Sumathi Ramaswamy tells Zeenat Nagree why Husain is vital not just for India’s art, but also for its history.

Ever since MF Husain left the country in 2006 to avoid attacks by Hindu fundamentalists offended by his work, most conversations about him have focused on the artist’s right to freedom of expression, an issue that continues to resonate with the right-wing protests over the screening of the animated Sita Sings the Blues at the San Jose Museum of Art. Over the years, however, assertions of solidarity have overshadowed critical evaluation of Husain’s oeuvre. In a new book, Barefoot Across the Nation: Maqbool Fida Husain and the Idea of India, 13 essays by Geeta Kapur, Susan Bean, Ram Rahman, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Ananya Jahanara Kabir and others assess at Husain’s work and persona. The book, edited by Sumathi Ramaswamy, a professor of history at Duke University, brings together diverse approaches to Husain, including an appraisal of his most iconic paintings, his involvement with Madhuri Dixit and popular cinema and the complexity of being a Muslim artist who painted Hindu themes. Among the most engaging articles is Guha-Thakurta’s thoughtful questioning of the rights and privileges of contemporary art and Kabir’s examination of whether Husain was really the secular artist that he was praised for being. Though the book was delayed by a year, Ramaswamy tells Time Out why it is a fitting celebration of Husain’s contribution to modern Indian art.

Why did you choose an interdisciplinary approach for Barefoot Across the Nation?
My scholarly engagement with Husain’s art emerged in 2006 when I was writing a book on the visual history of Mother India [The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India], and I was drawn towards understanding his 2005 painting Bharat Mata, which provoked controversy. I approached his work, however, as a historian of colonial and postcolonial India, rather than as a historian of art. As I began to explore the range of debates surrounding his artwork, I became convinced that Husain’s work demanded the engagement of scholars from across knowledge fields. It touches upon almost all the key debates many of us in the social sciences have been studying over the past few decades such as nationalism, the idea of the secular, the place of religious affiliations in a pluralist polity and the contours of an Indian public sphere. I was also struck by the fact that recent influential commentaries by social scientists such as Sunil Khilnani’s The Idea of India (1997), or Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi (2008) had no argument to offer about the place of the arts in the shaping of India as a democracy.

How would you describe MF Husain’s artistic engagement with India?
In the book, I describe Husain as a “midnight’s artist”, borrowing from Jawaharlal Nehru’s evocative use of the trope. I have been struck by how little there is about India’s history over the past 60 years that has escaped Husain’s eye or brush: from the big bustling cityscapes to rural Kerala, from famous people like Nehru or Mother Teresa to the humble peasant, from celebratory moments such as the recent election of Mamata Banerjee as the chief minister of West Bengal to industrial catastrophes like the Bhopal gas tragedy of 1984. This has been very much a product of his location and rootedness in India in spite of being a globe-trotting Indian.

What about Husain made him a national icon?
Husain emerged as a national icon at a time when India most vigorously promoted values like “unity in diversity”. The fact that as a Muslim man and painter he was at ease with Hindu myths and stories, and that as a cosmopolitan artist he was conversant with folk traditions, helped. But I also can’t help thinking that his persona – including his gentle charm, his cultivation of the rich and powerful (such as the Nehru-Gandhis), his use of the media to promote his work made him a larger-than-life figure. One of the goals of the book is to demonstrate that national icon though he might be, he felt threatened enough to leave the country in 2006. It suggests the fragile nature of our much-vaunted pluralism and possibly even the fact that creativity that doesn’t lend itself to a majoritarian nationalist project has to be policed.

Are discussions on his oeuvre eclipsed by those on the defence of freedom of expression?
Yes, part of the reasoning for convening the academic conference on Husain at Duke University in 2009 was in response to a concern that we do not have a comprehensive catalogue of his vast number of artworks, and that a good bit of the published writing on him, especially in recent years, has perforce been hagiographic, defensive, or plain anecdotal. I have even wondered whether in our anxiety to defend his rights as an artist and a citizen, as a result of everything that has unfolded since the mid-1990s, we have tended to be less than critical of his work, some of which has been path-breaking in its exploration of new forms, others quite pedestrian. Our multi-disciplinary engagement offers critical appraisal without compromising our desire to take a stance against the illiberal forces that have placed not just Husain, but other dissenting voices at risk

To read this review in Timeout

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The Husain postscript

A new anthology of essays on MF Husain takes the discourse back from controversy to canvas

Anindita Ghose

A Google search for “M.F. Husain” yields the usual clichés: He was the “Picasso of India”, he was controversial, and the “most famous” and “most celebrated” Indian artist of our times.

The spotlight moved from Husain’s art a couple of decades ago. We discussed, instead, his flamboyance (a Rs. 7.6 crore Bugatti Veyron​), his various muses, the vandalization of his works by Hindutva groups, his frustrations in exile, and most recently, his death at the age of 95.

Barefoot Across the Nation: Maqbool Fida Husain and the Idea of India, a scholarly anthology of essays published in India by Yoda Press, is a pioneering effort to take the discourse back to the artist’s works. Each of the 13 essays in the book makes an interdisciplinary engagement with the artist’s oeuvre. It looks through political and sociological lenses to establish how Husain’s life and work are intimately entangled with the legacy of independent India as a democratic, secular and multi-ethnic nation. The book also has 67 plates of artworks, including reproductions of the artist’s own iconic works as well as works by other artists. It opens with a curious composite photograph by artist Vivan Sundaram​, titled Barefoot with Husain, which splices together 16 images of people with bare feet and those of Husain’s, in a show of solidarity for the famously unshod artist.

Edited by Sumathi Ramaswamy, a professor of history at Duke University, US, the book has contributions by artists, curators, anthropologists, historians, art historians, critics, sociologists and scholars of postcolonial literature and religion.

In the opening essay, art critic Geeta Kapur traces the arc of Husain’s prolific career. She discusses his early significant works from the 1950s and 1960s, which reveal the “originary drama of a people becoming a nation”. Kapur calls Man (1950) the first sample of Husain’s virtuosity. It depicts a hulking dark figure poised between two disparate worlds—a possible depiction of the just-preceded Partition. She also dwells on the dark spots of his career, such as his defence of Indira Gandhi​ during the Emergency.

Flashback: (above) Last Supper in Red, M.F. Husain, acrylic on canvas, 1991; and Barefoot with Husain, Vivan Sundaram, 2009. Courtesy Yoda Press

David Gilmartin and Barbara Metcalf, both American academics with an interest in the Islamic history of South Asia, explore Husain’s Nehruvian notions of secular nationalism. They elaborate upon the influence of Indian artistic traditions in shaping Husain’s art, ranging from classical Gupta sculpture and Basohli paintings to folk art. Ramaswamy’s own essay in the book, Mapping India after Husain, provides an in-depth analysis of one of Husain’s most controversial paintings, a 2005 untitled painting of a woman assuming the cartographic shape of India, which was later referred to as Bharat Maa ( Mother India​). Ramaswamy draws historical parallels with similar images appearing in Indian popular culture, including a 1947 chromolithograph by P.S. Ramachandra Rao from Chennai, which showed a goddess-like figure clad in a sari printed with the Indian flag. She also digs out a 1909 precedent from an expatriate revolutionary Tamil newspaper called Intiya, which was edited by the nationalist poet-journalist Subramania Bharati​, almost a century before Husain’s painting. In this, Mother India holds four infants in her arms, two of whom are suckling at her exposed breasts, while the whole ensemble occupies a roughly delineated map of (British) India. A century has transpired between Intiya’s literalist picturing of Bharat Maa and Husain’s Modernist effort. And in that, Ramaswamy observes, the capacity of a Muslim man not just to draw images of Mother India, but to show her unclothed body, has been enormously circumscribed because of the events leading up to Partition, the avowed secularist and nationalist credentials of the artist notwithstanding.

The essays in Barefoot Across the Nation were commissioned—and an international edition published by Routledge earlier in 2011—while Husain was still alive. But it is even more relevant now, not as a last word, but as a preface to a new brand of engagement with Husain’s art.

To read this review in livemint.com

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Bookshelf

Barefoot Across the Nation: Maqbool Fida Husain & the Idea of India

An interdisciplinary engagement with the contribution of iconic contemporary artist Maqbool Fida Husain, whose life and work are intimately entangled with the legacy of independent India as a democratic, secular and multi-ethnic nation. The 13 articles in this volume—by artists, curators, anthropologists, historians, art historians and critics, sociologists and scholars of postcolonial literature and religion—critically examine the artistic statement that Husain presented on the self, community and nation through his oeuvre.

To read this review in The Caravan

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