You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (7 page)

You only had to look around to understand why they accepted that there might be something in the clash-of-civilisations hypothesis after all. The 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington were planned in Hamburg. The 7/7 attacks on the London transport system were planned in Leeds and executed by men with broad Yorkshire accents. Most terrorist violence in Europe came from within. Meanwhile Britain exported terrorists to Pakistan, Israel, Iraq and Afghanistan, and Danish Muslims travelled the world to whip up trade boycotts against their own country.

Theirs were not typical cases. But those in charge of politics and culture were well aware that behind the terrorists were hundreds of thousands of people whose attitudes towards violence were at best ambivalent. In 2007 a survey of British Muslims found that, contrary to expectations, the sense of belonging to Britain was higher among the old, who were more likely to have been born abroad, than the young, who were more likely to have been born in Britain. A significant minority was turning to religious reaction. About one third of Muslims surveyed aged between sixteen and twenty-four wanted the introduction of Sharia law and supported the execution of apostates. Cheeringly, two thirds did not, but anxious cultural bureaucrats were more impressed by those who might do them harm than by those who would leave them alone, particularly when the forces of reaction appeared to have history on their side.

In his caustic
Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West
, the American conservative writer Christopher Caldwell saw a continent that was declining in numbers and paralysed by political correctness. It had become too weak to face down the ‘adversary culture’ of militant Islam. He and others on the right held that post-Christian, post-imperial, post-Holocaust, post-modern, post-just-about-everything European countries lacked the patriotic pride and religious certainties of strong societies, and were wide open to attack from those who felt no comparable embarrassment about their beliefs. As I hope this book makes clear, I think that conservatives underestimate the power and appeal of liberalism. But the most striking feature of the twenty years after
The Satanic Verses
was that Western political and cultural grandees, who trumpeted their anti-Americanism, behaved as if American conservatives were right. They treated Muslims as a homogeneous bloc, and allowed the reactionaries to set the cultural agenda.

They might have looked to Salman Rushdie, to the feminists in Women Against Fundamentalism, to the Arab and Iranian dissidents and to liberals in immigrant communities struggling against the religious ultras. But a principled stand would have involved confronting their fears. However fantastic those fears were, they were not irrational. They could glance at the evening news and see Islamists slaughtering tens of thousands of civilians in Pakistan, Iraq, Nigeria and Afghanistan. They knew it could happen here, because in Rushdie’s case it
had
happened here.

With religious censorship, as with censorship in all its forms, you should not just think about the rejected books, newspaper articles, TV scripts and plays, but remember the far larger class of works that authors begin then decide to abandon. The words that were never written, the arguments that were never made during two decades when argument was needed. In 2010, the BBC asked the Egyptian-American feminist Mona Eltahawy why ever-larger numbers of European women were allowing men to tell them that they must hide behind veils. ‘I think it has become more prevalent because the space has been left completely uncontested to the Muslim right wing, which does not respect anyone’s rights whatsoever except for this one right to cover a woman’s face,’ she replied. ‘No one has pushed back against the Muslim right wing. Integration has largely failed across Europe, even in the UK.’

You can find many reasons why writers, journalists and politicians failed to push back against the Muslim right wing, or even to admit that a Muslim right wing existed. I accept that they were not always cowardly, and that an honourable wariness about the possibility of aiding the white right wing motivated many. But beneath the plausible arguments lay a base and basic fear.

It pushed the majority of Western liberals into adhering in whole or in part to the post-Rushdie rules of self-censorship:

If these rules were all there were, it would have been bad enough. But rules imply limits, and there were no limits. After Grayson Perry said he did not satirise Islam because he feared having his throat slit, he added a shrewd observation. ‘I’m interested in religion and I’ve made a lot of pieces about it,’ he said. ‘With other targets you’ve got a better idea of who they are, but Islamism is very amorphous. You don’t know what the threshold is. Even what seems an innocuous image might trigger off a really violent reaction, so I just play safe all the time.’

One nineteen p.m.

No one seems to be going in.

Instead a fat baldy’s coming out.

Like he’s looking for something in his pockets and
at one nineteen and fifty seconds
he goes back for those lousy gloves of his.

WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA
,
‘
THE TERRORIST, HE WATCHES
’

No one doubted that Maqbool Fida Husain was India’s greatest modern artist. Western conceptual art became so formulaic, so lost in mannerism and self-reference, that he may have been the world’s greatest living artist, although writers risked ridicule when they made such ostentatious claims. I would defy any critic, however, to deny that Husain’s work embodied the struggles and glories of India.

For half the year, he lived in London. If you had passed him in Mayfair before he died in June 2011 at the venerable age of ninety-five, you would have found him hard to ignore. He strode out from his studio to Shepherd’s Market in bare feet or socks – he did not wear shoes, whatever the weather. Often he carried an oversized paintbrush, just to make sure that the curious could guess his trade. Yet most people in Britain who thought of themselves as cultured found it easy to ignore his work, because no one showed it to them. In part, the ignorance was the result of the parochialism of British culture. But that was not the only reason for Husain’s obscurity.

London’s Serpentine Gallery included a selection of his paintings in a wider exhibition of contemporary Indian art in 2008. Strange though it once would have been to say it, the gallery’s staff deserved praise for their courage as well as their good taste. In 2006, the Asia House cultural centre in Marylebone tried to give the British public the first major solo exhibition of Husain’s work. Threats from protesters closed it within days. Even though the Indian High Commissioner opened the show, they denounced Husain as an enemy of the Indian nation. Husain offended all Hindus, they said, with his pornographic and blasphemous art. The possibility of violence terrified the exhibition organisers, and they backed away from a confrontation with censorious extremism.

In India, Husain’s position was worse. Hindu militants attacked his home and galleries showing his work. For twelve years, the Indian legal system aided and abetted them. Without understanding how his enemies were exploiting him, the old man became a cog in a machine that manufactured offence. Sectarian politicians exploited him to keep their supporters in a useful state of religious fury, a splenetic condition that delivers many votes to unscrupulous operators at election time.

Born into a Muslim family in Maharashtra in 1915, Husain began his career as a self-taught artist under the Raj. His family moved to Bombay when he was in his teens, and he went door to door offering to sketch portraits. ‘What I discovered was that everyone, regardless of their looks, wanted to have their cheeks rosy. I could not do all these rosy cheeks, so I decided to paint Bollywood cinema hoardings instead.’

He painted posters for nearly twenty years, scaling scaffolding and sleeping on the pavement. ‘I loved it, that street life. All art in India is viewed as celebration. That is what I’ve tried to put into my work.’

Husain’s friends tell me that he travelled round India, and when he ran out of money he exhibited his drawings on railway station platforms and invited passing passengers to pay what they wanted for them.

When Nehru announced Indian independence in 1947, Husain joined the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group. It had the cosmopolitan project to make a new art for a new country by combining Indian traditions with the Western avant-garde. Husain stayed true to the progressive promises of the 1940s all his life. German expressionism and the modern movement influenced him, and Western critics called him ‘the Indian Picasso’, but he never lost his ability to straddle high culture and popular culture, which is as good a definition of greatness in art as I can find. In his paintings, gorgeous Bollywood stars appear alongside gods and goddesses of the Hindu tradition. ‘For me, India means a celebration of life. You cannot find that same quality anywhere in the world,’ he told an interviewer in 2008. ‘I never wanted to be clever, esoteric, abstract. I wanted to make simple statements. I wanted my canvases to have a story. I wanted my art to talk to people.’

All India’s religious traditions moved him. His family were from the Sulaimani Bohra branch of Shia Islam, which had absorbed many Hindu beliefs. His mother died when he was young, and his father sent him away from home when he was a teenager. ‘I used to have terrible nightmares when I was about fourteen or fifteen. This stopped when I was nineteen. I had a guru called Mohammad Ishaq – I studied the holy texts with him for two years. I also read and discussed the Gita and Upanishads and Puranas. This made me completely calm.’

All of which is a long way of making a short point: Husain was from the roots of India. He painted for longer than the Indian republic has existed, and tried to tie its present to its past through his work. Until he was close to eighty, the suggestion that he had no right to include himself as a part of the Indian cultural tradition because he was from a Muslim family would have struck him and all who admired him as inexplicable. As would the notion that there was anything offensive about his nudes.

You only have to visit the Lakshmana temple at Khajuraho to see the erotic strain in Indian culture. The presence of naked gods and goddesses tells visitors that they are far from the taboos of the Abrahamic religions. Hinduism bears partial responsibility for the many crimes of the caste system, but its admirers defend it by saying that because it has no prophet or pope, it has room for those who believe in thousands of gods or none. ‘You can cover up your goddess in the finest silk and jewellery,’ wrote a sympathetic observer. ‘Or you can watch her naked. You can look at the beauty of her face and admire the divinity of her halo, a sari wrapped around her, and her face made up like a Bollywood queen. Or you can see her with ample breasts heaving, her luscious lips parted seductively carved, her thighs wrapped in supreme sexual ecstasy around an athletic god or even goddess – carved for eternity on the walls of a Hindu temple … At least that’s the theory, and it has been the practice in large parts of India for thousands of years.’ The sculptors of the Tantric and Shaktic traditions openly celebrated eroticism. Others placed erotic carvings on the outer walls of temples – not to excite visitors, but as a reminder that they should leave their desires behind before they entered. More often, artists used nudity in religious painting and sculpture to symbolise purity. Their work carried no more sexual charge than the nudity of the sadhus who wade into the Ganges at Kumb Mela.

Husain’s sketch of Saraswati, the goddess of learning, did not compare with temple carvings of goddesses wrapping their thighs around gods. You could not even call the drawing a fully realised nude. Saraswati sits cross-legged beside a lute, holding a lotus flower above her head. There is nothing erotic – let alone pornographic – about his stylised white-on-black sketch in which only the contours of the body are evident. Husain’s goddess is pure to the point of being ethereal. He drew her in the mid-1970s. No one complained. In 1996, a Bombay art critic included the sketch in a book on Husain. A writer on a sectarian Hindu monthly picked up a copy, saw the line drawing of Saraswati, and decided to create a scandal out of nothing.

‘M.F. Husain an Artist or a Butcher?’ ran the headline above an article accusing the artist of insulting Hindus. The provocateur had picked the right time to start a culture war. By the 1990s, religious parties and sectarian militias had infested the supposedly secular Indian state. They wanted to – they
needed
to – inflame their supporters. If they could not find real offences, they were happy to manufacture them.

Shiv Sena, a thuggish bunch of rabble-rousers, dominated Husain’s Bombay. They saw a copy of the article, and instructed the police to file charges. Three days later, Hindu activists stormed a gallery showing his work and trashed his paintings. Husain’s enemies had thrown him into the self-pitying and vicious world of Hindu sectarianism, whose malignancies the West should treat as a warning.

Identity politics contains a trap. Of all the reasons to be wary of religious leaders asking the state to suspend freedom of speech to spare their tender feelings, not the smallest is that selective censorship leaves liberals with no argument against sectarians from the dominant denomination or ethnic group. The Indian version of identity politics has led to the majority – or demagogues claiming to represent the majority –
behaving as if it were a persecuted minority
. The various Hindu sectarian parties complained that the state gave special treatment to the descendants of India’s former Muslim masters. Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress government banned
The Satanic Verses
to please Muslim sentiment. It agreed to exempt Muslim men from paying the alimony to divorced wives the secular law demanded, while not allowing Hindu men to benefit from the cheap rate authorised by Sharia. Look, cried the Hindu sectarians, look at how the elite panders to the minority while penalising the majority.

The worst thing one could say about the Hindu nationalist charges was that they were true. By departing from equality before the law, Gandhi had left India with no argument against sectarianism, in whatever form it came. Hindu nationalists saw an opening, and poured through it. They told the mass of Indians that they remained the victims not just of their former Muslim conquerors, but of the former British conquerors too. The Raj’s final imposition on India was to indoctrinate Nehru and his anglicised, British-educated contemporaries with alien democratic and secular ideas. Like militant Islamists and so many pseudo-leftist Western academics, Hindu nationalists damned human rights, including the right to free expression, as colonial impositions.

Bal Thackeray, Shiv Sena’s leader, showed where the rejection of secularism led in one of his many declarations of admiration for that ultimate cultural relativist, Adolf Hitler. Thackeray announced that Hindus must ‘shake off their stupor’ and consider protecting their civilisation and culture. ‘If telling it like it is makes one a Nazi, I say: Fine, better that than the spineless, deaf, dumb, numb and blind state exalted as Nehruvian secularism. I wouldn’t even spit on it.’ Thackeray and the many politicians like him said that Hindus were put upon and cozened. To end the injustice they must free themselves from their former Muslim and British oppressors and become a force the world must reckon with. Hence the destruction in December 1992 of the Ayodhya mosque, allegedly built by the conquering Mughals in the sixteenth century on the site of a Hindu temple, and the slaughter of thousands in the communal riots that followed. Hence the threats to the lives of historians who said that India had always been an amalgam of cultures, religions and ethnicities, and that some Hindu princes had been as keen on sacking Hindu temples as the Mughal invaders were. And hence the campaign to persecute Husain, who, as a supporter of Nehru’s ideals and a Muslim to boot, was their perfect target.

As soon as Shiv Sena filed lawsuits against him, Husain had to cancel his planned attendance at a commemoration in the city of the achievements of the Progressive Artists’ Group. If he had come, the police would have arrested him for ‘disturbing communal harmony’ – and there was a chance a religious mob might have killed him too. A group of young artists unfurled a banner at the party reading ‘Husain, we miss you’, but other guests were unimpressed when a Western collector insisted that they speak out on Husain’s behalf. ‘Why doesn’t he understand?’ said an artist’s husband. ‘This is like asking us to speak out in Berlin in 1936.’

As so often, the Hitler comparison was an exaggeration, although given Thackeray’s pronouncements, you can see why the man reached for it. Fanatics threatened Husain and all associated with him with violence. They destroyed his paintings at every opportunity. When a TV network asked its viewers whether Husain should receive India’s highest honour, religious yobs stormed the studios. In 1998, militants attacked Husain’s Bombay home and wrecked it. Thackeray justified them and identified with them. ‘If Husain can step into Hindustan, what is wrong if we enter his house?’ he said as he redefined secular, multi-cultural India into mono-cultural ‘Hindustan’, and made Husain an enemy alien in his own city.

The logic of retaliatory sectarianism dictated that when Islamists offered a reward to anyone who would kill Danish cartoonists who had offended them, Hindu nationalist politicians offered a reward to ‘patriots’ who would chop off Husain’s hands.

A dirty mind is a perpetual feast, and once they started looking for reasons to be offended, sectarians found them everywhere. Husain painted a nude woman whose body curved around a map of India. His persecutors denounced it as pornographic, and claimed he was insulting Bharatmata (Mother India). In truth, Husain had painted a severe work because it was his contribution to a charitable campaign to raise money for the victims of the civil war in Kashmir, and the cause demanded restraint. As might have been expected, the fact that the aid was going to Muslim Kashmiris made his opponents angrier still.

When they had finished with what he had painted, Husain’s enemies questioned him about the subjects he had never painted. Why did he not paint Muhammad? Why did he paint nudes of Indian goddesses, but not of the Prophet’s favourite wife Aisha? On the Web, they contrasted his abstract nudes of gods and goddesses with his fully clothed portraits of his wife and daughter, and of the Prophet Muhammad’s daughter Fatima. ‘Husain depicts the deity or person he hates as naked. He shows Prophet’s Mother, his own mother, daughter, all the Muslim personalities fully clothed, but at the same time Hindus and Hindu deities along with Hitler are shown naked. This proves his hatred for the Hindus.’

India’s lawyers and politicians helped at every stage of the campaign of harassment. India and America are the world’s greatest democracies. But whereas America’s founding fathers wisely protected free speech with the First Amendment, India’s founders took their lead from the British colonialists. They believed that censorship could promote national unity, as many European politicians and bureaucrats believe today. Article 19 of the constitution grants Indians free speech – but adds opt-outs to allow censors to intervene in every important area of debate – the ‘sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality, or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement’. Article 295 of the criminal code penalises ‘deliberate and malicious acts, intended to outrage religious feelings or any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs’. For good measure, Article 153 mandates the punishment of those who promote ‘enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, etc., [by] doing acts prejudicial to maintenance of harmony’.