M F Hussian is no more. A man who is considered to have catapulted India to the world art map, a man considered to be the Picasso of India, a man loved and loathed in equal measure is dead.
From being a movie billboard artist to becoming India's most sought after painter, MF has travelled a long journey and on the way have courted controversy as much as he was bestowed with accolades.
From being India's most influential artist to one of the most persecuted, MF covered a full circle during his lifetime and even after his death while on one hand there are people who mourn his death, there is another group who doesn't feel an iota of pain in the demise of the legend.
In a career that started even before India's independence, MF turned from a hero to a villain only in the later stages of his life. His works which brought laurels to the country and hoisted him as one of the treasures of India -- all faded and forgotten once he started depicting Hindu goddess and deities in nude.
He was hounded by the law, activists and moral police and eventually had to flee his country and take refugee in Qatar before breathing his last in exile in London.
I often wonder if MF deserved what he received from his own countrymen, if he really was a pervert not a painter, if he actually committed such a huge crime that he didn't even deserve a death in his place of birth,
if he really intend to hurt the sentiments of a particular religion with his paintings, if he really deserved to be a pariah.
Art as I see is an interpretative form of communication that thrives in interpretation. What I see in an art can never be similar to what someone else gauges in between those strokes of brushes. What I read amidst those blend of colours can be diametrically opposite to what others feel and sense.
I wonder if the fabric of religion is so thin that a painting can tarnish it, can tear it into pieces with just some strokes of brush. What good is of democracy if there is no freedom of expression, if there is to freedom to live the way one intends to.
But then when I see those paintings and think from a lay man's point of view or just stare at those nude images of the goddess without trying to look beyond them, I have to admit even the staunch secular and liberal in me, feels more than a bit awkward.
My mind questions why MF didn't paint any other religious goddess or deities in nudity, why he never tried to inculcate nudity in the Islamic themes which he explored, why all his painting always ended up portraying only a particular religion.
Perhaps, these questions will never be answered, perhaps I lack the understanding of seeing his painting in the right perspective or perhaps he actually was what people say a butcher in the grab of a painter.
Whatever it might be, all I can say is "Now that you are gone, May you get what you deserve in a world which is beyond us". Amen!!!
