ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a set of contentions and paradoxes that have arisen from the repeated blurring of distinctions between the ‘artistic’ and the ‘religious’ object across different institutional and public sites in contemporary India. This is the central, recurrent problem that I track across two divergent sites of art production and reception. In the first case, I revisit the unabated Hindu right-wing campaign against India’s veteran modern artist, Maqbool Fida Husain, that began to snowball from 1996 around Husain’s ‘offence’ of painting Hindu divinities in the nude (figure 2.1). Notwithstanding two definitive rulings of the Delhi High Court and Supreme Court of India (in May and September 2008) that have acquitted the artist of the many ‘criminal’ charges that were levelled against him,2 the campaign has refused to let go of its target, forcing the artist into a life of self-imposed exile in Dubai.3 If the ‘Husain affair’ has come over time to exemplify the siege of culture by the Hindu Right and the beleaguered state of the ‘secular’ in contemporary India, it also throws into the open a deep instability in the status of the nation’s ‘artistic’ and ‘religious’ imagery, in the representational licences they enjoy and in the public fields of their circulation.
