Opinion Mother,and India

In the post-Independence period,this meant opting to stay in India: “When I look back,I realise that the nationalist movement also meant Hindu-Muslim unity. We were brought up on these ideals. That is why,when our country was partitioned into India and Pakistan,our family never thought of emigration. We felt we belonged to the place where we had lived for generations.”

To be a staunch nationalist was to join the march towards modernity,and many of Husain’s paintings are directed towards this.

Even while he was in exile his thoughts were with India constantly. He was making a painting of Mamata Banerjee as Shakti which shows how much he kept abreast of what was happening here.

His mother had died soon after his birth and he was constantly recreating the woman as mother and Shakti. So he made that exquisite series on Mother Teresa. He sought the creative,nurturing mother in various forms,though always in a progressive,creative,modernistic manner. Essentially the death of his mother when he was hardly a year old left him always searching for her. He recounts: “My mother Zainab died when I was two years old. I had fallen seriously ill and her desperate prayer was that her life should be taken and mine spared. That is exactly what happened. Though alive I counted myself extremely unfortunate. Can anyone make up for the loss of a mother? I don’t even have a picture of her. She refused to get herself photographed. In those days people were afraid of the camera… Sadly I have nothing which remotely resembles or reminds me of my mother. She is just a name to me,not even a memory.”

The best known of his watercolours are from the Mother Teresa series. At their first encounter,her presence made a visual impression on him: “so animated,so brisk was her walk… I sat there aghast,looking at her,at her frail body bent at the back. She was in a coarse white cotton sari,worn in the Bengali style. Her face,her wrinkled skin was illuminated by an inner light. The empty room looked dingy no more.”

Awed by her presence,Husain was to make one painting after another with a faceless woman clad in a white sari with a blue border bending over brown children,holding them in her lap or close to her breast. Sometimes the folds of her sari would cover the brown bodies entirely enveloping them in compassion. Perhaps the manifold yards of cloth could hold the lost and yearning child in Husain forever: “I try it again and again,after a gap of time,in a different medium. To translate that pain in my paintings,I think I will have to die of it.”

The artist himself became a phenomenon — the centre of attention,something of a cult figure. With his flowing beard and barefoot appearance,he became both Messiah and itinerant wanderer,an image further heightened by his unconventional behaviour. He spanned continents,equally at home with the ordinary worker across the table in an Irani restaurant. Husain’s quicksilver personality found a resonance in everyone. That is why,perhaps,even more than his art,he himself became something of a national hero,the only Indian artist to be placed on the wall of every home. If his artistic consciousness was based in the mythic,today the man himself is a myth,the reservoir from which springs everyman’s fantasy.

His art was very linked to the nation’s destiny and he knew how to transcend the cesspool and make something profoundly creative out of it. In that sense he was an inspiration for both the ordinary person and the artistic genre. His thoughts were always with India. That self-exile was out of necessity and it was a matter of great sadness and caused him grief.

His exile was a loss for us as Indians. What does it say about us? We turned away from the most creative,productive,generous asset we had. We should hang our heads in shame. We need to make amends in some way; we could have a museum for Husain and for the Progressive Artists Group to mark his memory.

Dalmia is the author of ‘The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives’,passages from which are included in this article