Herwitz presents on 'secularized heritage' in India at APC Research Lab

'For decades MF Husain occupied the role of celebrity, swanning around India in a locally made car with the slogan pasted on its boot: They can drag me to college but they can't make me think, playing out his close resemblance to Charleton Heston, if not Michelangelo's Moses. With his tall frame, stunning, chiseled face, deep sunken eyes that winked with delight at the slightest provocation, with his long white beard, white kurta or pin-striped suit, he resembled a demi-god who had floated off the silver screen onto the streets of India.' Daniel Herwitz

In May, APC Honorary Research Associate Professor Daniel Herwitz presented at the APC's third Research Lab on the topic, 'Secularized heritage and fundamentalist India: The case of MF Husain'.

His presentation was based on his recent book, Heritage, Culture, and Politics in the Postcolony, (Columbia University Press, 2012), which he worked on as Andrew Mellon Visiting Scholar at the APC in 2010. In it, he traces the career of MF Husain, India's premier painter and until his death in 2010 a national icon, whose life was a window into this project of secularization, and into its discontents, in the unresolved history of India.

'Heritage-creation is critical to the cultural politics of the nation at a moment of decolonization,' he writes. 'In India these cultural politics were, from the start, highly ambivalent about secularism. Mahatma Gandhi's version of universal peace, dignity and nation building preached universalism (the desire to include everyone). But it remained Hindu in tradition to the core, aggravating (in spite of its avowed intentions) Muslim insecurity and malcontent.

'At the same time, modern art and literature, along with museums and universities played a role in the secularization of the past, re-scripting a religious, and partisan past into one understood in terms of national enchantment, as if a mythic river inclusive of all and available for all in virtue of their Indian citizenship.

'This re-scripting of the past was part of the project of building citizenship with its civil and political rights: here to the use of the past in free speech and expression,' writes Herwitz, who is former Director of the Institute for the Humanities and Mary Croushore Professor of Humanities at the University of Michigan, and former Director of the Centre for Knowledge and Innovation at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban.