In the past few years, criminal prosecution of artists and new laws have made it clear for those who criticise the Kremlin or Russian Orthodox Church in their creative work, will face consequences for portraying either of these institutions negatively.

A Russian artist came under fire for depicting members of Pussy Riot as religious icons

Just last week, the State Duma passed two controversial laws in the first hearing. One forbids obscene language in movies, books, TV, and radio during mass public events. The other stipulates criminal punishment — including five years in prison — for “insulting believers’ feelings”. Both laws, as far as human rights activists are concerned, limit artists’ freedom of expression, and encourage self-censorship.

Index spoke to three notable artists to find out how the art community deals with self-censorship, and the ever-increasing restrictions on freedom of expression in Russia.

Artyom Loskutov, an artist from Novosibirsk, is famous for holding “monstrations” — flash mobs with absurd slogans like “Tanya, don’t cry” and “Who’s there?”. In 2009, he was arrested on drug possession charges, but he claims that the marijuana was planted on him by police. A blood test proved that he had not taken any drugs, and his fingerprints were not found on the package. Three years on, he faced three administrative cases, and paid a 1000 rouble fine for creating icon-like images of Pussy Riot members Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alekhina and placing them on billboards. He was accused of insulting believers. He is currently appealing the court ruling in the European Court of Human Rights.

The artist told Index that the cases against him are acts of censorship, but vows to remain defiant and continue with his work:

The icons idea concerned two kinds of mothers: one mother is honoured as a saint, the two others — Tolokonnikova and Alekhina — were thrown in prison. The authorities, including the court, are becoming more insane, and one wouldn’t want to cause persecutions. But I can’t say that  given that, I refuse to implement any of my plots. In the 90s my generation felt that we had nothing, except free speech, and all the 2000s attempts to take it away meet nothing but incomprehension

In 2010, The prosecutor’s office  in Moscow’s Bassmany district examined the works of Moscow-based artist Lena Hades,  “Chimera of Mysterious Russian Soul” and “Welcome to Russia”. Russian nationalists appealed to the authorities claiming these paintings insult Russians. The case did not go to court, but Hades told Index that Russian galleries feared exhibiting her paintings after the incident.

“Galleries are afraid of financial sanctions,” Hades says, “Although 95 per cent of my paintings are about philosophy rather than about social events, they are only exhibited in Tretyakov Gallery and Moscow Museum of Modern Art”.

Despite reduced chances of her work being exhibited, Hades still painted Pussy Riot’s members, and went on a 25-day hunger strike against their prosecution. The artist is no fan of self-censorship, even if it comes at a cost. According to her, no artist that responds to reality can accept self-censorship:

This is not courage, this is aristocratic luxury of doing what you want. Self-censorship is more harmful for a modern Russian artist than censorship. He is frightened of scaring away galleries and buyers and prefers to paint landscapes with cows — anything far enough from real social life

Artist Boris Zhutovsky has a long-standing relationship with censorship. In 1962, he was slammed by then Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who banned work by Zhutovsky and his colleagues. For several years following the incident, the artist faced difficulties in finding employment, and his work was not exhibited in the USSR.

Zhutovsky continues to court controversy today: in the past few years he has painted the trials of Russia’s most well-known political prisoners, businessmen Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, who were first convicted in 2005. He explained Russia’s culture of self-censorship to Index:

Self-censorship is based on fear, and the amplitude of this fear has changed throughout my life. In the times of Stalin, it was the fear of the Gulag and execution. In the times of Khruschev it was the fear of loosing a job or a country – a person could be forced to leave the Soviet Union. After Perestroika the fear shrank, and now the fear which nourishes self-censorship is the fear to anger your boss

He is optimistic that a younger generation of artists will not accept self-censorship as a standard, as the the era of Putin is far from that of Stalin, but only time will tell.

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“Always Franco” sculpture (Demotix)

“Always Franco” raised a few eyebrows when it was exhibited in Madrid last February. The sculpture of the Spanish dictator jammed inside a Coca Cola fridge, in his characteristic green military uniform and dark sunglasses, was apparently too much for some nostalgic souls.

The artist, Eugenio Merino, is being taken to court by Francisco Franco National Foundation (FNFF) — an organisation dedicated to “disseminating the memory and work” of Franco.

Last February, FNFF vice-president Jaime Alonso visited ARCO — the modern art fair in Madrid where the work was being exhibited — escorted by a notary, to take pictures of the work. The sculpture was “grotesque”, he declared, and an attempt against “someone’s dignity”, someone who “couldn’t defend himself because he is dead”.

“This work generates hatred and confrontation” said Alsonso, quoted by El Mundo. “You can think what you want of Franco, but taunting people is simply not acceptable.”

“ARCO took place in February. In July, I received the lawsuit, and on February 21 2013, I will go to court,” says Merino in an email interview.

FNFF  is suing him for damaging their honour, identity or image indirectly through harmful conduct. They want Merino to pay 18,000 euro in compensation.

It appears that Merino is not going to get a lot of institutional backing, “the director of the art fair (Carlos Urroz) has not even sent me an email to offer his help against this attack to the freedom of speech (sic),” says Merino.

Index tried to get Urroz’s version of events, but our email went unanswered.

Apparently in response to the FNFF’s complaints, José María Álvarez del Manzano, President of the IFEMA — which is the institution where the fair takes place — sent them a soothing letter.

In the letter sent while the exhibition was still in situ, he said that “personally… I find this an indignity, because representing any human being like that, independently of the personality of General Franco (sic), is absolutely inadmissible. Above all, I think the author only pretended, in principle, to draw people’s attention.” He went on to say that as much as he liked to remove the work from the fair, it would grant “unmerited” attention to Merino’s work.

After staging a coup against the Republican government, Franco was the authoritarian head of state of Spain from the end of the Civil War (1936-39)  until he died peacefully of old age in 1975.

Memories, only for some

Even though Spain passed laws in 2007 to remember and repay the victims of the Civil War and the dictatorship that ensued — the Historical Memory Law — it looks like evoking Franco’s times is still not easy in Spain.

Trying to fill a legal vacuum left by the law, in 2008, “superjudge” Baltasar Garzon opened an inquiry into alleged crimes against humanity during the Spanish Civil War and after, and exhumed 19 victims’ remains.

However he found plenty of obstacles and enemies. A 1977 general amnesty had pardoned all criminal offenses with a political purpose previous to 1976 and these offenses were almost 70 years old, prior to the conception of “crimes against humanity”.  In 2009, an organisation called “Manos limpias” (Clean Hands) filed a lawsuit against him, and a few months later, Garzon was indicted by the Spanish Supreme Court for prevarication, or breaching his legal duty.

Weekly meeting to remember Franco’s victims in the Puerta del Sol, Madrid [NathaliePaco - Demotix]

At the end, Garzon dropped the investigation, was barred from judicial activity (with pay) and  stood trial. At the beginning of 2012, the Spanish Supreme Court found Garzon innocent on these charges.

Meanwhile, anthropologist Francisco Etxeberria and a team of forensic experts had continued digging up mass graves from the Civil War period. As Etxeberria said in an interview with this writer in 2010, most of the victims’ remains that have been unearthed so far were from the Republican side.

“We have also been asked to investigate right-wing people killed by the Republicans” he said. But there are few such cases left to investigate, since the Franco regime did so itself after the war ended. Furthermore, there is no comparison between the victims on the two sides, in either quantitative or qualitative terms.”

About the case against Garzon, Etxeberria commented: “It looks like we’re sliding backwards. In Spain there is no risk of a return to dictatorship, but this is a sad development that brings to mind pre-constitutional times. Actually, the victims’ families had sought judicial support and safeguards to provide legal guarantees for the investigation that was launched.”

According to Etxeberria, the Historical Memory Law was an attempt to “move from truth to reparations, but no one wants to get involved in the justice aspect.” No one, that is, except for Judge Garzon  who launched the unprecedented and short-lived legal inquiry of 2008.

“The three rights of victims are truth, justice and reparations, and these have not been forthcoming” in the case of the roughly 200,000 victims of murder and forced disappearance during the war, he concluded. Historians have put together lists of up to 130,000 people killed in areas not near the front lines. These crimes involved forced disappearance, to which no statute of limitations applies.

“In the past two weeks, we have opened new graves and recovered more remains —  says Etxeberria now in an email interview with INDEX. There is no institutional support whatsoever, but we will continue doing what we can with the resources of the (Basque Country) University and the investigative teams we have. Currently, we have already discovered 300 mass graves and recovered more than 5,000 bodies. There are (private) commemoration ceremonies every week… This means that we go on and that there is still public interest.”

Etxeberria mentions the book Jueces, pero parciales. La pervivencia del franquismo en el poder judicial (Judges, but partial. The endurance of  Franquismo in the judiciary), by Carlos Jimenez Villarejo (prosecutor) y Antonio Doñate (judge). “(The authors) demonstrate why the courts don’t have an interest in investigating these crimes. Judges have been involved in only 10 of all the exhumations so far,” he says.

Franquismo is a term used to refer to Franco’s regime and his government style, which combined right-wing thinking, traditional Catholicism and economic self-reliance.

The glorification of Franco continues today

Organised by FNFF, “120 years after, Francisco Franco, present!” is the slogan a tribute to the dictator to be celebrated on 2 December  in Madrid. Critics have pointed out that the event is to take place in public facilities and that FNFF receives public funding too, as does the dictator’s monumental burial vault.

It is ironic that while excavations of mass burials of Civil War victims proceed with virtually no financial support and rely on the work of dozens of volunteers from around the world, the victims of franquismo continue paying with their taxes for the maintenance of Franco’s grandiose mausoleum in the “Valley of the Fallen”, conceived by Franco himself to honour those who fell during the Civil War. About 10 per cent of the construction workforce were convicts, some of them political prisoners.

The Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory has recently demanded the Spanish government to put a stop to it and invite Franco’s family to take charge of his remains, as it the case in Italy with Benito Mussolini’s.

“There is a contradiction in the political class, because they say these are times of remembrance and they talk about ‘the duty of memory’ for everything except for the ‘francoist’ crimes”, says Etxeberria. “For the right, saying this divides citizens’ suffices.”

It looks like in today’s Spain there is still little room for either free artistic exploration of the Civil War and the dictatorship that followed or full remembrance and reparation for its victims.

Miren Gutierrez is Editorial Director of Index

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Artist Chris Drury’s 2011 sculpture Carbon Sink: What Goes Around Comes Around.  Image: Chris Drury

It’s hardly breaking news that big fossil fuel companies often exert a great deal of influence over political processes through campaign contributions and lobbying. On 13 September, the New York Times, for example, reported that, “with nearly two months  to go before Election Day on 6 November, estimated spending on television ads promoting coal and more oil and gas drilling or criticising clean energy had exceeded $153 million this year.” But how do the oil, gas and mining industries exert influence over the cultural sector? A recent American example is instructive, demonstrating how this influence can lead to institutions buckling under political pressure, censoring art and lying to the public.

Carbon Sink: What Goes Around Comes Around had barely been installed at the University of Wyoming before it was removed without warning in May 2012. The installation, which was 36-foot in diameter, consisted of a “flat whirlpool of beetle-killed logs spiraling into a vortex of charred, black wood and studded with large lumps of Wyoming coal”, representing natural and human-induced global warming.

It was a provocative installation in a state where the fossil fuel industry is a major economic driver and the 2011 sculpture by British artist Chris Drury immediately generated controversy. Marion Loomis, executive director of the Wyoming Mining Association, told a local newspaper:

They get millions of dollars in royalties from oil, gas and coal to run the university, and then they put up a monument attacking me, demonising the industry. I understand academic freedom, and we’re very supportive of it, but it’s still disappointing.

Bowing to pressure from both the local mining industry — a major university donor — and outraged local Republican officials, the university removed the installation after less than a year. It’s worth noting that in the fiscal year 2011 the university received $43.1 million in private donations via the University of Wyoming Foundation — when releasing the figures, fund president Ben Blaylock said donations from the energy sector were on the increase. After initially claiming the sculpture was removed because of  water damage, in October a local radio investigation obtained emails that revealed the university actually decided to remove Carbon Sink “because of the controversy it generated”.

This episode is extreme, but it’s not entirely isolated. In December 2011, fashion label Lacoste demanded the removal of artist Larissa Sansour from a Swiss photographic competition it was sponsoring for being “too pro-Palestinian”. In the UK, draconian cuts to public spending on the arts sector means that more organisations are being pressured to find corporate sponsorship. But is the price sacrificing content?

Arts Council England, which supports museums, galleries and theatres, has had its government funding cut by 29.6 per cent last year. Arts and cultural organisations are now much more reliant on private contributions. In the UK, some of the most high profile arts sponsorship deals have been with the oil industry: the Tate galleries have taken money from oil giant BP for more than 20 years. At the end of 2011, BP announced a £10 million deal for four arts institutions, including Tate, over five years. BP also sponsors the British Museum, the Royal Opera House and the National Portrait Gallery, while Shell is a long-term sponsor of the Southbank Centre.

Increased levels of corporate sponsorship of the arts can lead to overt interference in programming and curatorial decision-making but there hasn’t yet been a smoking gun incident on the scale of what happened in Wyoming. One can only speculate what the response might be from BP if Tate Modern were to use the iconic Turbine Hall for a large installation that explicitly referenced the environmental and human rights abuses of the oil industry.

There are justified fears that long-standing sponsorship arrangements lead to self-censorship — one of the most pernicious enemies of freedom of expression. If overt political pressure is brought to bear we stand a chance of discovering it, but we will never have conclusive evidence of what has not been programmed, who has not been invited, which work has not been made, or which issues have not been tackled.

In 2011, at an oil-related event at the London Literature Festival at the Southbank Centre, a duty manager insisted on vetting materials on a stall in case they were critical of Shell, while in 2010, Tate staff sought to ensure that a workshop on disobedience didn’t go anywhere near the issue of the gallery’s sponsors — accidentally giving birth to the art-activist collective Liberate Tate in the process. This sort of self-censorship is arguably a far harder nut to crack, and one that serves corporate sponsors’ purposes far more successfully than a sponsorship agreement that sets down in writing what can and can’t be said, made, or done.

There’s an institutional opacity of Tate and others in refusing to “go there”on the subject of controversial sponsorship choices, beyond trotting out a series of platitudes as to BP or Shell being great friends to the arts. Sadly, we may have to rely on initiatives like Art Leaks, which gives an anonymous space for people within these institutions to give insight into the inevitable impact of corporate sponsorship on many of the UK’s most prominent institutions.

Kevin Smith campaigns on oil sponsorship of the arts for Platform, an environmental and human rights organisation that combines arts, research and activism. He is the co-editor of Not If But When - Culture Beyond Oil.

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Earlier this year, the arrest and detention of Ai Weiwei, China’s most famous artist and Index contributor, caused an international outcry. In an exclusive interview with Index, celebrated sculptor Anish Kapoor explains why artists have a duty to take a stand for freedom of expression

Index: When you made the decision to withdraw from the show in Beijing and to make a stand for Ai Weiwei, had you ever made that kind of political gesture before?

Anish Kapoor: When Ai Weiwei was arrested, I was doing this work in Paris at the Grand Palais [‘Leviathan’, pictured below]. I thought about it long and hard –– should I, shouldn’t I dedicate the work to Ai Weiwei? What does it mean? One has to be very clear that in doing such a thing you never do it without a degree of self-interest. I needed to understand what my self-interest was and what I was trying to do. Was this about Ai Weiwei or was it about me? And I decided in the end that as one of the big shows in Europe during the summer, I could dedicate it to Ai Weiwei and that it wasn’t about me. I discovered in doing it that actually I have a voice that I probably didn’t know I had before and I think that’s very important. And then I felt that since I’d already taken a stand, the show that the British Council was planning ["UK Now" in China next year] required a further stand. I think it’s essential that while there are still a hundred and more people locked up in Chinese jails — I’m talking about intellectuals, I’m not for the moment talking about ordinary people who go on the internet — I think it’s the duty of all artists to stand up and say we won’t take part. I’ve called out to artists all over — don’t take part, don’t show in China. A few have started to respond. I see that Daniel Buren, the great French conceptual artist, has pulled a show in China, and there are others. I’m glad to see it. It means something.

Index: You also proposed that galleries close for a day across the world and said it would be good for the art world to come together more.

Anish Kapoor: It’s perhaps naïve of me, but I think it’s important that we stand together for colleagues. It’s very hard for galleries to close for a day, but rather than a negative action, I feel in the end we were about to make a positive action on the anniversary of the 100 days of Ai Weiwei’s incarceration, but thankfully he was released. The positive action was to try and get thousands of galleries all over the world to show a work of Ai Weiwei’s.

Artists under threat

Index: China is an extreme case in the degree to which it controls, and attempts to control, freedom of expression. Would you like to see the art world being more politically engaged and showing more solidarity? There’s a very long tradition of writers coming together, but not in the art world.

Anish Kapoor: The art world is extremely fragmented. It is a place that’s also infiltrated by money and other instruments of influence. And it never finds itself in a place where it can shout. I think we need to learn how to do that and find a way to have singular voices. Through the whole period of Soviet repression of artists, which was severe, the art world didn’t say a thing. The avant-garde has held itself away from human rights. It’s been a great struggle for artists of non-European origin. It’s been a great struggle for women artists, quite contrary to the sense that the aesthetic world is an open forum –– it isn’t. It’s extremely doctrinaire and extremely partisan. And I think those battles are still being fought. So it’s not surprising at one level anyway.

I can only explain it by [the fact that] these old instruments of power in the art world are generally male and white, and within a certain aesthetic tradition. All of that has begun to fall apart in the last decade or so. We still haven’t got to the point where, if you like, lone, outsider voices can be properly heard. Ai Weiwei is a celebrity, so it’s relatively easy [for him to be heard] –– much harder in many other cases.

Index: Artists are more subject to arbitrary censorship wherever they are –– whether in the free world or more repressive world.

Anish Kapoor: I think it’s also because contemporary visual culture isn’t uni-directional. When you write a piece, you have to articulate a precise point in words – political or otherwise. An art work can be nebulous in relation to the politics of its situation. It can indicate a discomfort without actually articulating it and therefore it’s much harder to pin down. It’s much harder to say: ‘This is subversive.’ It’s hard to define what subversive is –– especially in contemporary language and contemporary visual culture. Ai Weiwei, in that sense, is somewhat more articulated towards a series of events — noting down the number of people killed by corruption and maladministration, or collecting and making monuments with marbled doors of all the houses that have been knocked down and land that’s been taken away from the so-called squatters. It’s still nebulous though. If you look at the work it’s just a bunch of marbled doors. It doesn’t obviously say what we infer from it. Though we know what to infer of course.

Index: I’m also thinking of artists in the West. There’s a famous case of the Smithsonian last year bowing to conservative pressure. There’s galleries in London that have problems when they show the work of Sally Mann for example.

Anish Kapoor: I think we have a very carefully defined sense of what’s acceptable, especially if it goes near children or pornography — all those much more difficult areas. Censorship is there and some of it is okay, I assume. But how we monitor it is important.

Index: When you say it’s ok …

Anish Kapoor: I can see that there’s a reason to monitor pornography and paedophilia, especially unacceptable things, and we have to understand that anything that encourages them has to be watched carefully. I understand that impulse but we go there, even there, with great care.

Index: Artists are by the very nature of their work going to be more vulnerable to pressures of conservatism or conformism.

Anish Kapoor: Of course. There’s a kind of naughty boy or naughty girl way of doing it which a lot of artists have taken — why not? I’m not that kind of artist at all. I feel that agitprop as a method is problematic — for me — in terms of my poetic understanding of what a work can be.

When it comes to governments, economic interests override human rights

Index: I wanted to ask you about the British Council’s response to the dilemma of artists displaying work in countries that have a poor human rights record. Chief executive Martin Davidson has said: “It is through cultural exchange that we best demonstrate the benefits of free artistic expression and build supportive links between people in the UK and China.”

Anish Kapoor: I say phooey to that I’m afraid. I did suggest to them [that they] ought to make the central piece in the [UK Now] show a kind of dedication to Ai Weiwei — or to one of the other artists. If they’re going to do this show then they ought to have [Chinese] artists properly take part. The governmental view over the past 30 years has been we’ll speak quietly in public and loudly in private. Well, 30 years of doing that hasn’t done a damn thing. We had the premier of China here [in London] and Cameron was silent on the subject. [Was that] just because Ai was released? No, that was carefully timed. And I think silence says that there are economic interests that override human rights interests. It’s disgraceful.

Index on Censorship: China’s one of the most flagrant examples [of human rights abuse], Iran would be another. Would you start applying the same [tactics] to other countries?

Anish Kapoor: One has to. In the end one has to. Iranian culture, like Chinese culture, is extraordinary. One has to take a moral stand in a way with colleagues for solidarity. I think it’s important to understand in this also that governments are ineffective. I think that’s maybe the most important point of all. Individuals have to do it all. So therefore it’s our duty as individuals to stand up and say we won’t take part or protest. The Chinese don’t listen to anyone while there are government protests — I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that it’s individuals making a noise all over the world that made them release Ai Weiwei. I’ve no doubt about it. Governments are just ineffective at this. And we have the power. We must do something.

This article appears in the new edition of Index on Censorship. Click on
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This issue is nominated for an Amnesty Award

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For almost 20 years, artist MF Husain was threatened and his work abused. Salil Tripathi says goodbye to a controversial and spell-binding master

Maqbul Fida Husain, who died in London today, was an involuntary exile. He loved London, but his heart belonged to India. Many Indians, including the government, celebrated him, but vigilantes in India did not like some of his paintings, and succeeded in hounding him out of India. He was a worthy recipient of an Index on Censorship award earlier this year; he could not attend the event itself. He divided his time between the Middle East during the winter and London during summer, unable to return to India because he would not have been allowed to paint there in peace.

In the mid-1990s, a magazine in India found an old sketch of a nude Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of learning, which Husain had painted. The sketch is elegant and clean; and while it does not “resemble” Saraswati (for who knows what she really looked like?), it was his interpretation of Saraswati. But many Hindus felt offended because she was painted without any clothes. Then, they searched through his paintings and found many other paintings which also showed Hindu divinities without clothes. None of that was gratuitous, nor was it surprising: Hindus have painted their gods and goddesses without clothes for more than a thousand years. There is a concept, of nirakara, or formless, which lies at the heart of this: that you imagine what your deity might look like, giving the formless some shape.

That was too profound for the fundamentalists, and they began campaigning against him, in India and abroad. In 2006, the Asia House in central London had to cancel an exhibition of his works after unknown assailants damaged paintings. An art gallery showing his work in India was attacked.  A television studio was attacked after a programme it produced asked viewers whether  whether Husain should be given India’s highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna.

At one time, hundreds of cases were filed against him. India has peculiar laws dating from colonial times, introduced by Britain soon after the rebellion of 1857 to keep communities separate and segregated. India kept them on the books, allowing bullies to terrorise artists and writers: the laws allow anyone who feels offended to lodge a complaint, which is then initiated by the state.  Husain was prosecuted under Section 295 of the Indian Penal Code, which outlaws insulting religions, and section 153A, which deals with promoting enmity between groups.

Courts, which are supposed to judge if such cases have merit, would often accept the cases nonetheless, and had Husain lived in India and wanted to be a law-abiding citizen, he’d have spent the better part of his life criss-crossing across the vast country, appearing in different courts. There was no guarantee that fresh charges would not be brought against him — his presence in a town could be considered likely to cause violence, and so new, criminal charges could easily be imposed on him, with no certainty that he’d get bail.

In the end, higher courts threw out the cases, and, in a more polite tone, told his critics to get a life. But in India, that does not end the matter. And the kind of people who had ransacked galleries or attacked the TV studios made violent threats against him.

Against his wishes, and in a decision that must have broken his heart, Husain left India. In 2010, he accepted Qatari citizenship. Since 1995, when the troubles started, Husain saw his canvases defaced in India, his family harassed, his property attached, his personality ridiculed, his art physically attacked and his work deliberately and disingenuously misinterpreted. His art has captured India’s ethos. He was India’s chronicler, portraying the stark agony of a cyclone; a court jester, painting Indira Gandhi as Durga astride a tiger after she declared Emergency; a cheerleader, celebrating the centuries of Sunil Gavaskar; an inventive exhibitionist, painting as Bhimsen Joshi sang, painting with Shah Rukh Khan, painting on the body of a woman.

When he left India, some nationalists claimed betrayal. The more important question is: did Husain betray India, or did India betray its own ethos? My book, Offence: The Hindu Case, began with a long anecdote about Husain’s absence from the opening of the National Gallery of Modern Art in Bombay’s exhibition of the Progressive Artists’ Group, which came into being soon after Independence. Husain could not attend because of threats against him. Towards the end of my book, I had hoped for a happy ending.

Salil Tripathi, a writer in London, is chair of English PEN’s Writers-in-Prison Committee. He first met Husain in 1982, and instead of writing an interview, he wrote a poem about him. His book, Offence: The Hindu Case, can be ordered here.

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