Artists in Courts

Abstract

Chapter 2 of this first section turns to independent India’s concerns with law as a broader problem and solution to this issue of violence, and questions whether legal-institutional logics might have produced not less but more offence-taking. The idea here is not simply to ‘critique’ vigilant, and even, as many would argue, necessary laws and regulatory bodies, or to suggest that they are the cause of the escalation of violence against artists. The widespread and dramatic increase in criminalized competitive and communal electoral politics, the onslaught of globalized media since the economic liberalization of the 1990s, the rise and radicalization of Hindu nationalism since the mid-1980s, the politically creative and deepening bargaining capacity of hitherto disadvantaged groups—all have played a part in the definitive increase in the anxieties around free speech and the attacks against artists. However, if the violence of offence-taking steadily came to not so much dislocate but relocate itself in the courts, the courts themselves remain a critical element among many others that contributed to the precariousness of free speech, with the law emerging as a medium of harassment.