Indian art nets record prices even as its makers suffer threats to their freedom of expression.
Salil Tripathi
Published 04 June 2007
A year ago, a group of Hindu activists attacked two paintings by Maqbool Fida Husain, India's best-known painter. The artist, now aged 91, had offended their sensibilities by drawing Hindu goddesses in the nude. Judging the zeitgeist - the attack happened during the time of the dispute about the Danish Muhammad cartoons - the organisers hastily closed the exhibition. It was not the first attack on Husain's work; for nearly a decade, he has borne the brunt of Hindu nationalists' anger. Today he lives in self-imposed exile, dividing his time between Dubai and London. What was unusual about this particular act of mob censorship and vandalism, however, was that it occurred in the heart of central London, at Asia House.
A sale at Bonhams and Asia House this month will include 85 works by major Indian artists, including Husain. The profits from "Art for Freedom" will go towards another champion of freedom of expression, the Indian weekly newspaper Tehelka, which is backed by such luminaries as V S Naipaul and Arundhati Roy, and for which I also write. Since its launch in 2000, the publi cation has used investigative guile, outright subterfuge and spycam techniques to break several stories in India - betting scandals in international cricket, corruption in defence deals and, most recently, unlawful killings of Muslims in Gujarat. The paper was closed down by the government after breaking a story on corruption, only to relaunch in 2004. Appropriately, the word tehelka means sensation.
The defence of free speech seems particularly important this year, as India marks the 60th anniversary of her independence. The country has surprised cynics and sceptics by remaining true to constitutional parliamentary democracy (except for an interruption of 21 months in the mid-1970s when Indira Gandhi imposed a national emergency). On paper, and often in practice, India's film-makers, writers and artists enjoy the kinds of freedom that their counterparts in the west take for granted but which, unfortunately, are far from the norm in the developing world.
In the past decade, however, activists of vir tually all faiths have objected vociferously to such freedom for artists. They have sought to get film screenings cancelled, scripts rewritten, exhibitions closed and books banned - and have often succeeded. The Indian state stands by, a passive spectator.
In the latest assault, on 9 May, Chandramohan Srilamantula, an award-winning final-year student in the prestigious Faculty of Fine Arts at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, was arrested on antiquated obscenity charges after a bunch of Hindu agitators, joined by a number of Christians, protested against the works he was displaying on campus. His paintings included a nude deity giving birth (inspired by Lajja Gauri, an image from Hindu iconography that dates back to the beginning of time) and a crucifix shaped like a penis with a commode beneath. The university's dean supported Chandramohan, so the cowardly administrators suspended the dean and declined to help the artist. A higher court released the artist five days later, with some restrictions placed on his movements.
M F Husain has not been arrested yet, but early last month a court tried (unsuccessfully) to attack his Indian property. Husain has more than 1,200 cases pending against him all over India for having painted various Hindu gods - the elephant-headed Ganesh, the goddess of learning, Saraswati, the monkey-god Hanuman, Rama's wife, Sita, and assorted others including the secular deity Mother India - in the nude. Hindu nationalists are particularly upset with him because he is a Muslim and, in many ways, a symbol of secular India. They question why he does not paint the Prophet's wives in the nude - as if artists had to cater to every faith.
One could argue that Husain is not a radical. He has, in fact, been criticised as a sarkari (pro-government) artist, as he often documents national achievements in didactic, sentimental paintings. Yet he has also created breathtakingly energetic canvases with firm brushstrokes, using vivid colours and encapsulating a complex reality with a uniquely Indian vision. By painting Hindu goddesses in the nude, Husain is not challenging the conventions of Indian art; he is imitating its millennium-old tradition of seeing the gods as uncovered and pure, and by striving towards formlessness. He is not alone in this: as the other canvases on display in London show, nudity is commonplace in Indian art.
In the colonial era, as Victorian morality seeped into the thinking of administrators and sections of India's elite, Indian art became realistic, dull and derivative. It took the boldness of Amrita Sher-Gil - a fiery, Indo-Hungarian painter who inspired the Aurora Zogoiby character in Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh - to forge a national artistic identity by drawing on the legacy of cave paintings and miniatures.
At independence, Husain was one of six painters who formed the Progressive Artists' Group in Mumbai, which aimed to cultivate a modern Indian sensibility. The other founder members of the group were Krishnaji Howlaji Ara, Francis Newton Souza, Syed Haider Raza, Sadanand Bakre and Hari Ambadas Gade. They created large canvases covered in confident brushstrokes, drawing on traditions but conveying a contemporary reality. Souza's and Ara's nudes shocked viewers in their time; Raza drew inspiration from the precise geometry of tantric art; and Husain revelled in painting horses. Among the works being shown at Bonhams are examples of the pale subtlety of Jehangir Sabavala, the neo-realism of Yusuf Arakkal, the photomontages of Vivan Sundaram (Sher-Gil's nephew), the subtle humour of Atul Dodiya and the fluid grace of Jogen Chowdhury.
Today, Indian art commands prices that were unheard-of even three years ago: Tyeb Mehta's Mahishasura fetched more than $1.5m at auction at Christie's in 2005; the following year a Sher-Gil canvas called Village Scene was sold for $1.6m. In the past year, the Indian art market has grown in size from $52m to $150m. With a burgeoning middle class at home and a prosperous diaspora scattered all over the world, Indian painters have a large market. Not that it is confined to those of Indian descent - the American collectors Davida and Chester Herwitz inspired German bankers and Swiss investors to buy Indian art.
A thousand-year-old tradition is a heavy burden to carry. Indian artists have an inheritance of medieval miniatures, folk art and work by the anonymous craftspeople and sculptors who carved ancient erotic masterpieces and the sublime Taj Mahal. Contemporary artists are able to emerge from a similar anonymity because they have a story to tell. It is the story of an unfettered India that is syncretic and modern, inclusive and vibrant. Sure, some within India are threatened by such art. But that is the whole point.
"Art for Freedom" previews at Asia House, London W1, until 6 June. Auctions at Bonhams, London W1, on 7 June and Asia House on 11 June. http://www.asiahouse.org and http://www.bonhams.com
Maqbool Fida Husain will paint a canvas together with the Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan live at Bonhams on 7 June
For info on "Art for Freedom" and other Tehelka projects visit: http://www.criticalfutures.org
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