Maqbool Fida Husain, arguably independent India’s most public painter and one of the greats of visual representation this country has ever produced, died in self-imposed exile in London on Thursday at the age of 95. The irony for us is that he died a Qatari citizen, not an Indian national,

although he was born in the temple town of Pandharpur in Maharashtra, lived in Indore and Mumbai for much of his life, and engaged himself actively with political movements and intellectual trends among the leading artists of his time.

Probably no artist in this country — no street painter, no folk artist, nor one born into a Hindu family — has drawn as much inspiration in his work as Husain did from narratives and legends of Hindu mythology. And yet he was denounced and hounded by Hindutva zealots for portraying Hindu goddesses in an allegedly “obscene” manner. Only those of the Hindutva strain were offended, not ordinary Hindus, by some of Husain’s art. In the end, the antics of the Hindu right-wing made the renowned artist leave India for good in 2006 and he changed his nationality, although the rest of his family stayed on in this country.
When Husain was big pilloried, only artists and art lovers came to his public defence. The government was conspicuous by its silence when his home was vandalised and his exhibits at public spaces made targets of attack. The self-appointed keepers of Hindu religion and morality also simultaneously filed cases against him in the courts in different parts of the country. Thus, had Husain remained in India, he would probably be running from one courtroom to another for the rest of his life, given the slow grind of our legal system. The question then is, is there greater artistic freedom or the freedom to express oneself in Qatar than in the liberal and democratic India we think exists? One doubts it. But in Qatar — a thriving economy — the royal household, aware of his fame, set him up with a hefty commission. This would have pleased the exhibitionist in Husain. But he was still careful to keep his home in London, where ordinary freedoms can more or less be taken for granted, or resided in Dubai which — in an antiseptic sort of way — has been kept free of sociological tensions for the sake of international investments.
It bears noting that three well-known contemporary writers/artists from the subcontinent — Husain and Salman Rushdie from India, and Taslima Nasreen from Bangladesh — have suffered in similar ways in the matter of freedom of expression. If Husain was made an example of by Hindu chauvinists, Rushdie (who has lived in the West for several decades) had to live in hiding for many years on account of an Iranian fatwa. In the former case, the Indian government chose to look the other way, in the latter it imposed a ban on the book that had brought on the writer’s head the wrath of the Iranian clergy and many other Muslims. The case of Taslima Nasreen appears to be different at a formalistic level as Bangladesh — unlike India — has been something of a military dictatorship tied up with the mullahs for years until recently, and Ms Nasreen’s writings chronicle the suffocation and suffering of the Hindu minority in such an atmosphere. But in the end, is Bangladesh so very different from India when it comes to not protecting free expression even of well-known artists, leave alone ordinary citizens?
Indians would do well to reflect on the theme. It is interesting that Raj Thackeray, a Maharashtrian chauvinist and Hindutva-oriented leader, has asked that Husain be buried in Maharashtra. If the same solicitousness had been extended to the artist when he was alive, he is unlikely to have contemplated departing Indian shores.