M F Husain’s passing in a London hospital marks the conclusion of one of the most pitiful chapters in independent India’s secular history. It is an indictment of India’s government and its poisoned politics that Husain, arguably India’s most celebrated and prolific artist, died in exile.
For all our pretensions to freedom and secularism, we failed to defend a frail, nonagenarian artist against a clutch of right-wing fanatics. The last few weeks have seen angry articles and emotional obituaries, but neither is this the first time this has happened nor is it the last. Husain joins a host of prominent writers, thinkers and artists — Salman Rushdie, Deepa Mehta and Taslima Nasreen, to name a few — who have waged protracted battles with Indian religious fundamentalists and succumbed.
As India becomes increasingly polarised along communal lines, it is important to tell and re-tell their stories, so we do not soon forget and allow ourselves to, once again, become mute spectators to orchestrated religious intolerance.
Husain’s story is the stuff of legends. He famously started out painting cinema hoardings in Bombay to support his young family. Working on large canvases with bold colours developed his characteristic style, and the city’s grimy backstreets inspired his personality. He came to prominence in the 1940s and joined the Progressive Artists’ Group, with avant-garde artists like F N Souza and S H Raza, who broke with tradition and experimented with content and technique.
Souza, the group’s founder, was the first to be hounded out. In 1950, he left India after his studio was raided in search of obscene paintings. Raza also left for Paris some years later. Husain stayed back and spent decades as a successful artist, exhibiting his works freely. By the 90s, with India on the fast-track to free-market reforms, he was an icon. India’s nouveau riche scrambled to acquire artwork and display them in drawing rooms and boardrooms. Investing in art became a marker of social and cultural mobility, and Husain capitalised fully.
His troubles began in 1996, when he was 81, following an article in a Hindi magazine. Some of his paintings — of Bharat Mata (Mother India) and Saraswati (the Hindu goddess of learning) — were called obscene, often by those who had never seen the works in question.
Interestingly, India’s religious art has brazenly depicted nudity and sexuality through the ages, whether through sculptures at the Khajuraho temple complex or through murals and frescoes across temples in southern India. And so it was strange that Hindu groups, and their followers, showed themselves to be so intolerant of their own art and culture. The real dispute was communal: outrage that a Muslim artist had painted Hindu goddesses.
A raft of criminal cases followed, harassment and intimidation by bigoted mobs reached epic proportions and several exhibitions of his work were vandalised. In 2000, for example, the premiere of Husain’s second film ‘Gaja Gamini’, a celebration of Indian womanhood, was cancelled after 25 biker-thugs attacked the City Pulse multiplex in Ahmadabad.
All of a sudden, despite his artwork fetching millions at leading auction houses around the world, no gallery would risk holding an exhibition of Husain’s work in India. Tormented by the threat of legal action and numerous death threats, he was forced to go into exile in 2006.
In India, there have always been ready incentives for attacking celebrated artists and writers. For one, it gives cause for right-wing politicians to make a name for themselves as the defenders of religion and culture. They manipulate their targets’ fame, and the massive publicity that gets generated is used to energise a supporter base. Perhaps most dangerously, though, these attacks also thwart any real, open discussion of different ideas and viewpoints by giving the issue at hand a volatile religious colour.
India does not easily tolerate bold creativity or those who are ahead of their time. The drastic extent to which expressions of individuality and creativity can be made to feel insecure speaks volumes about the future of imagination in this country. Will we ever find ourselves among the world’s thought leaders? Or will we remain beholden to ideologies that muzzle any expressions that run contrary to prescribed narratives and norms?
Successive Indian governments have failed spectacularly in supporting Husain’s cause and enabling his return to India. Vote-bank politics is partly to blame. Right and wrong is subordinated to what will work at the ballot box. And when they are unsure, the government muddles through, trying to appease liberals as well as conservatives, and ends up nowhere. The result, as in the Husain case, is no real action, and lots of excuses.
India’s failure revolves around living up to the ideals of freedom and pluralism that define a secular nation’s constitution. Our failure, as ordinary citizens, was to watch helplessly as a small, insufferable band of bigots bullied and tormented a range of beleaguered intellectuals. We remained silent as they were denied the freedom to express their interpretations of history and culture. But Husain’s battle was the battle for the kind of freedom and thought that should govern India.
The hallmark of Husain’s greatness, and rootedness, was the balance and perspective he kept throughout his ordeal. Although India failed him repeatedly in the last decades of his life, he showed no bitterness. “What happened with me is a small thing. We remain a free country,” he told an interviewer last year.
If not for his prolific, magnificent artistic oeuvre, his thoughtful attempts at cinema and his full life as an Indian icon who reached the very pinnacle of his field, then perhaps as an apology, India owes him a posthumous Bharat Ratna — its highest civilian honour, for the true gem that he was.
The writer is an Indian columnist and writer. He tweets at twitter.com/rakeshmani and can be reached at [email protected]