The death of 97-year-old Maqbool Fida Husain represents the passing of many things – of the country's most celebrated artist, of a genius who created a unique visual language by combining the grammar of European modernism with the idiom of India's cultural syncretism, of a man of the world who was as comfortable in his red Ferrari as he was walking barefoot through a city's streets, of a free spirit whose humility and generosity never failed to touch anyone who knew him. His remarkable journey from humble origins to become a name virtually synonymous with Indian contemporary art has only added to the legend that he was. Although he was tutored briefly by N. S. Bendre in Indore and mentored by Francis Newton Souza as a co-founder of the Progressive Artists' Group in Mumbai, his real apprenticeship was with poverty. He was largely self-taught and his success as an artist owed in no small measure to his determination to find the free time to pursue his passion while making ends meet as a cinema billboard painter in Mumbai. He had a natural flair as well as an instinctive liking for the country's folk and mythological traditions, for the patterns of its everyday life, and for the varied manifestations of its syncretism – all of which found expression in a dizzying range of canvases. He lived in and for his art, which he repeatedly showed would not bow down before the dictates of narrow-minded, petty men.
He was extremely generous and I have seen him entertaining guests lavishly at famous restaurants in Jama Masjid and Nizamuddin and Bombay surrounded by eight to 10 invitees who had nothing in common with each other except for the fact that we were honoured to be Husain’s guests and knew that he knew his parathas, raans and kebabs like few other connoisseurs did.
Husain also wrote poetry that was contemplative and layered with meanings and emotions. Yet, like in his Golden Bear Award winning film, Through the Eyes of a Painter, the images in his poetry were almost abstract, but ingrained with a life and an energy that you surprisingly discovered for yourself. Not a word was misplaced and yet you had to ponder on its belonging there, juxtaposed with a thought that apparently conflicted with it.
His was a tricky and complex mind that refused to unravel its mysteries for easy and lazy comprehension. You have to have a very open mind when you read Husain and you have to give yourself plenty of time to luxuriate in its richness and diversity of abstract thought processes. When you have solved the puzzle he created, you feel quite elated and chuffed.
Husain designed and made his own furniture and sat on it and ate off it with a joy that was infectious. He rolled around naked on canvases, with two beautiful girls rolling beside him, all of them covered in paint, under the open sky and created art that was hilariously attractive.
He slept with dirty feet on clean bed sheets, adored his children and lived every moment for his family, loved beautiful women as much as they were drawn irresistibly to him, made asses of rich sycophants by dumping unsaleable junk on them with élan, treated millionaires like tramps if they betrayed his trust and, through it all, never ever lost his sense of humour.
From ancient times India, and Hindus, have had an interpretation of hedonism that is virtually unique. It encompasses female sexuality and a form of liberation that can only emerge in intellectually and morally advanced societies. Tantrism is at the very core of our Shaktism in Bengali society. We above all others should find it in our hearts to try and understand what drove Husain to depict deities in ways that we consider abhorrent.
At the turn of the last century, Victorian values and western interpretations of morality became fashionable amongst the elite. But our rural folk never sacrificed truths at the altar of retrograde evolution. Khajuraho and Konarak are ordinary peoples’ and ordinary artisans’ works of art that liberate and purify and sanctify the presence of Brahman within us.
I am deeply saddened that Husain died ostracised by an unforgiving Mother India — his Ma, his Mati and his Manush. May his restless soul and playful imagination paint patterns in distant worlds who will never understand where such notions came from, light years away — where the dogs of society will howl once again.
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