M.F.Husain: A Portrait of India's Intolerance

WALL STREET JOURNAL

By Salil Tripathi



INDIA - Maqbool Fida Husain (1915-2011) was India's most celebrated painter, and his death in London last week was front-page news across the subcontinent. However, Husain's story says much about modern India. The penal code makes it a crime "to outrage religious feelings" and also outlaws "promoting enmity" between different groups on the basis of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language—and the all-inclusive "etc." Vigilantes attacked his works and damaged the studio of a television network that polled its readers on whether Husain should be given India's highest civilian honor.[link]

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A Framed Painter: Maqbool Fida Husain

NEWSWEEK

By Salil Tripathi

"Last Supper" by Hussain

INDIA - Maqbool Fida Husain, who died on June 8, was India’s most prominent painter—but in the last year of his life, he had become a national of Qatar, and he died in London, far from the city he loved, Mumbai. Husain was born a Muslim, and Hindu activists saw an opportunity to lead a sustained campaign against him. He was born in pre-independence India around 1915 and lived there until the 1990s, when Hindu nationalists launched a vicious campaign against him. They were upset after a magazine found some of his old paintings and sketches, some dating back to the 1970s, which showed Hindu deities in the nude. [link]

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Maqbool Fida Husain, India’s Most Famous Painter, Dies at 95

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By William Grimes

Maqbool Fida Husain stands before his “Last Supper” in 2004.

UNITED KINGDOM - Maqbool Fida Husain, an artist whose modernist reinterpretations of mythic and religious subjects made him India’s most famous painter and, in recent years, a target of right-wing Hindu groups, died on Thursday in London. He was 95.

Indifferent to both religion and politics, Mr. Husain, a Muslim by upbringing, treated the gods and goddesses of Hinduism as visual stimuli rather than deities, depicting them unclothed and often in sexually suggestive poses. This cavalier treatment earned him the bitter hatred of Hindu nationalist groups, which beginning in the 1990s mounted a campaign of intimidation and violence against him. [link]

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