A Man For All Seasons

As M. F. Husain strides Barefoot Across the Nation, Sumathi Ramaswamy leads a band of writers to reflect on his shifting locations and interpret the signs of the times, discovers ABHAY SARDESAI.

M. F. Husain. Man. Oil on fibre-board. 121.3 cms x 243.2 cms. 1950. Geeta Kapur feels that the work "allegorises a theme more epic than any of his other works dealing demonstrably with epics and myths, civilization and history".

No other artist epitomises the multistation journey of modern India over the last sixty years as formidably and forbiddingly as M. F. Husain - celebrated and pilloried in equal measure, he has risen from humble origins to become a much-envied and much-reviled icon; he has been the unembarrassed darling of the market, explored practices as diverse as painting, installation and film with protean glee, documented social and political transformations with compelling commitment; and in the last years of his life, has become the most notorious exile from being a famous son of the soil. Contradictions that attend our national life have inflected his life and career overwhelmingly and movingly.

Barefoot Across the Nation, edited by Sumathi Ramaswamy, is an impressive attempt at examining the vicissitudes that made his life a wild roller-coaster ride; the essays in the book chart the crests and troughs that incontrovertibly altered the nation's character and profile, impacting his shifting fortunes over the last couple of decades.

M. F. Husain. Bhishma. Lithograph. 44.5 cms x 60.9 cms. 1983.

In the opening essay, Geeta Kapur elaborates with a commanding sweep on the multi-planar interplay of contexts - modernist, national and iconographic, amongst others, to critically situate Husain's presence, productions and projections. From his appropriation of archetypal imageries in the '50s to their abandonment in the late '60s, and from his project of skimming religious epics like the Ramayana (1968) and the Mahabharata (1971) for heroes and heroines to what one may call his Madhuri Project in the 2000s, Kapur limns a picture which shows a rupture in the '70s, when "Husain resorted so early in his career.to a pastiche of his own vivid corpus". With a tone that is both firm and empathic, she deciphers the myths of modernism keeping an eye out for the mythologies of the artist. The last section of the essay, written with much feeling, describes around eight "profiles of exile" - from that suffered in the throes of alienation in a home away from home to that experienced as a result of being targeted by a manufactured bogus 'national' hurt. Many of these categories collapse into each other or are at least co-terminous - one wonders therefore why they had to be awarded distinct stations. In fact, one wishes Kapur had dwelled a little more on the loss described in the last profile - one that was born out of Husain's expansive "sufiyana disposition" that allowed him to want to re-inhabit "the memory of subaltern survival".

David Gilmartin and Barbara D. Metcalf parse the Delhi High Court judgment of 2008 which offered a defence of Husain's paintings - the implicit premise on which Justice Kaul presented his verdict, however, does disservice to the civilisational enthusiasm that Husain embodies, foregrounding essentialised identitarian expectations, they contend. In her essay, Karin Zitzewitz examines some of the arguments levelled against Husain by the members of the Hindu Right in the light of the "modernist idiom of citizenship", while Ananya Jahanara Kabir sifts through Husain's words (as against his images) to reflect on, among other things, the crisis that attends a Muslim "iconophiliac's" acts of belonging in post-Partition India that has moulted its Nehruvian skin.

Questioning the assumptions implicit in the Supreme Court judgment of 2008, which formally recognised Bharat Mata (2005) as a work of art, Tapati Guha-Thakurta looks at the compulsions that make an artist like Husain turn his back on the work's modernist antecedents and insist on his art being "part of India's 5000 year old culture". She examines the politics of viewing a work of art as a religious object and assesses how this politics gets impacted and in turn influences a transforming public sphere. Kajri Jain elaborates on the dynamics of affront - acts that generate community outrage and spark off a series of self-righteous countermaneouvres - as Veena Das reflects on zones of an individual's or a community's 'self ' that allow or disallow images to be constituted as prurient or non-prurient, profane or profound. Sumathi Ramaswamy assesses the act of organizing the cartographic space while depicting Mother India - referring to Husain's Bharat Mata (2005) and other pictorial versions of the nation, she unpacks the assumptions behind diverse representations, many of which take possession of the national form in the spirit of "barefoot cartography" - the intimate, playful and oftenanthropomorphised conjuration of its geo-body.