MF Husain was forced into exile; now his work finds permanent home in Qatar | Arts and Culture

Doha, Qatar – In the 1930s, a young Maqbool Fida Husain, barely in his 20s, arrived in the Indian financial capital of Mumbai, then known as Bombay, from Indore city 600km (370 miles) away.

His dream was to make films. But struggling to survive in the city, he started painting billboards for the emerging Bollywood film industry.

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A decade later, as newly independent India was finding its footing, Husain became a part of a group of artists who laid the foundations of modern art in the country. In the years to come, he went on to become one of the most celebrated and internationally recognised Indian modern artists of the 20th century, often dubbed “India’s Picasso”.

But despite the global renown and the numerous awards – internationally and at home in India – Husain found himself the target of a concerted hate campaign by a rising Hindu majoritarian movement starting in the 1990s, forcing him to flee.

Now, nearly two decades after he went into exile, and 14 years after he died in London, Husain’s iconic works have found a permanent home in Doha, the capital of Qatar, which in 2010 offered the artist citizenship.

Lawh Wa Qalam: MF Husain Museum inaugurated

Last month, Qatar inaugurated a stunning new museum, Lawh Wa Qalam (meaning the board and the pen), dedicated to Husain’s life and works that spanned more than six decades.

“Maqbool Fida Husain is a legendary artist – a true master whose artistic works transcend borders and connect cultures, histories, and identities,” Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, the chair of Qatar Foundation, said during the museum’s inauguration.

The new museum, located in Doha’s sprawling Education City, features the celebrated artist’s final works commissioned by Sheikha Moza, along with his other works, including photography, films and poetry.

At least 35 paintings, which were completed as part of his Arab Civilisation series before Husain died in 2011, are on display in the building.

Among them is The Battle of Badr, for which Husain used calligraphy and the Arabic script, and fused them with his bold modern style to capture the significance of the early Islamic military victory. Arab Astronomy, another painting, honours scholars who mapped the heavens.

Seeroo fi al ardh (meaning “travel through the earth”, in Arabic), a multimedia art installation that opened in 2019, now forms part of the museum. The installation chronicles the journey of human civilisation through the lens of the Arab region.

“From the outset, one of the biggest questions for us was how to represent the range of Husain’s practice without reducing it to a simple linear story at Lawh Wa Qalam,” Noof Mohammed, museum curator, told Al Jazeera.

“We wanted to focus primarily on presenting the works he made in Doha, which represent one of the most ambitious periods of his late career. Projects like Seeroo fi al ardh and the Arab Civilisation series show him working on a scale and clarity that deserve to be seen together, and that shaped how we approached the narrative.”

Spread over 290 square metres (3,000sq ft), the museum also houses his personal belongings, including Indian passport books that he relinquished in 2010.

“We were lucky that Husain made Qatar his home, where he was able to produce a lot of artwork that is part of the collection in the museum,” Kholoud Al-Ali, executive director of community engagement and programming at Qatar Foundation, said.

Qatar Foundation’s Education City is home to leading educational institutions, including Georgetown University, Northwestern University and Weill Cornell Medicine, and is also a hub of modern Arab art. The campus boasts more than 100 public art installations, including those by Damien Hirst and Faraj Daham.

“This museum is going to be an addition to the Education City ecosystem, a place where students, researchers, anyone interested in art can find basically what they’re looking for,” Al-Ali told Al Jazeera.

Hounded out of his home

By the time Husain had moved to Doha, he had long secured his place as one of the world’s biggest figures – and as a lightning rod for criticism from the Hindu far-right in India.

Through the 20th century, his paintings broke auction records, with his work featuring at international exhibitions, including the 1971 Sao Paulo Biennial in Brazil alongside legendary Spanish painter Pablo Picasso.

Husain was a versatile artist working across multiple mediums: Films, photography, tapestry and poetry.

He made an experimental film, Through the Eyes of a Painter, in 1967, which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival. He also directed Meenaxi: A Tale of Three Cities and Gaj Gamini, starring his muse, Bollywood star Madhuri Dixit.

For decades, Husain was a popular public figure loved by the press, attaining a celebrity-like status with his own idiosyncratic style – he walked barefoot. The Calcutta Club, an elite British-era social club based in the Indian city of Kolkata, once came in for heavy criticism when it refused Husain entry for not wearing shoes.

Attack from Hindu right

But by the mid-1990s, Husain’s portrayal of nude Hindu deities, some of them drawn in the 1970s, stirred controversy. He was accused of sacrilege and insulting Hindu sentiments.

Multiple criminal police complaints were filed against the artist after a magazine, Vichar Mimansa, published his painting depicting Hindu deity Saraswati in the nude in 1996. Eight years later, a painting of Bharat Mata (Mother India) as a naked woman brought a new barrage of lawsuits. He apologised, but that did not deter the torrent of hate and legal cases.

Hundreds of police complaints were filed across the country, arrest warrants were issued, and his Mumbai house was ransacked in 1998. His exhibitions were vandalised in India and abroad, forcing Husain, in his 80s, to leave India in 2006 for safety.

In 2008, India’s Supreme Court quashed the cases against Husain, saying the Bharat Mata painting was a work of art. India has a tradition of graphic sexual iconography in temples, the top court reminded petitioners.

Yet Husain did not feel safe returning to India, where anti-Muslim rhetoric was on the rise. He died in 2011 in London at the age of 95.

The attacks on Husain were not isolated. The right to freedom of speech and expression in India has been declining since the rise of the Hindu right in the 1990s.

Several filmmakers, authors and artists have faced growing attacks from Hindu nationalist groups. Bollywood star Aamir Khan faced boycott calls from Hindu groups over his work and past media interviews, during which he expressed concerns about rising religious intolerance.

Since the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, came to power a decade ago, dozens of Muslims have been lynched by Hindu vigilantes, hundreds of houses have been demolished as part of so-called “bulldozer justice” without due process, and several legal and institutional measures have been implemented, affecting the minority community negatively.

In January this year, a Delhi court ordered the seizure of “offensive” paintings by Husain. And months later, Hindu groups threatened to disrupt the auction of the late painter’s work in Mumbai. The event eventually went ahead without incident under tight security.

“His flight from India is a tragedy, and in many ways was an early sign of the kind of censorship and repression of speech, of expression that has become much more pervasive – in fact, normalised in many ways,” Sonal Khullar, an art historian from the University of Pennsylvania, said.

Khullar, who featured Husain in her 2015 book Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity and Modernism in India, 1930-1990, said the attack on Husain was due to both his Muslim heritage and the secular ethos that informed his work.

“I think it really came down to this artist’s position in India, and what he represented, whether you understand him to represent Muslim cultures, peoples and societies or you understand him to represent a secular ethos. And I think that’s what came under an attack,” she told Al Jazeera.

The museum’s architecture

The museum’s architecture was inspired by Husain’s sketch dubbed Lawh wa Qalam. The multiple influences that inspired Husain are reflected in the building design.

“For instance, the blue tile used in the building has its origins in Central Asia, and it has become an important part of the architectural language,” said Martand Khosla, the architect of the museum.

Khosla says the project was deeply personal, given Husain’s influence on the Indian cultural landscape.

“We grew up seeing his work … at airports, at convention centres and inside people’s homes,” he recalled. “He remains significant. So in that sense, it was a real privilege to be able to come and build a museum for him.”

Husain’s work

Husain was one of the most prolific Indian artists of the modern era, producing an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 works.

His paintings portrayed Indian icons such as Mahatma Gandhi, leader of India’s independence struggle, to mythologies such as the Mahabharata with motifs of rural and urban life.

“Many of his early paintings seemed to reference wall painting traditions in India, the type that you would find in the caves of Ajanta, but also wall painting that you would see in village homes,” Khullar, the art scholar, said.

Painter Akhilesh, who wrote Husain’s biography, Maqbool, said the turning point of his career was Between the Spider and the Lamp, which portrays five women figures standing with a lamp and a spider coming down from the roof.

Akhilesh called it the most important painting in contemporary Indian art. It was modernist yet rooted in the folk tradition of India, he told Al Jazeera, adding that it defined Husain’s style.

Husain’s artwork was a break from the revivalist nationalism of the past that had triggered the creation of Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan.

Secular ethos became the language of his work, which was influenced by Indian culture, history and folk traditions and fused with elements of Western modernism.

His first solo art exhibition was held in Zurich five years after India’s independence. In the following decades, his work was showcased across Western cities, gaining him global recognition.

Akhilesh, the biographer, said Husain’s peers moved abroad, but he stayed in India.

“He helped build the entire contemporary art scene of the country,” Akhilesh told Al Jazeera, adding that sometimes he gave his own paintings to start galleries.

His contribution to Indian art was recognised by the government. He was awarded the Padma Vibhushan in 1991, the second-highest civilian honour, among others. He was also nominated to the upper house of parliament in 1986.

Early life and the future

Husain was born in a Sulaymani Bohra Muslim family in 1915 in the Western Indian state of Maharashtra. But early in his life, he was drawn towards art while studying calligraphy at a madrasa in Vadodara, located in present-day Gujarat state.

After his mother’s death, he moved to the central Indian city of Indore, where his father landed a job in a textile mill.

In Indore, he was introduced to the images of Hindu deities and other figures from Indian mythology by an art teacher at the Indore School of Art, which he attended, said Akhilesh, his biographer.

Husain left Indore for Mumbai about 1933, when India was still under British colonial rule, Akhilesh said.

“He went to Bombay to pursue filmmaking. He thought that film was a broader medium to express himself. But he couldn’t find any entry. So, he started painting film banners,” said Akhilesh, who is an acclaimed painter himself, based in the Indian city of Bhopal.

Husain had to juggle jobs, also working in a toy factory, to earn additional income before he got a start in the art world. In 1934, he sold his first painting for 10 rupees (just 11 cents according to today’s exchange rates).

By the late 1940s, he had established himself as an avant garde artist known for his bold and bright colour on canvas. Husain co-founded the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group along with Francis Newton Souza and Sayed Haider Raza in 1947.

Souza, who later worked in New York and London, was known for his provocative art with erotic and unconventional themes.

But to those who knew him well, Husain was more than just an artist. The legendary artist was a friend of Akhilesh’s father. “He treated me like his son,” Akhilesh told Al Jazeera. “I remember him coming to our Indore house with a Jalebi (Indian sweet) early in the morning.”

Akhilesh recalled how, in the early 2000s, Husain once invited him to London. There, Husain made breakfast for Akhilesh and took him around London in his Rolls-Royce. “He enjoyed every moment of his life,” Akhilesh said of Husain.

Though he gave up his Indian passport, Husain’s love for his motherland did not cease. “This is just a piece of paper. India is my motherland, and I simply cannot leave that country,” he said after surrendering his Indian passport in 2010.

Akhilesh said that while in exile, Husain wanted to visit three Indian cities – Varanasi, Mumbai, and Hyderabad. “‘I will come anytime,’ he told me from exile,” Akhilesh said. “But he died before he could undertake his journey back to his homeland.”

That Husain was forced to spend his final years in exile remains a blot on India, said Khullar, the art scholar.

“The loss of a figure like Husain is a loss to the secular ethos of the [Indian] art world that he founded in 1947, and one could say, for a certain section of society, more broadly, for India itself,” she said.

“It’s a dark time, and people are afraid,” she said.

But Husain himself never let the attacks stop him from pursuing his work: He used his time in exile to work on art projects in Qatar and Dubai.

“He laughed off the controversies. He never talked about the past. He was a man of the future and always looked forward,” Akhilesh said.

Now, that ethos, too, has found a forever home in the museum – an ode to the board and the pen, an artist who created magic from them, and a venue where present and future generations can marvel at Husain’s wizardry.