Читать книгу You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom - Nick Cohen - Страница 14

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.

WISłAWA 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’.

The courts and the police, who never seemed to be to hand when criminals attacked art galleries, besieged Husain for more than a decade. Censorship was not promoting harmony, let alone the interests of justice, but allowing sectarians to pick grievances out of thin air. It took until 2008 for the Delhi High Court to throw out all of the hundreds of criminal charges against Husain, and warn, ‘In India, a new puritanism is being carried out … and a host of ignorant people are vandalising art and pushing us towards the pre-renaissance era.’

By then Husain had had his fill. In 2010, at the age of ninety-four, and after years of exile, he renounced his Indian citizenship. Speaking with sadness but not bitterness, he said, ‘I have not intended to denigrate or hurt the beliefs of anyone through my art. I only give expression to the instincts from my soul. India is my motherland and I can never hate the country. But the political leadership, artists and intellectuals kept silent when Sangh Parivar [Hindu nationalist] forces attacked me. How can I live there in such a situation?’

India must carry the shame of being the first country to ban The Satanic Verses, the work of its greatest novelist, and of following up that miserable achievement by driving its greatest artist into exile.

Why pick on Husain for sketches no one found disturbing when he first released them? Read his accusers, and they cannot justify their charges of blasphemy or obscenity. How can they, when Husain’s paintings are not remotely pornographic, but part of a deliberate attempt by the artist and his contemporaries to continue Indian traditions? Husain’s real offences were to be born into a Muslim family almost a hundred years ago, and to defend the secular dream of Nehru. That was it. His enemies wanted to feed their supporters a diet of indignation, and needed to supply them with new targets for their rage. The identity of the target was irrelevant. If they had not gone after Husain, they would have gone after someone else.

In his study of the crisis in Indian secularism, Salil Tripathi emphasises how unIndian Indian nationalism has become. ‘Whenever Hindu nationalists attack an art gallery, or tear down posters they consider obscene, or demand bans on books they don’t want others to read, or vandalise a research institute, or destroy the home of an editor, or threaten an academic, or run a campaign against a historian they disagree with, or force film studios to change scripts, or extract apologies from artists, or hurl eggs at scholars, or destroy mosques, or rape Muslim women, or kill Muslim men and children, they take India into a deeper abyss [and] push Hinduism into a darker age. They look and act like the Nazis and the Taliban … [They] are untrue to the meaning of their faith and are disloyal to their nation’s constitution. They shame a great nation and belittle how Rushdie saw India: “The dream we all agreed to dream”.’

The self-satisfied might say how lucky we in Britain are that we do not suffer from India’s censorship laws, and how proud we should be that we could offer Husain a sanctuary. Before we become too smug, we should go back to the forced closure of the Husain exhibition in London in 2006. The reaction to the attack on intellectual freedom in the heart of a city that boasted of being a great cultural capital was instructive. There was no reaction. The artists and intellectuals who are usually so keen to write round-robin letters to the press denouncing this policy or that injustice stayed silent. Journalists and politicians bit their tongues too, as they tacitly accepted the tyrannical proposition that if a writer or artist failed to show ‘respect’, then he or she must suffer the consequences. The denial by fanatics of the right of the public to see the work of a major artist did not warrant one paragraph in even the news-in-brief columns of any of the daily papers.

I must enter one further caveat. For all the bad faith behind their concocted accusations, the religious thugs had one good question: Why couldn’t Husain paint Muhammad, or come to that, his favourite wife Aisha?

‘God is love’

Sherry Jones gave every appearance of being a warm-hearted American. She covered Montana and Idaho for a business news service, until in 2002 she decided like so many reporters before her to try to break into fiction. She learned Arabic. She read academic studies of the history of early Islam. Then, like no other reporter before her, she sat down to write a novel about the life of Aisha bint Abu Bakr, whose father, according to popular accounts, betrothed her to Muhammad when she was six, and gave her away to be his wife when she was nine.

The wars of 9/11 moved Jones to seek reconciliation between peoples. ‘We in the West know so little about Islam that we tend to demonise it,’ she told an interviewer. Muhammad was ‘fairly egalitarian in his attitudes to women’, and got a ‘bad rap’ from feminists. The sooner Muslims, Christians, Jews, atheists and Buddhists realised that ‘we are all human beings with needs, desires and fears … the closer we will be to achieving Paradise right here on Earth. Because Paradise means living continually in the presence of God, and, as the Bible says, God is love.’

Jones’s novel, The Jewel of Medina, continues in this vein – at some length. The opening lines set the tone for the rest of the book: ‘Join me on a journey to another time and place, to a harsh, exotic world of saffron and sword fights, of desert nomads living in camel-hair tents, of caravans laden with Persian carpets and frankincense, of flowing colourful robes and kohl-darkened eyes and perfumed arms filigreed with henna.’

As the above suggests, Ms Jones was writing a historical romance for the women’s market. The New York office of Random House was impressed, and paid her an advance of $100,000 in a two-novel deal.

I defy any reader to guess how a religious, racial or other interest group could find grounds for offence in her work. As with the paintings of M.F. Husain, it is impossible for those who do not know what happened next to understand why even the most twisted censor would want to hurl Jones’s book on the fire.

The Jewel of Medina is an anti-Satanic Verses. It replaces scepticism with reverence, and satire with solemnity. Jones’s Aisha is a feisty girl, as all modern heroines must be. Muhammad is wise and good. Jones does not suggest for a moment that his teachings are inferior to Christianity or Judaism. For those who do not like to see their prophets or gods cast in a bad light, Jones puts the best possible gloss on an event that shocks modern sensibilities: an old man taking sexual possession of a young girl. Jones avoids the obstacle by pretending it isn’t there. In the novel, they are married when Aisha is nine. Muhammad kisses the child and says goodbye. She reaches the age of fourteen. To her intense frustration, her marriage is still unconsummated. ‘Each day flowered with hope – would Muhammad visit me today? – then dropped its petals like tears. The weeks dragged by like a funeral procession.’ The waiting lasts for years, and the marriage is not consummated until after she reaches puberty.

This comforting view of Aisha’s life is popular with apologists for religion, most notably Karen Armstrong, a former nun who now soothes modern readers by assuring them that there is little or nothing to worry about in Catholicism or any other creed she comes across. Her biographies of Muhammad and her history of Islam guided Jones as she worked on the plot of The Jewel of Medina, and Jones seems to have been impressed by Armstrong’s bold assertion that the emancipation of women was a cause dear to the Prophet’s heart. To make it, Armstrong had to explain away the hadiths and verses in the Koran that support the beating and sexual exploitation of women, and the power the holy book gives husbands to divorce unwanted wives. On the question of men marrying little girls, Armstrong’s Muhammad, like Sherry Jones’s Muhammad, does the decent thing. He waits until Aisha reaches puberty before making love to her. As Armstrong explains:

Finally about a month after she had arrived in Mecca, it was decided that it was time for the wedding of Muhammad with Aisha. She was still only nine years old, so there was no wedding feast and the ceremonial was kept to a minimum … Abu Bakr had bought some fine red-striped cloth from Bahrain and this had been made into a wedding dress for her. Then they took her to her little apartment beside the mosque. There Muhammad was waiting for her, and he laughed and smiled while they decked her with jewellery and ornaments and combed her long hair. Eventually a bowl of milk was brought in and Muhammad and Aisha both drank from it. The marriage made little difference to Aisha’s life. Tabari says that she was so young that she stayed at her parents’ home and the marriage was consummated there later when she had reached puberty. Aisha went on playing with her girlfriends and her dolls.

Tabari, the ninth-century Koranic scholar, is not in fact such a comforting source. In his collection of stories about the Prophet, he quotes Aisha as saying, ‘the Messenger of God consummated his marriage with me in my house when I was nine years old’. In other traditions he cites, he puts her age at ten. The hadith collections of Bukhari, which Sunni Muslims consider to be the most authoritative, also say that Muhammad consummated the marriage when Aisha was nine. For most of the history of Islam, there was nothing controversial about her age at the time of the wedding. Because it confirmed her virginity, it reinforced Aisha’s status among the Prophet’s wives, and gave her wishes added force in the power struggles within Islam after Muhammad’s death.

Perhaps Jones, Armstrong and all those like them who avert their eyes from inconvenient evidence do so because they worry about Western racists, who use Muhammad’s marriage to Aisha to taunt ethnic minorities. But it is as important to worry about religious extremists who use the arguments for male supremacy, homophobia and the exploitation of women and children in holy books to justify oppression – and to notice that there is not a great deal of difference between the ideologies of the religious and the racial extremists.

In Does God Hate Women?, their scholarly study of the links between religion and misogyny, Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom criticise Armstrong by making the essential point that when sacred texts are taken to be divine instructions, you cannot allow nervousness to inhibit criticism.

In Iran after the 1979 revolution, the Islamists reduced the minimum age of marriage for girls to nine. In 2000, under pressure from women’s rights activists, the Iranian parliament voted to raise it to fifteen. However, the Council of Guardians, an anti-democratic oversight body dominated by traditional clerics, vetoed the reform, saying that the new ruling was contrary to Islamic law. (They had the example of Ayatollah Khomeini on their side. He had availed himself of the law’s blessings and married a ten-year-old girl.) The case of Yemen is equally instructive. In 1998, the Yemeni parliament revised a law that had set the minimum age of marriage at fifteen. The new ruling allowed girls to be married much earlier, so long as they did not move in with their husbands until they had reached sexual maturity. Conservative clerics take this to mean that the consummation of a marriage can take place at the age of nine. Human-rights activists have fought to reverse this ruling, but to date they have been unsuccessful, because Islamic clerics can point to Muhammad’s marriage to Aisha to justify their views.

‘Although it would be a massive oversimplification to claim that Islam is the cause of these patterns,’ Benson and Stangroom conclude, ‘it is nevertheless the case that Islamic beliefs are sometimes a factor in child marriage.’ As the Iranian reformers found, religion makes the task of stopping girls becoming the possessions of older men – sometimes far older men – harder. The men can always say that religious authority is on their side. Unless religious authority is challenged, they will win.

There are three possible challenges. The first, and to my mind the simplest, is to give up on religion. To reject communism, you do not need to know why Marx’s beliefs in the inevitability of proletarian revolution were wrong, you just need to look at the vast crimes the communists committed, and resolve to have nothing to do with the ideology behind them. Similarly, to reject religion you do not need to understand the scientific and philosophical arguments about the extreme unlikelihood of God’s existence, or go through the archaeological and literary studies which tell us that the early years of Judaism, Christianity and Islam were strikingly different from the accounts presented to believers. Knowledge of the vast crimes committed in the name of religion is once again sufficient.

Religious reformers must try subtler strategies. They cannot abandon their faiths, therefore they take, say, the problematic lines in Leviticus, St Paul’s epistles and the Koran that license the persecution of homosexuals and try to reinterpret them.

Leviticus says:

Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.

The prohibition appears to leave no escape hatches, but liberal Jews and Christians must find a way out so they can continue to practise their religions without sacrificing their tolerant instincts. American Christian homosexuals made a dogged effort when they formed a group with the splendid title of the National Gay Pentecostal Alliance. (Sadly, they later changed its name.) They did their own translation of Leviticus, and came up with a new version of the prohibition:

And a man who will lie down with a male in beds of a woman, both of them have made an abomination; dying they will die. Their blood is on them.

They updated the language into contemporary English to produce:

If two men engage in homosexual sex while on a woman’s bed, both have committed an abomination. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.

It did not sound much of an improvement. But the gay Pentecostalists were undaunted. ‘Rather than forbidding male homosexuality’, they decided, Leviticus simply restricts where lovemaking may occur. According to their reading, if a bisexual man takes a gay lover into the bedroom he shares with his wife, he is committing an abomination in the eyes of the Lord. But if he sneaks him into the spare bedroom, then everything will be fine with God, although not, I imagine, with his wife.