What's ailing Indian arts?
A system of unquestioned power inscribed in the guru-shishya parampara may be the cause for a loss of precious talent from hallowed institutions
Dhrupad singers. Olympian wrestlers. Kathak students. Cyclists of the National team. Research scholars. Investigative journalists. Bharatanatyam dancers. Women sports coaches. Even the Under 17 women’s football team. What do they all have in common? All of them have made allegations of sexual harassment.
These allegations have been made against gurus, patrons, bosses, coaches, Federation heads, and even ministers, all of whom have the capacity to wield power that goes unquestioned. The surrendering implicit in the guru-shishya parampara in the arts as well as many deeply-held assumptions like the “the boss is always right” have created a culture of impunity, where accountability is seldom demanded from the heads of such hierarchical set-ups.
The cult status of gurus in the arts lies at the intersection of patriarchy, caste, class, and misogyny. A culture of hero worship manifests in the touching of the feet, the desirability of ‘sanskari’, obedient and pliable students, the ‘satyavachan’ quality of the Guru’s words, and is reinforced through cultural references like the Mahabharata character, Karna, who quietly bore immense pain so that his Guru was not disturbed and Kabir’s dohas. All of it feeds into promoting a culture of silence around the Guru and his misadventures.
Part of the problem is the perplexing inability to see specialised training spaces, like the Dhrupad Sansthan in Bhopal and the Kalakshetra Foundation in Chennai, as workplaces. While the Dhrupad Sansthan saw allegations against its gurus in September 2020, more recently, allegations of sexual harassment emerged against senior faculty in the foundation’s Rukmini Devi College of Fine Arts in Chennai. Hari Padman, one of the main accused, was arrested on April 3.
All places are work places. Swimming pools, racecourses, tracks and fields, rinks, rings, courts and akhadas are as much work places for sports people, as classrooms, gurukuls, auditoriums and greenrooms are for artists. Even the team bus that takes us to these spaces are workplaces, as per the Prevention of Sexual Harassment ( POSH) Act 2013. If the recipient of unwanted attention is underage, the harsher Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) law comes into play. One wonders if the arts that prefer to “catch them young” given the length of training involved, are POCSO sensitised? Do they know for instance that in the case of a POCSO charge, arrests must happen immediately, and the punishment can go up to life imprisonment, depending on the heinousness of the crime?
In most cases, there is a tendency for the establishment to hush such matters up. That is if the women and girls speak up at all. Counter charges like “hidden agenda”, “political vendetta”, “professional jealousies” are often made to silence, humiliate, blame and shame them. Irrespective of the parallel tracks at work, in the wake of the statutory nature of the POSH law, once an allegation has been made, it is in effect a crime against the state and therefore has to be probed.
While the Internal Committee (IC) and Local Committee (LC), which works under the office of the District Magistrate are required to submit their findings in a time-bound manner, special and oversight committees, like the one established by the Union in the matter of the protesting wrestlers who have levelled serious charges of sexual harassment against Wrestling Federation of India chief, Brij Bhushan Singh, have different timelines. In this instance, the oversight committee formed on January 23 was given four weeks; it was extended by another two at their request. It was when the report was not forthcoming that the wrestlers re-started their dharna.
A recent Forbes India story based on the data analysis by Complykaro.com, pointed out that the number of sexual harassment complaints grew in 2022 from the previous year by 27%. Interestingly, in the arts, it was during the respite from performance during the pandemic that several allegations emerged from cultural and artistic spaces. The first to hit the news was in September 2020, when a set of 19 complaints against the Bhopal-based Dhrupad Sansthan established by the Gundecha brothers — Umakant, Ramakant and Akhilesh. The allegations were made against all three. Despite being a Gurukul, or an International Residential School of Music as they describe in their trust deed, with several foreign students, POSH compliances were missing.
An ICC was hastily thrown together, consisting mostly of people known to the Gundechas. The students protested and eventually another, more appropriate committee was formed. After conducting a thorough investigation, this committee validated the claims of 12 students.
However, Akhilesh and Umakant Gundecha brothers (Ramakant had passed away in 2019 before the public complaints, but the allegations of harassment were made against him too) moved the Madhya Pradesh High Court against the IC and its findings. The court is yet to reach its conclusion. The Gundechas appear frequently in the papers in the company of the local political elite.
Barely three months later, an allegation of sexual harassment emerged from the government-run Kathak Kendra, National Institute of Kathak Dance. This was made by a student against a Pakhawaj teacher. With no POSH compliances in place, the student was left with no option but to take the FIR route, which led to the instructor’s arrest the very next day itself. The Kendra set up an IC post facto.
And now, more recently, allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct have emerged from another hallowed institution, this one under the Union Ministry of Culture. Set up in 1936 by Rukmini Devi Arundale during the height of the national movement, when India was asserting its identity against colonial injuries, Kalakshetra has all the trappings of a genuine gurukul: on campus living, a small teacher-student ratio, classes in the open and assembly under a banyan tree. In this world steeped in traditionality, the female students draped in the elegant Kalakshetra sarees, and the male students in dhotis, remain in “summa iru”, the cult of silence, bowing down to and accepting everything the Guru said in the name of the ‘kalacharam’ or tradition.
Since December 2022, there have been hundred allegations of harassment, including sexual harassment made against senior members of its world-famous repertory. The statements of Kalakshetra survivors, most of whom are women and a few men, attested to a large arc: from corporal punishment, bullying and verbal violence to body shaming, inappropriate sexual references and sexual harassment. Besides Padman, who is in judicial custody, the board has suspended three more accused.
Many students have reported how Brahminical and mythological imaginings stereotyped casting for coveted dance dramas in Kalakshetra. The alleged perpetrators made themselves indispensable to artistic productions, as a result of which many students left the institution in what was a preventable loss of talent.
The allegations at Kalakshetra and the way they were handled revealed a conflict between the law and its spirit on one hand and the might of the institution and those it chooses to promote and protect, on the other. The director of Kalakshetra was herself the head of the IC since May 2018, in what seems a blatant conflict of interest.
After external member advocate B.S. Ajeetha resigned from the IC on April 3, on account of being “disturbed” by the response of the Kalakshetra administration to this crisis, there were attempts to set up a new IC with P.T. Narendran, a faculty and board member of the foundation. However, he himself became the subject of allegations made by a trans woman, who had not yet transitioned when studying at the institute. The former student also named another teacher, claiming that the atmosphere when she was there, was particularly toxic, transphobic and insensitive to gender dysphoria.
The Kalakshetra case has foregrounded the concern that the POSH law as it stands today does not specifically cover the trans spectrum. The law is also silent against the harassment that men face at the hands of other men in positions of authority. Given the fact that in this case many complaints fall in that zone, it becomes evident that this is a turning point for us.
This incident, unfortunate as it may be, gives us an opportunity to re-centre, realign and re-calibrate our efforts at correcting wrongs that have crept into our institutions.
Arshiya Sethi is one of the founders of Unmute, which hosts a website that offers information on arts and the law. She is also a founder and managing trustee of Kri Foundation, which conducts activism in the arts
The views expressed are personal
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