For a moment in the 1980s, my brother's hand was briefly worth a small fortune. M.F. Husain was a frequent visitor to our landlord's home in Delhi, and unlike the Calcutta Club, which memorably evicted the artist for lack of appropriate footwear, the barefoot artist was welcomed by Mr Dhillon and his family.
My brother was a toddler with an explorer's zeal for new territory, and he once escaped from our house to wander in the Dhillons' garden. He was restored some hours later, in cheerful spirits; he had chatted with the artist, who had drawn a story on his hand.
Husain already had a towering reputation, had been awarded the Padma Bhushan, and was one of the best-known of the Bombay Progressive Artists Group, though his canvases had not yet sold for the stratospheric prices they would command in the art auctions of the 1990s. The discussion on how best to preserve a miniature modern masterpiece worth thousands was, sadly, terminated by my brother, who was found washing garden dirt and Husain's birds off his grubby paws.
There may have been no modern Indian painter as prolific as Husain, though. His collected canvases ran into the thousands. His sketches in blackboard chalk were on display at Kovil in Delhi's Connaught Place, carelessly tossed off, eagerly preserved. Meeting him at his studio in Delhi in the early 1990s, I knocked a large file off the table.
"Throw it in the trash," he said, busy pulling out some sketches from the 1960s. The file was filled with old brochures from art shows—and new drawings. He shrugged and stuffed the drawings back into a drawer. "That's a few lakhs more in the bank," he said. And he continued talking about Rembrandt, one of his early inspirations, and how he had been haunted by the faces in Rembrandt's portraits as a young man aspiring to be an artist, painting portraits obsessively.
Husain at work on a live variation of his equestrian theme
Those two sides coexisted without apparent contradiction: Husain the artist in love with his work, Husain the showman in love with the prices his canvases commanded. He told a revealing story about his early life as an artist in Indore, where his family had moved from the temple-town of Pandharpur. His father took him to art school, but MF, looking at the work of final-year students, decided he could do better than that. He was proud of this, and told this story much more often than the sentimental story about him working as a billboard painter in Bombay—which he did, briefly, along with whitewashing walls, until he found his niche with F.N. Souza and the rest of the Progressives.
Husain was good at gimmicks. In the late 1960s, he rented an art gallery and painted in public for 40 minutes every day. In later decades, there would be the Svetambara exhibition, where he covered a gallery with crumpled newspapers; and the famous obsession with Madhuri Dixit, which he tried later to replicate, unsuccessfully, with more forgettable Hindi film heroines. He loved his cars—he had more, he boasted, than Bhagwan Rajneesh—and was especially pleased to add a Bugatti to the roster of Jaguars and bmws after his sad self-exile to Dubai.
Those who say M.F. Husain should have held his ground and fought the relentless tide of attacks on him and his art forget that he had stayed, for a decade-and-a-half. He joined a beleaguered and illustrious roster that included Salman Rushdie, Deepa Mehta, Habib Tanvir, Vijay Tendulkar, Taslima Nasreen and several others, victims of an orchestrated, cynical intolerance.
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There was very little genuine outrage in all these decades against Husain; almost all of it, from the crowds who smashed paintings in the Amdavad ni Gufa (designed by him and Balkrishna Doshi) to the righteous indignation expressed by those who said he had desecrated 'their' goddesses, was carefully manufactured, as Salil Tripathi documents in his book on censorship.
For those with little access to the English language media, attacking a celebrity like Husain had many benefits: it allowed right-wing politicians to make a name for themselves, it brought in massive publicity, and it blocked the open discussion of history, art and ideas. The damage done to freedom of speech and free expression was almost incidental, almost a byproduct of the real agenda, which was to demonstrate who wielded power in today's India. And he was an equal-opportunity offender, facing the bigotry of Islamic groups for carrying a qawwali in the filmMeenaxi that apparently contained words from the Quran.
The real crime against Husain was not even the destruction of his paintings, or the twisted process by which his images of an exhausted, drained Bharat Mata or a lively Saraswati were rendered 'obscene' in the public mind. His paintings of goddesses, like his raga series, like his beloved horses, like his almost childish fascination with cinema, came from being an equal inheritor of the Hindu tradition, of growing up knowing the Ramayana as well as he knew the kalma. The real crime we committed against M.F. Husain was to watch helplessly as a tiny, hate-filled set of bigots attempted to deny the artist the right to his own Indian traditions and his own history.
Neither of the two images that linger in my mind are of M.F. Husain the showman, or Husain the flamboyant, media-loving artist. One is of an old man in his nineties, too tired to fight any more battles, leaving his country unwillingly for Dubai, on the back of a series of compromises. The other is of a barefoot artist with a generous heart who took the time, on a long-ago Delhi afternoon, to make a child happy with a story and a priceless scribbled bird.
| ALSO IN THIS STORY |
PROFILE M.F. Husain was a contemporary of every Indian artist, young or old |
AUTHORS: NILANJANA S. ROY
PEOPLE: MAQBOOL FIDA HUSAIN
TAGS: VISUAL ARTS | HOMAGES & TRIBUTES | PAINTING | FREE SPEECH | MORAL POLICE | HINDUTVA
SECTION: ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
SUBSECTION: PORTRAITS
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JUN 12, 2011 07:24 PM 9 | Nilanjana, it was really sweet that M.F.H made your little brother happy with a painting and a story, that has nothing to do with the reason why a large section of Indian population ( who are mostly tolerant and more humane than most of the world ) does not like him.He was a great painter , but together with that, he was greedy for money. And to earn money, he was trying to sale his mother( may be to buy a Bently? Do you know if he bought a Bently in Dubai after he got kicked out from India) Do you think that has anything to do with your little brother smiling with painted birds in his hand and a story? Nilanjana, you really wrote a nice to read article, and I am also sad that you are sad about MFH , but the subject of the article,MFH( though was a great artist) , is what they say a little "screwed up". I wish goddess Sarashwati , or god hanuman take care of his dead soul in next life. |
JUN 12, 2011 03:20 PM 8 | He was a bill board painter in essence. His paintings lack depth, and he is not famous for introducing any new genre. He will be forgotten by future generation of artists and art lovers. First he painted Goddess Saraswati in a nude form and then he explained that indeed Saraswathi statute was nude in a 14th century cave. At that time some educated muslims objected to his paintings and warned others that M.F.Hussain's idea of painiting is only to make money and nothing else. He was after all not an artist for the sake of art. Whoever lablled Hussain as Picasso of India must be an idiot. He later painted a Hindu goddess which less Hindus expected but most Muslims feared. I heard it from my muslim friend and exactly it happened. He painted Sita of Ramayana , as hanging on to the tail of Hanuman flying over Ocean. Her sary was flying.Her face looks very disturbed and she clings on to hanuman's tail. Who asked him to paint this picture? does it exhibit any modern art ? does it show any new genre of art ? has it got any great artisitc values? Could he, Hussain, have explained the painting and any abstract values it represents ? What all that he wanted was money and he got plenty of it. All the rest of his greatness as artist is bullshit. With such a painting of Sita , in such a ridiculous,insulting manner what he had achieved? He actually posed a great danger to communal harmony and also to the great legends of India and its great epic characters like Sita. Who asked him to take citizenship of Qatar. Why he did not stand up to his so called idealism,art values and freedom of speech , if he had really believed in them? The truth is that he suffered from guilt complex and he had no courage to show his ugly face to indian soceity. |
JUN 12, 2011 02:05 PM 7 | Freedom of Expression should idealy have no constraints. Which means that if Mr A has a right to paint the picture of a Hindu Godess in Nude, Mr B should also have the right to paint the picture of a Non Hindu Religious Prophet in whatever way he wants. Unless we guarantee this "Freedom of Expression" to everyone and anyone in this nation, there is no point in talking about freedom. And if we cannot , why dont we admit it straightaway without making any fuss? Why dont we go ahead and enact a law that makes painting the revered icons of any religion in an unacceptable manner, a offense? The question is straightforward - either we allow all kinds of expression or allow nothing. But our MSM is simply not interested in this question, they are only looking at a political agenda here. Again they fail - the primary duty to protect Mr MFH from the so called threats of Right wing Hindus lies with the government, particularly the government of India that is the UPA -2. Atleast till May 2014. And the government has failed in that. Yet, the MSM looks the otherway. Maybe MFH's death was a timely god send for the India's dynasty supporters to divert attention from the ongoing public campaign against black money? |
JUN 12, 2011 07:49 AM 6 | why he has not painted his ALLAH bedroom paintings abusing hindu god is called secularism |
JUN 11, 2011 11:20 PM 5 | Those people who are crying hoarse over death of Hussain outside India will conveniently take cover of respecting religious sentiments when Tasleem or Salaman Rushdie are hounded. Even Hussain who never apologised for painting nude bharat mata or a parvati copulating with Ganesha, drew Mother teresa or his own mother perfectly dressed. Even if one passes all this off as artisitc freedom , how does one explain his prompt removal of Meenaxshi film when Mullahs protested agaisnt a song to his steadfast refusal to do so in case of contentious paintings. Pseudoecularists in India strongly believe that consistency is a virtue of asses. |
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