Maqbool Fida Husain, one of the last artists linked with the famous Progressive Artists Group, kept dreaming about going back to India during his self-imposed exile, but his dream died with him in a London hospital on Thursday morning.
Multi-faceted Husain, who started as a Bollywood film billboard painter in Mumbai, always got emotional when asked in London about his plans to return to India. However, he was always optimistic about his chances of returning to India. “I never said I won’t go back. I am working, I am just giving it a little time. I am dreaming all the time,” he said in an interview to this newspaper in June 2009.
He said at the time that political scenarios change in India all the time and “because the political scenarios keep on changing, so I’m hoping.”
Husain, who left India in a self-exile in 2006 after being harassed and accused of obscenity by right-wing Hindu activists over his paintings of Hindu goddesses in nude. In his exile, he divided his time between London and Dubai and in 2010, he was conferred citizenship by Qatar, a rare honour.
He was working on two projects, the history of Indian civilisation and the history of Arab civilisation, commissioned by Qatar ruler Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani’s wife Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser al Missned, to be housed in a museum in Doha.
Husain, who was awarded the Padma Shri in 1955, Padma Bhushan in 1973 and Padma Vibhushan in 1991, felt let down by the successive Indian governments who did not facilitate his return.
Husain, the best known Indian artist across the world, hit the headlines with for his flamboyant image, created painstakingly with a flowing beard, long hair and bare feet. As his abstract paintings, especially those of animals, started breaking records in auctions the world over, Husain became a celebrity in his own right, instantly as recognisable as popular filmstars.
Husain, who was born in Pandharpur, Maharashtra, had wanted to become a filmmaker since childhood. “I became a painter as I came from a middle class family and had no opportunity to get trained as a filmmaker,” Husain recalled decades later in an interaction in London. The painter made two Hindi films, Gaja Gamini, starring his muse Madhuri Dixit, and Meenaxi — A Tale of Three Cities. He won a Golden Bear for his film, Through the Eyes of a Painter, at the Berlin Film Festival in 1967. Husain moved on lavish praise on actresses like Tabu, Amrita Rao and Vidya Balan, but it was his obsession with Madhuri and her film Hum Aapke Hain Kaun that left an indelible impression.
His work was influenced deeply by Hindi cinema and in the recent years had made a series of paintings inspired by K. Asif’s film Mughal-e-Azam.
Full of plans to make more films and continue his painting, Husain was ready to keep working till the end. “No one can stop the creative urge. One can go on all the time.”
Husain, who joined the Progressive Artists’ Group, founded by Francis Newton Souza, just months after it was formed, introduced the Indian works to the dizzying heights of astronomical prices at art auctions.
Husain, regarded as the “Picasso of India,” had met the Spanish painter at the Sao Paolo Biennial in 1971, where both of them were special invitees. He had great relationships with his fellow Indian artists, and regarded Tyeb Mehta and Syed Haider Raza, one of the two remaining founders of the Progressive Artists Group, among his close friends.
The painter, who was trained like many of his famous contemporaries in Mumbai’s J.J. School of Arts, married in 1941 and is survived by his six children.