In the mid-1980s, I did a long piece on M.F. Husain for this newspaper. He was in Calcutta for a show and staying in a suite in Astor Hotel. I went to the hotel and met him and he talked to me at some length, surrounded by the work he was about to show, his “Assasination” series, a banal set of paintings about the deaths of Gandhi and Indira and others. If I remember correctly, the piece I wrote began by saying that Husain’s greatest creation was not his large body of quite mediocre paintings but himself, his lovely personality, the way he had sculpted himself out of the life he had been given. I described — because there was no way I could avoid admiring it — his great humility and quiet warmth even towards some strange young fellow who’d landed up to interview him.

Long before I actually met M.F., it always baffled me why he got so much adulation from the country’s art establishment, from the collectors, the critics and the press: I could not separate Husain’s line from a watered-down Picasso hand and, whenever he chose to go ‘colourful’, I couldn’t see anything but bad Matisse variations in his palette. Till the end of the 1970s, when a whole new batch of Indian painters came to prominence, it was a matter of some embarrassment for a lot of us that Pablo-P derivatives such as Husain and (at a slightly higher level) F.N. Souza were regarded as the country’s great painters.

For many of us, the problem with Husain was that he was too tame, both in terms of form and also in his content, such as it was. Added to this was the cringe-making sycophancy towards Indira Gandhi, when he painted Despot-Aunty as Ma Durga. All this aside, one hardly thought of him as a ‘Muslim’ with a capital M (in much the same way Pataudi was never a Muslim whereas Azharuddin definitely was); Husain and S.H. Raza were both Muslim names but de-fanged of any ‘Mohammedan’ payload: as modern India’s court-painter, Husain indiscriminately painted everything, while Raza painted mostly abstraction based on Hindu symbology; both painters were, classically, modern, secular, Indians, albeit with different levels of talent. From the 1950s to the 1970s, Husain, Souza and Raza were like Ambassador, Fiat and Standard Herald, the only brands available at the time, the vehicles in which the artistic ambition of the country had to motor forward.

What the Hindu fascists were going after when they attacked Husain was this secular mythology and the ‘brand’ of Husain, with all its attendant monetary value and art- clout. The parivar mobs and their controllers weren’t bothered about the quality of Husain’s art — they had no means or inclination to analyse it — they were attacking what they saw as the ‘effrontery’ of having a ‘Muslim’ as the best-known painter of the country. To rework Naipaul’s famous quip about Khomeini’s fatwa against Rushdie being a rather extreme form of literary criticism, this terminal art criticism was directed via Husain at the whole Nehruvian idea of modern India — “the old man is your mascot and we are going to destroy him”. Husain’s tragedy is that he spent his whole life avoiding the tag of the “Musalman who transgresses”, he spent a lot of time making nice with the powers that were, but in the end the identity pigment caught up with him and stained his crisp, white profile. At the time, in the 1950s, when Husain made those tongue-in-cheek drawings, he was a free man and so were others: if the same sketches had been made by someone called Bendre, Gaitonde or Sen, the Parivar Phalangists could today have done sweet jack-all with it.

As we know, to our shame, neither Nehru’s party nor unattached secular grandees in large enough numbers rose to defend Husain and, in this instance, that idea of Modern India. But one of the ironies of the story is that many of Husain’s paintings hang in the mansions of the same people who now pour huge money into the coffers of the sangh parivar. Husain, of course, knows this. While his disappointment with the secularists (and the Congress that he so stroked with his brush), must be deep, it’s not hard to also imagine his sadness and anger when these same billionaires who feted him and used his paintings — not only as investments but also as tickets to move from crude bania-dom to ‘classiness’ — failed to do anything to defuse the mob attack.

How exactly M.F.-sahab came to his Qatar decision can be a matter of endless conjecture and it is, ultimately, irrelevant. We need to examine what we have ‘lost’ as a result of the decision. At 95, it may be safe to say that Husain has spent the major portion of his life as an Indian, that he will always be known and remembered as an ‘Indian painter’. A large majority of his works are also in Indian hands or owned by people of Indian origin (again, this is because, where Husain counts is as a peculiarly important phenomenon in the story of emerging independent India: just as Sunil Gavaskar, with all his world-beating gifts, turned ‘cricketer’ into a viable profession for Indians, so did Husain, despite his provincial limitations, almost single-handedly establish ‘modern artist’ as a respectable and profitable job). It could also be perversely argued that our loss is perhaps the Arab world’s gain, or that ‘handing over’ Husain is a bit like giving a much poorer country our obsolete fighter aircraft to help start off their own air force.

In any case, it’s clear that we haven’t lost either the man or his work, what we have lost is that far more important thing — Face. Where we have taken damage is on that crucial idea of India as a ‘modern’ and ‘secular’ society; the twin flags of democracy and free speech we wave to the world when comparing ourselves favourably to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Burma, or to Libya or Iran, or even China, now look somewhat frayed, tattered and pretentious. This thing is a huge slap on our collective, newly botoxed face, and one we richly deserve as a cowardly nation and a cynical, uncaring society. It’s a slap that will start to sting properly only in a little while.

While I wait for that to happen, I find myself looking at the painting the old gent made for his favourite dhaba on Ballygunge Circular Road. I’ve always been irritated by that dashed off canvas which hangs behind the cash counter, just as I’ve found deeply annoying the small, tatty Husain reproductions that dot the grimy walls of a certain bar on Park Street — it’s my favourite dhaba as well, just as the bar is my favourite bar, and the Husains both real and fake seemed to signify everything that was wrong with art and culture in Calcutta and India — easy, lazy, unoriginal and fading. But now that there’s no chance that the old man might walk into the dhaba for a late-night meal, I realize why this stuff is, despite itself, precious.