The barefoot artist’s publicity factory gets a fillip with Pradeep Chandra’s pictorial record of his personal and professional life.
When Anil Dharker took over as editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India, his first choice of cover story was M F Husain. But Dharker didn’t want the artist’s popular visage with its flowing beard as his choice of cover, nor indeed his paintings, opting instead for “one of the aspects of the painter everyone knew about: his bare feet”. The task fell to Pradeep Chandra, one of the Weekly’s photographers, to track Husain down. But the peripatetic artist, who would famously head for the airport without a destination in mind, led him on a wild goose chase. He had reportedly left for Calcutta “just two days ago”, then was spotted in Hyderabad, but he remained elusive nonetheless.
And so a panicky Dharker took Chandra to the Bombay Gymkhana, removed his shoes, and had his bare feet photographed “impersonating Husain’s more famous ones”, swearing Chandra to secrecy. Nor does the story end there. Collector Harsh Goenka called up Dharker to tell him he liked the issue, “But, Anil, did you notice something? How young Husain’s feet are!”
That was a time when Pradeep Chandra missed his muse, but he spent the next couple of decades tracking Husain on assignments for various media organisations. He was often invited to even personal rendezvous, such as Husain sharing an Eid lunch with friends outside his artistic and collecting circle in the Badar Baug neighbourhood in Mumbai. This image, part of a series, is exceptional because it is beyond any suggestion of time and quite different from Husain’s celebrity circus.
Husain, it can be safely said, has built a successful publishing industry around his art, with critics and scholars offering up interpretations of everything from his childhood influences to his inspiration and the stretch of his painterly life. Chandra’s book is at least novel in that it looks at the subject through a photographer’s lens, even though it only captures those moments in the last few decades of the artist’s maverick ways. Nor is it merely a photographer’s tribute — his paintings prop the innumerable images of Husain going about his day and life, and there are enough anecdotes and observations to make the book an interesting addition to Husain editoralia. In the bargain, it also shows how photographs can communicate new insights into a person that words can never quite capture.
There is the familiar Husain iconography — his bare feet, of course (and these, from all that barefoot walking, one presumes, are not particularly photogenic, though they lend a picaresque element to Husain pictures that show him otherwise elegantly togged); his white mane, sometimes wild, on other occasions tamed; his extremely long brushes, some of which he used as a cane. There’s Husain not always looking into the camera, painting the ceiling of his home while the books in the shelf behind him indicate his interest in a diverse range of reading choices — Husain himself, of course, but also books in Urdu, on the concept of zero, even on other countries and cultures (China Today); here he is giving bytes to the media while the glamorati appear lost in the crowd; there, again, asleep on a chatai on the floor of a gallery; or posing amid strewn newspapers and bales of white cloth at the inauguration of his controversial “Shvetambri” exhibition; or simply painting on his trademark large canvases, oblivious of the photographer…
Having occupied a space close to Husain, Chandra had the privilege of being at hand to record several of Husain’s eccentricities, not the least of which was to arrive, unannounced, at the offices or homes of those he considered his friends. So it was that a young Nadira Babbar came home to find her front door painted and signed by Husain to record her absence; that Pritish Nandy found a painted note from Husain at his Sunday Observer office; that the homoeopath Dr Mukesh Batra had his office painted by Husain so that “when my patients lie down on the bed of my clinic, they would see the ceiling and feel the healing process”; that a fellow diner at a restaurant would find that Husain liked his face enough to astound him by drawing his portrait and leaving it for him; that Husain might find fresh garlic at a market in Delhi and rush to Mumbai to cook kheema-lahsan in Upper Crust editor Farzana Contractor’s kitchen, and leave her with a painted apron in the bargain.
The personal Husain is a delightful discovery in Chandra’s book, in which attempts to offer up a defence of his art or analyse his paintings are at best misplaced. The pictures, which range from pensive portraits to Husain posing for the photographer, are in themselves satisfying and offer a glimpse of the artist beyond his mainstream popularity. There are the predictable images — far too many of them, perhaps — with his Bollywood muses Madhuri Dixit, Urmila Matondkar and Tabu, but also enough extraordinary ones, including those of him with his family or his wife Fazila, to make this a rare book.
It is another matter that the market- and brand-conscious painter should think to invite the photographer Chandra on several of his otherwise unannounced escapades! Chandra has taken care to identify the people, location and occasion for each picture, though one wishes the captions were longer and, like the text, a little more anecdotal. An absence of dates for the pictures, then, is but a minor irritant.
M F Husain
A Pictorial Tribute
Author: Pradeep Chandra
Publisher: Niyogi Books
Pages: 218
Price: Rs 4,500