Hurting culture with litigation
Nudity is not conflated with profanity in Indian cultural traditions. There is a long aesthetic tradition of depicting gods and goddesses in the nude
Maqbool Fida Husain, arguably among India’s finest artists, died in exile in 2011. He was forced to leave his homeland after hundreds of lawsuits were filed against him on charges of obscenity in his works and for hurting religious sentiments. But the targeting of Husain hasn’t ceased even after his demise, as is evident from the plea filed in a Delhi local court that two of his works that were on view in a private art gallery as part of a December exhibition, Husain: The Timeless Modernist, depicted Hindu deities in an “objectionable manner”. The court ordered that the two paintings be “seized”. Importantly, three months ago, the Bombay high court criticised the customs department for seizing the works of FN Souza and Akbar Padamsee, Husain’s contemporaries, on charges of depicting nudity. While describing the customs official’s action as perverse and unreasonable, judges MS Sonak and Jitendra Jain observed: “The Assistant Commissioner Customs has failed to appreciate that sex and obscenity are not always synonymous. Obscene material is that which deals with sex in a manner appealing to prurient interest”.

Nudity is not conflated with profanity in Indian cultural traditions. There is a long aesthetic tradition of depicting gods and goddesses in the nude — our temple sculpture provides ample evidence. There are living traditions that celebrate worshipping in the nude and invoking the beloved deity through sensuous poetry. It is the colonial gaze, shaped by ideas of Victorian morality, that institutionalised the identification of the sensuous and the nude as vulgar and obscene, which seems to be inspiring some to take offence at art that draws inspiration from the aesthetic inheritance of Indic cultural practices. The hurt-sentiment brigade, which justifies bigotry in the name of faith and tradition, has a history of targeting not just artists, but also writers and scholars using legal instruments, even physical violence. It threatens constitutional rights such as the freedom of speech and expression.
Husain, who has worked with the Ramayana and Mahabharata traditions on the advice of socialist leader Rammanohar Lohia, is hardly disrespectful to his subjects in his works. In any case, art is not to be judged by the uninitiated, even when the themes are religious. The targeting of modernist art — in galleries and even university classrooms — has been a favourite act of aesthetically challenged activists, who take special pride in disrupting exhibitions and harassing artists, gallerists, and art students. For a country that is building an art economy through fairs, exhibitions, biennales and so on, the loss, aesthetic and economic, will be immeasurable and lasting.
