Pranay Gupte: The Barefoot Secularist
Al Arabiya, 09 June 2011
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Maqbool Fida Husain was arguably the leading proponent of secularism in a constitutionally secular country. (File photo)
By PRANAY GUPTE
Al Arabiya
The death in London Thursday of Maqbool Fida Husain, widely known as India’s Picasso, brings to an end a career that began on the bustling footpaths of Bombay as a painter of Bollywood billboards and became one that brought him great riches and critical acclaim globally.
They may have called him “Picasso,” but a better moniker would have been “Gandhi.”
It’s not as a creator of tens of thousands of paintings and sculptures alone that Husain will be missed. A devout Muslim, he was arguably the leading proponent of secularism in a constitutionally secular country where restive Hindu radicals would like nothing more than drive India’s Muslims away, or at least reduce them to the status of second-class citizens.
The only problem with that, Husain often told me in Dubai—where he lived in exile—was that a handful of malevolent Hindus would have to subjugate more than 200 million people, the second largest Muslim cohort in the world after Indonesia. Husain refused to believe that the majority of India’s billion Hindus subscribed to an ideology of sectarian segregation.
His belief in secularism was unshakable, and he paid a price for it. Hindu fundamentalists took umbrage at his paintings, which sometimes depicted nude Hindu goddesses. They besieged his home in Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay), they burned his art, they flamed him on dozens of ugly Web sites, they brought lawsuits against him, and they threatened him with bodily harm. They succeeded in driving him into exile in the Middle East.
Being away from his beloved motherland, away from an ancient land whose history and mythology animated his art, did not pain Husain as much as what he perceived as the dangerous descent of India into mindless communalism.
He frequently noted that he was more than 30 years old when the British Raj’s colonial rulers portioned Greater India into India—which opted to be secular—and Pakistan, which adopted an Islamic creed. As a mature adult, he witnessed the horrors of Partition, when Hindus fled Pakistan, and Muslims migrated to the new Islamic nation. Thousands died, and more thousands were displaced.
“I though that we had learned lessons from that tragedy,” Husain told me in one of our conversations earlier this year in Dubai. “But, of course, we didn’t.”
He did not bill himself as a secular artist who happened to be Muslim-born. With self deprecating humor, Husain would say that he was quite happy with being characterized as “eccentric.”
And that he was. He walked around barefoot. He wore clothes that were elegant but defied designation. And he loved fast cars, and the adoring women who piled on to him. He openly acknowledged his infatuation with Bollywood actresses, some of whom he painted in suggestive poses.
But it was his very eccentricity that agitated Hindu fundamentalists in India. Without quite defining what “wholesome art” should be, they felt that Husain’s sensibility was offensive to Hinduism. Not particularly conversant with art and its various schools, they assailed Husain’s cubism as a grotesque parody of Indian culture. They failed to acknowledge that Hinduism celebrates sensuality just as it does spirituality. They also failed to understand that a predicate of a democratic society is freedom of expression.
Husain refused to be straitjacketed by the Hindu thought police. Already in the 90s when they ratcheted up their campaign against him, he held out as long as he could. Then one day he left for Dubai.
Perhaps not surprisingly, few secular voices bemoaned his departure. Few decried the shameful treatment meted out to Husain. Charitably put, it could have been because India’s opinion shapers and decision makers may have had other issues on their mind. My own view is that Hindu radicals, through their relentless thuggery, have succeeded in suppressing dissent, for the most part. If they don’t like you, they beat you up, or worse.
I speak here as a Hindu-born secularist. I hadn’t been born when Husain witnessed the end of the Raj, enthralled by high hopes for an independent India. But like him, I really did not expect that things would turn out this way. Like Husain, I always thought that a secular society meant a tolerant society. I always thought that post-Independence Indians would have the courage to resist the blandishments of communalists.
Instead, they drove away Maqbool Fida Husain. So today I mourn not just him, but the India that might have been.
(Pranay Gupte’s “Mother India: A Political Biography of Indira Gandhi,” has just been issued in paperback by Penguin. His next book, “Dubai: The Journey,” will be published by Viking Penguin later this year. Mr. Gupte can be reached at: pranaygupte@gmail.com)
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