Revisiting Love, Fear, and Hatred

The color of Vigor, Energy, and Strength connected with spirituality and purity: Saffron has been my favorite. My obsession with the color appeared before I could understand the deeper meaning and importance of saffron in religious beliefs and politics. In my childhood, I never knew anything through which I could relate saffron to fear, insecurities, death or destruction. It always meant peace, spirituality, pure energy and the path of higher enlightenment.

After the 2002 communal riots in Gujarat, this color has played a different role in my mind and in the minds of the people: it is like a mass hysteria, synonymous with fear and insecurity. Today this color again resurfaced due to growing incidences like communal threats and killings. This brought back all the traumatic thoughts and past experiences of staying in my room, enclosed during curfew, seeing hundreds of police patrolling in sensitive areas, and feeling fear and insecurity doubling while passing the sensitive areas. Saffron has become a symbol of fear in my country, the color of spirituality has become the color of fear, and gradual politicization of this color has opened the floodgate in my country.

In this performance I am not only representing my identity and culture but also my current state of mind due to the socio-political conditions prevailing in my country. While my love for saffron should not be affected by this, it is, and the state of mental flux brought on by this contradiction makes it feel like there is war inside my mind. I tried to bring this dichotomy of love and hate, spirituality and materiality, the clash of extremes through the use of voice and body gestures and also through using the color saffron along with audio during the performance. Throughout my performance I tried to negotiate the idea of sacredness of the color, oscillating psychological tension between the love/hate, the purity/impurity of saffron’s sacredness. I tried to map the paradigm shift of saffron power, mapping the psychological tension created in this fluctuation through my body. I evoked the power of the body/love of saffron and its use in healing rituals with milk. All through the process, the same question haunts me: what will a common person like me do if someone attacks? Why does history keep repeating again and again? Why are the wings of angels cut?