Opinion He painted a nation
M.F. Husain was an artist of eternal India.
At last he must be soaring. Maqbool Fida Husain,artist,mystic,rebel,set free on a white horse. Those magnificent horses of his youth,Duldul,the horse that follows the mourners at Muharram,the sacrificial steeds of the Aswamedha ritual that he himself became in his later years,the broken horses pulling a tonga in the streets of his native Pandharpur,call them what you will,but these were the images that reined in his early admirers.
Everyone could identify with one of Husains horses. Not everyone knew what an artist was,nor cared to know. Art galleries were areas of dampness tucked away in small back alleys and lofts,made even more mysterious by their inhabitants and hangers conversing in tongues that no one understood. Husains language was one that stood out for its clarity and simplicity; he was after all a poster artist when he first came to Mumbai. The language of the streets was something that came easily to him. It was easy to understand by even the least uninitiated. Husain invented the idea of the artist in contemporary India by both painting himself into the public mind as the barefoot man of the people walking the streets alongside them and recording the images that a newly emerging nation was still struggling to explore and experience.
He did not seek to preach,except perhaps to himself. It was always an interior monologue of images that he sought to define what he felt was his metier,his calling as a poet and an artist who had been given the extraordinary gift of painting a nation. What is nothing short of extraordinary is the energy,inventiveness and single-minded obsession with which he pursued his task. If we compare the relentless force of his creative output to a river we may also be able to say that it was an endlessly changing river that flowed through many rocks and whirlpools and eddies while remaining essentially the same.
He was the quintessential flaneur,the roving eye of the rootless wanderer travelling from one country to another,like many of his generation of artists,Paris was the fountainhead of ideas from which they could quench their thirst for inspiration. Unlike them,Husain always came back to Mumbai,to India,and never left it,despite being an exile,the most famous of those who have been made into pariahs by the jingoistic ferocity of those who took it upon themselves to savage some of his earlier images of mythical female characters and the fertile mother goddesses as being disrespectful to their own narrow interpretations of morality.
In an interview with Neville Tuli,recorded in The Flamed Mosaic: Indian Contemporary Painting,Husain clearly explains his approach to his work. I realised that there is nothing original in this life,it is all about how you select and make it a part of yourself. That is the eye. So,I had to find my own way of selecting from Indian art. At that time,it was a learning process for all of us. I needed a certain period from Indian Civilisation,for I wanted to evolve a language right from the beginning. Our own colours,our own forms,and a sense of space,we did not have a technical advancement. So without telling anybody I came out with five paintings. In these paintings for the annual Bombay Art Society,I used the colours of the Basohli miniatures,the figures of the Gupta period. Also the innocence of folk art has from the start attracted me most deeply. All the festivals,the earthen toys,bringing these strands together were my art at that time. Also my background with cinema hoardings helped me very much with these strong and raw Basohli colours.
It explains why,at the heart of Husains work,at the centre of the universe that he created to arrive at an image that would illustrate,articulate,celebrate,the soul of India as he imagined it,is the woman. She is the mother rocking the cradle in his earliest images taken from his own struggle to paint while bringing up two small children in a one-room tenement in Mumbai. She is the Mother India figure playing multiple roles in building a nation in Zameen (1955),the Durga riding a tiger form that pays a tribute to Indira Gandhi after the Bangladesh War and all the strident womanly heroines who raise their heads and voices,(with bared breasts sometimes riding the tigers of patriarchal protests) through the Ramayana and Mahabharata epics that he illustrated through the 1970s,to the tender tributes on film to real-life heroines like the meltingly lovely Madhuri Dixit who dominated the public imagination,to the equally emotionally charged portraits of a blue-and-white wing-like sari enfolding the never-to-be-seen,but always to be imagined face of Mother Teresa,cradling the dead and dying. Even in his days of exile,he turned his minds eye towards the women of India,a dazzling portrait of Subbulakshmi to mark her passing,a born-again Bengal Renaissance in his last portrait of Durga triumphant.
To the end he remained what he had been born to be,an artist of eternal India.
Geeta Doctor is a Chennai-based critic
express@expressindia.com
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