Right To Be Offended

Salil Tripathi’s book provides a refreshing Hindu perspective in a bold and provocative new series

IN 2006, A group of Hindu activists attacked two of MF Husain’s paintings at an upscale art gallery, asserting that if Muslims could ban cartoons of Prophet Mohammed made by Danish artists, why couldn’t Hindus do the same with Husain’s art?

What was unusual about this act of vandalism was that the gallery was in central London, at Asia House near Oxford Circus, and the attack was carried out by a self-styled Hindu Forum in the UK that claims to speak for its 700,000 Hindus.

At the heart of the activists’ complaints against Husain’s art is that he paints Hindu deities without clothes. Such a complaint could have merit if nudity were an alien concept in Hindu art. But Husain is hardly a pioneer here; for millennia, Hindu divinities have appeared unclothed in art. When Husain depicts a Hindu deity in the nude, he is following an aspect of Hindu, or Indic, tradition; he is not insulting it or defying it. By challenging his art, his critics are going against the grain of Hindu tradition; they are acting as Hinduism’s moral Taliban.

Husain’s paintings aren’t meant to titillate; these are not classic, voluptuous human forms in the conventional Western sense. Rather, they elevate the body to an abstract realm, suggesting the formlessness of divinity. Hinduism has a concept, nirakara, describing just that.

Husain has apologised to those whose sentiments are hurt. Explaining his motives, he traced his art to India’s millennia-old heritage, where gods and goddesses are ‘pure and uncovered,’ as he puts it. Indian painters, he adds, are the ‘direct descendants of that golden era of great vision that transcends the mundane reality’ where the human form turns into a metaphorical structure.

That a Muslim artist in Hindu-dominated India can paint Hindu deities freely is something to celebrate. But some Hindus are seething over a peculiar injustice: Muslims command the world’s attention when they are offended by images they consider blasphemous — a concept alien in Hinduism — and they now want equal treatment. That is, they want the right to be offended.

What these activists forget is that the sacred and the profane have always coexisted in India. India gave the world Kama Sutra and millions of Hindus worship Shiva’s linga, or the phallus. As a faith, Hinduism is broad enough to include some sects that think that sex is the primary way to attain enlightenment, and understands that some ascetics are preaching abstinence when they roam around naked, their bodies smeared with ash.

As art historian Rita Banerji suggests, a good section of British colonisers and most Muslim rulers found the sexual sensibilities and ways of Indians to be unappealing and unaesthetic, besides appearing to be immoral. Many Muslim rulers adopted the shariah in the parts of India they ruled and imposed censorship on Hindu arts of this period. The British took that further, banning books, sanitising scriptures, branding as obscene certain forms of theatre, even sending the police to stop performances.

The behaviour of today’s Hindu nationalists mirrors the behaviour of the colonizers; if anything, it is Husain, and other artists, who are the true inheritors of that tradition. While what Husain paints may not be sacred, what the fanatics are doing is profane.