Maqbool Fida Husain

I’m not a connoisseur of art. I can call myself an fledgling art-enthusiast, someone who has peripheral but keen interest in art. With that meagre qualification, I can proclaim that I’m a fan of M F Husain. I have a print of one of his horse series paintings. Obviously a print as I can’t afford the original. His focus on the shapes of the objects and playing with colours rather than definitive figures to convey the theme always fascinated me. In his typical style of masking the face and blending the body parts reminded me of cubism. I consider him one of the most brilliant and astonishingly original artists to emerge from India. I held this belief long before his exile from India, long before his paintings sold for millions, long before he became the fan of Hum Apke Hain Kaun.

I had written a piece about his exile in this blog where I had expressed my belief strongly. Today, on the eve of his departure, news channels in India are spending hours of airspace in questioning whether India failed Husain. I think that’s unfair on two accounts.

Firstly, his life and death in exile is not the most important thing to talk about now. I believe there are plenty of qualified, renowned artists and critics who will be able to enlighten illiterates like me about the nuances of his paintings, his techniques and strokes that made Husain great. Nude goddesses were just one chapter in his long and illustrious career and leaving India was just one episode in his much longer, almost 100-year life. But unfortunately this episode ended up being his penultimate chapter which is still lingering fresh in the memories of the intellectual elite which is why it’s gaining prominence in his obituaries.

Secondly, India didn’t fail him. There’s very little the government could have done or anyone else could have done. But Hinduism failed him. Being the majority religion in India and having gained dominance in the post-reform era due to emergence of reactionary communal forces fuelled by the media-explosion, Hinduism began to show its ugly side that was hidden or unpublicised in the socialist era of 70s and 80s. In the 90s the hungry media needed stories, more importantly controversies to feed their 24x7 stream and Hinduism was ready to oblige. The communal forces were on the rampage and the majority Hindus turned either silent supporters or impotent observers. There were many casualties of this rampage. Sadly Husain turned out to be one of them.

Husain certainly enraged us through his Nude Goddesses series. But that’s what artists do. Or rather supposed to do. Those who titillate your ribald senses have a different name. Ai Weiwei enraged China, or rather he wanted to but ended up agitating the authorities and is now is languishing in prison. Husain fared only slightly better. There can be a rude justification for Weiwei that he lives in an authoritarian world where ‘Tianenmen’ is a four-letter word. There’s no justification for what we did to Husain. Hinduism celebrated the saints who dared to defy even the gods and sculpted copulative statues on the temple facádes.

Today the government is claiming, had he returned, it would have given protection to Husain. Nobody is in a mood laugh at such statements. But then this government, despite its participation in the silent supporter group, has little to blame. The blame lies with the Hindu fundamentalists. For it won’t be possible to bring up any future conversation about Husain without talking about his forced exile. And nude goddesses.

That will be the grievous insult to his memories.