(The Financial Times
December 12 2006 18:38 | Last updated: December 12 2006 18:38)
RETURNING INDIAN PAINTER TO FACE FURY OF HINDUS
By Jo Johnson in New Delhi
India’s most celebrated living artist – and bete noire of Hindu nationalists – will next month return from voluntary exile to face obscenity charges in a case that has divided the country.
Much of liberal India is appalled at the prospect of the criminal prosecution of M.F. Husain, a frail 91-year-old. But Hindu fundamentalist groups are adamant that the Muslim painter must answer for “insulting” depictions of deities.
“Husain is a perfect example of a gentle man of love and creativity becoming a target for religious football,” said Neville Tuli, chairman of Osian’s, a Mumbai auction house that has sold some of his massive works.
The persecution of one of the most visible symbols of secular India has embarrassed the coalition government led by the Congress party, which sees itself as the traditional defender of religious minorities against discrimination at the hands of the Hindu majority.
The white-haired painter left India in March to live what he has described as the life of an “international gypsy”. Interviewed recently in Dubai by an Indian newspaper, Mr Husain confessed to being “extremely homesick” for Mumbai.
“I long to walk through the streets of Grant Road and Byculla where I have spent some of the best years of my life,” said Mr Husain, who has been moving between London, Dubai, Melbourne and New York.
Works by the star of the Progressive Artists’ Group have been commanding seven-figure sums. A Husain sold last year for $2m (£1.02m) in a private sale in London, trumping the $1.58m fetched weeks earlier by his Mumbai contemporary, Tyeb Mehta, at Christie’s in New York.
In a ruling on December 4, the Supreme Court described the cases against Mr Husain as “proper and just” and ordered four separate cases filed in Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat states to be consolidated into a single trial in New Delhi.
All four cases had been brought by individuals under public interest provisions and claimed that the artist’s work was “obscene”, breached the Indian penal code and created “enmity between different religious groups”. They focused on one painting, “Bharat Mata”, portraying Mother India as a naked woman. It is the latest of many Husain paintings over the years to have provoked anger by showing revered Hindu female deities in the nude.
“This is a work of art; he’s just expressed himself,” said Bina Madhavan, an advocate representing Mr Husain.
In May an exhibition of Mr Husain’s work at London’s Asia House closed after canvases were vandalised.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
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