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Beyond Maqbool Fida Hussain
The bug of bugging |
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On the record by
PROFILE
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Beyond Maqbool Fida Hussain Even
as the Indian art community mourned the demise of one of its most prolific ‘pillars’ of post-independent artistic renaissance, the oft revisited conundrum of creativity versus cliché has piqued the minds of serious connoisseurs not easily swayed by bloated auction house price-tags and media hype. Perhaps a counter point is necessary to dissociate personality, personal life and political wrangles and to take a critical look at why his work did not gain resonance outside the realm of primarily svelte socialite Indian collectors and business patrons, with curators and art museums who regarded his caricature-like illustrations as benign compositional poster collages. The barefoot Bugatti-loving nomad exuded a sense of vibrancy for life in all its myriad hues, as he traversed between hotels and hospitals...with an in-born desire to paint. Never a believer in formal studio environments, Hussain often spread his canvases and palettes on the floor of hotels, paying for damages as he checked out. In a candid BBC interview two weeks before he died, Hussain told Michael Peschardt about his drive to keep adding to the staggering 60,000 paintings and sketches he has claimed to have created during his lifetime. Though, numbers don’t necessarily certify quality, from earning 6 annas per square-foot as a billboard painter in Mumbai, he made history for contemporary Indian artists in 2008 when Christie’s sold his 1971 painting Battle of Ganga and Jamuna: Mahabharata 12 at $1.6 million inching a step closer to the whopping $3.4 million fetched previously for S.H. Raza’s Saurashtra. Perhaps in a surreal twist, two of his paintings including Sita with the Golden Deer came under the gavel at Christie’s yielding to anonymous bids totalling £108,100 at Kensington Gallery 12 hours after he had passed away. As Christie’s held a minute’s silence as a mark of respect for the Indian icon, an era had
ended..
Identity & creativity While the ‘Group of Seven’ was formed in Canada influenced by European impressionists in the 1930s to explore terra nullius, Hussain was part of a similar initiative called the Progressive Artists Group of Six, founded by Souza after India’s independence in 1947 to break away from the nationalist style of the Bengal School of Art. Realising the lack of patronage and appreciation, most impressionists and early contemporary artists from India gravitated to the West, painting for a living, often at the cost of catering to European stylistic sensibilities and acceptability. S.H. Raza and Amrita Shergill graduated from Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts and soaked in Parisian lifestyle with Amrita returning to India after 5 years and Raza staying on for over five decades. Artists Francis Souza and Tyeb Mehta spent most of their creative lives in London and New York. The leftist leaning ideology of this group found interesting patronage in the early years from Jewish émigrés to Bombay fleeing European Nazism. Prominent among these were businessman Emmanuel Schlesinger, Times of India art director Walter Langhammer and art critic Rudolf von Leyden who exposed Indian artists starved of experimental thought, to European books, provided them with financial support and encouraged discussions on art movements and engaged them to appreciate new meanings of creative thought. With Raza, Souza, Bakre and others leaving India in the 1950s, the Progressives faded away with no real influence on the vernacular, ironically shedding socialist ideologies in favour of western capitalism. The quest for a forced “Indianness” has plagued Indian artists seeking uniquely Indian identities post-independence and has proven elusive in its articulation beyond coloured references to tigers, snake charmers, bollywood billboard characters, modernistic adaptations of tantric mantras, cheap commercial kitsch of ornamental truck-art laced with fluorescent folksy vibrancy and the indigestive “learning and unlearning” of style over substance, that often impedes free thought. This is true for music, movies, literature and overwhelmingly for contemporary art.
Picasso’s influence An artist can be an effective communicator, an emotive provocateur, a skilled painter aware of the purse strings of commercial forces, a dabbler on canvas or none of the above, riding the waves of inexplicable staying power of mediocrity – occasionally engaging in deliberate publicity driven controversies and carefully crafted acts of self-righteous indignation against societal wrong or personal persecution. What prevails overtime is true creativity and its truthful expression. When Pablo Picasso painted the massive Guernica in 1937 to bring the world’s attention to the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by German bombers supporting Nationalist forces of General Franco during the Spanish Civil War, he influenced three ensuing generations of artists and muralists- among them- M.F. Hussain. The cubist maestro’s canvas with its writhing human forms with mouths open in a silent scream, outstretched flailing arms, destruction of life- both human and animal symbolised in the presence of a convulsing horse and a flaring bull that gains layered meaning in Spanish culture, attained monumental status of inspired expressionism against brutality and inhumanity. Space was the form truth took for Picasso according to Professor T. J. Clark. Today, nearly 75 years later, it still continues to hold the attention of viewers, across geo-political boundaries, given its inspired virtue and purity of thought. The emotive transcendence is palpable, even when people diverse socio-cultural and linguistic backgrounds and beliefs from around the world look at a copy commissioned by the Rockefellers for the United Nations. While it is hard to deny that Hussain’s forms and compositions have drawn significantly from Picasso’s cubism and other avante garde pioneers of expressionism in Europe decade after decade, apart from stylistic nuances, critics seldom find his works emotionally charged or capable of inducing a certain universal appeal that distinguishes genius. His works attempt political satire, statement and seem to adopt a staid vocabulary that shies away from taking the risk of unleashing unbridled fire of an icarus soaring to the sun. If saleability was a measure of success, Picasso’s works have commanded over $120 million in the art world for a single painting- a hundred twenty times that of Hussain dubbed as the Picasso of India by the local media, clearly lacking in perspective, perpetuating a myth and perhaps creating a legend biased in their own disproportionate affirmations. If one was to look beyond the sales and patrons, Van Gogh only sold one painting during his lifetime, The Red Vineyard for 400 francs compared to the $760 million that 7 of his paintings fetched in New York in the last two decades alone. Why has Indian contemporary art not climbed the very lowest rungs of global appeal? Why are patrons and buyers of Indian art, almost always, predominantly Indian with the exception of museums and galleries seeking to address the needs of building a contemporary south-asian collection? Where is the missing ingredient to commandeer an international presence of such magnitude of a Cezanne, a Monet, a Rothko or a Warhol in a Gujral, a Bawa, a Souza, a Joshi or a Hussain and others known and hitherto unknown who live, create and experience art ?
Style & substance The rigours of what qualifies as the decorative and the creative, guides many a curatorial discourse while including a work of art for its stylistic and subjective rendition. When does art transition from being a skilled illustration rendered from a stale menu of style driven strokes to a realm of purity of thought simultaneously captured and set free, to live and breathe on canvas ? When do decorative and commercial concerns of playing to the gallery take a back seat in favour of what comes naturally to an artist in resonance or discord with the universal soul? Critics of Hussain have wondered over the use of discernably un-inspired symbolism of the Ashok Chakra, Saree clad Bharat Mata, obvious injection of the Indian tri-colour, bleeding map of India, clichéd over-use of Gandhi’s round-rimmed glasses, the blue border nun’s habit attributed to the imagery of Mother Teresa, the holy cow or Durga with her recognisable ferocious form. It seemed lacking in finesse to resort to poor shock value in feeble attempts to depict bestiality, with insipid political correctness akin to populist posters and advertisement campaigns in colour- where the artist had to actually stoop to amateurish levels and write “Rape of India” in English onto the painting for a western audience to augment decipherability (!) Poster and bill-board artists tend to work with readable symbols to drive home a message, often arranging them in visual linguistic poetry- be it a flag, a weapon, a dove, discernable metaphors of destruction or caricature of political figures. The art world is full of powerful political artists and mediocre poster painters. From war-torn domains of Africa to the ideological struggle against fascism, communism and consumerism, to the cries against apartheid and Human Rights violations, artists have wielded the brazen brush to evoke emotional response and raise awareness or unleash campaigns against atrocities or injustice. Though Hussain’s paintings and colour palette reflect strong influences of Austrian Expressionists like Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt celebrating the grotesque with a severe intensity of line and the shocking distortion of form, it seldom offers the brooding haunt that lingers. The lack of serious substance behind Hussain’s work has also perplexed curators seeking an exploration beneath and beyond the cursory, which has little to do with the artist’s own motivations for his creative depictions and visual vocabulary.
Cusp of a movement When the glowing eulogies and tributes subside, one cannot help but admire the sheer volume of work that adorns countless galleries and living rooms of private collectors, the tense tango with fundamentalist forces, the eccentric entertainment, the uncanny sense of the unconventional and the passion that embodied the persona of M.F. Hussain in his effervescence and exuberance blurring the gap between style and substance. While the volume of work in itself is not the litmus to a legacy of emotive expression, his long and illustrious life was punctuated by many national awards and honours including the Padma Shri (1955), Padma Bhushan (1973) and Padma Vibhushan (1991). The contemporary Indian artists today are more acutely aware than ever of their creativity, more widely travelled, more exposed to global trends and more reflective of the influences shaping their identities as ambassadors of visual voices. There is a heightened consciousness regarding the potential of art as a medium and message. A generation of pioneers from the early post-colonial phase in India is giving way to new inventive vectors making inroads into the pulsing universe of art and artists. India is on the cusp of an exploding art movement that has the capacity to chart a hitherto unexplored course without the crutches of validation from the west. Contemporary museums, private galleries, resourceful collectors, eclectic tastes and the confluence of resources have the potential to re-think philanthropic patronage and art as a lifestyle choice. It is only a matter of time before the purity of expressionism and creative impetus would re-write art appreciation for the indigenous ingenuity. As an era comes to an end with the passing of Hussain, an eros for art continues to course through conversations of creativity, with a renewed sense of vitality and vigour for times to come...
(The author is a Smithsonian trained museum planner, designer, columnist, sculptor, curator and a leading art critic.)
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The bug of bugging THE New Delhi grapevine holds that when Gyani Zail Singh was the President, and the trust deficit between him and Rajiv Gandhi, the PM, was high, the Gyani would complain that he could not speak even to his wife in the Rashtrapati Bhavan. He would invite his visitors to take a stroll in the garden so that they could speak without inhibition. Union cabinet ministers normally use secure telephone connections to speak to each other or to the Prime Minister. Information of a confidential nature are quite possibly discussed in person when they meet. But whatever prompted the Union Finance Minister to write to the Prime Minister, asking for a secret inquiry into a case of suspected bugging in his office ? People put ink to paper to make things official. So, Pranab Babu clearly wanted to place on record his misgivings over somebody trying to infiltrate his office. It is known that every morning the DIB ( Director of the Intelligence Bureau) briefs the PM and all that Pranab Babu needed to do was to personally apprise the PM of his apprehension, possibly in the presence of the DIB. But he chose to communicate through a letter. It is of course known now that the Prime Minister acted on his apprehension and directed the Intelligence Bureau to conduct the inquiry. But it seems the letter was written three days after a private detective agency was called in to ‘sweep’ his office for bugs. A reasonable inference would be that the agency drew a blank and hence forced the FM to write to the PM. But if the private agency found nothing, then who discovered the adhesives, at 16 different places, in his office ? If it is the IB which came in later and stumbled upon them, it is hard to explain why the private agency found nothing in the first place. Could the adhesives have been placed by the private agency then ? And was it appropriate for the FM to get a private agency involved in the first place—is a question that has not yet been answered. The government’s current stand is that it was much ado about nothing; that access to the FM’s office is not easy; that security at the North Block is adequate and that nothing really was found. Even the FM now says that the issue is “ bogus and no time should be wasted on it”. That obviously has not stopped the opposition from crying foul. Describing it as a serious breach of security, the BJP describes it as a ‘civil war’ within the government, alleging that one arm of the government is carrying out surveillance on another arm of the government. If it is a case of corporate espionage, then the issue gets even more serious, they point out. The confusion was worse confounded by clumsy attempts to explain the adhesives away as ‘chewing gum’, spawning jokes that chewing gums must have accumulated in the finance ministry over the years. Who would chew gums in the presence of the FM and in his office ? And even if one assumes that visitors chewed gums and stuck them under the table before they left, what were the maintenance staff doing ? The scandal has led to the enlightenment that reasonably cheap and sophisticated listening devices are freely available in the market and that they can remain functional anywhere between 20 days and 10 years. There are devices, it seems, which can even escape detection. But still, to mount an attempt to spy on India’s Finance Minister would be deemed audacious and a ‘whodunit’ mystery that needs to be solved.
THE comic controversy A letter written by the Finance Minister in September last year seeking a ‘secret inquiry’ into attempts to bug his room and that of his aides in his North Block office was leaked to the media. This apparently followed the discovery of 16 adhesives Implications Either the government itself or outside agencies tried to bug the offices. The FM took it seriously enough to write to the PM, commission the CBDT (Central Board of Direct Taxes) to “sweep” the offices and even engage a private agency to check.
Explanations The FM has publicly said that the Intelligence Bureau, at the instance of the PM, checked his office but found nothing. IB sources have been quoted in the media as saying that chewing gum was found on the edge of the FM’s table (Which end of the edge is not clear though !)
Insinuations The Union Home Minister, who makes no secret of his interest in finance, and whose ministry alone authorises phone-taps and bugging, is the popular suspect. The other theory is that the FM’s own aides engineered the whole thing and then leaked the letter to embarrass the FM. The third theory is that corporate lobbyists infiltrated the North Block to collect details of policies or investigations conducted by ED or DRI (Directorate of Revenue Intelligence).
The Timing The timing of the leak is believed to be linked to the much awaited cabinet reshuffle with analysts speculating that the PM would like P. Chidambaram to take charge of the finance portfolio. The leak would make it more difficult.
Unanswered questions How could chewing gum or adhesives at 16 different places go undetected ? What was the role of the security and maintenance staff at the North Block ? Did the FM do the right thing by hiring a private detective agency to sweep his office for bugs ?
The jokes
A Union cabinet minister and a minister of state are known for their ‘chewing gum’ habit. The inquiry, say SMS jokes, should focus on their visit to the FM’s office.
The Law Phones can be tapped and bugging devices used only after authorisation by the Union Home Secretary or the state governments. At the Centre, they need to be reviewed by the cabinet, the Law and the Telecom secretaries. Fresh orders are required to be issued after two months. The Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI), the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and the CBDT, all under the Finance Ministry, are also authorised to seek permission to tap or to bug.
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On the record At the relatively young age of 42, Anurag Behar is the unlikely Vice Chancellor of Azim Premji University. He took up this challenging assignment after a successful run in corporate roles in Wipro. As the VC of the university and CEO of Azim Premji Foundation, he leads the philanthropic arm set up by Azim Premji to improve quality of education in India and address related development issues. He was recently in Chandigarh to speak about the university which is starting its courses from this year.
How is Azim Premji University different from the rest ? It’s a University with a clear and specific social purpose. And that purpose is to create a large cadre of Education & Development Sector experts – you can call them “professionals”. This purpose reflects in all our activities. For example all our programs, courses and research are on Education and Development fields e.g. curriculum development, pedagogy, education management, public health & nutrition, environment. It reflects in many other ways e.g. we encourage and enable diversity in the student group, our pedagogy integrates “theory” and “practice” very deeply. How did this idea come up ? The Azim Premji Foundation has been working in the field of improving quality and equity in school education in India for the past 10 years. We worked with over 2.5 million children and over 22,000 schools, and we realised that India needs several hundred times more number of high quality experts & professionals than it currently generates, in the field of education and development. So we knew someone had to set up a large institution focused on doing only this. After thinking about it for a while we decided to do it. What are the main challenges India faces with respect to education? There are challenges of quality and equity both. Schools and enrollment have both improved in numbers in the past 20 years. But the quality of learning and issues of equity have not. There is still an issue of inequity on the basis of gender, socio-economic back ground and various other factors. This is visible in practice and reality. We still have a system where schools are focused on rote learning – whereas we all know that that is not what really education is. This is why we have such poor learning outcomes as measured by any method. Children must learn to “learn”, they must gain conceptual understanding, they must gain other cognitive abilities like critical thinking, analytical thinking etc…....education must enable this, but currently our education system just doesn’t do anything about this. Let alone other key issues on character, values and social abilities. How well are Indian universities placed to handle the demands of the future ? Our universities are inadequate to handle the future of this country. Both in terms of numbers and quality. Some 7-8% of our students find their way to higher education – so the numbers have to increase significantly. However the crisis of quality is even deeper in our higher education system. We cannot build a “developed” India without fundamentally changing our higher education. What has the Azim Premji foundation accomplished so far? We have worked with thousands of government schools across many states. We have intervened in collaboration with the government on multiple facets of education e.g. in Karnataka we are running a program for the capacity building of 56,000 school leaders (headmasters), in Rajasthan we have developed workbooks from class 1-8 for all subjects for all government schools and in Uttarakhand we are running an “assessment led” comprehensive improvement program in over 1600 schools in two districts. How did you shift your career from corporate management to that of a missionary educationist ? How challenging was that? I knew that this is what I have always wanted to do. In some senses I had “drifted away” from what I wanted to do. It was a long detour of almost twenty years. But better late than never. Also, for the past 10 years, while still at Wipro, I have been closely involved with education – through the education work of Wipro and also with the Foundation. So I have always had my feet wet in Education. What are the future plans of Univesity and Foundation? We will scale up the student numbers and research programs significantly at the University – we hope to have around 4000 students (all in the field of Education and Development) in the next 5 years. We (the Foundation) are also setting up Institutes dedicated to capacity building of existing functionaries (including teachers) in 50 disadvantaged districts and 8 state capitals of the country. How do you handle the unease you cause to a regular university professor because of your age and background? I don’t claim to have any expertise in the areas that they have expertise in. I think that is the starting point. Also all of us know that we all have a role o play. What helps is friendly dialogue and some humour. I take them seriously and don’t take myself seriously.
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PROFILE How spiritual are our leaders and how wisely are they leading us ? He edits the world’s ‘only journal’ dedicated to the scientific study of ‘love, altruism, compassion and kindness’. He is a Protestant who has founded the ‘Order of St. Thomas’. He is the Director of the International Institute of Peace Studies and Global Philosophy at London. He is a peace activist, poet and a writer. What’s more, at a relatively young age of 55, he is carving out a niche for unconventional, even radical, thinking. Daffern, not really known beyond the circle of scholars and academics, has vast and varied experience in his chosen field. He has taught in the Muslim College, London, which was founded by late Dr Zaki Badawi, an Egyptian scholar. He has been the teacher of religions in a grammar school, has studied Philosophy and Religion besides History and has been linking the study of Politics and History with both Psychology and spirituality. The publications of the IIPSGP, edited or written by Daffern, seek to find answers to a few basic questions like “are the ruling elite leading us wisely ?” or “ are they conscious of the moral aspects of their work ?” The Institute’s journal, The Muses, explores a wide range of issues that excite intellectual curiosity even as Daffern himself travels extensively , attending seminars and conferences on a bewildering variety of subjects. Sample this : International conference on ‘ Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies’; ‘Make Poverty History’ campaign; ‘Forbidden Knowledge Conference’ and Conference of Philosophers and Poets for Peace. Having taken vows as a Buddhist at the age of 20, studied Yoga and Sufism, attended Quaker meetings in Canada and baptised as an Ecumenical Anglican, Daffern has been intensely interested in conflict resolution besides the history of ideas. He calls himself a Gandhian and has travelled to India, which he calls a second home, on several occasions. The teachings of Buddha and Lord Mahavira, besides Gandhi, are specially relevant today, he feels, in a world racked by terrorism and violence. A prolific writer and poet, several anthologies of his poems have been published while some of the poems have also been set to music. Born in Montreal in 1956, he graduated from the University of London, studied Philosophy and Religion at the University of Bristol and at the University of Calgary and taught at Oxford. Some observers, however, consider Daffern to be an incorrigible romantic and optimist. They cite his prescription given in the aftermath of the 26/11 attack on Mumbai to buttress the point. He came up with the idea of setting up an “ Indian Union Mediation Service” for the nations (Tibet, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Nepal, Bangladesh and of course India and Pakistan) to sort out their differences.
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Media tributes bemoan the politics of prayer and pigment that hounded Maqbool Fida Hussain (17 September 1915- 9 June 2011) to a self-imposed exile and forced him into embracing Qatari Citizenship in 2010 where he was actively engaged in creating 99 paintings in reverence to the name of Allah. The series were to be housed in a new museum under the patronage of Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani. 
The national capital, known for intrigues for over a thousand years, is no stranger to cloak-and-dagger stuff and the latest bugging scandal swirling around makes for a perfect pot-boiler and is sure to tickle script writers in Mumbai.
Thomas Daffern, born a Canadian, boasts of a Welsh ancestry and is settled in England. Earlier in June he was in India to receive the Anuvrat Peace Award at Jaipur, instituted by the Anuvrat Movement for ‘Ahimsa’ and promoted by Jain thinkers and saints.