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Artists meet President to highlight government apathy to l'affaire Husain

President K R Narayanan gave a sympathetic audience to a group of eminent artists, including Anjolie Ela Menon and Manu Parekh, who met him on Wedneday to seek his intervention in the light of ''the government's inaction and silence'' after the recent attack, allegedly by Bajrang Dal activists, on painter M F Husain in Bombay.

According to Ram Rahman of Sahmat, the delegation, during its 30-minute meeting, apprised the President of the growing number of attacks on artists by the "Sangh Parivar and its allies in the name of cultural nationalism''.

''They are giving a distorted interpretation which can snowball by creating an image in the popular psyche which could be detrimental to the cultural fabric of the country,'' Rahman said.

''People who carry out such activities believe they have the support of the powers that be,'' he said.

In a letter to the President, the artists said, ''Husain's work, which has earned him so much acclaim in the post-Independence decades, is precisely what is now being arbitrarily attacked.''

''All the attributes of creativity are being tested on the basis of a so-called iconographic orthodoxy,'' it said.

The artists said, ''Far from making images of Hindu gods and godesses as an act of provocation, he (Husain) has exhibited publicly his love of this very culture to which he belongs, and that produces the most exuberant, uninhibited and protean -- not to speak of the boldly nude and erotic -- representations of mythology.''

''The offence and abuse signal a dangerous move towards an entirely instrumentalised and recognisably fascist use of culture,'' they said.

Art critic Geeta Kapur felt, ''The question of representation should be allowed to remain complex.'' She said if it was an issue of censorship, a debate was called for.

Anjolie Ela Menon said the incident had two aspects. ''It is a moral and aesthetic issue as well as a law and order problem.''

The artists felt any attack on creativity was a precursor to an attempt to regiment society which needed to be frustrated, and appealed to the President to intervene to ensure the safeguarding of the secular character of the country's polity and its institutions. ''We tried to put everything into context before him,'' Rahman said.

Other members of the delegation were Gulam Mohammad Sheikh, the wellknown painter of the Baroda School, Prabhat Patnaik, economist in Jawaharlal Nehru University, Sohail Hashmi of Sahmat and Santo Dutta.

UNI

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