To explain what Lawrence Liang, writer from the alternative law firm and lead essayist for Art India’s cover story means by this sentence, one has to look at how censorship has worked as a tool to reconfigure this power dynamic between art and the law. To support his argument, Liang gives the example of 1927, when the Romanian sculptor Brancusi had a work Bird in Space, shipped to the US where a buyer had acquired it. Interestingly Bird was stopped at the customs because the customs officer did not find it birdlike at all (It has no head, no feet or feathers). The officer then slapped it with a whopping US $4,000 duty for industrial raw materials. The matter went into court and Brancusi won the case reaffirming that his Bird was a work of art because of its artistic outlines. The courts not only upheld the power to pass the work through customs but also began defining what is and isn’t art.

Recent policing by the self-appointed guardians of morality has proved less ‘productive’ though. As Shivaji Pannikar puts it in an interview with Sandhya Bordewekar: “The authorities have shown a complete disregard for the production and dissemination of knowledge. They seem to believe that to learn art is merely to gather skills. It is a pity that they have overlooked the national importance of the Department of Art History, in their efforts to protect political thugs,” says Pannikar who was in the eye of the storm on May 9, 2007, when the Faculty of Fine Arts was barged into by VHP activists over S Chandanmohan’s art which was being evaluated at by the Faculty.

Despite his isolation and hardships post suspension, Pannikar states no regret for standing up, which is perhaps the only productive outcome of the saga .