MAN AND MAHABHARATA

Maqbool Fida Husain (1915-2011)

May I use the word "I" as an artist of

present century who lives simultane
in Kyoto, Mahabalipuram, Samarkand ously
, Palermo, Provence, Liverpool and
Having established the word "I" let Alaska.
me now stretch my canvas, spread
chisel wood and marble, hammer and rice paper,
bore metal , pour plastic lava into moul
and wrap them with glass fibre. There ds
the Chola Nataraja and the Venu s d'Avi FIGUR E 4o.
are born. Their birth pain has stirred gnon
Richard Barth o1ome W, "M · F· Husai n (Profile) New Delhi ," ea. 1958, photo graph.
an unending dialogue between the
seven Artwork and imag
'
e
points; from Kyoto to Alaska . © Richard Bartholomew/ Estate of
Richard Barth olomew.
MAQ B00L F. HUSA IN, JULY
11, 1969 FIGUR E 41 .h 1
Richard Bart o omew, "M· F· Husa in (holding Ericsson Cobra phon e)," New Delhi , ea. 1962,
photo graph.
. age © Richard Bartholomew/ Estat
Artwork and 1m e of Richard Barth olomew.

These words, from Maqbool Fida

Husain's poetic prologue to the 1971 thro u h a serious and sustained
volume Husain,
es a~~ forms
published by Harry N. Abrams in enga gement with nonmodernist mod
New York , announced the cosmopol . gd f om South Asian public cultu
and world-historical ambition of the itan orientations denve r re.I This critique was overlooked by
artist's work and indeed of the proj cntICs who
tended to see the artist as an unrecons . . h
ism in India. They signaled Husain's
particular commitments to translati
ect of modern- tructed moderm ~t m t _e ~oId. of .Picasso or Klee,
on, that is, an Indi an inheritor of a tradition e That
to working across med ia-p aint ing, of visual representation ong mat i:g
sculpture, performance , and film was the view of Richard Bartholo m ;:~op A~r ams
ing boundaries of cultural practice -an d to bridg- mew an~ Shiv S. Kapur, the a~e ;i\:s
associated with East and West, or volume. Two mid-twentieth-centur edecritic and
Husain at once acknowledges the craf ts and art. y portraits by Bartholomew, a
artist's role as individual creator l
of tradition, as the "I" who births and as the vessel friend of the artist who contributed h 1 d to the Abrams vo ume , 1·11u minate
and is birthed by the beautiful , male t _e ea . essahy H . cherishe d and cultivated
(Dancing Shiva) and the grotesqu Cho la Nata raja myths of mod ern man an d pos t lomal artist t at usam
e, female Venus d'Avignon. This co . . . a e and
generative, produced by and the prod "I" is fictive and (figs. 40 and 41) . The artist is strug shre wd operator in
ucer of art. The artist inhabits the gling dreamer m ontee1rmom:ntic and
time and space · t' 1'd ntity as consumma canny business-
of many continents and cultures, the othe r, poin ting to t h e artis s e
and his art- for Husain, the idea . . t ·v·ing and hopeful as he gaze
imagined as other than mal e-is l artis t cannot be man . In the earlier portrait, . h b hested Husam 1s sn s
an amalgam of national and glob t e are-c d .
citations from Hindu temple scul al imperatives, of out from a dark inteno . d the light seate m a s tu d'10 space as suggested by the
pture and modernist masterworks r towar '
Les Demoisel!es d'Avignon (1907). such as Picasso's wooden edges of the canvas m . th b kgro' und th at frames h 1' s body. In the later portrait,
The artist comes into being by work e ac . C b telephone seated in a well -lit
ing thro ugh these . d h
references and the materials of his
craft: stretching canvas, spreading he seems to have arnv e , as e h OIds an Encsson o • ra
ing wood and marble, ham mer ing rice paper, chisel- office, twirling his hair. . his legs on the chair an d des k·
and boring metal, pouring plastic lava, and restmg . . h of the artist taken almost sixty
and wrapping
glass fiber. The se images by Barth o1ome,v antICipate photograp s
This passage reveals-key features ofH years later by Tamara Abdu l Had'1for the New or imes ,
y, k r· of Hus ain living in exile from
usai n's art: an emphasis on doing . . . h the artist looks pensive seated
as opposed to expression or introspec and mak ing .. of Had i's photograp s,
tion , translation between media, and India m Dubai m 200 8. In one
.
artistic creation as magic. These featu the notion of
on a low divan, covered m . b ine fabnc an d decorated with colorful pillows (fig. 4 21·
res were neither incidental nor insig au erg . h
the 1950s and r96o s, Husain offer nificant. In d .n a gallery of pictures on the
ed a postcolonial critique of originali In the othe r, he appears to be per fi0rmm g as e stan s 1
ty and mastery . . . b bearing visual citations from his .
.
occasion of Id-ul-F1tr, wea nng a stnk mg green ro e

90
MAQ BOO L FIDA HUS
AIN . 91

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 scious of being part of a whole strea m a strcan1 .
- · 1\ , .. ,. , -, I ;r\_ . ' wit 11 goal and di re t' .. 7 I
~
'
. - '-11 - • ,- ' [-{usai n's education took place in tenements _1 l ·t c ion. n Bombay,
• nc s reels as lw made .1 l' · d . .
:;,: .-· ,.L1 ~ q,ilj • I _.
toys, m aking furniture, and painting billboa rd s TI • , _ -
·1 , d I I . .
_- ' ivm g es1gn1ng
. iesc early l'xpene nces have b,•come
r
the stuf- o f egen , myt 10 og1zed by the arti st ,ind I ·. b' . .
·, -: lr' ' ' , . . . Hs mgr,i phcrs ahke, and ,ire widd
understood as the basis of l11 s epic artistic vision." Y
Yet the paintin gs that e merged fro m thi s quintes ·• t' -11 .
1
3
· se n Y llr1>a n comm g-of-age had
titles such as Potters (1947) , J>cnsn11t Couple (19 5c) 1im"u (i ) M • .
• . . • b 9 53 , ot 111- rn11d Cl11ld (1955)
lndi1111 V1/111gc (1955). Zn111m 1 (Land) (1 955), Wo11 ,c111 ut \Vork ( S) _ d • , • _'
. . . . . . 195 , an 1·urmer s /·0111111,
(, 9 60), ec ho111g nallonah
.
st pro1ects of the 193os and th . I ·
..
f
• ' <' Sll JJccts o ar t by Sher-Gil,
FIGURE 42 . Roy, Bose, Mukheq ee, a nd Ba11. Indeed the fi gure of woman tl
. . . . · -. d d
• , 1c pnv11cgc mo · e of
Tama ra Abdul Hadi. " M . F. Husain . Ind ia's most famous painl,•r, in one of his homes iu Dubai, Un ilctl Ar:ib representmg India for anll-colomal natio11alists and the sit , of tl ·11 .
Emirates, whe re ht• n ow lives· (original caption) , puhli slwd in Smnini Se nHupla , "Au Artist Tests India's
. . . . ' c 1e v1 age, va1on ze d by
Gandhi as a microcosm of the nation , remained the prce 1111·11 c-iit . b' t· f d .
Dt•mocratic Idea ls." Ne w l'ork Tim es, November 8, 2008. hnag,• rnnrtesy of 'flt e Nr111 l'ork Tim es and Rc<lux su Jee s o mo ern1st
art in the 1950s and beyond. In Co11t c111porarl' /11diclll Artists (i<' 8) G t K
Pictures. - :, 7 , ee a apm noted·
continuities between Sher-Gil's and Husain's careers: "In hi s tendency to romanticize,
FIGURE 43 .
Husain is in line with Annit a Sher-Gil, )amin i Roy and George Key t: for that matter
Tamara Abdul Had i, " M. F. Husain" (orig inal caption), published in Somini Se ngu pta, "An Artist Tests lmlia's
with the Ben galis Rab indranath Ta gore and Sailoz Mookhcrjea."'1 Thus Kapur situated
De m ocra tic ldt•als," New l'ork Tim r.s, Nov,• mbe r 8 , 2008 . Image courtesy of Tlt e Neu, l'ork Tim es and Rcdu x
Pictures.
[-{usain in a dis tinctive tra jectory of modern art and a lineage of modern artists in India.
In subject and style, Husain inherited a practice of modernis m that engaged womt>n,
the village, a nd other signs of the primitive as the repository of nation.ii tradition, ,1
modern, anti-colonial natiomlist, and eve n (to use Kapur 's phrase) "romant ic," inven-
paintings (fig. 43). Somini Sengupta reported for the Tim es: "Mr. Husain, a master of
tion and intervention. 10 Kap ur explained: "Husain took Amrita's legacy towards a more
flamboyance, stood beaming in a green silk jacket embroidered with motifs from his
authentic stage. H is villagers are not particularly beautiful: but m rro1111dcd b)' th eir 1001s,
paintings, including several voluptuous, scantily clad wome n." 2 This comment on the
tlzeir a11it11als, th eir mngic sig11s n11cl symbols. they appea r more truly alive , secu re and
artist's dress was loaded with significance as Husain was forced to flee India in 2006 rooted in their environment."11 Husain's art privileged women and villagers in the 1950s
because of persecution from the Hindu right, which began in 1996, for his depiction and 1960s as Sher-Gil did in the 1930s and 1940s, even if. as Kapur obscrw d. "hi s
of nude Hindu goddesses and especially a controversial painting, Bl1arat Mata (Mother primary concern is not with the historical state of man" and "his peasant s, therefore,
India) (2004) .3 This painter of India-of its villages, peasants, and women-was its are not strictly a class with specific social attributes or historical role." 11 In other words.
modern man and modernist master par excellence for most of the twentieth century, Husain transformed man and peasant into myth . m aking them over into national-
ye t he died in 2ou a Qatari citizen, splitting his time between homes in London, Doha, cultural ideal and civilizational idea. His project was not realist in the way that Sher- Gil's
and Dubai.4 In 2008, Husain was at work on two series of paintings, "one on Indian had been; instead it heralded a new aesthetics of abstract signs, unh·ersal symbols. and
civilization, to be mounted in London, the second on Arab civilization, which will be international codes.
exhibited in Qatar." 5 This pairing-and the straddling of nationalist and international- Take Husain's remarkable experimental black-:md-white film Through the Ey.-s ,f
ist priorities it represented-was apposite to a life lived at the center of world culture, a Painter (1967), shot on location in Bundi. Chitod (Chittam) . and )aisalmer in the
imaginative!)• if not always materially, as suggested by the prologue to H11sai11 (1971). western state of Rajasthan (fig. 44). Commissioni?d by the Films Division of lnd b . a
Born in the temple town of Pandharpur, Maharashtra, in 1915 and raised in the pro- government agency, Through th e Eres of o Pnintcr won the Golden Bea r award at the
1,;ncial capital oflndore, Husain arrived in Bombay in 1937 after brief stints in Siddhpur Berlin Film Festival and India's National Film Award for best experimental fi lm in 1967.
and Baroda in Gujarat with little by way of formal art training. He had tal..--en evening The nonlinear narrative follows the painter in his e.-xplorations of the Ind ian ,·illage and
classes at the British-administered College of Art in Indore for a year and gained expo- villagers, keenly tracing what Kapur called ·thdr tools, th eir crni11rnls. t);eir m,igi, ~ign.<
sure to basic draftsmanship and academic oil painting. At various libraries in the city. he and symbols.~ The dominant visu al principle of the film is mont age. and it, recn rring
read books on Western art moYements and encow1tered his #first history of a.rt, written motifs are ajooti (handmade leather shoe). an umbrella, a bull. paintrd image · of 3 man
by John Ruskin.~ Through this self-directed education in modern art, he became ·con-
6
and woman, and a storm lantern.

') 2 • MAN AND MAHABH Al! ATA MAQS00L f <D A HU Sl l N 93

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 FIGURE 44.

M. F. Husain , Through the Eyes of a Painter, 1967, film still (17:00). Films Division, Ministry of
Information and Broadcasting, Government of India. Film© Estate ofM. F. Husain; image courtesy
of the Films Division, Government oflndia.

In Through the Eyes of a Painter, the lantern seems to have migrated directly from
Husain's painting Between the Spider and the Lamp (1956; fig. 45) onto the screen. The
spindly legs of the spider in the painting have metamorphosed into the dark ribs of the
umbrella in the film. The solitary jooti hangs on a wooden door and stands on a plaster
wall in the film, indexing the artist's eye, hand, mind, and body. In a few memorable
scenes, a single hand or pair of hands belonging to an unseen person move-as if doing
a jig-next to the shoe on the wall, suggesting the artist's role as a kind of puppeteer or
projectionist, a manipulator rather than an originator of the image.
The film highlights the human hand: hands at work, hands at play, and the artist's
_hand. The hand is a central motif in Husain's painting Man (1951; fig, 46), inspired
by Rodin's The Thinker (1902) and Picasso's Guernica (1937), and in Husain's film it
becomes a metaphor for making. Hands make art, crafts, the village, and the nation,
Through the Eyes ofa Painter seems to say. Graphic matches of found objects, shapes, and
patterns-the finial of an umbrella and the horns of a bull, a circular grinding stone FIGURE 45 .

and women's bangles, the intricate coils of a turban and the twisted forms of a jalebi M. F. Husain, Between the Spider and the Lamp. 1956, oil on board . Estate of
(a syrupy, fried dessert), a sculpture of an elephant and a drawing of an elephant-are the artist. Artwork© Estate ofM. F. Husain; image courtesy of Vadehra Art
Gallery, New Delhi.

94 · MAN AND MAHABHARATA

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 Husain's film had argued that just as the craft
Year' sman worked on his c ft t d. d
the artist create t~rough ~oing rather than expressing. ra • so 00 1
This was a radJCally different notion from that 0 f th . .
. . h. . e artiS t as a gifted individual or
genius commumcatm g 1s mnermost thoughts pr
. ' ocesses, and feelings spontaneous!
onto external surfaces, a notion that Husain actively par ficipate . d. . Y
. . m disseminating dur-
B b II
ing the 1950s and 1960s. In a 1965 mterview with om ay co ector Ayaz Peerbhoy
., .
Husain stated: When I pamt I experience an expression 0 f my bemg. . . . '
. . The pamtmg
represents m a way the totality of my experience Bein . . . .
. . ···· g a pamter 1t 1s very difficult
to put mto words the feelmg that I feel about my paintings · All 1 can say 1s . h
t at each of
my paintings represents the totalness which is of that minute "1• Th h h
. . . · roug e Eyes of a
t
Painter disrupted .the logJC of the .artist as an individual maker, s·t - h. . d
1 ua 1mg 1m mstea
within a commumty of makers, Six Days of Making disrupted the logic of the artwork as
a freestanding vision, situating it instead within a community of viewers.
Both the film and the performance emphasized the role of chance and construction
FIGURE 46.
rather than idea or inspiration. Yet neither film nor performance has been analyzed
M. F. Husain, Man , 1951; oil, wood, metal, and Masonite; 47.75 x 96.75 in. The Chester and Davida
Herwitz Collection, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts (E301146). Artwork © Estate of as an exercise in visual thinking, much less as a challenge to or critique of dominant
M . F. Husain; image courtesy of the Peabody Essex Museum. notions of art, the artist, and art-making in India during the 196os. The film and per-
formance are usually upheld as testaments to the artist's virtuosity, talent for showman-
ship, and knowledge of international artistic developments such as performance art and
avant-garde cinema. It is shortsighted to view Husain's artistic projects of the 19 6os
punctuated by the sounds of schoolchildren and rural singers and the original music of as merely confirming his skills and talents in marketing, sales, and public relations,
Elchuri Vijaya Raghava Rao. though these were no doubt considerable. I propose instead that we see the film and
The play between light and darkness in Between the Spider and the Lamp carries performance in a continuum with Husain's easel paintings and epic murals, produced
over into the film, with the umbrella and lantern functioning as universal symbols of for Air India International, the national airline, in Hong Kong, Bangkok, Prague, and
heat and rain, generation and extinction, life and death. Through such formal exten- Zurich; the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research, a scientific research institute in
sions and transmutations , Husain draws analogies between handmade painting and Bombay; and the Dhoomimal Gallery, a private art gallery in Delhi. In opposition to
mechanical film, between artist and craftsman, and between city and village. Through dominant paradigms of the period whereby the modern artist was considered irrelevant
the Eyes of a Painter reimagines the painter's art as akin to the potter's craft. It shows or ineffectual, Husain's projects claimed modernist art as national-cultural work and
India's rural and urban citizens as participants in a shared project of nation-building . the artist as public person and world-citizen.
It loans cultural authenticity to the "foreign," "imported," or "Western" practices of A critical art history ofHusain's oeuvre, spanning his monumental painting Man to
modernist art and avant-garde film. It makes over the elite figure of the painter into that his Mahabharata series of paintings for the Bienal de Sao Paulo in 1971 (fig. 47) , would
of the popular picture showman. shift scholarly focus from his late career and right-wing attacks on the artist, or what
Consider Bartholomew's description ofHusain's 1968-1969 performance, Six Days Susan S. Bean has called "contemporary culture wars." 15 It would examine the condi-
of Making, which followed Through the Eyes of a Painter, at the Shridharani Gallery in tions that enabled him to become India's national artist without equal for most of the
New Delhi: "What he [Husain] created was an interest in painting, in painting as an twentieth century, and analyze the formal and social properties of his art in the period
activity the result of which can be art. "13 At the critic's suggestion, between December 27, from the 1950s until the early 1970s. This period merits special examination not least
because, as Husain asserted, "I reached my peak as an artist in the late 1950s. All my
1968, and January 1, 1969, Husain worked on six canvases at once for an exhibition and
other work is a manifestation of that." 16 Kapur, one of his champions, lamented that
invited the public to watch him working. Bartholomew's account of this performance
"Husain resorted so early in his career-already by the 197os-to a pastiche of his vivid
direc_ted attention to the materiality of artistic practice, to the notion of art as process
corpus," abandoning "the great typology/iconography he had created in the first phase
rather than product, and to the identity of the artist as practitioner rather than master.
ofhis career."17
The contingency entailed in the "activity" of painting could yield art or not. The previous

MAQBOOL FIDA HUSAIN 97

96 .· MAIJ AND MAHA8HARATA

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 rupees (US$3-1 million), far exceedino the presale estimate of8 8
. . "' - - crore rupees (USS1. 46
million). He VJewed Husam as a commercial or popular art 15 · t
and h.IS artwork as com-
modity and kitsch: "A look through the catalogue reveals the arc of the painter's humble
beginning and growth through the 1950s and thereafter, ending with works executed
in the 1980s, by which time he had become an established brand and was seeing his
drawings being block-printed on ladies' scarves and sold in high street boutiques."'9 For
Murthy, the artist was neither original nor particularly Indian: "A cursory look through
his works reveals them to be a pastiche of various western styles, including collage and
surrealism." 20 His skeptical view of the artist was by no means unique.
In an obituary published in the Guardian, Tapati Guha-Thakurta v.-,ote: "Husain had
become to many a jaded star on the contemporary Indian art scene, w'ith what they saw
as his outdated, overdone, repetitive brand of national modernism. There were strong
criticisms, in particular, of his sycophantic paintings of Indira Gandhi as the goddess
Durga during the state of emergency of 1975-76, of his courting of rich patrons and of
his penchant for gimmickry and showmanship." With the artist's death, she concluded,
"stock can now be taken of the art that he did so much to shape, while refusing to accept
limitations on his freedom of expression." 21
This chapter takes up Guha-Thakurta's imitation to reexamine Husain's art and his
position within a history of modernism in India. I trace the beginnings of the artist's
career and visual imagination in his paintings of the 1950s, specifically Man , Zameen,
and Between the Spider and the Lamp, which laid out the representational task of the
postcolonial artist in India. Then I analyze how that imagination was translated into
f fC.Ui:£ 47.
cinema in Through the Eyes of a Painter, a film that shifted the boundaries between
M. F. H= in. 1'.,j:.r.a ;;,i:h Char.a: "modernist" art and "traditional" crafts and staged a dynamic exchange between the
(YA}.abi-..arcr~ Jj)~ 1971. oil cm earn-as, city and \'illage. Finally, I address how Husain reemisioned the role of art and the artist
Tr_e Ches-= and D;r.,tl.;a Herv.i tz in modem India through an inventive play between painting and performance in the
Crll~on. Pe.!Y.Jdy [s;;,>_z Museum. late 1960s and early 1970s. He adopted the persona of picture showman, an artistic
S2Jem, Mass:sd rus..<-tts (E301 :.8z).
figure common to India's rural and urban cultures, and changed the terms on which
Artv.-orl: © L<t!!e c.{ !;I. F. Husain;
imag~ COOrt.."S}· of the Peabody Essex audiences received modernist painters and painting. The performative strategies of
Mll9.1lm.. Husain's art were crucial to its conception and e..xecution, yet they have been neglected
in critical discourse on the artist.
By focusing on unifying themes across Husain's works and identif}ing the artist
as maker and performer, I propose that the artist's main achievement was translation
between media (performance, painting) and sites (village, city) that were perceived as
~~eev_aluation ~f Husain's art is especially necessary in the wake of the artist's death
separate and opposed. For much of Husain's career, these media and sites were asso -
w. ra1Sed _questior15 about his legacy and the past and future of modernism . I di '
Witness Surul Murthy writing in the Hindu, a major English-langu d ·1 ~ n a. ciated with the categories of East and West and practices of crafts and art. The artist
"H . I age a1 y m 2013· critiqued boundaries between these categories and practices through work in diverse
usam casts a ong shadow across the Indian art scene and w1·11 co t· ' .
dee3 d ' n mue to do so fc media including painting, performance, and film. Husain's engagement with indig-
many es to come. Like it or not, he is the best known of all te or
- - con mporary I d ·
pamters, and also the most overrated of them all •18 Murth . n ian enous, marginal. and nonmodernist worlds of experience-socially and politically
value of H · · k· · Yque 5 honed the aesthetic marked as folk, popular, rural. and vernacular-linked him to Sher-Gil, and to Subra-
usam s wor m response to a Bombay auction, where it fetched 8
1 -5 crore manyan and Khakhar, whose careers I explore in subsequent chapters.

98 . LIAN AIIO MAHABHAAATA

MAQBOOL FIDA HUSAIN • 99

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ART-MAKING AS MYTH-MAKING: THE PAINTINGS OF THE 1950S . .
Progressive Writers' Association (AIPWA) and the Ind'ian people,s Theatre Assoc1alion
.
In 1984. Francis Newton Souza. the original enfant terrible of the art world in India, (!PTA) and for a hme to the Communist Party of Ind.1a.29 Eac h of these groups-the
AJPWA. !PTA, and PAG-had a distinct agenda , yet they were umte · d . h . opposi-.
reflected on his motives for establishing the Progressive Artists Group (PAG) in 1947: _ . . m t e1r
tion to colomahsm, fascism, capitalism • and cultural cons erva1ism.
- io Th e PAG was the
r had begun to notice that the J.J. School of Art turned out an awful number of bad artists shortest-lived of the three groups and has functioned as a powerful myth in cultural and
year after year and the Bombay Art Society showed awful crap in its Annual Exhibitions ·
institutional memory. As Karin Zitzewitz has noted , "it di'sbanded aImos t as soon as 1t
which comprised the amateur efforts of some memsahibs in India who were pampered formed" with the dep~rtures of Raza and Souza. 31Her interview with Kekoo Gandhy, an
by British colonialism. Hence their pretty-pretty paintings together with the work of sev- associate of these artists and the influential founder of Gallery Chemould in Bombay,
eral artists coming out of the art school exhibited once a year in the Art Society had no encapsulated the myth of "the Progressives as a set of poor migrants to the city who,
directions, no goal. no inspiration, no energy-regardless of the style _or method they through their own creativity, contributed to the secular culture of the city while demon-
choose to work in. It then occurred to me to form a group to give ourselves an incentive. 32
strating its capacity for equity." Of these artists, none embodied this myth more than
Ganging up in a collective ego is stronger than single ego. 22 Husain. This bohemian and often barefoot artist had "a long apprenticeship to poverty,"
as Kapur described it, and achieved the celebrity status of "a film star in India" well
Husain was invited to join this group of artists, which included Souza, Syed Haider before this was a likely possibility or imaginable condition for artists in that society. n
Raza, Krishnaji Howlaji Ara, Sadanand Krishnaji Bakre, and Hari Ambadas Gade, and Jn the 1960s, the artist Tyeb Mehta, one of Husain's contemporaries, reputedly said
showed work at their exhibitions held in Baroda and Bombay in 1949. As Souza's with- to the artist, poet, and critic Gieve Patel: "To pick up a brush, to make a stroke on the
ering words suggest, the PAG challenged the orthodoxies of the J.J . School of Art, the canvas-I consider these acts of courage in this country." 34 This remark gestured to
colonial art school in Bombay, and the Bombay Art Society, an association of artists and the status of modernist painting in mid-century India, where it was regarded as an
patrons that enjoyed state patronage. It refused their "pretty-pretty" amateurism and elite preoccupation and self.indulgent activity by comparison to necessary tasks of post-
lifeless academicism and proposed an art that was revolutionary and dynamic. A review colonial nation-building such as economic or political development. 35 Writing in the
of their Bombay exhibition by Rudolf von Leyden, published in the Times of India in July 1980s, Patel understood Mehta's remark to mean "We do not have a free and easy right
to paint." 36 Patel articulated the predicament of modernist art and the artist in India
1949, suggests that they were successful in this task: "Those who go to the exhibition to
during the 1950s and 1960s thus:
look for pretty pictures will be, on the whole, disappointed. Those, who want painting to
be the expression of the deeper emotions and the strivings of a generation, will be well
23 Post-Independence India had no role for the urban, contemporary artist, the man who
satisfied with the progressive offerings of these artists."
would fabricate and comment on the present, and who would not necessarily continue
The PAG drew on the formal vocabularies of Cubism and Expressionism, in part
with folk and classical forms. The world would have certainly been chill for him, with the
because of the encouragement and support of central European emigre critics and col- unexpressed, ubiquitous question: "What is your work for? Who is it for?" It has taken
24
lectors Walter Langhammer, Emmanuel Schlesinger, and von Leyden. Finding them- the artist two or three decades to reply simply: "It is for you. And me." And specific third-
selves in Bombay as refugees from the Second World War, these displaced aesthetes world tragedies gave a special edge to the chill. In universal deprivation, may one allow
collaborated with Indian artists, critics, and gallerists to establish the modernist art oneself the luxury "to pick up a brush?" 37
world in India. 25 Members of the PAG sought belonging to an international fraternity
of artists, secular citizens, and modern men. 26 All were migrants to Bombay, and most
By Patel's account, "the modern Indian artist" was "the favorite whipping boy for art
came from marginal groups or minority communities by virtue of their religion, caste,
professors, newspaper reviewers and editorial columnists" in the newly independent
and class. For some, migratio~ to that city was not the only one they would undertake. nation, condemned for being "Western, rootless, alienated, confused, self-seeking, imi-
Souza and Raza left Bombay for London and Paris, respectively, in search of interna- tative and sterile." 38 Husain's career flew in the face of such skepticism and hostility
27
tional recognition, while others, such as Husain, built careers in India. toward modern art. His biography attests to overcoming the embattled status of mod-
These artists' commitments to the city, technological progress, professional asso- ernist art within related, if distinct, personal, social. political. and historical contexts,
ciations, and universal freedoms marked them as different from their predecessors and to making over modernist art into a national activity.
and peers in India, and aligned them with artists in "Paris, Munich, New York. and Husain's father worked as a clerk in a textile mill-his father had been a tinsmith-
.London." 28 They forged links to other modernist movements such as the All-India

MAQBOOL FIDA HUSAIN . 101

100 • MA"f · AN D MAHABHARATA

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and wished for hi g son to learn a trade and become a tailor. 1'; Defying theHe familial
expectations, Husain went to Bombay with an aim to pursue an arti stic career and
rented "a cheap room ju8t off Grant Road, a hovel in a bylane inhabited by pimps and
pro8tituleH."''' He found rncntorK and friend s in Raza and Souza, and exhibited hi~
early paintings, few of which s urvive, with them. In 1947, he won the gold medal of the
Bombay Art Socie ty for Putten; Sher-Gil had won the same prize for Three Girls (1935)
in 1936. In 1950, he held hi s first one-man show at the Artists' Centre on Rampart Row,
a s pace rented by Schlesinger for the occasion. This European patron bought many of
Husain's early works for "fifty or a hundred rupees" (approximately US$1-2), a far cry
from the $1,609,000 that Battle of Ganga and Jamuna, from his Mahabharata series,
commanded at a New York auction in 2008,•1 In 1951, Husain visited China, where he
met the artists Qi Baishi and Xu Beihong.' 2 In 1953, he traveled to Europe for the first
time and showed his work there regularly through the 1950s, including at the 1954
Venice Biennale. Such trips set him apart from his peers and established his reputation
as a jet-setting, itinerant artist well before it was the norm in India or indeed very many
other parts of the world.' 1 Jn 1955, Husain won the Padma Shri, India's fourth-highest
civilian hcmor. (He went on to win the greater honors of the Pad ma Bhushan in 1973
and the Pad ma Vibhushan in 1991.)
Such awards and accolades, conferred just five years after his first solo exhibition,
secured Husain's position as a national artist despite his somewhat belated introduction
to the nation's artistic and cultural past.44 After an intensive immersion in academic flCURE 48.
and modernist Western art during the 1930s and 1940s, Husain had a transforma- "The Progressive Artists Group surrounded by their supporters at the Bombay Art Society Salon."
1951, photograph. Image courtesy of Gallery Chemou ld Archive, Mumbai.
tive encounter with Indian art in the Great Exhibition of 1947-1948, organized by the
Royal Academy and shown at Burlington House in London in 1947 and at the Viceregal
Lodge in New Delhi in 1948. This exhibition, officially titled Masterpieces of Indian Art, period) and folk practices, recalls Sher-Gil's appropriation of the wall paintings of Ajanta
marked the transfer of power from imperial Britain to independent India. It surveyed and Mattancheri and miniature painting from the Rajput and Mughal courts alongside
five thousand years of art and culture from material artifacts of the Indus Valley Civi- village crafts in her oil paintings of the 1930s. These references to classical art and
lization to painting from the Rajput and Mughal courts. Many of the works on display, folk practices did not signify continuity with the Indian past, but rather allegiance to a
sourced from public and private collections across the country, became the nucleus modern notion of national tradition. 48 This allegiance was evident in Husain's paint-
of the National Museum , established in 1949 on the premises of Government House ing Man, exhibited at the Artists' Centre in his first solo show, where it functioned as
(now the Presidential Mansion) in New Delhi.45 Guha-Thakurta has proposed that this a backdrop to an eclectic gathering of the art world in Bombay. Husain, seated cross-
exhibition reified a national art historical canon.46 It is ironic that postcolonial India's legged in the foreground of a photograph of the group (fig. 48), sports a black hat and an
preeminent modern artist and premier art museum trace their origins to a colonial intense, earnest expression. Elsewhere in the scene a distracted Mulk Raj Anand (critic)
exhibition that made significant cultural claims on behalf of the new nation-state. reads a pamphlet; Khorshed Gandhy (dealer) looks serious standing next to a bemused
Husain remembered the exhibition: "I came out with a set of five paintings in 1948 Krishen Khanna (artist); an ebullient Walter Langhammer (art teacher), dressed in a
after visiting Delhi with Souza where I saw all the Indian works and then I felt I should light-colored jacket and dark tie, beams at the camera as an unassuming Shiavax Chavda
paint something else. Till then I was influenced by the Expressionists. After visiting (artist), arms crossed over his body, looks away from it.
the exhibition I combined three periods, the form of the Gupta period, the strong colors Man is a vision of the future saturated with traces of the past; magic and myth oper-
of the Basohli period and the innocence of folk art and worked on it and came out with ate as the central principles of a postcolonial modernity. In terms of color. line, and
five paintings which were shown at the Bombay Art Society in 1949." 47 This turn to composition, it is darker, rougher, and less exuberant than the celebrations of village
indigen~us motifs and modes of representation, drawing on India's classical (Gupta life, modern nation, and ancient civilization in panoramic pictures such as Zameen

102 • MAN AND MAHABHARATA MAQBOOL FIDA HUSAIN · 103

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(1 955) that Man foreshadowed and for which Husain became famous . As Kapur rightly Su rrounded by the action of other figures·· a bull , an ups"ide -down man, a woman, an
observes, the painting is "wholly unexplained, and in some senses, unsurpassed."49 Its upright man, and two couples (whose paired forms flank the central figure on sur-
achievements can be described in terms of formal innovation, iconography, address, and faces that could be canvas or tablet). Critics and scholars have understood the upside-
affect, though the effect of Man exceeds the sum total of these. Kapur writes: down male and female figure as deities, with the male figure and bull representing
the Hindu god Shiva and his mount Nandi, and the female figure holding her hand in
The surface seems at first to mimic a wall painting in the way the line, a white incision, abhaya mudra (gesture of reassurance) as a village devi (goddess). The central figure in
contours the tumbling forms across the surface of the wall/canvas, and even the way the the composition is nude, pensive, powerful, and primal, embodying oppositions that
rich-hued pigment is applied, as though smeared, dabbed, and squelched with fingers Kapur described as "savage and superhuman, demonic and wise." 54 Yashodhara Dalmia
and palms. But there is also a strange fragility about the surface and, on second take, one viewed him as "a man from a dark autochthonous tribe, a representative of both the
might read the painting as a giant-sized collage fabricated from colored kite-paper (used archetypal and the ordinary," who "sits contemplating the vortex of events that designate
for tazias [replicas of the tomb of Husain ibn Ali, the martyred grandson of the prophet contemporary India." 55 She interpreted the intriguing representations of couples in the
Muhammad] and the Duldul horse carried processionally at Muharram, the love of which image as "votive tablets that echo artefacts from the Indus Valley show[ing] torsos of
initiated Husain as a boy into art-making)." 50
men and women ripped apart." 56 Alkazi noted the juxtaposition of "primitive art in the
static, monolithic hewn forms of the women, and of classical Indian sculpture in their
Thus the critic understands this painting as wall and canvas, collage and procession, rounded fullness," attesting to the artist's engagement with the past, tradition, nation,
allegory and autobiography. It narrates the artist's self and the nation's history through and civilization as they had been articulated by Masterpieces of Indian Art.57
a modernist appropriation of primitive marks, signs, and gestures. Kapur's brilliant Man functions as a portrait of the citizen and artist in a violent and creative conflict,
reading captures the ambiguity of the painting, which could be "'fresco' or collage," in the throes of what Husain called the "birth pain" that generates the Shiva Nataraja
"archaic or ephemeral," "chanced upon a cave" or "carried like a banner in a pageant." 51 and Venus d'Avignon. This figure, like the nation, was new and old. He.was a subject
Indeed Man evoked a history of anti-colonial nationalist visual representation, from formed by world war and mass destruction, not least the Partition of 1947, and governed
copies of the cave paintings or "frescoes" at Ajanta-as they were commonly known by ancient codes and rituals. Husain's Man was an emblem of enchantment in the
after the publication of Ajanta Frescoes (1915)-and Abanindranath Tagore's Bharat face of disenchantment. It is replete with cryptic signs and icons that represent village,
Mata (Mother India) (1905), initially executed on a banner during the Swadeshi (of tradition, nation, and civilization, and it prefigured elements in Husain's paintings and
one's own country) movement in Bengal, to Sher-Gil's paintings of village women and films to come.
Bose's posters of Santhal drummers for the Haripura Congress in 1938. Through this Take Zameen (Land), Husain's oil painting, which won the national award of the Lalit
painting, Husain asserted lineage and belonging as well as rupture and future. The Kala Akademi in 1955 amid some controversy (fig. 49).58 This work extends and elaborates
paradox of Man lies in its being burdened by history and becoming free of it, material- the large scale and horizontal format of Man . Zameen, now in the collection of the National
ized in the painting's figural oppositions of standing up and falling down. It revises the Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, measures 9r.5 centimeters high and 548.5 centimeters
format of the nationalist tableau, as it had been deployed by Ravi Varma and Sher-Gil, by wide. A vivid depiction oflndia, this painting reproduces the notion of the nation as village
reducing-formally and socially-the subject of the nation to a single, male individual with a gendered economy in which woman is mother and man her child. Kapur described
·and citizen-subject rather than a community of women as in Galaxy of Women (c. 1889) its elements thus: "Zameen shows a pack-mule; a woman with a sieve; a vignette of village
or the masses of Gandhian nationalism as in South Indian Villagers Going to Market wall inscribed with letters from the alphabet; and a snake which is the symbol of fertility;
(1937). The abstraction and desolation of Man was unprecedented. For Ebrahim Alkazi, a man with a pair of bulls; a hand with a lion-the Panja [hand] denoting holy persons,
Husain's·painting presented an image of"organized chaos" and "cataclysmic upheaval," the lion a metaphor of courage; a woman delivering a child; a multi-armed man; a woman
· a simulacrum of urban disorder and disorientation," and "an elaborate jig-saw puz- churning milk; a man beating a drum; a bunch of faces; a wheel; a kite; and a cock in a
z]e_"5Z It did not enact the nation as vibrant, splendid pageant, as Bose, Mukherjee, strutting pose." 59 And this list is not complete. The painting also depicts footprints, a tree,
and Baij did in the 193Os and 194Os, but depicted the solitary, heroic quest of artist and a fish, an elephant, a horse, horses and human hands fused together, homes and build-
citizen. It did not perform a movement toward freedom but announced the imperfect, ings, a pile of hay or grass, a group of pots, and a female dancer, all of which are presented
uneasy arrival ofliberal democracy_ in square or rectangular frames across the surface of the picture.
The male figure at the center of the painting, and ostensibly the man of its title, This painting not only represents "a pictorial inventory of images from rural life"
is brooding. seated on a red chair-interpreted by critics as stool and throne 53-and but also draws on visual forms and techniques associated with the village, such as wall

MAQBOOL FIDA HUSAIN · 105

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FIGURE 49 .
M. F. Husain. Zameen (Land), 1955, oil on canvas. National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi.
Artwork courtesy of the estate of the artist; image courtesy of the National Gallery of Modern Art.

painting and scroll painting, performed by untrained or itinerant artists and celebrated Jn "Nirvana of a Maggot," Souza conceives artistic expression as a fierce contest
in Husain's film Through the Eyes of a Painter. 60 His fragmented image, however, does between nature and culture, of wrestling inner and outer forces in an effort "to make
not develop a linear narrative, nor do its parts relate to identifiable, known narratives. one of creation within Creation."67 Coming to language is a struggle, for "how can one
Indeed it invents a set of new mythologies about the village, nation, woman, and man. articulate in Anglo-Saxon with a jeweled mandible that was fashioned by the ancient
Identifying particular citations from East and West, Shiv Kapur understood the paint- Konkan goldsmiths of Goa?" 68 The act of painting brings relief as the artist becomes a
ing in universalist terms as "a characteristic product ofHusain's imagination in which "master" with images in a way he cannot be with words.69 He is "happy as a barbarian"
light and darkness shadow each other and life is spawned in anguish and primeval amid the oral, aural, tactile, and visual pleasures of the village, where he ambitiously
strength." 61 He focused on the image of the woman giving birth to "a distorted child" and imaginatively engages questions of colonialism, capitalism, Christianity, and cre-
under a black sun on the right side of the painting, viewing this figure as "an anthropo- ativity.70 For Husain's one-time comrade in PAG, meals with the vicar enable reflections
morphic representation of the earth. "62 For this critic, the child born of this woman is on creation and creators; memories of a childhood in Bombay produce denouncements
man_ This child is a metaphor for the artist, and woman is the subject of his art. This of urban corruptions and "a mechanical, Macaulian educational system"; and writing
reading of Zameen reveals gendered myths of creation and creator, and suggests it is a and painting engender profound insights on colonialism: "my inarticulation was due to
companion to the allegory of artistic production in Man. England having possessed a lot of boats which had netted India into its vast empire." 71
These paintings tell us as much about art and the artist as about village and the If Souza's way out of this postcolonial predicament was an embrace of disenchantment,
nation. Husain's inquiries into the role of art and the artist in a postcolonial society then Husain's strategy was to reenchant the world. Whereas Souza's savage. sacrilegious
found a parallel in Souza's "Nirvana of a Maggot," even though the relative civility, even pictures critiqued old myths (secular and religious), Husain's symbolic, epic pictures
festivity, of Zameen may at first glance appear the antithesis of the primordial village invented new ones.
imagiped by Souza.63 Souza's autobiographical essay, published in 1955 (and therefore Consider the dramatic enchantment visible in Between the Spider and the Lamp
contemporary with Zameen) in the British literary magazine Encounter, narrates the (r956). In this famous painting (fig. 45). Husain places a group of female figures against
return of the modem artist to an "almost deserted" village in "his native" Goa, to an a textured, gray background enlivened by a field of rich, blood-red paint. These flat.
"old h~.l f dilapidated house· infested with "toads, white ants, silverfish, cockroaches, cutoutlike figures appear like puppets on an improvised rural stage with the painter
spiders, lizards and snakes." 64 These "creeping inhabitants," the embodiments of "an assuming the role of puppeteer. This painting stages an encounter between a veiled
uncivilized Goan countryside," are "swatted ruthlessly, brutally," by his servant Salu, "a figure clad in a white-gray sari holding a storm lantern on her head and an enigmatic
good cook, a primitive sort," so the artist could carry on "painting peasants and rural brown-skinned figure dangling a . spider from one hand. These figures , depicted in
landscapes." 65 Souza's language is laden with violent imagery and dark humor; the profile, have usually been understood to represent an elderly peasant woman and a
artist describes himself as "a blooming maggot on a dung heap" with the "nose of a middle-aged adivasi woman. The third female figure in the group-nude, alert, youth-
fetus." 66 Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis (1915) is a clear point of reference. ful. and yellow-skinned-stands with arms folded across her waist gazing at the viewer,

106 • MAN AND MAHABHARATA MAQBOOL FIDA HUSAIN · 107

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a witness to the compelling encounter on the left. Behind-indeed attached to-two of rimitive others who are alter egos for or counterpart ("fi 11 ..
P s e ow-citizens") to the artist's
the figures are ghostly half-figures, not quite persons that seem to denote masks and self. but it is also a parable of the psychic and social impulses 'th' h lf
' • . • . . . WI m t e se that yield
costumes. Inscribed above the figural group are Devanagari letters, geometric symbols, rt Husam reclaims pnm1tiv1sm as a postcolonial im pu Ise, much as Octavio . .
a · . , Paz did
and graphic marks that mimic writing on a village wall. This script is as undecipherable ·n
l The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) when he claimed Mexican ·d . .
" . . 1 en11ty was essentially
as the scene playing out below it. .....,asked:
,.. We hide our true selves, and sometimes deny the m.«7s Th e use of masks and
Kapur views this image as turning Western modernism on its head, as Husain's .....,asking
,.. . wh ereby the
in Husain's paintings of the 1950s participates 1·n a s·1m1-1ar 1og1c
nod "to the Picassianf'primitivist' component of modern art.'' 72 By her account, before postcolonial artist is master and "Nobody," in Paz's term, "the eternal absentee" from
"a red half-curtain, the yavanika of Indian classical theater." the artist stages a play history and society and a stranger to himself.76 The task of the postcolonial artist was to
that "convert[s] early modern artists' ethnographic indulgence into a progressive nativ- bring that figure out of what Dipesh Chakrabarty has called "the waiting room of his-
ism, and thence into a representational project." For this critic, Husain's primitivism is tory" and into representation, to render ambivalence as identity, and to claim originality
aligned with that of"modernists from Mexico, Brazil and Cuba with access to living folk through mimicry.77 Citing European masters Picasso, Rodin, Klee, and Kafka, Husain
and tribal traditions." rather than with that of Picasso and other European masters. The and Souza came to language and established speaking positions as postcolonial artists.
primitive does not function as a figure of distance, exoticism, mystery, and savagery for
the postcolonial artist. Instead Between the Spider and the Lamp renders "the proximate
SCRATCHES IN TIME: THROUGH THE EYES OF A PAINTER (1967)
figure of tribal/peasant/proletarian subjects: the artists' fellow-citizen's [sic] in inde-
pendent India whom he embraces with warm alacrity and ideological astuteness." For "Will the scratches be there?" Husain inquired of Santosh Sivan, the cinematographer
Kapur, this painting represents "a nationalist aspiration to render iconographically (and for his feature film Meenaxi: A Tale of Three Cities (2004). Sivan recalled Husain's
situate within the modern) the living archetype of the ' Indic' body while articulating, worry as he reflected on the "magic of theater" in the documentary film Celluloid Man
73
at the same time, the impossibility of arriving at the 'truth' of this representation." It (2012).78 For Husain, the painter who long wished to be a director, cinema possessed

epitomizes Husain's talent for "treating the archaic/archetypal and the modern as mutu- a magical materiality, legible in scratches on the screen. 79 Digital technologies of the
ally constitutive categories." 74 late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first centuries were unable to reproduce the magic that
Kapur's deconstructive reading of Between the Spider and the Lamp highlights the marked his first film, Through the Eyes ofa Painter (1967). This film was propelled by the
work of representation in the face of nationalist and modernist imperatives. However, magic of modern technology, the magic of rural culture, and the magic of artistic cre-
she does not address art at the level of making as Man, Zameen, and indeed "Nirvana ation. Through the Eyes of a Painter was one of the earliest art films in modern India and
of a MaggoC seem to do quite directly. What is artistic creation? Who is an artist or cre- perhaps the first artist's film . It was a landmark attempt to unite two disparate genres of
ator? For artists like Husain and Souza in newly independent India, art was a struggle. filmmaking: the documentary on art and artists and the experimental art film.
It was a project of borrowed forms and identities, of learning to speak again or anew In the opening frames of Through the Eyes of a Painter, which function as a prologue
in the wake of colonialism, of rerouting the language of such Euro-American masters to the film, the painter is seated on the ground at work on a canvas. He explains the proj-
as Rodin, Klee, Picasso, and Kafka. These Indian artists' claims to modernist original- ect as an experiment with new sources and materials for an artist who had previously
ity were tempered by the awareness that they were postcolonial subjects, coming after worked with "color pigments, brushes and canvas." His stated goal is to "tackle the film
and critiquing the modernism and modernity they had inherited from Europe. Hence medium" with "the feeling of a painter." Husain describes the formal logics of the film
Souza's play with colonialist and modernist tropes of savagery and civility in "Nirvana thus: "They are unrelated moving visuals juxtaposed to create a total poetic form , very
of a Maggl)t~ and H.usain's reworking of nature and culture (and by extension, female integrated. No spoken word but the very sound of music makes a dialogue between shot
and male) in Mar. and Zameen. sequences in the film which you'll see now." This short speech is reinforced by written
Bawun the Spider and the Lamp, like Man and Zameen, provides an account of this text, which appears just before the title and credits: "No Story. Impressions of Painter
artistk proc.t:Ss. The postc.olonial artist stages theater, plays roles, wears masks, and Husain as He Passes through Bundi, Chitod and Jaisalmer." As at other moments in
reveals truths. He conjures a world of magic and myth, creates a Jiminal zone of ritual, the film, the repetition here is humorous, not pedantic or didactic. A set of diagrams
and rommmdi the p<r....-er$ of light and darkness, sex and death, illusion and reality. announces the film's key conceptual and visual formula: the image of a bull with an
He ii n ot expre;sionist genius but masked performer. Husain's formal vocabulary of umbrella plus a lantern minus a shoe equals a man and woman (fig. so). These motifs
ci.rtouu, e<>llag.-:s, and cartoons, which he de-.·eloped and perfected in later work, articu· recur in painted and photographed forms throughout the film, setting up a play, or
fated th1» kk-ntity in Bt4wun the Spider and The Lamp. Not only is the painting a fable of "dialogue," as Husain termed it, between reality and representation.

MAQBOOL FI D A H U ~AIN 109

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FIGURE 50. FIGURE 51.
M. F. Husain, Through the Eyes ofa Painter, 1967, film still (01:12). Films Division, Ministry of M. F. Husain, Through the Eyes of a Painter, 1967, film still (14:54). Films Division, Ministry of
Information and Broadcasting, Government oflndia. Film© Estate of M. F. Husain ; image courtesy Information and Broadcasting, Government of India. Film © Estate of M. F. Husain; image courtesy
of the Films Division, Government of India. of the Films Division, Government oflndia.

The opening and closing shots of the film (as well as one in the middle that suggests analogizes the painter and the filmmaker, urban art and rural life, the handmade draw-
the painter's journey between sites in Rajasthan) convey the speed of a train or car that ing and the mechanical shot.
transports the painter to the countryside where he will shoot in the film. The relative Early in the film, we see a village home painted with riders astride a pair of ele-
speed and smoothness of the other shots in the film reflect the rural landscape Husain phants on the upper level, and two tigers embracing-their tongues touching-on
surveys. They are slow and rough, corresponding to the gait of women carrying pots of the lower level (a lone horse and rider stand to the left of the tigers, and several small
water and men leading cattle through a village street. As Husain's camera pans across parrots embellish the action of the larger animals) . A live boar strolls by the verandah
the built environment and arid earth, he invites the viewer to partake in the pleasures of this house and finds himself between the tigers, as does a goat later in the film (fig.
of the cinema: to focus in and out, to scan left and right, to look up and down. Natural SI). These amusing shots exemplify how Husain repeatedly invites us to consider the
textures-rocks, water, trees, shrub, sand-and creatures big and small-children, boundary between animate and inanimate, real and represented, and two- and three-
camels, a horse, goats, a wild boar, birds, a squirrel, cattle-come under close scrutiny. dimensional forms. There are other sequences in which we see-and are asked to
The painter highlights marvels of everyday life in rural India: bathing at a tank, turn- compare-elephants that have been sculpted and painted; the wooden wheel of an ordi-
ing a grindstone, washing clothes, cleaning pots, making art, polishing leather, work- nary cart and an elaborately carved balcony also made of wood; and painting on wall,
ing with animals. In one sequence, Husain juxtaposes shots of diverse activities like cloth, or paper, and the body of a cow (fig. 52). Through the use of montage, Husain
twisting rope, grinding spices, and lathering hair, linking them through the sound of makes inventive connections between mixing paint and rolling dough, between tying
musical instruments, which hum, spin, buzz, whirr, ring, vibrate, drone, and drum in a turban and frying a jalebi, between the moving lips of an old man and the rotating
response to the work and workers visible on screen. In this sequence and others, Husain record of a gramophone. Such connections probe the boundaries of high and low cul-

MAQBOOL FIDA HUSAIN . 111

110 • MAN AND MAHABHARATA

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 say, he was possessed of a highly cinematic imagination before he began work"mg m
. the
medium of film.
Consider Sergei Eisenstein writing in 1939 on montage: "This property reveals that
any two pieces of a film stuck together inevitably combine to create a new concept, a new
quality born of that juxtaposition." 83 He elaborated: "The result of the juxtaposition of
two montage pieces is something more like the product than the sum . It is so because
the result of juxtaposition is always qualitatively (that is, in dimension, or power, if
you like) different from each of the components taken separately."84 Widely understood
and debated as an essential property of cinema in the 1920s and 1930s, montage is the
central principle of the Through the Eyes of a Painter. Husain exploits what Eisenstein
called the "the potentialities of juxtaposition" to generate "a new notion, a new concept, a
new image." 85This new image, materialized in Through the Eyes of a Painter, pushed the
limits of visual representation at many levels. It renewed Husain's practice as an artist.
It produced original ways of making and seeing cinema in the 1960s. It generated novel
forms of depicting the village and nation.
Through the Eyes of a Painter refused what Srirupa Roy has called the "disenchanted
imaginary" of the Films Division oflndia and the "boredom effects" that its films culti-
vated.86 Established in 1948 as a branch of the Ministry of Information and Broadcast-
ing of the Government of India, the Films Division was tasked with producing news-
FIGURE 52. reels, short films, and documentaries in service of the new nation.87 These films were
~t Husain , r;rough the ~yes ofa Painter, 1967, film still (09:50). Films Division, Ministry of
n ormat1on an Broadcasting, Government of India. Film © Estate of M F H . ..
viewed in commercial movie theaters, a requirement of the state until 1994, and in free
screenings in rural and urban locations, made possible through mobile cinema vans or
of the Films Division, Government of India. . . usam, image courtesy
as and when electricity was available. Positioning itself against the entertainment values
and visual pleasures of commercial Bombay cinema, the Films Division sought to make
ture, artistic and everyday activity, and handmad d h . films for "instruction, information and motivation." 88
· , e an mec amcal technologies as the From 1949 to 1972, the majority of Films Division films were dedicated to the sub-
artists camdera a_nd curious gaze magnify and minimize distinctions between things
persons, an actions. , ject of "development and planning" (696 films of 1,742 total) , with "citizenship and
reform" (314) and "defense and international" (289) occupying the next most popular
In the 1960s, Kapur described the effects of the film thus· "Ah I d
empath ·1 h .
there i//:e:;0;:~:: :~ ::!::, · umorous y etached
::t~ :e::tatnoetohus logkicdor deli~erate illogic. In this,
,
Through the Eyes of a Painter represented "a perfect carr
e wor - ay routme •so F h " ..
.. or t IS cntic,
categories.89 Films on "art and culture" were a minority (139 , or 8 percent) , and very few
films were produced under the category "experimental" (18, or 0.01 percent) . The Films
Division organized the films on "art and culture" into subcategories: "Archeology and
process, from painting into film-making."81 She describ:do~~r of_h1~ [Husain's] visual Monuments," "Arts," "Crafts," "Festivals," and "People of India." Within this frame -
as "studded with symbolic images that are introd d is pamt_mgs of the period work, Through the Eyes ofa Painter, an "experimental" film, engaged and dismantled the
position with the more explicit images Th ucbe I naturally and m continual juxta- subcategories of the "art and culture" film.
. ese sym o s are not t b d.
sense. They are to be comprehended th . . . . o e rea m any literal In Roy's view, the "art and culture" films of the Films Division rendered "culture as
as ey are pamted mtmtiv 1 . h h .
logic. Their untold element reveals itself i·n I t· ' h e y, wit t eir own fluid a tangible artifact, object, or visible practice that could be located in a specific time and
re a 10n to ot er hap · .
context and seldom needs outside refi • 82 I . penmgs within the place; for example, Madhubani paintings from Bihar in eastern India, temple carvings
erence. n Husam's fil th h
umbrella are symbols, in Kapur's th . m, e s oe, lantern, and from the Ajanta caves in western India, or Kathakali dancers from the southern state of
. sense, at acqmre meaning th h .
Like the symbols in his paintings they m tat d roug Juxtaposition. Kerala."90 By her account, the Films Division presented culture as the exclusive property
' u e an metamorphose I d d
a 5 kil led practitioner of an art ofi·uxtapo ·r . h . · n ee Husain was of rural or premodern societies, and performed salvage anthropology of the folk. In this
s1 ion m t e medmm of painting wh· h .
' IC IS to context, Through the Eyes of a Painter, despite its rural setting and preoccupation with

ll2 . M A N A N D M A H A 8 HAR AT A

MAQBOOL · FIDA HUSAIN · 113

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 . 1m
folk culture. was ra d1ca
,
· 1·1-, aesthetics and politics.
. It showed mobility across
. . time and
. , .bed rura I and urban Iabor. It claimed art and culture as hVJng practice
-
space. It remscr1
rather than rarefied thing.
Husam . presen1ed a live!}' and d,,1amic
, exchange between India's art and crafts '
. . an d v1·nagers, 1·ts modern men and rural folk. The painter produced himself
1. ts c1t1es

as a worker amon g \\·orkers

· in the village and therefore in the nation. This notion of
the artist as worker had an intriguing precedent in Eisenstein's Notes of a Film Direc-
tor. in whidi the filmmaker referred to himself and his colleagues as "We Soviet film
workers:n The Soviet worker imagined by Eisenstein, whose films were well known
in India, was the citizen-artist of Russian Constructivism. The idea of artist as worker
has other modernist genealogies that were also influential in India, such as those of
the Bauhaus, a model for the National Institute of Design, established in 1961 with the
technical assistance of Charles and Ray Eames. In the context ofNehruvian India, when
the nation embarked on a modernization process emphasizing heavy industry and five-
year plans, Constructivism and Bauhaus, with their emphasis on modern technology
and the machine, provided models for reimagining artistic labor and national work.
Husain cultivated an identity analogous to Eisenstein's worker in his film, which
supported and was supported by the nation, yet was not statist or nationalist. Through
the Ei•es ofa Painter linked the labors of painter and film maker in a milieu where cinema
was understood by the state to be corrupt, crass, and commercial, providing entertain-
ment for the ·masses," not culture for the "classes" as did visual art, music, dance, FIGURE 53,

theater. and literature.92 The film linked "foreign" (Western) practices of modernist M. F. Husain, Througli tlie Eyes of a Painter, 1967, film still (06:08) . Films Division, Ministry of
film and painting with "indigenous" (Eastern) cultural practices of the village, sug- Jnformalion and Broadcasting, Government of India. Film © Estate of M. F. Husain; image courtesy
oflhe Films Division, Government oflndia.
gesting a continuum between them. In so doing, Husain made the work of the artist as
much a national priority as that of the craftsman, the embodiment of rural labor and
moral virtue in Gandhi's schema. Husain proposed the painter-filmmaker as a worker
ity. It displayed a fascination with children as sources of creativity and surrogates for the
among other workers and claimed modernist practice as necessary national-cultural
artist. Children are shown writing on slates-training their hands and refining their
work, not art for art's sake. Recall Patel's comment on the place of the modern artist
skills-and being released from schoolwork under a shady tree. As their bodies scatter
during the 1950s and 1960s: "Post-Independence India had no role for the urban, con-
and spread across the frame, Husain juxtaposes sounds of delighted shrieks with the
temporary artist. the man who would fabricate and comment on the present, and who
image of a silent gramophone and solitary record in the foreground , leaving the viewer
would not necessarily continue with folk and classical forms." Husain's art was by no
to contemplate the difference between original and mechanically reproduced sound (fig,
means reducible or equivalent to the folk forms-visual, material, aural, and oral-that
53). This scene, like others in the film , was characterized by a sense of discovery. Its
he engaged in Through tl,c Ercs of Cl Painter. Nevertheless he suggested solidarity and
aesthetic effects owed to Husain's belief, contrary to the public consensus of the 1950s
proximity between modernist and nonmodernist cultural practices. He was an artist-
both painter and filnunaker-who was also a maker like the village schoolchild and and 1960s, that films were material. handmade, and improvised artifacts.
pastoralist, probing and playing with his environment. Take his childhood memory of a bioscopewC1l!C1h (literally, "man with a bioscope") ,
Attesting to this identity of the artist as maker, Tl1rough tl1e Eyes of a PC1inter lacked who projected moving images from rudimentary, often recycled and refurbished, pro-
the slick polish and technical finesse of Husain's paintings from the s · d jectors in towns and villages across India:
ame peno , as
the artist tried and h~sted his cinematic skills and style before the audi TI k
. ence. 1e sI1a y, A man installed a box in the town or village square and loudly invited the people to take
unpn.'<l1ctable mo,,ement of the camera; the use of found objects and r d . .
. __ . . · an om 1uxtapos1- a peek inside. He had an amusing patter. "Dilli kC1 darbar dek/10, Viceroy Curzon ko dekho"
hons. and the 1mprov1sed rhythm of sequences gave the film a naive e . ·
• xpernuental qua!- (See the court in Delhi. Look at Viceroy Curzon). The box had a peep-hole, Through it

1l,4 · LIAN ANO I.IAHA8HARATA

l.lAQBOOL FIDA HUSAIN • 115

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 you could see action pictures. The box was cranked to make a picture-strip move across
the frame very swiftly. This created the illusion of motion. I was so intrigued by it that I
constructed m~· o,vn "Peep box' -hand crank and all. l drew a strip of eight to ten draw.
ings. rather like animation pictures, or those you see in flip books. My invention was a
91
tremendous success and after this I got hooked on photography.

From an early age, then. Husain imagined himself as a collector. curator, editor, and
bricolc..r oF Jroa::es. as a playful improviser, professional performer, and amateur film-
rn.ak,,,._r_As a child. he gathered pamphlets, magazines, and ephemera relating to the c.in-
= ·a.vicil~-
li.,-.~n:;-,,~ to the man ma torr.ga (horse-<lri..-en ,ehide) who would advertise its
·marvels and mi.ra.des~ about town.'!4Toe young co!lagist cut and pasted mechanically
reproduced ITTP:?=5 of the cinema to make a collection; such skills would also be mobi-
Iiz..=d for his prize-winning art =d crafts prniects.9~
The J?eepholes: and picture-strips of the cinema had a physical. tactile. and animate
q=lity fur this arti._q_ They Were capable of prnducing wonder. Consequently. Through
t:l----<! Eyes of c; Pcri:r.ur w-..s not the vision of a master, but of a worker, and that too of a
p.rrticirLrr k:i::!d of nz:ional-cn.l~ worker. It was not the wo":"ker of the steel plants and
r:.76-a-:ilic b-n-s -=.e:gen: m and iconic of Nehnman India. but a worker that continued
tf::e vfiI.age- ~ -~ r-=tio!! of Gandhlan mtional:h---m_ To reimagine the village as a site
cfcr=s,d.l'l ~~2 ;wd. p,:rhctrri::y-w-as 2 crucia1 cfu=,,i,e and material prefect for Gandhi.
tee rr;c=;;;~ v-~--=., a=r.fj- 5 b Gandhi =
bot-..b 'dung-hezp~ and dream.% Gan- flCURE S-4.

e:.?, •ce-' .;r-;.?"'" e:ri:,d ir:: a: rcJpi'.= fi.....~e where the,· would function like "tiny M.F. Husain. Througf: t/<.e Ey,es cf a Pi.ir.:a. 196-. film s till (02:28). Films Di,isio:i, Mini..~· o:
Information and Broadcasting. Gc,,;·emment o: India. Film© Es-..a:e of M. F. Husai..'1: i.m.a.ge court.."S'f
g;;.=:"=s--cf&.:=...rr [:w-..s: r:oc rndia';; ron~-npc.r..ry villzges that earned his admiration..
of the Films Drnsion, Go,;ernment of India.
F..e .ir::.tc:: *Yrn = t mn ~ cm: I am =~g]ng o-m- village life ;;;sit is to-<lay.
TI-..e -,~~ c£=i a-,:;.= is ~z rn m: mrru:i. .. _.. },~y ideal lillag-e wm cmrtain intelligent
-:.=-,~ E.e:::-zi: 1'Ee:- W-C rmt E;e rn ort «n.a & i = h"k.e am=k.~ Fm- Gandhi, vil- handmade, nonmechanica.l, nonindustrial, and nationalb""t l.abor. It vr,as a modality of
=
fage-~fr rr.:i± a:i-~ .. ::: a=d w-ea-.ing w~ e:iwa.ry- .labor, tlr..e repetitr-.e if medita- construction and creation comparable to that of art.
6 e ~ c : fazite::~~ =ta. ::ccial ~=-=-ci.t,. •m& mti=al tran...-fonnztion.5'' The maker of Through the Eyes of a Painter was a ....-orker, to use Kapu:r's lan,,=ge.
r::: ac::;;:Ji: re a:e- C'df...ra--..z.:,. &e ~~ .,,c.--rn:r was a h-u~. a tedmkal specialist ,;,.1Jo rediscovered ·v,-onder" in "work-day routine." He was a v.-orker ,;,;ho recalled the
a::-.i! d-n"J e::.:..." =. w~..o "'-~~..a.~ CI::1:$ a::.:d tw,-m~, ~ and unin:rsities, bioscopewallah of Husain's childhood and youth. a magician possessed of the pov;-ers
6.-:::ir ;.'?'.:'C l:.r.'i.e?'L TI--.es;8:,-G' ~,..-~~£ ~..,-.r,;n in Tr..re-~ tf,..,:; fy~~ ofa Pair.ta did not rorre- of cinema_This worker produced wonder by means of the everyday and ordinary, not
:1p--m ro #i::-~r.:. a£:.c, ~!li ~ teru1es, l":".e"i.2ro-£;i',t;., a.rli!l '1,0001"1,0-rk. thzt hzrl beffi through grand monuments or high culture. Thraugh the Eyes ofa Painter quenioned the
,:.&~ i\.,;!· 8~a c...,}~; ,,....-h-,ri-;~ ari-..& ~,e pw~>Yhnia1 mtioo~.a!e.. The figure of d n,ision of India's culture into discrete classical and folk elements, as suggested by the
~ b~...-J O.?f~l-'..\,',!J ;,,t: ~~l';' ;,1,<"..ffJ:.t:r, Tf":etab;-,;;--r""-...,.,-, (ff '1,0"Jlhit-"tt-er did nal: appear in Films Division subcategories of"Archeology and Monuments," "Arts," · c rafts." "Festi-
~::-.:::.. ~!=r.r); .,.-~3~.eik r.::-.-em!"'~ -,,ere in ifAinaTj' and L-.-ery·&j•acti,ities vaJst and "People oflndia_~iw Forts and pa.races in Rajasthan are the scene of pleasure
~re ,,...,_~~-ml,, !E-Z.,-i7f·.; w::d ar.)}~ -,;.~ ..,,f::'Ie mn uPA.t.1:$'.r.-od as ereatr,e practice or and desire and the mise-en-sct:ne for an artfully arranged, if humble, lantern. umbrell.a,
e~ 2i; 1r-£e3 ~:Y.-'l'.. uz_~i; (~:.':1tl 1n Th-c-"-lfa tk Eje1 ofa Painur as a category of and shoe (fig. 54). People and animals make their homes and lives around these artifacts
16.l'Jg 4'I.l'..J dQ5!'~ :aw~~ , ,'ltl! fut ·;ifutW:, Th<:: ~-iJ!zg,; ar...d craft<S were often cnllap.s-ed of princ.ely India, bringing "archeology and m onuments" into contact ,;,,ith "crafts· and
~ 7.;;b:.k d°1W"..r...1~ ~If 6Je f-e1"Y4 ~nd Hlw.<lrt:E film m.aie ws.e of this a,;wciatfon. Jn "festivals." Moreover, this environment is strewn with Husain's art and that of his rural
Thrf.Y;,;Jfo ~~ 'fy!i! efA Pa~ aafrs functi.'r.W.d b:-$ ai; diu:r<.1e 15kJJb than as a sign of peers, or the "people of Jndia." Many sequences juxtapose paintings by the artist with

MJ..QBOOL F IO I- H U SJ.. l f~ . 1 17

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 •
. of the village or "crafts." In others, the artist whimsically situ-
the cultura 1pro duc t10n cleaned steel dinner-plates with coal ash. The washing of the utensils struck up a tune,
ates his paintings on desert dunes and sites them on cattle. . . . . shin-shin-kreech-kreech. A Iota [round vessel] gurgled, ghutargooed [cooed] pigeon-like,
Husain's film was distinguished by its divergences from Films D1V1s1on documen-
rising and then drowning in a bucket of water. The sound of the water, the utensils and
taries, and from contemporary commercial and art cinema.101 Through the Eyes of a
the bucket blended into a symphony, as memorable as the compositions of John Cage,
Painter was shot in black-and-white in a period when color films, often shot in Europe,
the master of avant-garde fusion."107 The ordinary could produce the extraordinary if
such as Sangam (Confluence; 1964) and An Evening in Paris (1967), proliferated on com-
one looked through the eyes of a painter (read: artist). The simple could be sophisticated
mercial screens in India.102 The landscapes surveyed in Husain's film were quite unlike
depending on one's point of view.
the fantasyscapes of Paris, Tokyo, Rome, or even Kashmir in these Bombay films that,
Bundi, Chitod, and Jaisalmer, where Husain sited Through the Eyes of a Painter, are
as film historian Ranjani Mazumdar argues, produced a "'postcard imagination' that
and were towns and cities, not villages. He shot the film in a way that played with village
brought . .. jet age aviation, tourism, consumerism, color film stock, fashion , and music
and city as representation. Husain's gaze was focused on activity, action, and artifice
into a distinct cultural configuration." 103 According to Mazumdar, the advent of color in
rather than on a realist, beautiful, and moving depiction of rural life as in Ray's films.
cinema bespoke a complex economy of desire, consumption, and excess, and the 196os
His film made no claims to ethnographic truths or historical authenticity, for its subject
were a decade marked by "the longing for colorful images." 104 In Through the Eyes of a
was art and the artist. 108 The village was the site of art: of making, crafting, building,
Painter, however, pleasure was located neither in the middle-class consumption oflux-
and working. It was a place of pleasure and productivity. It bustled with energy and
ury goods nor in the traversal of international airspace or national highways. Husain's
ulsated with vitality. Art was essential to the village-and by extension, the nation-as
film celebrated ordinary pleasures oflooking, listening, and making; of traditional and
~videnced by the sequence in which Husain likens rolling dough to mixing paint, and
natural spaces; and of slowing down, rather than speeding up, time.
therefore, making roti (bread) to making art.
A romance of the Indian village was key to the film's accomplishment, yet this was
not the village ofSatyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy (1955-1959), which included Father Panchali
(Song of the Little Road) (1955), Aparajito (The Unvanquished) (1956), and Apur Sansar PAINTER AS PICTURE SHOWMAN: THE PAINTINGS
(The World of Apu) (1959).105 Based on a novel by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, Father AND PERFORMANCES OF 1968-1971
Panchali, the first film in the trilogy, was set in 1920s Bengal and portrayed the travails
Like those who depict Infernos, loud singers paint unrealities on the
of a Brahmin family struggling with debt, disaster, poverty, and privation. The premise
canvas of the air (canvas, air= ambara). 109
of the film was an essential distance between the city and the village as exemplified in
ANANDA K. COOMARASWAMY.
the famous scene in whicli the young Apu and his sister Durga race through rice fields "" PICTURE SHOWMEN " (1929)
to catcli a glimpse of the fast train billowing smoke, which functions as a metaphor for
modernity, the city, and the cinema. Apu and his parents' tragic departure on an oxcart And Ramlila! It was not street theater at all but an unforgettable
from their ancestral home for the city of Banaras at the end of the film highlights the experience. The characters of the old myth took fantastic shapes. It was

distance between the village and city. A storm lantern dangles below their cart and rocks more than real. It was magical.110

to the movement of its wheels, symbolizing hopes dashed and dreams destroyed. The HU SAIN, IN CONVERSATION
WITH GOWRI RAMNARAYAN (1997)
village Apu leaves behind is the site of death, highlighted by the ominous snake that
slithers into the abandoned family home.
Through the Eyes of a Painter anticipated the way in which Husain took his art to the
By contrast, Husain's film suggests, through its camerawork and sound, greater inti- people in 19 68 at the suggestion of socialist politician Ram Manohar Lohia, who advi~ed
macy between the city and village. The pace of Through the Eyes of a Painter is rapid, set him to create art for new, non-elite publics.111 According to K. Bikram Singh, Husam's
to folk rather than classical rh th d· .
. Y ms, an its 1ens moves qmckly, even randomly, through biographer, Lohia said to the artist: "Stop painting for Tatas and Birlas [two of India's
vanous forms of village work. 106 It moves to -the beat of musical instruments native to most prominent family-owned conglomerates]. Start painting for the _c ~mmon_~an.
Rajasthan such as the Sindh"1 · b ..
sarangi ( owed fiddle), man11ra (cymbals), matka (clay Paint Ramayana."112 Commissioned by Hyderabad-based patron Badnv1shal P1tt1e, a
pot), and bhapang (plucked dru ) d .
. m , an transmutes the polyphony of ordmary sounds- Lohia supporter, Husain staged paintings based on the Hindu epic poem the Ramay~na
people walking, water pouring b 11 h " . . .
, e s c 1mmg-as they were heard and experienced m in the annual Ramlila performances (reenacting the Ramayana) of a village outside
everyday life. A passage from H · , b"
. . . usams auto JOgraphy, Where Art Thou (2002), reveals the city of Hyderabad in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh.m The artist studi_ed
his interest m the capacity of th d
e every ay to generate art: "The sister-in-law, the bhabhi, the poem with a Hindu priest and took approximately twenty paintings from the senes

118 • MAN "AND MAHABHARATA

MAQBOOL FIDA HUSAIN ' 119

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 to rural India by bullock cart, thus playing out "a self.elected role as a modern-day great crowd of inquisitive
.. .
children," holding out a " · t d
pam e canvas stretched out on the
sutradhar (narrator, storyteller, performer, stage manager] for the nation.'' 114 In the support of rods m one hand and "wielding a reed w d · h"
. . . an m 1s other hand."119 This fi .
197Os, Kapur described Husain's paintings as "stage props in a nautanki [folk theater] ure of the painter as mag1c1an and salesman operatin · th bi" g
. . . .. gm e pu JC space of the bazaar
performance of the Ramalila near a village in Hyderabad_"m This signaled a reversal of corresponds with the hvmg trad1t10ns of many commu ·r f .
. . . . m ies o artists and artisans in
conventional hierarchies between art and crafts-designated here by the rural, folk per- India, mcludmg the bhopas m RaJasthan, patuas in Bengal gar0 d . G .
• • as m u1arat, and gollas
formance of the Ramalila-whereby the modernist master's paintings were consigned in Telangana, whose . practices
. . are often termed "folk performa nces. •120 F"l1 mmakers m
.
to th~ status of prop and the nautanki players took center stage. India from DhundiraJ Govmd Phalke (1870-1944) and Prithvi·ra·J Kapoor (1901-1972)
Whereas Through the Eyes of a Painter marked the transport of rural art to the city, to Raj Kapoor (1924-1988) and Yash Raj Chopra (1932- 2012 ), often referred to in the
Husain's Ramayana paintings marked the transport of urban art to the village. This per- country's English-language press as "dream merchants," have also functioned as pic-
formative exchange between village and city-iflargely symbolic and limited in impact- ture showmen, at once performers, producers, directors, and writersm Contemporary
was Husain's unique contribution to modernist practice. In the 193Os, painters such as artist Nikhil Chopra performed the identity of picture showman in his Memory Drawing
Sher-Gil, Baij. Bose, and Roy located themselves in the village to produce an authentic series (2007-2009). However, in the art world of the 1960s, artists and critics held the
national art, often repudiating the city and modern technology. Following Gandhi, they picture showman of the rural theater and urban cinema at a distance from the practice
viewed the village and the city in opposition to and competition with each other. There of modernist painting. In claiming the identity of picture showman, Husain offered a
could be little traffic between spaces that were defined and differentiated by their associa- critique of dominant notions of art, the artist, and art-making.
tions with East and West, nationalism and colonialism, handmade products and mechani- Consider how the artist remembered the intention and reception of his Ramayana
cal technologies. Moreover, these spaces represented separate spheres of art and crafts, paintings in a 1992 interview with Yashodhara Dalmia:
which Ruskin--:-whose writing initiated Husain into art history-had memorably called
"The Two Paths" in his inaugural lecture at the South Kensington Museum in 1858.116 I painted the epic not from the religious angle, but for the people. After Lohiaji [Ram
The public event Six Days of Making at Shridharani Gallery in New Delhi in 1968- Manohar Lohia] died, these paintings were taken on bullock cart to a village about eighty
1969 was the logical conclusion to Husain's experiments in film and performance of kilometers from Hyderabad and were spread out there. There were these six feet and ten
1967-1968, through which he raised consciousness about art. Bartholomew recalled feet high paintings of[the gods] Hanuman and Ram strewn around and the villagers sat
Husain's response to his suggestion that he invite people to watch him at work: "That's enthralled for about three hours while Borakatha [Burrakatha, a folk storytelling style
a brilliant idea, come to think of it. Why not? Let's call it something; let us show every- native to Andhra Pradesh] singers sang the epic. No one asked where are [sic] Ram's eyes
or why a particular painting was done in a particular manner. 122
one how a painting is made. Everyone. Some will consider this a stunt-but there will
be people who will look more closely at their paintings after this."117 Note the artist's
emphasis-at least in the critic's mind and memory-between making and viewing. Husain's goal of painting for the "people" resonated with the "everyone" that was his
Husain wished to take art to the people, to have an audience examine its process and intended audience in Delhi. The way his large paintings were "spread out" and "strewn"
craftsmanship, to look upon painting as practice. Although many in the art world, then in a rural environment recalled their staging in Through the Eyes of a Painter, where
and now, would view Husain's painting and performance as "a stunt," the two modes Husain's work found a home on mud walls and sandy soil. The artist's recollection of
went hand in hand for this artist. He cultivated the identity of puppeteer, performer, the villagers' embrace of his art-no questions asked-pointed to his belief in their
projectionist, and picture showman in order to reach "everyone." This "everyone" intuitive understanding of creative work.
referred to an expanded public for art, and it continued Sher-Gil's efforts to generate an The village and its people were the repository of national culture, as they had been
"art of the soil" that was organic and authentic. In his quest for such a public, Husain for Husain's predecessors, but his village did not function in isolation from and contra-
troubled and transformed boundaries of elite and popular practice. distinction to the city. Nor did its cultural production figure as pure motif and symbol
The category of picture showmen, proposed by Ananda K. C:oomaraswamy in 1929 to embodied in vessels such as the Santhal woman or terra-cotta pot. Instead the village
describe yamapattaka (painters ofYama, god of death), traditional exhibitors of Hindu was a place of live action and Jiving audiences for art. Through the Eyes of a Painter,
and Jain narratives in South and Southeast Asia, can encompass the humble bioscopewal- and the paintings and performances that followed it, seemed to realize the stage set of
lah and the big Bombay filmmaker in modern India.U 8 Citing an example from Bana's Between the Spider and the Lamp and theatricalize an encounter between the village and
Harsha-carita ' a Sanskr"t
1 b"10graph Y of t h e Hmdu
· · Harsha dating to the sevent h the city, and between radically divergent notions of cultural production emblematized
kmg
c::entury, Coomaraswamy conjured a picture showman active in a "bazaar street amid a by Borakatha performance and easel painting.

MAQBOOL FIDA HUSAIN . 121

120 . MAN AND MAHAB "HARATA

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 cessional trickster, amateur magician, and itinerant singer-st t II
1' ory e er common to ma
oflndia's urban and rural cultures. ny
At a twenty-year retrospective exhibition held in Bomb ,5 J h .
. . . . . ay e ang1r Art Gallery in
19 9 ' Husam installed
6
.
his pamtmgs alongside "a painted Fi.at [ ] . h l'fi .
. . car wit I e-s1zed fig-
ures, a smal~ r~om with wooden puppets ms1de as in villages and Salle de Bal, a black
tent with a dmmg room. The tent could be looked into like a peep-show."128 This traffic
between performance and painting, between the ballroom and peep show, between the
Fiat car and wooden puppets, bespoke a visual imagination that thrived on the modali-
ties of props, panoramas, procession, and pilgrimage. This imagination can be related
to what Sandria B. Freitag has called a distinct "visual vocabulary of the nation" that
emerged in the public cultures of modern India through the intersection of various
media (painting, print, photography, and cinema) and their circulation and reception,
specifically, "South Asian courtly culture, religious practices including the centrality of
darshan [seeing and being seen] and the special reshaping effected under bhakti [popu-
lar devotion], and live performance traditions." 129 Husain located his art firmly within
this vocabulary. Take this marvelous passage on art-making from his autobiography:
"He [Husain] made a grand paper palace complete with a royal durbar [court assembly]
FIGURE SS- and a king's chamber, out of the empty packets of Passing Show cigarettes discarded
Richard Bartholomew, Krishen Khanna (left), Ram Kumar (centre), and Virender Kumar (right) at by his Uncle Murad. Scissors snipped to create latticed jharoka windows, the robes of
a gathering at Krishen's home, New Delhi, ea. 1967, photograph. Artwork and image© Richard
the raja [king] and his queen, mini-elephants and horses and parrots perched on baby
Bartholomew/Estate of Richard Bartholomew.
trees. Like the devout carrying taaziyas on their head during Muharram, he carried this
wonder exhibit to the school's annual fete. He was awarded the first prize in arts and
Such gestures toward rethinking the role of art and remaking what it meant to be an crafts.'' 130 In this world of Husain's creation, art and crafts were bound together as were
artist in India have received little critical attention. They have been reduced to crowd- elite and popular cultures, represented by royal costumes and Passing Show cigarette
pleasing stunts and advertising gimmicks or attributed to the artist's innate folksy, packs, and secular and religious practices, represented by school fetes and Muharram
naive, itinerant, or childlike personality. 123 However, what Sumathi Ramaswamy has processions. Art was a "wonder exhibit," extraordinary but crafted from the everyday,
called Husain's "Judie nomadism" charted a distinct path between domains of practice snipped and conjoined by hand.rn
and worlds of experience that were kept apart in mid-twentieth-century India. 124 His A similar method can be observed in the artist's mature works. Kapur describes
determined crisscrossing and crosscutting of these domains and worlds had aesthetic Husain's technique in Man: "The joinery at the seams of the cut-out figures resembles
and political aims and effects. the rough stitching of a tailor's white thread so that the composite image becomes a
In the 1960s and afterward, Husain occupied the paradoxical position of being paste-and-stitch collage. Man is the first 'sample' of the virtuoso in Husain but the
bohemian and populist, _nonconformist and commercial, elite and entertaining. He virtuosity carries the poignancy of an explorative, craftsmanly, language-seeking hand
presented a model of the artist rather different from the cerebral Ram Kumar or elegant that will acquire, and later squander, the gift of great draughting talent." 132 She com-
Krishen Khanna, gathered together with other male comrades from the art world, seri- pares Husain's collagist technique to the craftsmanship of a tailor, punning on the
ous suits smoking and talking intensely in a book-lined living room with oil paintings words joinery, sample, seam, and stitch and mixing metaphors of modernist and non-
hanging on the wall, as depicted in a 1967 portrait by Bartholomew (fig. 55). 125 Bar- modernist modes of production.m Nevertheless, for Kapur, the resulting painting-a
tholomew recalled that Husain organized, often impulsively, informal salons where masterpiece-is "emphatically modernist" and "cubist" and Husain is a craftsman-
"house painters and carpenters ... sat with artists." 126 According to Bartholomew, the turned-draftsman.134 In her account, craftsmanship is a sign of virtuosity, an individ-
artist's generosity left no room for snobbery in what might have otherwise been "awk- ual trait-perhaps even a badge of male artistic genius-but not a social or political
ward occasions." 127 By contrast to the contemplative male figures in Bartholomew's commitment.
pho_tograph, Husain adopted an artistic persona akin to a picture showman-the pro- What if, in our assessment of Husain's career, crafts were to operate as more th an

MAQBOOL FIDA HUSAIN 123

122 • MAN ANO MA·HABHARATA

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 metaphor and residual trace? His practice of painting-as-performance proposed a syn. 146 ,
in Rajasthan. In. these .early studies, craft was a capacious and sh'fi 1 tmg category that
chronic ' not diachronic relationship between art and crafts, and a commitm ~~
. .
and I d
135 encompassed textile traditions and wall paintings sound scu pture, an the work
translation across media and sites constituted as separate. It was a critique ofb ound- •
of men and women, amateurs and professiona ls.
· .
aries established by canons, schools, textbooks, and institutions of British colon 1a1sm
1 .
Husain's uncle and man Through their collective efforts, a notion of crafts-broa dly defined as nonmo dermst
and Indian nationalism. Art was not a "useless activity," as activity emerged in
and nonclassical forms, genres, practices, and media-as creative
Indians in the 1960s believed, but a livelihood and a technique of enchantme nt aki; through exhibitions such as
the late 1960s and was consolidate d in the 197Os and 1980s
to crafts.13 6 as the Crafts Museum
Aditi: The Living Arts of India (1985-1986 ) and institutions such
Such notions distinguished him from many of his peers for whom art was anmtel- ·
in New Delhi. The pioneering artists and activists of the crafts revival movement
147
lectual and highly interiorized pursuit. Bartholomew, one of Husain's most ..
sensitive
of the mind Thi· · . rejected the idea of crafts as unskilled repetition, unimaginative labor, unchanging
and sympathetic critics, understood art as "a theatre ·
"137
s cntic read
essence, and the antithesis of art. Husain was early and progressive in his insistence
the artist's work through a formalist and subjectivist lens ' describing th e process of
. . " . 138 on the modernity of crafts and, by extension, the tradition of art. Crafts could be tech-
pam~mg_ from genesis t~ revelation." For Bartholomew, transcend ence-not com-
nological, art could be national, Husain's modernist paintings, performances, and
mumca!Jon or commumon. with people-wa s the purpose of art ·139 H e un d erstood
. , . . · I mastery of film proposed.
Husam s pamtmg as essentially an art of "poetic expressionism"·, te ch mca
.
compressio n of me . . By painting Hindu epics, Husain extended these insights to the relationship between
lme, color, and form;. and "the work of aesthetic mory commg mto
. . . . 140
,
"viv'd d • the classical and the folk, state-sanctioned and widely recognized divisions of Indian
bemg mall its plastic eqmvalents." This art had the character of a
fleeting mood.141 I ream or culture. The Ramayana and Mahabharata span great and little traditions, though there
are key differences between Sanskritic and regional or vernacular versions. These
148

.Yet Husain aspire~ to a m~re ordinary and everyday practice of art even as he engaged epics can be rendered in classical and folk forms ; Husain rendered them national and
epic themes and sub1ects. His projects of the late 1960s and early 197Os were comm1t- . for
· modernist. His Mahabharata paintings, a series of twenty-nine canvases executed
d exchange
te to m~g over the classical into the folk and vice versa, to enacting an characters and events from the
the Bienal de Sao Paulo in 1971, referred to specific
between India's "great" and "littl e• tra d itions. ·· 142
The notion of great and little traditions epic with titles such as Bhima, Bhishma, Kauravas, A,juna with Chariot (fig. 47) , and
149
:~s; f~om an account of the division of social and cultural life in India into Sanskritic Duryodhana Arjuna Split (fig. 56) , yet they represented a modern and secular mythos.
flu:tsm (the cl~~sical) and its others (the folk) . Although scholars have emphasize d Husain was invited to show his work in an exclusive exhibition space at the biennial;
. ty and mob1hty across these categories, they were often polarized in popular Picasso was the only other artist to receive such an invitation that year. His decision to
d1scourse and practice In mid tw - h
. .. · · entiet -century India the theory of Sanskritization ' paint the Mahabharata was in response to the perceived honor of exhibiting alongside
wherebY I1tt1e traditions and th . .
b ul . e groups associated with them achieved upward mobility an artist he had long admired. In Husain's view, the Mahabharata was a subject worthy
y ~tmch_atibng great ones, was influential. Since the 1980s, scholars have discussed code- of the occasion and of Picasso.1so Husain sketched extensively and studied C. Rajago-
SW! mg etween the great a d J'ttl d. ·
India' cla . 1 d n I e tra itions, and proposed a continuum between palachari's English translation of the Mahabharata, originally published in 1951, with a
s ssica an folk practices.143
tenth edition published in 1970. The artist researched the paintings over eight months
Such insights into cultural exchan . . 1 1
ho · · h ge, mediation, and translation were not on the and eventually produced them in a temporary, makeshift studio in Paris. s
nzon m t e 1960s when H . d
painting as a kind 0 f fc usam ma e Through the Eyes of a Painter and presented The premise of the Rajagopalachari translation was that the epic was living tradi-
per ormance. In 19 65 th . . .
awards for "M te C fts ' e government oflnd1a mstJtuted national tion for many Indians, though contemporary audiences received the Ramayana and
as r ra men • reco · · fi
Stella Kramrisch . d ' gruzmg era ts as special and skilled labor. In 1968, the Mahabharata "embroidered with garish fancies of the Kalakshepam [also known as
organize the exhibition U known Ina·ia: Ritual . Art m . Tribe and Village Kathakalashepa, a performance involving song and storytelling native to Tamil Nadu]
at the Philadel h · M n
h . .
p ia useum of Art In pa II I . h t ese mstJtutional initiatives, vari-
· ra e wit and the cinema as to retain but little of the dignity and approach to the truth of Vyasa
ous individuals unde t k 12
r oo surveys ofcr ft
Surv fl d" a s
d I
an rura folkways in the r96os. Working for and Valmiki [scribes of the Sanskrit Mahabharata and Ramayana, respectively]." s Raja-
the Anthropolo gical popular
ey o n ia between 1962 an d 1 9 64, scuIptor Meera Mukherjee gopalachari's translation was intended to serve as a corrective to such folk and
researched The Metalc •Ii .
raJ'smen of India (1978) I« ArtJst . H k h corruptions, yet he imagined himself as a modern storyteller "for dear Tamil children"
Swiss ethnographer Eh h d . · a u S ah collaborated with
er ar Fischer on a stud Yo erafit tra d'Jt1ons
h
f . .
m rural Gujarat.145 and "hoped the reading of these stories might enliven village evenings, when rustics
Artist Jyoti Bhatt ph t . . 1 3
o ograp ed and docum t d h 11
e t e wa pamtmgs and terra-cotta art of gather socially in the chavadi [meeting place] or temple after their day's work is done." s
Gujarat while folkl . t Komal Koth · en h
' ons
an gat ered and recorded the music of the Langas He understood himself as part of a lineage of "gifted reciters," who interpreted and

124 . IAAN ANO IAAHABHAR ATA MAQBOOL FIDA HUSAIN • 125

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 . f them to the lives of ordina ry Indian s. 154 This
added to the ep!CS, connec mg under.
·. d . . .
standmg was s11are Y t b H isain whose Mahabharata pamtm gs recited , restag ed,
• and
re-created the epic.
. , . ,
Take Duryo d,iana A']·una Split · in which the artists palette refers to P1Casso s Guer-
.,ca d H ·n·s early work The nude female figure
11 an to usa1 · , facing the viewer on the left
0 f the canvas , w1
'tll finoers held up to her face, recalls the yellow
" -skinned damsel in
Between the Spider and the Lamp. Husain struct ures
the canvas aroun d two semic ircula r
forms resembling the split halves of a black sun, a
central motif in Zameen. Two female
fioures stand on the left, while a grotesque three-
headed male figure is seated on the
ri;ht, gesturing toward the center of the composition
with a raised arm. These figures
are not easily identifiable as the hero Arjuna and
his villainous cousin Duryo dhana ,
named in the painting's title. Bean's identification
of the figures as the blind king Dhri-
trashtra and his blindfolded queen , Gandhari, witnes
s-observers to the epic rather than
its main protagonists, is compelling. The flat, partiti
oned space of the compo sition and
sketchy, spare figures evoke popular and vernacular
formats such as the tableau, pan-
orama, film still, and comic strip. The splits and cuts
of Duryodhana Arjuna Split, like
those of Ganga Jamuna (fig. 57), can be related to contem
porary political events, specifi-
cally India's war with Pakistan in 1971, a "fratricidal
conflict" that resona tes with the
subject of tl1e Mahabharata. 155 Yet they also extend
the struct ural play betwe en darkn ess
and light, ernblematized by the spider and the lamp,
in painti ngs like Man and Zameen,
and reiterate Husain's interest in painting as a time-b
ased art that unfold s like cinem a
or performance (precisely the media lamented by
Rajagopalachari).
The Mahabharata paintings refer to Husai n's pictur
es and those of others . Altho ugh
Bean noted a citation ofMichelangelo's Adam from
the Sistine Chapel in Duryodhana
Arjuna Split, outstretched arms and spread-out hands
were a long-s tandin g feature of
Husain's oeuvre.156 In Zameen, the hand combined
reference to Le Corbu sier's open
hand, a symbol of modernist Chandigarh and Nehru
vian India, and the panja (palm)
associated with saintly or gifted individuals, a symbo
l of traditional knowledge and folk
religious belief. In Through the Eyes of a Painter,
hands repres ented the makin g and
magic of artists and craftsmen. In Arjuna with Chario
t, a pair of abstract and abbreviated
hands , painted in white, mimicked the elongated
forms of horses ' heads and an ele- FIGURE 56.
phant's trunk. Positioned above a wooden cart, presum M F H ain Duryodhana Arjuna Splil (Mahab1rnrata ·
ably the chario t of the painti ng's 9), 1971. acrylic on canvas . T he Cl1ester an d
title, these dynamic figures are animals, toys, and D~v;da :en;it z Collection, Peabody Essex Museum
icons like the symbols that anima ted . Salem, Massachusetts, E300243. Artwork ©
Husain's 1967 film. The fingers at the center of the Estate ofM .F. Husain ; image courtesy of the Peabod
y Essex Museu m .
composition spin a golden chakra
(wheel), which represents artistic creation as much
as cosmic strugg les and dharmic FIGURE 57.
(ethical) obligation, the subjects of Krishna's discou .
M.F. Husam , Ganga Jamuna (Mahab harata 12), 197 1, oil on canvas . T h e Chester an d D ·'da Henvitz
rse to Arjun a in the face of battle. ' a-.
Husain's Mahabharata series pointed to the existe . p b d)' Essex Museum Salem, Massachusetts, f
E30024 4 . Artwork © Estate o M. F·
ntial and everyday throug h a well- o
C llect1on, ea o · ·
developed vocabulary that encompassed Husain's Husain : image courtesy of the Peabody Essex Museu
projects in various media . m.
In this series, Husain's technique can be likene
d to storyboarding a film. Daniel
Herwitz noted: "Some [ofMahabharata paintings)
seem to layer filmic images telescopi_-
cally. Together these paintings can be read as if the
precis of a film." 157 Unlike Raja go-

126 · t.liHl ANO MAHA BH,.RA TA

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 _ . L->, _~ dnfi!lZ a.:id perfcrma= to be authentic national-cultural
~ 1 , Husam v=!!e°i"r:u ~ were not separate, as evidenced by Man , Zameen, Through the Eyes of a Painter, and the
fzms ~ equip;,ea tD ccr.n·e:,- the ..onder of the epic -~ ~o modern audiences.
Mahabharata series. Unbounded imagination and skilled repetition were operative in
_- I:".--'-'''-
The ar-~-t --'•'-.....-effects
,,,.,,.,=..: ui,c:~
ofimme<liacy and pmxirmty m his Mahabharata paint-
art and crafts, the city and the village, and West and East.
oz. "6idi zt o:-= es-oked bi1lboards and Picasso's Guernk a. The scale and seriality of This view of the artist's career and achievements requires reading the artist's words
th:..-~ pair::ings suggest an engagement v;ith narram-e traditions such as those of the
and those of his critics against the grain. Husain's showmanship has often been under-
R=li!z zrirl Eorakatha performances that Husain admired. In link ing painting and
stood in opposition to his artistry rather than as an essential component ofit. For many
an= with fofk theater and epic poetry, the artist presents modernist media as capable
critics and art historians, the artist's flair for commerce-sales, marketing, and exhibi-
of ger.emi.ng oztional forms. tion-detracted from his art instead of contributing to it. Noting Husain's talents as "a
Gi>en the stat us of modernist art and the artist in public discourses of the period,
kind of performance artist," whereby "his work becomes almost incidental to the actual
this w-a.s an original. ew:n radical, proposition_ In 1963, critic S.A_ Krishnan deplored life process and the way he puts it on stage," Kapur wrote: "The artist's performance has
tls.e hypocrisy of haw on one hand · we talk of one world and internationalism" and, on come within the process of commodification." 160 This commodification, for the critic,
the other hand, ·demand total traditional purity and national fidelity of the modem art- was acquiescence to capitalist and cultural nationalist logics. However, by the standards
ist_•m He condemned "tradition-mongering" in the art world: "U1timately it is not what of the picture showman, making wonder was doing work. The picture showman was
is painted or sculpted that lends a worlc its 'Indian' character, but it is that indescribable artist as well as technician, advertiser, and dealer.
unobtrusfre apprehension of and affinity with the past.. .. It does not matter if his [the Husain's translation of practices across media and sites was a critique of dominant
axtist's] worlc shows influences of an extraneous character. So do many other activities paradigms of art, the artist, and art-making in India (though this critique was perhal'.s
in our life. When we think of the Nangal dam, the steel works ofBhilai or Durgapur, we more intuitive for Husain than for Subramanyan, whose critique took more academic
do not confuse their identity with the countries that helped us to build them." Modem and systematic forms). His translation cannot be reduced to eclecticism or virtuo_s-
art 1.vas no-less Indian than steel plants and gravity dams for, as Krishnan wrote, "we ity; it represented a commitment to probing the boundaries of East a~d West. Husam
have changed inevitably and organically and we must face this fact .. .. Why single out understood himself as a postcolonial master who would emulate the pICture showman
the artist for 'infection' from the West when it is occurring all around us and for very of India's great and little traditions to invent a distinctive modernist language. :h~s
good reason too?" In Krishnan's opinion, "the jet aircraft and the bullock cart do go picture showman was not the antithesis of modernity, but instead its emblematic, if
159
together for the time being." In his practice of the 1960s and early 1970s, Husain shape-shifting, figure.
aimed to transform the modem artist into a national worker, to unite the logics of the
jet aircraft and the bullock cart, and to synthesize the handmade and the mechanical.
Husain played with folk, rural, popular, and vernacular forms long before it was
fashionable or commonplace. This playfulness was different from crafts documentation
projects under way in the 1960s or efforts at crafts revival by the state and its agencies,
which are addressed in the following chapter on Subramanyan. It was also different
from the work of those artists that used crafts as a static symbol of the Gandhian village
or of a rural past that Jnd 1·a· d ·· ha . . .
. .. . s mo em c11Jzens d left behmd. Husam's play mtroduced
mstabil1ty m the relationship bet • d . • .. .
ween mo ermst art and "trad1t10nal" crafts, creatmg
the possibility for permeabTty 1 1 d
. an porousness between them. It challenged patroniz-
ing and primitivizing views ofth -11 d . .
. . e VI age an crafts, whICh were often collapsed m pub-
he discourses of the 1950 a d 1 6 d. .
. s n 9 os, an 11 resisted evolutionary and developmentalist
paradigms for conceiving the .
. se categories. In Through the Eyes of a Painter, Husain did
not valonze crafts as the pa t Of b . ..
· s art, ut rendered 1t contemporary, cnt1cal, and avant-
garde; hence the sounds of ever d
Y ay movements and activities in an ordinary household
were the material of a Cagean ..
. compos11Jon. Through this play, Husain proposed not
an eqwvalence between art and fi b
. . era ts, ut analogies between these modes of making
an d th mkmg, of constructing d .
an creatmg, of being and doing. The hand and mind

128 .• \.IAN ANO MAHABHARATA

MAQBOOL FIDA HUSAIN • 129

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