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Bruce Lawrence on the Legacy of India's Great Artist M.F. Husain

An artist who transcended national boundries offered a bold vision

husainmf.jpg
M.F. Husain died June 9 in London

In September 2010, M.F. Husain celebrated his 95th
birthday by painting. He painted every day, from 4-9 a.m. He began painting
when he was 14. He painted big and small pictures, in acrylic and oil. Though
he did individual frames, he preferred triptychs and large, multi-year
projects. He produced more than 30,000 works of art before his death in London
on June 9 after a brief illness.

Maqbul Fida Husain,
known as M.F. Husain, was arguably India's most famous, and certainly its most
infamous, contemporary painter. Often labeled the Picasso of India, his life
and work spanned, and then exceeded, the 20th century. Some of his
paintings sold at auction for over $1.5 million. He would have preferred to
live and die in India, but the Hindu political/religious right decried his
painting of goddesses, claiming that these works offended their religious
sensibilities. He fought case after case in Indian courts, beginning in the
late 1990s, and then in 2005 moved to the Gulf for his own safety and for the
freedom to pursue his art.

Last September I
organized a conference to celebrate his 95th birthday. It took place
in Doha, and Husain was there, not to observe but to participate, speaking,
joking, doodling and questioning.

He had not ceased to wander, to marvel, to paint and also to
provoke, ever since the death of his mother when he was a child. His father
wanted him to be a priest. He preferred to paint. He migrated to Mumbai (then
Bombay), where he made a modest living doing street canvases. He wore no shoes
then. He continued to wear no shoes, though he did color his nails -- toenails
and finger nails -- well into his '90s.

Husain embodied the irony, and also the beauty, of secular
religion. He was Muslim but more than Muslim. His ancestors emigrated from
Yemen to Gujarat centuries ago. Born Indian, he became a citizen of Doha. A man
of wealth, he exuded a simple, genuine touch – a quest for humanity in all
creation, especially the most mundane, the everyday, the animal.

For Husain all life was to be celebrated. "Nothing in
creation is useless," he once observed. "It is our duty to see how
best to use it." Nowhere was this more evident than in his relation to religion
and to nation. He drew on resources that deny creedal finality even while
acknowledging the appeal of revealed truth, and institutional patterns of
liturgical observance. He roamed from India to Arabia to Africa to America, addressing
the Mahabharata and the Qur'an, Christianity and Islam, Mother Theresa and the
Queen of Qatar, Bilal, the first Muslim muezzin or prayer caller, and President
Obama.

Bilal and Obama?! Only an artist of Husain's genius could,
and did, make that connection. Integral to his imagination was bringing
together past and present, conjoining opposite moments and actors in ways that
seem at once fantastic and farcical, irreverent as well as implausible, yet suffused
with joy and evoking celebration.

Husain painting

The Bilal-Obama connection happened less than three years
ago. It was inspired by the 2008 election. Husain stayed up to listen to the
results in Doha. He was so elated he could not sleep (at age 93), and so he
devoted himself to a canvas of Bilal, who had also been Ethiopian. The phrase
Allahu Akbar looms large; one has to know the painter's story of its
inspiration to guess that Obama is being depicted as the new Bilal.

"It took America 200 years to do what Islam did in less
than 10 years," quipped Husain: "make a black man its major icon to
the outside world." Bilal was, of course, not Muhammad; he was only the
leader of ritual prayer, not of the entire Muslim community; yet the comparison
reflects Husain's dazzling ability to cross religion and politics, enriching
one with the other.

This image would lite the fires for the Palin/Romney
faithful. "We knew he was a Muslim all along. His father's religion is
still his; you can see it by the fervor in his uplifted arms. His heart belongs
to Muhammad, not to Jesus. He can never be an American patriot!" One can
imagine the cheering throng of Tea Party minions. As they sing another refrain
from the Allelulia chorus, they commit themselves to taking back the White
House from that commie, socialist Moslem (who also happens to be a Black
American).

If that seems like a fictive scenario, it still reflects a no less
combustible mix of religion and politics than the one that ignited the Hindu
right in India during the 90s. It was guardians of Hindu's sacred goddess that
protested at the 'insult' of her depiction by a Muslim artist. Little did it
matter that Husain had done his painting of Bharat Mata in the 70s and that it
only became a public scandal in the 90s. In New Delhi as in New York, time can,
and does, collapse when political expediency requires new enemies.

In a manner as seamless as it was disingenuous, the
political/religious right in India coopted public space in Mumbai/Delhi, as has
the political/religious right in the USA, using freedom of speech as a fig leaf
via Fox News and Rush Limbaugh to attack President Obama with flagrant rant.

In early summer 2011 no one knows how either religion or
race will play out in the heated election year just ahead, but one lesson from
the long, productive life of M.F. Husain seems worth pondering. Back in 1993, before the Hindu right had
attempted to harass and revile him, Husain, then a mere 78, had presided over a
retrospective at Delhi's National Gallery of Modern Art.

"Let history
cut across me without me," he declared. And now it has. First with his
exile from India and then with his death in London, one of the most brilliant
modern day artists -- at once experimental and affable, philosophical and
playful, religious and secular -- has passed to another realm, leaving others to 'cut across him', to enjoy but also to contest his piebald legacy. Our sky has
stretched, our vistas at once bolder and more ominous due to the nonagenarian
genius of M.F. Husain.