PAINTER IN EXILE TESTS INDIA'S DEMOCRATIC IDEALS !

by SOMINI SENGUPTA

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Maqbool Fida Husain, India’s most famous painter, is afraid to go home.


Mr. Husain is a Muslim who is fond of painting Hindu goddesses, sometimes portraying them nude. That obsession has earned him the ire of a small but organized cadre of Hindu nationalists. They have attacked galleries that exhibit his work, accused him in court of “promoting enmity” among faiths and, on one occasion, offered an $11 million reward for his head.

In September, the country’s highest court offered him an unexpected reprieve, dismissing one of the cases against him with the blunt reminder that Hindu iconography, including ancient temples, is replete with nudity. Still, the artist, 93 and increasingly frail, is not taking any chances. For two years, he has lived here in self-imposed exile, amid opulently sterile skyscrapers. He intends to remain, at least for now. “They can put me in a jungle,” Mr. Husain said gamely. “Still, I can create.”

Freedom of expression has frequently, and by some accounts, increasingly, come under fire in India, as the country tries to balance the dictates of its secular democracy with the easily inflamed religious and ethnic passions of its multitudes.

The result is a strange anomaly in a nation known for its vibrant, freewheeling political culture. The government is compelled to ensure respect for India’s diversity and at the same time prevent one group from pouncing on another for a perceived offense. Ramachandra Guha, a historian, calls it “perhaps the fundamental challenge of governance in India.”

The rise of an intense brand of identity politics, with India’s many communities mobilizing for political power, has intensified the problem. An accusation that a piece of art or writing is offensive is an easy way to whip up the sentiments of a particular caste, faith or tribe, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, an Indian political scientist, points out. He calls it “offense mongering.”

There have been isolated episodes of violence, and many more threats, often prompting the government to invoke British-era laws that allow it to ban works of art and literature. India was among the first countries to ban Salman Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses.”

In March, Taslima Nasreen, a Bangladeshi novelist living in exile in the Communist-controlled state of West Bengal, was forced to leave for several months after a Muslim political party objected to her work.

Meanwhile, in the western state of Gujarat, controlled by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, a political psychologist, Ashis Nandy, was charged with “promoting enmity between different groups.” His offense was to write an opinion article in The Times of India criticizing the victory of the Hindu nationalists in state elections; the case is pending.

“That politics has gotten out of hand,” Mr. Mehta, the political scientist, argued. “It puts liberal democracy at risk. If we want social stability we need a consensus on what our freedoms are.”

Even threats of violence from offended parties are a powerful deterrent. In Mumbai, formerly Bombay, where Mr. Husain lived for most of his life, a recent exhibition on Indian masters did not include his work. Nor did India’s first modern art fair, held in New Delhi in August. The same week in the same city, a small show featuring reproductions of Mr. Husain’s work was vandalized.

Of Mr. Husain’s exceptionally large body of work — at least 20,000 pieces, he guesses — there are three that have angered his foes. Two are highly stylized pencil drawings of Durga, the mother goddess, and Saraswati, the goddess of the arts, both faceless and nude. The third is a map of India rendered as a female nude, her head in the Himalayas, a breast jutting out into the Arabian Sea. Mr. Husain insists that nudity symbolizes purity. He has repeatedly said that he had not meant to offend any faith. But one of his paintings, showing a donkey — to the artist, a symbol of nonviolence — at Mecca, created a ruckus among his fellow Muslims.


Harsh Goenka, a Mumbai-based industrialist and one of the country’s most important collectors, has a similar Husain nude, an oil painting of the goddess Saraswati. As “an average normal Hindu,” he says he is appalled that Mr. Husain is not safe in his country.

“Keeping him away is, in a way, showing the weakness of the system, that we cannot protect the rights of the citizen,” Mr. Goenka said. “If he has done a crime, punish him. If he hasn’t, let him live here with dignity and peace of mind.”

Mr. Husain calls the current Congress Party-led government too weak-kneed to offer him protection from those who might harm him. Mostly, though, he cautions against making too much of his case. India, he insists, is fundamentally “tolerant.”

Not least, he said, he has always been a vagabond, sleeping on the Mumbai streets during his impoverished youth, wandering through Europe to study Rembrandt, or bouncing, as he does now, among several lavish apartments and villas here in Dubai — or rather, cruising among them, in one of his five costly thrill machines, including a lipstick-red Ferrari, his current favorite. Mr. Husain is India’s best-paid artist. Last March, at a Christie’s auction, his “Battle of Ganga and Jamuna,” part of a 27-canvas series on the Mahabharata, the Hindu epic, fetched $1.6 million.

“I am working, it’s O.K.,” he said. “If things get all right, I’ll go. If they don’t, so be it. What can I do?”

And then he quoted the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, a Pakistani who went into exile in the late 1970s during President Muhammad Zia ul-Haq’s regime and who wrote about missing the animosity of his enemies as much as the affection of friends. “Of course,” he conceded, “the heart is there.”

On the morning of Id al-Fitr, Islam’s holiest day, Mr. Husain sat in the back seat of his Bentley as it whizzed past a row of construction sites, taking calls from Mumbai on his new iPhone.

Back home on the same day, his granddaughter Rakshanda was getting engaged. It was the first major family function he had missed since his exile. “Such an auspicious day,” he murmured. “Anyway, we will have a ceremony here again.”

In Mumbai, it had been his custom to host an annual Id al-Fitr breakfast for his community, a Shiite subsect that calls itself Suleimanis. This morning, he hosted one here, too, at a community hall with steaming plates of mutton and flatbread. A stream of people came to pay their respects, taking his gnarled right hand, placing it above their eyes, one after the other, then to their lips. Mr. Husain, a master of flamboyance, stood beaming in a green silk jacket embroidered with motifs from his paintings, including several voluptuous, scantily clad women.

He is now working on two ambitious series: one on Indian civilization, to be mounted in London, the second on Arab civilization, which will be exhibited in Qatar.

Here in Dubai, he is at work on a whimsical installation titled “Form Meets Function,” which will incorporate his five luxury cars, including a sound piece he intends to create using their engines.

At sundown, he climbed into the passenger seat of the Ferrari, pounded the dashboard and instructed his driver to hit the gas pedal. The engine revved, and he squealed in delight. He said he had stopped driving several years ago, after cataract surgery.

He does not have a studio in Dubai. There are easels in each of the homes he has bought for his extended clan. He spends a night here, a night there.

One of them is an 11th-floor apartment with spectacular, south-facing views of jagged skyscrapers under construction. It is filled with dozens of small canvases from the 1950s that he had given to a Czech woman he had once intended to marry, though she turned him down.

She found him recently and returned his paintings. “They belong to India,” she told him.

This afternoon, recalling the story, Mr. Husain said he would eventually have to take them home. “Temporarily,” he mused, “they are here.”