3

Art on Trial: Civilisation and

Religion in the Persona and
Painting of M. F. Husain
David Gilmartin & Barbara D. Metcalf

F or decades, the distinguished Indian artist Maqbool Fida Husain (b. 1915) has been well-known to
a large public audience. A child in one of the colonial-era princely states known for its cultivation and
support of the arts, Husain came to maturity in a new world where patronage gave way to the market,
and talented artists learned to produce for a world of connoisseurs, gallery owners, collectors, international
competitions, the media, and, in some cases like Husain, official patrons. Thus Husain has operated in
a public world, not a world of courtly or private production, during the whole of his career. A second
dimension of Husain’s public character has been his identification with nationalist and even official
projects. Nationalism has been a central theme in both his art and his life experience, quite apart from
the government honours and patronage he has from time-to-time enjoyed. The nationalist dimension
of Husain’s art can be seen as part of the great transformative project in 20th-century India of making
Indian subjects into citizens of a modern state.
Husain is often associated with the vision of secular nationalism commonly tagged ‘Nehruvian’. But
Husain’s art is perhaps better seen in terms of an association with a vision of India as a ‘civilisation’, a
term that has often been deployed in writings about his work. As a galaxy of Indian intellectuals argued
in a 2006 petition to the President of India, calling for Husain to receive the Bharat Ratna award,
‘Indian civilisation, in all its diversity, has been Husain’s basic inspirational project.’1 ‘Civilisation’, is,
of course, a term with multiple meanings, many embedded in the history of colonialism, and some in
modern geo-political contestation.2 Yet in Husain’s case, the term is one that is useful in highlighting
a particular approach to Nehruvian secularism. In certain ways, Nehru’s vision of secularism harked
back to a colonial vision of India’s people as divided into ‘communities’ defined by religions, of which
‘Hindu’ and ‘Muhammadan’ were the most important, whose boundaries were fixed and clear. This
Nehruvian vision of secularism posited a modern state standing above these religious divisions, forging

Acknowledgments: We would like to thank Sumathi Ramaswamy and Monica Juneja for very helpful comments.
1
‘Letter to President of India in Support of M. F. Hussain on 17th November 2006’, http://www.sahmat.org/
letterpresitdend.html, accessed 2 October 2009.
2
In its most controversial contemporary usage, the term has been associated with Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of
civilizations’. It was widely used in the colonial period both as a marker of the ‘civilisational’ superiority of the
‘the West’, and as an Orientalist framing for the cultural achievements of older ‘civilisations’ now seen as occluded
from modernity and long dead.
 Art on Trial 55

unity through its modern developmental purpose. The state, strongly conceptualised in this view as an
engine of progress and change, implicitly accepted the colonialist vision of a society characterised by
tenacious communities of religious faith, rooted in a traditional past.
Husain’s ‘civilisational’ view of national culture shared something with this Nehruvian vision but
broke from colonial categories in more fundamental ways. Husain, a Muslim, euphorically embraced
in his art the Hindu gods and epics, subject of arguably his greatest art; the great Christian symbols like
the paradigmatic Last Supper, which he painted over and over; as well as the Islamic calligraphy and
drama of the Karbala story. For him, these were all the civilisational heritage of all Indians. In these great
symbols of his heritage, Husain found and painted not an archaic, traditional, romanticised past but
rather universal symbols profoundly engaged with the present. This was a vision of civilisation that, in
effect, redefined the colonial understanding of religion by seeing at its core a universalism that not only
defied the association of religion with exclusionary communities, but also defied the sharp, oppositional
juxtaposition between religion and a modern secularist vision.
The power of Husain’s vision was recognised in the extraordinary position he gained in public life,
as perhaps India’s premier national artist. Given his importance and official recognition, it is in some
ways not surprising that his work became the target of critics of official secularism in favour of a view of
religion far more rooted in the colonial past. What right, some critics implied, did Husain, as a Muslim,
have to interpret what some claim to be exclusively Hindu symbols?
But Husain’s civilisational approach to India’s nationhood also highlighted broader questions
about the relationship between artists and India’s people. Husain’s focus on multiple cultural icons and
civilisational exemplars inevitably suggested a vision of national culture built not on commonalities
of practice or essence but on those of ideals and aspiration. Such a civilisational vision of nationhood
implied an Indian population itself always in the process of developing and becoming, emulating lofty
civilisational models and archetypes, even in the face of India’s everyday complexity and division. It thus
fostered recognition of difference, in this case difference in degree of civilisational attainment, even while
seeking the universal. But this vision was in inevitable tension with another vision of the nation (and
of religious identity) that was more imminent and organic. If colonial visions of identity were reductive
and essentialised, they were also capable of being imagined as populist and egalitarian. To be sure, as
Husain often made clear, his source of inspiration as an artist could only lie in the people. For him,
the spirit of the people was essential to art. Yet his civilisational vision of nationhood was one that in some
ways appealed more to what might be termed a ‘civilising process’, than to a vision of the nation (or of
religion) defined in terms of fixed essence or reductive devotional immediacy.3
All of these issues came to a head in the court cases initiated against Husain at the turn of the 21st
century. Juxtaposing a review of Husain’s career and his concept of Indian civilisation, against the recent
Delhi High Court judgment that in 2008 dismissed attacks on his art, this article underscores the
shared ideals of ‘art’ and ‘law’ precisely in furthering a specific ‘civilising’ vision of citizenship in India.
At the same time, the Court’s decision makes clear the conflicted relationship between civilisation
and ‘religion’ that has marked both Husain’s art and public reception in the context of the cultural
construction of the Indian nation.

3
The phrase ‘civilizing process’, echoes the title of Norbert Elias’s well-known work of the same name. We do not
use the term with any particular concern to link our arguments to those of Elias (though there are, of course, some
parallels between our analysis of how the term operates in India and the processes Elias focuses on). Elias is quite
clear, however, that his work concerns only those who, as he puts it, ‘are civilized in a Western way’. Norbert Elias,
The Civilizing Process, Oxford: Blackwell, 1994, p. ix.
56 David Gilmartin & Barbara D. Metcalf

An Iconic Life: Nehruvian Nationalism and Bombay Dreams

At the heart of Husain’s iconicity for his admirers has been his seeming encapsulation of mid-20th century
nationalism coupled with his success as a marketing marvel.4 He is routinely described as India’s ‘most
celebrated modern artist’.5 The Government of India awarded him successively the Padmashree in 1955,
the Padma Bhushan in 1973, the Padma Vibhushan in 1989, and appointed him to the Rajya Sabha
(the upper house of parliament) in 1986. The then President K. R. Narayanan had him do a painting
for Bill Clinton on his state visit to India; and Prime Minister A. B. Vajpayee presented a Husain graphic
of Mother Teresa as a gift to the Pope.6
By the time that Husain began to be noticed as an artist, his very life-story was the stuff of myth.
His was an ‘only in Bombay’ story, a version of countless Hindi films storylines where the boy from the
country comes to the big city, begins at the bottom, meets adversity, finds love, and finds his place. Not
only was it a filmi story, but films, in the form of his early employment as a painter of hoardings, were
the foundation of his career. The scale of those commercial paintings, the taste for narrative, and even the
stars would find their way into his art in myriad forms over the years that followed, touching him with
the magic that film itself has had in India’s public life. Husain sold an image of himself as well as his
paintings. His own performative style — dress, public events focused on his producing art before an
audience, his ties to celebrities, his penchant for some forms of high living, his devotion to his own
local roots — all, coupled with his whimsical and charming personality, won him an audience beyond
connoisseurs of modern art.7 Husain was a self-made man who enjoyed the fruits of his work.
Husain’s was a Bombay story not only in his participation in the opportunities for reinvention offered
by that burgeoning city but also in other dimensions of the city’s seeming magic of the immediate post-
Independence years. Not only was the city a symbol of the hopes of individual lives that served as a
metaphor for the nation’s aspirations it was also the ideal, in those pre-Shiv Sena days, of India’s vaunted
embrace of nationalist diversity and pluralism in the face of the horrors of the Partition. Bombay was, as
well, the gateway to the international world, a world ever less defined by the British Empire and more
by an internationalism that was embraced from the non-aligned politics of Bandung to the continental
art and architecture of burgeoning Modernism. Husain’s art was fully a part of the post-1947 world
encapsulated by his involvement with the program of the Progressive Artists Group, formed in Bombay
at the cusp of Independence.
There is no way to see the programme of the Progressive Artists Group, formed in Bombay in
1947, as anything other than a product of the moment’s imminent celebration of freedom. Husain
himself later called the artistic work of this group ‘a parallel freedom movement’.8 The group was small;
their formal unity was short lived, but the goals of Nehruvian nationalism they stood for permeated

4
His ‘The Last Supper’ (an empty bowl next to an African woman) was auctioned in 2005 for US$ 2 million, an
unprecedented price for an Indian artist at that point. Saloni Mathur, India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural
Display, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007, p. 1.
5
Ibid.
6
Rashda Siddiqui and M. F. Husain, In Conversation with Husain Paintings, New Delhi: Books Today, 2001, p. 209.
7
Sundaram Tagore, ‘The Story of a Jagged Line: The Art of M. F. Husain’, Art and Asia Pacific, vol. 19, 1998,
pp. 53–59.
8
M. F. Husain, ‘An Artist and a Movement’, Frontline, vol. 14, no. 16, 9–22 August 1997.
 Art on Trial 57

their individual lives. Husain’s school years had corresponded to the rise of mass politics; he attended
a school where the boys wore khadi, it being one of his earliest encounters with the experiential power
of the visual. In 1947, ever attuned to the visual, he organised ‘a tableau of freedom with the workers’
at the furniture design studio where he then worked — and was about to leave to devote himself to his
work as an artist.9
The Progressive Artists Group called first and foremost for freedom from what they saw as stifling
colonial artistic frames. It was a break from the confining structures of the academic realism of colonial
art education, from what they deemed an artificial relegation of Indian culture and civilisation to a
fossilised past and, as noted above, from a colonial art history that distinguished ‘Hindu’ from ‘Muslim’
art. They dismissed the Bengal school of modern painters for a kind of romantic engagement with
‘tradition’ and the ‘folk’, categories that had shaped British rule. Their own embrace of Indian tradition
was intended as a re-creation, in dialogue with the realities of contemporary life. It was expressed
through the freedom of structures and techniques offered by the novel styles of international modern
art, a world of expressive forms that India seemed poised to enter, just as it was about to climb into a
world more economically developed.
As Susan Bean notes in this volume, modernist painters from outside Europe or America have been
trapped between a judgment that they are mere mimics, doomed to play catch up on the one hand, or,
equally judgmentally, that they are unauthentic for even embracing modernist art, on the other. Geeta
Kapur echoed these judgments early on in speaking of the ambitions of the Progressives as what Saloni
Mathur calls ‘a balancing act’, most centrally between the ‘Euro-Western avant-garde, and Indian history
and aesthetics’.10 Husain and his colleagues, however, confronted such judgments head on. Husain’s
own interpretation of their Modernism takes nationalist pride in explicitly rejecting any ‘additive’ or
binary understanding of the modernist project. India, he argues, had already passed the stages the West
experienced from the Renaissance to the 20th century: ‘the image of Nataraja is the highest form of art; it
corresponded to the cosmos’. As for western Modern art, moreover, ‘[the European artists] took it from
Japan and from Africa’.11 Thus, in the 1960s, Husain himself could speak of himself as an artist at home
in the world, as his European modernist predecessors had been. He was, he wrote, in an evocative list, ‘an
artist of the present century who lives simultaneously in Kyoto, Mahabalipuram, Samarkand, Palermo,
Provence, Liverpool and Alaska’.12 This was not separate from but intrinsic to his nationalism.
For Husain, Modernism lay in asserting the relevance of the universal (and thus modern) values
that had long been embodied in Indian civilisation. Indeed, the influential émigré patron and guide to
the Progressives, Rudi van Leyden, for example, writing in The Times of India in 1953, sought to justify

9
Ila Pal, Beyond the Canvas: An Unfinished Portrait of M. F. Husain, New Delhi: Indus, 1994, pp. 62–63.
10
Ibid., p. 2.
11
M. F. Husain, ‘An Artist and a Movement’. This vision of the subcontinental art tradition is, one might note, a
variation of the argument that the Lahore-based poet Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938) made in regard to philosophy in
the Islamic tradition. In that case, Islamic philosophical trends, he proposed, had been taken over by Europe, and
Indians like himself were now simply reclaiming them. See Barbara D. Metcalf, ‘Iqbal’s Imagined Geographies: The
East, The West, the Nation, and Islam’, in Kathryn Hansen and David Lelyveld (eds), A Wilderness of Possibilities:
Urdu Studies in Transnational Perspective, New York: Columbia University Press, 2005, pp. 147–69.
12
Frontispiece, in script, in Richard Bartholomew and Shiv S. Kapur, Maqbool Fida Husain, New York: Harry N.
Abrams, 1972; also in Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni, Husain: Riding the Lightning, Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1996,
p. 102.
58 David Gilmartin & Barbara D. Metcalf

‘The Moderns’ precisely in terms of how ‘Indian’ they were. ‘The modern India artist carries in himself
the accumulated experience of two thousand years of Indian art and, in addition, the newly acquired
experience of art beyond the borders of India.’ He emphasised their commitment to the world around
them, their conviction that ‘emotional power and significance’ are best found in color and form — ‘what
the layman calls distorted and “unnatural” forms’. This, admittedly, sometimes made their work hard
for ‘the average friend of painting’ to understand. Nonetheless, these are among ’the most original and
even most truly Indian painters of today’.13 The civilisational project was intrinsic to Modernism.
For Husain the link to Indian heritage was foundational to his art. Aesthetically he claimed three
earlier artistic traditions as guides: he particularly identified as a major influence in his work the shaping
of the female body in classical Gupta sculpture (represented in paintings like that in Plate 3.1), which he
encountered in an exhibit in Delhi in 1948. He also emphasised the bold colour patterning and angled,
disparate figures he found in Basohli paintings, as well as the folk artistic traditions he, like other modern
painters, re-created. His earliest paintings, including The Potters, shown at the first Progressive Artists
Group exhibit in 1947, Marathi Women (1950), Mother and Child (1951), Zameen (1955; Plate 2.3), and
the mysterious Between the Spider and the Lamp (1956; Plate 2.6) rejoiced in the multiplicity of India
and the dignity of its ordinary people. At the same time, the art critic Yashodhara Dalmia sees a painting
like the last one, with Husain’s own hermetic symbols, as ‘a virtual metaphor for modern India’.14 In this
comment Dalmia identifies Husain’s achievement in what Karin Zitzewitz in this volume calls Husain’s
two part ‘brief’, namely to develop his individual style yet embody a national identity.
Husain was emerging as a person who could represent India. The National Gallery purchased
Zameen. He was commissioned to paint a mural for Air India in Prague in 1957 and another one in
tiles on the Indraprastha Bhavan in New Delhi in 1966. He was invited by the Films Division to make
an experimental film, his evocative In the Eyes of the Painter representing Rajasthan, which garnered a
number of international awards. Between the Spider and the Lamp was reproduced as a Government of
India postal stamp released in 1982.
By the late 1960s Husain turned to painting his Ramayana series, a direction stimulated, in a story
he often told, by the socialist activist Dr Ram Manohar Lohia who said he should paint for ‘the common
man’.15 Husain’s engagement with India’s epics was not superficial. Thus, his experience with the
Ramayana was based both on his own youthful experience of performances and later time spent with a
pandit as he recited both the Sanskrit–Valmiki and the beloved Hindi–Tulsi versions. Some critics, going
back to the reified colonial categories of distinctive religious ‘communities’ have analysed Husain’s art
as if he were drawing on distinct traditions. Thus an essay in the important Henry Abrams volume on
Husain (the first international book on an Indian artist) described Husain as ‘the inheritor … of two
traditions of expression in India … the Muslim … and the Hindu’.16 Nothing in Husain’s performative
style, if one might call it that, nor in his art, draws that line. Banaras, which he began drawing in the
late 1950s, most famously in a series of serigraphs from the 1970s (including the example in Plate 3.2),
is often presented as the quintessential ‘Hindu’ city, but as Husain himself later commented while

13
Reproduced in Yashodhara Dalmia,. The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2001, pp. 293, 300; emphasis added.
14
Ibid., p. 105.
15
Ila Pal, Beyond the Canvas, pp. 118–19.
16
Richard Bartholomew in Bartholomew and Kapur, Maqbool Fida Husain, p. 21.
 Art on Trial 59

Plate 3.1 M. F. Husain, ‘Padmini, Mohini, Shankini’, 1969.

drawing in that city, ‘I felt an exhilarating sense of freedom … all barriers between life and death were
broke down.’ Similarly in the epics he found keys to the human condition beyond any specific religious
tradition. Husain’s art implicitly, then, embodies a particular expression of a unitary vision of what
secular nationalism might mean.
At core, Indian secularism is often taken as additive, embracing the sum of the cultures and interests
of religiously-defined groups. Unlike the American rhetoric of ‘a wall of separation’ between the state
and religious institutions and practices, the Indian state is meant to be even-handed, protecting and
patronising each equally. The state then imagines itself, as did the colonial state, as standing apart from
any religion and above a multicultural society. But Husain’s practice is embedded far less in such a
vision of secularism than in a vision of civilisation as a cultural structure itself defined in continuing
interaction with diversity. He models the embrace and absorption of the entire civilisational heritage
as part of what one imagines as an inner consciousness,17 transcending external identities and open to
every Indian as a birthright. Karbala and Kurukshetra both serve as symbols to ‘think with’ in relation
to violence among groups and within the person; Mother Teresa evokes a shared human image of
maternity and compassion; Mother India mapped and clothed signals the achievements of a half-century
of Independence, but naked represents the nation’s sorrows.18

17
E. Alkazi, M. F. Husain: The Modern Artist and Tradition, New Delhi: Art Heritage, 1980, p. 3.
18
See Sumathi Ramaswamy’s discussion of the Bharat Mata image in this volume, which puts it in the context
of a longer history of Husain’s images of Bharat Mata. Ramaswamy provides a more complex historical context of
such images and their multiple meanings in Sumathi Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother
India, Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming 2010.
Plate 3.2 M. F.Husain, ‘Benaras Serigraph’ (No. 8 in a series), 1973.
62 David Gilmartin & Barbara D. Metcalf

These are polyvalent images. Each one may well serve as object of ritual worship or source of trans-
cendent guidance to followers of a specific historic tradition or, in modern politics, as a symbol of a
communitarian identity. But Husain claims them all as living civilisation just as he boldly claims the
culture of contemporary films as the latest form of India’s civilisational achievement. Indeed it would
seem in the face of challenge that his claims to engage these diverse cultural icons have become more
comprehensive — reaching even to film — and more bold!
Husain’s self-presentation came to embody this civilisational image. But his image was also marked
by the tension between virtuosity (or elitism) and populism that was intrinsic to such a civilisational
image — a tension that was ultimately compounded by his official recognition. In photographs of him
at the time of the formation of the Progressive Artists Group, he is marked as a Muslim in dress and
facial style; in that mode he would fit the heterogeneous sartorial styles of Bombay of his day with
its proliferation of sects and sub-sects, linguistic and even national groups.19 He is easy to identify
in photographs of the Progressive Artists Group of the late 1940s, as in Plate 3.3, where he stands out in
the front row with his flowing beard and cap. Subsequently, the black topi (cap) gone, the beard varying
from that of an artist to a holy man to a cosmopolite, he evokes visually neither a Sulaimani Muslim
nor any religiously-marked figure.20 In paintings, he often presented himself as the embodiment of the
modernist image, recognisable certainly as a bearded figure but defined preeminently by bold lines
and colours (Plate 3.4). In some contexts Husain saw himself as part of a transnational elite; in others
he dressed not only in local costumes but also bare feet, evoking either the ascetic or the villager, that
became his trademark. A photograph of him taken in Manhattan in 2006, in contrast, could be that of
any (aging) cosmopolitan artist — dressed in black, a fedora on his head, the beard neatly trimmed, a
colorful scarf casually draped around his neck, with a paintbrush in his hand.
Husain may well have welcomed being the toast of the international art world but he insisted that
he himself was a man of the people, barefoot and comprehensible to them, and his art similarly was
legible to the ordinary person as an embodiment of the Indian tradition that lived in Indians today.
Biographers recount episodes of Husain’s morning tea routine in a stall frequented by labourers, or his
delight in the drawings of school children.21 The Times of India article cited above might have had to
justify the art of the Progressives to a sceptical English-knowing elite. But Husain felt that villagers needed
no interpreter for his art. He frequently told the story of taking his 80 paintings of the Ramayana, done
over many years, to villages outside Hyderabad on a bullock cart.

The paintings were spread out, and the people saw them, and there was not one question. In the city, people
would have asked: Where is the eye? How can you say this is Ram? And so on. In the villages, colour and
form have seeped into the blood.22

19
In Nadkarni, Husain, p. 6. Of the six members of the initial group, Tyeb Mehta, Abbasy and Raza (all Muslims)
are unbearded. Minority artists were represented disproportionately among the early Progressives. See also
V. S. Gopalakrishnan, ‘Muslim Triumvirate [Mehta, Raza, Husain] Rules India’s Art Republic’, 8 May 2006, http://
www.chowk.com/articles/10566, accessed 2 October 2009.
20
Although Sulemainis are often described as a sub-group of the ‘Bohras’, Bikram Singh writes in a recent biography
that ‘Husain does not like to be called Bohra. Once he brusquely told me that he was a Sulemani and had nothing
to be with the Bohras.’ Bikram K. Singh, Maqbool Fida Husain, New Delhi: Rahul & Art, 2008, p. 17.
21
Siddiqui and Husain, In Conversation with Husain Paintings, p. ??.
22
Husain, ‘An Artist and a Movement’.
 Art on Trial 63

Plate 3.3 The Progressive Artists Group.

The villagers, he commented in another interview ‘sat enthralled for about three hours’.23 Husain thus
imagines ‘the people’ as intuitively attuned to the civilisational ethos he espouses. Each person may
follow his or her own religious traditions but there is a universalising ethos, equally ancient and modern,
encompassing all of these.
Husain’s public face is in a sense literal in his massive art in public places including his murals and,
as sadly became known world-wide during the terrorist attack in November 2008, hotel lobbies that
include Bombay’s Taj Palace Hotel. His wider public reputation also derives from paintings that are
seen as interventions in painful national crises, whether natural disasters or the anguish of the nation
in the wars of 1965 and 1971 as well as after episodes of mounting anti-Muslim violence in the 1990s.
His Muharram and Mahabharata paintings and his collages of demons and heroes all speak at once to
the condition of individual humans with their conflicting impulses and to the larger society that stands
poised between positive humanity and the evils of war and violence. His paintings celebrating Prime

23
Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art, p. 112.
Plate 3.4 M. F. Husain, ‘Maqbool’, 1969.
 Art on Trial 65

Minister Indira Gandhi as the powerful goddess Durga justified her suspension of civil liberties in the
1970s; in this case, Husain painted against the grain of liberal opinion and for many he had damaged his
reputation in ways that would take long to recover. But those who criticised this work did not question
his fundamental project of commenting on the present through an interpretation of core symbols and
motifs of Indian civilisation. That critique of the very core of his artistic and ideological vision would
come later.

Being Muslim in India: The Ambivalence of ‘Hindutva’

Still, if Husain’s self-presentation has explicitly transcended the particularity of specific religious identities
in the name of identification with India’s civilisation, he has hardly been able to create a world free
of such identities. There is room for asking what difference it has made for this public image, in both
explicit and unspoken terms, not only recently but throughout, that Husain is Muslim. That background
was immaterial or minor at the level of explicit statements until the swirl of controversy around his
paintings, beginning with special intensity in 1996. Was the issue of his religious background, which
became the heart of death threats, lawsuits, websites, and public discussion, irrelevant until then? Or
did his ‘Muslim-ness’, in fact, contribute an unspoken part to his very secular appeal?
It is plausible to argue that for some Indians Husain’s iconicity in fact derived at least in part from
his being imagined as a symbol of India’s absorptive diversity. Especially for those committed to the
principle of secularism and a shared cultural world for all Indians, Husain’s Muslim background makes
him, in a sense, more, rather than less, significant as a nationalist. To achieve that he must be ‘Indian’ to
an extreme — more engaged with Hindu icons, more tied to his local roots than others of the modernist
artists. A model for this interpretation comes from scholarly writing on the film actress Nargis (née
Fatima Rashid) in her role as the self-sacrificing maternal heroine of the Hindi film Mother India (1957),
produced by (yet another Indian of Muslim background) Mehboob Khan. By this argument, in the line
that always blurs film and life, the power of the universal figure of Mother India only a decade after
1947 was fundamentally tied to its portrayal by Nargis. Roy asks in relation to Nargis: ‘How does the
Other become the icon that represents nationness?’24
Analyses like this, coupled with a range of anthropological studies, call into question the success
of the cultural and personal project espoused by Husain and its goal of transcending colonial-era
communitarian categories in favour of a civilisation-based Indian identity. Even for a sophisticated élite,
by this argument, religious origins do not disappear. As ethnographic studies have shown, Muslims
must work at effacing difference, not only in film roles but in life, in order to secure their relationships
with non-Muslims.25 The historian Shahid Amin has spoken of chance encounters when strangers have
thought to compliment him by saying — as others may consciously or not feel — ‘But you don’t seem
like a Muslim.’ Whether at the level of personal friendships or in public life, the erasure of distinctive
signs of being Muslim, coupled with an almost excessive claim on ‘Indianness’ for Muslims, often seems
essential to functioning well in India in recent years. As for Muslims in public life generally, those most

24
Parama Roy, Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India, Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1998, p. 154.
25
Mahua Sarkar, Visible Histories, Disappearing Women: Producing Muslim Womanhood in Late Colonial Bengal, Durham:
Duke University Press, 2008, chapter 4.
66 David Gilmartin & Barbara D. Metcalf

prominent have been those who ‘passed’, those Muslims who best matched the secular, modern, forward-
looking homogeneous ideal. Would a non-Muslim president of India, for example, ever be described as
‘thoroughly Indian’ or even ‘200% Indian’?26 Does every modern artist, like Husain, have to explicitly
articulate that his goal ‘is to relate to a specific Indian-ness’?27
There is a further argument to make about being Muslim in certain contexts that complicates this
rather straightforward one about the delicate universality of Indian civilisation. This argument, made
recently by the anthropologist Daniel Gold, speculates on the complex reasons that some Hindus are
drawn to Urdu poetry, or seek out Muslim Sufis as powerful agents for securing their needs, or enjoy
the pulsating music of qawwals, or idolise movie stars like the Aamir/Shahrukh/Salman Khan trio.28 Gold
points to pervasive cultural stereotypes, or what he calls ‘fantasy images’, about Muslims, associating them
on the one hand with the courtly, refined cultures of the past and violence and sexual prowess — fueled
by Bollywood gangster movies depicting rough, even dangerous, Muslims — on the other. Thus, he
posits that an engagement with Muslims entails a tension between some mix of low, earthy vitality and
high cosmopolitan elevation that may be unspoken but is still powerful. Here the category ‘Muslim’ is
projected less as a distinctive identity than as a marker of tensions both within a larger vision of Indian
civilisation and within the Indian self. That which is marked as ‘Muslim’ is potentially a part of all Indians
(and thus of what it means to be fully ‘Indian’). And yet, at the same time, it is inescapably linked to a
distinctive and identifiable group in Indian society which is characterised by its association with that
which is dangerous, yet at times desired, within the larger canvas of Indian civilisation.
All this is part of the larger public culture in which Husain and his works of art are valued and
challenged. Attacks on Muslims in general in recent years have been a way to attack the government
whose alleged ‘appeasement’ of Muslims is a rallying cry; a Muslim like Husain, who embraced from the
beginning the founding nationalist ideology associated with the government, has made a particularly
good target. Kajri Jain, in her article in this volume, sets out the larger socio-political context in which
distress over Dalit/ lower class assertion has been displaced onto Muslims in the name of ‘Hindu unity’.
In some ways, attacks on Husain reflect concerns to hold at bay a society in which economic develop-
ment and democracy have together upended older forms of dominance and prestige. Yet, at the same
time, such attacks have played on the uneasy juxtaposition between élitism and a populist vision of
culture that is deeply embedded in Husain’s public persona — and perhaps in the very vision of India
as a civilisation.

26
K. Bhushan, A. P. J. Abdul Kalam: The Visionary of India, New Delhi: A. P. H. Publishing Corporation, 2002.
Both phrases are used in the book description at http://www.saujanyabooks.com/details.aspx?id=13236, accessed
5 October 2009.
27
‘My concern in film, as in paintings, is to relate to a specific Indianness. Perhaps that’s why Gaja Gamini starts
with the recreation of and a return to Varanasi, the prime seat of Indian culture.’ M. F. Husain, The Genesis of Gaja
Gamini: A Film by M. F. Husain, designed and comp. Anil Relia, photographs by Shaina Nath, Ahmedabad: H2A
Graphic International, 2000, p. 12.
28
Daniel Gold, ‘Sufis and Movie Stars: Charismatic Muslims for Middle-Class Hindus’, mimeograph, Cornell
Univesity, 2009. See also idem, ‘The Appeal of Urdu: Its Significance and Potential’, Social Scientist, issue 360–61,
vol.31, nos 5–6, 2003, pp. 73–79; and ‘The Sufi Shrines of Gwalior City: Communal Sensibilities and the Accessible
Exotic under Hindu Rule’, Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 64, no. 1, 2005, pp. 127–50.
 Art on Trial 67

Art on Trial: The Law, Religion and Civilisation

The recent judgment in the Delhi High Court case (2008) relates precisely to these recent religious
challenges to Husain’s art. The judgment was a fundamental vindication of Husain, upholding not
only his right as an Indian citizen to engage with the variety of civilisational themes that have marked
his art, but also underscoring, sometimes in forthright language, the importance of these themes to
India’s free construction of its own culture and national identity. At the same time, the adjudication
of ‘art’ by ‘law’ crystallised the sometimes conflicted relationship between ‘civilisation’ and ‘religion’ in
Husain’s work.
The juxtaposition of ‘art’ and ‘law’ in Justice Kaul’s court in fact highlights the degree to which both
operate largely in India as civilising discourses. For Kaul, they are both processes that define the higher
ideals that hold a civilisation together in the face of the cultural differences and individual temptations
that threaten it. For Kaul, free expression, a concept at the heart of Husain’s case, is perhaps the most
basic ‘wellspring of civilisation’. Though an artist must limit himself so as to avoid harm to social order,
the freedom of expression central to art is critical to the basic purposes of a civilised society, including the
pursuit of self-fulfilment. Its aim, he says (quoting Plato), is: ‘To give the members of the society,
all the members, the best chance of realising their best selves.’29 From this perspective, the importance of
art to civilisational order clearly transcends any issue of particular religious identity; civilisation stands
for a universal process by which individuals ‘develop’ through knowledge and self-cultivation what is
best in themselves (and in the process ‘develop’ the nation as well).
The role of art in this regard, as Kaul makes clear, parallels the role of law in society. If the artist’s
role is critical to civilising values, so too is that of the jurist. ‘The role of the magistrates and judicial
scrutiny in protecting individual rights and freedoms and promoting constitutional values’, he notes,
‘is not discretionary but obligatory. In a constitutional democracy wedded to and governed by the rule
of law, responsibilities of the judiciary arouse great expectations.’30 Implicit in Kaul’s judgment is an
assumption that without law, the freedom to realise one’s full self (and one’s civilisational heritage) that
art opens up, is impossible. This is why Kaul criticises sharply what he sees as the abuse of the law in
Husain’s case by those who have manipulated it in order to harass Husain. Such abuse is in conflict with
the law’s higher structural purpose. ‘… The world’s greatest paintings, sculptures, songs and dances,
India’s lustrous heritage, the Konarks and Khajurahos, lofty epics, luscious in patches,’ he says, quoting
Justice Krishna Iyer in an earlier case, ‘may be asphyxiated by law, if prudes and prigs and State moralists
prescribe paradigms and proscribe heterodoxies’.31 Law, used correctly, in contrast, fosters art’s purposes.
Indeed, in its appeal to civilising values, law is necessary to art. In this sense, the processes of law must
also transcend the particularities of religious identity.
Kaul’s vision of art is largely predicated, in other words, on a world shaped by struggles for self-
understanding, in which the roles of exemplary élites are critical. Certainly, as Husain’s populism
suggests, the potential reach of art (like law) can be conceived as encompassing the entire population.
But it falls to those with refinement, knowledge and self-awareness to give it form. As Kaul’s judgment
suggests, in the case of both art and law, the masses, who have not yet attained the interiorised aspirational

29
Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust, Maqbool Fida Husain …Petitioner, New Delhi: SAHMAT, 2008, p. 74.
30
Ibid., p. 77.
31
Ibid., pp. 42–43.
68 David Gilmartin & Barbara D. Metcalf

principles (including self-discipline) that define the ideal citizen — and that allow the free competition
of ideas to nurture them — cannot be left to define or control how art or law are defined. This is clear in
Kaul’s reference to a quote from Picasso at the very outset of his decision: ‘“Art is never chaste. It ought
to be forbidden to ignorant innocents, never allowed into contact with those not sufficiently prepared.”’32
And this applies equally to law, the application of whose principles can only be left to those who have
internalised the values of the jurist.
Such assumptions are most evident in Justice Kaul’s discussion of the law of obscenity, and his
understanding of its relationship to Husain’s painting of a nude Bharat Mata which became a central
focus of litigation against the artist (Plate 1.1).33 Kaul ultimately ruled that the painting failed to meet
the legal tests for obscenity in a variety of ways. But his arguments in the case were based on underly-
ing assumptions about the relationship of ‘art’ and ‘law’ in the construction of ‘civilisation’ that went
well beyond the technicalities of Indian obscenity law. Censorship, Kaul underscored, was a potentially
dangerous threat to free expression — and thus fundamentally dangerous to art. Yet, at the same time,
obscenity law was made necessary by the threat to the civilising process represented by salacious
materials, which could ‘deprave’ and ‘corrupt’ the individual. Indeed, underlying the argument is the
assumption that exemplary élites (cultural, intellectual, legal, artistic, religious) serve as the necessary
lodestars of moral cultivation in a civilised society. In buttressing his judgment, Kaul thus cited earlier
legal opinions on the importance of such cultural exemplars: ‘Our country has had the distinction of
giving birth to a galaxy of great sages and thinkers’, the Court wrote in 1989. ‘The great thinkers and
sages through their life and conduct provided principles for people to follow the path of right conduct.
There have been continuous efforts at rediscovery and reiteration of those principles…. These are the
bedrock of our civilisation and should not be allowed to be shaken ….’34 Legal support for tolerance and
free speech was thus central if the influence of such ‘thinkers and sages’ was to be allowed to give
meaning to civilisation. But obscenity represented a corruption of this process, diverting susceptible
individuals away from the civilising process and thus making a more intrusive use of state law necessary
to maintain it.
It was thus ironic — and in a way that further underscored the parallelisms in the workings of art
and law — that one of the points in Husain’s defense was that his impugned painting had not actually
been intended to be made fully public. Such an assertion of course reflected the underlying assumption,
shaped by the very concept of civilisation, that self-cultivation, self-control and cultural knowledge were
not equally distributed. Art might be rooted in civilisational connections to the people but, like law,
it could not be made subject to gratuitous popular control. ‘It seems that the complainants are not the
types who would go to art galleries or have an interest in contemporary art’, Kaul thus wrote, ‘because
if they did, they would know that there are many other artists who embrace nudity as part of their
contemporary art.’ Though obscenity might have been a potential threat to them, it was the very fact

32
Ibid., p. 16.
33
Husain’s painting was apparently originally untitled, though labelled as ‘Mother India’ when it was put up for
auction.
34
Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust, Maqbool Fida Husain …Petitioner, pp. 43–44. The judgment cited is S. Rangarajan
v. P. Jagjivan Ram, 1989 (2) SCC 574. As Rajeev Dhavan puts it, ‘It is eventually the judiciary that decides whether
the work would be regarded as offensive by the proverbial reasonable man.’ Rajeev Dhavan, Harassing Husain: Uses
and Abuses of the Law of Hate Speech, New Delhi: SAHMAT, 2007, p. 30.
 Art on Trial 69

that Husain’s ‘art’ was not intended for all the people that suggested that a case against Husain under
Section 294 IPC (Indian Penal Code) could not be made out.35 Here the implicit elitism in the artist’s
role is clear.
Yet such a view was, of course, in tension with Husain’s vision of himself as an artist for all Indians.
This tension suggested the complex relationship between the idealised vision of both artists and jurists
as self-aware élites, and a view of Indian society (and the Indian masses) as constituted by their not yet
having fully realised the civilisational ideal of Indian citizenship in its entirety. The tensions one finds
in Kaul’s judgment (and in the law) on the meaning and relationship of art and civilisation mirrored in
critical ways the tensions we have already seen in Husain’s public persona — one defined by the
juxtaposition of a self-conscious populism linked to the ‘spirit’ of the people, and an equally strong
identification with an élite, internationalist cultural world.
Perhaps the clearest window into the structural tensions generated by such a civilisational view of
Indian culture can be seen in Kaul’s dealing with the relationship of Husain’s art to ‘religion’. The religious
issues surrounding Husain’s impugned Bharat Mata for the court depended on the defining of religion in
a very particular way. What was at stake in the case was whether Husain’s painting violated Section 298
IPC, which dealt with the legal consequences of ‘wounding the religious feelings of any person’. Critical
here was the law’s construction of a distinctive definition of ‘religion’ that was in sharp tension with the
larger view of civilisation as a process. Religion was in this construction fixed by a set of assumptions
and beliefs that could be imagined as being capable of being ‘wounded’ by new ideas. This harked
back to an essentialised colonial definition of religion associated with fixed identity categories — ones
that were laden with assumed emotions, instincts and superstitions that were intrinsic to the person,
that is, organic, and hence capable of being ‘wounded’. Such a view, of course, configured religion in
sharp contradistinction to a view of culture (or indeed, in a different definitional frame, religion itself)
as constituted by the process of civilising self-restraint. Indeed, the law constraining the ‘wounding of
feelings’ reflected the colonial state’s fear of social disruption in a society that was conceived of not as a
civilisation but as a congeries of fixed identity categories.
Yet, in challenging a vision of culture and civilisation as a process, such a vision of ‘religion’ also
tapped into the new themes of personhood and equality pervasive in the emergence of a concept of
nation in India. For if a vision of ‘religion’ as an identity (and a set of ‘feelings’) allowed individuals
to lay claim to the law to protect the emotional core of their identity from external ‘wounds’, it also
suggested a culture defined by the fundamental equality that a reliance on ‘feelings’ represented. It is
here that the contrast between a ‘civilisational’ vision of cultural gradations and one tied to ‘religion’
as organic identity — a contrast central to Husain’s case — becomes most clear. Civilisation and the
civilising process was predicated on an underlying vision of the unequal distribution of self-cultivation
and even on the inevitable struggle for self-realisation producing the ‘mature individual’, as Zitzewitz
frames it in discussing the critique of such a view of religion proffered by Pratap Bhanu Mehta. In
contrast, the vision of religion contained in Section 298 IPC underscored a notion of community (and
political personhood) rooted in the equality of ‘feelings’ (or devotion). And though this idea originated
in the essentialising policies of colonialism, it had come to play a critical role in the imagination of new
forms of community and nation that had their own links to a ‘modern’ world.
The importance of religious devotionalism, and emotional attachment to public religious symbols,
was essential to mass political mobilisation in the name of popular community in the early 20th century.

35
Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust, Maqbool Fida Husain …Petitioner, p. 71.
70 David Gilmartin & Barbara D. Metcalf

Thus, the mobilisations surrounding the Cow Protection Movement of the late 19th century, the pro-
tection of the Kanpur Mosque (1913) and the reaction to the defamatory pamphlet Rangila Rasul (1927)
represented key moments at which the elitism of politics was bridged precisely because these movements
were cast not in terms of civilising self-restraint but in terms of the mass display of ‘wounded religious
feelings’ in the public realm. In contrast with civilisational structures of moral hierarchy, appeals
to communities of devotion (that is, communities constituted by making ‘feelings’ public) seemed to
suggest a vision of fixed egalitarian commonality constituted not by gradations of moral cultivation
and self-control (again, both within society and within individuals) but by the very power of unrefined
egalitarianism, of appeals ‘to the heart’.
The linking of such devotional visions of community to the nation thus posed a potential challenge
to the civilisational framework within which Kaul sought to defend Husain’s art. ‘Wounded religious
feelings’ seemed to trump the implicit elitism of a civilising process, particularly when the structure of
such religious feelings could be linked to the nation. And indeed, the complainants in the case made
this link to the nation explicit. Husain’s depiction of a nude Bharat Mata not only ‘hurt the feelings of
Hindus who are in majority in India’, the complaint declared, ‘but also every patriotic Indian who loves
his mother land’. ‘Bharat Mata’, they suggested, ‘is a symbol of pride, prestige, dignity and the soul
of this country and it was the case of the respondents that the petitioner cannot be given the right to hurt
the sentiments and feelings of the society under the garb of freedom of expression and that no one can
be permitted to have onslaught on such sensibilities.’36 This was, in other words, a vision of the nation
which was in tension with that projected under the signs of either ‘art’ or ‘law’, for it was not related to
the processes of self-cultivation at all, but simply to fixed, organic ‘feelings’ (or devotion) already in place,
shared in theory by all, as the basic foundation of a common, essential national identity.
That such a devotional vision was highly problematic from the perspective of ‘art’ and ‘law’, with
their civilising visions, Kaul’s judgment makes absolutely clear. But the challenge to the implicitly élitist
character of such a vision was far more problematic. Indeed, the inability of the language of law to fully
deal with devotional nationalism is reflected in the very structure of the prohibitions of Section 298 IPC
which put the onus for controlling the potentially disruptive passions of public devotionalism not on
the devotees (whose ‘love’ and ‘sacrifice’ for the community or nation could not be legally called into
question), but on those who would dangerously stir up passions (‘feelings’) in a person by uttering ‘any
word’ or making ‘any sound in the hearing of that person’, or making ‘any gesture in the sight of that
person’ or placing ‘any object in the sight of that person’ with ‘the deliberate intention’ of wounding
the person’s ‘religious feelings’.37 The implication of this is clear. The devotees cannot be expected to
control themselves in accord with the self-controlled internalisation of the law in these circumstances,
so the law must be directed against those who stir up such religious passions. In such a framework,
the very civilising process itself, if it ‘wounds religious feelings’, can be turned upside down, as it is the
very lack of self-cultivation and self-knowledge that becomes a legal justification (indeed, that gives, in
a sense, legal standing) for attacks on art.
But Kaul, in fact, refuses in his judgment to be drawn too far down this road for such a framework,
though rooted in the substance of the IPC, challenges in procedural terms the very structure of the
civilising mission of the jurist. Since the law itself technically required the proof of intent as a central

36
Ibid., p. 55.
37
Ibid., p. 53.
 Art on Trial 71

element in bringing Section 298 IPC to bear, this by itself was enough to provide a ground on which the
case against Husain could be rebuffed. As Zitzewitz argues in this volume, the notion of intentionality
was itself a complex one as both sides in the case invoked Husain’s intentionality in different ways. As
an artist Husain was both heroic in his intentionality and yet, at the very same time, a passive conduit
for a civilisational vision larger than himself. But for Kaul, the very centrality of ‘art’ as the key category
for interpreting Husain made it impossible to assert that Husain’s intent was to harm a particular religion
since this contradicted art’s basic civilisational meanings.
Nevertheless the very juxtaposition of Husain’s art with devotional forms of religious identity, which
this case brought to the surface, underscored the political tensions inherent in both Husain’s art and,
equally, in his public persona. However linked to Indian civilisation, Husain’s work derived its power
precisely from its roots in a universalist internationalism associated with a modernist style, a style that,
for Husain himself, was ‘at home’ in a cosmopolitan world. The examples of Husain’s art included in
this article exemplify that style and provide a context for viewing the painting under attack (Plates 2.3,
3.1, 3.2, and 3.4). Viewed in this light, the contrast between Husain’s rendering of Bharat Mata and
common devotional renderings of Bharat Mata is striking. Devotionalism draws strength (indeed, its very
meaning) from the powerful particularity and familiarity of its images. Indeed, one might speculatively
argue here that the objection of some Hindu nationalists to Husain’s representation of India as a nude
female figure in this painting lay precisely in the fact that, within a normative vision of the Indian nation
(and ‘Bharat Mata’) as a figure of particularistic devotion, and bounded national/religious identity, such a
clearly non-particularised, universalised (and naked) representation of India seemed to call into question
the purity of their own ‘feelings’ and devotion.
The tensions between an ‘art’ cast in civilisational terms and a devotional populism is in fact evident
in the very structure of Husain’s painting itself. For some, the power of Husain’s image of Bharat Mata lay
precisely in his ability to ground the figure in a universalising vision of civilisation that drew in uncanny
ways on multiple civilisational frames (and indeed brought them together in the nation’s definition). If
the modernist style of the nude ‘Mother India’ evokes the importance of a modern international world,
a world deeply implicated in India’s ongoing civilisational struggle for a full place in modernity, the
images that surround her suggest the presence of other, older, yet still powerful, civilising frames as well.
These include an Arab dhow (a sign of India’s powerful links to an Islamicate, Indian Ocean civilisation),
an Ashoka chakra (a symbol of cosmic order),38 and a dark Buddha (or sage), a symbol of the power of
inward self-cultivation and control, so central and still so relevant to India’s civilisational history.
And yet, in an echo of the very conflicts that had ensnared Husain in these cases, Husain’s painting
also juxtaposes these symbols of civilisation against a world of fixed identities — and a mapped and
bounded nation. Indeed, the sadness of the female figure of ‘Mother India’ in this picture seems precisely
linked to her being awkwardly and uncomfortably bound to the map, and to the place names with all their
particularistic (and even violent — Bhopal, Gujarat) associations marked out on her body. Whatever the
universalising civilisational referents surrounding her, Mother India, in all her modernist universalism,

38
Interestingly the ‘chakra’ in particular has multiple and potentially conflicting meanings here. While it can be
associated with a civilisational heritage (linked to the ruler Ashoka) that transcends narrow religious identities (or
even nationalism), it had, of course, also been appropriated for the Indian flag, and became in this sense a national
symbol against which Husain’s attackers could juxtapose his naked ‘Bharat Mata’ as a wound to national feelings.
See, for example, the website of the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti http://www.hindujagruti.org/activities/campaigns/national/
mfhussain-campaign, accessed 2 October 2009.
72 David Gilmartin & Barbara D. Metcalf

is here inescapably bound to, yet in tension with, the particularism of the fixed nation-state drawn on
the map. Indeed the tension between the universal and the particular — even as they are inescapably
connected — is at the very root of the sorrow associated here with her figure and, perhaps one might
add, with the link between the ‘nation’ and the ‘civilising’ process itself.

Conclusion
The Nehruvian moment of freedom which profoundly shaped Husain’s development represented an
escape from the colonial world of fixed and confining identities and posited a universalist civilisational
framing for the culture of the nation, linked as much to the modern world as to India’s own past heritage.
For Husain, this was a link to the people embodied not in the clarity of devotional attachments or the
fixed identities linked to religion, but in a less tangible inner orientation to the world — a link captured
in Husain’s story about taking his art to the people in a bullock cart. There, he says, he encountered
questions not about the whereabouts of Ram’s eye, as would come from an audience interested in
devotional darshan; rather, his engrossed audience responded to ‘colour and form’ that had ‘seeped into
the blood’. Here was the hint of a civilisational fount emanating neither from self-cultivated élites, nor
from the fixities of particularistic religious identity and devotion but from an almost mystical evocation
of ‘the people’. But it was still, in the end, up to the genius of artists like Husain to give it form and
national meaning.
The struggle to frame the meaning of such a ‘civilisational’ vision for the nation is what is at the
heart of Kaul’s judgment. Interestingly, Kaul himself invokes a sort of ‘soft’ Hindutva ideology (though
he does not explicitly use the term) to characterise his own appreciation of the civilisational meaning
of Husain’s art. Quoting from the Supreme Court’s well-known ‘Hindutva decision’ of 1995 which
allowed appeals to Hindutva in elections as not violating the law’s ban on attacks on other religions in
electoral rhetoric,39 he holds this up as a sort of model for framing a civilisational culture transcending
fixed religious divisions.

Hinduism being the world’s oldest religious tradition, incorporates all forms of belief and worship
without necessitating the selection or elimination of any. The Hindu is inclined to revere the divine in
every manifestation, whatever it may be, and is doctrinally tolerant …. Since religious truth is said to
transcend all verbal definition, it is not conceived in dogmatic terms. Hinduism is then both a civilisation
and a conglomerate of religions with neither a beginning, a founder, nor a central authority, hierarchy, or
organisation.40

Husain’s work is here implicitly equated with such a civilisational vision. But even for Kaul the notion
of distinct religious identities lurks here only barely beneath the surface. Unable, seemingly, to escape
the significance of Husain’s external Muslim (‘non-Hindu’) identity as an underlying fact in the case, he
adds: ‘A Hindu may embrace a non-Hindu religion without ceasing to be Hindu.’ Yet here the tyranny
of the language of fixed religious identities threatens to overwhelm him, for the word ‘Hindu’ that is
used to evoke participation in an Indian civilisational process that transcends fixed religious categories,
is also used to describe, at the very same time, an exclusive, oppositional religious category.

39
Dr Ramesh Yashwant Prabhoo v Shri Prabhakar Kashinanth Kunte & Others, AIR 1996 SC 1113.
40
Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust, Maqbool Fida Husain …Petitioner, pp. 69–70.
 Art on Trial 73

In fact, Kaul’s judgment, while vindicating Husain, points us back to many of the underlying con-
tradictions that have marked Husain’s public role in India discussed earlier. At the heart of these
contradictions is, as Kaul’s judgment (and the structure of the law) helps us to see, the tension between
a national identity drawing from fixed, essentialised principles of culture and one drawing from civil-
isational process. For Husain, art’s role is to transcend the narrowness of fixed categories and to point
toward universalising principles, a project that depends critically on his ability to encompass all of
India’s cultural symbols — from Arabic calligraphy to Karbala horses to Indian epics — within a
modernist, internationalist style. But critically embedded in such a civilising vision is also the assumption
that both art and law alike are based on the power of self-possessed and self-cultivated individuals to
exemplify civilisational values to a broader population always in the process of becoming, always on
the path to a never-quite-realised self-realisation.
This is why artists and jurists have special responsibilities to both society and nation. But at
the same time the vision of a national self defined by ‘civilising processes’ remains in tension with the
essentialised, egalitarian implications of fixed identities, both religious and national. An organic self
constructed around religious or national ‘feelings’ may in fact be one that — from a civilisational or
‘developmental’ perspective — is immature and lacking in self-discipline and self-awareness (as Kaul
tends to present it), but it is one that can claim a central place in the egalitarian, devotional ethos of
modern nationalism, as even the law recognises. Indeed, tension between fixed identities and universal
aspirations may be at the heart of all forms of civilisation in the modern world, a reality to which the
sadness of Husain’s Bharat Mata bears witness. If so, it should be no surprise that even as Husain’s
larger-than-life persona has transcended the fixities of India’s religious identity politics, the shadows of
this politics have, even before the spectacular and sad eruption of his recent harassment, lurked never
too far beneath the surface.

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