-----------------------------------------------------------------
Goanetter Francis Rodrigues (Vasco/Toronto) book launch in
London, England @ the World Goa Day festivities on 15 Aug at 7pm
Details http://www.konkanisongbook.com
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Our Cultural Crossroads
by Vivek Menezes
Goa's future as a cultural centre hangs by a single thread today, as State
Museum
authorities continue to formulate their response to the Hindu Janajagruti
Samiti's
demand that an uncontroversial painting (of a white bull) by M. F. Husain be
removed
from its modest gallery of contemporary Indian master artists. If the director
of
the museum, Radha Bhave capitulates to this unreasonable demand, it will mean
instant destruction of all the goodwill and credibility that Goa has
painstaking
accumulated as a hospitable, nationally significant centre for film, art, music
and
literature. It is vital that all the stakeholders who have contributed to this
development - from Kala Academy to the Entertainment Society of Goa to the
artists,
writers and musicians of our state - now ensure that the accumulated results of
their hard work isn't lost at this critical juncture.
The stakes are extremely high. In the past five years, Goa's cultural profile
has
risen steadily. It has become a centre for film-making - just last week the
director
Rakeysh (Rang de Basanti) Mehra predicted Goa will be "India's next film
capital."
In addition, for the first time ever, painters like Subodh Kerkar, Antonio e
Costa
and Viraj Naik are demonstrating that mature international careers are
possible
even if you live in a Goan village. And our state has also become home or
retreat to
an unbelievable array of literary luminaries - winners of the Nobel and Booker
Prize, Sahitya Akademi award-winners, international, regional and national
best-selling writers, they have begun to flock to Goa precisely because of the
longstanding traditions of openness and tolerance that are now under threat.
The unreasonableness of the HJS demand is underlined by its admission that the
Husain painting that it wants removed isn't objectionable. Instead, it claims
Husain
"has always hurt the religious feelings and national sentiments of millions of
Hindus and Indians.his paintings of deities and Bharat Mata in the nude were
thoroughly obscene". But this argument has already been comprehensively
demolished
by the Supreme Court of India decision of Sept. 8 last year, when Chief Justice
Balakrishnan noted that "there are many such pictures, paintings and
sculptures, and
some of them are in temples also". In Goa itself, we know that there are many
striking examples of 'sky-clad'deities, like the glorious Loliem Vetal (to name
just
one).
The campaign by HJS actually has little to do with religion, instead it is all
about
the politics of intimidation. In this regard, it is instructive to read the
text of
the sharp rebuke delivered from the bench of the Delhi High Court earlier in
2008,
to similar petitioners against the 92-year-old Husain. In plain language with
great
relevance to our current situation in Goa, Justice Sanjay Kaul wrote, "India's
new
Puritanism, practiced by a largely ignorant crowd in the name of India's
spiritual
purity, is threatening to throw the nation back into the pre-Renaissance era.
The
criminal justice system should not be used as an easy recourse to ventilate
against
a creative act." Justice Kaul added, very reasonably, "Our greatest problem
today is
fundamentalism, the triumph of the letter over the spirit. The test for judging
a
work of art should be that of an ordinary man of common sense and not that of a
hyper-sensitive one.looking at a piece of art from the painter's perspective
becomes
very important, especially in the context of the nude."
Examine the astonishingly productive 70-year long career of Maqbool Fida Husain
in
the context of his peers in Indian contemporary art, and it immediately becomes
clear that we are talking about a genuine desh-bhakt. He came to prominence
after
being discovered by our own, Saligao-born Francis Newton Souza, at whose
invitation
he joined the seminal Progressive Artist's Movement in 1947 (the Goan artists
Vasudeo Gaitonde and Laxman Pai were also members of the PAM at various times).
But
unlike his avowed mentor Souza or friends, Gaitonde, Pai, Raza, Ram Kumar,
Padamsee
and many, many others, he never left India for the better developed art
marketplaces
of the West for any significant time. All through the very lean 1950's and
1960's,
when there was only a very arid, impoverished market for Indian painters at
home he
stayed and painted in India, always on Indian themes like the Mahabharata, and
lived
in near-penury while his contemporaries achieved marginally better lives
abroad.
These were entire decades when the words "modern art" were a kind of slur in
India,
except to a limited coterie of intellectuals and the occasional collector.
Husain's career thus exactly mirrors the long doldrums and sudden, steep rise
of
contemporary Indian art, more so than any other painter. As India's
increasingly
moneyed urbanites developed (or aped) western-style bourgeois aspirations, they
immediately fell upon Husain's paintings which almost overnight became status
symbols, a Husain horse on your walls meant that you had arrived. And when our
home-grown lakhpatis and crorepatis became dollar millionaires, a flashy Husain
canvas became the essential accessory for conspicuous consumers, and his prices
went
even higher. Not at all coincidentally, this is when a fringe element in Indian
society took notice and Husain started to come under attack. But the
controversies
did nothing to dampen ardour for his canvases - Husain's huge diptych, 'Battle
of
Ganga and Jamuna: Mahabharata 12' sold for $1.6 million at auction last year.
It is
the highest priced contemporary Indian painting with only one exception, our
man
Francis Newton Souza' masterpiece 'Birth' which sold for $2.5 million, roughly
at
the same time.
The brilliant, polymathic Souza definitely comes to mind as we face this
crossroads
in Goa's cultural development. Though he remained a very proud Goan all through
his
life, even into multiple (partly self-inflicted) exiles in Paris, London and
New
York, Souza also remained bitter about the provincial hostilities he faced in
colonial Goa when he first showed off his brilliant canvases in the 1940's.
Years
later in London, just on the cusp of abrupt, meteoric fame, he would write,
"better
had I died. Would have saved me a lot of trouble. I would not have had to bear
an
artist's tormented soul, create art in a country that despises her artists and
is
ingnorant of her heritage." It should be noted that these words ring painfully
true
even today, in the state which has not acknowledged F. N. Souza in any way,
where
there is no monument or memorial to his name even in his native village, and
the
State Museum holds precisely one tiny, unrepresentative canvas that bears his
signature.
But there is no denying that times have indeed changed, and even Souza would
get a
chuckle out of the way that Goan art has become a buzzword that seems to
connotes a
kind of glamour to many. And it is undeniable fact that galleries, museum
spaces and
arts centres have mushroomed all over the state. Some of these are quite
ambitious,
with detailed plans to capitalize on Goa's rapidly developing status as a
open-minded, quietly sophisticated, cultural centre and showcase for the arts.
But
these players should note that art has never been a safe, one-way ticket to
glamour - it has always involved a struggle to define safe boundaries, to
ensure
creative freedoms. They should be aware that all their ambitious plans for the
arts
in Goa will go nowhere if they do not step in right now to ensure that fringe
elements cannot hold our culture to hostage. This is a test of resolve; the
costs of
capitulation will be extremely steep.
========================================================
The above article appeared in the Herald, Goa on August 14, 2009
