The Painter of Signs

India Today

24-07-2025

Earlier this year, I went to watch the film Emergency, directed and produced by, and also starring, Kangana Ranaut. It was expectedly strange, given the lead actress's reputation as a spiky cheerleader for the ruling dispensation and the fact that the film was focused on the Emergency of 1975-77, an infamous experiment with dictatorship by the previous party of government, under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.advertisementRanaut inhabited her role as the former prime minister with an entertaining, slightly unhinged zeal, revelling in the melodrama of the late strongwoman's inner struggles with the powerful impulses of megalomania and, well, motherhood. In one memorable scene, she faces herself, framed in a mirror, and sees the portrait of a churail, her flesh corrupted by the contagion of narcissism and nepotism. It's an unintentionally hilarious masterclass in cringe, simultaneously channelling The Picture of Dorian Gray and the Ramsay Brothers.Yet, this wasn't what I had come to see. Nor was it the scene of the Lok Sabha breaking into a song-and-dance routine, like a chorus line in khadi. Or even Ranaut's extravagantly prosthetic Indira-nose, a character in its own right. No, I was drawn to the Odeon cinema in the hope that the actor-director would not be able to resist a set-piece depicting the notorious incident on July 24, 1975, not long after Emergency had been declared, when the famous artist, and sometime Indira sycophant, the late MF Husain, demonstrated his admiration for the prime minister by presenting her with a triptych of paintings portraying her as a goddess. Three goddesses, actually. I was not disappointed.
Ranaut stages the scene with Mrs G facing a single faux-Husain painting. 'The Prime Minister has been depicted as the goddess of power,' the Husain character explains. But unlike the naked goddesses of the original canvases, the tiger-straddling deity in Emergency sports a robust choli.
Screenshot from Emergency (2025)
MF Husain was hounded out of India in 2006, arguably, for painting too many goddesses and not enough cholis. And he died in 'self-imposed' exile in 2011. But his cameo appearance (played by Balkrishna Mishra), in Emergency was no flash in the pan. Of late, he has returned to India's shores, or at least India's eyeballs, in a number of uncanny avatars.Since 2023, an interactive AI-powered hologram of the artist, trained to respond to questions using every known utterance he left, as a dataset, has been drawing crowds to Abhishek Poddar's MAP in Bengaluru.
Interactive Husain hologram in Bengaluru (Photo: MAP)
Last year, in Venice, a similarly technologised 'immersive' multimedia experience, based on Husain's life and work was premiered by Kiran Nadar's KNMA.
The Rooted Nomad Husain immersive experience (Photo: KNMA)
Meanwhile, his art has been back in the headlines for more familiar reasons: In January this year, two drawings by the artist, on display in Delhi, were placed in judicial custody when an advocate (whose Twitter bio proclaims 'will pursue legal action against anyone who insults Sanatan Dharma') alleged that her religious sentiments had been hurt.In March, Husain reclaimed pole position in auctions of modern Indian art when an untitled canvas he had painted in 1954 went for 13.75 million dollars (about Rs 118 crore, nearly twice the price of the previous titleholder, a painting by Amrita Sher-Gil). And in June, another auction saw the sale, for around Rs 70 crore, of a series of 21 Husains that had languished in receivership since 2002.This was, apparently, after the artist, piqued that a rival's painting had outsold him, devised a botched scheme to raise the price of his artwork 'by funding part of the advance money' to the 'buyer' (so Kishore Singh in The Indian Express).advertisementGiven such tales of the painter's financial shenanigans, it seemed deliciously appropriate that he made another peek-a-boo appearance in the media a week later, in a viral YouTube interview with the fugitive Indian 'liquor baron' Vijay Mallya. Although the once flamboyant tycoon never said a word about the artist, throughout the four-hour-long conversation in his London hideaway, he was carefully framed against the backdrop of what looked like an expansive and colourful Husain canvas.
A Husain as the backdrop for Vijay Mallya's interview with Raj Shamani? (Screenshot: YouTube)
MF Husain really should have been there for the Ambani wedding last year. I realise, of course, that he would have been an unlikely 108-going on-109, had he lived to grace this already surreal occasion. But in my defence, it was a bizarre coincidence that first provoked this hallucination.advertisementOn July 12, 2024, as the internet was strobing with images of dazzling ostentation beamed out of the Jio World Convention Centre, the news cycle cut abruptly to a homely minister, gravely announcing that June 25 would henceforth be Samvidhan Hathya Divas. Or National Dark Days of Emergency Day. I took it as another sign of Husain's lingering presence in the national ether.I still think the Ambani's bacchanal in Mumbai would have made a fine subject for one of Husain's more grandiose canvases.
Husain with his painting 'Last Supper' (2004)(Photo: AFP)
We know he was given to obscure and whimsical allegories of the high tables of power and celebrity, where he had certainly earned his own well-upholstered seat. It's so easy to imagine him both painting, and posing for, the pictures that streamed from the innermost circles of the Bandra Kurla Complex.He should certainly have been there when Madhuri Dixit busted her moves to Choli Ke Peeche. Sadly, she did not attempt the tribhanga mataks of Didi Tera Devar Deewana, the number that famously slew our artist, back in 1994.
Madhuri Dixit dancing to Choli Ke Peeche at the Ambani wedding (Screenshot from Bollywood Buzz Now/Instagram)
advertisementHusain loved big fat Indian weddings. He claimed to have watched Hum Aapke Hain Kaun 85 times. He painted wedding cards for his beloved children and grandchildren, and his friends. The documentary Kekee Manzil contains a genuinely touching account of his post-Emergency reconciliation with the anti-Indira Gandhi Gandhys of Gallery Chemould, when he turned up at a family wedding and literally painted his way back into their hearts.There are so very many stories about Husain, and perhaps just as many Husain paintings. Of late, I've been collecting some of the things that have been written about his art. One passage from a business magazine is a particular treasure of unintended irony: 'His canvases showed common life—a Mohun Bagan football match in Kolkata, the allure of Dixit's curvaceous figure, Indira Gandhi's take-no-prisoners approach in the Emergency era'Did I mention the Emergency? The truth is that my earliest perceptions of MF Husain were shaped by his reputation as the fawning court painter of this period. I was just a child at the time, but even in that internet-less era, I was aware of the painter's celebrity, his gimmickry and gimcrackery—the speed-painting, the painting over paintings, the painting on live animals.I'm sure I was aware that Husains were very expensive too. These were all elements of what we called 'Modern Art' back then, and MFH was the emblematic modern artist, often parodied in the affectionately resentful cartoons of Mario Miranda, Sudhir Dhar and others, where hairy bohemians passed off distressed canvases as high-priced works of staggering genius. Much as I loved these gags, I wasn't a total philistine.
Husain-ish artists in a cartoon by Sudhir Dhar (L) and a comic strip from Deewana magazine (R)
Indeed, during the Emergency years, I was sent to take oil painting lessons at Delhi's Triveni Kala Sangam, where we were instructed by the rising artist Rameshwar Broota. His paintings were full of sinister apes—an anguished metaphor for the nation, I presumed. And he carried himself like he was the next Husain, leaving the tedium of instruction to his wife, Shobha. An accomplished painter herself, she had a pleasingly sardonic manner and would stamp her authority on the class by pointing wryly at the stern slogan on a government-issue DAVP sign directly above her head. 'Work More, Talk Less,' it said.Meanwhile, perched in a barsati in another part of town, Husain was working, with characteristic energy, to ingratiate himself with Mrs Gandhi. On July 24, 1975, he was photographed posing with her as he unveiled the infamous triptych of three goddesses manifesting 'The Triumph of Good over Evil'.In sketches for an accompanying pamphlet bearing the same title, he spelt out the meaning of each deity in excruciating detail: Janaki, faced by 'accusing fingers' for 'Twelfth June' (the day of the Allahabad Court judgement against Indira Gandhi), 'Mother Earth'—really a cartographic Mother India—with 'her hair thrown over the Himalayas' for 'Twenty Fourth June' (the day the Supreme Court upheld the ruling), and Durga, with 'the paws of her tiger clinched' (sic) for 'Twenty-sixth June', the day the Emergency was publicly announced.This hand-drawn pamphlet (or Maquette for Triumph of Good Over Evil Catalogue, as it was titled at auction) is presumably an object of some value today. As it should be. It's a historically significant artefact that demonstrates the virtuosity and skill of an important artist.Despite the very dodgy politics, there's no mistaking Husain's distinctive hand in the sly and attractive cover motif, which manages to suggest the trinity of Indira, India, and Bharat Mata with remarkable economy.Meanwhile, the 'geometrical analysis' of the paintings within its pages, reveal his attention to the kinetic architecture of each image. Reduced here, to its skeletal axis, the notorious Durga recalls the doomed angular visions of those early Soviet artists, the Constructivists and Supremacists, whose totalitarian flirtations have long been forgiven by the art market.
Pages from Husain's Maquette for Triumph of Good Over Evil catalogue (1975) (Photos: Christie's)
But the pamphlet is also valuable, or should be, as a document of Husain's pusillanimous opportunism and vanity. Two of the pages here display a frame, left blank, for An Appreciation of MF Husain, awaiting the genuflections of an 'S. Chowdhry'.This was presumably filmmaker Sati P Chowdhury, director of the hagiographic Films Division documentary on Husain, A Painter of Our Time (1976). But even Chowdhury's hosannas pale before the astonishing mawkishness and self-regard with which Husain describes his own creative process in the pamphlet. It peaks in a flush of such page-curling awfulness that one can only conclude he had been reading Irving Stone's torrid Michelangelo novel, The Agony and the Ecstasy, for inspiration. 'The painter from deep inside the weave of the canvas begins to paint in agony,' Husain writes of himself. 'And in one day, the surging charging lava of events is poured out. A violent fracture indeed. The paintings are torn from a living body as three big chunks of flesh.'Today, some 50 years after those events, it may seem churlish to hold Husain—or his ghosts—to account for such trespasses. Given the many turns of fortune in his long life, particularly the cruelty of his second cancelling and persecution at the hands of Hindutvist vigilantes when he was in his 80s and 90s, and his final years in gilded exile, the late painter has acquired an aura of beatitude and restraint.Last year, I attended the flashy event where his life and art were presented in the KNMA's audiovisual 'immersive experience', not unlike the Van Gogh extravaganzas that have been touring the globe in recent years. Emerging, a little disoriented, from the churning tunnel of projected colour and sound, I felt a nagging question forming, persistent as a smudge of lint: was Husain being tumble-washed for a posthumous return to another take-no-prisoners India, or had he himself become some sort of reputational formula for the curatorial class?One of the defining features of Husain's art is its ambiguity. His paintings are insistently referential, and yet somehow evasive—both inviting interpretation and eluding it. In a Festschrift published as the artist turned 95 in 2010, the historian of religion, Bruce B Lawrence eulogised his (then) recent work Last Supper in Red Desert, a painting Husain had produced for his new patron, Sheikha Mozah of Qatar.The canvas, which features four enigmatic characters at a long table, along with a camel and an assortment of cherubs and imps, also plainly references an earlier pair of Last Supper paintings by him. Lawrence himself was transfixed by a gold-lettered 'storyboard' Husain had attached to the new work. This read: "In Lenardo [sic] Da Vinci's 'LAST SUPPER' Europe may be heavily CODED, Yet Arabia in my 'Last Supper of the Desert in Red' remains UNCODED."Husain's gnomic hints leave Professor Lawrence invoking the Sufi mystic Rumi, but it never seems to occur to him to consider that the artist might be low-brow enough to make a heavy-handed allusion to Dan Brown's pulp bestseller, The Da Vinci Code (Actually, Husain had good reason to feel some affinity for the novel, the film version of which had been banned by several Indian states in 2006).Some of Husain's more famous paintings, Between the Spider and the Lamp (1956), for example, have provoked more fervid speculation from the cognoscenti. Is the spider dangling from a thread or being skewered? One noted critic speculates on a 'coded connection' between 'the dancing spider and the bare pudenda' of the young woman on the right side of the picture. Another suggests that the lamp is phallic, yet another that it is the flame that represents the female sex. Husain himself expressed his happiness that 'there is a kind of mystery about what the five women are talking about,' in this painting. 'Stories perhaps even unknown to themselves.' Maybe they're talking of Michelangelo.In one interview, Husain selects The Spider and the Lamp as his Guernica. Pablo Picasso's most famous work was, of course, an enduring reference in Husain's art, and its reception. He also told his biographer, Ila Pal, that another work, the installation Theatre of the Absurd (1989), was his Guernica. Pal, for her part, describes the fevered days he spent in Paris, creating a series of Mahabharata paintings, in anticipation of an encounter with Picasso in 1971, as Husain's attempt 'to produce a masterpiece that would be a match for Guernica.'A Christies catalogue draws the same parallel. The collector Kent Charugundla, makes his own claim for the massive 12-panelled hoarding, Lightning, a propagandist work produced by Husain for the Congress party in 1975. The panels are festooned with a stampede of Husain's famous horses, and symbols of Indira Gandhi's own vision of a Viksit Bharat (atomic energy and the Family Planning triangle), but Charugundla describes this work as 'being for India, what Guernica is for Spain.'
Husain's 'Lightning' (1975)
Lightning actually looks to me like Husain trying to channel Franz Marc's horses, while The Spider and the Lamp seems more of a response to the Demoiselles d'Avignon.
Husain's 'Between The Spider And The Lamp' (1956) recalls Picasso's 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon' (1907) (Right image: AFP)
But I can see the central dying horse of Guernica in the screaming black steeds of Husain's Karbala (1990). And inevitably, Guernica is present at his Waterloo too. In that precious pamphlet on the 1975 triptych, 'torn from his living body', he finds the purplest of parallels: 'the fracture of forces on a vast canvas. Guernica: that created history and gave birth to Picasso."
Husain's Karbala (1990) (Photo: KNMA)
Husain was the author of many legends surrounding the birth of his own genius. Perhaps the most appealing of these is the story that he became an artist at the moment of Indian independence. 'On that night, I decided I would commit myself to the art world in a big way,' he once said. Midnight's painter, as it were. This fable would acquire a tragic portentousness decades later, when, harried by religious fanatics, he became a strange, painterly mirror for the fatwa-occluded figure of Salman Rushdie. But along the way, Husain built a reputation as a national painter, or as the critic Geeta Kapur puts it, with what I think are mixed feelings, as a 'self-elected modern-day sutradhar for the nation.' In that sense too, he seems, uncannily, to foreshadow Saleem Sinai, the protagonist of Midnight's Children.In untangling my own mixed feelings about Husain, I am confronted by my nostalgia for the nation he painted and painted for. And I do have my own sentimental answer to Kapur's famous question 'When was Modernism in Indian Art?'. For me, modernism was the time when Husain was 'our Picasso': the Number 1 import-substitution modern artist. It was the time of Scandi-desi teak furniture by Ravi Sikri and Mini Boga, of Riten Mozumdar's bindu bedspreads, and the sarkari brutalism of Shivnath Prasad and Mahendra Raj. That time of Kolhapuri chappals and desperately seeking denims. Somewhere in this eddy of cosmopolitan consumerist aspirations and Handloom House virtue-signalling, of bourgeoiserie with Gandhian characteristics, were the modernist Indian aesthetics that settled in, and shaped people like me.We all know how those days would end, of course. And what would follow. But with the distance of five decades, even the Emergency becomes an artefact of nostalgia. Our own, shabby knockoff import-substitution experiment with dictatorship.As it happens, some time ago, I was a tenant in the building in Delhi's Jangpura Extension, where Husain once rented a barsati. There was a house designed by Shivnath Prasad two doors to the left and the sculptor Amar Nath Sahgal's home on the right. I heard tales about how, back in the day, Husain would cross over the naala to visit his friend Gaitonde in neighbouring Nizamuddin, and cross Mathura Road to see Krishen Khanna in Jangpura B.His pal Ram Kumar was on the Bhogal side, I'd been told. Occasionally, junk mail aerograms addressed to Husain would arrive at my door, and I would collect them. Our landlady told me stories about him with some affection, and a pride I came to share—in a very house-proud, Dilliwala way. She told me that he had painted the 1975 Indira-as-Durga right here. More recently, watching the 1976 Sati Chowdhury Films Division film on Husain, my growing irritation at the ponderously flattering voiceover was interrupted by delight, as I stumbled on footage of Husain enjoying the view from the barsati above my old balcony.
Husain, on the left, in his Jangpura barsati. A screenshot from the Films Division documentary A Painter Of Our Time (1976)
As you can see, I still like to show off my proximity to the national artist—we were virtually flatmates, after all. But the scene from A Painter of our Times also reminds me of how Husain's arc as a sutradhar faded from Rushdie-esque magical realism to the treacly ubiquity of a Forrest Gump. There was an early signal of this trajectory in the celebrity globe-trottery with which he had once trumped the exilic glamour of his peers, Raza, Souza, Padamsee and Co.Back in the 50s and 60s, while they festered in European garrets, he was the barefoot jetsetter, seen now with Nehru, now with Lohia. With Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman in Rome, with Truffaut in Paris and Chairman Mao in Peking. Perhaps this Gumpian streak played a role in both his Emergency downfall and his late-career salvation, reprising civilisational panoramas for NRI steel magnates and the Sheikhs of Araby.But Husain's life was no box of chocolates, and we should not remember him only for his errors or the opulent squalor of his final years. Better to end with another of his gritty early fables. My favourite is the one about his Damascene moment in 1948, when he travelled to Delhi with his comrade FN Souza to see the Exhibition of Indian Art, a display of historic national treasures, at Government House (what is now Rashtrapati Bhavan). Husain described the exhibition, and particularly the impact of seeing ancient Gupta-era sculptures, and 'the rawness of colours' in antique Pahadi miniature paintings, as a transformative experience. It's a famous episode that is sometimes nervously compared to the encounter of an earlier generation of European painters, notably Picasso, with 'primitive' art.But I find myself held by the vision of a young Maqbool and Souza walking up to the palace of wonders at the top of Raisina Hill, and later, careening down again, drunk with visual delight. 'The exhibition left me both humbled and exhilarated,' Husain told Ila Pal. 'It was like scaling a mountain and then discovering a whole new range of mountains.' And then comes the best bit: 'We couldn't afford a hotel, and we had no friends. So we slept on the steps of the Jama Masjid.'It was early winter, and he would have been just 33 at the time. In a country that was young and hopeful too. It must have been very heaven. Today, it's hard to imagine anyone in India making a film about the life of MF Husain, though it's said that Amitabh Bachchan was once considered for the role. And who knows? Maybe Kangana Ranaut will give Husain another shot. But if he ever does get the biopic he deserves, that humble and exhilarating night on the Jama Masjid steps is a tableau that simply must be staged.- Ends(Views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author)Must Watch