‘Authoritarian state fears art and artists world over’: Actor Swara Bhasker in Kerala

In 2014, when the first Narendra Modi government assumed power, Hindi film actor and activist Swara Bhasker had put out two tweets — one of them on the Gujarat riots of 2002, and the second stated how even Hitler’s Nazi party had come into power through a democratic process. The tweets opened the floodgates for right wing hatred and propaganda against the actor. “I never lived down those tweets. In fact, I never tried to. If anything, I have only been more provoked,” she said, while speaking on the topic ‘The Artist as Citizen’, at the sixth T K Ramachandran Memorial Lecture held at TDM Hall in Kochi on Thursday, July 21.

The lecture is organised annually in memory of T K Ramachandran, an eminent writer and teacher, by the Friends of T K Collective. N S Madhavan, renowned writer, former bureaucrat and co-organiser of the lecture, remembered Ramachandran as a prescient being who had sensed the arrival of fascism at a time when the rest of the country was oblivious to it. His contributions, such as the Gramsci Institute and the Secular Collective, as well as his efforts to introduce the Frankfurt School of Marxism in Kerala, were all aimed at countering the emergent fascist tendencies, Madhavan reasoned. Elaborating on the organisers’ decision to choose Swara for this year’s memorial lecture, Madhavan said that Ramachandran was acutely aware of how the fascist state would go to any extent to drive artists to silence, exile, or even death. Being an artist who is under constant attack for her views on social media and elsewhere, Swara has experienced the cruelties of the right wing firsthand, he said.

Swara described her foray into activism through social media as accidental. “But the realisation that a citizen is an active being and that an artist has a role much larger than entertainment had come early on. The understanding that films are only for entertainment is a painfully limited one. Films, and art in general, provoke thought and create empathy,” the actor said, adding that the authoritarian state is deeply aware of this power of art to move its audience. “This is reflected in the authoritarian governments that fear art and artists the world over. No one understands the soft power of art more than the state,” she argued.

Elaborating on why artists should embrace their roles as citizens, Swara said, “My job is to be the medium for stories that involve the world I inhabit. I have to become the people. No performance can begin without empathy for the character being portrayed. How can any actor in India today play a Muslim character without sparing a thought for what the implications of CAA-NRC will be for the minorities of this country?” Swara further argued that when the actor empathises with the world around them, they will ensure that their performances will make the audience also have empathy for those characters. That is the most frightening thing about an artist for any authoritarian state, she said.

According to Swara, her vocal opposition to the ruling disposition has cost her and her career severely. “The most effective way to target an artist is to target them economically. I have lost several brand endorsement deals and film offers because of the right wing propaganda targeted at me. I have also been the target of vicious cyber bullying and trolls, not to mention the over two-dozen police complaints and FIRs registered in my name,” she said.

While there is an active effort to discredit the artist who opposes power, the Hindu right wing has gone to great lengths to use the cinematic art in the Hindi language to serve the project of Hindutva, she stated. “This takes different forms, including patronage to a certain kind of art and artist. If you take any historical film being made in Bollywood, you will find that the script is parroting the revisionist project of Nagpur,” she claimed.  

“If the art and the artist do not engage with the world around them, the state will make us engage according to their project. We may not even realise that we are serving their narrative,” Swara cautioned. For her as an artist, politics is neither her job nor her choice, but her majboori, a necessity born out of helplessness, she said. “In new India, a new kind of politics is deciding what we eat, what we wear, who we marry, how we party. We better wake up to what politics is doing to us,” she warned.

“Slowly but surely, small freedoms are being taken away from us.” Yet, it is doubtful whether our country understands what it means to be a citizen beyond casting votes, she lamented. The larger question facing us today is, she said, “What of the art, what of the artist, and most importantly, what of the citizen remains?”