Of images and image-breakers
By Manohar Malgonkar

LIKE many people all over the world, I subscribe to the New Yorker magazine because I am convinced that it is far and away the best periodical in the world. Yet I skip its regular articles on the state of American politics — after all, politics are the same everywhere, full of murk and catch-as-catch-can struggles for power.

So when, in a recent issue of the magazine, I saw an article titled ‘Clinton’s Other Pursuer’, I was in the process of turning the page when the picture that accompanied the article stopped me cold. It showed Bill and Hillary Clinton as two cowering figures banished from the White House by this ‘other’ pursuer, a lawyer called W. Hickman Ewing, Jr, who is depicted as a gigantic barrage-baloon figure floating over the scene, and both the President and his wife are, like the couple who were evicted from their paradise at the creation, Adam and Eve, dressed in nothing but single fig-leaves which must be gummed or stapled to their skins in the region of their lower abdomens.

That picture offended my Indian — or Hindu — sensitivities. How can a man and woman so prominent in America’s public life that the whole world knows what they look like, be depicted in the altogether? Would such a transgression of the proprieties if not of common decency be tolerated in any other country? Would it be condoned in other advanced societies? — say England or France?

I remembered that only a year earlier, a group of American citizens had protested because a judge had put up a copy of the Ten Commandments on his courtroom wall. They felt that, while the Ten Commandments were only rules of good behaviour applicable to all mankind, they were fundamentally a part of the Christian religion. So how could a judge who openly professed to be bound by the Ten Commandments be trusted to be unbiased against a Muslim or a Jew or, for that matter, a Hindu?

Quibbling? Oh, but yes! — and this brings out a peculiar trait of America’s public conscience. It can be roused to action to uphold a principle, but it shows a civilized tolerance to those who are critical of its heroes and leaders. In short, it has no sacred cows. Sure Abraham Lincoln and George Washington are held in reverence by most Americans, but that does not mean that they will take to the streets or organize morchas and bandhs and go on the rampage if someone were to say something derogatory about either.

In contrast India is the proverbial land of sacred cows. We have literally hundreds of them: saints, social reformers, military heroes, freedom fighters — men and women who are held in high esteem if not actually revered by their followers. No one can say anything, or write anyhthing about them except in praise. They have become legends more than persons and that fact alone acts as a bar to our wanting to know anything about what they were really like when they lived, as human beings. The argument runs something like this. "We just don’t need to know anything about what these men and women were like as people; all we want anyone to do is to sing their praises — join the chorus of adulation. If you can’t do that, just shut up.

And if you don’t, we will jolly well shut you up; ban your book, stop your play from being staged, take you to court for painting pictures that offend the sensibilities of some of our people.

So a reporter of formidable credentials and a scholar of repute, Arun Shourie, is booed and physically roughed-up in the streets of Pune — Pune which prides itself on being the cultural capital of the Marathi speaking people — for writing a book about Bhimrao Ambedkar which disputes some of the commonly held concepts of Ambedkar’s motives and actions.

Is the Ambedkar image so fragile then, as to suffer damage by the opinions and conclusions of a single biographer? And is it not the attribute of a man who had become a legend that the transformation itself renders him inviolable to the snipings of his detractors?

So what about a play that was running in Bombay, ‘Me Nathuram Godse Boltoy’ being stun-gunned by a fireman from Delhi?

The Mahatma’s image is that of a colossus, not only to us but, increasingly, to much of the civilized world. Can even his stature be diminished by an obscure playwright giving voice to teh contorted ravings of a man whose sole idea of serving his motherland was to murder the Mahatma?

OK. Intellectual argument is powerless against street sentiment. But then is not the banning of the play an instance of a readiness to yield before pressure-groups and public opinion?

Censorship is a shoot-from-the-hips weapon of repressive regimes; it has no place in democracies except in emergencies. So Iran can ban dancing and drinking, Pakistan can send to jail or to death people of the Ahmadi sect for, of all things, saying their religious prayers, and the Taliban in Afghanistan pass a decree forbidding all girls from attending schools.

But then how are such prohibitions any different from Indira Gandhi’s enacting a law to prevent newspapers from showing her in unflattering cartoons?

By that logic, the artist who painted that picture of Bill and Hilary Clinton wearing nothing but a single fig-leaf, should have been instantly flung into some American Tihar and the New Yorker ordered to recall all six million copies of its April 6 issue to be publicly burnt.

Just between ourselves, nude images are of particular concern to me right now for, who knows, I might myself be found to have violated the laws forbidding the exposure of the naked representation of a goddess.

M.F. Hussain, it will be recalled, made a very rough line drawing of a naked woman, and under it wrote the word Saraswati. If he had not himself furnished that caption, no one had any reason to believe that the sketch was that of a goddess.

In my case, I’m afraid, the goddess is unmistakably a goddess, a stone figure of Mahishasur-Mardini in the very act of spearing a buffalo. And she wears no clothes — not even a fig-leaf.

She sits in a niche all her own in my veranda and, truth to tell, she happens to be the pride and boast of my few stone images; more than a thousand years old and, unlike most such statuary even in museums, unblemished.

True, it is not as though I make a public exhibition of her, but she is on display for all those who visit my house to see, and many of these visitors have photographed her.

My fear is: Supposing one of these photographers were to publish the goddesse’s picture in some magazine or the other, would that not constitute an offence? — of a naked goddess exposed to the public gaze? — the same offence that M.F. Hussain is said to have committed — and in that case, would I as the owner of the statue be accused of having permitted the statue to be photographed?

I remember Khushwant Singh being prosecuted for a similar offence, of printing photographs of nude sculptures in Surya a magazine which he used to co-edit with — of all people — Maneka Gandhi, who too was made a co-accused.

Some day I must find out from Khushwant what arguments his lawyers put forward to get him and Maneka Gandhi off the hook for having done something which, as Khushwant told me, the prosecuting lawyer kept insisting was "wurruss that murrdurr."

Just in case.