A newspaper opinion piece sometime back began with a rhetorical question about us: “Is India an ancient civilization on the cusp of modernity? Or is it actually a 3,500-year-old civilization in an advanced state of decay? We believe it’s the former, and middle-class Indians take pride in their belief that we are living in one of the world’s greatest cultures.”
But the real answer perhaps was playing it out in a long drawn, dramatic episode that began in the mid 1990s. Curtains fell on the final act recently.
According to media reports, Maqbool Fida Hussein, India’s most celebrated modern painter – venerable 95-year-old seeped in the syncretic culture of Pandharpur, Maharashtra, and soaked not just in the knowledge but also deep understanding of Hindu mythology and religious universe – has been conferred the nationality of Qatar by the Royal family of that tiny Arabian country.
Whether he accepts it or not, or whether that means he no more remains an Indian, is merely an immaterial technicality. It is the putrid atmospherics that indicate a rot among an ancient people, whose cultural and civilisational hubris hides the philistinism that flourishes in the nation hurtling towards forced modernity.
A billion plus people could not conjure up the guts to stand up to that creeping crudity of society and for the harassed artiste.
A state married to the idea of ‘freedom of expression’ could not muster up the meager resources to ensure the safety of one of the most priced modern cultural symbols of the country.
A supposedly thriving breed of intelligentsia could not counter the fraudulent, silly and diabolical accusations against conventional notions of artistic grammar, ideation and execution by a handful of people who never really understood art, let alone appreciate its social implications.
The bloodthirsty hoodlums who hounded him chose to not understand several of India’s ancient principles:
1. that religion is not stagnant;
2. that religious philosophy must also accommodates profanity;
3. that gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon are mere signposts in the human being’s path to self-actualisation. They are not self-actualisation personified;
4. that art and literature are the spearheads that guide a society towards progress;
5. that free ideation and expression are the cornerstones of a healthy society;
6. that artistes are not supposed to think within the four-walls of social mores and norms;
7. that it is their job to explore the outer realms of these very social norms.
Looking at it in another perspective, it is only fitting that Hussain abandons India. The original spirit of enquiry, openness of mind and veneration of new spiritual and social ideas that India was known for, have already shrunk to non-existence – or let’s say thrashed into non-existence.
So, Hussain’s artistic merit notwithstanding, the quintessential India that he long represented is already a thing of the past. There is no place for him in this land anymore.
We deserve to rot. We will.
