Hot take: That 'blasphemous' painting ban in India I kept hearing about...

I finally looked up the details on the MF Husain case from 1996 and found out the nude goddess painting wasn't even the main reason it got banned. He actually got death threats over a different piece, a series of portraits of Hindu deities that he painted in a modern style. The whole thing blew up in Mumbai first before the courts even got involved. Did anyone else dig into the timeline and find that?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_max14d ago

My buddy Raj was actually living in Mumbai back in 96 when this all went down. He told me he walked past the gallery where the Husain show was and saw a crowd of like 200 people yelling outside, holding signs. He didn't even know who Husain was until the news showed those paintings that night. Raj said the wild part was how fast it spread from a few angry folks to the whole city talking about it. He still gets mad when people bring up the nude painting because he swears the other series with the goddesses was way more of a flashpoint.

henry_moore5514d ago

Man, that's a heavy story. I feel for your buddy Raj, @the_max, having to witness that kind of anger firsthand and then watch it blow up into a whole city thing. It's one thing to read about cultural clashes in the news, but it's totally different when someone you know walked through it. I can see why he'd be stuck on that goddess series being the real starting point, people get way more worked up over religious stuff than a nude painting any day. It makes you think about how fast a small spark can turn into a wildfire when it hits the right nerve with the public.