Contemporary painting and Indian politics

[ramana]

EDITS | Saturday, June 11, 2011 | Email | Print | | Back





Vanvaas from Ram's India

June 11, 2011 12:47:55 AM



Ashok Malik



In the end, Husain lost to the mob. The gutter rhetoric on the streets kept him away from India. But the anti-Husain constituency has won a pyrrhic victory.



There is something downright disquieting about intellectual sensibilities in India. Even in his death Maqbool Fida Husain, India’s best-known contemporary artist, has been subjected to abuse and only grudging praise from the Hindu Right. A BJP spokesperson argued Husain “should have come back, respected the law and people’s sentiments and merged his breath and body with Indian soil”. Instead, he got “got distanced from Indians”. For good measure, “his caricature of Durga and Bharat Mata was obnoxious and unacceptable”. It was unnecessarily convoluted phraseology, out of place at the time of departure of a titan of Indian creativity. <img src='http://www.india-forum.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/tongue.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='' />



On Internet forums, the criticism of Husain was far worse. He was labelled ‘anti-Indian’, ‘anti-Hindu’, ‘anti-national’ and all the favoured cuss words of the Internet Hindus — a shorthand phrase for those who, while representing a minority of Hindus on the Internet, make up perhaps the most bigoted social media community anywhere on Earth. <img src='http://www.india-forum.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/tongue.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='' />



It was left to Balasaheb Thackeray, chief of the Shiv Sena, to bring closure that was appropriate: “MF Husain was as strong-willed as he was fantastic. There are differences over his art, but he did not give up his obstinacy … An artist has his peculiar style, and Husain pursued his modern style wilfully. He only slipped up on the depiction of Hindu gods and goddesses. Otherwise, he was happy and content in his field. If his demise is a loss for modern art, then so be it. May his Allah give him peace.” :rotfl: {Bal Thackery was slamming the guy and this fool thinks he was praising him faintly!}



The Shiv Sena founder’s nephew Raj Thackeray, who now leads a breakaway party, was even more forthright: “He was an asset to the country. His passing should put an end to all the controversies surrounding his paintings.”



{This is incorrect. His work lives beyond him and now that he is dead will get proper critique and judged for its merits or demerits de-linked from MHF's religion and leanings.}





Husain was not perfect. The films he made were an embarrassment. :mrgreen: It was sometimes felt he courted controversy as a sort of publicity tool. His eccentricity was both genuine and on occasion cultivated. When he walked into a club barefoot, he knew what he was doing: Aiming for the next morning’s headlines.



{Make up your mind!}



Even so none of this is unusual. Creative people anywhere, artists and writers, actors and even television anchors — 9.00 pm generalissimos for instance — often acquire affectations and mannerisms or merely say, draw and write things to attract attention to themselves and their craft. It is possible Husain’s recent problems lay in one of these experiments having gone horribly wrong.



{No kidding!}



That aside, his choice of refuge from India was decidedly strange. Dubai and Qatar were scarcely domains of free expression, even if Husain made them his home. If he had migrated to, say, Paris, India’s embarrassment would have been much more acute.



{i]{That region is the right place for it harbors Indian criminals and shelters them with visas and police protection. It exploits Indian lobor. If India were more developed economically no India would go to those places. I worte after he took up Qatari citizenship that Indian elite were flummoxed at his choice. I was not for it showed the true roots of his denigrating paintings of Hindu religious icons. It was Islamist pure and simple. He was a reverse water melon. An Islamist masquerading as a Communist/Leftist protestor. }[/i]



However, the anti-Husain constituency has won a decidedly pyrrhic victory. It kept him out of India but invited ridicule upon itself. By reacting churlishly to the great man’s death and refusing to acknowledge he had been punished much more than his so-called sin merited, the extreme fringe of the Hindu Right — its influence largely limited to the Internet — has isolated itself even further.



{In whose eyes? Eyes of deracinated wannabe Wasterners?}



Why didn’t Husain come back to India and submit himself to court scrutiny? Why didn’t he answer his opponents from behind a courtroom post? The questions may seem disarmingly simple. Yet those who ask them — people such as the BJP spokesperson who now stresses Husain should have “respected the law and people’s sentiments” — are either innocent of the fundamental decency of a democracy or are plain disingenuous.



The hate-Husain brigade filed some 900 cases against him. Could a man past 90, past 95 when he died, be expected to run from one mofussil court to another, up and down the country? If India’s most famous artist had actually subjected himself to this torture, his health and mental peace would have been shattered. More than that Indian democracy and commitment to artistic liberty would have come out looking like a caricature. Paradoxically, in not coming back to India, Husain did the Hindu right a favour.



The cry-baby Hindutva brigade — the type the members of which post replies on Internet forums using pseudonyms because a deep-seated inferiority complex prevents them writing under their real names — will no doubt point to Salman Rushdie, The Last Temptation of Christ, the Danish cartoons episode, The Da Vinci Code. The defensive (and defeatist) contention would be that if it is fine for (some) Muslims and Christians to take offence too easily, then it is fine for (some) Hindus to take offence equally easily and copy those they claim to loath.



{All those people criticised or depicted their own religion. Rushdie criticised Islam and got a Shia fatwa. Dan Brown mocked Roman Catholics. He didnt eget any stricture. Hussian however mocked Hinduism. If he had mocked even once Islam, I will grant him his liberal status. The reason why DIE support MF Hussien is he was doing their job for them. In other words his attack were their attacks. Plain and simple. Hence the empathy for their foot soldier!}





This is flawed logic. For a start, no seriously democratic country — other than India — has placed prohibitions on almost any of the artistes or works of creativity cited above.{Note selective creativity. BTW India banned Salman Rusdie's book Satanic Verses, in case the writer is too young to know! And India censored Da Vince Code.} Second, the international assault on Rushdie was led by a crazed Ayatollah in Iran. Does the Hindu Right see itself in the same league? Third, state-specific restrictions and clumsy attempts to censor films like The Da Vinci Code are abominable, but do not constitute the systematic targeting of a venerable artist by manipulating and misusing the Indian legal system.



In the end, Husain lost to the mob. The gutter rhetoric on the streets — now adopted by the Internet Hindu on Twitter and similar networks — kept him away from his beloved India (and make no mistake he loved this country deeply).{Which India did he love? The muslim India of the Bahmain kings?} It gave the mob an inflated sense of its strength. Today, more than ever before, books, films and paintings are subject to clearance by arbiters who cannot rise above the lowest common denominator. Politicians attempt to justify this by citing “people’s sentiments”. What they mean is the noise of the rabble.



Of course, this rabble is not exclusively Hindu. Even so the competitive hysteria of Hindu and Muslim self-appointed censors is nauseating. The banning of The Satanic Verses in 1988 and the driving out of Husain constitute the bookends of an extremely disturbing period in India’s democratic discourse.



Husain’s death so far away from India, and the fact that he has been laid to rest in distant London{Its free will. he wanted to be buried in London. Does the author propose re-burial in Mumbai or Hyderabad?} — rather than amid the smells and sounds of the Mumbai he so cherished — shames us all. How different is it from the British Government sending Bal Gangadhar Tilak to far-off Mandalay simply because it considered his ideas and writings dangerous? Can disagreement with an artist’s sense of graphic description — and that right to disagree is no doubt legitimate — lead to such extraordinary expulsion? Can the land of Lord Rama be blasé about Husain’s vanvaas?



These are troubling, even poignant questions. I suspect they won’t get answers; they will meet still more Internet Hindu poison.



malikashok@gmail.com



[/quote]



I think the poor writer should have him self checked into therapy for above article is full of hyper ventilation and imagined liberalism. Not only that he has got his story wrong.



It was Ram who went into vanvaas, where Ravan abducted Sita.

MFH derogatory depiction of Sita is a similar act of intellectual abduction.



Unfortunately the writer is not even fully Macaulayised. Only half baked.