A Tribute to Great artist indian picasso Maqbool Fida Husain

I will begin my essay about the nomadic eye of Maqbool Fida Husain (known to millions of his admirers simply as M.F.Husain) by referring to his feet. This is in no way an odd or capricious decision, because what is odd for others appears to have become the norm for Husain. Husain walks barefoot--as far as I have been able to determine he does this at all times when he is in India, which is virtually most of his life. The gesture is peculiarly appropriate for the Indian painter who has come to represent for many people Indian art itself. For, in India the majority of the population goes about its daily business in unshod feet.

It will not be hard to bring to bear upon Husain’s habit of walking about on naked feet some pietistic or fatuous symbolic reading: that he commiserates with the poverty-stricken masses of India, or that he "expresses" his Indian-ness through this act of remaining in contact with the soil of India. To say so would be merely to attribute to the man qualities of mind he doubtlessly possesses; but it would inevitably obscure yet another aspect of his personality--especially his artistic personality--his ‘style’ or, more accurately, his sense of style. But, of course, style is also always an extinction of personality, a reaching beyond the accidents of identity.

Style, as the classic humanist dictum of Buffon has it, is the man (and we could do worse than emphasize the word "man," after all Buffon’s 1753 word was "l’homme"). The whole issue, clearly, operates at multiple levels. If by being barefoot Husain creates his "style" in the Western humanist sense of Buffon, then his action is not merely an expression of his personality, but nearly co-equal with it. After all, Husain is India’s most public artist, 4 and on many highly publicized occasions he has created his art working barefoot in front of large audiences, including press reporters, art critics and art lovers. Moreover, numerous photographs of such occasions, depicting the artist doing his work in bare feet, have appeared widely in the press--in turn replicating nearly ceaselessly the image of the barefoot artist in the act of creation.
 At one level, then, Husain’s barefoot "style" is a deliberately orchestrated circulation of a set image of his personality. But I wish to argue further that it is as much Husain himself, his identity, that these images broadcast as they do the "trademark" of his artistic enterprise in the postmodern economy of contemporary Indian public media. Not surprisingly, then, corresponding stories about a barefoot Husain having been denied entry into this or that snooty private club regularly feature on the front pages of newspapers and personality columns of countless news magazines in a country where the ephemeral printed word of journalism still provides significant challenge to the equally powerful and equally fleeting impact of numerous formula movies routinely churned out by film studios, especially in Bombay and Madras.
A point that is often missed by critics writing about Husain is that he operates out of probably the one country in the world that can mount a really serious challenge to the so called new imperialism of a postmodern, post-rational, fast replicating, information proliferating, media-dominated, United States of America. 5 Once the student of India, or the artist of India, learns to erase and overwrite the colonial "Orientalist" discourse of a stratified, hidebound ancient culture, she is likely to recognize--as I think Husain has clearly done--the fluid, multivalent, unsettled, ironic, absurd, and palpable vitality of the country and its multi-layered, multifaceted culture. Here ideas undergo metamorphosis rapidly while they also remain constant. And when one has cultivated the requisite rapidity of eye movement--the nomadic eye--and resulting ability of a fluid focus, one learns to look at once at many things and at one thing, to look through one thing at many things and, most importantly, to look at one object (or image) and know its unity to be as real as its possible/inherent multiplicity, its fractured wholeness, even its inscrutable absence within its undeniable presence.
Clearly, the nomadic eye, needed for such an enterprise, is also the ludic eye, or the playful eye; and that eye must be carried on restless feet--movement being the hallmark of that constantly playful gaze. Perhaps by some equation, which we can appreciate

 only by the other-than-rational logic of the postmodern, a connection exists between the unblinkered ludic eye and this artist’s unshod feet; perhaps a metaphoric equivalence prevails between a vision unencumbered by convention, and fleet feet untrammelled by the bourgeois respectability routinely associated with footwear. Husain keeps his feet out of commodities, at the same time his bare feet become valuable investment in buying him the attention of media and the public. His feet support the productions of his eyes (and hand)--his paintings, collages, drawings, serigraphs.

How does such an odd equation help? Is there a real utility here? Do bare feet help nomadic eyes? I think they do, and very significantly. The language of the nomadic eye, as it expresses itself on canvas or in print, can easily lapse into mystification and cant: the one and the many; the real and the unreal; the noumenal and the phenomenal. This is especially a problem with India and Indian matters because such mystification derives directly from the received or Orientalist "wisdom" about the country, the almost solid construction of a mystical India. The earthy and earthbound feet of Husain--almost always in view--juxtaposed with his complex real vision and allow for a necessary lapse from metaphysics: an absurdist, somewhat irreverent, descent into the terrestrial. (At the same time, the absurd is not quite absurd, the irreverence not quite irreverent.)

At any rate, Husain always stops, as T.S. Eliot said the artist of necessity must, "at the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism." The frontier is a divide, but its location is not spatial. It is a line, it is one-dimensional and lacks breadth. So, when one is at the frontier, one is at a liminal situation: no matter which side of the boundary one might be on, as long as one is at the frontier one cannot be any closer to the other side. It is a point of intersection. Husain’s art, like all credible art, gets close, whereas fastidious and cautious Reason remains apart. Instead of the solidity (stolidity?) of the modern, Husain’s art places us at the fluid frontier, at the threshold--in other words, in "India," in a rapidly reconfiguring topography that is also a rapidly recyclable topos.
Maqbool Fida Husain was born in 1915 and spent his childhood in the central Indian town of Indore. He lost his mother at the age of three, and spent his childhood and youth in considerable penury. Husain received no formal training in art. As a young man he moved to the bustling metropolitan city of Bombay--a major cultural and commercial centre of India--then as now--and while still in his teens he began his "artistic" career as a lowly paid painter of movie posters and billboards. Thus the crass vitality of oversized advertising art depicting the improbable, larger-than-life, glamour-and-adventure world of film images was able to register its imprint on the artist’s mind at a very early and crucial phase of his career.

Films, rather movies and moviedom, continue to fascinate Husain to this day. But this is no uncritical attachment, for Husain has discovered in the shifting and slippery world of movies and filmic images numerous different analogies for his projection of both a vibrant personal imagination--with its attendant contradictory and shifting demands--and (in the absence of a more appropriate term) a "postmodern" India, a country whose postmodernity is, certainly in Husain’s eyes, as old as its history. At best, the characteristics one associates with contemporary postmodern society and the art it has generated provide a somewhat convenient analogy to Husain’s sense of a trans-historical India and its qualities. Clearly, in the context of this India projected by Husain, the term "postmodern"--which does not occur in the title of my essay--must be used within quotation marks, and avoided altogether if possible. 6
To study the work of any major contemporary Indian artist we must consider issues relating to the particularity of India, not merely as another possible "case study" in the exploration of the supposedly universal notion of "postmodernity," "postcoloniality," or "nationalism." Each term needs to be problematized, its universalizing and homogenizing thrust challenged. Yet the terms cannot be entirely rejected. Whether one is dealing with Satyajit Ray’s movie "Ghorey Bairey" ("Home and Abroad") or with Husain’s long "The Raj" series of paintings--he is unique among Indian painters to have attended to this period of colonial history--one cannot entirely ignore nationalist or post-colonialist concerns. Similarly, in other contexts Husain’s paintings require us to drag in the word "postmodern."

The terms are problematic for two separate reasons. The fact that they are privileged by the power operations of western institutions (its publishing industry, its media, its universities), is only one of these. The other reason is more significant because it does not operate merely by default, and goes beyond the negative mode of the first argument, which must run something like this: because the terms are produced outside of India they are not valid in India. The second argument operates, instead, on the basis of equivalence (at the least): India is a ‘world’ in itself. Here, what comes into the "endo-world" (so to speak) from the outside world has no especially privileged status because what is generated within is at least as adequate, self-validating and appropriate. Whether this argument (or sentiment) is overtly expressed, or its validity is silently and subconsciously accepted, its presence is undeniable in the globalizing thought processes of really powerful countries and their cultures.


Although it is hard to realize this in the First World, the artists and thinkers of India--especially those who live and work in India, and have not been co-opted into the First World’s essentially alienating "visible minority" agenda--regard the world to be Indo-centric. A few other countries, too, feel that way about their own cultures but clearly not every country can do so. And, for a number of valid reasons, Indians can and often do feel that way. One reason has to do with the continuous presence of a very large number of contradictory discourses in virtually all periods of India’s recorded history. A ‘nation’ in a narrow sense--in its classic European notion of a state--cannot allow a diversity of discourses to coexist; it would have a dominant discourse (the national discourse) subordinate the others. When that does not happen, one has--in the classical view--mere chaos. Or, one might in fact be describing an entity one could call a world-state, rather than a nation-state. In India--a country that routinely frustrates theorists of "nationalism"--an entire collection of nations co-exists, not always peacefully, often chaotically, but nearly always vitally. If in this synchronic view--perceived at one point in time--India presents multiplicity and diversity of discourses, it is multi-layered in a diachronic way too. Virtually all ‘times’ seem to co-exist in India, from the pre-industrial to the post-industrial.

India is, then, in a certain sense both all world and all time. 8 In the kind of complexity India presents, all normal categories of Reason breakdown. National thought in India transcends "nationalism." The distinguished Indian political theorist, Partha Chatterjee, has argued that this transcendence is the expected result of the conflation in India of borrowed European notion of "nation" and the continuously present pre-colonial realities and particularities. 9 In another sense, this transcendent nationalism, also transcends history. Consequently, in India the premodern, the modern, and the postmodern are all co-existent. And not only are they co-existent, in each case the meaning of the specific term transcends its limited routine sense. The only exception, perhaps, is "postmodern," which, by definition, appears to rupture limit and postpone closure.
In the view I am proposing, two things happen simultaneously; and we need to understand them clearly if we are to appreciate the art of Husain. First, the creative Indian mind can adopt any view or any principle from the outside world because the world is at once outside and inside of one’s Indian-ness. Second, whatever is imported somehow also becomes native; it is possessed, co-opted, and transfigured. This will explain my hesitation with the academic expression "postmodern"--in that technical sense it can only be a borrowed concept in India. But it is not merely so. For Husain, as we will see, the postmodern has always been a felt presence in India, and the obscurity, open-endedness, and near absurdity that the term connotes can be seen evident in virtually all periods of Indian history and all aspects of its culture. The only odd exception is the officially-sanctioned ‘nationhood’ of the state, and the colonially induced modernity that to this day drives its official laws, its official science, its planned industrialization.
India’s poor assimilation into the spirit of modernity--in spite of the creditable performance of many individual Indians in the fields of education, social thought, science and technology--has been commented upon by many. The utter despair that many colonial administrators felt about their largely-failed mission to modernize the country--the notorious white man’s burden--is attested to in many chronicles of the Raj. In the arts, the profoundest statement is found in the admission made in the final words of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India: "No, not yet," and "No, not there." In Husain’s "The Raj" paintings that encounter of cultures--the national and the modern on the one hand, and the supra-national (or non-national) and the ahistorical on the other--is depicted as utterly ineffectual; it is baffling for the colonizer, and absurd for the colonized.