K. BIKRAM Singh, a filmmaker who made films on Indian artists long before the art boom, has espoused the cause of Husain at a time when the state has chosen to treat him as a pariah. In the Middle East sheikhdoms Husain has gained generous patronage, his museum in Qatar being one instance. But his presence there has become a heraldic sign of unresolved minoritarian issues in art and culture. The ban on Satanic Verses, like the Husain exile, mark different faces of this complex issue.

Bikram Singh’s book draws out a number of facets of Husain’s enormously productive life and career. Some rare family photographs, Husain’s drawings for children’s furniture and toys in the 1940s accompany the narrative on the
artist’s early history. Singh has done what few Husain biographers have attempted. Instead of locating Husain in the ‘modernity’ framework of Mumbai which he reached as a migrant, Singh goes to Pandharpur and Indore, as originary sites in the Husain saga. This early documentation is valuable. It marks the religious and familial influences in Indore, of a conservative upbringing in Siddhpur with his stepmother’s father, an orthodox priest, and later his schooling at the Darul Tulaba Husamiya Madrasa in Baroda.

There is also a record of Husain’s very individual pursuit of photography and art; his first box camera and sketching trips on a cycle. It was on these trips into the Indore countryside that he came across Bendre, a decisive figure in Indian modernism, whom the young artist turned to as an artistic guru. The lyrical approach of the Indore art school principal Deolalikar, of Bendre who communicated his interest in Cubism (and expressionism),
as well as Husain’s interest in cinema all appear to have guided Husain’s aesthetics. Singh writes of how Husain followed his father and stepmother to the movies at night, and then “would feverishly paint characters and scenes from the film that he had just seen”.

Husain’s strong linear quality is attributed to the swift painting strokes that he developed as a hoarding painter over about five years in Mumbai. Singh also helps us recognise the location of much of Husain’s work: the celebratory folk ethos of the work is closer to the city and village continuum of his early youth, rather than the grim squalour and over-crowding of his own difficult early years in Mumbai. “The basic personality and temperament of Husain was forged in the crucible of Bombay’s streets and chawls. By 1947, he had already spent the best years of his youth struggling to survive.”

Husain’s world is a world without shadows. Nevertheless, in much of his work the overriding impression is of uninflected celebration. Singh locates Husain’s artistic maturity and formation to the period 1948 to the early 50s, when he was exposed to a range of artistic influences from Gupta sculpture, Basohli painting, Chinese calligraphy and the post-Cubist, expressionist painting styles of the West. This is also the period of the most contemplative work, tinged with existential concern and led upto his most well known work ‘Between the Spider and the Lamp’.

It is also worth analysing if Husain does not imbue his folk images with colour and positive energy because this became a national paradigm, suggested by Nehru’s priviledging of folk dances as the true image of village India.
Latterly, Mother Theresa’s sari, the iconography of the gods are among the foremost metaphors that are most ecognisable in Husain’s oeuvre. It is instructive to learn that in 1980 Husain was invited by the Ramlila committee of Delhi to design their annual diary — an offer now unthinkable in these less tolerant times.

Singh devotes separate chapters to identifiable Husain subjects — the woman as erotic muse, horses and other animals and a chapter to Husain’s personal beliefs. It s in the latter context of beliefs and syncretism, and artistic freedom that Singh makes an impassioned argument for Husain as “India’s most important humanist”.

He argues that in the attacks on Husain it is easy to ignore how much Husain’s own work — abundant and continuous, and steadily reflective of Indian public life — has done to influence our own vision of India.

Bikram Singh brings to the book his own predilections as a filmmaker. His point of entry is Husain’s intense visuality; this allows his relaxed style of writing to dwell in the realm of the anecdotal rather than the strictly arthistorical.

This sumptuously illustrated volume also leads up to a forthcoming seminar on Husain, scheduled in April at Duke University titled Barefoot across the Nation: Maqbool Fida

Husain and the Idea of India. Perhaps no other artist in any discipline holds up a mirror to the chinks in our modernity and the secular promise of India.