How India failed MF Husain, a son of the soil, and one of its greatest artists

As a colossus on the firmament of modern Indian art, Husain — along with his contemporaries like SH Raza and FN Souza (they co-founded the Bombay-based Progressive Artists Group in 1947 as a newly independent India asserted its cultural identity on the world stage) — changed the way art, and artists, were perceived in the public imagination. After the group disbanded in 1956, he dedicated his largest work of the decade to the emergence of India’s voice in the international arena. Voices, the 18.8-feet, oil-on-canvas painting, was auctioned for Rs 18.47 crore in 2020 — it’s the highest price his work has been sold for in an auction so far. As one of India’s most saleable artists of the 20th century, Husain put modern Indian art on a global plane, raising India’s cultural stakes at major museums around the world, where his works continue to be exhibited, and put under the hammer.

A mind-numbing, cruel irony

It’s a cruel irony then that Husain was forced to flee India in his later years, hounded out by the Hindu extremist groups, and was left with little choice but to accept an honorary Qatari citizenship in 2010, after having shuttled between Dubai and London as criminal cases against him in the Indian courts dragged on. The fringe elements — who have become the mainstream now — accused him of defiling the deities by depicting them ‘obscenely’. Two of his works — his sketches of the Goddess Saraswati, and one of his paintings entitled ‘Bharat Mata’ (Mother India), both in the nude — were at the centre of the controversy. When this issue was raging, the Congress government at the Centre chose to turn a blind eye. Not only did it let the tension simmer, it also failed to do anything to bring the artist back. To add insult to injury, several state governments joined the chorus to prosecute Husain for outraging religious sentiments. Many among the art fraternity, too, chose to dissociate themselves from the artist. So much so that when the first edition of India Art Fair was held in Delhi in 2008, it showcased the works of over 300 odd artists, but not Husain’s. 

The Indian press, with a few exceptions, claimed that the artist was in ‘self-imposed exile’. However, in some of his last interviews, Husain reiterated that he very much wanted to return to the land he loved truly and madly, but even though the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court ruled in his favour, he was not convinced that he would be safe in the country. He had reasons to think so. Despite the fact that he had issued an apology, the extremists were far from pacified. It all seemed surreal. A Haridwar court ordered Husain’s property to be confiscated in one of the obscenity cases. Bajrang Dal members, who had ransacked his gallery in Ahmedabad, invaded his house and vandalised his paintings, kept threatening him with dire consequences if he returned. The Hindu Personal Law Board announced an award of Rs 51 lakh for anyone who killed Husain. A Congress leader in Indore promised Rs 11 lakh to anyone who cut his hands. Husain feared for his life, and it was with tremendous pain that he gave up the Indian citizenship; as an Overseas Citizen of India (a category of citizenship introduced by the Indian government in 2005, the year Husain left the country), he could visit India whenever he wanted, but he never did. Until he died in London, surrounded by strangers, in 2011.

In interviews before his demise at the age of 95, Husain said: “India is my soul. But the country has rejected me.” One can only imagine the anguish he would have felt at increasingly being isolated, marginalized and vilified in his homeland, and subjected to dehumanising vitriol. Despite all this, however, Husain never lost faith in India’s democratic system or its judiciary. There were 900 cases in different courts against him, and he was quoted as saying in an interview that he paid his lawyer Rs 60,000-70,000 for about 12 years to fight them. “That’s because I have not fled from the Indian legal system,” he said. Looking back, it seems unfair and unfortunate that an artist of his stature and repute was treated like this in a country that prides itself on freedom of speech and expression. “What is democracy if there is no freedom of expression?.. When the principles of liberty and tolerance become meaningless, an artist is bound to feel insecure. A nation that has bred and nurtured so many faiths — including Buddhism, Islam and Christianity — needs to ask itself where it is going,” Husain said in an interview.

Fighting every taint with paint

Husain, never to be deterred, fought every taint with paint, writes Ila Pal in Husain: Portrait of An Artist (2017). He continued to work with renewed vigour. In his defence, he said that for the Saraswati series, he drew on the sculptures of the goddess on the walls of the 11th- and 12th-century Hoysala temples in Karnataka, in which her torso is invariably bare, with only her lower parts covered with ornaments. In May 2008, the Delhi High Court passed a historic judgment, in which Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul rubbished the Hindutva foot soldiers’ claims of blasphemy committed by Husain. “It is most unfortunate that India’s new ‘puritanism’ is being carried out in the name of cultural purity and ignorant people vandalize art,” Justice Kaul said in his verdict. He asserted that the painting was neither lascivious nor appealing to prurient interests. “Its aesthetic quality in fact dwarfs the so-called obscenity and renders it so insignificant that the nudity can be overlooked,” he added.

Husain’s own response to these accusations was characteristically simple, and poignant: “Would I insult that which I feel so close to?” Along with horses and landscapes, the female form was at the core of his artistic vision. In his hands, the feminine became the archetypes of creation and fertility that have permeated art and culture throughout history. “My subject is woman,” he once said. Early in his career, women were a recurring leitmotif in his works: from the women on the street to public figures like Mother Teresa and Indira Gandhi. They included both rural and urban women, the mortal and the divine. His intent as a painter was not to titillate; his nudes were rarely erotic. “My women are not sensuous. I am interested in the structure of the female body,” he said in an interview once. 

If you see Bharat Mata, you’d find yourself hard pressed to term it ‘offensive’. It shows the bright red body of a nude woman with her knees folded back in a manner that the contours form the map of India. There is the Himalayas and the rising sun on the top, a white charkha in the middle, and the Indian Ocean below, with a silhouette of a man in yogic pose. The only objection the right-wing had to the painting was that it was ‘nude’; it was enough for them to brand it sacrilegious. Months after the Delhi HC verdict, the Supreme Court declared: ‘Husain’s Bharat Mata is a work of art.’ However, this did not put an end to the spectre of legal battles looming over Husain and the hatred against him brewing in the minds of small men. The truth was that Husain had drawn nude goddesses even in the 1970s. However, it was never held against him. By the mid-1990s, in the wake of the demolition of the Babri Mosque, his art came to be labelled as ‘anti-Hindu’ — by design.

The great betrayal

The ruling party at the Centre turned its back on Husain and India failed and betrayed the great son of its soil. In contrast, in Qatar, Husain was treated like royalty. Queen Sheikha Mosa ensured that he was accorded all special facilities for the ambitious project of painting 99 canvases on Arab civilization that she had commissioned. Before he died of cardiac arrest, Husain was working on a series of paintings on Indian civilisation, commissioned by Laxmi Mittal (alas! he could not complete it), a series on the history of Indian cinema, another on Mughal-e-Azam, and a Mahabharata series commissioned by a Russian. While the world was celebrating his genius, the Congress party was wary of articulating its support for Husain lest it was censured for appeasement of a community. It was a pity because Husain was as secular as they come. When he was braving the right-wing onslaught and left the country, neither the then PM Manmohan Singh nor Sonia Gandhi nor the then home minister P. Chidambaram bothered to even call him up. When he was asked whether he was approached by anyone from the government on his possible return, Husain said, “Nothing. Not a word…”

The UPA government could have handled ‘The Husain Affair’ better, but it remained inert, indecisive and indifferent. Worse, it was also hypocritical. The government had commissioned Husain to do a series of paintings to mark the sixtieth year of Indian independence (2007). However, days before Husain’s exhibition was scheduled to open in London in May 2006, the Central government directed Delhi and Mumbai police to take “appropriate action against Husain (if need be) because his paintings had the potential to hurt religious feelings”. Pal writes: “This is as self-serving as it can get. The government was fully aware that there was no other painter who could bring out the panorama of images and project the history and ethos of India, its composite culture, like Husain. In this he surpassed his contemporaries. He had the grasp of history, vision, vocabulary, training and the ability to handle scale. He is the only painter who has painted all the world events. But so what? Who cared? Had the government ever thought in terms of how much he would have been able to contribute in documenting and hence immortalising the history of India?”