Sumesh Sharma

A ‘Damocles Sword’ of Freedom

As a people, we are keen to let freedoms hang — as the ‘Damocles Sword’ did — precariously loomed over our heads. As if they were guaranteed to us? Yes, they are on many documents that pronounce countries as republics and through constitutions on which we take oaths. Freedom perhaps arrives in currencies we spend, the jet fuel we evaporate on our journeys across continents and the access we have to information that can be gathered at our will.

Simon Njami tasked a few authors with a challenge of Orwellian scale for a journal published out of the Canary Islands to fathom what the future held for us — we could articulate it through artistic practices but also fail to do so if we did not hold the right answers. None of the texts I wrote before this attempt satisfied my answer to his editorial mandate. I agonised through many nights over a few months, writing texts on modernisms, constituting geographies as diverse as India and Africa – finding intelligent reasons to find connections I only saw and could form the basis for my clairvoyance towards the future. But I failed.

Many deadlines slipped past me. I wondered if the Colonial bureaucracy in Burma’s dreary humid climate was the only reason for him to write ‘1984’ or was it a life between the incessant wars, that made him structure a toolkit to expose what the British were manifesting for our futures. The Sykes-Picot Accord put together in 1916 was going to transcend the joyful events of 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall – the euphoria of the utopia it presented, hoping humans would live in peace forever has constantly been breached. But as Germany sought to redeem itself from the overbearing legacy of the Nazis or the voyeuristic state East Germany had come to be with its paranoia and dependence on the best trained spies, events in South Kivu, Darfur, Ethiopia, Yemen and most importantly Palestine were raging violently. Yemen also reunited a year later but stands divided today.

The Art World began to accommodate the violences the state patronised in these places without art scenes by inviting artists to residencies, supporting not-for-profit art spaces in their capitals, holding thematic exhibitions around the cause and effect of violence, supporting academic research and forming a bulwark of solidarities with those affected. They were effective in supporting crucial initiatives such as Forensic Architecture, the Gazan art collective – Eltiqa, Zamthingla Ruivah from Manipur and various Burmese artist collectives that have transcended the role of artists and have become real actors who resist strife and state repression. We see forensic science, the law and journalism intersect with art to perform resistance. But our solidarities haven’t been effective for raising empathies has not prevented us from witnessing genocide.

The distressing reality I witness every day in 2025 was not what I had perceived as a young student in 2005 in Aix-en-Provence. I held an Indian passport, getting visas was difficult but at Cité Universitaire De Cuques – our student residence all doors were open to the many capitals, revolutionaries, thinkers, poets, writers and musicians from Africa. Every Student from New Caledonia to Benin was keenly examining their reason for being in France — it wasn’t just an average decolonial discourse but a real intellectual examination of circumstance and one’s self. This is where my Pan-Africanism was formed.

In 2014 was an ICI (Independent Curators International) fellow in Dakar, Senegal and one day at a Grocery store I came across a bar of chocolate fabricated in Gran Canaria. The Canary Islands weren’t famous for their chocolates but enterprising Indians had set-up factories to export daily necessities to people across Western Africa from the perch in the Atlantic. They were keen observers of the consumption needs of people they had lived amongst since the late 19th century. These were Indians who had followed British ships to ports in Africa from where they could establish entrepot businesses. They were called Sindhis and were syncretic Sikh- Hindus who came from the province of Sindh in Pakistan. Further displaced by partitions they joined long established communities in the Mediterranean. Sindhis from Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco later migrated to Spanish enclaves in Africa and the Canary Islands when these countries began nationalising industry. The Canary Islands were not just gateways to Africa and Europe but also were placed on the shipping lines towards Latin America. The Sindhis in Punta Arenas, São Paulo and Jamaica arrived by way of the community in Las Palmas and Tenerife. That year in Dakar many thousands of young Senegalese men caught boats to brave the Atlantic sea to find exile in the Canary Islands. You may meet them on the beaches of Spain each summer selling Indian textiles as beach towels supplied by enterprising Sindhi entrepreneurs.

Immigrants across the world establish small businesses, restaurants, groceries, and larger companies. These diasporas become the communities that give birth to the intellectuals, artists, philosophers and the social atmosphere to question cultural homogeneity and the nation state. Across the globe we see the rise of neo-liberal multinational corporations that transcend political and economic borders in order to exploit natural resources, the working populations, and the demography of markets. While facing no opposition from the nation-state that prides itself in working for the interest of its people. This dichotomy and its visual manifestation becomes the most pertinent argument to encourage immigration and cross-continental dialogue. But also a recipe for art. We are no longer at the edge or away but always on crossroads of larger narratives as artists and as people. We can be unaware but it doesn’t wish away reality.

I am in Brazil writing this text and what made me actually gather my thoughts was another personal incident. I am here in Sao Paulo assisting — Metta Pracrutti— a group of 15 Indian artists curated by Prabhakar Kamble install their exhibit. We transported the works across the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean in our bags because our ambitions could not be afforded by the steep tariffs and cargo costs between Brazil and India ( countries hoping to create an alternative economic pressure group – the Brics). Bhushan Bhombale, a young artist from the Deccan Plateau took his first flight out of India to Brazil and, having installed early, began collaborating with Hamedine Kane fabricating sculpture out of salvaged wood from boats in Bahia. After a heavy day of slow paced work we left to get a beer with other artists. As I went to order an uber for our group my phone was picked by a swift cyclist.

Adjani Okpu-Egbe, a British Cameroonian artist from our group sprinted behind my thief and we followed. Among them was — Hamedine Kane a Senegalese — Mauritanian artist who dreamed of being a filmmaker and had made a film on immigrants crossing the Sahel and the Sahara towards Morocco and is now celebrated as a visual artist because he came to Bombay and had his first solo where he experimented with wood-cuts changing his relationship to materiality. There was Boris Raux who began as a scientist but believed his study of scent and odour would rather be apt in the art world for the perspectives it brings through another dimension about the human mind — something he could not have pursued in the perfumery industry. We all reached a crossroad where Adjani had lost sight of the cyclist.

Adjani came to England and served in the British Army but was keen to be an artist to commemorate the 40 years his mother had given to the Cameroon Development Corporation as a rubber-tapper. For which she was paid less than twenty dollars a month. Despite the hardships she put him and his sisters through the best of schools. She never went to collect wages and sent others to collect them because she wasn’t keen to lose her dignity to a kleptocratic regime that had already stolen her health and being. Adjani ran after the phone-snatcher because he was not to be defeated by a thief. Bhushan Bhombale began arranging salvaged detritus as his art because he had once taken strips of rubber from his father’s tyre repair shop to shape animals after school. Losing his father as a young school going boy to the challenges of poverty — this was his ongoing conversation with a pertinent happy memory.

At the Museum of Art of São Paulo, Bhushan came across his first retrospective on Claude Monet, his first Picasso, his first Rembrandt, his first Van Gogh and many others. He is 34 but has never been to a Western Museum of Modern Art. But what marked him most was Brazil’s Concrete and Kinetic Art movement, something he had been following through the internet since long. He remarked that Oscar Niemeyer’s pavilion for the biennale and Lina Bo Bardi’s design for the MASP both reminded him of the stations he passed on the commuter train he took from his home in the suburb of Virar to the centre of Bombay 88 kilometres away. This is how accessible art is. My sarcasm at its inaccessibility stems from the mimicry of the elite especially in places like India and Brazil. Concrete pillars were there to symbolise a rejuvenation and exuberance we felt as countries in the 1950s and 60s — engulfed by modernist utopias.

But this coming of age wasn’t restricted to countries — the elite also played a role in creating the myth of a nation. At the ‘Sir Ratan Tata’ Gallery of the CSMVS Museum formerly the Prince of Wales Museum in Bombay sits the “Sword of Damocles” an 1804 painting by French artist Antoine Dubost. Like Antoine Dubost many lesser known European artists populate the gallery. Akshay Mahajan paints narratives through photography where the malaise of mediocrity goes unobserved in colonial architecture. Sir Ratan Tata’s father Sir Jamsetji Tata had once envisioned turning the suburb of Juhu into a commune of canals and recreate Venice. Even today newly built tall high-rises in Bombay and Brazil sport the names of American and European cities. The Tatas who initially began as agents for the Opium trade with China under the British are now an international conglomerate and run one of the largest charitable trusts that supports the arts under the name of Sir Ratan Tata. Anyone on a road trip across Senegal can never miss their buses plying people across potholed roads. The MASP was founded by Assis Chateaubriand in a similar vein for legacy.

Private patronage for the arts has become essential for both museums and biennales in time where the state is absconding from art. But this allows private foundations to author narratives and control writing of the history of art. The lack of patronage is the most effective form of censorship. Meta Platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp have 4 billion daily users. Mark Zukerberg can influence more minds than the two most populous countries put together — India and China. Political narratives are born and defeated on these platforms. As I saw my phone slip away I knew I had lost all access to Zuckerberg’s platforms. My own enslavement was now evident.

Akshay Mahajan has a popular page on Instagram with a dispositive of photos that speak of untold stories, here characters stand within the shadows of falling architecture and the outlands of India’s faraway districts. People and the landscape they inhabit is inherently intersectional and poetic in his work. He photographs maquettes at Wagh Sculptor Studio where busts of politicians of varied persuasions wrestle for space. The sculptors assistant stands besides Dr BR Ambedkar who beckons India’s masses with his pointed finger to cross the thresholds of caste and annihilate its inhuman classification. At the Sir JJ School of Art, Bombay, Akshay is intrigued by the framing of the copies of Greco-Roman sculpture. After the First War of Indian Independence in 1857, one of the first acts of imperial exercise was to establish the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art in Bombay in 1858. They were keen to build a colonial language where the vestige of power would be visible to all.

Every political situation has a visual language. We are beginning to live multiple realities which we aren’t able to fathom with ease. The man who stole my phone is not to blame for I understand the conundrum he is faced with – the consumer access to goods that they are well informed of is not fulfilled by the deepening inequality. But by denying me access to social media platforms he reminded me of the precarious freedom I hold in a world made inaccessible by visa regimes and xenophobic narrative building.

We as artists and writers must align as those who have come together in this essay by chance but also determined action to contest destinies – for destinies can be shaped and destroyed by powers who have easy access to human life.