my montage.

Are all montages dangerous?  to someone , somewhere, in some way?   I guess they would be.  No image is inherently  innocent. Is it ?

" I offer here  an example of one of the most militant secularist images that I have encountered in the post-Ayodhya struggle, which draws on the German photo-montage artist John Heartfield's anti-fascist image of a dove ( a symbol of peace), pierced with the blade of a bayonet pointing upwards, with the  slogan 'Niemals Wieder !'(Never Again) emblazoned below. Drawing  on this archetypal image  of the 1930's the photographer-activist Satish Sharma has intervened ingeniously by adding two red prongts of a trishul on the tip of the bayonet, thereby recasting the anti-fascist content of the image withing a differenthistorical time-frame. 'NeverAgain' ? is his question. This image works  within the grammar to Heartlield's agit-prop idiom, but also extends it through the  insertion of another religio-cultural political illusion. 

Significangly, such a re-inflection of anti-fascist imagery proved too strong for the idealogues of SAHMAT , who have settled for more 'politiacally correctt' anti-communal imagery. A strategic manoeuvre, such as Satish Sharma's , therefore , can be marginalized in the abscence of a forum in which its representation can be debated, and thrrough which it can be  disseminated as a political sign for a particular movement. sharma himself is aware that the politics of an image cannot be seperated from the space and context in which it is viewed.

As a relentlessy iconoclastic researcher of visual culture at ground levels- literally the pavements ad chor bazaars of Delhi- he has collected a range of glossy pavement posters , including images representing the dalit leader DR. Babshaheb Ambedkar in various 'Hindu'  incarnations. Through iconographic gestures and visual echoes, Dr. Ambedkar has been re-envisioned as Rama  and Krishna in pseudo-divineincarnations. To reveal the intricacies  of this political appropriation, by which Dr.Ambedkar's anti-brahminism hs been erased through the filter of HIndu religiosity, one would more that an exhibition of these posters in a gallery space with an accompanying polemical te4xt. The mere transference of these posters from the pavement (for consumption by an unnamed mass clientele) to a gallery space (for the gratification of a predominantly metropolitan elite) could easily result in yet another commodifictaiton of 'popular culture' , with Dr Ambedkar's metamorphosed providing  a humorous subtext to the very real political manipulation of dalit icons. Any strategy , therefore , would need to resist their transformation into art objects in a museum or gallery. 

I offer these examples from Satish sharma's subaltern research to highlight the difficulties of strategizing secular cultural activism through the re-appropriation of visuals. In any such process there is an inevitable risk, since certain political agendas( feminism, anti-bahminism, anti-fascism) are contaminated by newly-enforced significations. 

RUSTOM BHARUCHA.  

 "IN THE NAME OF THE  SECULAR"  Contemporary Cultural Activism in India. Oxford University Press - 1998