Indian Courts and Artists

Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul
The Indian Republic Needs More Like Him

By Badri Raina | May 31, 2008

Badri Raina's ZSpace Page

I

Without going into the question why some artists/painters are designated greater or more important than others, or why a vase made lovingly by the potters' deft fingers fetches less than a painting made of it by some renowned painter, it is acknowledged that Maqbool Fida Husain, now a nonagenarian, is justly India's best-known and best-selling painter.

He has also come to be India's most controversial contemporary artist.

Like a long line of painters through human history, Husain has often painted the nude. Painters we are told seek to penetrate beyond man-made encumbrances to celebrate how god made the world in the first place. Far, then, from being a lascivious fetish, the nude has often designated an emblem of purity, and a tribute to the skill of that greatest of artists, however you call her/him/it—Nature, DNA, Creator.

Husain walks and works and visits barefeet, a defiance, I take it, of civilizational curbs on naked flesh—a striking way of expressing discontent.

Some years ago, Husain painted India partially in the figure of a nude, legs bent backward at the knees to form the peninsular conical, hair flowing laterally to imply the Himalayas, head thrown back in a gesture of distress, and one eye shedding a tear.

Many years later a collector christened the painting "Bharat Mata" (Mother India).

All that was enough for the majoritarian fascist lobby to go to town, attacking Husains' work wherever they found it, smashing exhibitions, and slapping some seven court cases in diverse states of the country against the painter on charges of obscenity and insult to the Hindu veneration of the motherland.

Consequence: this man who loves his motherland and everything in it, most keenly its Hindu mythological heritage, had to go into exile.

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Now, just recently, the Delhi High Court, Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul presiding (given the communally charged context surrounding this and other such issues, a truly fortuitous and heartening circumstance that), has pronounced on three of the cases against the artist:

"In view of the aforesaid, the summoning orders and warrants of arrest issued against the petitioner in the complaint cases are quashed and the revision petitions filed against them are allowed leaving the parties to bear their own costs"(section 121) Justice Kaul has opined.

And the "aforesaid" of Justice Kaul's 70-page judgement it is that must make for a landmark interpretation not just of the laws that pertain to the suites in question but of the implications of all such fascist attacks on the most dearly-held values of India's republican constitution and democracy, and on the most prized attainments of the human spirit everywhere through history.

Continued . . .