I received an excited SMS from a classmate from Qatar around midnight last week that went: "MF Husain is now a citizen of Qatar! I might actually get to see him some day!"
Maqbool Fida Husain, dubbed by Forbes as the 'Picasso of India', has been granted Qatari nationality by the state's royal family.
For years, India's best known modern painter has been forced to shuttle between Dubai and London, to flee obscenity cases and threats to his security over a series of nude paintings of Hindu goddesses.
The paintings angered Hindu nationalist parties and their affiliates, who ransacked art galleries that exhibited his work and lodged court proceedings to seize his property in Mumbai.
Though such art form was very prevalent in mediaeval India and can still be observed in cave paintings and temples, hardliners accused him of denigrating Indian culture.
Husain, now 95, left the country for good amidst calls for his death.
In a television interview with Riz Khan, he said his work was one of love and conviction and he apologised if it had offended some people.
According to senior Indian artists, no other artist in history has done such extensive work on both Hindu epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, or understood it better.
Also, these paintings were made in the 1970s and became embroiled in controversy only in 1996.
The controversy brought to mind the book My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk, which beautifully depicts the divide between the East and the West.
In 15th century Istanbul, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire commissions a book to be made to showcase the splendour of his realm to the Europeans.
However, the murder of one of the miniaturists threatens the making of the book and plunges the artistic community into disarray.
The murdered miniaturist (speaking from after-life), tells how he was disturbed when he learnt that some of the paintings were to be made in the fashion of the Frankish masters, who depicted people and places in a realistic way, which was blasphemous in those days.
Fearing the tradition of the masters of Herat school is endangered, he accuses a fellow miniaturist, who would later kill him, of not conforming to Islamic tradition.
In the final scene, the murderer is being pursued and declaresa his intent to leave Istanbul and flee to Hindustan, to make his living.
The subcontinent has long been open and tolerant to artists from everywhere, who helped shape its unique heritage and culture.
The moral and cultural policing currently going on over what is 'Indian' art and what isn't is certainly frivolous.
At no point in history has there been an exclusively Indian culture that has not been derived and hence been strengthened by foreign inputs.
Had it not been for these migrant artists, India's monumental structure of beauty, the Taj Mahal, the epitome of Mughal architecture, which is a blend of Persian and Hindu styles, would never have been constructed.
On Wednesday, the offices of a daily in the Indian state of Karnataka which published an article by Taslima Nasreen were attacked and two people were killed in clashes with the police the day before.
The author, who fled her native Bangladesh for having offended a few public figures through her books, took refuge in India for some years.
She was kept under virtual house arrest in New Delhi and finally forced to leave the country in 2008, because of the rising agitation against her stay.
Artists and writers have always walked the tight-rope of causing offence by being truthful.
Freedom of expression shouldn't be a vehicle for malevolence, but those opposing what comes out of art and literature should do so peaceably, without violence.
As Indian laws don't allow dual citizenship, Husain will have to renounce the citizenship of the world's largest democracy to become a Qatari national. He still wants to come back and as he nears the winter of his life, it's high time people left the old man alone.
¥ Jennifer Gnana is a former Bahrain resident now studying in Mumbai. Her family still live here.
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