Alvida McBull Fida

Why M F Husain will live forever

‘Chund tasveerey butaan chund haseenoki khatut, baad marne ke mere gharse yeh samaan nikla’
(A few photographs and some love letters from my sweethearts is all that was found from my home after I died.)

Ghalib’s above mentioned couplet was among M F Husian’s favourites and now reads relevant, in his death. While life ended for him in exile, the painter who was perceived as India’s Picasso and awarded with highest honours like the Padmashree, Padma Bhushan and Padma Vibhushan, has left behind a vacuum in the art world that will never be reclaimed.

“He was a wonderful human being and I have yet to meet another of his caliber in my life. We had a long association. In 1999, during the production of Gajagamini, he was short of finances and I volunteered to work out the matter for him, he in turn, gave me some of the finest pieces of work. He loved sipping chai over which we shared fond memories. I was waiting for him to return to Dubai, was meaning to meet him soon, but alas!” reminisces Praful Shah, a connoisseur of Husain’s art and MD of Garden Silk Mills. The Garden Art Gallery in Surat was graded as one of the country’s finest by the artist when he had come to inaugurate it.Husain painted a scene from his childhood on a black canvas, holding the audience enthralled.

“Husain saab was a great philosopher, when he met my father and me, it was an absolutely unbelievable experience for us. My father expressed this thought aloud to which Husain saab replied, ’All of us build our individual karma, what goes around comes around .Our Karma pinds were destined to meet and hence, have we.” says VNSGU Professor of Art, Rajarshi Smart.

Surat’s renowned artist, late Jagdeep Smart, translated M F Husain’s biography in Gujarati – ‘Dadano Dangoro Lidho, Tene Toh Mein Ghodo Kidho’, named after a popular Gujarati limerick, it was co published in 2004 by Archer, Ahmedabad.

Written in Gujarati text to bring out nuances of, ‘Husain –Shailee’, Maqbool’s childhood, Husain’s artistry, Mc’s jovialness, Bull’s hidden grief and aggression (Husain often signed works as Mc Bull), M .F. Husain’s popularity and Fida’s volcanic love rush, translator Smart points out to the reader that he left intact Husain’s sentence formation, wordplay, Urdu verse so that the essence of the artist could flow to the readers.

Husain’s address to his own childhood reads: ‘O mara dost, mara balpun, taney aapna dadana ordani ae baari yaad chey ? Jemathi hu baharni duniyani nani nani vaarta o joya karta hata.Aapney joyu ghanu,janyu ochu’- O my friend,my childhood,do you remember that window in our grandfather’s room? From which we looked out at little itsy bitsy stories. We saw a lot, learnt little.’

Capturing Maqbool’s picturesque memory of ‘An earthen pot on a cot under the roof from which a silent lantern hangs ,a book below the pillow opened to page fourteen,a trunk of tin with two pairs of clothes,a dirty coloured blue shirt of a man,a broken chain from a bicycle,a velvety orange scarf,bamboo flute and a ring wrapped in fuchsia kite paper ’, to quoting Fida’s philosophy of, ’Modern art being a joyful labyrinthine of the fact that it gives the onlooker the right to perceive it with his own view and nature. Modern art’s nature is not royal but democratic. It looks like royalty; its lines proclaim self respect and its colours are luminous with pride.’

The book encases the very essence of Husain ,sketching out the artist’s meteoric rise from painting cinema hoardings to producing art cinema featuring his muse,Bollywood’s queen bee Madhuri Dixit in whom he envisioned his mother, his museum at Ahmedabad-Ahmedabad ni Gufa.While no one in the world can paint horses better than Husain,his favourite ride were bicycles.His cycle stuti philosophy read thus-’A cycle’s seat is a man’s head, handles two hands, pedals are feet, the boy (himself) sits on the carrier behind ,riding it seems as if the entire cycle is in his lap, or the boy is in the lap of the cycle. It can’t be said who is caring for whom cuddling the other in his lap.’

It enlightens the reader in the artists own words, about humble beginnings within Indore’s ‘naalawalu makaan’,to the cheeky ‘Bapuni shaadi ma beto diwaano’,from the nostalgic ’Dadanu achkan’ to joy filled ‘Vadodrani boarding school’ where his teacher helped him enact a Persian couplet-

‘Kasbe kamaalkun ki azeezat jahaan shavi/Kasbe kamaal niyarjad azeezey mann’-

‘One who has cultivated proficiency in arts and crafts is loved by all. But one lacking in those skills can never ever win hearts.’

A lesson that India’s finest artist preached not only in his life but also in death.