Maqbool Fida Husain

I’m not a connoisseur of art. I can call myself an fledgling art-enthusiast, someone who has peripheral but keen interest in art. With that meagre qualification, I can proclaim that I’m a fan of M F Husain. I have a print of one of his horse series paintings. Obviously a print as I can’t afford the original. His focus on the shapes of the objects and playing with colours rather than definitive figures to convey the theme always fascinated me. In his typical style of masking the face and blending the body parts reminded me of cubism. I consider him one of the most brilliant and astonishingly original artists to emerge from India. I held this belief long before his exile from India, long before his paintings sold for millions, long before he became the fan of Hum Apke Hain Kaun.

I had written a piece about his exile in this blog where I had expressed my belief strongly. Today, on the eve of his departure, news channels in India are spending hours of airspace in questioning whether India failed Husain. I think that’s unfair on two accounts.

Firstly, his life and death in exile is not the most important thing to talk about now. I believe there are plenty of qualified, renowned artists and critics who will be able to enlighten illiterates like me about the nuances of his paintings, his techniques and strokes that made Husain great. Nude goddesses were just one chapter in his long and illustrious career and leaving India was just one episode in his much longer, almost 100-year life. But unfortunately this episode ended up being his penultimate chapter which is still lingering fresh in the memories of the intellectual elite which is why it’s gaining prominence in his obituaries.

Secondly, India didn’t fail him. There’s very little the government could have done or anyone else could have done. But Hinduism failed him. Being the majority religion in India and having gained dominance in the post-reform era due to emergence of reactionary communal forces fuelled by the media-explosion, Hinduism began to show its ugly side that was hidden or unpublicised in the socialist era of 70s and 80s. In the 90s the hungry media needed stories, more importantly controversies to feed their 24x7 stream and Hinduism was ready to oblige. The communal forces were on the rampage and the majority Hindus turned either silent supporters or impotent observers. There were many casualties of this rampage. Sadly Husain turned out to be one of them.

Husain certainly enraged us through his Nude Goddesses series. But that’s what artists do. Or rather supposed to do. Those who titillate your ribald senses have a different name. Ai Weiwei enraged China, or rather he wanted to but ended up agitating the authorities and is now is languishing in prison. Husain fared only slightly better. There can be a rude justification for Weiwei that he lives in an authoritarian world where ‘Tianenmen’ is a four-letter word. There’s no justification for what we did to Husain. Hinduism celebrated the saints who dared to defy even the gods and sculpted copulative statues on the temple facádes.

Today the government is claiming, had he returned, it would have given protection to Husain. Nobody is in a mood laugh at such statements. But then this government, despite its participation in the silent supporter group, has little to blame. The blame lies with the Hindu fundamentalists. For it won’t be possible to bring up any future conversation about Husain without talking about his forced exile. And nude goddesses.

That will be the grievous insult to his memories.

Another Letter to Rahul

Dear Mr Gandhi

Hope you are doing well. I wrote you a letter a few weeks ago when an incident occurred that made you feel ashamed of being an Indian. Since people like me knew some bit of history, and we had been ashamed several times in the past, I wrote to appraise you that the incident concerning farmers of Noida was not the first such event. As it turned out, it wouldn’t be the last one either.

Just when your shamefulness seems to be waning, a contingent of police swooped down on a gathering of people peacefully protesting against an issue on which the present government has been doing, well nothing.

Black money is a very grey area for most of us in India and Swiss Bank accounts are something that we have heard only in the movies, where somehow within the span of two and half to three hours, the hero makes sure that the villain is punished and the monies recovered. So for decades, we’ve been made to feel good that the black money from Switzerland was being steadily extracted. By people like Amitabh Bacchan, Rajnikanth, Chiranjeevi, Anil Kapoor, and countless other heroes across India.

It is only recently that the curtains actually came down on the screen and we realised that we had been watching movies. The monies had not been recovered and were safe there and even piling up more. With scandals like 2G, it must be getting quite exhausting for politicians like you to even count the money made in the corporate and other deals. So many mines to be discovered across central and east India and so that many mining deals had to be signed and more tribals to be displaced and more ecology to be destroyed...

In such a busy political life, people actually have forgotten that somewhere between signing 2G or Bauxite deals, the American and European governments arm-twisted the Swiss government to pry open their secret accounts. Suddenly the shady accounts with billions of Indian money, made through countless robberies, became available for the Indian government’s scrutiny and even (partial) recovery. As an aside, please excuse me for using the word ‘robbery’. I was quite tempted to use some other word but since this is a pubic blog, I had to exercise self-censorship and restrain from using expletives. I’m sure you’ll understand.

Anyway, using the facility provided by the Swiss banks, countries such as US, Germany, etc., went ahead and got the names of the culprits and even recovered part of the stashed funds. What did India do? Nothing. Actually, that’s unfair. The Indian government actually went ahead and made a deal with the banks not to release the names of the account holders! I was a bit taken a back when I heard you say you were ashamed. Actually you were right. We all should be ashamed.

And then guess what happened? A Yoga guru, don’t ask me which one – there are thousands in India - but anyway, one such guru set out to launch Satyagraha to force our government to act on the black money issue. When I say a swami, don’t mistake him to be an ascetic. He is indeed worth millions and you know something? He is so powerful he cures cancer and even AIDS. Well, I wonder why the government has not introduced him to the WHO officials. Our ministers seem to be a bunch of slackers!

I digress again. Leave this guru’s powers aside. They are still not powerful enough to bring the robbed wealth back into the country. He still had to resort to decades’ old tool to make the government listen.

Here’s where it gets interesting: just stay with me a while. As soon as he announced the Satyagraha, the government lost even the semblance of bearings it had. Everybody, from central ministers to ordinary MPs kept talking in different tones and singing different tunes. They used their media cronies to frame allegations on the guru. They questioned his wealth. They questioned his stand on homosexuality, as if all other politicians are very firmly committed to gay rights. (by the way, what’s your view on that?) They tried every indirect weapon they had to circumvent the real issue and slander the swami. When nothing helped, as the ancient Indian principle suggests, when they failed on sama, dhana, and bedha, they took the dhanda.

Well literally. The police swooped down in the middle of the night as if they were raiding a terrorist hideout. Dozens of police (or were there hundreds?) descended on the grounds, woke up the sleeping swami and when the crowd protested, fired teargas at them. I know, you must be wondering that teargas is usually launched on rioting gangs. But what can I say? I never fully understood your anguish when you spoke about being ashamed. I’m a slow learner. Although the swami was safely escorted out of Delhi, many people were injured and as of now, one young woman is paralysed for life.

The tragedy didn’t stop there. Later on, the Congress leaders called various names to abuse the swami; the same person who was received by four central ministers and a cabinet secretary was being called a thug and a cheat. And Madam Sonia claimed she didn’t know about the raid. And what’s more, there’s going to be a CBI inquiry into the source of his yoga empire. And many Congress leaders have already started linking the swami with their favourite whipping boy, the RSS.

Well, what about the black money issue? You might ask. Exactly my point! Quite clever, did you say? Yes. Quite clever.

That’s exactly what Karunanidhi family must have thought two years ago when the central government buried the 2G issue.

Saints and Sinners

Christian theology has clear definitions for saints and sinners. There are even manual-like guidelines on how one could be categorised as a sinner or, through Vatican's beatification processes, a saint.

In the Indian mythological context, however, as with everything else, such definitions are murky. Many things described as sinful were committed by the gods and saints. Likewise, sinners too were claimed to possess saint-like qualities. So Raavan was a great devotional singer and his veena recitation lauded as divine-inspired. He was an exponent of all four Vedas and his meditational powers were unrivalled. On the contrary, Rama was a jealous, insecure and chauvinistic husband and Krishna was a scheming liar.

People have been quite accommodative of such saints (and sinners) for centuries. Apart from long flowing beard (the whiter the better) and saffron or white robes, any other definition of identifying a saint is quite complicated. So is Baba Ramdev a saint, a godman?

Many think that Baba Ramdev has suddenly woken up to the issues of society and some even accuse him of trying to play proxy to the opposition. Some claim that swamis don’t have a place in politics and they are best relegated to teaching yoga to ardent followers, or to people with plenty of money.

Baba Ramdev has been exhibiting interest in socio-political issues for quite a while. He had even founded an organisation called Bharat Swabhiman that promotes nationalist and democratic consciousness. Just like any Indian, he is not a perfect person, and considering he had reached only eighth standard and is a proclaimed-religious teacher, many of his world views are archaic and even regressive. But does it really matter?

In the middle of all these atavistic clamours, we forget something important. Baba Ramdev is a citizen of India who is initiating a Satyagraha for a very serious problem that has been plaguing India since Independence; the problem that’s sapping our nation of all our economic energies and on which the present government has been dragging its feet in wilful negligence.

Vinod Mehta claims that saints have no place in politics. Ironically that’s exactly what the British complained about Gandhi! Mehta asks Ramdev to ‘go back’ to his yoga teaching. Let us say if a heart surgeon launches a political protest tomorrow. Would Mehta ask him to ‘go back’ to his operation theatre? What about teachers, plumbers, software engineers? Should Amir Khan have ‘gone back’ to his studios instead of writing a letter in support of Anna Hazare? Why is Vinod Mehta printing the anguished articles of Arundhati Roy instead of advising her to start another novel?

Just like others, the godmen too have a role in society. I don’t know if Ramdev calls himself a godman but at least he is an acknowledged religious figure. Indian mythology and history are littered with examples of politically motivated rishis. They have even participated in the wars. In one such war when the valiant archer cows down because he had to face his guru, a famed rishi, in the battle, the scheming liar eggs him on with his most popular motivational speech. Nobody asked what that rishi was doing in the middle of the greatest war ever fought on an Indian soil.

So Baba Ramdev may be an imperfect person, but what of his cause? The cause Ramdev has taken up is the most relevant and most important one. His method of protest is non-violent and the one that has been an indigenous Indian invention which even helped to liberate India. So there’s nothing wrong with what’s going on now. In the context of this topic, his other negatives don’t matter. Unfortunately the saints may not be clearly defined today. But the sinners are very clearly visible. They do not possess Raavan-like divine qualities. They are more like Christian-sinners (pun intended), with identifiable evil traits.

Only a second Satyagraha will rid the country of these sinners.