MF Husain...RIP

(Written for the Hindu, but used rather differently there....)

So much has been said and written about the artist often called the ‘Picasso of India’. Many speak of the sadness that MF Husain felt at being exiled from the land that was his home and most feel that he would have wanted to end his life in India. But the ‘barefoot painter’, as he is known, died in London, with friends and family in attendance, leaving behind a host of memories and an enormous body of work. That work, and the aura of the man himself, will live for ever. As artist Anjolie Ela Menon has said, “I consider him sort of immortal in my mind – even if he is not physically there, his whole body of work stands.”
Artists old and young see him as an icon, almost a God, albeit a very human one, perhaps even something that he himself may have painted. Jitish Kallat intellectualises his impression of Husain: “He forged a language very early on, in the decades immediately after Independence,, that in some ways merged the tenor and texture of an emergent India with the language of modern Europeanism – he found a novel middle ground with his typically agile and intuitive manner.” To Kallat, “He will always be seen as a visionary cultural figure, for the entire transformative effect he has had on the landscape of contemporary Indian art and for expanding its circumference to where we have it today.” And doom and gloom was not the artist’s story once he fled the country. “He dodged the tragedy of his exile and the legal brouhaha through humour, a kind of insightful equanimity,” and his fantastic artistic legacy is more relevant than the hate felt by the few who objected to some of his works so many years ago.

The lawsuits, the exile, the analysis – all this did not detract from the very warm and funny human being called Maqbook Fida Husain. Geeta Mehra of Sakshi Gallery remembers, “Whenever I was in Dubai or London I would call and meet with him – on one occasion I was going to visit some gallery and he immediately put his Jaguar and driver at my disposal! In the morning of the same day he invited me over to tea and in the backyard he had a proper Bedouin tent set up, fully furnished, tent style, and served me chai from a samovar. And he told me that if I had come in the evening, he would have arranged for a belly dancer!” He was always great fun, Mehra says fondly, “His joie de vivre was amazing – i use to tell him he was always my ideal person. He had time for everyone actually, no matter who they were, and the capacity to take whatever he found in anyone.” And exile was not that big a deal, for Husain, she believes. “I think he was a man who lived practically out of the boot of his car – it held audio cassettes, CDs, a quilt, books and brochures, even an Armani suit! He could sleep anywhere, travel at short notice; he carried his paintbrush and some paints and could set up a studio anywhere. He lived in his head – he did have his favourite restaurants and tea stalls, but that we all have terms of endearments. He was having a ball living between continents.”

Art collector Ashwini Kakkar owns six Husains, last count. “My favourite work is Bull Leading a Procession – it never had a formal name, but it is from the Bull series and is almost like a Ganpati procession, with people dancing and singing, except that the Ganpati head is replaced by a bull-head.” And Kakkar has a favourite memory to share of the “man with a very large heart”, one that has him laughing as he tells it: “One day I was driving out of my office in Mumbai and saw this man walking along barefoot - it was so hot, the peak of summer and the road must have been burning – I offered him a lift. He was going to Regal cinema. We chatted in the car and when he got off, he said ‘You send your car to me tomorrow and I will paint the whole thing for you!’ It was a brand new white Fiat and I completely chickened out – to this day I regret not having sent my car to him!”

There are some who may never have spoken to Husain, but revere him. Artist Sudarshan Shetty explains that “I never met him formally, I only saw him a few times. The first time I really saw his work was when I was in art school, in a book published in the ’80s by Abrams. I think his work in the ’50s and ’60,s was truly marvellous. Moreover, I was always fascinated by the distinction that he was able to create between the artist and his persona.”

There will always be life after death, in a legacy that lives forever. After all, that was the way Maqbool Fida Husain would have painted it!