Maqbool Fida Husain was born in the pilgrimage town of Pandharpur in Maharashtra — and like other children, would look forward to attending the annual Ramlila with friends. He was fascinated by the valour of Ram and Hanuman, spending hours sketching the deities on sheets of paper, and, occasionally, enacting them during play sessions with his friend Mankeshwar, the son of a pandit. Little could the young boy foretell that his fascination with Indian epics would one day compel him to leave his motherland.
After almost a decade of defending his decision to paint nude Hindu gods and goddesses, in 2006, Husain left India on a self-imposed exile at the age of 90. By then, his home and exhibitions had been ransacked, he had received multiple death threats and hundreds of cases were registered against him for outraging religious sentiments and insulting the motherland with his painting of Bharat Mata, where the contours of a nude female formed the boundaries of the subcontinent. Though the art community stood by the pioneer, the nonagenarian spent the next five years shuttling between London and Dubai. “At the age of 40, I would have fought them tooth and nail. But I just wanted to concentrate only on my work. I don’t want any disturbances,” he said in an interview after accepting Qatari citizenship in 2010, a year before his death on June 9, 2011. The Delhi High Court had dismissed criminal proceedings and overruled charges of obscenity against his paintings in 2008, but there was no assurance of security if he chose to return home. “His eyes would become moist when he talked about India. He wanted to come back but couldn’t,” says close friend, gallerist Arun Vadehra.
India’s cultural versatility was his inspiration and the jet-setter, with patrons across continents, propagated it through his art.
On September 17, the protean maverick would have turned 105, and, despite the stormy reactions to his work in the latter half of his life, his art continues to remain as vibrant, relevant and important a symbol of India’s cultural plurality as ever. As Indian art’s foremost modernist, Husain’s life and work were rooted in the nation’s history and its democratic ethos. The charismatic painter who redefined Indian art also paradoxically tested its democratic ideals like none before. His persecution came to be viewed as a conflict between sectarian and secular values and a precursor of the many curbs on freedom of expression that has followed since. “Husain was an emblem and to attack an emblem is much easier because you get that many more supporters and that much more publicity… He didn’t cross over into any excess but he had to be attacked because he was what he was and too big a symbol for the right wing to take on or want to take on,” says artist Vivan Sundaram, 77.
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The state machinery, too, he says, failed to protect Husain adequately. The then home minister Shivraj Patil had reportedly asked the police to take “appropriate action” against Husain so that his controversial paintings did not lead to communal trouble. “The crescendo has only built up and the attack has systematically grown under the current government. Now, nobody will touch anything to do with Hindu religion. Artists are very wary of speaking out. Anyone who stands up is trolled in different ways,” he adds. Incidentally, earlier this year, a performative art piece on the “strength of women” was interrupted by the police at the India Art Fair following a complaint that some paintings at the fair were against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA); in 2012, artist Balbir Krishan was attacked for works based on homosexuality.
In his 2008 judgment, Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul had emphasised “beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder and so does obscenity”, but photographer and activist Ram Rahman notes that Husain’s bitter experience has also kept future generations from depicting Hindu epics for the fear of inviting the wrath of extremists. “It forced many artists into a mode of self-censorship. People became wary of doing anything related to mythology or culture because that became the point of attack on Husain,” says Rahman.
Leading a life marked with trials and triumph, Husain — who stopped wearing footwear as a tribute to Hindi poet Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh — left his footprints across the globe. He had arrived penniless in Mumbai from Indore in 1936 and famously paved a career from being a cinema-hoarding painter to becoming one of India’s most recognised artists. Until the ’60s, a single-room apartment in Mumbai’s Grant Road area was his home with wife Fazila, whom he married in 1941. Drawing parallels between the fate of the Indian republic and his own, Husain had celebrated the end of colonial rule on August 15, 1947, by designing a tableau of freedom with his co-workers at the nursery furniture and wooden toys store called Fantasy he worked in. “That night I was roaming the streets of Bombay and the whole celebration triggered my imagination… I decided I should also become free and I should enter the art world,” he told curator and Swiss art historian Hans Ulrich Obrist in one of the last interviews he gave.
The same year, he tentatively submitted his paintings for the annual exhibition of the Bombay Art Society and it caught the attention of artist FN Souza, who invited him to be a part of the eminent Progressive Artists’ Group (PAG). In the company of artists such as KH Ara, HA Gade, SK Bakre and SH Raza, Husain strove to develop an avant-garde language for Indian art that broke away from the dominant notions of academic realism and revivalist nationalism. Though short-lived, PAG went on to become one of the most significant art movements in India and Husain was its most popular name who appealed both to the masses and classes with a distinct vocabulary that drew from India’s social and rural landscape, its rich folk and traditions. “I knew all the theories and all the different isms, and I appreciated them. I didn’t reject them, but I wanted the basis of my work to be folk. I was very conscious of the question, ‘What is Indian culture?’ I painted images that were relevant to our time,” he stated in an interview to ArtAsiaPacific magazine in 2010.
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The 1950s saw him produce some of his most iconic canvases — from the National Award-winning Zameen (1955 ) that celebrated the relationship between people and land, to Passage of Time (1954) that had his signature horses. He painted Mother Teresa and Indira Gandhi, the simplicity of village life and the vibrant ghats of Varanasi. If with the film Through the Eyes of a Painter (1967), he fuelled his cinematic ambitions, by painting the Ramayana in the ’70s at the behest of socialist freedom fighter Ram Manohar Lohia, he intended to widen the viewership for art. Produced after studying different versions of the Ramayana, Rahman recalls how the canvases were taken on bullock carts to villages near Hyderabad by Husain so that people from all walks of life could interact with his work.
This desire to reach a wide spectrum of viewers also defined Husain’s oeuvre. India’s cultural versatility was his inspiration and the jet-setter, with patrons across continents, propagated it through his art. Wooed by people in power, from politicians to business-people and socialites, the price of his works escalated but he remained spontaneous and magnanimous, leaving sketches on napkins and tabletops. As early as 1968, he turned painting into performance when he worked on canvases before the audience at Delhi’s Shridharani Art Gallery. “When we were struggling, he never complained about money, nor did he flaunt his wealth when he became famous,” says fellow PAG member and close friend Krishen Khanna.
In whatever he did, whimsy played a role. On his 90th birthday, he reportedly asked his friends to gift him lollipops, for his 94th, he ordered jalebis in the US. Khanna remembers an incident when Husain was visiting his parents in Shimla. “My mother prepared his morning tea and went to his room, only to find him missing. None of us had a clue about where he had gone, but after a while he called and said, ‘Main thaane mein hoon (I am in the police station)’. He had taken his car and was driving on The Ridge, which was not allowed. He was fined a sum of Rs 40 or 50, but he took out a 100-rupee note and offered to pay for a lady whose goats had wandered and eaten someone’s fruits.”
The plurality of the republic that Husain had attempted to explore through his re-imagination of the epics ironically became an argument for divisiveness.
In the same way, though he went on to own a fleet of cars, including a Bentley, a Jaguar, a Mercedes, a Ferrari, a Rolls Royce and a Bugatti Veyron, his ride in the ’60s was a Fiat painted with horses on its bonnet. It wasn’t egotism when he insisted on entering a South Mumbai club barefeet, Husain was an iconoclast — he believed in stretching boundaries. Sent to a religious school in Baroda to train to become a maulavi when he was eight or nine, during his conversations, Husain would often share how in the short period he spent there, he would defy rules to pursue his passion for art, “painting on the floor, on cups and plates and dishes”.
By painting the Hindu deities Husain believed he was telling their stories to the world. For instance, when invited to the Bienal de São Paulo in 1971 to exhibit with Pablo Picasso, he took inspiration from the latter’s antiwar Guernica (1937) to paint the moral battle between the Kauravas and the Pandavas in the Mahabharata. “His paintings do not illustrate events in the Mahabharata as a traditional narrative would, but rather capture its themes in compelling images,” notes the catalogue for the exhibition “Post-Picasso: Contemporary Reactions”, curated by Michael FitzGerald. While Vadehra says that to Husain “religiosity was important and not religion”, Rahman adds that, through the works, “he was celebrating human philosophy and creativity in all cultures.”
The plurality of the republic that Husain had attempted to explore through his re-imagination of the epics ironically became an argument for divisiveness. Though many of his contemporaries were also drawing from Hindu mythology, several believe that Husain was targetted because he was most known to the common man on the streets. “When you are very successful you stand out,” says artist Arpana Caur, adding how Husain would always encourage young talent and was the first buyer for her work at her debut solo in Mumbai in 1980.
While his critics questioned why Husain did not paint Islamic figures like the Hindu deities, his supporters argued that Islam had no tradition of nude paintings. In Pradeep Chandra’s book MF Husain: A Pictorial Tribute (2012), Husain says, “Some hardline Muslims asked me why I don’t paint Islamic themes. I asked them whether Islam has as much tolerance; if I make a small mistake in calligraphy, they would tear my canvas.”
Almost a decade after his demise, Rahman feels that his detractors have failed in their battle against Husain. Referring to the sale of his 1958-canvas Voices for a record-breaking. Rs 18.47 crore at AstaGuru’s solo auction dedicated to the artist last month, Rahman says, “The attempt of the Hindutva crowd was to erase his work and his memory from our consciousness and that hasn’t happened… They were successful in that moment in driving him out but culturally they haven’t succeeded in demolishing his stature.”
Leading a life marked with trials and triumph, Husain — who stopped wearing footwear as a tribute to Hindi poet Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh — left his footprints across the globe. 
India’s cultural versatility was his inspiration and the jet-setter, with patrons across continents, propagated it through his art.
The plurality of the republic that Husain had attempted to explore through his re-imagination of the epics ironically became an argument for divisiveness.
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