M.F. Husain’s tapestry, opposite the Pavilion at ITC Maurya in Delhi, demands your attention like nothing else. It sets you thinking about Indian airport T3 where artists have been asked to create works, and you wonder how can India’s airport be complete without the magnificent Husain? How can the airport have so many works that mean nothing more than paint and subject?
While these questions ripple through, so do these images in this mega panorama that plays out Indianesque idioms. Husain recalls his own “Civilisation” series. In the classical tradition, visual interpretations of Indian musical modes were featured in Ragamala paintings, whereby each raga evoked a specific emotion. The tapestry interprets the theme into a modern artistic language with Husain’s complex composition, rich in a palette influenced by Indian miniatures. There is a sense of sheer vivacity in this canvas of thought; the positioning of images and the dove of peace in distinct, overlapping interrelated spaces whose line, colour and forms convey Husain’s deep-rooted Indian ethos and vernacular. At its most fundamental level, the artist understood the classical Sanskrit notions on aesthetics that in order to have a handle in painting, one must first grasp the elements of form, movement and music. The juxtapositions of the drummer the goddess and the baby god in the womb, each idea is created with the panache of passion and a deepened sense of vision.
Here, too, one can see the influence of classical Indian sculpture in this work and Husain’s interest to convert sculptural and three-dimensional figures into flat two-dimensional surfaces. Discussing the prevalence of the tribangha (three bends) in temple sculpture, Husain notes: “One reason why I went back to the Gupta period of sculpture was to study the human form... when the British ruled we were taught to draw a figure with the proportions from Greek and Roman sculpture... in the East the human form is an entirely different structure... the way a woman walks in the village there are three breaks... from the feet, the hips and the shoulder... they move in rhythm, the walk of a European is erect and archaic.”
(P. Nandy, The Illustrated Weekly of India, December 4-10, 1983 in Y. Dalmia, M.F. Husain: Re-inventing India, M.F. Husain: Early Masterpieces 1950s-70s, 2006).
All the figures in this composition are represented with strong lines and with postures borrowed from Indian narratives, as seen in the group of figures in the canvas, also bearing resemblance to Greco-Roman counterparts. There is a stunning harmony and sense of rhythm which moves through the painting in the rendering of the images and subjects’ gestures and body language.
The inter-disciplinary nature of music, sculpture, dance, painting and film provided enormous inspiration to Husain at that time and his series of images on this tapestry embodies the masterful usage of his most recognisable pictorial elements. The Ganesha, the womb of mother earth, everything flows as if there an epic drama is flowing through the eternal quality of civilisations.
For art lovers, this work is not merely powerful, and visceral —but also strangely melancholy — because it’s like an assemblage of a number of scholarly discoveries being made while it is focusing on a different slice of Indian art history.
Husain’s imagery, over several decades, has developed into a narrative iconography that allows the viewer an insight into Husain’s own experiences. “The dramatic is transmuted and becomes symbolic as each image is separated from its life context and, unsupported by time and history, is given the freedom of aesthetic environment. Nature, mythology, rituals, old architecture, festivals and the heraldry of the past — these sort themselves out from the records of Husain’s past experience and from his responses to them.”