If we don’t do it, who will?

“We have got fed up reading news and articles about art education. This whole matter is unending. So much corruption in the art field? Write something positive.” Lately, Whatsapp messages or phone calls saying so have started coming to ‘Chinha’ frequently. We feel it is necessary to clarify the role of ‘Chinha’ in that context. Hence this special article.

Many students are getting upset after reading the articles that we at ‘Chinha Art News’ are publishing one after the other about art education institutions like JJ School of Art, Directorate of Art and Shakam (Govt Art College), Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar. Art teachers across Maharashtra also have mixed reactions regarding this writing. Many people are enjoying this writing while many people are upset about it. Educational institute heads have quite negative reactions about this. However somehow, the class three or four staff in art institutions are very happy with this writing. Parents’ reactions, however, are mixed. They say that they don’t understand anything about it. The parents who do understand, however, are frightful about the future of their children.

The art loving reader of ‘Chinha’ is reading all this writing with interest, but many of them say that you should publish something positive about art. Which can be useful to many readers like us. There is no doubt that your struggle is well meaning. It is also very important that you write consistently on it, but you should also pay attention to whether a reader like us will not get distanced. After a certain age, reading educational news articles or text is quite taxing. And especially the kind of unforgiving writing style that ‘Chinha’ is using is becoming annoying for regular reading.

Chinha’s readers often ask that if the situation in the art educational institutions in Maharashtra is so terrible, what are the concerned officials of the Higher and Technical Education Department or the Education Secretary or the Education Minister himself are doing about it? I often wonder what to answer. Today in Maharashtra, if a youth wants to pursue a career in painting, even a knowledgeable person like me cannot tell which college he should take admission in, then one can easily imagine how dire the situation is.

To change that situation, I started reporting about it forty-two years ago. But the situation continued to worsen. Maharashtra was blessed with an Education Minister who gave a shameless answer that ‘Providing education is not Government’s job’. And that’s where the downfall of the education system of Maharashtra started. If it is not the job of the Government to provide education, they should have closed down all the educational institutions in one day. But they did not have the courage to do that. So instead, they then gradually destroyed the entire educational system step by step. And thereafter educational institutions run by the politicians spread their roots across Maharashtra. That was their real goal and they succeeded in it. But while doing this, they did not realize that they should have carefully preserved the 150 plus years old institutions like JJ School of Art.

It was our fate to witness that first the education of Maharashtra and then the whole of Maharashtra was destroyed due to the people of low caliber getting elected as ministers who were not even qualified to work in district level offices of Zilla Parishad. What else will happen if such ministers get four-five consecutive or intermittent terms? That’s what is happening currently and we are watching helplessly. Apart from that, the situation is out of hand that we cannot do anything else.

Only when I repeatedly faced the question whether to allow the state rulers to swallow the campus in which we have spent six-seven valuable years of our lives, I picked up the pen as my mighty sword and continued to assault sharply. Not all of my blows were successful. Many were wasted but those which were not wasted played their part. Hence the corruption in the JJ and Art Directorate was substantially curbed later on. JJ’s scenic campus which was about to be swallowed by the builders was narrowly saved. Eventually the central government also had to take cognizance of this. It has been announced that the central government will grant Denovo status. It is a great satisfaction to have made a tiny contribution to this.

I am sure that the JJ School of Art will be a guiding beacon to countless generations of future artists in Maharashtra. In this regard, so much documentation has been done that those working in this field will not dare to commit any corruption in the future. It is not possible to even imagine what would have happened to JJ and the its campus had this not been done by ‘Chinha’. Therefore, the regular readers of ‘Chinha’ are requested to continue to respond as you have done so far. Soon we are coming to you with a lot of new information about painting and visual arts, apart from the topic of corruption in the art education sector. Corona has hit this sector badly. This sector has just now started to revive. You may have noticed that exhibitions are not being held as widely like they used to. Even the news in the art sector is not coming out like before. That is why we focused on the education sector for a while. We are also seeing its results. Experts say that the situation will improve after Diwali. Until then, let’s wait and watch! What say?

Satish Naik

Editor, ‘Chinha Art News’