Colour of shame

Many accusations have been hurled at MF Husain, especially in the recent past. The latest one suggests that he has done something reprehensible by accepting Qatar citizenship. This would be laughable if it weren’t so outrageous. All you have to do is to look at what’s happened in the last 15 years.

Yes, it’s been that long: for a decade and half, India’s one time icon has been hounded by Hindu right wing organisations for one reason or another. His museum in Ahmedabad had been vandalised, cases have been launched against him for ‘obscenity’ in every possible part of the country (at the last count the number  was 900) and galleries which wanted to exhibit his work have been threatened. So much so that even the India Art Summit in Delhi had to withdraw his canvases.

In short it has been made impossible for him to work in this country. What is he expected to do? Fight for his right to work in a country which refuses to protect him, and that too when he is 95? Some people have even criticized him for taking the citizenship of a non-democratic country. What would they have him do? Apply for asylum in a Western democracy? We should be grateful that he has been patriotic enough to spare our country that embarrassment.

Instead of criticising Husain, we should be looking at the core of the problem: Is there a tenable case against Maqbool Fida Husain? The answer can only be a swift ‘no’. This is not based on the freedom of expression argument, because we all know that freedom of expression is not absolute especially in a volatile, heterogeneous society like ours.

There’s no case first of all because Husain’s ‘nudes’ are strictly not nudes. As art critic Ranjit Hoskote points out in an essay on the painter, “he is not so much a painter as he is a single - minded celebrant of the line ….Colour has served him chiefly as an infill between his bold linear patterns, a connective glue smeared over his graphic strut work.”

Husain’s line — that strong, confident slash of the brush which is the essence of his work — is what you see in his painting of Saraswati. In this there isn’t even any infilling of colour; the flesh tones and voluptuous curves that would be the essence of a nude are entirely absent. This Saraswati isn’t a nude at all; it’s only an outline of a female form with no sensuous body parts, not hinting even remotely at eroticism.

As it happens, even if Husain had drawn a real nude, he would have only continued the tradition of artistic representation of our goddesses set centuries ago. For example there is the naked depiction of Saraswati in Mathura which dates to around 2nd century AD. Or the depiction of the goddess Lajja Gauri’s supine form in a birth-giving position. In a little known museum in Kerala, I was quite startled to see wall paintings showing Shiva with Parvati, his hand playfully on her bare breast. There were other paintings showing the birth of Rama and Lakshman, the mothers in squatting position and painted in graphic detail. Startling yes, vulgar or erotic decidedly no.

None of this is surprising. As art historian Rashmi Poddar points out, the origin of these is the Yakshi figure, the Nature Spirits who were the forerunners of our goddesses. In a predominantly agrarian society fertility and fecundity were worshipped and the mother figure with large breasts and broad hips represented fecundity in a near literal form. You could say that the right wing defenders of “purity” have forgotten our heritage; you could say it but you can’t simply because they didn’t know it in the first place.

Their idea of what our goddesses should look like comes from calendar art and the oleographs of Raja Ravi Verma which are not even a hundred years old. That is our heritage? Not only that, their inspiration doesn’t even come from our roots. As Hoskote points out, Raja Ravi Verma “modelled his Sitas and Draupadis on the over blown Graeco-Roman women beloved of Victorian history painters like Alma-Tadema”.

As to the often asked question why Husain didn’t paint figures from Islam, the answer is simple: Islam is an ascetic religion with severe strictures on the depiction of Allah or even of a perfect human form, whereas Hinduism is a joyful religion with its profusion of gods and goddesses for all occasions and its huge treasure trove of myths and stories. Which Indian artist would want to miss out on that as a source of inspiration?

This would apply especially to someone like Husain who is a barefoot painter in more ways than one: his work has always been instinctive rather than thoughtful, an extroverted and exuberant celebration of life rather than an introspective, ruminative meditation on existence.

For  Maqbool Fida Husain to be cut off from his country towards the end of his life is tragic; for India, to allow it to happen is nothing less than shameful.