THE FUNDAMENTALISTS RETURNED to their favourite cultural pursuit last week:
M F Husain-bashing
(Indian Express is a Fanatically liberalist Newspaper that is forever seeking to Curb the now rising Hindu Voice against the perversive depictions of Holy Symbols and Deities in art! HJS has not only bashed Husain but will make it a point to see that when he returns to India he is also dashed behind the bars while the Indian Express’s pervert Editors keep gritting their teeth in despair.)
Outside auction house Saffronart’s Prabhadevi office in central Mumbai, some 50 rabble-rousers belonging to the Hindu Janja-gruti Samiti shouted out the 91-year-old painter for his depictions of Hindu gods, an echo of their protest over the artist’s painting Bharatmata, earlier this year.
(By calling selfless activists of Hindu Janajagruti Samiti, the representatives of Hindu Community as rabble rousers, Indian Express has insulted the entire Hindu Community. Express Group of Newspapers should apologize for insulting the Hindu Community and commoners in this way. Hindu Janajagruti Samiti will permanently remember this accusation by Indian Express and at the right time will being a mass campaign against such anti-Hindu newspapers and reduce their readers. Hindu Janajagruti Samiti and Hindus as a community have no concern at all, if Husain in his artistic frenzy draws a naked picture of Madhuri Dikshit or even his own mother or even Prophet Mohammed,(which he has never done and wont ever do). The question arises only when he paints Holy Symbols of Hinduism. Every Hindu has the right to protest against such abusive artwork if he so desires.) So the basic rule is, you leave us alone and we will leave you alone!
The controversial piece, which was taken off from Apparao Gallery’s New Delhi auction in February, shows the nude figure of a reclining woman that takes on the shape of India, with her rippling hair forming the Himalayas in the north and her bent knees the Dec-can peninsula. To Hindu rightists, por-traying Mother India without any clothes on amounted to blasphemy.
Husain has been here before. Some years ago, his canvas of Saraswati in the nude was burned by the Bajrang Dal in Ahmedabad, and his Sita Res-cued enraged Hindutvavadis enough to go and ransack the painter’s apart-ment in Mumbai. Yet, ironically, Hu-sain’s iconic paintings of themes from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and his explorations of their inherent conflicts enjoy mass popularity.
(Unfortunately, he has been permanently tarred now. Another revelation by God to Indian Express Editors! A Handful of insane Sex perverts buying the crap at Million Dollars does not give mass popularity to his Paintings. Rather Husain has been notorious since the last 10 years since the Hindu Voice has become increasingly defeaning, so that Indian Express has heard it and responded by giving a rat-squeak in the form of this article!)
He undertook to paint them in 1968 after socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia told him
that he ‘paints for the Tatas and the Birlas and not for the vil-lagers’. But Husain is hardly the only artist who has earned the displeasure of India’s self-appointed moral police.
OBJECTION : The words "Self Appointed Moral Police". Does Indian Express mean to say that only the Moral Police appointed by them would be the rightful Moral Police ? Or Does it imply that there should be no Moral Police ? Now Policing is when you force others to stop something which has no connection with you. In this case the connection is with the National Pride of India. Now again it is not a wonder that only Indian Express can be Shameless enough to assume that a person has no concern with the pride of his own country. The Newspaper is after all a reflection of its Editor’s thoughts. The Indian Express should give a contract to Husain to draw a Naked Painting of The Chief Editor’s mother or Wife and Publish the painting on its first page! Again, Hindu Janajagruti Samiti is not a bunch of idle road-mongers or stupid jobless reporters or Sex Pervert Editors to take up this task! It is not self-appointed but the appointment to HJS has been given by Saints in the Society.
Akbar Padamsee had been a target of the ‘righteous’ more than half a century ago. In 1954, the Mumbai-based painter’s work Lovers came un-der the scanner for obscenity. A po-liceman walked into his exhibition at the Jehangir Art Gallery and an-nounced that ‘a higher-up in the home ministry’, then headed by Morarji Desai, wanted it removed.
In the court battle that ensued, Padamsee won, but it brought to the fore the question of artistic freedom and contradictions in howwe view nu-dity in art and popular culture. Even though nudity in Indian art dates back to the Indus Valley civilisation, the study of the nude as an ob-served reality is as recent as the late 19th century.
Foundations of this were laid in the art schools at Madras, Calcutta and Bombay between 1850 and 1857. In response to demand for European-style paintings from the growing class of ur- ban gentry, a subject called Represen-tation of Visually Observed Data was introduced and sitting models be-came a tool of learning for art stu-dents.
‘TheIndiantradition lays down the ideals and form of how a human anatomy should be painted, but there are no records of people actually pos-ing for paintings’, says art historian Tapati Guha Thakurta. While painting the nude was a standard practice and many painters in pre-Independence India, like Mukul Dey and Hemendra Mazumdar, started their career paint-ing live models, Paris-trained Amrita Sher-Gil was perhaps the first Indian artist tomakeexplicit nudes.
But it was after Independence that artists began to break away from tradi-tion. If drawing nude women and cop-ulating couples was a way for FrancisNewton Souza, brought up in strict Catholic tradition, to break away from the rigid moulds of society, Krishnaji Howlaji Ara’s big and shy
nudes largely faced away from the viewer. Nudes have always been the basis of understanding the inflections and colours of nature.
Says Jehangir Sabavala, who worked extensively on nudes before moving to make abstract landscapes with glassy surfaces: ‘Unless one learns to handle the light and muscle structure of a human body, one can’t paint a landscape. It is only through this knowledge that one can transform the human figure into flights of imagi-nation.’ And how artists choose to in-terpret it depends on their artistic temperament.
(More than how Artists interpret it, what is more important is how the Society interprets it. You may draw an apple and label it as Orange. That makes no difference to an onlooker. After all the Artists too live the same Society. What would Artists like Padamsee do without a social life ? and What would Indian Express as a newspaper do without a Society ? )
The response to the interpretation also seems to depend now on the tem-perament of the moral police.
(Again Moral Police !!! If Hindu Janajagruti Samiti is a Moral Police then Indian Express can be termed as Nudity Guards!)
