The auction of Art for Mission Kashmir ran into heavy weather for the wrong reason. Predictably, the enemies of India?s successful global foray into art made one more effort to ensure that we don?t enter the global market as the most advanced contemporary artists in the world today.
They have taken exception to a powerful depiction of India Shining by M F Husain. India Shining has a subtly painted symbolic reference to the tricolour and the map of India, interwoven with the myth of the descent of the Ganga and with Kashmir, and a powerful contemporary image of India as a tribal woman.
The auctioneers retracted the work and saved it for posterity. Now it will find its way to a good collection for a handsome price. This image of the India of our times is likely to live longer than the iconoclasts who stopped it from being sold. Art has always been the target of attacks of moral brigades. This is no exception.
We cannot equate these attacks on works of Husain with those against a Danish cartoonist?s caricature of the Prophet Mohammad. The image is not a caricature. It is a sensitive image of India, age-old and young, with grey strands in her young woman?s tresses. So to protest against it is to protest against that trend that is profitable to us in a globalising world.
It is worth noting that the auction netted about Rs 10.7 crore for Kashmir earthquake victims. Among the noteworthy sales was a Ram Kumar watercolour on paper, Landscape, that sold above its highest expected price at Rs 15,95,465, while his canvas, The Desert, sold at Rs 81,52,199, also above the highest price expected. Arpita Singh?s The Yellow Arm Chair, a 3-ft sq work, sold for Rs 44 lakh.
N S Bendre?s Mother and Child sold for Rs 24.20 lakh, again above the highest price expected of it. Manjit Bawa?s Krishna and the Lion sold for Rs 22.28 lakh while a Sunil Das canvas of a horse?s head sold for Rs 16.50 lakh. Shibu Natesan?s Seated Couple, a watercolour on paper, sold for Rs 14.09 lakh. Another artist who did predictably well was Arpana Caur, whose Dharti, a work reminiscent of the Husain image, sold for Rs 8.36 lakh while her Raj Kapoor-Nargis image sold for over Rs 5.84 lakh and the Sohni image sold at Rs 4.94 lakh.
The message to moral brigades is that they may stop the marketing of certain works for a while and damage our competitiveness in the global market, but they cannot prevent its development along the path it has mapped out for itself.
