India’s most-loved, most-hated artist-in-exile shares a few candid moments with Kishore Singh.
E lsewhere, the world is falling apart – but elsewhere is another place, not Dubai, where money continues to pour in, where recession is still a word in the dictionary, and where M F Husain, currently India’s most famous exile, is in residence.
And Husain — I call him Husain sa’ab in deference to his age, and his art — is, as always, both a stranger and a mischievous friend, simultaneously aloof and intimate. I have been urged to call him by Vikram Bachhawat whose Emami Chisel Art auction in Kolkata hasn’t been a huge success, but he’s managed to sell two Husains for Rs 40-something lakh each. Bachhawat is hoping Husain will endorse the auction. I am less hopeful.
“They have worked very hard,” says Husain, somewhat ambiguously, his voice from Dubai strong and clear, not the voice of a 93-year old.
“Husain sa’ab,” I urge him, “who are ‘they’?”
But Husain has clear ideas about what he wants to say. “This is what I have always wanted, that people should promote artists properly. Art dealers should not be like shopkeepers, people should not buy art like they’re buying it from a supermarket shelf. Paintings are an emotion, not a commodity.”
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“Paintings are like falling in love,” he says. And then he says what Bachchawat is probably hoping he would say. “I give credit to Emami for selling in a very difficult market. It’s all because of Vikram’s personal relationships with his clients, which he’s developed” — you can hear him chortle all the way from Dubai — “with ladies from big families.”
There’s no one who understands money better than Husain. India’s most well-known and equally prolific artist, says K Bikram Singh, civil servant, filmmaker, columnist, and now the author of a doorstopper book on Husain (called, unimaginatively, Maqbool Fida Husain) has always cultivated rich men. “Money for him is a measure of success,” he points out.
We’re having coffee at the India International Centre in New Delhi, only yards away from its bar where he broached the subject of a film with Husain. The artist was agreeable, but in the meanwhile lumpen political elements made capital of a Husain painting that purported to be a “nude” study of “Bharat Mata”, and Husain was forced to flee the country for his own safety. “But exile has accentuated that vulnerability,” says Bikram Singh.
It’s certainly true that Husain has never been far removed from the media. He’s courted it as assiduously as he’s mocked critics, once famously having a show in Bombay the sum and substance of which was torn, crumpled sheets of newspaper strewn across the gallery floor. Because he was Husain, and even though installation hadn’t yet become a part of art vocabulary, he got away with it, as he got away with most other things — walking barefoot into board rooms to sell his paintings to corporate India at prices that were always astronomical. He was always meant to be evangelical in his white beard and crumpled kurta. Even now, no one has come out openly to ask what the hell he was doing when he said he was making movies — very bad movies — that some still say have artistic merit.
Certainly, no other artist was allowed to get away by selling a painting that topped Husain’s price. He’d arrange private sales to announce that he was still India’s most expensive painter, even controversially striking a deal at Rs 100 crore for 100 paintings that caught the imagination of Indians (though collectors shuddered at what this might mean in terms of ‘quality’ — it was the equivalent of selling apples by the kilo, rather than getting value by converting them into, say, apple tarts!).
Husain is in Dubai sporadically; the rest of the time he’s in London where he’s reportedly working on a particularly attractive commission for the Mittals (eat your heart out shakha-wallahs).
“Four days after Lehman Brothers collapsed,” he tells me, “there was a sale by a British artist called Damien Hirst — have you heard of him?” he asks sharply.
“He’s almost as well-known as you, Husain sa’ab,” I say.
Husain isn’t sure whether he should be flattered. “Yes, well he had an auction at Christie’s where he hoped to sell two years’ works for $60 million, but he made $200 million.”
“Two hundred and eleven million,” I tease him. But his point is?
“Art thrives at the time of crisis,” he says.
Not just any art but art of a certain quality, I argue back, but Husain is not finished yet.
“Rich people, to drown their sorrows, they indulge in buying art,” his voice is smug. Then, in a saucy undertone, “Or they indulge in the oldest profession in the world.” He laughs a whole minute.
“He’s invariably full of fun,” Bikram Singh agrees, remembering how his wife had once chided him that Husain, several decades his senior, seemed the younger of the two. “He’s capable of showing his happiness, khul ke hastein hain,” he says.
Husain’s story is too well known — the pavement artist who painted cinema hoardings till he became bigger even than the stars — but less well known is his ideology, if he has one. In Dubai, he’s found the opportunity to make even more money, working on a body of work on the Arab civilisation; simultaneously, he’s working on an even larger series on the Indus Valley civilisation that he’s somewhat mockingly referred to as “from Mohenjodaro to Manmohan Singh”. Yet, “he genuinely misses his friends,” Bikram Singh says.
And is likely to miss them forever, if his reasoning, that Husain has no intention of coming back, is correct. “He’s shifted all his paintings to Dubai,” he qualifies, “it’s a clear indication that he has no intention of shifting back.”
Even though he’s been exonerated by the courts in India? “He knows India is no longer governed by the rule of law,” Bikram Singh explains. “No government here can provide him the security, and he’s unwilling to be imprisoned in his own home.”
Still. “As a human being, he does not have a clear political agenda,” Bikram Singh says, “He supported the Emergency because he didn’t understand the forces at work, and even now, when he says he’ll only be able to return to India when Advani becomes prime minister, he’s unaware of the implications of what he’s saying.”
The pity is that this should happen to Husain of all people who, even with his closest competitors, has always shown the greatest generosity of spirit. “He’s never been critical of his contemporaries,” says Singh, “never spoken ill of them. Even though Souza was his closest rival, he’s always called him his mentor, always said it was Souza who taught him English. Basically, he is a very generous man.”
“It’s not possible you won’t return to India, Husain sa’ab,” I tell him over the phone.
Husain mumbles something about “political aspects”, about this having “nothing to do with art”. “Pablo Neruda couldn’t go back to his country,” he says, “Charlie Chaplin couldn’t return to the US.”
So? “These are difficult things to analyse,” says Husain — you can hear him sigh far away, in another continent — “it’s better to let things take their own time.”
That’s more than most would say when they’re 93 years old.