The right-wing outrage over M.F. Husain’s painting of a nude Mother India, or Bharat Mata, has now taken a new turn. According to today’s Hindustan Times, the government in Delhi has issued a “red alert”:

Artist MF Husain’s apology for the nude painting, Bharatmata, has not helped. The Union Home Ministry has alerted the police chiefs of Delhi and Mumbai to his “objectionable” paintings and asked them to take “appropriate action”. It is the first time the Centre has decided to go against the Padma Vibhushan winner.

What it means is that this painting is considered capable of inciting community violence and the governments in the individual states are allowed to arrest or otherwise persecute Husain.

Why has the Congress-led government in Delhi not shown more spine? And the leftist members of the coalition?

The picture below is from a protest in February when Shiv Sena activists in Delhi called for Husain’s head. A right-wing Hindu leader in Lucknow had offered 51 crore payment for anyone who killed Husain as well as the Danish cartoonists. (The offer was going to be upped to 101 crore rupees if the killer was the Muslim politician in U.P. who had earlier promised the same amount for killing the Danish cartoonists.) And then a Muslim leader joined in, offering 11 lakhs for anyone who chopped off the painter’s hands.

Shame on them all!

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Here’s an excerpt from a delectable review, written by Jai Arjun Singh, of the film The Mistress of Spices:

Like I said, The Mistress of Spices takes its premise very seriously. It opens with a solemn title (presumably for the edification of the Western viewer) that states: “India is a land of myths, magic and tradition. When immigrants from India come to the West they often lose these traditions. This is a story about what happens when such traditions are lost.” A little girl in a village somewhere in India has mysterious magical powers which she uses to warn the elders of impending floods, help locate a lost ring and so on. Bandits come looking for her so she can lead them to treasure. They kill her parents, transport her away in a boat, but she gets free and casts herself into the raging river.
The film could so easily have ended right here, he said wistfully, but the girl survives and comes under the protection of the aphoristically endowed “First Mother”, played by Zohra Sehgal (who I thought of alternately as Mrs Yoda and Old Spice). She names the girl Tilo, trains her and a few others in the magical properties of spices and then transports them to cities around the world, where they must use their knowledge to help people. So now here’s Tilo (Aish) running a large shop called the Spice Bazaar in San Jose, solving customers’ problems by choosing “the right spice” for them. (Did you know turmeric induces tumescence? Okay, I made that up but you get the general idea.)

The film is based on the book by Chitra Divakaruni Banerjee and my thoughts on it appeared in Transition Magazine several years ago. The article is available on my website:

In its brief review of Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices (1997), the New Yorker noted that “Divakaruni’s prose is so pungent that it stains the page.” Remarks like these help explain why so many Indian writers based in the West have succumbed to the same familiar culinary themes. To his credit, Rushdie’s tales of the Indian sub-condiment are as much about colonialism as cooking. Divakaruni sets her sights firmly lower. In her story, Indians are postcolonial chickens coming home to roost-as spicy, well-barbecued tandoori.

As I have long believed that Chitra Divakaruni Banerjee is the name not only of a writer but of a worldview, you might also want to read another piece I had written entitled “The Mistress of Pious Effusions.”

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“I can’t believe I bought these shoes”, exclaims the performance artist Miranda July in her hit indie film, Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005). “They’re exactly the same as my old shoes. Except they’re pink.” I had a similar feeling about her film. It is bright, cute and attention-grabbing, but it’s the same as my old shoes.

So writes Asad Haider–he is “a student at Cornell University. He serves popcorn at the Cornell Cinema.”–in Senses of Cinema. Asad is a former student of mine and, although I like Miranda July’s work, I’m quite willing to accept the argument that pink shoes and postmodernism can both be boring.

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