 
>> ticket), the other guardian of public morality who protested against 
>> the art student Chandra Mohan's work in a departmental exhibition at 
>> the Fine Arts Faculty at MS University Baroda happens to be a pastor 
>> with the Methodist Church, most appropriately named the Rev. Emmaneul 
>> Kant.
>>
>> See, a report on the Vadodara incident in the Vadodara City page of 
>> Indian Express 'BJP Men rough up fine arts student'(Express News 
>> Service, May 9) at
>> http://cities.expressindia.com/archivefullstory.php?newsid=235608&creation_date=2007-05-10 
>>
>>
>> Apart from the fact that this incident shows a beautiful secular 
>> synergy between majoritarian and minoritarian interests (thereby 
>> confusing all those who spend most of their time worrying about 
>> majoritarian communalism, especially when it comes to the province of 
>> Gujarat), there has to be adequate recognition, I think of the 
>> magical facticity in knowing that a protest against a work of art is 
>> being led (at least in part) by an Emmanuel Kant.
>>
>> For all those familiar with the Vadodara pastor's distinguished 
>> Konigsbergian philosopher namesake,  Emmanuel (or Immanuel) Kant's 
>> 'Critique of Judgement' (a book that continues to be influential 
>> enough in discussions of contemporary aesthetic practice and thought 
>> to be seen hovering around the curatorial mandate of Documenta 12 and 
>> other serious matters like a spirit that got stuck in limbo after a 
>> mistimed seance), the delicate ironies of this haunting of the 
>> Vadodara controversy by the ghost of Kant cannot be escaped.
>>
>> In his Critique of Judgement,(and I quote, for the sake of 
>> convenience, from the excellent, online entry in the Internet 
>> Encyclopaedia of Philosophy)  http://www.iep.utm.edu/k/kantaest.htm
>>
>> Kant can be found paraphrased as saying :
>>
>> "through aesthetic judgments, beautiful objects appear to be 
>> 'purposive without purpose' (sometimes translated as 'final without 
>> end'). An object's purpose is the concept according to which it was 
>> made (the concept of a vegetable soup in the mind of the cook, for 
>> example); an object is purposive if it appears to have such a 
>> purpose; if, in other words, it appears to have been made or 
>> designed. But it is part of the experience of beautiful objects, Kant 
>> argues, that they should affect us as if they had a purpose, although 
>> no particular purpose can be found."
>>
>> Now a Kantian, confronted with Chandramohan's work, Jain & Kant led 
>> protests, and the sections 153 and 295 of the Indian Penal Code, 
>> would not be in any position to wriggle out of the problem of 
>> 'aesthetic intention'. If Chandramohan is an artist, his work would 
>> affect us as if they had a purpose, even if no particular purpose 
>> were to be found.
>>
>> The only legal solution available under the Indian legal system, in 
>> my opinion, is for Chandramohan to say that he is not an artist, but 
>> a mere impostor, and that his work, is not purposive, or intentional, 
>> but the mere outpouring of a distracted, and demented mind. What I am 
>> suggesting, is the insanity defence, as used in a murder trial.
>>
>> In other words  the - 'My Lord, my client was not of sound mind, he 
>> did not know what he was doing, when he shot the plaintiff's aged 
>> mother' maneouvre.
>>
>> If Chandramohan is an artist, then the courts will look at intention. 
>> And as in a murder trial, the calibration of intention can lead to a 
>> degree of dimunition of a sentence from homicide to manslaughter, but 
>> cannot do away with the fact of the offence.
>>
>> I say this neither to attack Chandramohan's work, nor to defend his 
>> practice (although I have no doubt in my mind that the freedome of 
>> expression is a higher good than artistic quality or religious 
>> sensibility). I say this only to underscore the problems of aesthetic 
>> intention, ethical conduct and legal judgement that this case seems 
>> to have thrown open, perhaps at the instance of the long neglected 
>> spectre of the venerable I(E)mmanel Kant
>>
>>
>>
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>>
>>   
>

-- 
Prof. Anil K Gupta
Professor, Indian Institute of Management
Ahmedabad 380015, India  anilg at sristi.org or anilgb at gmail.com
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