Driving out of the city today, past little post-monsoonal streams that run along our highways, you’ll see bouquets of silver tufts of Kash, erupting from the moist earth, heralding that glorious half-week of Durga Pujo that keeps the withering Bengali in the Probashi alive. The other day, while driving back from the mountains, these flowers, swaying to a silent music, like an orchestra conducted by the ministrations of the wind, drew me back to last year’s ‘pujo’ where I met old friends in New Delhi’s Bengali ghetto of CR Park.
It was a Saptami afternoon and the ‘pandal’ was quiet. The ‘bhog’ over, the hitherto bustling pandal wore a look of contented slumber… My friends, the characters of this account, are all living separate lives now. But whenever the Kash flower blossoms, we become children again... Aar, a Jaat who’s participated in Durga Pujas all his life, is a Major now, who until recently was ducking bullets along the LOC (Can’t imagine that lamb in wolf’s clothing firing any). Aay’s a journalist with a Bengali weekly, and an intellectual snob (Yes, a pseudo intellectual snob, but let only that bong who claims not to be one cast the first stone); Bee’s a writer (Calls himself a poet, which explains why he lives off the pocket money he gets from his wife); Tee is a professor of something complicated and self important in a southern university (He actually wanted to bowl fast for India. Of how he ended up hurling theorems at unsuspecting students instead of bouncers at hapless batsmen, he has no idea). Then there’s me - your Greek Chorus, if you will…
Aay: See that Durga idol... that’s ekchala (single frame). Just got back from Kumhartuli, the Grand Vatican for idol makers. Those fellas have strong opinions. To make ends meet, they’ve often deviated from tradition and made idols where the asura has Osama’s face, but they hate it. They prefer the traditional ekchala idols. And one of them, Nimai, just railed off against our Fida sahab (he means MF Hussain; told you... he’s a snob)… said his paintings insulted Maa Durga. The idols in his workshop were semi-finished, without a stitch on them. So I asked …‘you’ll clothe them now and he didn’t, but there are ancient temples around the country with our gods in the nude. So what?’. Nimai was unmoved. ‘This is an art I’ve learnt from my forefathers, with bhakti. But that man has no right… let him paint his own gods if he wants to…’ baap rey baap…
Aar: He’s right! I don’t care if every temple in this country has nude idols. Let Hussain attempt painting his own God and his Prophet in the same manner before attempting to paint our deities… But he knows he can’t. I’ve seen his paintings on the net. He’s painted the Prophet’s daughter and there is such a stark difference between the conservative dignity of her image and the naked abandon of ones like Maa Durga’s (hmm… our lamb had grown teeth). You know how Muslims around the world reacted to Hazrat Muhammad’s cartoons… But we... we just get taken for granted…
Tee: Hang on, there’s a difference… (Did I forget to mention, Tee’s a real intellectual and a Muslim, a Bengali Muslim). There’s a difference in objectives to begin with. The cartoons were insensitive and designed to incite the community. There’s a historical precedent to the portrayal of Hindu deities in various styles but Islam forbids any images of the Prophet, and these cartoons weren’t even in good taste…
Aar: Tee, you can’t possibly be defending all that violence that followed. Why should a man in Nigeria have to die for a cartoon drawn in Scandinavia? You don’t need a sense of humour to see this… just be logical…
Tee: I’m not defending those who indulged in arson and violence in different parts of the world. They perhaps hadn’t even seen the offending cartoons. It was done to bait Muslims, and many naïve and ignorant individuals fell in the trap. They obviously weren’t being rational. But Hussain’s paintings are different… it is artistic expression and you can’t straitjacket that within narrow religio-political interpretations…
Bee: Fine, but then what about the Satanic Verses? Wasn’t that an example of artistic expression too?
Tee: I haven’t read the book... but it was the work of an eccentric who ridicules everything! To take him that seriously was a mistake. Hussain though must’ve made his paintings out of reverence rather than to ridicule....
Aay: How can…
Bee (He raises his voice to speak and we become quiet. Except for his wife, everybody listens when Bee speaks): Tee’s got a point! It doesn’t make sense to react to artistic expression of any sort, irrespective of intent, with any sort of vandalism. Sexual symbology, from the Shiva lingas in our temples to Krishna’s love play in the “Gita Govindam” and Vidyapati’s “Padavali”, has been characteristic of Hindu mythology.
That’s our heritage. Whoever argues otherwise is actually confusing borrowed Victorian prudery with the real essence of Hindutva. And does it matter if a Christian’s depiction of Islam or a Muslim’s depiction of Hinduism, or a Hindu’s depiction of Christianity (like in Chandramohan’s paintings) goes against the grain of the faith? Even if artistic expression does go wrong, it can’t affect faiths that have survived centuries. It is we who need God to protect us, and not vice versa. In civil society, art should only be condemned and criticised through art. But to vandalise is to confess to one’s insecurities and lack of intellectual ability…
(Dan-da-dadan-dan… the ‘dhakis’, traditional ‘puja’ drummers, were back. It was time for the evening ‘arati’. Tee jumped forward in his dhoti and took up two heavy earthen lamps and danced to the beat of the drum with Aar taking the other two… they had both been exceptional ‘arati’ dancers and as the rest of us watched along with the appreciative audience, here surely was an artistic expression that no one could complain about)
The slip stream
God knows?!
‘Religious controversy’ has come to be yawn-inducing as much as it proves to be sentiment-stoking, given the alarming regularity of the phrase in the media. Even areas one would imagine to be shielded from radical musings of the fundamentalists are gatecrashed into. Consider these:
Da Vinci Code (2003) : Dan Brown’s fiction novel, essentially a murder mystery with a Harvard symbologist and a cryptographer on the detective trail, finds itself in religious territory with references to Opus Dei as an organization with secret rituals and albino henchmen. Its fact-o-fiction allusions to Jesus Christ’s marital status and his alliance with Mary Magdalene created much furore in the Catholic world apart from great publicity for the book as well as the Tom Hanks-starring movie.
The Bamiyan Buddhas: After the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan in 2001, the World Heritage Site of the Bamiyan Buddhas fell to concerted vandalism unleashed by the new rulers of the state, declaring the idols and its worship ‘un-Islamic’. Dynamite and artillery fire destroyed the archeological treasures in Bamiyan Valley, ones that had even survived the onslaught of Taimur and Ghazni.
Madonna: Earlier this month, the queen of pop made enough news for her Sweet & Sticky Tour, when she dedicated her ‘Like A Virgin’ song to the Pope. Déjà vu 2006 – the Confessions Tour – when the lady staged a mock crucifixion atop a 20 feet cross wearing a crown of thorns, inviting outrage from church groups across the world. God bless them all…
It was a Saptami afternoon and the ‘pandal’ was quiet. The ‘bhog’ over, the hitherto bustling pandal wore a look of contented slumber… My friends, the characters of this account, are all living separate lives now. But whenever the Kash flower blossoms, we become children again... Aar, a Jaat who’s participated in Durga Pujas all his life, is a Major now, who until recently was ducking bullets along the LOC (Can’t imagine that lamb in wolf’s clothing firing any). Aay’s a journalist with a Bengali weekly, and an intellectual snob (Yes, a pseudo intellectual snob, but let only that bong who claims not to be one cast the first stone); Bee’s a writer (Calls himself a poet, which explains why he lives off the pocket money he gets from his wife); Tee is a professor of something complicated and self important in a southern university (He actually wanted to bowl fast for India. Of how he ended up hurling theorems at unsuspecting students instead of bouncers at hapless batsmen, he has no idea). Then there’s me - your Greek Chorus, if you will…
Aay: See that Durga idol... that’s ekchala (single frame). Just got back from Kumhartuli, the Grand Vatican for idol makers. Those fellas have strong opinions. To make ends meet, they’ve often deviated from tradition and made idols where the asura has Osama’s face, but they hate it. They prefer the traditional ekchala idols. And one of them, Nimai, just railed off against our Fida sahab (he means MF Hussain; told you... he’s a snob)… said his paintings insulted Maa Durga. The idols in his workshop were semi-finished, without a stitch on them. So I asked …‘you’ll clothe them now and he didn’t, but there are ancient temples around the country with our gods in the nude. So what?’. Nimai was unmoved. ‘This is an art I’ve learnt from my forefathers, with bhakti. But that man has no right… let him paint his own gods if he wants to…’ baap rey baap…
Aar: He’s right! I don’t care if every temple in this country has nude idols. Let Hussain attempt painting his own God and his Prophet in the same manner before attempting to paint our deities… But he knows he can’t. I’ve seen his paintings on the net. He’s painted the Prophet’s daughter and there is such a stark difference between the conservative dignity of her image and the naked abandon of ones like Maa Durga’s (hmm… our lamb had grown teeth). You know how Muslims around the world reacted to Hazrat Muhammad’s cartoons… But we... we just get taken for granted…
Tee: Hang on, there’s a difference… (Did I forget to mention, Tee’s a real intellectual and a Muslim, a Bengali Muslim). There’s a difference in objectives to begin with. The cartoons were insensitive and designed to incite the community. There’s a historical precedent to the portrayal of Hindu deities in various styles but Islam forbids any images of the Prophet, and these cartoons weren’t even in good taste…
Aar: Tee, you can’t possibly be defending all that violence that followed. Why should a man in Nigeria have to die for a cartoon drawn in Scandinavia? You don’t need a sense of humour to see this… just be logical…
Tee: I’m not defending those who indulged in arson and violence in different parts of the world. They perhaps hadn’t even seen the offending cartoons. It was done to bait Muslims, and many naïve and ignorant individuals fell in the trap. They obviously weren’t being rational. But Hussain’s paintings are different… it is artistic expression and you can’t straitjacket that within narrow religio-political interpretations…
Bee: Fine, but then what about the Satanic Verses? Wasn’t that an example of artistic expression too?
Tee: I haven’t read the book... but it was the work of an eccentric who ridicules everything! To take him that seriously was a mistake. Hussain though must’ve made his paintings out of reverence rather than to ridicule....
Aay: How can…
Bee (He raises his voice to speak and we become quiet. Except for his wife, everybody listens when Bee speaks): Tee’s got a point! It doesn’t make sense to react to artistic expression of any sort, irrespective of intent, with any sort of vandalism. Sexual symbology, from the Shiva lingas in our temples to Krishna’s love play in the “Gita Govindam” and Vidyapati’s “Padavali”, has been characteristic of Hindu mythology.
That’s our heritage. Whoever argues otherwise is actually confusing borrowed Victorian prudery with the real essence of Hindutva. And does it matter if a Christian’s depiction of Islam or a Muslim’s depiction of Hinduism, or a Hindu’s depiction of Christianity (like in Chandramohan’s paintings) goes against the grain of the faith? Even if artistic expression does go wrong, it can’t affect faiths that have survived centuries. It is we who need God to protect us, and not vice versa. In civil society, art should only be condemned and criticised through art. But to vandalise is to confess to one’s insecurities and lack of intellectual ability…
(Dan-da-dadan-dan… the ‘dhakis’, traditional ‘puja’ drummers, were back. It was time for the evening ‘arati’. Tee jumped forward in his dhoti and took up two heavy earthen lamps and danced to the beat of the drum with Aar taking the other two… they had both been exceptional ‘arati’ dancers and as the rest of us watched along with the appreciative audience, here surely was an artistic expression that no one could complain about)
The slip stream
God knows?!
‘Religious controversy’ has come to be yawn-inducing as much as it proves to be sentiment-stoking, given the alarming regularity of the phrase in the media. Even areas one would imagine to be shielded from radical musings of the fundamentalists are gatecrashed into. Consider these:
Da Vinci Code (2003) : Dan Brown’s fiction novel, essentially a murder mystery with a Harvard symbologist and a cryptographer on the detective trail, finds itself in religious territory with references to Opus Dei as an organization with secret rituals and albino henchmen. Its fact-o-fiction allusions to Jesus Christ’s marital status and his alliance with Mary Magdalene created much furore in the Catholic world apart from great publicity for the book as well as the Tom Hanks-starring movie.
The Bamiyan Buddhas: After the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan in 2001, the World Heritage Site of the Bamiyan Buddhas fell to concerted vandalism unleashed by the new rulers of the state, declaring the idols and its worship ‘un-Islamic’. Dynamite and artillery fire destroyed the archeological treasures in Bamiyan Valley, ones that had even survived the onslaught of Taimur and Ghazni.
Madonna: Earlier this month, the queen of pop made enough news for her Sweet & Sticky Tour, when she dedicated her ‘Like A Virgin’ song to the Pope. Déjà vu 2006 – the Confessions Tour – when the lady staged a mock crucifixion atop a 20 feet cross wearing a crown of thorns, inviting outrage from church groups across the world. God bless them all…
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