On Sunday mornings I generally detour after a game of gently paced badminton to breakfast with my mother, Smita. Last Sunday our conversation turned to a headline about the Bombay high court (a bench of Justices Mahesh Sonak and Jitendra Jain) admonishing the customs department for confiscating seven nude art works of the renowned artists, Francis Newton Souza and Akbar Padamsee.
My mom was quick to recall her chance encounter, 70 years ago, with Akbar Padamsee, then a 26-year-old artist. Young Padamsee had walked up five storeys at Amar Niwas, Girgaum and asked to meet the criminal defence advocate, her father, Haribhai Desai. Haribhai had earned a reputation for searching cross-examination and Padamsee, the recipient of a French government scholarship Prix de Noël, needed to puncture a government prosecution.
On April 29, 1954, the Jehangir Art Gallery in Bombay hosted an exhibition of Padamsee’s paintings. The invitation card suggests a range of 22 works, some of them with bland titles: ‘Man and City 1’, ‘Landscape 1’ and ‘Head 1’.
What appears to have caught the attention of the Vigilance Branch under then chief minister Morarji Desai’s administration were two paintings, ‘Lovers 1’ and ‘Lovers 2’.
The paintings depict a nude man touching a naked woman’s bare breast. Inspector Kanga huffishly asked Padamsee to remove the ‘obscene’ works. Padamsee refused. Foreshadowing the Indian state’s current irritation over journalists, comedians, and assorted free spirits – Padamsee was arrested. Although he was granted bail after two days, the paintings remained in police custody.
Haribhai was initially unconvinced about his client’s defence but when Padamsee trudged up the steep fights again, this time bearing several weighty tomes on art, Haribhai was impressed. Central to many of the great artistic works of the West and East were the human nude.
In a wonderful book, The Catalyst (Speaking Tiger, 2024), Reema Desai Gehi captures the contribution of Rudolf von Leyden (Rudi) in encouraging the Progressive Artists’ Group in the 1950s. On Haribhai’s advice for a strong defence witness, Rudi stepped into the box of the Presidency Magistrate on June 16, 1954. In Gehi’s telling:
“On that fateful day, dressed sharply in a suit, Rudi, a towering figure with a powerful voice and an imposing personality, said in his defence of Padamsee, that the accused was a recognized artist. ‘I don’t think that it was unusual for an artist of his stature to symbolise human love by the gesture of a male touching a female breast,’ he stated. ‘This form of symbolising human love could be traced to the art of various countries, including India.”
On June 16, 1954 the Magistrate M. Nasrullah rendered judgement:
“…In my opinion, painting which is of artistic talent does not become obscene for the simple reason that it contains an expressive pose which in other settings may even be considered objectionable, which from the artistic point of view does no more than justice to the subject before the artist… In the pictures before me, the accused has selected as his subject ‘The Lovers’. In doing justice to his subject availed itself certain liberality in respect of expression and pose. As the accused put it in his statement before the Court, in depicting a subject such as ‘Lovers’, you cannot have a brotherly embrace.
“Looking at these pictures therefore from the point of the viz. the place where they were exhibited and the people who are normally likely to see such products of artistic talent, the pose, the posture, and the facial expressions which I must say are calm and devoid of any glamour, I fail to see how these pictures can come within the purview of section 292 of the Indian Penal Code. I must therefore acquit the accused. I order accordingly. Bail bond cancelled.”
In January 1955 after the state’s appeal was dismissed, the Superintendent of Police returned the two paintings.
Padamsee’s refusal at a young age to be cowed down by officials who saw threats to Indian culture set a benchmark for artistic expression. When the news report of the recent Bombay high court judgement reached Akbar Padamsee’s daughter, the actress Raissa Padamsee, she simply messaged ‘Again !!!!!’.
Shyam Divan is a senior advocate.
This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.
