Art on trial

An exhibition of reproductions of M.F. Husains paintings and some photographs of the artist, organised by SAHMAT in New Delhi, was vandalised on August 24. Here, a destroyed photograph.-V.V. KRISHNAN

The attacks on M.F. Husains 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 Husains 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 Husains 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 Summits 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 Husains 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 Husains 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 Husains works should be displayed with police protection at the India Art Summit, too. The decision not to do so in effect ostracised Indias Picasso. Husains 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 Husains contribution to art, an event like the India Art Summit would not have taken place in Delhi.

The communal attack on Husains 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 Nehrus 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 Summits 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 Husains 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 ones 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 Husains case, he said, There are very few people with a gift to think out of the box and seize opportunities and therefore such peoples 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. Husains 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 Sothebys, 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 Husains 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 Rahmans 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 communitys 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 Francos Spain, Porfirio Diazs 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 Husains 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.