https://www.heraldgoa.in/Cafe/Art-in-the-age-of-climate-change/208101
When torrential rains set in over Goa earlier this month, the volcanically talented artist Praveen Naik found it too humid to use his favourite paints on paper and canvas, but kept working in different genres “to explore my uncomfortable zones”. As usual, this highly productive 43-year-old – his day job is at the Dr. K. B. Hedgewar School at Cujira – shared his experiments on social media, and when he tried out cartoons they had instant visceral impact, as you see in the wry, sorrowing illustration along with this column. Here is the view from the street in the grand democratic lineage of both RK Laxman and Mario de Miranda, but even more invaluable because such doses of reality are otherwise almost totally absent from Goa’s contemporary public sphere. “I feel like shouting,” says Naik, “this is my voice as an artist. It is my reaction to the pathetic Smart City, and new infrastructure like Atal Sethu requiring to be repaired already. The disaster at Kala Academy, and refusing to accept the high court’s wisdom to save our Mhadei, It’s the common people’s voice that should be heard instead of the same idiots who created the problems.” Naik has been in an excellent groove since the pandemic struck, when he began sharing an impassioned torrent of what I described as “prophetic visions” in *Art India*’s issue about lockdown art: “It was an extraordinary experience to watch along as he shared something every day - collages, water-colours, oils, and the occasional drawing. His relentlessness, and ceaseless invention, as well as the cheeky political content, reminded me strongly of Rauschenberg at his peak.” I also noted “he is part of an impressive generation of artists who have emerged from Goa’s villages in waves over the past couple of decades, who tend to share similar preoccupations. Paramount amongst these is the sense of overwhelming loss caused by rapid changes being imposed on India’s smallest state, where massive – often illegal – concretization is accompanied by immense demographic displacement. The quality of life has plummeted in just a few years, as democratic norms are being subverted to thwart the people’s will in favour of powerful special interests. All of this is in Naik’s art.” What is the point of “mere” painting, or any of the arts, in the dark crisis of today? Here is what Ranjit Hoskote said about his new book of poems: “I have been deeply aware of certain key questions, as we transit into a very precarious future. As vulnerable actors in a broken world, damaged by ourselves, how do we re-calibrate our lives, how do we articulate our love and compassion even in the most difficult circumstances? How do we bear witness to our own deep flaws as individuals and as a species, spreading toxicity even as we hope fervently to transform our societies and environments for the better? How can we imagine a future based on equity and mutuality and healing, when some of us think that the best solution to managing our ship- wrecked planet is either to polarize turbulent societies yet further and yet more violently, or to escape to other planets, presumably to exploit and destroy them in the same way, armed with the same extractivist mentality? *Icelight* is, in one of its dimensions, a protest against such failures of the social and political imagination.” In his recent interview with Nidhi Verma for *Platform*, Hoskote explained how he writes with “everyday knowledge of living in a coastal metropolis, Mumbai, which is almost certainly doomed to suffer submergence prompted by the global sea-level rise within my lifetime. And to have to suffer, on every side, large-scale infrastructure projects that planners have inflicted on us — the coastal highways, the metro and monorail systems — serenely untroubled by the ecological apocalypse that is on its way.” This is precisely Praveen Naik’s standpoint - the only sane and supportable one – and it remains deeply shocking that it is so rarely aired in mainstream discourse in India, let alone its criminally misgoverned smallest state. *Icelight* bears this glowing testimonial from Amitav Ghosh – who shares a strong sense of connection to Goa with Hoskote, with both writers having spent years living here – “Like jewelled windows in a war-torn city, Ranjit Hoskote’s exquisitely crafted poems offer tantalizing glimpses of a disintegrating world.” It was his landmark 2016 *The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable *– in my view, the most important book of the 21st century – which first truly acutely analysed the global imaginative failure to describe what is happening: “these changes are not merely strange in the sense of being unknown and alien; their uncanniness lies precisely in the fact that in these encounters we recognize something we had turned away from; that is to say, the presence and proximity of non-human interlocutors.” Ghosh asked then: “Can the timing of this renewed recognition be mere coincidence, or is the synchronicity an indication that there are entities in the world, like forests, that are fully capable of inserting themselves into our processes of thought? And if that were so, could it not also be said that the earth itself has intervened to revise those habits of thought that are based on the Cartesian dualism that arrogates all intelligence and agency to the human while denying them to every other kind of being?” It is deeply moving to read those prescient questions again in the context of this week’s High Court decision filled with wisdom, delivered in favour of Goa’s forests and their beleaguered tigers by Justices Deshpande and Sonak: “In the universe man and animals are equally placed, but human rights approach to environmental protection in case of conflict, is often based on anthropocentricity. Man-animal conflict often results not because animals encroach human territories but vice versa…This Court cannot blink at the reality that often at the State level, regional, parochial, anthropomorphic, and times, even narrow political considerations would prevail over the more significant national interests involved in conserving and protecting the tiger and the tiger habitat.”