The attacks on M.F.
Husain’s art must be seen in the context of communalism thriving on
economic liberalisation.
LET us begin with two recent, and seemingly unrelated, events in New
Delhi.
First, at around 3.30 p.m. on a dusky afternoon, on August 24, eight or
10 Hindu fanatics, identifying themselves as belonging to the
little-known “Sri Ram Sena”, vandalised an exhibition showcasing
reproductions of some paintings by Maqbool Fida Husain and some
photographs of Husain taken by Parthiv Shah. Furniture and a television
set showing Husain’s films were also broken. The exhibition was going
on outside the SAHMAT (Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust) office in New
Delhi.
Only a few months ago, some miscreants attacked Husain’s exhibitions at
India International Centre, New Delhi, and in London. Facing seven
cases for “obscenity in his paintings” and “causing offence to
religious sensibilities”, Husain has been living in self-imposed exile
in Dubai and London, fearing physical danger from people who are
opposed to his paintings. Photographer Ram Rahman said that Raghu Vyas,
a painter and a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), and
the Hindu Janjagruti Samiti spearheaded the campaign against Husain.
Second, the India Art Summit 2008 in Pragati Maidan from August 22 to
August 24. With the objective to tap the expanding art market in India,
this was the first full-fledged corporate initiative in getting 34 art
galleries from India and abroad on one platform. Sunil Gautam, the
managing director of the Summit’s organising company, Hanmer MS&L,
said during the event: “The Indian art market is worth Rs.1,500 crore
and is growing at 35 per cent a year.”
The buzzword at the Summit, unsurprisingly, was “art market”. Phillip
Hoffmen, who owns 16 art funds across the world, said in his
well-received speech, “Art of making money”: “The August 2007 credit
crunch has still not affected the art market, and in India the market
should be worth Rs.400 million in five years.”
He went on to say, “Pseudo-collectors are dominating the market now. In
future, I anticipate around 20 billionaires in different pockets of the
world spending $100 million each. The market would slowly become more
limited and richer.”
These, which prima facie look like unrelated events, have more than one
missing link. SAHMAT decided to hold the exhibition after the
organisers of the India Art Summit decided to exclude Husain’s
paintings from the displays of all the participating galleries. Three
galleries from New Delhi, including the famous Delhi Art Gallery and
the Dhoomimal Art Gallery, which wanted to display Husain’s paintings,
were told not to display any of his paintings before the Summit began.
SAHMAT believed that while the organisers might have made the decision
out of fear of attacks or protests against the works of Husain, by
giving in to such threats by communal political groups they were
playing into their hands. Gautam, quoted in a newspaper, said at the
event: “We issued an advisory about the real risk of including Husain….
India is the fourth most buoyant market in the world. Must it be
derailed by controversies attached to one artist?”
In solidarity with Husain, SAHMAT displayed images of his work through
all three days of the Summit. SAHMAT had informed the nearby Parliament
Street police station of the exhibition. No police protection was
provided.
The organisation had demanded that Husain’s works should be displayed
with police protection at the India Art Summit, too. The decision not
to do so in effect ostracised India’s Picasso. Husain’s role in putting
India on the world art map is phenomenal. He is also one of the
principal forces behind the world market boom for Indian art. SAHMAT
members said that without Husain’s contribution to art, an event like
the India Art Summit would not have taken place in Delhi.
The communal attack on Husain’s exhibition comes at a time when there
is a booming art market in the country. Over the past decade, the
Indian art market has grown by leaps and bounds. Over the same period,
attacks on artists and their works have escalated. Be it the
Chandramohan case of 2007 in Vadodara or the seven legal assaults on
Husain, there is a build-up of fascist tendencies in the way art is
perceived.
It is debatable whether economic liberalisation and fascism grow
simultaneously. But the constant emphasis on the art market in recent
times can be definitely branded as a by-product of the economic changes
witnessed by India since the early 1990s. “Artists like M.F. Husain
characterise the function of a national artist,” writes Geeta Kapur.
“He marks the conjunction between the mythic and the secular and then
between secular and aesthetic space.”
Jawaharlal Nehru’s left-liberal ideology gave the Indian state a basic
infrastructure for culture and the arts, as well as the confidence to
host international modernism. However, there was a significant shift
that began in the early 1990s. With the consistent demand for “global
art”, the arts in India came off the path of progressive nationalism, a
trend manifested in the Art Summit’s motto emphasising global art. From
the 1990s, artists broke their pact with progressive nationalism,
leaping beyond statist parameters to grasp the discourse of
contemporaneity. With this pact broken and the demand for more global
art increasing, the public presence of art and artists such as Husain,
who intended to create art for an audience beyond the esoteric realm,
kept decreasing.
The political scientist Aijaz Ahmed writes about the inevitable link of
capitalism and fascism in history. He says that “policies of
liberalisation can succeed only if Indian nationalism can be detached
from its historic anti-colonial origins and redefined in culturalist,
irrationalist, racist terms, so that the national energies are expanded
not on resistance against imperialism but on suppression of the
supposed enemy within: the denominational minority, the communist Left,
the ‘pseudo-secularist’, any and all oppositions to ‘tradition’ as
defined by Hindutva”.
It is in this larger perspective that the ideological construct of
Hindutva and the public policy of liberalisation are not only
reconcilable but also complementary. With the secular parties
liberalising the economy in India, additional spaces are being created
for the growth of Hindu fundamentalism in the country.
Economic globalisation not only ensures a complete reorganisation of
culture, it also depoliticises people in the process so that they fail
to resist. Thus, the rich become unconcerned and the desperate poor
incline towards sectarian ideology, which promises to liberate them
from their deplorable situation.
It is not surprising, then, that the India Art Summit 2008, touted as
the first biggest art summit in the country, steered clear of Husain.
The art galleries, except for a few, did not protest, knowing full well
the damage that they would incur if Husain were to be included. There
is clearly a transition in the way art was perceived before and the way
it is now.
Husain, in an interview to a magazine, said that he had been inspired
by Hindu mythology. His controversial paintings are those that were
made for Ram Manohar Lohia for his Ramayan Mela (1960s) as part of his
political campaign in the rural hinterland. “It is people in the
villages who understand the sensual, living, evolving nature of Hindu
gods,” says Husain. He sees purity in nudity and says that his study of
the Hindu culture has only reaffirmed his belief. The renowned Bharat
Mata, a work that has been attacked by Hindu fanatics, was so named not
by him but by an art gallery that exhibited it long after he painted
it. He imbibes the spirit of the Indian Constitution that guarantees
freedom of speech and expression to every citizen of the country and is
a torch-bearer of its core secular values.
When ideologues of Hindutva such as Arun Shourie complain that the
proponents of freedom of speech did not come forward to support the
Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten when Muslims all over the world
agitated against the cartoons of the Prophet that it published in
September 2005, what they conveniently overlook is that the cartoons
provocatively represented the Prophet as an accomplice in terrorism.
Journalist Sukumar Muralidharan writes, “Far from being an exercise in
the right to free speech, the newspaper was, by in its own boastful
claim, engaged in an effort to rub in the superiority of Western
culture.” Husain, in contrast, has never harboured any malicious intent
and each of his work aims at connecting with people at an aesthetic
level.
The Summit organisers’ attitude towards Husain’s works persisted
despite the historic May 8, 2008, judgment by the Delhi High Court,
which gave Husain a reprieve in three of the seven cases against him.
In his judgment, which was also an indirect attack on the growing
communalism in the country, Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul mentioned in
point 120: “In the end, it may be said that education broadens the
horizons of people and means to acquire knowledge to enhance one’s
ability to reason and make a sound judgment. However, when one is
instructed to only view things in a certain manner, regardless of truth
and facts, this is actually a form of programming – not education.”
Contextualising Husain’s case, he said, “There are very few people with
a gift to think out of the box and seize opportunities and therefore
such people’s thoughts should not be curtailed by the age-old moral
sanctions of a particular section in the society having oblique or
collateral motives that express their dissent at the very drop of a
hat.” Husain’s exclusion not only amounts to encouraging communal
tendencies but also boosts the “programming” Kaul talks about.
The Ministry of Culture and the leading art auction house Sotheby’s,
which supported the Art Summit, assumed strategic silence on the issue.
Ambika Soni, Minister of Tourism and Culture, made an unconvincing
request to the Summit organisers to include Husain. The statement in
solidarity with Husain said, “As far as the present India Art Summit is
concerned, the Union Ministry would be happy if all major artists and
their works including the paintings of Shri M.F. Husain are displayed
at such event.”
Though the letter of support was seen as a positive development, SAHMAT
felt the need to stand up for the artistic community and its creative
freedom at the Summit. The point of contention is whether it is the
market that stifles the creative voice or a process that thrives on the
gradual co-option of artists into a class – apolitical and implicitly
communal – that has the capacity to buy paintings at astronomical sums.
The Mexican Mural movement, Fluxus, Arte Povera, Installation art and
Dadaism were all attempts to further artistic practices that interacted
with people. They represented anti-war and anti-imperialist sentiments.
However, it can be argued that global capitalism and its cultural
fallout cancel the very concept of the avant-garde.
Not everyone, however, was silent on Husain’s exclusion from the
Summit. Peter Nagy of Nature Morte Gallery showed the courage to
distribute SAHMAT pamphlets at the exhibition. He also displayed one of
Ram Rahman’s photographs of Husain painting a horse in his gallery. He
said, “If the Art Summit is not a safe place to show Husain, where will
it be shown? You have got to start from somewhere. It is about the
freedom of speech.” He declined comment on the artistic community’s
silence but said that people had not known about the exclusion until
the last moment. Dhoomimal Art Gallery actually had on display a
painting named Judaism by Husain but had to remove it on the second day
under pressure from the organisers. Rob Dean Art, U.K., also followed
suit.
Rajendra Prasad of SAHMAT said, “It is an attack on the plural
representation of our culture. They are people who want to impose a
majoritarian representation of our culture.” The question that looms
large is who this “majority” is? Is it just the Hindu fundamentalists
or people for whom economic liberalisation is the solution to all woes?
This trajectory of thought is becoming increasingly majoritarian,
assisting fundamentalists in reorganising culture.
Today, the libertarian thought has led to a summit where not art but
the art market is important, where not Husain but the absurd
controversy surrounding him is important, where not ethics but
potential buyers are important. Art history made transitions at
important historical junctures as and when the artistic community stood
up for progressive streams of thought.
In the age of economic liberalisation and state withdrawal, art is
moulding itself to turn its back on the historical. Geeta Kapur says,
“Such contemporary art will meet its nemesis in obsolescence, in a
premature, death-driven decrepitude.”
Artists have often found themselves in exile during historic upheavals.
Nazi Germany, General Franco’s Spain, Porfirio Diaz’s Mexico before the
revolution, all have witnessed mass exoduses of artists. Husain,
largely seen as not an overtly political painter, is in exile today
because for a large section of society his identity is confined to that
of a Muslim. Ram Rahman contextualises and links this kind of attack on
a pluralistic culture to the increasing intolerance by Hindu
fundamentalists.
He said that what was happening in Orissa – the violence against
Christians – could be directly linked to the attack on the exhibition.
It is in such contexts that the attack on Husain’s paintings should be
looked at. Whether only Hindu fundamentalists are responsible for such
attacks or state-supported global capitalism should also share the
responsibility remains an open question.
Communalism in art is a result of depoliticisation and a simultaneous
“valorisation of the un-theorised contemporary”, as Geeta Kapur points
out. It should be looked at in the context of a larger process of
economic liberalisation. Contemporary artist Jitish Kallat said at the
Summit: “The operational term in art has shifted from creativity to
production.”
The implications of this trend are countless. What if the popular comic
character Calvin had seen Hobbes, his dear friend, as just a soft toy?
It is human imagination that allows art to flow unrestrictedly,
creating for us our fantasies, wonderlands, angels, demons and
adventures. The hour demands that art be set free to explore the
endless horizons of the imagination unbridled by fascist and communal
forces.
As lawyer Lawrence Liang puts it, “The true test of democracy lies not
in the volume of speech that it is willing to grant its citizens but in
the volume of uncomfortable speech that it is willing to listen.”
http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/stories/20080926251904300.htm
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