To dub him India’s Picasso is no way to pay tribute to MF Husain

Bare feet
That have walked miles
Across the frontiers, beyond the black waters
Bare feet
That have trodden
The slushy roads of Manhattan
Bare feet
That have marched
On the scorching tar of the roads of Madras
While the right finger pressed the shutter
And captured the leper
Dwarfed by the big breasts of the nautch girl
Bare feet
That have sunk deep
Into the soft sands of Rajasthan
While Airavata descended from the skies
And a gallant Rajput galloped away with a
Moghul beauty in the mind’s eye.

The perceptive connoisseur pensively remembers the 124-line poem  Barefoot by Salil Tripathi in 1982. This was no exaggeration about Maqbool Fida Husain, arguably the most well-known Indian painter during the last five decades of his life, who began his career as a movie billboard artist in Bombay.

Irreligious by temperament
Death at 95 is nothing to be mourned about. But deep agonies smear our conscience and pride as he died not an Indian, but a Qatari citizen. He had to leave India due to frequent threats to his life by militant outfits of the Sangh Parivar. This was after his solo exhibition in New Delhi in which one of the exhibits, a nude woman on her knees, represented India’s geographic borders.

In 2004, the Delhi high court turned down complaints of “promoting enmity between different groups”, but the intimidation continued while art lovers remained helpless and silent spectators.

It’s true that Husain drew his motifs from Hindu mythology and icons, and never painted an Imam or a gathering at a namaz. But equally, he was not drawn to the Maha Kumbh or the like. He drew his inspiration from the Mahabharata, one of the greatest epics of the world.

Take his spell-binding piece ‘Airavat’, the mythical elephant or the principal carriage of Lord Indra, in the ’60s.

Husain was irreligious by temperament. The Muslim clergy too was up against him for the film, A Tale of Three Cities. The All-India Ulema Council alleged that the Qawwali song ‘Noor-un-Ala-Noor’ was blasphemous because the lyrics incorporated words directly from the Quran. It didn’t matter to them that the film was applauded and fetched national and international awards.
International acceptance

Eminent painter Ganesh Pyne points out that it was Husain who established a place for Indian art in the international arena. “Art critics and connoisseurs were unwilling to accept the phenomenon of miniatures. It was because of Husain that modern Indian art vivaciously forges ahead,” says Pyne.

Dashing, highly eccentric from the beginning, with a ready quip for newspersons, he had a rare capability for projecting himself and always had buyers. Going barefoot with a free-flowing beard and an extra-long paintbrush as a slim cane was part of this persona he built up, and so confident he was in this self-promotion that he never thought of having a studio of his own. He would just spread his canvases out on the floor of whichever hotel room he happened to be in, and attract buyers, mostly foreigners.

He did as many as 60,000 paintings, which stupefied Western art critics. Michael Peschardt of the BBC went so far as to drop a hint that quantity was compromised with quality, at which Husain lost his cool.

Husain shunned the traditional Indian painting styles, drawing his inspiration instead from stalwarts of European art like Degas and Delacroix, who first prompted him to try paintings of horses early in his career. That is why in techniques and stylistics he was more Western than Indian.

But describing him as the Picasso of India is a hyperbole. When noted painter Nirode Majumdar was asked in the mid-1970s whether he would describe Husain as India’s greatest living artist, he reacted, “Only sycophants would say something like that. We have amidst us Ramkinker, who could be compared to Henri Moore as a sculptor”.

His words came to my mind when art critics all over India ignored Ramkinker during his birth centenary.

The Picasso connection
In the ’80s, Husain exhibited his series on assassinations after the death of Indira Gandhi. He began with Mahatma Gandhi. One of his main canvasses was Gandhi with his she-goat, and some critics immediately compared that with Picasso’s tormented horse in Guernica.

Such irresponsible comparison emanates from a cavalier attitude towards the history of art. Three things inspired Picasso to move towards his Cubist innovation: the geometric texture in Cezanne, the angularity in the drawing of El Greco (even in compositions of clouds) and the Congolese masks.

While Husain might have been inspired by Picasso as much as he was by other great European artists, to call him the Picasso of India is a loose exaggeration, and some other artist’s tag could as easily be hung on him. Husain was basically an impressionist (using bright colours to bring in luminescence), not a cubist. The first of our cubists — actually following synthetic cubism — was Gaganendranath Tagore; Husain was not really at home in abstraction.

Sycophancy or hyperbole is an antithesis of dispassionate appraisal. That’s not the way of paying tribute, too. Maqbool Fida Hussain will remain one of the best artists of modern India, along with Ramkinker, Rabindranath Tagore, Souza and a handful of others. It’s better that we let Tripathi have the last words:
Bare feet

That climbed never-ending steps
To the beat of conch shells
And the ghant-naad of Varanasi
The brush-strokes caught
The reflection of twilight
Of women washing down their sins
Of floating diyaas looking like fireflies
Of the flight of crows.