The Great Censorship Culture

Stories of censorship either by the state or self styled protectors of national culture run abound in the Indian Subcontinent. They continue to haunt the liberal minded citizens of this region.

A recent exhibition in Dubai of art works of Colin David brought back the memory of one such dark phase in Pakistan. Colin David, a British by race, but a Pakistani by birth was born in 1937 in Karachi. He had his art education at the Punjab University, Lahore, when the Fine Arts Department opened its doors to male students in 1956. After taking his MFA from the Punjab University Fine Arts Department in 1961, Colin was awarded a scholarship for post-graduate studies at the Slade School of Art, London.

Colin could have stayed back in London and build up a successful career in art there but had chosen to return to his birth place and joined the faculty of the Fine Arts Department of the Punjab University. He remained there until 1964, and then joined the National College of Arts.

Colin David's Nude Study

Colin’s signature works included elements of Op art fused with portraits and landscapes in classical genre. His paintings often had a nude woman in the centre. Nudity is not necessarily linked to eroticism and Colin’s works could not be classified as erotic art. For sometime Colin did have a smooth sail as his works became popular with the art –students. But the dictatorial regime of Gen Zia ul Haq put Colin in a corner. The new military regime brought in draconian censorship laws, where women could not be shown without traditional clothes and dupatta. National policies decreed that figure studies were no longer artistically acceptable.

Yet Colin decided to stay back and exhibit his works mostly in his own studio for selected viewers. His paintings could not be sold openly and so he had to export them abroad where European collectors bought his works.

Though he had stopped selling his works in Pakistan, Colin continued to exhibit his work discreetly until 1990, when an invitation to a private viewing of work at Colin David’s house fell into the wrong hands. Shamefully, the event became a black spot in Pakistan’s art history, as a gang of young men, leaving one of their numbers armed with a gun on the doorstep of the house, burst into the artist’s home brandishing sticks. They proceeded to destroy a number of canvases, including a portrait of the artist’s young daughter.

Today none of he important works of Colin David exist in Pakistan and an entire generation of Pakistani youngsters lost the opportunity of viewing one of Pakistan’s most prolific artists.

The attack on MF Husain in India’s biggest cosmopolitan city by a band of religious fanatics brings us back to that era in Pakistan when Colin David was attacked. It seems things do not quite change in the sub-continent.