{"id":247779,"date":"2025-10-24T04:58:11","date_gmt":"2025-10-24T04:58:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/247779\/"},"modified":"2025-10-24T04:58:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T04:58:11","slug":"why-indias-picasso-is-breaking-auction-records-and-enraging-the-hindu-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/247779\/","title":{"rendered":"Why \u2018India\u2019s Picasso\u2019 is breaking auction records \u2014 and enraging the Hindu right"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n For the complex legacy of M.F. Husain, one of 20th-century India\u2019s most important artists, this year has been a tale of two auctions.\n <\/p>\n

\n In March, one of the late painter\u2019s monumental depictions of rural life, the 14-foot-long \u201cUntitled (Gram Yatra),\u201d became the most expensive<\/a> modern Indian artwork ever to go under the hammer. The $13.75 million price tag almost doubled the previous record, with onlookers at Christie\u2019s in New York bursting into spontaneous applause.\n <\/p>\n

\n Three months later, an auction of 25 long-lost Husain paintings in Mumbai was far less celebratory. Police patrolled the premises<\/a> and erected barricades at the auctioneer\u2019s office after a right-wing Hindu nationalist group warned<\/a> of \u201cstrong public agitation\u201d if calls to cancel the sale \u2014 due to Husain\u2019s \u201cvulgar and obscene\u201d portrayals of sacred figures \u2014 were ignored.\n <\/p>\n

\n The auction went ahead without incident. But the contrasting moods exemplified the painter\u2019s status as one of Indian art\u2019s most celebrated but controversial names. As if to further underscore his polarized reputation, this year also saw a Delhi court order the seizure of two \u201coffensive\u201d Husain paintings, while, earlier this month, the Qatar Foundation announced plans for an entire museum<\/a> dedicated to his work (Qatar had given Husain citizenship after he fled India, in 2006, fearing for his safety).\n <\/p>\n

\"Four<\/p>\n

\n Known for bold, colorful explorations of folk and pop culture, Husain was lauded as a pioneer of Indian modernism and often dubbed \u201cIndia\u2019s Picasso.\u201d His paintings played with icons in all their forms, from Mother Teresa and Indira Gandhi to Bollywood stars and mythological figures from literary epics.\n <\/p>\n

\n The artist\u2019s portrayals of nude Hindu deities, however, stand accused of offending religious sentiments \u2014 a reaction his supporters believe is exacerbated by his Muslim heritage. As a result, his later life was dogged by protests, legal action, death threats and an arrest warrant. Despite later being exonerated by India\u2019s supreme court, he died in self-imposed exile, in London, in 2011. In its statement opposing June\u2019s Mumbai auction, right-wing group Hindu Janajagruti Samiti said that Husain \u201cdeliberately painted vulgar and obscene images of goddesses \u2026 thereby gravely hurting the sentiments of millions of Hindus in the world.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n The rekindling of old grievances, almost 15 years after his death, may be down to burgeoning interest from the global art market. But reactions to Husain\u2019s work are also a bellwether of Hindu nationalism, according to Dr. Diva Gujral, an art history fellow at the University of Oxford\u2019s Ruskin School of Art. While many of his most contentious works were produced in the 1970s, it is no coincidence that protests only erupted in 1990s, a decade when the Hindutva ideology flourished, communal tensions deepened and, Gujral said, Muslims became \u201ca lightning rod\u201d in India.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cThe reception of Husain is such a good litmus test for Indian cultural politics, because there are times when it wasn\u2019t controversial,\u201d she added, calling the reactions a \u201cway to take the temperature of the country.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

Icons past and present<\/p>\n

\n Hailing from an Indian branch of the Sulaymani Bohras, a Muslim sect residing primarily in the Arabian Peninsula, Husain was exposed to both Hindu and Islamic art from a young age.\n <\/p>\n

\n He was born in 1915 in Pandharpur, a pilgrimage town dotted with Hindu temples in western India. After his mother\u2019s death, he was sent to study Urdu and Islamic calligraphy at his grandfather\u2019s madrassa in Sidhpur<\/a>, Gujarat. Husain later lived in the city of Indore and immersed himself in folk traditions, like performances of the Hindu epic \u201cRamayana,\u201d before enrolling in art lessons at the local art institute. In 1934, he sold his first painting on a roadside for 10 rupees.\n <\/p>\n

\n His interest in iconography always stretched far beyond religion. In his early 20s, Husain moved to Mumbai to paint billboards for the nascent Hindi film industry. It would prove a formative experience \u2014 one that shaped his fascination with contemporary idols and Bollywood, as well as his penchant for vivid colors and flattened, figurative forms.\n <\/p>\n

\n Then, in 1947, came another decisive moment in the artist\u2019s life: India\u2019s independence from colonial rule and Britain\u2019s partition of the subcontinent into a Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. Partly inspired by the religious strife that ensued, the painter co-founded the Bombay Progressive Artists\u2019 Group (PAG), alongside major figures like F.N. Souza and S.H. Raza, later that year.\n <\/p>\n

\"Indian<\/p>\n

\n The avant-garde group sought to forge a new visual language of \u2014 and for \u2014 India. Rejecting revivalist nationalism, its members fused local art traditions with outside influences, especially those of European modernists like Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani and Henri Matisse (though Husain also traveled to China in the early 1950s), as they interrogated their country\u2019s emerging identity.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cIt was about creating something new, breaking with the past,\u201d said Gujra adding that the group did more than \u201csimply take\u201d from Western art. \u201cThey\u2019re reinvigorating a language that\u2019s made available to them through access to places like London and Paris. But it\u2019s very much their own thing.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\"Husain's<\/p>\n

\n For Husain, this meant a Cubist-inspired style rooted firmly in the Indian experience. It is an approach epitomized by the record-breaking \u201cUntitled (Gram Yatra),\u201d which he produced in 1954, though it went largely unseen for seven decades before going on sale at Christie\u2019s this year. The narrative painting comprises 13 vibrant vignettes, each containing a snippet of rural life. Abstracted villagers are depicted working the land, milling grain and tending to livestock. Elsewhere, a farmer symbolically reaches out of his portrait\u2019s frame to hold up a landscape in a neighboring vignette.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cIt\u2019s literally the farmer supporting the land, and supporting the state and the nation,\u201d said Nishad Avari, head of South Asian modern and contemporary art at Christie\u2019s. \u201cThis is Husain\u2019s way of saying that, while we may be modernizing, post-independence, and entering this new era, it\u2019s very important not to forget that the basis of the country is its rural folk.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Despite the public attention Husain\u2019s later work attracted, his most valuable paintings emerged during this early period, Avari said. \u201cHe\u2019s playing this critical role of defining what it is to be an Indian artist in the new country of India, and what Indian modern art really means,\u201d he added. \u201cHe\u2019s a linchpin figure in defining this moment.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n As many of Husain\u2019s contemporaries moved overseas (including Souza and Raza, who relocated to the UK and France, respectively), the painter remained in India, his eternal muse. He nonetheless enjoyed some global recognition, exhibiting in New York City in 1964 and participating in the 1971 S\u00e3o Paulo Biennial in Brazil alongside Picasso. This period also saw Husain exploring female forms, including images of Hindu goddesses like Durga and Lakshmi, sometimes in suggestive or erotic poses.\n <\/p>\n

\"Hussain<\/p>\n

\n Husain maintained that he never intended to degrade these deities. His subjects were not the goddesses themselves, but their iconography \u2014 how they appeared in temple art, sculptures and friezes. Their nudity was drawn from Indian art history, not his imagination, though the paintings were nonetheless viewed by some critics as a \u201ckind of desacralizing act,\u201d said the University of Oxford\u2019s Gujra.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cIn Hindu nationalist politics, the bogeyman is the Muslim invader who outrages the modesty of the Hindu woman,\u201d she said. \u201cFor a lot of your average Indian viewers who didn\u2019t have an enduring understanding of the nude and its art historical heritage\u2026 he becomes the Muslim disrobing the Hindu woman.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cIt reignited old ideas of the Muslim taking what isn\u2019t his,\u201d she added. \u201cBut the idea for Husain is that this heritage belongs to all of us.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n The entire 1980s passed before the paintings faced significant religious backlash. In that time, Husain was even welcomed into the political establishment as a member of the Indian parliament\u2019s upper house, the Rajya Sabha, where he served until 1992.\n <\/p>\n

\n But everything changed in the fall of 1996, when a Hindu monthly magazine, Vichar Mimansa, published the artist\u2019s nude depiction of the goddess Saraswati alongside an article headlined \u201cM.F. Husain: A Painter or Butcher.\u201d The incident led to multiple criminal complaints<\/a> against Husain, who was then aged in his early 80s, beginning a chain of events that led to his self-imposed exile.\n <\/p>\n

\"Police<\/p>\n

\n In 1998, Hindu fundamentalists attacked Husain\u2019s Mumbai home and galleries displaying his work. Eight years later, another hardline group offered a 510-million-rupee (then $11.5 million) cash reward for his murder. The protests stretched beyond India\u2019s borders, too, with London\u2019s Asia House controversially canceling an exhibition of Husain\u2019s work in 2006, citing security concerns, after Hindu groups demanded its closure and vandals defaced two of his paintings.\n <\/p>\n

\n That year, a court in Indore issued an arrest warrant for Husain. The offending image, this time, was a more recent painting that reimagined the map of India as a naked woman on her knees, city names marking her body. The artist publicly apologized for causing offense and denied giving it the name \u201cBharat Mata\u201d \u2014 or Mother India, a personification of the nation \u2014 claiming the work was untitled. This did little to appease his critics.\n <\/p>\n

\n Concerned for his safety and facing hundreds \u2014 or as he later suggested,<\/a> thousands \u2014 of legal cases, Husain left India in 2006. The Delhi High Court and, later, India\u2019s Supreme Court eventually rejected calls for Husain\u2019s summons and cleared him of obscenity charges, effectively quashing cases in other cities. In its ruling, in 2008, the Supreme Court criticized the emergence of a \u201cnew puritanism\u201d in India, stating that erotic sculptures were a common sight in Hindu temples. Yet, Husain never felt it was safe to return to the country again.\n <\/p>\n

\n His plight meanwhile became a rallying cry for supporters of Indian secularism. Novelist Salman Rushdie was among those to criticize<\/a> the Indian government for its \u201cinadequate\u201d protection of Husain and the freedom of expression he represented. \u201cViolence and its ugly sisters, both Hindu and Islamic, have to be resisted,\u201d Rushdie said at an address in Delhi in 2010. \u201cThey must be rebuffed. To appease it is the best way to ensure their growth. I am afraid India is going that way.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\"Indian<\/p>\n

\n Husain spent most of his final years in Dubai, Doha and London. Upon surrendering his Indian passport to apply for Qatari citizenship, he is reported to have said: \u201cIndia is my motherland, and I simply cannot leave that country. What I have surrendered is just a piece of paper.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n He also often spoke of his desire to return home \u2014 including to his friend Abhishek Poddar, a prominent collector and founder of Bangalore\u2019s Museum of Art & Photography, who regularly mailed Husain his favorite Indore newspaper. \u201cHis love was India, and he always missed India,\u201d said Poddar. \u201cI once said, \u2018What is it that you miss? And he said, \u2018What I really miss is the earth there. The mud.\u2019\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Husain\u2019s goddess paintings were just a fraction of his life\u2019s work. Even the most conservative estimates put his total output at 30,000 to 40,000 artworks, spanning printmaking, writing and filmmaking of both the arthouse and Bollywood variety. He was similarly prolific after leaving India: In 2007, he completed 51 paintings inspired by the Bollywood classic \u201cMughal-e-Azam,\u201d and was, at the time of his death, working on a series of 99 artworks, reflecting the 99 names of Allah, telling the history of Arab civilization.\n <\/p>\n

\"Husain<\/p>\n

\n \u201cHe needed to paint all the time,\u201d said Poddar, who first met Husain as the artist waited for a lift, without shoes, at a Kolkata bus stop in the early 1980s. (The 57-year-old collector, then a teenage art enthusiast, approached Husain after recognizing his flowing white beard from a weekly magazine, and the pair struck up an unlikely friendship.) \u201cI once saw him at his London property where he had between 25 and 30 works. I met him again two or three days later, and lo and behold, there were another 12 or 13.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cThere would have been at least a dozen occasions when he\u2019s sitting with me and he\u2019s drawing somebody\u2019s portrait,\u201d added Poddar, who holds several Husain works in his museum\u2019s collection.\n <\/p>\n

\n Husain painted anywhere and everywhere. Renowned as a showman, he even painted during live performances and immediately auctioned off the resulting works. Taking commissions from Gulf royals and industrialist billionaires, he was something of an art-world celebrity, his distinctive appearance, designer suits and reputation for walking around shoeless all part of his own icon-building.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cHe was known as the barefoot artist,\u201d said Avari, the Christie\u2019s specialist. \u201cHe made that a thing. He would walk around with this very long paint brush, using it as a cane. There was no mistaking the figure of Husain wherever he went.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cI don\u2019t know anybody who doesn\u2019t have a Husain story,\u201d he added.\n <\/p>\n

\n But if Husain was, to use Poddar\u2019s words, a \u201cbrilliant marketing man,\u201d is it plausible that he had attempted to exploit religious outrage to serve his own ends? Gujra described the painter as a \u201ccontrarian\u201d who \u201cdefinitely liked controversy,\u201d though she suggests he would neither have intended nor anticipated the reaction his work provoked. \u201cHe was interested in mass images,\u201d she explained.\n <\/p>\n

\"Indian<\/p>\n

\n Poddar meanwhile argued that his fiercely secular friend treated Hindu icons the same as all his other subjects. In fact, Husain was also accused of blasphemy by Islamic groups over a song in his 2004 movie \u201cMeenaxi: A Tale of Three Cities,\u201d as its lyrics used words directly from the Quran.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cIf there were a pantheon of figures associated with Islam, I don\u2019t think he would have looked at that any differently from the way he looked at Christianity, Sikhism, Hinduism or whatever else,\u201d said Poddar.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cI don\u2019t think he ever had an anti-Hindu agenda,\u201d he added. \u201cEver.\u201d\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For the complex legacy of M.F. Husain, one of 20th-century India\u2019s most important artists, this year has been…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":247780,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[228,226,227,229,88],"class_list":{"0":"post-247779","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-design","12":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=247779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247779\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/247780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=247779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=247779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=247779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}