News came in from London that MF Husain has passed on to another stage of journey in the universe. India to Qatar to London to…
A mournful, wistful voice of another star of India, Mohd. Rafi came to my mind instantly : “Do gaz zameen bhi na mili kooye yaar mein…,” Bahadur Shah Zafar II wrote from jail in another land after the British exiled and imprisoned him in Burma after what they called the Mutiny of 1857. The Mughal patriarch pined away for homeland as his two best-known kalaam iterate. The power of the Empire was such that Zafar could only look around and bemoan the stretch of solitude and isolation. And express his anguish through verse no one could hear. But… sang ,though there be no audience (koyii na miley tau akaeley mein gaana… I wrote in my opening blog ). Na kisii ki aankh ka nor hoon/ na kisii ke dil ka qaraar hoon. His exile dispirited him no end.
Zafar wrote, Rafi sang almost as if for Maqbool Fida Husain. If Zafar went by dint of the politics of Imperialism, MF Husain went by “virtue” of the politics of Culture. His depictions of Gods in the Nude did not go well with people who arrogate the power of cultural proscription to themselves. May be ,they were right. But it is arguable whether gods have the form of humans, and whether nudity is assignable to them and whether nudity is an awful form of existence and creation. Is nudity not metaphorical of ‘soul’ without body, analogous to body without clothes? Isn’t ‘God’ abstract and without attributes, nirguna? Does our culture teach us of one single ‘God’ or of numberless ‘Gods’ according to our perception based on karma? What forms do the ‘Gods’ take in the ViraatRupa… are they dressed for dinner or for bed or for an official meeting… are they ever undressed at all?
The truth must be that Gods, if there are Gods, can not have human shape or human attributes. An anthropomorphic imagination plays what tricks it will. At all events, WE Don’t Know.
On such grounds was a man exiled from his land.Our cultural assumptions are no more than our assumptions and do not confer the power to threaten and to banish . True, Husain’s was more of a self-exile. But a bunch of cultural radicals did enough to force an exile From 2006 onwards, Husain stayed out of India, telling any one who was ready to listen, that he wanted to return to India.
Unfortunately (some one used the word very tellingly the other day) we have a government which can only pander to the sentiments of differing cultural blocks. So Husain died in England without setting foot on Indian soil again.
And his last rites are to be performed in England. MF Husain coloured in Zafar’s words , “main woh bekasi ka mazaar hoon.”
Koi Hindoo koi Turak kahaavai
dono maram na jaana… said Kabir.
India ,still in the zero tolerance mode, may not know how to celebrate the colour-filled life of MF Husain.
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