Looking back at the M.F. Husain imbroglio, it is worth posing a counterfactual. What if the artist had not decided to take Qatari citizenship and returned to India to face the court cases, the rabble and the drama?
Would India have forced a 95-year-old artist, one of its best, to make multiple appearances in court or — in an extreme chance — face arrest? It would have invited ridicule. The so-called angry mobs that have spent years disrupting every Husain exhibition — even if these featured paintings completely unrelated to the controversial nude renditions of goddesses — would have become the subject of public hostility. They would have been as isolated as the Shiv Sena a few weekends ago.
Unfortunately, the Husain affair has handed a victory to the wrong sort of people for the wrong reasons. The reference here is to the Hindutva fringe, much of which has now migrated to the Internet. The Internet Hindu has blogged and tweeted and emailed exultantly about the defeat and exile of Husain. In parallel, a new campaign has gathered momentum, centred on a new hate figure: Wendy Doniger.
Doniger is a well-known American academic who, in 2009, released her book The Hindus: An Alternative History. In part, the book is engaging, its treatment of ancient India is detailed — that period is Doniger’s self-admitted strength — but its analysis of modern Hindu currents are perhaps a bit too rushed and dismissive. That aside, there are stylistic angularities that the author is no doubt entitled to but individual readers are free to disagree with.
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2:16 AM
Moderate Islamist here
