Poet Aamir Aziz, artist Anita Dube are in dispute over a popular poem
New Delhi: Five years after it caught headlines in the context of the anti-CAA protests across the country in 2020, poet Aamir Aziz’s revolutionary text “Sab Yaad Rakha Jayega” is back at the centre of debate on the “rage against injustice”.
Aziz put out a series of social media posts across various platforms Sunday to allege that renowned artist Anita Dube has used his poem without his “knowledge, consent, credit, or compensation” in her works currently exhibited at Vadehra Art Gallery in the national capital.
Responding to the “social media trial initiated by Aamir Aziz with sadness”, Dube said the intent of quoting his poem was to celebrate it and she had reached out to him to apologise.
“I have been in love with ‘Sab Yaad Rakha Jayega’, especially some lines which swirled around in my head like dervishes. As a visual artist, I work with materials that I love, that become means to critically comment, and the intent of quoting words from Aamir Aziz’s poem was to celebrate them,” Dube said in a statement.
She added that she has quoted Martin Luther King, Bell Hooks and other in the same spirit of “fellow-traveller solidarities and spirit of the Commons and Copyleft”.
“I realise that I made an ethical lapse in only giving credit, but not checking with Aamir using words from his poem. However, I reached out and called him, apologised, and offered to correct this by remuneration. Aamir instead chose to send a legal notice, and then I had to go to a lawyer as well,” the artist said.
Her ongoing show, “Three Storey House”, showcases her recent body of works, including sculptures, mixed-media compositions, and a kinetic installation.
Dube said the works were immediately put “not for sale” and hoped to resolve this issue “in a fair manner”.
The gallery also issued a statement, expressing the hope that the issue between the two artists can be “resolved in an amicable and constructive manner”.
“We have been in touch with Aamir Aziz and his legal representatives for over a month. This is a situation that we have taken very seriously. We immediately ensured that the works Aamir Aziz has concerns with were not offered for sale. We remain committed to all artists and their creative expressions, and for building respectful dialogue across the art community,” the gallery said in a statement.
In his posts on Facebook, X and Instagram, Aziz wrote that a friend called him March 18 after seeing his words stitched into a work on display at the Vadehra Art Gallery.
“That was the first time I learned Anita Dube had taken my poem and turned it into her ‘art, ‘” Aziz said.
He said that upon confronting, Dube made it “seem normal like lifting a living poet’s work, branding it into her own, and selling it in elite galleries for lakhs of rupees was normal”.
“And the irony? The poem raged against injustice. Anita Dube turned it into a luxury commodity—proof not only that injustice is alive, but that it now wears silk gloves and sells itself as art. That a poem written in defiance was gutted, defanged, and stitched into velvet for profit,” the Jamia Millia Islamia alumnus said.
Aziz had composed the poem in 2020 in response to the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens. It reached international popularity when Pink Floyd’s musician Roger Waters recited the poem’s translation at an event in London.
In his posts on social media, Aziz went on to say that Dube had been using the poem since as early as 2023 in an exhibition titled “Of Mimicry, Mimesis and Masquerade, curated by Arshiya Lokhandwala” that was later displayed at the India Art Fair this year.
“She didn’t mention this in our first conversation. She hid it. Deliberately. Let’s be clear: if someone holds my poem in a placard at a protest, a rally, or a people’s uprising, I stand with them. But this is not that,” Aziz said.
He added that his poem “was written in velvet cloth, another carved in wood, hung inside a commercial white cube space, renamed, rebranded, and resold at an enormous price without ever telling me”.
“This is not solidarity. This is not homage. This is not conceptual borrowing. This is theft. This is erasure. This is an entitled section of the art world doing what it does best, extracting, consuming, profiting while pretending to be radical,” the 35-year-old said.
Terming it “outright cultural extraction and plunder”, Aziz said it stripped authors of autonomy “while profiting off their voices, especially those from marginalised backgrounds”.
“Their work is used without their knowledge, precisely so they can be excluded from the wealth produced through it. I have sent legal notices. Demanded answers. Asked for accountability.
“In return: silence, half-truths, and insulting offers.”
He also claimed the gallery refused to take the work down even when asked to.
“What Anita Dube has done isn’t a gesture of solidarity or resistance, it’s the oldest trick in the book, inherited from the same colonial masters: steal the voice, erase the name, and sell the illusion of originality. It is the systematic erasure of authorship in favour of profit,” Aziz alleged.
PTI
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