KM Madhusudhanan examines nature of power and ideas as tools of history in his ongoing solo, ‘Babel’

KM Madhusudhanan’s works titled The Arrival

Biblical literature tells the story of the Tower of Babel, a structure made by the people of Shinar. These were the descendents of those who, just before the Great Flood, had been wise enough to pay heed to Noah’s words and join him aboard the Ark. They were united by a common language and this gave them power. The power gave them the hubris to believe that they could build a city and a tower that would reach the heavens. When God saw this evidence of humankind’s arrogance, he knew that they hadn’t learnt from the devastation caused by the Flood. So instead, he broke their unity by giving them multiple languages. With people no longer being able to understand each other, they eventually scattered all over earth, and so the Tower of Babel remained unfinished.

This story of the ill-fated tower and the people who could no longer communicate with each other is the inspiration for artist and filmmaker KM Madhusudhanan’s ongoing solo, “Babel” at the Guild Art Gallery in Alibaug, near Mumbai. “I had earlier made an installation, putting together loudspeakers as a tower, and played a different speech on each of them. The speeches are by people like Jawaharlal Nehru or Mahatma Gandhi or Hitler, but they’re all in different languages, and you can’t understand anything that is being said,” says the 61-year-old artist.

The unified front of humanity is a doomed project, destroyed all too frequently by wars and other atrocities. “It always happens. Human beings build something that is beyond their understanding, and then the whole thing collapses,” says Madhusudhanan. This failure to make a connection or understand each other is something that the artist sees, for example, in many instances of book burning that have marked human history — whether it was 15th century Italian monk Savonarola’s “bonfire of the Vanities” that targeted, among other things, “immoral books”, or the systematic destruction of the indigenous books of the Aztecs and the Mayans carried out by the Conquistadors or, most infamously, the Nazi’s ritualistic destruction of all literature that was in ideological opposition to them.

This image of a book on fire — as depicted in Madhusudhanan’s The Capital 1 — is made all the more powerful because of an incident from the artist’s personal history. “I was very involved with communist activities when I was young and one time, the police arrested me. When I eventually got home, I found that my mother had taken all the communist literature that I had in the house and dumped it outside, and set fire to it,” the Delhi-based artist says. He recalls the incident with a chuckle now, but confesses to an almost visceral reaction to the very idea of someone burning books. “Even now, with the banning of books, one could say that the same thing is happening,” he says.
Communism and the ideals of Marxism, in fact, are linked with the issues raised by “Babel” in other ways too. Was the Soviet Union — born out of the ideas of Marx and Engels — too ambitious, too idealistic a notion to sustain? Was it also not brought down by human weakness, a lust for power and an instinct for totalitarianism? In Red Shirt, a bust of Lenin, once a potent symbol of Communism, sits atop sandbags piled into a wheelbarrow, while a long red robe glows with a ghostly light next to it. In Red Shirt 2, a dinosaur skeleton tumbles off a pedestal. These images recall how, after the Soviet Union collapsed, statues of Lenin, Stalin and others were pulled down in the former Soviet republics. Are the ideals of communism mere relics or fossils now? It’s not nostalgia that animates these works, but the clear-eyed awareness that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Look at how a boot tramples over a light bulb in Light. “The corruption of communism began when Lenin formed the Communist Party. Once the party became big, the leaders became corrupt, and then it led to terrifying things like Stalin’s Gulag. But this is how the power systems have been throughout history,” he says.