The Husain saga
CHITRAPU UDAY BHASKAR
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Story of the legendary artist tracing the evolution of his art over the last six decades
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MAQBOOL FIDA HUSAIN: K. Bikram Singh; Rahul & Art, E-10, Defence Colony, New Delhi-110024. Rs.9999.
Maqbool Fida Husain (born 1917) is undoubtedly India’s most celebrated — and now alas — controversial artist who has been forced to live in self-imposed exile in Dubai. With his flowing white mane and jauntily held paint-brush, his penchant to walk barefoot adds to the allure of an artist, who is as restless as he is creative in diverse disciplines of aesthetic enquiry and exploration. Testimony to his prolific output is borne out by an extraordinary statistic. In the last six decades, the man has feverishly created over 10,000 paintings, drawings and murals of distinctive visual quality and untrammelled vigour. In between he also turned his hand to still photography and film-making thereby giving his vast oeuvre a texture that is unmatched in contemporary Indian art. This versatility incidentally does not include Husain’s brief forays into toy making and jewellery design.
Imposing spectrum
This imposing spectrum of creativity has been very ably condensed into what may well rank as the most informative and sumptuous tome on Husain by Bikram Singh — a bureaucrat turned documentary film-maker and writer. Modest to a fault, the author avers that his aim in writing this book was limited: “The objective of this book is to provide a broad and critical overview of MF Husain’s work for those who are generally interested in art, for art connoisseurs and for those who have a special interest in Husain.” This objective is commendably realised and Singh writes in an easy-to-understand manner that is mercifully shorn of the complex semantic and needless verbosity that has become the hallmark of certain types of art writing.
Embellished with almost 350 visuals, the book is divided into 12 chapters that trace the evolution of Husain from his birth in Pandharpur, where his grandfather made a living as a tinsmith, to his later emergence as India’s best-known artist. The format that Singh has chosen to render the text is perhaps derived from his preference for the documentary film — for he provides some very useful socio-historical background to each chapter that addresses a specific phase or theme in the Husain trajectory. Thus the reader gets to know of Husain’s specific identity as a Suleimani Muslim within the Indian context and the impact that the loss of his mother (when he was less than two years old) had on the young Maqbool. The critic in Singh then provides the linkages with his later paintings and alludes to the manner in which the suppressed yearning for his mother surfaces in the Mother Teresa series, or how the lamp and the horse associated with his grandfather become recurring motifs in his work.
Self-taught artist
Outlining the formative years in Indore, Siddhpur (Gujarat) and Baroda, the book provides a detailed account of the travails of the young Husain who resisted formal education but displayed a natural flair for drawing and was encouraged by N.S. Bendre — then teaching at the Indore Art School. The restless young man chose to go to Bombay in 1934 and joined the J.J. School of Art but was forced to leave when his father lost his job due to the Great Depression of the 1930s. But a determined Husain returned to Bombay in 1936 and found employment as a cinema hoarding painter and designer of toys and nursery furniture, and embarked on his journey of becoming a self-taught artist.
In subsequent sections, the book dwells on the seminal impact that F.N. Souza and the Progressive Artists Group had on Husain and the gradual exposure to Indian and European art. A visit to Delhi in 1948 where a special exhibition was mounted at the Rashtrapati Bhavan allowed Husain to savour classical Indian art and as the artist recalls later: “The (Delhi) exhibition left me both humbled and exhilarated. It was like scaling a mountain and then discovering a whole range of new mountains. Looking at the forms of the Gupta sculptures, experiencing the innocence of Indian folk art and seeing the rawness of colours in Basholi and Pahari paintings, I knew I had stumbled upon something priceless.”
Themes
Predictably, the distillate of these three influences — classical Indian sculpture, the folk and the miniatures — are discernible in myriad permutations and combinations in Husain’s work in later decades. Having provided a comprehensive “establishing shot” as it were, of his foundational context, Singh deftly focuses on discrete themes that have engaged the artist — namely the female form, the search for the abstract through the figurative, rendering the great Hindu epics (some depictions which earned the wrath of the extreme Hindu right wing leading to his current exile), the transition from rural themes to his preoccupation with select Indian cities (Varanasi, Kolkata and to a limited extent Chennai), contemporary stimulus including portraiture of Indira Gandhi and Mother Teresa, the obsession with horses and elephants, satire about the British Raj and Islamic calligraphy.
It is a rich narrative of the Husain saga leavened with the right mix of empathy and tentative critical enquiry but one minor quibble—Singh could have offered us more of his own assessment about Husain’s stupendous artistic contribution instead of relying so much on others.
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