SINGAPORE — For the complex legacy of M.F. Husain, one of 20th-century India’s most important artists, this year has been a tale of two auctions.

In March, one of the late painter’s monumental depictions of rural life, the 14-foot-long “Untitled (Gram Yatra),” became the most expensive modern Indian artwork ever to go under the hammer. The $13.75 million price tag almost doubled the previous record, with onlookers at Christie’s in New York bursting into spontaneous applause.

Three months later, an auction of 25 long-lost Husain paintings in Mumbai was far less celebratory. Police patrolled the premises and erected barricades at the auctioneer’s office after a right-wing Hindu nationalist group warned of “strong public agitation” if calls to cancel the sale — due to Husain’s “vulgar and obscene” portrayals of sacred figures — were ignored.

The auction went ahead without incident. But the contrasting moods exemplified the painter’s status as one of Indian art’s most celebrated but controversial names. As if to further underscore his polarized reputation, this year also saw a Delhi court order the seizure of two “offensive” Husain paintings, while, earlier this month, the Qatar Foundation announced plans for an entire museum dedicated to his work (Qatar had given Husain citizenship after he fled India, in 2006, fearing for his safety).

Known for bold, colorful explorations of folk and pop culture, Husain was lauded as a pioneer of Indian modernism and often dubbed “India’s Picasso.” His paintings played with icons in all their forms, from Mother Teresa and Indira Gandhi to Bollywood stars and mythological figures from literary epics.

The artist’s portrayals of nude Hindu deities, however, stand accused of offending religious sentiments — a reaction his supporters believe is exacerbated by his Muslim heritage. As a result, his later life was dogged by protests, legal action, death threats and an arrest warrant. Despite later being exonerated by India’s supreme court, he died in self-imposed exile, in London, in 2011. In its statement opposing June’s Mumbai auction, right-wing group Hindu Janajagruti Samiti said that Husain “deliberately painted vulgar and obscene images of goddesses … thereby gravely hurting the sentiments of millions of Hindus in the world.”

The rekindling of old grievances, almost 15 years after his death, may be down to burgeoning interest from the global art market. But reactions to Husain’s work are also a bellwether of Hindu nationalism, according to Dr. Diva Gujral, an art history fellow at the University of Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art. While many of his most contentious works were produced in the 1970s, it is no coincidence that protests only erupted in 1990s, a decade when the Hindutva ideology flourished, communal tensions deepened and, Gujral said, Muslims became “a lightning rod” in India.

“The reception of Husain is such a good litmus test for Indian cultural politics, because there are times when it wasn’t controversial,” she added, calling the reactions a “way to take the temperature of the country.”

Icons past and present
Hailing from an Indian branch of the Sulaymani Bohras, a Muslim sect residing primarily in the Arabian Peninsula, Husain was exposed to both Hindu and Islamic art from a young age.

He was born in 1915 in Pandharpur, a pilgrimage town dotted with Hindu temples in western India. After his mother’s death, he was sent to study Urdu and Islamic calligraphy at his grandfather’s madrassa in Sidhpur, Gujarat. Husain later lived in the city of Indore and immersed himself in folk traditions, like performances of the Hindu epic “Ramayana,” before enrolling in art lessons at the local art institute. In 1934, he sold his first painting on a roadside for 10 rupees.

His interest in iconography always stretched far beyond religion. In his early 20s, Husain moved to Mumbai to paint billboards for the nascent Hindi film industry. It would prove a formative experience — one that shaped his fascination with contemporary idols and Bollywood, as well as his penchant for vivid colors and flattened, figurative forms.

Then, in 1947, came another decisive moment in the artist’s life: India’s independence from colonial rule and Britain’s partition of the subcontinent into a Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. Partly inspired by the religious strife that ensued, the painter co-founded the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group (PAG), alongside major figures like F.N. Souza and S.H. Raza, later that year.

The avant-garde group sought to forge a new visual language of — and for — India. Rejecting revivalist nationalism, its members fused local art traditions with outside influences, especially those of European modernists like Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani and Henri Matisse (though Husain also traveled to China in the early 1950s), as they interrogated their country’s emerging identity.

“It was about creating something new, breaking with the past,” said Gujra adding that the group did more than “simply take” from Western art. “They’re reinvigorating a language that’s made available to them through access to places like London and Paris. But it’s very much their own thing.”

For Husain, this meant a Cubist-inspired style rooted firmly in the Indian experience. It is an approach epitomized by the record-breaking “Untitled (Gram Yatra),” which he produced in 1954, though it went largely unseen for seven decades before going on sale at Christie’s this year. The narrative painting comprises 13 vibrant vignettes, each containing a snippet of rural life. Abstracted villagers are depicted working the land, milling grain and tending to livestock. Elsewhere, a farmer symbolically reaches out of his portrait’s frame to hold up a landscape in a neighboring vignette.

“It’s literally the farmer supporting the land, and supporting the state and the nation,” said Nishad Avari, head of South Asian modern and contemporary art at Christie’s. “This is Husain’s way of saying that, while we may be modernizing, post-independence, and entering this new era, it’s very important not to forget that the basis of the country is its rural folk.”

Despite the public attention Husain’s later work attracted, his most valuable paintings emerged during this early period, Avari said. “He’s playing this critical role of defining what it is to be an Indian artist in the new country of India, and what Indian modern art really means,” he added. “He’s a linchpin figure in defining this moment.”

As many of Husain’s contemporaries moved overseas (including Souza and Raza, who relocated to the UK and France, respectively), the painter remained in India, his eternal muse. He nonetheless enjoyed some global recognition, exhibiting in New York City in 1964 and participating in the 1971 São Paulo Biennial in Brazil alongside Picasso. This period also saw Husain exploring female forms, including images of Hindu goddesses like Durga and Lakshmi, sometimes in suggestive or erotic poses.

Husain maintained that he never intended to degrade these deities. His subjects were not the goddesses themselves, but their iconography — how they appeared in temple art, sculptures and friezes. Their imagery was drawn from Indian art history, not his imagination, though the paintings were nonetheless viewed by some critics as a “kind of desacralizing act,” said the University of Oxford’s Gujra.

“In Hindu nationalist politics, the bogeyman is the Muslim invader who outrages the modesty of the Hindu woman,” she said. “For a lot of your average Indian viewers who didn’t have an enduring understanding of the nude and its art historical heritage… he becomes the Muslim disrobing the Hindu woman.”

“It reignited old ideas of the Muslim taking what isn’t his,” she added. “But the idea for Husain is that this heritage belongs to all of us.”

The entire 1980s passed before the paintings faced significant religious backlash. In that time, Husain was even welcomed into the political establishment as a member of the Indian parliament’s upper house, the Rajya Sabha, where he served until 1992.

But everything changed in the fall of 1996, when a Hindu monthly magazine, Vichar Mimansa, published the artist’s depiction of the goddess Saraswati alongside an article headlined “M.F. Husain: A Painter or Butcher.” The incident led to multiple criminal complaints against Husain, who was then aged in his early 80s, beginning a chain of events that led to his self-imposed exile.

In 1998, Hindu fundamentalists attacked Husain’s Mumbai home and galleries displaying his work. Eight years later, another hardline group offered a 510-million-rupee (then $11.5 million) cash reward for his murder. The protests stretched beyond India’s borders, too, with London’s Asia House controversially canceling an exhibition of Husain’s work in 2006, citing security concerns, after Hindu groups demanded its closure and vandals defaced two of his paintings.

That year, a court in Indore issued an arrest warrant for Husain. The offending image, this time, was a more recent painting that reimagined the map of India as a woman on her knees, city names marking her body. The artist publicly apologized for causing offense and denied giving it the name “Bharat Mata” — or Mother India, a personification of the nation — claiming the work was untitled. This did little to appease his critics.

Concerned for his safety and facing hundreds — or as he later suggested, thousands — of legal cases, Husain left India in 2006. The Delhi High Court and, later, India’s Supreme Court eventually rejected calls for Husain’s summons and cleared him of obscenity charges, effectively quashing cases in other cities. In its ruling, in 2008, the Supreme Court criticized the emergence of a “new puritanism” in India, stating that erotic sculptures were a common sight in Hindu temples. Yet, Husain never felt it was safe to return to the country again.

His plight meanwhile became a rallying cry for supporters of Indian secularism. Novelist Salman Rushdie was among those to criticize the Indian government for its “inadequate” protection of Husain and the freedom of expression he represented. “Violence and its ugly sisters, both Hindu and Islamic, have to be resisted,” Rushdie said at an address in Delhi in 2010. “They must be rebuffed. To appease it is the best way to ensure their growth. I am afraid India is going that way.”

Husain spent most of his final years in Dubai, Doha and London. Upon surrendering his Indian passport to apply for Qatari citizenship, he is reported to have said: “India is my motherland, and I simply cannot leave that country. What I have surrendered is just a piece of paper.”

He also often spoke of his desire to return home — including to his friend Abhishek Poddar, a prominent collector and founder of Bangalore’s Museum of Art & Photography, who regularly mailed Husain his favorite Indore newspaper. “His love was India, and he always missed India,” said Poddar. “I once said, ‘What is it that you miss? And he said, ‘What I really miss is the earth there. The mud.’”

Husain’s goddess paintings were just a fraction of his life’s work. Even the most conservative estimates put his total output at 30,000 to 40,000 artworks, spanning printmaking, writing and filmmaking of both the arthouse and Bollywood variety. He was similarly prolific after leaving India: In 2007, he completed 51 paintings inspired by the Bollywood classic “Mughal-e-Azam,” and was, at the time of his death, working on a series of 99 artworks, reflecting the 99 names of Allah, telling the history of Arab civilization.

“He needed to paint all the time,” said Poddar, who first met Husain as the artist waited for a lift, without shoes, at a Kolkata bus stop in the early 1980s. (The 57-year-old collector, then a teenage art enthusiast, approached Husain after recognizing his flowing white beard from a weekly magazine, and the pair struck up an unlikely friendship.) “I once saw him at his London property where he had between 25 and 30 works. I met him again two or three days later, and lo and behold, there were another 12 or 13.”

“There would have been at least a dozen occasions when he’s sitting with me and he’s drawing somebody’s portrait,” added Poddar, who holds several Husain works in his museum’s collection.

Husain painted anywhere and everywhere. Renowned as a showman, he even painted during live performances and immediately auctioned off the resulting works. Taking commissions from Gulf royals and industrialist billionaires, he was something of an art-world celebrity, his distinctive appearance, designer suits and reputation for walking around shoeless all part of his own icon-building.

“He was known as the barefoot artist,” said Avari, the Christie’s specialist. “He made that a thing. He would walk around with this very long paint brush, using it as a cane. There was no mistaking the figure of Husain wherever he went.

“I don’t know anybody who doesn’t have a Husain story,” he added.

But if Husain was, to use Poddar’s words, a “brilliant marketing man,” is it plausible that he had attempted to exploit religious outrage to serve his own ends? Gujra described the painter as a “contrarian” who “definitely liked controversy,” though she suggests he would neither have intended nor anticipated the reaction his work provoked. “He was interested in mass images,” she explained.

Poddar meanwhile argued that his fiercely secular friend treated Hindu icons the same as all his other subjects. In fact, Husain was also accused of blasphemy by Islamic groups over a song in his 2004 movie “Meenaxi: A Tale of Three Cities,” as its lyrics used words directly from the Quran.

“If there were a pantheon of figures associated with Islam, I don’t think he would have looked at that any differently from the way he looked at Christianity, Sikhism, Hinduism or whatever else,” said Poddar.

“I don’t think he ever had an anti-Hindu agenda,” he added. “Ever.” – CNN