The Exile of Maqbool Fida Husain
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This text is an unedited draft on the basis of which the speaker delivered a seminar, talk or lecture at the venue(s) and event(s) cited below. The title and content of each presentation varied in response to the context. There is a slide-show below that accompanies this document. If the text has been worked upon and published in the form of an essay, details about the version(s) and publication(s) are included in the section pertaining to Geeta Kapur’s published texts. Venue • Lecture: The Exile of M.F. Husain, SAHMAT, New Delhi, 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 Richard Bartholomew 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 India 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 painting, Man, 1951, may open this out. The painting is horizontal, mural-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 Nandalal Bose 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. [Jawaharlal Nehru 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 Indian art (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 paintings 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 New Delhi 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.