Of Artists, Expatriates, Faith and India

An excerpt from Vikram Kapur’s article “When Society Failed the Artist” today at The Hindu, on the recent death of exiled Indian artist M.F. Husain in London:

What is interesting in the case of Husain is that the furore over his nude depiction of Hindu deities did not erupt when the paintings were created in the 1970s. It happened in the 1990s during the golden age of Hindutva. It was in the heady days of the headline-gathering rath yatras and the demolition of the Babri Mosque that elements of the Hindu right woke up to the fact that a Muslim painter had depicted Hindu deities in the nude. They may also have taken their cue from the Muslim right’s success in getting the government to ban Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. In the years that followed they successfully utilised intimidation and the courts to hound Husain from the country and, ultimately, to Qatari citizenship.

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