Maqbool Fida Husain passed away two months ago in London, quietly, when no one expected it, not even his children.
He was ninety-six years in age and still painting with two major projects in Qatar and London. [break]
When we spoke on phone last December, he said he would like to visit Nepal because he had never been here.
He was still curious about the world and had travel plans! Living in self-imposed exile in Dubai, Qatar and London, unable to return to the country which inspired his paintings, his spirit remained undaunted.
His was a life of contradictions, compromise and courage. Fakir, nomad, lover, poet, dreamer, artist, filmmaker, stuntman, adventurer – he lived them all.
He possessed the ability to reinvent himself whenever the situation demanded. In an interview with CNN in Dubai, he had remarked, “To complete what I have to do, I would need four lives.” In fact, he lived through many more than four lives!
Unlike many artists, he courted attention and invited controversy. In 1975, I was among the audience, spellbound, when he painted in public, with his long arms and legs spread-eagled on the floor.
In the early 1990s, he orchestrated what he called his tamasha at Gallery Art Today. He persuaded Madhuri Dixit to grace the occasion, to “make Indian art more famous.”
He gambled with his prices, raising the value of contemporary Indian paintings which began selling overnight at inflated prices. Was he to be blamed or praised?
Each time we met, Husain was in a different incarnation. He was unpredictable. In 1969, he arrived at our house in Nizamuddin to sell us his painted car.
Surprised, we replied we were not ready with the cash. Without hesitation, he replied, “Pay me next time.” He opened up the back of the old car, took out a bicycle and rode away.
In the late 1990s, when he was creating his mega film, he summoned me to Bombay to see the rough cut. What did I make of it? Madhuri Dixit, the woman of his dreams, leaps out of his canvas to walk down with her bundle and disappear on the ghats of Benares.
Itinerant gypsy, dancer, Shakuntala from Kalidasa’s play, Mona Lisa running away from the Louvre, she finally plays herself as a screen goddess cavorting with SRK.
I wrote in India Today, “It’s a fable, not a film… It’s the conviction and belief in self-transformation – as in the life of Husain himself.”
His passion for cinema had begun in his adolescence, sneaking out of classes until one day he was caught. Ironic then, that when he arrived in the metropolis of Bombay, he began his career as a humble painter of film hoardings.
On one occasion, he had to paint eleven gigantic film boards in five days. He painted them freehand with a brush, hanging precariously in the sky. His reach was far, striving for the impossible. Urdu poet and calligrapher, he began to write poetry in English in his inimitable style:
As I begin to paint
hold the Sky in your hands
as the stretch of my canvass
is unknown to me.
Husain once observed that his paintings were “metaphors” – and he always remained a painter of “Signs.” His obsession with Mother Teresa shows her invariably as the mother of compassion with the gesture of her hand, floating mysteriously into view against the pitch black of night, the blue border of her sari like a halo, the child on her lap.
Hanuman is defined with his mace as he leaps across burning Lanka. Draupadi lies stretched across the chaupad, the game of dice where she was bartered.
These are concise, strong statements. He was tuned in to capturing the essence of a place, a person, not the precise moment. Consider his comments on filmmakers which are like metaphors in prose, where he focuses on graphic symbols. And we can’t miss his dry humor!
Most of my thematic series of paintings are inspired by the works of great filmmakers. Kurosawa, Bunuel, Pasolini and Satyajit Ray.
Never miss any of their films….
For example, Kurosawa is a line dug in deadly acid on a shiny metal sheet and the colour is a hundred layers of white on white. Bunuel is a massive crystal chandelier (which) crashes on a dining table where 200 Heads of State are eating their black ties.
Pasolini is a pragmatic sperm licked by a thousand ants and Satyajit Ray is a white Dhoti daily washed in the Bay of Bengal.
In 1971, Husain was invited to represent India at the Sao Paolo Biennale, along with Picasso.
They were the only two artists who were singled out to exhibit in separate spaces. He responded by creating – in one fortnight, as he told me – his magnum opus on the Mahabharata. They were his response to Picasso’s painting of Guernica.
His enemies asked, how could a practicing Muslim choose his heroes from a Hindu epic? For him, there was no conflict in what he called “India’s unique and composite culture.” The spectacle of religious festivity had inspired him – why would he not paint themes from both religions?
In 2007, Husain Sahab invited me to stay with him and his family in London.
He called it a haveli but it was a penthouse in Mayfair with a superb view.
The living room and dining room were covered from walls to ceilings with paintings inspired from the tragic film classic, Mughal-e-Azam, directed by K. Asif. For the first time, his images were not on Benares or Bombay or the Mahabharat or the Raj – these paintings evoked the grandeur of the Mughal era.
He titled this not after the film or the director but with his second name: the Fida Museum. His Self Portrait hung above the staircase where he appears as cool as James Bond – wearing a black cape, boots, and a belt inscribed “007.”
I was a guest lodged in the attic. One morning, with the first flush of dawn, I watched awestricken as he knelt down to pray and then went down to work before we all gathered for tea. Life was a race, and no one understood this better than him.
Age had not diminished his energy. He would walk down Mayfair, a tall lean figure in a black sherwani walking ahead of us, to stride barefoot into the red carpets of the Dorchester Hotel.
In exile, his new passion was cars: a red Ferrari in Dubai, a black Rolls Royce in London. As we drove in his sleek black Phantom, cruising around the Hyde Park, he would comment that though he lived abroad, his paintings would always be on “the Indian landscape.”
The writer is an author, art historian, and director at Indian Cultural Centre, Embassy of India, Kathmandu. She can be reached at sengeeti@gmail.com
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