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Venue • Lecture: The Exile of M.F. Husain, SAHMAT, New , 24th August 2009

The Exile of Maqbool Fida Husain

Modernist Myths Contrary to the claims of the canon, modernism is countered/complemented by distinctly different genealogies of the modern, and it flowers and shrinks at different political and cultural sites during the twentieth century. In its many avatars, modernism comes to be inscribed within different civilizational structures, national cultures, artisanal protocols, whereby other linguistic and iconographic resources open up, posing questions to the western rubric of authorship and style. Husain’s position exemplifies such a conjunction—where artistic autonomy of the modernist kind is ‘balanced’ by an assumed access to cultural plenitude so that a different ambition is put in place with regard to the symbolic.1 In the Indian setting, modernist myths develop multiple mandates: the modernity project, with its aspirations for ‘advancement’ and its claims to becoming the shared language of universal modernism, is expanded to the mythic imaginary and thence to metaphors and narratives that lie outside the modernist grid. While the modernist/mythic imaginary privileges abstraction, a surviving civilizational ethos fleshes it out by figural fabulations nurtured in the Indic matrix of myths.

1 and Shiv S. Kapur, Husain My own work on Husain goes back to the late 1960s: a slim monograph titled Husain 1968, followed by ‘M.F. Husain: Folklore and Fiesta’, in my book Contemporary Indian Artists,1978). There are some dialogues/dictated autobiographies, famously by Ila Pal, Rashda Siddiqui and Khalid Mohamed. These are now complemented by a recent, full-length book K. Bikram Singh, Maqbool Fida Husain, 2008.

1 These multiple mandates rest on unique circumstances: there is the secularization of the very notion of the mythic in modern that draws on an inherent, even ‘traditional’, cultural tendency towards scrambling the (sacred and profane) forms of iconicity; there is the initiative of the Indian state in adopting a constitutional distance from religions that encourages manoeuvres by artists to tackle more freely the lure of iconic address. These mandates run into trouble when secularist readings of the civilizational (alias national) come into doubt. And equally when the historicist mind-set of the modernity project proves to be insufficient in casting the universalizing assumptions of modernist myths in multiple/plural/alternative modernisms commensurate with the societies and polities in which they emerge.

Man, 1951 [Man) How do modernist myths that are fictions about modernism, as well as iconographies shaped by modernity, develop in different cultures? My double allegory based on Husain’s very early, still unexplained and, in some senses, unsurpassed , Man, 1951, may open this out. The painting is horizontal, -sized and monumental, and works on the structural principle of a triptych, each roughly equal ‘panel’ holding a prime motif with several figural accretions clustered around it. Man is the first ‘sample’ of the virtuoso in Husain—but the virtuosity carries the poignancy of an explorative, craftsmanly, language-seeking hand that will acquire, and later squander, the gift of a great draughting talent. Husain intuitively understood what modernism’s grammar could do for him at the head of his artistic journey, and with Man he grasped that potential: to construct a complex thematic yet withhold its narrative; to provide an ambiguous gestalt of meanings that shifts in and out of the grid and destabilizes the ‘picture of the world’, making the very risk, of falling apart, correspond to a universal—humanist—call for survival. A stark black figure is majestically enthroned in the centre of the painting, his profile studded with a green eye that looks omniscient even as his nude body, sitting on a pidhi-throne roughly painted crimson, mimics the gesture of the thinker. The man, ‘savage’ and superhuman, demonic and wise, is accompanied by an upturned (more ethnicized) double on the left of the painting. This figure in dull-ochre with large head and blind eye, chequered garment and upswung foot, takes a fall, his skull docketing into the humped back of a black bull—an archaic symbol spanning Indic iconography from Mohenjodaro to Siva’s Nandi (and indeed the central figure, black and phallic, could be the primordial Siva himself!). Two earth-coloured tablets engraved with torsos are propped up on either side of the central figure—learning takhtis, spelling out Husain’s figural alphabet for his indigenous typology-to-come. On the extreme right,

2 symmetrical to the fallen man on the left, looms a goddess figure in the shape of a giant effigy, holding up a large white hand that has symbolic as well as choreographic value in that it is one of three alliterative hands sequenced across the painting. Just as each large figure gestures with a single hand, there is a play of feet: large footprints on the picture surface that serve an indexical, a kind of evidentiary purpose in the otherwise opaque allegory of de-grounded bodies. In the painting’s boldly laid out gestalt is embedded a half-clad midget, bent and balancing on a single foot; the most ambiguous ‘character’ in this frieze of figures, he could be a puppeteer or the puppet, an itinerant spy or the proverbial clown in every epic; he could be Husain’s talisman, a fetish against fate. I am not sure if Man’s structural/existential rendering should be read in historical relation to the just preceded holocaust of the subcontinent’s partition or, indeed, the birth of the Republic; but I am recklessly lured into drawing from it a pictorial allegory matching Husain’s present position in a violently divided world. Risking an anachronistic reading of an artist’s uncanny vision of the future, I propose, on behalf of Husain, that Man allegorizes a theme more epic than any of his other works dealing demonstrably with epics and myths, civilization and history: it offers from within the very paradigm of what I call modernist myths, the paradox of Husain’s upturned life. Replete with civilizational symbols, bewitched by the hand of fate, the split and doubled artist ponders and meditates and gestures—rendering performative, through the powers of the meta-mime, apocalyptic energies that unfold time in great cycles as in dialectically determined histories. (Blank)

Typology From as early as 1950, Husain undertakes to work out, like before him, the linguistic modalities for an iconographic rendering of the national. Unlike Bose, he enters the nation-space in the first decade after independence, and this of course marks him differently: a self-declared modernist and an artist of/for modern India, he falls in step with the national as it is set apace by Nehru’s modernizing project. [ 1964)Husain also puts his faith in the new state, as does a legion of post-independence modernists. It gives them a participatory, if also an almost formulaic agenda of sovereignty that conflates national and individual self- representation, and both these with the national state. Husain is thus engaged in a tripartite project: with the civilizational nature of Indian nationalism as derived, among others, from Nehru (the Discovery of India perspective); with the nation as an imagined community (in somewhat the Benedict Anderson sense—of imagining and hypothesizing, but also of making and sustaining the nation); and with the nation-state where the

3 state’s constitutional mandate defines the new nation’s value structure and enjoins citizen- protagonists to advance its agenda for a democratic, secular, progressive and egalitarian future. The artist must of course convert the above into a workable aesthetic, a visual language—giving the otherwise wholly ideological paradigm his own canny twist. (Blank) Husain then extends this contemporary/generic figuration to what is more like the ‘archetypal’ figure from among the tribal population inhabiting the heartland of India.2 Mapping the contemporary with the archetypal (while also maintaining the foundational grammar of modernist figuration), he formalizes a template that will serve a life-long representational project: nothing less ambitious than pressing genre to the task of re-rendering Indian iconographic traditions, even as iconography will lend gravity to subject-matter drawn from the lives of ordinary Indian people. Within a couple of years of his recognition as an artist, he believes himself to be inventing a new national–modern language for (indeed for modern India), even as he believes Picasso invented a universal language for modern art. 3 During the 1950s, Husain moves deftly from expressionist exuberance to quite delicate and decorative cameos from the more folk genres of Rajput/Pahari miniatures, to mural-size with a compartmentalized structure resembling pat (phad) paintings. Major art- historical influences in the early period include Husain’s inspirational encounter in the seminal exhibition, titled Masterpieces of Indian Art (held in in 1948; originally held at Burlington House, London.) with Kushan, classical Gupta, and Khajuraho sculpture, and with miniatures including Basohli paintings. This encounter was reinforced and iternalised to become a stylistic accomplishment with his 1954 visit to the site of Khajuraho. [Khajuraho Women ] By treating the categories of the archaic (/archetypal) and modern as mutually constitutive, modern artists privilege a semantic economy that Husain readily recognized, confirming his self-invention as an artist at once indigenous and universal. Man (1951), Zameen (1955), Indian Village (1955) and Between the Spider and the Lamp (1956), exemplify the spare yet monumental nature of Husain’s figuration, its material impact and representational concerns. Farmer’s Family (1961) still answers to this claim; and perhaps also his short film, Through the Eyes of a Painter, made in 1968. Through this range Husain demonstrates how simple images, playful metaphors, cultural symbols (the stock-in-trade of Indian artists) can extend into an allegorical field and deliver, through the deployment of a bold grid upon that very field, a frame that holds the originary drama of a people becoming a nation.

2 Husain was born in Pandharpur, Maharashtra and brought up in Indore, Madhya Pradesh. 3 Amrita Sher-Gil in 1934: ‘Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse and Braque and many others. India belongs only to me.’ Husain’s relationship with Sher-Gil is deep and telling.

4 Husain’s seminal painting Between the Spider and the Lamp stands at the peak of this phase wherein he perfects a unique figural type in situ, in location—such that it could have been conceived and executed nowhere else but in India. Beyond the stylistics, the motif in the format of an allegorical tableau is sheer genius—what on earth is the strong sturdy tribal matron in the centre of the figural ensemble doing with the spider on a string held out gingerly like a toy or a yoyo or pet-fetish, leashed and ready to perform its macabre dance! This is performance indeed, and the dramatis personae have already come round to the front of the red curtain: the half- curtain, the yavanika of Indian classical theatre. The monumental matron archly conducting the spider is flanked by a white-clad (peasant) woman with a hurricane-lantern on her head: a messenger; on her other side are two part-figures: a torso and a profiled face notating an ensemble; and at the extreme end, a young, fully naked woman anointed with yellow turmeric. She crosses her arms below her small flat breasts and contracts her pubescent genitals by pressing tight her straight slender thighs. The ensemble is not sexually explicit, yet could there be a coded connection between, say, the dancing spider and the bare pudenda? Is this a reading of the signs at the start of a wedding ritual; is it a fabulation of village witches leading up to black magic? What is art-historically and culturally significant is how Husain’s figural typology gives a witty turn to the Picassian/‘primitivist’ component of modern art. And, indeed, to the (colonial, explorative/expropriative) discovery by western artists of the civilizational ‘other’. The aura surrounding the ‘other’, at best an archetype in cross-cultural exchanges, shifts here, on our site, to the proximate figure of tribal/peasant/proletarian subjects: the artist’s fellow-citizen in independent India whom he embraces with warm alacrity and ideological astuteness. Mediated by the modernist principle of autonomy and its near-transcendent category of form, this rendering of the body is scarcely authentic to any originary (ethnographic) source—that entire notion being itself pure fiction. The body-type that Husain fantasizes as quintessentially Indian is premised on prior anthropological notions about the ‘original’ inheritors of this land (would it be the Harappa dancing figurine, one might wonder); but for this body to appear materially ‘different’ (from the range of Aryan, Dravidian or Semitic body-types—as if these could be told apart), the artist’s formal construal, his distinct style of rendering the contour, his fashioning of a ‘typical’ stance and gesture, become a fortuitous gain within the popular discourse of origins. (Blank) The circular cause-and-effect has its own significance. Husain is both following and reinforcing, and turning around the romantic mind-set stirred by civilizational discontents. In the romantic view, the tribal population’s ethnicity appears at once more ambiguous and more absolute—a paradox that can lead to a hypostatization of origins, but also to a radical valorization conducive to the life of the image. And here an interlude with , Husain’s

5 predecessor (and brief contemporary), is crucial. Already in the 1930s, Baij set the stage with a living community (of the Santhals) to begin to imagine the ‘authentic’ nation; it was with him (then with the IPTA, and then with the filmmaker and photographer , all sympathizers and sometime members of the Communist Party of India) that the quest for a new national imaginary was directly translated into a quest for an artistic and political vanguard. And, vice versa, the image of the valorized was adopted by the artistic vanguard to galvanize the national imaginary on behalf of the people, democratically so designated, and politicized. How this guilt and aspiration towards disappearing communities translates into an ethical rendering of cultural, artistic and, therefore, political representation, is of course a very complicated question. In the utopian moment of imagining the nation as community, the figural ensembles prepared by national/progressive artists dare to hold the ground, belong to the land and, metaphorically speaking, inherit the earth. The critiques that engulf that utopian moment—in which Husain’s work is inscribed—are the ones by which Husain will of course be periodized. The question to ask in tandem is whether his typology/iconography has generated representational resources and, more, a creative morphology that has a life of its own and builds up an aesthetic surplus, analogous to the promise of plenitude that nurtures the imaginary and keeps it alive.

Mythology Today’s circumstances force us to make a reckoning with what should probably remain, in the interest of the aesthetic, indeterminate: the absence/presence of the erotic in Husain’s oeuvre. For the full picture, several aspects of the nude female figure need to be considered, among these the nude in western art, especially in the twentieth century, and its ‘dis-placed’ yet fully realized life in India. What I do here however is limited to the place of the female nude within Indian modern art, which draws simultaneously on modernist lineages and on the Indian visual tradition Among an entire treasure of magnificent artworks in the 1948 exhibition at Rashtrapati Bhavan, Husain will have seen examples of the voluptuous Yakshis of the Kushan period from the Mathura region; flying celestials of the Gupta period from Gwalior; Chandella figures of the surasundaris from the temples from Khajuraho; bronzes of Shiva and Parvati from the Chola period. Also, in particular, Basohli paintings. In 1954, on a site visit to Khajuraho, he made dozens of line (pen-and-ink) drawings that are remarkable for their brevity and elegance; and for a mode of figuration that is not, despite the models, voluptuous, and never in the actual motif ever explicitly erotic (there are no coupling/mithuna motifs).

6 Husain’s romance with the dancer and his continued attraction to the nartaki figure, as to the protocol of nritya itself, contributed to his evolving iconography. The tribhanga pose that had so struck Husain in classical sculpture is now imbibed in his draughting vocabulary. As he sees his ‘muse’ dance the enchantress in Mohiniattam, and bring alive the sculptural heritage with the slow-moving stance of ; as he sees a poetical rendering of the erotic through coded mudras (especially the much-performed sringara rasa by the abhisarika), the spare body-form that he so astutely created in his 1950s drawings and paintings yields to more seductive figuration. In a continued process of transmutation, Husain converts the nartaki into an ersatz apsara, a celestial nymph, in whom the erotic is provoked and withheld—who parries the experiential pleasure of intimacy by staging the spiritual dilemma of human and divine intercourse. This relay takes Husain to the point in the late 1960s when he begins to name all and sundry, nude and semi-nude female figures, as apsaras and goddesses—including Parvati, Durga, Saraswati—each with her lakshanas: not incorrect but incidental attributions that fix her with a simulacral iconicity. The puranic divinities and epic characters are themselves highly motivated performers; their bodily stance and narrative fantasy, as indeed their very (re)presentation, command a corresponding system of aesthetics in the sensuous, almost visceral experience of the rasas. In this sense, Husain’s choices suit the gods admirably; he is spot-on in co-relating the mythological and the performative as rendered especially by a woman/goddess. From 1968, epic characters in a highly mannered characterization begin to feature in Husain’s oeuvre. When he executes the Ramayana cycle in 1968, the protagonist is Sita (with Ram and Hanuman and Ravana); and in the Mahabharata cycle of 1971, there is Draupadi and, on occasion, Kunti or Gandhari (with Arjuna, Yudhishtira, Bhima, Bhishma Pitamaha, Duryodhana et al.)—all part of the grand narrative alluded to. The compelling feature of these epic cycles is, however, less the actual paintings (though there are some fine examples), and more the context of their production and exhibition. The Ramayana cycle was painted in 1966 at the behest of Rammanohar Lohia himself.4 He prompted his socialist comrade, the littérateur Badri Vishal Pittie, a Husain friend and collector in Hyderabad, to facilitate Husain to paint for the people—and to then convey this labour of love to the people. This was after Husain’s heart. He enaged a pandit to recite the exquisite verses of Tulsi’s Ramacharitamanas before embarking on these twenty large oil-on- canvas panels, which were then carried on bullock-carts to villages near Hyderabad where they

4 Given Husain’s self-elected role as a modern-day sutradhar for the nation-state, Lohia’s suggestion that he paint not for the Tatas and Birlas, but for the people, was electrifying.

7 served for the yearly Ramlila. [Hanuman] His cycle of paintings performed the task that folk and popular performances do in each region—of re-telling the Ramayana and providing precisely the pedagogy that inducted Husain into the epics when he was a young boy out with his brahmin friend Manakeshwar to attend the performance of the Ramlila in Indore, and with whom he also enacted it, playing, as one might guess, the volatile Hanuman! (Blank) The Mahabharata was painted with quite different intentions. In 1971, Husain was invited to exhibit in the very prestigious international Biennale of Sao Paulo, where, as it happened, Picasso was being shown on a major scale. Husain says that in great agitation and excitement he thought about what he might do to meet this challenge and came upon the idea that he should present, vis-à-vis the man who painted Guernica, the great war epic of India, the Mahabharata. Then, as now, Husain was able to stretch his scale and his ambitions at the first opportunity and with an élan derived from popular antecedents (that of a hoarding painter), but also perhaps, more remotely, from the inspiration of agit-prop artworks that socialist artists have attempted through the twentieth century. [Mahabharata] Not agit-prop but some form of civilizational (and thereby also national and international) pedagogy was certainly part of Husain’s project; here he was, literally deploying the puranic pantheon and the great epics to appropriate their abundance of motifs and an undepleted iconography.(Blank) As his representational repertoire became wider over the decades, he relied ever more on his stylistic flamboyance to get by, leading to careless delineation, shallow painterliness, flaccid form. The critique of Husain’s repertoire, although it became in time narrowed to the nudity/sexuality issue, did not begin on that note; it was certainly not because he garnered for his purpose the erotic ‘excess’ of medieval Indian art—he hardly did that—but because he entered into a profligate relationship with easily accessed motifs leading to overproduction, repetition and attenuation. ‘… it is not Husain’s intention to provoke on the basis of class, sex or religion. If any form of subversion can be attributed to him it comes from the inherent tendency in modern (expressionist) art to put an autobiographical stamp on the image. Thus references to myths and epics carry the same libertine style of representation that the artist’s self may sport, and the authorial signature enhances the complicit nature of all iconographical renderings including the more erotic among these. The artist, making an expressly personal intervention in epic realms, can appear to be driven by hubris or, on the other hand, by unjustified intimacy.’ Geeta Kapur Now, when all serious critique is devoured by a deadly assault that denies Husain any right to ‘mess with’ Indian (Hindu) iconography at all, we as secularist-modernists regret all the

8 more that Husain resorted so early in his career—already by the 1970s—to a pastiche of his own vivid corpus and let go of the great typology/iconography he had created in the first phase of his career. This regret addresses the fact that his paintings now appear at the periphery of, and even puritanical before, precisely those modernist sanctions that he so well understood, and that would have made his work provocative in the more substantive and avantgarde sense of that term. There is a set of paintings Husain does in 1990-93 that return him his reputation as a soothsayer/sutradhar: when Hindutva’s vituperative ideology was in place and Husain as a Muslim had already been targeted in Mumbai, the painter Husain came into his own for a flash of a moment. He executed what might well be his last set of significant paintings, a series that extended itself to the farthest shores and netted iconographic references to world civilization.5 [Last Supper in Red, 1991] Husain crafted giant, oil-on-canvas marionettes, picking characters from Arab, Negro, Caucasian—Christian, Muslim Hindu—Oriental and Occidental—Ancient and Modern mythologies; he arranged them in tableaux, staged them within shallow prosceniums of modernist pictures, and wrote naïve/ faux-Dada inscriptions for captions. Then he signed off the exhibition, shown in 1993 at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi, with the declaration: ‘Let history cut across me without me.’ (Blank)

Madhuri, 2000 There has been an overall misunderstanding that Husain’s output of the female nude—repetitive and insistent as it is—spells eroticism. The female figures have suffered, rather, from losing the typological acuity they, with due wit and conviction, once featured: a rough ugliness and great vivacity to notate precisely both beauty and sexuality. It is a tribute to his irrepressible creativity that Husain resurrects himself; his flagging oeuvre peaked in an extraordinary burst of ‘genius’ through the cinematic venture in the late 1990s through 2000 release of his ‘epic’ feature, Gaja Gamini was released.6 [Storyboard of Gaja Gamini] He also found a location for the hitherto suppressed erotic and gained the gumption to celebrate a surplus of desire in his adventure with : the filmic apsara as belated muse. Indeed she becomes a redeeming culmination of all the real and ersatz enchantresses he has created in his life, whether in the name of Woman (a vexed category in any feminist reading) or Goddess (so called by the careless addition of lakshanas, graphic danglers on the stereotypical figure). At one level, this frankly erotic exposition seemed to get public sanction—or so Husain

5Named paintings include Karbala, Last Supper in Blue, Mahabharata, again. 6 Gaja Gamini was followed by a very different full-length film, Meenaxi: a tale of three cities (2004), .

9 might have believed—by its Bollywoodization; a sanction that he had earlier sought (and gained) from the well-established modernist pact with nudity, as also, simultaneously, with the erotic in classical Indian art. The popular, always lurking in Husain’s preferred ambience, had dipped to sexually depleted kitsch in the phase before Madhuri appeared in the picture; now, with her collaboration, starting in the mid-1990s, he was once again ecstatic, no matter that there is a dose of excess that must be thrown into the final evaluation. I want to introduce Madhuri into the Husain discourse from the other end of the spectrum where she is so obsessively identified with Nisha in the Hum Aapke Hain Kaun? syndrome. Husain made a literal example of the artist–muse collaboration by turning Madhuri into Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. They go to Paris where, lavishing professional care on make-up and costuming, he takes her to the Louvre and asks her to glide through the halls until she reaches the hallowed spot of the masterpiece and stands posing beside a marble pillar, looking for all the world like a ghosted double of La Gioconda (the Florentine model for Mona Lisa). Quite independent of her role in his Gaja Gamini, Madhuri is inducted by Husain into an act of vagrancy in the palatial precincts of the Louvre—the veritable temple of art. Sensational masquerade, risky escapade, naïve daring—this is a performative coup supported by a series of still photographs where Madhuri, dressed like Mona Lisa in smoky blacks, mystifies onlookers in the streets of Paris. [Madhuri as Gaja Gamini and as Mona Lisa in Paris] Even more delightful is the suite of pictures where Madhuri is indeed the Maharashtrian dancer- nymph (with her backless choli and black-and-gold nine-yard sari draped around and between her buttocks and tucked in at the waist), peering into the vitrine that holds the little ballet dancer by Degas, or traipsing on the Champs Élysées and under the Arc de Triomphe, or sipping coffee at a roadside café.7 This suite of photographs is underwritten by another that confirms the heroically surviving modernist in Husain and which makes his relationship to the muse not so dated after all: Husain follows Madhuri about in Paris with a camera and then the two of them are followed by a photographer where Madhuri becomes herself, a diva. Husain, always a film buff, knows his world cinema, and he brings to his feature film not just that excess of kitsch for which it is branded a failure but a crazy avantgardism that bids high and (perhaps) fails in pulling off the surreal narrative in all its absurdity. There is breathtaking ambition in the film and a sumptuousness of art direction in the mise-en-scène that is as, and more, varied and elaborate as the sets crafted by artists any time anywhere in the world—including Chagall! This modernist angle on Gaja Gamini—which makes it an auteur rather than a genre film, and an experimental

7 Large colour photographs of Madhuri in Paris; a book, and a short film, The Genesis of Gaja Gamini.

10 rather than a kitsch spectacle—is important for the way it tilts the measure of its success and failure on the scale of aesthetics. It is important also because it puts the romance, seduction and frankly erotic manifestation of the Husain dream in more than one context. As much as Husain seemingly enters Bollywood via Madhuri (and all the other major stars, the reputed cinematographer, music and dance composers), he re-enters modernism; indeed he touches on the avantgarde’s fatal attraction for fetishistic (here scopophilic) allure, and for the tabooed erotic— such as Fellini reveals, Bunuel encodes and Godard deconstructs. Although Madhuri provides Husain amazing possibilities for a diversified, and intensified, erotic to emerge, the very Bollywoodization of the artist undoes the compact he had sustained for decades—with the gods, and with the nation. Or is it the other way round? The public earlier shied away from attacking uninterpretable motifs within ‘modern art’ and allowed them their own (isolated) claim to national space; now it feels free to opine and intervene. This is the level playing field that however the public commands—and it is as jealously guarded as the elite realm of modern art always under attack from various subaltern positions. The iconicity produced within the popular is as, or even more, proscribed: it sets up a regime that the male supplicant must follow as he enters into a state of adoration before the fetishized star—ending up with a protectionist mentality, inevitable closure and bitter envy of perceived opponents. Husain’s transgression, then, is unbearable because he is a Muslim, because he is a modern artist, because he is an old man, and because he is in the fray—the artist-genius and the dhak-dhak girl, imagine! (Blank) If Husain’s ‘flirtation’ with Madhuri was translated by the spectators into a retroactive reading of his already displayed repertoire of drawn and painted goddesses, it is not surprising, considering that in Indian popular culture stars and gods have an interchangeability in terms of iconic status. And both are offered adoration by the Indian public: adoration for the icon as such and the extreme form of reification that results from this. We have, then, distortions endemic to the iconophilic imagination, indeed to the scopophilic obsession that cathects desire on to the female body and then recoils on account of its supposed defilement. Madhuri Dixit, a brahmin beauty from Maharashtra, can be at the locus of this bad faith, but hardly the pure and abject Sita, already victimized by the demonized ‘alien’ in the popular imagination, nor the terrifyingly erotic and all-conquering Durga whom not even the demon, leave alone a Husain, can quell! While the Hindutva brigades wage a bitter battle against Husain’s right to be, and bestow and celebrate iconicity—in life and in art—a peculiar complicity (or is it abject confusion?) comes to light: between the overwhelming iconophilia in Indian visual culture, and the impulse towards a more recent, retaliatory ‘iconoclasm’ conducted in bewilderment against the changing,

11 threatening body of the ‘other’—a category so volatile that it will cover a Muslim today and a Christian or a or a woman tomorrow. Whether we should give this the name of iconoclasm is of course questionable, considering that there is neither a viable theology nor a commensurate aesthetic and certainly no radical praxis produced by this iconoclasm. Meanwhile, the attack by Hindutva forces on grounds of Husain’s personalized, and intimate, rendering of Hindu gods and goddesses continues to be met by quoting precisely the famously erotic iconography of Indian art. Everyone, including the more progressive judges (the judgement of the High Court Delhi delivered by Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul) foregrounds this as a tactical alibi in his defence. The antagonists then cast the issue as between Hindu/Indian iconography and Muslim iconoclasm, and the illegitimate license acquired by Husain to negotiate these. There is thus an impasse, which is precisely the trouble with iconicity—its Janus-faced address: affirmative and abusive at the same time. To conclude: at the same time as Husain assumes the mantle of ‘representing the people’, his self-representation takes from a statist to a populist turn—both representations far exceeding the status, in this regard, of his contemporaries. The attacks on Husain since 1996 are directly linked with the rightwing ascendancy of the urban middle class, but they feed on the Husain legend, his public ‘investiture’, and his star status, producing rampant resentment almost equally as religious outrage. Thus, with every turn in his long career, his unique status invokes nothing less than an ideological reaction corresponding to the particular cultural/political conjuncture in place. The most definitive of these have driven him into exile.

On Exile As Husain’s journey across and beyond the nation enters into the labyrinthine passage of exile, we must quicken our own step and unravel it ahead of him: as much in solidarity as to understand the trope of exile in its tragic, as also its political and discursive dimensions. The symbolic significance of the man and his art is to be retrospectively understood and inscribed in history. (Husain potrait with this text.] In 1993, Husain threw that strangely fateful challenge: ‘Let history cut across me without me.’ Husain faces multiple forms of exile and I now profile them, one by one. (Blank) Exile’s first profile. Embedded in the cluster of modernist myths with which I began this essay, exile is already a condition rather than a circumstance for modernity’s self-referring individual. Twentieth-century discourse around exile incorporates the profiles of many émigré poets and artists alienated or expelled from their countries. The theme of the diaspora (in the original sense of the term) leads to a sense of being marked, of producing loss and mourning. At

12 the same time, an exiled artist is seen to radiate a sense of self, an emanation of solitude, crucial to the creative soul. Remember how the eminently reasonable Raymond Williams saw exile as a key trope of modernity—the state of exile as an inspirational mode. Exile’s second profile. The meaning of existential markers is of course historically contingent. In the colonial and late colonial era, exile meant slavery, indentured labour, as well as the setting up of revolutionary communities and transitional governments-in-waiting elsewhere in the world. Today, the postcolonial and globalized economies of the contemporary world open up an unrealized spatial dimension. International careers are launched by accelerated mobility; at the same time, there are multitudinous movements that include forced and voluntary migration, troubled citizenship and a human rights discourse. Edward Said theorizes the meaning of exile in the postcolonial phase within the terms of global conflict, yet assigns it a transcendent status. To extrapolate, his argument suggests an equation between modernity, exile and the secular: the one who lives in exile becomes a secular citizen in the expanded sense of that term, exercising uncompromised understanding of ethical issues arising from the core of expropriated territories and peoples. While he wears the aura of uniqueness bequeathed by modernist myths, Husain is stereotypically a postcolonial artist and his exile carries the entire burden of the citizenship/community discourse in India. But here is a paradox. In post-independence India, Husain’s visible identity as a Muslim figured emblematically but was not overplayed, since the secular was simply a taken-for-granted for all modern artists. Now, sixty years hence, even as he (so admirably) refuses to play the opposite role of an embittered Muslim or national martyr, he must rely on the modern artist’s sense of singularity to salvage himself. Retaining the badge of sovereignty whereby he may transcend the identity issue, Husain’s journey comes full circle along the modernity circuit and sets the stage for his apotheosis as an exile. With the concept of exile derived from the double discourses of the modern and the postcolonial, I hope to obtain a radical identity for Husain. The figure he cuts, however, is a rhetorical one: ‘the most distinguished Indian artist’ who is no longer ‘properly’ national nor yet global, not properly modernist nor decisively contemporary, neither heroic nor liminal. Yet looming against the conscience of this nation with the grandeur of a Shakespearean ghost. Husain’s exile is a personal tragedy and a national shame. It is the exile of a modern artist, of a secular artist and, more explicitly, a Muslim citizen-artist from secular India. Relayed into each other, these aspects condense into a logic whereby it is precisely as a secularist that Husain is named provocateur. The cynics will be more careless and say it’s all over anyway:

13 frolicking gods, civilizational arcadias and the secular tea party—also the carnival of bohemian life, and the libertarian figure of the modern artist as genius…. Exile’s third profile. The ongoing process of deconstruction is relentless. It digs up the very category of the artist as auteur and, relatedly, of sovereignty and exile, of hermeneutic doubt and the vanguard promise—thus upturning the very premise of modernism. The ludic masquerade of the modernist artist, the productive obscurities of the object, the encoding of value and the symbolic defiance of commodification in the ineffable realm of the aesthetic may still be passionately upheld in the discipline of art history; but social and cultural theory is wary of art, and even more of artists believed to be suffering from an omnipotence that appears almost comic after the passing away of modernism. Husain, like legions of artists in the hyperbolic mode, is then in the process of being periodized—and sent into exile within (and without) the domain of art history! But rejection by cultural theorists prefigures some preferences as well: for a more ramified form of culture that is placed over and against art, and, within that ramified field, for popular genres in so far as these are considered expressions (and extensions) of desire in the populace that goes unrepresented by ‘high’ art: recall that Husain traverses the space between the two poles (apropos his affair with Bombay cinema) and merits interest from the verso version of high art; but also that he tried a ‘give-and-take’ between the play of subjectivity and cultural plenitude, between the poetics of a first-person account and epic allegory. Husain’s purported failure must still be plotted with due historicism. Exile’s fourth profile. Husain began to be hounded by rightwing in the mid- 1990s. Perceived as transgressive in the context of revived ethno-religious conflict, Husain can be seen to have fallen through the trap-door of two cunningly erected stations within the Hindu zeitgeist: good Muslim, bad Muslim.( Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror) His ‘fall’ leaves the secular artist-citizen in India in limbo, especially as he provided a wholly partisan representational ambition: he answered the call of the Indian nation, the Indian state, the national bourgeoisie, the Indian people—and, of his own initiative, he acted like a mascot for modern art and for modern Indian artists in the country at large. Overdetermined in favour of the nation as this project was, and in favour of the people within a populist discourse of ‘belonging’, the matter now hangs in the balance on the opposite end of the scale: of exile. That today the situation stands inverted requires that we understand the contemporary cultural conjuncture. We can easily name the chicanery of the Indian state (and the Congress government) in addressing the issues inscribed in the constitution as citizen’s privileges. We can protest the degradation of public debate, now frequently highjacked by media extravagance and

14 rightwing goons undertaking direct action for alleged offences against religions. But we also have to recognize how the discourse of law, civil society and the public sphere—on which grounds the secular community of artists and intellectuals express their outrage on behalf of Husain—has changed in response to the heterogeneity of interests seeking representation within a volatile democracy; specifically, how the composition of the public sphere has been deformed by the pressurizing tactics of politicized religions which, however we may abhor them, count on the political privilege of citizens’ rights, downgraded to the common denominator of hurt sentiments. Meanwhile, there has also been a change in the discourse of the artist-(as)-citizen from the radical end of public discourse. The place offered in post-independence India to the artist- citizen first began to be turned around during the years of the 1960s and 70s; the political disaffection put in place by the Emergency saw the emergence of the artist-(as)- interlocutor. The rightwing swing in Indian politics during the 1990s made the othering process at work in the polity fully visible to the more radical intelligentsia, as it also made visible the alienation of the minorities and whose political struggles echoed through and beyond the public sphere. The artist-interlocutor now undertook to investigate the faultlines within civil society structures, as well as to address the conditions of life that fall outside the protocols of governance. Husain is decidedly out of step with the premise of such criticality. His bravura-style modernism and his preference for a pageantry of gods and humans— where he draws on Indic as well as other civilizational panoramas with the help of recognizable iconographies—only go so far as to make him a playful protagonist in a benign humanist quest. Not ironical or critical, certainly not an interlocutor, he was already in the 1970s (especially during the Emergency) seen to be anachronistic, complicit and compromised. The rise and fall of Husain is related to the rise and fall of modernist myths: of existential autonomy and subjective desires, of eroticized flamboyance, signature and style. Also to the rise and fall of progressivist ideologies, secular commitments and the frank statism that accompanied the process of decolonization. Today is the time for diversified caste and class, ethnic and religious collectivities to claim political rights in one of the most volatile democracies in the world. And if fundamentalism is part of the process of reclamation of real or perceived wrongs, the secularist agenda is destined to be tragically relativized. Exile’s fifth profile. Indicted in numerous provincial courts across India, Husain has been symbolically disenfranchised on account of ‘crimes’ committed not so much as an artist but as a minoritarian citizen: a Muslim. We know that he stands accused before the rightwing and the largely conservative middle class by a designed strategy of the Hindutva ideologues. What we

15 have to reckon with further is that he is subject to a mix of solicitations/interrogations by intellectuals constrained to correct the (purportedly false) assumptions on which the secular charter of the nation was drafted—a charter that encouraged, or forced, the citizen to occlude aspects of caste, ethnic and religious identity. This discourse corners Husain into assuming— recoiling into—his Muslim identity. Antagonists as well as protagonists make it almost mandatory that he publicly embrace Islam and its metaphysics, endorse a sectarian identity, and valorize the Islamicate legacy by identifying with the Arab civilization. Thus, not only his secular but also his sovereign status in the embrace of modernity is denied. As it is, given Husain’s present (permanent?) domicile in the ersatz city-state of Dubai (with patrons in Doha and potentially in Abu Dhabi), his sovereign status can only operate in default mode: he accepts the largesse of the sheikhs and sheikhas ruling the Emirates who are generous and progressive without being democratic, and who will remain innocent of the complexities of the man and the artist they patronize: this postcolonial modern artist of a democratic nation to which he tried to give, in the moment of its birth, a pictorial language adequate to its ideal of a secular republic—and failed. There is an impasse when the failed romance of such terms of belonging as civilization and nation come to be compounded by a rejection also of the terms of unbelonging that the individual courted via modernity’s universalizing project. In India, and elsewhere in the decolonized and postcolonial world, these were sought to be combined in a quartet (civilization/ national; individual/universal) on the ground of the modern–secular nation—which makes the proposition all the more heroic even as it makes it more vulnerable. And finally, the empirical aspect of Husain’s exile. Always a peripatetic figure, his canny manoeuvres have allowed him a new life in Dubai/London since he turned 90. Husain has called forth his large family to the Emirates, and he lives and paints hastily, exuberantly, in a dozen homes and studios spread across the desert kingdoms. He picks up new assignments, some of them curatorially high-profile. But he is mostly assimilated within the global diaspora of Indians where he partakes of their alienated abundance, attenuated lifestyle and compensatory jouissance, Rolls, Bentley, Jaguar and all! The global now reveals unhomely spaces and, within these, the spectral existence of contemporary artists. Should we now count Husain among the diaspora artists; does the title fit the man? Only those who know Husain understand that he is aching to come home, his itinerant imagination has always returned to this land with almost the naïve trust of a fakir in the generosity of the common person. Perhaps his longing may want to embrace—not the last dream

16 of success, of which he still has plenty, but the possibility of subaltern survival back from where he once came. In actual fact, Husain’s style of survival is now desperately reified, and he has long ago buried that precious gift of doubt, uncertainty and flux that he grasped in Man way back in 1951, at the very beginning of his artistic journey. And he flagged that burial with a celebratory, even triumphal marker of individual and national survival. Neither his temperament nor his aesthetic has a way of expressing loss. Should we then exempt him from this burden? Overcoming our own guilt and sentiment—or, for that matter, our skepticism before his flamboyant manoeuvres—shall we find other ways for recounting the great irony sustained by the always affirmative, always graceful and irreversibly iconic Maqbool Fida Husain?

Geeta Kapur

17 MAQBOOL FIDA HUSAIN Man, 1950, oil , 121.3 x 243.2 cm

Jawaharlal Nehru,1964, oil, 102 x 213 cm

Khajuraho Women, 1954, pen and ink, 60 x 35.5 cm

Zameen,1955, oil, 92 x 548 cm Indian Village, 1955, oil, 101.6 x 335 cm Farmer's Family, 1960, oil, 151 x 103 cm

Between the Spider and the Lamp, 1956, oil, 96 x 48 inches

Untitled (Hanuman, the warrior), 1982, lithograph

Untitled (Mahabharata 11), 1971, oil, 178.1 x 312.4 cm

Last Supper in Red, 1991, acrylic on canvas, 213 x 487.6 cm

Gaja Gamini, collated storyboard, 2000, print Gaja Gamini, photograph of Madhuri in Paris museum, 2000 Gaja Gamini, photograph of Madhuri as Mona Lisa, 2000