Singh had set a high cap (thirty acres) on the land an individual farmer could own, against helping a greater number of peasants; and favoritism in the implementation of the new law further excluded weaker farmers. Soon after, another of Singh’s legislative achievements (consolidating fragmented landholdings to help farmers increase their efficiency) gave further advantages to already somewhat advantaged peasants. Not coincidentally, many of them were Jats from Singh’s home region, in western UP.
In any country, land reforms addressing immense disparities between landowners and tenant farmers create finer grades of inequality. Yet I wonder if Singh might have been more thoughtful about diminishing this risk had his view of the economic behavior of village farmers not been so rosy. The peasant, Singh contended, wasn’t a normal capitalist actor. Rather, his traditional values and staunch character rendered him less money-obsessed and more virtuous than, say, a factory worker. Even when employing others to help tend his fields, he claimed, the farmer didn’t exploit them.
It was probably good for the statistical incidence of apoplectic stroke in India that landless UP peasants (mainly Dalits who worked for cultivators such as the Jats) had been systematically denied the leisure and education to read the collected pamphletry of Charan Singh. The lot of the landless had been touched by land reform in only one important way: a larger and more diverse group of people was now able to work them like animals and pay them little, when they got around to it. And because Singh fought to keep farmers, even very rich ones, exempt from meaningful taxation (something true to this day in UP and all across rural India), there was little wealth for a state in the agrarian heartland to redistribute.
Even now, landless Dalits view the Jats with as much distrust as the Jats once viewed the zamindars. Though that animosity of course predated Singh, he intensified it. Through a long career in which he rhetorically positioned himself as an advocate of the masses, he initiated very little for his neediest constituents. Meanwhile, by the late 1960s, it was becoming hard to argue that his sustained largesse to cultivators had trickled down and created a better-fed populace. When modern India’s first famine threatened, it was in eastern UP—not because there was not enough grain, but because the poorest lacked the cash to buy it.
* * *
At a time when Indian poverty required urgent political action, Singh’s view that preferences and subsidies given to his base of farmers would transform the wider economy placed him at odds with the Congress, which had to appease constituencies other than farmers. So, in 1967, Singh quit the party, announcing he was fed up with its corruption and incompetence. The Congress instantly felt the effects of losing his support. Within three weeks, the state government fell. Singh, at the head of a coalition of opposition parties, became UP’s first non-Congress chief minister—a historic achievement in the heartland of Congress politics. It was a lesson he would apply nationally in the 1970s, to take on Indira Gandhi.
“The farmers are forgotten by this government,” Singh lectured on his seventy-sixth birthday to an audience massed on the broad avenue leading from India Gate up to Parliament House in Delhi. It was 1978. After imprisonment during the Emergency, he had achieved a sweet revenge, forming a joint opposition party that brought down Indira Gandhi’s government. Now he wanted to be India’s first peasant prime minister. The audience he addressed was unprecedented in the capital: nearly a million farmers in dhotis and turbans, many of whom, said a New York Times report, were still dusty from their work in the fields.
Some in the foreign press saw the crowds as threatening and abject, but that got their relative position in Indian life quite wrong. Indira Gandhi had in the previous ten years averted famine and drastically reduced the country’s dependency on foreign food aid, which had once allowed Lyndon Johnson’s agriculture secretary to gloat, “We had them over a barrel and squeezed them.” India’s so-called Green Revolution (one of the final economic policy initiatives of Indira Gandhi’s father) had entered its second decade, and high-yield seed varieties, tube wells, and fertilizers were increasing food stores, if depleting the environment. So Singh and the farmers who gathered weren’t merely begging for help; they were demanding that their vast newfound political power be rewarded. Many of the subsidies and tax breaks that farmers (including fabulously wealthy ones) receive today for water, electricity, fertilizer, and machinery can be found in the budget demands Singh made after his followers’ strength was impressed upon Delhi. By 1979 those farmers had helped him gain the prime ministership.
That’s the happy moment on which the children’s-book version of the story ought rightly to end, because the denouement was fast and ugly. Members of his coalition quickly turned against one another, and Singh was gone from the highest office in a trice (just twenty-four days in power, though he remained a caretaker prime minister for several months), replaced by a returning Indira Gandhi. Decades later, we have yet to see another genuine member of the peasant class rise to become a serious contender for prime minister.
As the political economist Terence Byres says, Singh was in the vanguard of Indian “capitalism from below,” but today his popular legacy is oddly diminished. He’s thought of mainly as the leader of his own caste, the Jats. In Yogendra Yadav’s assessment, Singh’s “inability to speak for different classes of Indian farmers, especially his inability or unwillingness to speak about the landless farmers, has proved to be a very severe limitation of his legacy.”
Though the Jats prospered during Charan Singh’s lifetime, in more recent years some of the state subsidies and favorable pricing mechanisms that enabled them to do so have shrunk, leaving them more exposed to the market. Many have invested their profits in small businesses (furniture and metal workshops, real estate) and are seeking ways out of agriculture. A caste that has not traditionally valued education, Jats are now pressing to be recognized as one of the less privileged caste communities, known as the Other Backward Classes, eligible for reservations (affirmative action) in education and in government jobs. I wonder what Charan Singh would have made of the fact that the people whose farming skills he celebrated and defended are themselves giving up on the land.
49
M. F. HUSAIN
“Hindustan Is Free”
1917–2011
“Hindustan has for a thousand years been enslaved. For seven hundred years it was ruled by Muslims, then by the English, and works made during these periods gave false stories about Indian art, culture, and history,” Ashok Deendayal Sharma, a large man in a neatly pressed safari suit, explained recently as he settled himself under a tree in the city of Ahmedabad. “But now Hindustan is free, and anyone who abuses or attacks the gods of the majority Hindus will not be tolerated by the majority community.”
Sharma, the founder of a small right-wing organization, the Hindu Samrajya Sena, belongs today to the regional Hindu party, the Shiv Sena. While unspooling his version of Indian history, he gazed evenly at the modern art gallery just across the concourse from where we sat. In the two decades since the art gallery’s opening, he and his ideological allies have attacked it three times. The gallery, whose series of low white domes become, from the inside, a modernist interpretation of the meandering caves of Ellora, was inspired, and houses murals, by one of the bogeys of Hindu extremism: the puckishly exuberant Muslim artist Maqbool Fida Husain.
Husain, who is recognized in other quarters as the face of modern art in independent India, learned to paint boldly and quickly in the 1930s while making ends meet by working on billboards for films. In the course of a long life, he racked up some ten thousand works—created on walls, chairs, billboards, plates, toys, and film as well as canvases. Some of those works were exhilarating commentaries on the emergence of a new nation. Some were the market-driven confections of a whimsical playboy. Had a fraction of the works not been of Hindu goddesses and Indian female icons in the nude, I suspect his legacy in India would be roughly as polarizing as that of Andy Warhol in America today—a matter of vernissage disp
ute, not an occasion for mob rampage. But modern Indian cultural debates have never been known for their proportionality.
In addition to the assaults on the Ahmedabad gallery, Sharma and his comrades have successfully intimidated other Ahmedabad and Mumbai galleries that planned to show the late modernist painter’s work. So when Sharma speaks of Husain, who was approaching eighty when he became a cultural lightning rod, it is with the relaxed mock sympathy of a man who’s won more battles than he’s lost. “It was Husain’s mental disease that caused him to inflict this,” Sharma says. “To do it in front of the whole world—he was a man who was trying to glorify his own name in the world market … But the moment we stood up and showed him our strength, he had to stop doing such work.”
The threats didn’t stop Husain, actually. What they did, after nearly a decade of pressure, was to drive a consummately Indian painter into exile. There, refusing either to apologize for his controversial works or to excoriate those who attacked him, he kept painting, in accordance with his own vision of India, until his death.
Many liberals of the time were distressed to see a free-spirited popular artist become, late in life, a butterfly on the wheel of Hindu nationalism. Yet now that he’s gone, to view him only as what he came to represent in that controversy, as an emblem either of free expression or of religious insult, shunts aside one of his original contributions to Indian culture. From the 1950s, long before he became a political shuttlecock, Husain was a democratizer of Indian modern art.
* * *
Many twentieth-century artists, in India and elsewhere, came from culturally sophisticated elites and produced work to be appreciated substantially by people like them. M. F. Husain’s own wanderings from childhood through a variety of villages, towns, cultures, and, later, countries, inspired him to build, over the course of his career, a bigger tent: an artistic public space that had room for popular audiences as well as privileged ones. There was no other modern artist whose name the average Bombay rickshaw-wallah was likely to know, not least for the many paintings he made of India’s greatest film diva of the 1990s, Madhuri Dixit (who also starred in a feature film he directed).
Despite the breadth of his later popularity, Husain was not originally part of any mainstream. His roots were Gujarati and, further back, Yemeni, but he was born, probably in 1917, in the temple town of Pandharpur, in what is now Maharashtra. His working-class family were Suleimanis, a subsect of the Shia community of Bohras. Being from a tiny minority, the artist who later became hated in part because of his religion recalled in the 1990s that, “until recently, we never disclosed our religion. We did not even build mosques.” This sense of being outside the fold also describes his relationship to his family.
His founding wound, in his own telling, was the death of his mother before he was two, a loss he connected to his later obsession with female forms, including those of Hindu goddesses. His father, who moved the family to Indore and took a job as a millworker, paid him only sporadic attention; when he remarried, young Maqbool lived for a time with his grandfather. Yet he considered himself, from a very young age, to be on his own.
Later, Husain made his enforced independence sound more like a lark than a hardship. Naturally sociable and obsessed with playing soccer, he assembled an alternative family from people he met on the maidans and streets. But his uncertainty about his real family’s support also made him view the world through a practical lens; he realized that as much as he’d like to kick a ball around all day, another of his skills, drawing, could be more readily converted into income. Nor did he mind the attention he received in middle school, when his patriotic headmaster selected him to draw a portrait of Gandhi on the great man’s birthday. “I don’t need any degree because of this brush in my hand,” he recalled telling his family upon finishing high school. “If nothing happens, I’ll whitewash the walls.” He later described that decision as his “great liberation, one of the greatest events of my life—that I got the freedom to work.”
He didn’t have to whitewash much. Instead, he began his career as a professional artist in Bombay, where he painted garish Bollywood film billboards for a pittance. Typically working outdoors, sometimes between monsoon downpours, he mastered with confident strokes a scale and sense of proportion that other artists working on large canvases would have required detailed sketches and grids to pull off. Years later, when extremist vandals ransacked his home, destroying paintings worth millions on the market, he accepted it with equanimity: “I know how it is to work so hard on a hoarding [billboard] that is put up for only a couple of weeks, and then destroyed. Isn’t it funny?”
I’ve always been moved by Husain’s account of how, new to the city and uncertain how to be an artist, he caught a showing of an American melodrama starring Charles Laughton as Rembrandt. The fictional Rembrandt’s anguish at his inability to be true to his art while earning enough to eat disquieted Husain, but the faces in the portraits on-screen fired him up. He started cutting photos of ordinary Indians out of newspapers and painting them. I still feel slightly cheated that his Bollywood billboards were lost to history. I’ll bet the faces, never to be seen up close, were very good, and maybe even a little Dutch.
* * *
Rembrandt, in film and in life, died poor; the pragmatic Husain simply acquired more marketable skills. Seeking a steadier income after he married in 1941, he learned to be a miniaturist, decorating nursery furniture for posh children. It was Jacks and Jills and Little Bo Beeps by the dozen. In his spare time, he started to design furniture he considered cooler than the stuff on which he was painting—productions that helped him think about shape and form. This subsistence work benefited his private art, which he continued on the side. As Independence loomed, he began playing with Indian artistic traditions, painting the fisherfolk and laborers in his neighborhood, and preparing for the first time to show a few pieces in an exhibition put on by the Bombay Art Society.
To four artists on the cutting edge of the city’s art world, among them the iconoclastic Francis Newton Souza and the tantric abstractionist painter S. H. Raza, the Art Society’s exhibitions were a provocation, proof that conservative critics couldn’t judge what was and wasn’t good in modern art. In 1947 the frustrated four founded the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group. Rejecting the academic manner imported by British institutions from the West, and the historicism and quaint stylistics of the nationalist Bengal School, they sought, as they wrote in a manifesto, to bridge “the widening gulf between the artists and the life of the people.” They nevertheless attended some of the despised exhibitions; at one, Souza encountered Husain’s painting Kumhar (“Potters”) and invited him to join the progressive ranks.
Krishen Khanna, a surviving member of the group, recalls with astonishment how little Husain or the other supposedly political artists discussed the fact that India had just been split into two nations. “He never had a political philosophy or anything,” Khanna remembers. “He had a general philosophy, which was a very good philosophy, but this country couldn’t take it. He said that this is a multicultural subcontinent—all sorts of people live here, which is actually an enrichment, and we get along all right.” A striking aspect of Husain’s early work was that the religions of many figures remained ambiguous.
Around this time, he began to take an interest in Pahari School paintings from Basholi (see 20, Nainsukh) and Jain miniatures, and traveled with Souza to see an exhibition of sculptures from the temples of Mathura. The influence of those red sandstone forms, particularly of yakshis (female spirits and divinities, often shown nude or seminude), would be lasting, and would emerge in one of his finest paintings, the monumental Man of 1950. Cubist vocabulary engages with Indian forms, motifs, colors, and images in a composition that could connect equally to Partition or to universal existential struggle. A formidable nude black figure broods, chin on hand, astride a low stool as a mêlée of torsos and limbs whorls around him, including the distinct, fateful hand of a female deity.
Th
e year Husain painted Man, Souza was leaving for London and Raza for Paris, where they’d each find stimulation and fame in the wider international avant-garde. But Husain, who lacked the others’ resources and exposure to Western art, stayed put with his wife and young children, and by comparison developed less. Later, he recalled that abstract art and pure Cubism were so unloved in India that when, after Man, he made five figureless paintings, he couldn’t sell them for even five rupees. Instead, he would evolve, to great profit and mixed reviews, the modern folk amalgam that came to define him.
* * *
Against the backdrop of a makeshift village theater (a deep-red stretch of cloth), a tribal woman, stunningly hieratic in head and form, dangles a giant spider on a thread. Flanking her are a peasant woman in a white sari, a lamp balanced on her head, and an adolescent girl, her naked body gilded with turmeric paste. “It could have been conceived and executed nowhere else but on location in India,” the critic and art historian Geeta Kapur wrote about Husain’s best-known painting, Between the Spider and the Lamp (1956). It’s a testament to Husain’s mainstream popularity from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s that this enigmatic, beautifully composed, and slyly erotic painting was featured, in 1982, on an Indian postage stamp.
Husain wanted his art to reach Indians who, like him, had grown up outside big cities, in places like his own Pandharpur and Indore. Eschewing a studio, he typically made his art while traveling—later in life, famously, barefoot. The religious and cultural influences he encountered and drew on were motley. Growing up, he’d been enchanted by the white stallions in Muslims’ Muharram processions, and horses became a recurring motif in his work. Yet he’d also acted as the Hindu god Hanuman in skits he’d put on with his friends, and eagerly awaited the appearance of the god in annual Ramlila performances, which tell the story of the god Ram. These, too, became an obsession in his art.