THE FUNDAMENTALISTS RETURNED to their favourite cultural pursuit last week: M F Husain-bashing. Outside auction house Saffronart’s Prabhadevi office in central Mumbai, some 50 rabble-rousers belonging to the Hindu Janja-gruti Samiti shouted out the 91-year-old painter for his depictions of Hindu gods, an echo of their protest over the artist’s painting Bharatmata, earlier this year.The controversial piece, which was taken off from Apparao Gallery’s New Delhi auction in February, shows the nude figure of a reclining woman that takes on the shape of India, with her rippling hair forming the Himalayas in the north and her bent knees the Dec-can peninsula. To Hindu rightists, por-traying Mother India without any clothes on amounted to blasphemy.Husain has been here before. Some years ago, his canvas of Saraswati in the nude was burned by the Bajrang Dal in Ahmedabad, and his Sita Res-cued enraged Hindutvavadis enough to go and ransack the painter’s apart-ment in Mumbai. Yet, ironically, Hu-sain’s iconic paintings of themes from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and his explorations of their inherent conflicts enjoy mass popularity. He undertook to paint them in 1968 after socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia told him that he “paints for the Tatas and the Birlas and not for the vil-lagers”. But Husain is hardly the only artist who has earned the displeasure of India’s self-appointed moral police.Akbar Padamsee had been a target of the “righteous” more than half a century ago. In 1954, the Mumbai-based painter’s work Lovers came un-der the scanner for obscenity. A po-liceman walked into his exhibition at the Jehangir Art Gallery and an-nounced that “a higher-up in the home ministry”, then headed by Morarji Desai, wanted it removed. In the court battle that ensued, Padamsee won, but it brought to the fore the question of artistic freedom and contradictions in howwe view nu-dity in art and popular culture. Even though nudity in Indian art dates back to the Indus Valley civilisation, the study of the nude as an ob-served reality is as recent as the late 19th century.Foundations of this were laid in the art schools at Madras, Calcutta and Bombay between 1850 and 1857. In response to demand for European-style paintings from the growing class of ur- ban gentry, a subject called Represen-tation of Visually Observed Data was introduced and sitting models be-came a tool of learning for art stu-dents.“TheIndiantradition lays down the ideals and form of how a human anatomy should be painted, but there are no records of people actually pos-ing for paintings,” says art historian Tapati Guha Thakurta. While painting the nude was a standard practice and many painters in pre-Independence India, like Mukul Dey and Hemendra Mazumdar, started their career paint-ing live models, Paris-trained Amrita Sher-Gil was perhaps the first Indian artist tomakeexplicit nudes.But it was after Independence that artists began to break away from tradi-tion. If drawing nude women and cop-ulating couples was a way for FrancisNewton Souza, brought up in strict Catholic tradition, to break away from the rigid moulds of society, Krishnaji Howlaji Ara’s big and shy nudes largely faced away from the viewer. Nudes have always been the basis of understanding the inflections and colours of nature.Says Jehangir Sabavala, who worked extensively on nudes before moving to make abstract landscapes with glassy surfaces: “Unless one learns to handle the light and muscle structure of a human body, one can’t paint a landscape. It is only through this knowledge that one can transform the human figure into flights of imagi-nation.” And how artists choose to in-terpret it depends on their artistic temperament.The response to the interpretation also seems to depend now on the tem-perament of the moral police.
