You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom. Nick Cohen
the Indian republic has existed, and tried to tie its present to its past through his work. Until he was close to eighty, the suggestion that he had no right to include himself as a part of the Indian cultural tradition because he was from a Muslim family would have struck him and all who admired him as inexplicable. As would the notion that there was anything offensive about his nudes.
You only have to visit the Lakshmana temple at Khajuraho to see the erotic strain in Indian culture. The presence of naked gods and goddesses tells visitors that they are far from the taboos of the Abrahamic religions. Hinduism bears partial responsibility for the many crimes of the caste system, but its admirers defend it by saying that because it has no prophet or pope, it has room for those who believe in thousands of gods or none. ‘You can cover up your goddess in the finest silk and jewellery,’ wrote a sympathetic observer. ‘Or you can watch her naked. You can look at the beauty of her face and admire the divinity of her halo, a sari wrapped around her, and her face made up like a Bollywood queen. Or you can see her with ample breasts heaving, her luscious lips parted seductively carved, her thighs wrapped in supreme sexual ecstasy around an athletic god or even goddess – carved for eternity on the walls of a Hindu temple … At least that’s the theory, and it has been the practice in large parts of India for thousands of years.’ The sculptors of the Tantric and Shaktic traditions openly celebrated eroticism. Others placed erotic carvings on the outer walls of temples – not to excite visitors, but as a reminder that they should leave their desires behind before they entered. More often, artists used nudity in religious painting and sculpture to symbolise purity. Their work carried no more sexual charge than the nudity of the sadhus who wade into the Ganges at Kumb Mela.
Husain’s sketch of Saraswati, the goddess of learning, did not compare with temple carvings of goddesses wrapping their thighs around gods. You could not even call the drawing a fully realised nude. Saraswati sits cross-legged beside a lute, holding a lotus flower above her head. There is nothing erotic – let alone pornographic – about his stylised white-on-black sketch in which only the contours of the body are evident. Husain’s goddess is pure to the point of being ethereal. He drew her in the mid-1970s. No one complained. In 1996, a Bombay art critic included the sketch in a book on Husain. A writer on a sectarian Hindu monthly picked up a copy, saw the line drawing of Saraswati, and decided to create a scandal out of nothing.
‘M.F. Husain an Artist or a Butcher?’ ran the headline above an article accusing the artist of insulting Hindus. The provocateur had picked the right time to start a culture war. By the 1990s, religious parties and sectarian militias had infested the supposedly secular Indian state. They wanted to – they needed to – inflame their supporters. If they could not find real offences, they were happy to manufacture them.
Shiv Sena, a thuggish bunch of rabble-rousers, dominated Husain’s Bombay. They saw a copy of the article, and instructed the police to file charges. Three days later, Hindu activists stormed a gallery showing his work and trashed his paintings. Husain’s enemies had thrown him into the self-pitying and vicious world of Hindu sectarianism, whose malignancies the West should treat as a warning.
Identity politics contains a trap. Of all the reasons to be wary of religious leaders asking the state to suspend freedom of speech to spare their tender feelings, not the smallest is that selective censorship leaves liberals with no argument against sectarians from the dominant denomination or ethnic group. The Indian version of identity politics has led to the majority – or demagogues claiming to represent the majority – behaving as if it were a persecuted minority. The various Hindu sectarian parties complained that the state gave special treatment to the descendants of India’s former Muslim masters. Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress government banned The Satanic Verses to please Muslim sentiment. It agreed to exempt Muslim men from paying the alimony to divorced wives the secular law demanded, while not allowing Hindu men to benefit from the cheap rate authorised by Sharia. Look, cried the Hindu sectarians, look at how the elite panders to the minority while penalising the majority.
The worst thing one could say about the Hindu nationalist charges was that they were true. By departing from equality before the law, Gandhi had left India with no argument against sectarianism, in whatever form it came. Hindu nationalists saw an opening, and poured through it. They told the mass of Indians that they remained the victims not just of their former Muslim conquerors, but of the former British conquerors too. The Raj’s final imposition on India was to indoctrinate Nehru and his anglicised, British-educated contemporaries with alien democratic and secular ideas. Like militant Islamists and so many pseudo-leftist Western academics, Hindu nationalists damned human rights, including the right to free expression, as colonial impositions.
Bal Thackeray, Shiv Sena’s leader, showed where the rejection of secularism led in one of his many declarations of admiration for that ultimate cultural relativist, Adolf Hitler. Thackeray announced that Hindus must ‘shake off their stupor’ and consider protecting their civilisation and culture. ‘If telling it like it is makes one a Nazi, I say: Fine, better that than the spineless, deaf, dumb, numb and blind state exalted as Nehruvian secularism. I wouldn’t even spit on it.’ Thackeray and the many politicians like him said that Hindus were put upon and cozened. To end the injustice they must free themselves from their former Muslim and British oppressors and become a force the world must reckon with. Hence the destruction in December 1992 of the Ayodhya mosque, allegedly built by the conquering Mughals in the sixteenth century on the site of a Hindu temple, and the slaughter of thousands in the communal riots that followed. Hence the threats to the lives of historians who said that India had always been an amalgam of cultures, religions and ethnicities, and that some Hindu princes had been as keen on sacking Hindu temples as the Mughal invaders were. And hence the campaign to persecute Husain, who, as a supporter of Nehru’s ideals and a Muslim to boot, was their perfect target.
As soon as Shiv Sena filed lawsuits against him, Husain had to cancel his planned attendance at a commemoration in the city of the achievements of the Progressive Artists’ Group. If he had come, the police would have arrested him for ‘disturbing communal harmony’ – and there was a chance a religious mob might have killed him too. A group of young artists unfurled a banner at the party reading ‘Husain, we miss you’, but other guests were unimpressed when a Western collector insisted that they speak out on Husain’s behalf. ‘Why doesn’t he understand?’ said an artist’s husband. ‘This is like asking us to speak out in Berlin in 1936.’
As so often, the Hitler comparison was an exaggeration, although given Thackeray’s pronouncements, you can see why the man reached for it. Fanatics threatened Husain and all associated with him with violence. They destroyed his paintings at every opportunity. When a TV network asked its viewers whether Husain should receive India’s highest honour, religious yobs stormed the studios. In 1998, militants attacked Husain’s Bombay home and wrecked it. Thackeray justified them and identified with them. ‘If Husain can step into Hindustan, what is wrong if we enter his house?’ he said as he redefined secular, multi-cultural India into mono-cultural ‘Hindustan’, and made Husain an enemy alien in his own city.
The logic of retaliatory sectarianism dictated that when Islamists offered a reward to anyone who would kill Danish cartoonists who had offended them, Hindu nationalist politicians offered a reward to ‘patriots’ who would chop off Husain’s hands.
A dirty mind is a perpetual feast, and once they started looking for reasons to be offended, sectarians found them everywhere. Husain painted a nude woman whose body curved around a map of India. His persecutors denounced it as pornographic, and claimed he was insulting Bharatmata (Mother India). In truth, Husain had painted a severe work because it was his contribution to a charitable campaign to raise money for the victims of the civil war in Kashmir, and the cause demanded restraint. As might have been expected, the fact that the aid was going to Muslim Kashmiris made his opponents angrier still.
When they had finished with what he had painted, Husain’s enemies questioned him about the subjects he had never painted. Why did he not paint Muhammad? Why did he paint nudes of Indian goddesses, but not of the Prophet’s favourite wife Aisha? On the Web, they contrasted his abstract nudes of gods and goddesses with his fully clothed portraits of his wife and daughter, and of the Prophet Muhammad’s daughter Fatima. ‘Husain depicts the deity or person he hates as naked. He shows Prophet’s