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print versionThe Observer, Sunday 12 June 2011
What price freedom of expression now?
by Nick Cohen
The BBC marked the death of MF Husain last Thursday by giving a Mayfair gallery curator a 30-second soundbite to describe one of the best artists of our time. She did her best. But everything jarred about her picture of a "pop star" painter with "an eye for publicity", whose life prefigured today’s artists who "have allied their work with celebrity".
Husain certainly loved movie stars. He painted cinema billboards when he was a young man in 1930s Bombay and retained an appreciative eye for Bollywood actresses for the rest of his life. He paid no regard to the barriers between high and low culture or any other dividing lines. Along with his contemporaries in the progressive artists’ movement of the 1940s, he greeted Nehru’s declaration of Indian independence by promising to combine the traditions of Indian art with the western avant garde – and succeeded brilliantly in a career that flourished until the end. In the widest possible meaning of the term, Husain was a "pop artist". No one who saw him leave his London flat behind the Royal Academy doubted that he was a showman as well. He would stride out, barefoot or in socks whatever the weather, carrying an oversize paint brush just to make sure the curious could guess his line of work.
The false note in the mini-obituary was the implication that Husain was a forerunner of Damien Hirst – a stuntman who pretended to be shocking to an audience which pretended to be shocked. The shock value in Husain’s career lay solely in the shocking treatment he received at the hands of India’s Hindu nationalist extremists and the shocking complicity of the Indian state in the fanatics’ harassment. His story deserves more than a brief mention because it is a lesson to those who believe that limiting freedom of speech can bring peace to multicultural societies.
Hindu nationalists accused Husain of being a pornographer and blasphemer. They wrecked galleries that showed his work, ransacked his home in Mumbai and threatened him with prosecution for one reason only: that he was born into a Muslim family almost 100 years ago. The campaign, which ended so miserably when Husain died in exile in London last week, had no rational cause beyond the need of Hindu extremists to keep their followers in a politically useful state of rolling sectarian rage.
The works that led to the phony war against him were nude pictures of Hindu goddesses that no serious observer could find offensive. Husain was an Indian, not a "Muslim", artist who wove all of India’s religious ideas into his art. Eroticism is a part of several Indian artistic traditions, as wide-eyed visitors who gaze on lustful gods and goddesses at Lakshmana know, as is the use of nudity as a symbol of purity. If the most sex-starved readers were to google Husain’s sketch of Saraswati, the goddess of learning, they would find nothing erotic, let alone pornographic, about the stylised, white-on-black drawing which his enemies were to denigrate with such venom.
Tellingly, there were no protests when he drew it in the 1970s. The attacks on him did not begin until the 1990s when, searching around for a new way to infuriate its supporters, the fascistic Shiv Sena movement in Mumbai decided to create a scandal about the sketch and threaten Husain and everyone associated with him. The Muslim religious right had persuaded the state to ban The Satanic Verses, the work of Salman Rushdie, India’s greatest novelist, so the Hindu religious right was determined that the state should punish India’s greatest painter.
The law was happy to egg them on. While America’s founders wisely protected freedoms of speech, the press and religious conscience with the first amendment in 1791, India’s founders kept and expanded the censorship laws of the British empire in 1947. They included in the Indian penal code the crimes of "insulting religion" and threatening "the maintenance of harmony" because they believed that censorship could promote national unity, as many politically correct European politicians and bureaucrats believe today. Instead of harmony, the law has allowed communalists to declare endless culture wars.
Husain had to flee abroad. Along with the threat of personal attacks, he faced years of court proceedings as his enemies initiated hundreds of actions against him. In one of his last interviews, he said with a quiet sadness that should shame India: "I have not intended to denigrate or hurt the beliefs of anyone through my art. I only give expression to the instincts from my soul. India is my motherland. But the political leadership, artists and intellectuals kept silent when Sangh Parivar [Hindu nationalist] forces attacked me. How can I live there in such a situation?"
The British can feel proud that he found a sanctuary here. But not too proud. In the obituaries for Husain, one could detect a certain tension. Here was a magnificent artist of global stature and yet his obituarists felt the need to explain who exactly he was.
But British ignorance was not only the result of cultural parochialism. In 2006, Hindu nationalists forced the closure of a Husain exhibition in London. The response to the attack on artistic freedom in a city that boasts of being one of the world’s cultural capitals told you all you needed to know about the spread of the reactionary dogma that society must "respect" any religious group that can claim offence and threaten violence. There was no response. The national media carried barely a word of protest.
The best tribute Britain could give Husain would be for the Royal Academy to organise a major retrospective of his art and include in the exhibition the supposedly offensive works, so viewers can realise how confected the charges of his accusers were. For that to happen, the police would need to break with precedent and promise to protect freedom of expression from its enemies. Politicians and cultural commentators would need to go further and find the courage to spit out a commitment to a simple principle: in free societies, artists have the right to paint what they damn well want and citizens have the right to look at what they damn well want.
