Art Positive

Roy was one among more than two dozen artistes invited to participate in a four-day HIV/AIDS workshop in Kolkata earlier this month.

Among the other participants were actor-director-playwright Narendra Ningomba of Imphal, who has performed in a number of plays organised by the Manipur AIDS Control Society; Mumbai’s Vidhyadhar Kashiram Mohite, who has written and directed about 80 street plays so far with HIV/AIDS as the primary subject; and Nithya Balaji, founder-trustee of the Chennai-based NGO Nalamdana which has been using street theatre, video films and audio cassettes to create awareness about the disease in Tamil Nadu villages for about a decade now.

‘‘The first thing we have to ensure is to get villagers out of their homes. And for that, we don’t reveal at the outset that we are putting up a performance about HIV/AIDS,’’ says Balaji.

‘‘Artists and celebrities have a major role to play in spreading AIDS awareness,’’ says Anjali Gopalan of the Delhi-based Naz Foundation India Trust that works in the area of sexuality and sexual health. ‘‘When we think of getting the word out there, an Amitabh Bachchan or a Shah Rukh Khan talking about prevention would carry a lot of weight.’’

While traditional Indian classical and folk art forms have contained social and political messages, the modern urban creative community rarely takes it upon themselves to take up issues—either through their work or through active campaigning. A complete contrast to the West where ‘‘giving back to society’’ by even moderately successful individuals is more common.

Cannes award-winning film-maker Michael Moore hopes his film Fahrenheit 9/11 may play a part in saving the US from a second term with President George W Bush. Richard Gere—whose Gere Foundation India Trust organised the Kolkata workshop—is a tireless campaigner for HIV/AIDS and a free Tibet. Fellow Hollywood star Elizabeth Taylor played a major role in bringing the AIDS crisis out in the open.

In a bid to substantiate his anti-war stance, this year’s Best Actor Oscar winner Sean Penn made a personal trip to Iraq in 2003 to discover for himself the extent of truth in Bush’s propaganda about the misery caused by Saddam Hussein’s regime.

While our stars have sometimes been known to rally around in a crisis (witness the reactions to the Kargil war), sustained involvement is missing. So when a Shabana Azmi campaigns for the rights of displaced slum dwellers, it sets off talk about an actor’s desire to draw the spotlight on herself. And when a Revathy makes a film—Phir Milenge—starring Salman Khan as an HIV-positive person, it sparks off rumours that other actors rejected the role for fear of damaging their image.

Revathy dismisses all such talk. What prompted her to put the H-word into her film? ‘‘The issue has become close to my heart over the years because of my interactions with HIV-positive people whose spirit has been killed by social attitudes,’’ replies the actor-director. Revathy has been sporadically helping HIV/AIDS NGOs in Chennai in their awareness campaigns since the mid-’90s. She is keen to point out that the disease is only the backdrop to the romance in Phir Milenge. The film will be released on August 13.

Actor Om Puri admits the country’s most visible creative community—the Hindi film industry—hasn’t done much for social causes. ‘‘A few individuals have done something. But not anything on a large scale. A step would be to create something like Jasoos Vijay,’’ says Puri, referring to the television show he anchors on Doordarshan-I. The title character of the show (played by National School of Drama graduate Khandkar Adil) solves mysteries and also gives information on HIV/AIDS and other social issues.

Puri has also been approached by a new film-maker to make a movie based on Goa’s Dominic D’Souza, who was held under armed guard in a medical facility when he was diagnosed as one of the first cases of AIDS in India in 1989.

Fears that such works would suffer low box-office collections or television ratings are unfounded, says Devika Bahl, creative director, drama, of BBC World Service Trust, which has produced the programme. ‘‘We have got 11 minutes of advertising for each 30-minute episode of Jasoos Vijay.’’

‘‘Why pick on the artiste?’’ asks actor Nandita Das. ‘‘There is a general apathy towards the problems of others. After all, actors and other artistes are emerging from this same society.’’

Das was a social worker before Deepa Mehta’s Fire made her a household name and even now she is far more visible participating in protest marches and doing her bit for the problems of women and children.

‘‘In the acting world, when people see you getting involved in such things, they ask, ‘Do you want to be a politician?’ People assume you have an agenda. They also assume this is a means of getting publicity,’’ she says.

While the publicity-seeking activist-artiste exists, there are those like reputed Kathak dancer Shovana Narayan, whose incessant work with disabled people is something she rarely talks about. She sees social responsibility and awareness-building as an intrinsic part of her art form. And for eight years now, she has conducted workshops for spastic children, the deaf and mute, and the mentally challenged, among others.

But through all this, artistes should also guard against activism becoming an excuse for mediocrity. ‘‘I’m a little uncomfortable with art being usurped for activism,’’ says Roy. ‘‘Very often, because something is a hot issue, somebody commissions a work of art on the subject and the artist quickly churns out a mediocre work. In the 1960s and ’70s, so many puppeteers were commissioned to do work on family planning and polio. Sadly, a lot of poor quality work was put out and people were put off puppetry in general.’’

If the art doesn’t appeal, the cause won’t either.