[Reader-list] Feel free, Mr Husain. Go paint Qatari leaders

[Pawan Durani]

Feel free, Mr Husain. Go paint Qatari leaders

March 10th, 2010
By Cho Ramaswamy


Now that M.F. Husain has settled in Qatar where there is total
freedom, he is free of the shackles imposed by the Indian system on
freedom of expression. All those who appreciate his art would now
eagerly await his imaginative paintings of the leaders of Qatari
society, hopefully not artistically clothed.

His fans would not expect him to confine nudity to Hindu deities
alone; it would extend to all the religions. Having already painted
his mother, daughter and Muslim kings fully robed, Mr Husain, being
the freed citizen that he is now in Qatar, should be prepared to
remove those clothes. How can the artist in him be satisfied with
seeing Saraswati and Parvati alone in the nude?

Fortunately for art in the nude, the courts here cannot do anything to
Mr Husain now that he has run away from the Indian judicial system.
All the cases could be now buried amidst the pictures drawn by him.
Both would mercifully go to the dustbin.

I am very anxious not to get branded as communal in my thinking. I
want to be hailed as a secularist and so I would say with all the
force I can command that Mr Husain has the inalienable right to depict
the Hindu deities in the most obscene manner while taking care to
paint even non-religious Muslims fully clothed.

He can claim that because he hates Hitler he painted him in the nude
so he could humiliate him and in the same breath justify his nude
pictures of Hindu goddesses as depiction of purity.

And because I am secular, I would also assert that his not returning
to India is only to gain freedom from the Indian fascism and not to
avoid being apprehended by the law enforcers in this country. Being a
liberal-minded artist, he naturally is not able to put up with the
protests which do not harm him in any way.

Shunning the Indian system and preferring the Qatar environment is not
an act of hypocrisy but one of liberal, secular and free thought. And
now that Mr Husain has established himself as such a stout campaigner
for free expression, I must believe firmly that he will forcefully
plead with his new protectors in Qatar to roll out of a bit of that
red carpet to Taslima Nasreen, another hounded victim from the
literary world.

- Cho S. Ramaswamy is a well-known political
analyst, actor, dramatist and editor of
Tamil magazine Tughlak

Source : http://www.deccanchronicle.com/blogs/others/feel-free-mr-husain-go-paint-qatari-leaders-773