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A quarter century ago sitting amid
designer chaos of paintings and sketches in various stages of
completion in his Cuffe Parade apartment in then more-tolerant
Bombay, painter Maqbool Fida Husain had a telling response to a
question about being Indian.
"I am not an Indian merely because I
was born here but because India's cultural exuberance made an artist
out of me," Husain, then 70 and already firmly perched on his
formidable reputation as one of India's greatest painters, had said.
As India today debates his decision to give up his Indian
nationality and choose to be an honorary citizen of Qatar, it is
much more about Husain ceding ground to the lunatic rightwing fringe
than just a change of passports.
It is perhaps unfair to expect a
95-year-old painter, who faced real physical danger from bigots
before he left India in 2006, to fight a battle for loftier ideals.
But an unintended consequence of his renouncing Indian citizenship
could be to embolden the very lunatic fringe that the liberal India
ought to challenge.
It is true that Husain has led his
peripatetic life more in the mould of a detached world citizen than
a constricted Indian nationalist but he has frequently let it be
known that at his core he remains Indian. While he does not have to
live in India to assert his cultural identity, the circumstances
under which he has chosen to disengage ends up undermining a lot of
what he stands for.
His choice of Qatar to forsake his
Indian nationality is a conspicuously bad judgment if his intention
was to make a larger philosophical statement about artistic freedom.
Qatar may be a marginally more moderate regime in a region notorious
for its unabashed suppression of great many personal freedoms, but
it is no shining example that can be held up as a counter to India.
At best it is erroneous and at worst it is egregious for him to take
this step. If it was about expressing profound personal anguish at
being practically hounded out of India, an artist of Husain's
stature could have chosen many other clearly more democratic
countries.
Despite his well known quirks such as
moving about unshod and fraternising with sections of society that
the elites in India wince at the mention of, Husain has for decades
been a much sought after presence in the rarefied circles anywhere
in the world. To that extent his decision was obviously not
influenced by any consideration of being in the proximity of royalty
or movers and shakers as he is in Qatar and elsewhere. It is not
right to second-guess his motivations other than concerns about
personal safety at an age where a minor fall in the bathroom could
prove devastating. However, somewhere along the line strongly felt
emotions at having been let down by his home country would have
played a significant role.
Husain has seen enough life, certainly
way more than his detractors, to know that the kind he has chosen
comes with its own intrinsic hazards. While he may not have
anticipated the hazards of the kind he had to eventually confront,
he ought to have been conscious of something approximate. Without
minimizing his genuine sense of loss, it is possible to argue that
Husain may also see this turn of events as a fitting twist to a
gloriously eccentric life.
Husain understood before anybody else
the value of creating stories and idiosyncrasies over and above his
resplendent talent. He recognized very early that people are drawn
to the superficial first and then perhaps to something more
substantial and deeper. Trimmings are a great way to lure people in.
They want the art as much as the artist. So while there may be
equally talented painters in India, there is none quite like Husain
in creating irresistible folklore about his art. A fine recent
example of that attribute was Husain painting a silvery white
Arabian stallion.
On balance, Husain's decision should
be of grave concern in so much as it bolsters the lunatic fringe,
which may not be just a fringe, that uses his exile as a triumph
that can be replicated in many similar instances. This is
particularly because Husain knows well that as complex
multicultural, multi-religious and multilingual societies go India
is still easily one of the most tolerant. That alone is a worthwhile
India, which he called culturally exuberant, to return to.
Mayank Chhaya is a
US-based writer. He can be contacted at
m@literateworld.com
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