It is a private word sport that I play with myself to enumerate descriptive words about a person. And the words that come to mind to portray the one person who put India on the art map of the world are enough to form the entire English alphabet! And even though it has been almost a year since his death, and not that many earth shaking events/exhibitions/auctions have happened in the last year, he remains vivid in our minds. Who else but M.F. Husain deserves the deluge of reports assessing, remembering and some even questioning him, that it is hard to believe that it has been almost a year since his death.
My memories over the years of him are many. In the early 90s, when I was this angry young woman of the Indian art world, wanting to slay all the demons that plagued it, I rarely had a kind word to say about him both in print and other media. I dubbed his antics as attention seeking gimmicks, often offensive and deliberate courting of controversy. Be it piggyback riding Bollywood or doing Shvetambri, when he spread 350 kilos of raddi on the floors of the entire Jehangir Art Gallery and created an installation with white unbleached cloth, or when he did the ritualistic visarjan of the seven goddesses he painted over seven days by whitewashing them, or when his juvenile and puerile poetry where he likened the breasts of one of his many women paramours to fried eggs, and other such infantile writing found place in a book, or when he wouldn’t show up after fixing appointments or walk barefoot with his signature brush in tow, or his more recent painting Indian goddesses in objectionable postures and the last straw was his accepting Qatar citizenship…it was indeed a long and exhausting list.
In this long list of negatives, many of his positives too were given the go-by, like his mastery over his idiom, his immaculate lines, his quick and accurate painting where he was able to capture the very essence of a person in his portraits, his honesty when unlike many artists of today, who have assistants to do their painting for them, each and every of his humungous portfolio of nearly 85,000 works have been painted by him, no matter what the size — perhaps thanks to his experience of painting cinema posters. His generosity was legendry, and he would often gift his works to people just like that. So many people will tell you that they have his works that he painted using their children’s paint box.
Deeply religious, he was a panch namazi and offered prayers five times a day no matter where he was. He was not a hoarder and it was much later that some of his children took over the commercials of his works. He created and sold as per his need, and whenever he needed to have show in any city, he would not send his works there, but go a few days before and paint away furiously and the show would be ready.
However, over the years, my opinion about the man and the art underwent a sea change. I feel that the man was ahead of his time; he focused attention on himself, but by default also focused attention on Indian art. Today, if you ask even a layman to name one contemporary Indian artist, it would undoubtedly be Husain, nine out of 10 times.
Creating that outreach single-handedly is virtually impossible unless you have a vision and the ability to play the media to carry your message. By the way, he was one of the two most charming men that I have met in my life so far. The other is undoubtedly Pandit Ravi Shankar.
Controversial as it was, to my mind, the so-called self-styled exile and accepting the citizenship of Qatar too was part of his larger game plan that ended up benefiting Indian art, and focusing attention on himself was perhaps a by-product.
It is my contention that Husain, with his far reaching vision, saw that the West Asia region was going to be THE place to be for international positioning of both himself and his art — considering that Guggenheims and the Louvre had grand plans to set up shop in Abu Dhabi and an international sculpture park that was to be set up in Qatar before the recession hit.
Now Husain was a very smart man. Instead of going away, he could very easily have sorted out the cases against him by shifting them to a single city and let us face it, who needs to leave the world’s largest democracy, India, to opt for monarchy and that too, for reasons of exile? It is my contention that he opted for Qatar for reasons of religious affinity and the fact that the Qatar government was keen on a museum of Husain’s work.
In this context, what greater salute to a single artist, than to have a museum for himself in his lifetime? I feel that it is every artist’s secret dream to have a museum for his or her work and why would Husain not cherish such a desire?
After all, he had tried to do something on the lines by creating a Husain ki Sarai in Faridabad in the 90s and the Husain ni Gufa in Ahmedabad in the same decade. These projects didn’t take off, for people didn’t have the vision and he didn’t find support. I feel our loss, as it would have gone a long way in positioning Indian art also. Look at the number of museums for Picasso’s works and only Husain had the stature, popularity and body of work to warrant it. I for one would certainly want to see his body of work in one place for sure.

Dr Alka Raghuvanshi is an art writer, curator and artist