Patriarch Of The Palette: M. F. Husain

Uma Nair

Uma Nair elucidates how the final series made by M.F. Husain, India’s most prolific artist, showcased at the Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum celebrate the ‘Indian-ness’ in him.

Indian Civilization is an ambitious series of eight triptych paintings, commissioned in 2008 by Mrs Usha Mittal as a tribute to the richness of India’s history. Each panel explores a different theme, together creating a personal vision of India, what Husain called ‘a museum without walls’. Interweaving religious and symbolic iconography with historic figures and events, the paintings also incorporate memories from the artist’s own life. Originally envisaged as a series of 96 panels, Husain was still working on the paintings at the time of his death in 2011. After his exile from India, Husain was actually forced to carry his motherland India inside his head. This was the insistently inclusive world of his youth; alive with mythologies and faith, hungry for independence and progressive politics. Husain, who had the ambition to be more prolific than Picasso, described the act of painting as something close to transcription, the ongoing fulfillment of a need to put those interior visions down on canvas. In 2010 he embarked on what seemed a final grand distillation of that interior world; thirty large triptychs on the theme of Indian civilization, his definitive home thoughts from abroad. In the event he completed eight of the threepart panels in a commission for Usha Mittal, wife of Lakshmi Mittal, the steel tycoon. Those panels, designed to walk among, each one a vivid bay window into another world, were on display at the Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum for the first time this year.

The Indian Civilization series

Husain marked the ceremonial beginning of his Indian Civilization series by painting the Hindu deity Ganesha. Known as the remover of obstacles, Ganesha is a patron of the arts and letters, worshipped at the beginning of any endeavor. He is represented as a four-armed man with an elephant head with an ancient terracotta goddess figure at his side.

Three Dynasties

Husain celebrates three ruling dynasties from India’s long and tumultuous history. He places the ancient Mauryan civilization centrally between two invading rulers, the Muslim Mughal dynasty (1525-1857) and the British Raj (1858-1947).