M.F. Husain, 2003

Maqbool Fida Husain, the famous Indian painter and major cultural figure, has died at the age of 95 in a hospital in London. By almost any measure, M.F. Husain’s life makes a long and happy story. First of all, there is the classic rags to riches graph: a man of modest means, a painter of cinema hoardings with a facility for drawing, makes it to the most exalted art circles in the country and then in the world. After an early life of struggle, Husain starts painting modern art and is discovered, then collected, and then, across the larger part of his life — for over half a century — lionized (in India at least) as a great artist. Once he starts selling his work, he never ever sees the price of his paintings dive, the worst that happens is a kind of mid-career price-plateau but that plateau flattens out at a very high altitude of money. In the last two decades of his life, the price of his work, and consequently his fame, rise yet again as the value and desirability of Indian art are driven up by newly rich NRI collectors and the surge of international excitement around Indian art in general. From the time he’s in his mid-thirties, Husain and his near and dear ones never go hungry, from the time he’s in his forties, he remains among the two or three wealthiest painters in India if not the richest. He never lacks for paint and canvas, he never lacks for opportunities to paint and show publicly, he never lacks for collectors and admirers and worshipful friends. In a young nation that habitually churns its artists into mince-meat, M.F. Husain is one of those rare kalakars who is able to earn a very good living and ‘name and fame’ while being able to work freely and constantly over a very long period of time. It’s all good, except, of course, for the last bit of the story.

M.F. Husain is blessed by god or genetic chance — he’s a beautiful looking man who stays handsome through every age; very usefully for an artist, he photographs brilliantly, again, across half a century. He is also, the way the Irish would put it, a lovely man, gentle, self-deprecating through great growing fame, humorous and generous, graceful, quite often quiet, cutely moody but never known to give in easily to temper. The combination means he is well-liked, nay loved, even in the dog-eat-dog world of Indian art and in the shark-bite-shark world of wealthy art collectors. The composite picture makes a very satisfying frame. Except, of course, the part that comes from the last 15 years of his life.

Look at the story another way, paint the portrait from a different angle perhaps, and this time find the flaws. Though he was possibly the nicest person among the Progressive Artists Group, Husain was also perhaps the one with the least talent and originality. Most of Husain’s work is hugely derivative of the Picasso of the 1930s, with a sprinkling of Matissisms and, in the later period, some tricks of the kind favoured by mid-level magazine illustrators. Husain became successful in a fledgling Indian art market that needed legible modern art that was both ‘Indianized’ in its subject matter yet legitimized by its close kinship to Picasso and other established Western artists. Just as arty Indians, critics, gallerists and collectors needed to recognize themselves in the large mirror- canvas of International art, so did the Euro-American art world need Third World artists who were clearly paying an open and ongoing tithe to the modern Western canon. Husain received clear, early licences from both these groups.

Once MF stumbled upon a formula that worked (from the early horses that cantered straight over into his pictures from Guernica), he never ventured too far from it. Husain avoided risks, creatively or politically. As his reputation was cemented, Husain became a court-painter to the rich and powerful, in one notable instance making sycophantic paintings of Indira Gandhi during the Emergency, and then piggy-backing on other already built ‘brands’ such as Mother Teresa or the characters from the films of Satyajit Ray. From the interesting 1967 experimentation of Through the Eyes of a Painter, Husain descended into the shallow showmanship of painting in ‘jugalbandi’ with classical musicians as they performed, and then the terrible, fawning ‘film-works’ with Madhuri Dixit and Tabu. In his early eighties, a smooth exit seemed to lie ahead of Husain at the end of a career that was far more interesting for the art market phenomenon it helped create than the art it produced. The paeans and tributes were already written and ready in the drawers of newspapers’ Obit desks, with the typically lazy comparisons and labels including ‘India’s Picasso’ and ‘India’s Greatest Painter’. Though one might have felt happy for a full, rich life concluded by a good man who didn’t harm too many people in his time, it would all have been pretty uninteresting. Except that the last, unexpected chapter kicked in around 1996.

Despite himself, across the last 15 years of his life Husain became a symbol of the struggle at the heart of modern India. Never mind that it took a lot of well-shod people to keep MF in his bare feet. Never mind that many like me have never rated him as a painter, as someone who struggled seriously with line and colour, leave alone as India’s ‘greatest’ artist. Never mind that MF himself was never known to take political stances, that he didn’t, for instance, speak out too loudly when Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses or The Moor’s Last Sigh were attacked, respectively by Islamic and Hindu fundamentalists. Despite himself and the mostly comfortable life he lived, M.F. Husain became a focal point, or a lens, which forces us to acknowledge where we fail and fall as citizens of a civilized, modern, progressive society, or where, despite all our setbacks, we still perhaps stand.

Across the last years of Husain’s life, what the pseudo-Hindu goondas have managed to pull off is this: they’ve used the very same secular judicial system they are bent upon dismantling to attack not Husain but, through him, Indian democracy and the Constitution. Even as their own poison-spouters continue to spew toxic words and conduct deadly actions against Muslims, Christians and tribals, the Hindutwats have successfully demanded the ‘protection’ of the law against various ‘insults’ to Hinduism, or to what they define as their Hinduism. If Husain took shamelessly from Picasso, Praveen Togadia takes even more shamelessly from the Ayatollah Khomeini. The message is: We are Indians. We are incapable of independent or original thought. We ‘borrow’. We steal. We not only take from Picasso to make ersatz oil-painted commodities for our rich, we sieve deadly excrescence from the worst gutter in Iran to try and turn India into a mega-Pakistan for everybody.

The deaths of famous people are never entirely their own and the passing of Husain is no exception. If Husain’s departure last year for Qatar and points West marked a defeat for a certain idea of modern India, his death presents a challenge to those of us who felt diminished and humiliated by the old man’s exile. If a small, vociferous, vicious bunch of goons can dictate to us whose books we can read or not, whose paintings we can hang in our galleries or not, and whose films we can see or not, we deserve to be consigned to the dark ages once again. On the other hand, if we can use this sad event to build up a reverse momentum, then this perhaps is the moment to push back as hard and as cleverly as we can. If we can look at Husain himself as his chief work of art, if the pain that Husain went through in exile and the tragedy of his dying away from his beloved country manages to galvanize even a few of us to resist this cancer of psuedo- offence, it will be worth more than all his canvases and drawings put together.