Mumbai Art Gallery Owner, Artist Booked For Obscenity
By Manu Shrivastava
Mumbai’s celebrated Gallery Maskara, a venue often associated with cutting-edge exhibitions and frequented by the city’s cultural elite, at Colaba's Third Pasta Lane, has suddenly found itself at the centre of a storm.
Known for pushing boundaries of form and content, the gallery has now drawn the gaze of the police after an FIR was registered against its owner Abhay Maskara and artist T. Venkanna. The charge: Exhibiting allegedly obscene portrayals of Hindu deities interwoven with erotic works.
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| Colaba Police personnel deployed at the entrance of Gallery Maskara |
The complainant, advocate Vishal Nakhwa, reportedly visited the gallery on Friday, 26 September 2025. What he claims to have encountered were semi-nude depictions of revered deities displayed openly, without any restriction on minors’ access.
According to Nakhwa, his protests were dismissed and he was asked to leave the premises, prompting him to lodge a formal complaint at Colaba Police Station. Acting on his complaint, the police registered a case under relevant provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), which deal with obscenity and offences relating to outraging religious sentiments.
“We have registered an FIR under Sections 294, 295 and 299 of the BNS Act,” said Senior PI of Colaba Police Station Sanjay Joshi when contacted by The Draft, stressing that the matter is “sensitive” and further details cannot be shared at this stage.
The case, however, has already set in motion a chain of investigative actions. Officers have recorded the complainant’s statement and are preparing to summon both the gallery management and the artist for questioning.
To pre-empt unrest, the police have deployed additional personnel around the gallery’s entry and exit points at Second Pasta Lane and Third Pasta Lane. The intent is clear: To prevent mischief, contain any flash protest, and ensure that a controversy within the cloistered world of art does not spill chaotically onto Colaba’s bustling streets.
The episode fits into a long lineage of confrontations between faith, morality, and artistic liberty in India. Only earlier this year, an exhibition of MF Husain’s works in Delhi’s DAG gallery drew protests alleging sacrilege, reviving memories of the relentless criticism Husain endured through the 1990s and 2000s, a pressure that eventually drove him to leave India.
Just a few months prior, the Bombay High Court delivered a ruling that underscored the other side of the debate. In a case involving the seizure of works by F N Souza and Akbar Padamsee, the court released the paintings, censuring enforcement agencies for lacking the cultural and aesthetic literacy to assess modern art. Nudity or provocation, the court reminded, cannot be simplistically equated with obscenity.
Together, these episodes reveal the fraught and fragile space within which India’s art community operates - caught between legal strictures, religious sensitivities, and public morality.
For Gallery Maskara, what began as an avant-garde exhibition has now snowballed into a high-profile case, thrusting once again into the spotlight the recurring debate over whether art in India can be both fearless and free.
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