20 years of SAHMAT MUSIC DVD
Music has been key to the performative events SAHMAT has initiated since 1989. The Sufi and Bhakti Traditions were a key source of inspiration, as their poetry was and is a popular people’s tradition of resistance to orthodoxies and a reassertion of the truly secular fabric of our culture. It has been a platform for classical musicians like Shubha Mudgal to explore more radical experiments with texts in their repertoire, as well as for artists like Indian Ocean and Madan Gopal Singh. It has enabled a brotherhood of the folk, classical and experimental musicians, to place their music and poetry and their message of love before the kinds of audiences not normally exposed to such music. Contemporary dance has often accompanied these performances.
 
Ways of Resisting DVD Ways of Resisting

The video Ways of Resisting, is a
documentary of a major exhibition
mounted by SAHMAT in 2002, at the
Rabindra Bhavan Galleries, New Delhi. Curated by Vivan Sundaram, the exhib-
ition included thirty five artists, and
artists’ groups, showing paintings and installations, photographs, videos and related archival material. The exhibition offered retrospective evidence on the decade of violence (1992-2002)
instigated by the Sangh Parivar.

Throughout this decade SAHMAT had worked to sustain secular values within a public sphere under siege from the rightwing. From 1992, with
demolition of the Babri Masjid and riots that followed in Mumbai, to 2002, the majoritarian ideo-logy of Hindutva
culminated with the BJP government in Gujarat openly supporting the genocide of Muslims in the state. Within the year, SAHMAT’S Ways of Resisting attempted to place a frame of under-standing on such unprecedented violence by bringing to view artists’ critical reflection on the conditions of survival at such a moment in history. Considering the artist as witness, the curated exhibition art iculated questions about the self, citizenship, and exile within an already fraught polity torn apart by hate.

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