The legacy of M.F. Husain, widely regarded as one of India's most important 20th-century artists, continues to generate both record-breaking auction prices and intense religious controversy more than a decade after his death. This year alone has perfectly illustrated the complex and polarizing nature of the painter's reputation, with two vastly different auction experiences highlighting the ongoing tensions surrounding his work.
In March, Husain's monumental 14-foot-long painting "Untitled (Gram Yatra)" made history at Christie's in New York, selling for $13.75 million and becoming the most expensive modern Indian artwork ever sold at auction. The price nearly doubled the previous record, with onlookers bursting into spontaneous applause as the hammer fell. The 1954 work, which had remained largely unseen for seven decades, depicts rural Indian life through 13 vibrant vignettes showing villagers working the land, milling grain, and tending livestock.
However, three months later in Mumbai, the atmosphere surrounding another Husain auction was dramatically different. Police patrolled the premises and erected barricades at the auctioneer's office after the right-wing Hindu nationalist group Hindu Janajagruti Samiti warned of "strong public agitation" if the sale of 25 long-lost Husain paintings proceeded. The group demanded the auction be canceled due to what they called Husain's "vulgar and obscene portrayals of sacred figures." Despite the threats, the auction went ahead without incident, but the contrasting moods perfectly exemplified the artist's status as one of Indian art's most celebrated yet controversial figures.
Known for his bold, colorful explorations of folk and pop culture, Husain earned the nickname "India's Picasso" for his pioneering role in Indian modernism. His paintings playfully incorporated icons from all spheres of life, from political figures like Mother Teresa and Indira Gandhi to Bollywood stars and mythological characters from literary epics. However, it was his portrayal of nude Hindu deities that sparked accusations of offending religious sentiments, a reaction his supporters believe was exacerbated by his Muslim heritage.
Born in 1915 in Pandharpur, a Hindu pilgrimage town in western India, Husain belonged to the Sulaymani Bohras, a Muslim sect primarily based in the Arabian Peninsula. After his mother's death, he was sent to study Urdu and Islamic calligraphy at his grandfather's madrassa in Gujarat. His artistic journey began in earnest when he moved to Mumbai in his early twenties to paint billboards for the emerging Hindi film industry, an experience that would profoundly shape his fascination with contemporary icons and his preference for vivid colors and flattened, figurative forms.
The pivotal moment in Husain's artistic development came in 1947 with India's independence and the partition of the subcontinent into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. Inspired partly by the religious strife that followed, Husain co-founded the Bombay Progressive Artists Group alongside major figures like F.N. Souza and S.H. Raza. The avant-garde collective sought to create a new visual language for the newly independent India, rejecting revivalist nationalism while fusing local art traditions with European modernist influences, particularly those of Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, and Henri Matisse.
For Husain, this artistic philosophy resulted in a Cubist-inspired style firmly rooted in the Indian experience. This approach is perfectly exemplified in the record-breaking "Untitled (Gram Yatra)," where abstracted villagers are depicted in various rural activities, with one farmer symbolically reaching out of his portrait frame to support a landscape in a neighboring vignette. As Christie's specialist Nishad Avari explained, "It's literally the farmer supporting the land, and supporting the state and the nation. 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."
Throughout the 1970s, Husain began exploring female forms more extensively, including images of Hindu goddesses like Durga and Lakshmi, sometimes depicted in suggestive or erotic poses. The artist maintained that he never intended to degrade these deities, arguing that his subjects were not the goddesses themselves but their iconography as they appeared in temple art, sculptures, and friezes. Their nudity, he insisted, was drawn from Indian art history rather than his imagination.
For nearly two decades, these works generated little controversy. During the 1980s, Husain was even welcomed into India's political establishment as a member of the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of parliament, where he served until 1992. However, everything changed in the fall of 1996 when the Hindu monthly magazine Vichar Mimansa published his nude depiction of the goddess Saraswati alongside an article titled "M.F. Husain: A Painter or Butcher." This incident triggered multiple criminal complaints against the then-80-year-old artist and began a chain of events that would eventually force him into self-imposed exile.
The timing of the backlash was not coincidental, according to Dr. Diva Gujral, an art history fellow at Oxford University's Ruskin School of Art. While many of Husain's most contentious works were created in the 1970s, protests only erupted in the 1990s, a decade when Hindu nationalist ideology flourished and communal tensions deepened. "The reception of Husain is such a good litmus test for Indian cultural politics," Gujral noted, "because there are times when it wasn't controversial. It's a way to take the temperature of the country."
The situation escalated dramatically in 1998 when Hindu fundamentalists attacked Husain's Mumbai home and galleries displaying his work. Eight years later, a hardline group offered a 510-million-rupee reward (then worth $11.5 million) for his murder. The protests extended beyond India's borders, with London's Asia House controversially canceling a Husain exhibition in 2006 due to security concerns after Hindu groups demanded its closure and vandals defaced two of his paintings.
The final straw came in 2006 when a court in Indore issued an arrest warrant for Husain over a painting that reimagined the map of India as a naked woman on her knees, with city names marking her body. Critics claimed the work was titled "Bharat Mata" (Mother India), though Husain denied this and publicly apologized for any offense caused. Facing hundreds of legal cases and fearing for his safety, the 91-year-old artist left India that year, never to return.
India's Supreme Court eventually vindicated Husain in 2008, rejecting calls for his prosecution and clearing him of obscenity charges. In its ruling, the court criticized the emergence of "a new puritanism" in India, noting that erotic sculptures were common in Hindu temples. However, Husain never felt safe enough to return home, spending his final years in Dubai, Doha, and London after obtaining Qatari citizenship.
Despite the controversy, Husain remained extraordinarily prolific throughout his career, with conservative estimates placing his total output at 30,000 to 40,000 artworks spanning painting, printmaking, writing, and filmmaking. Even in exile, he continued creating at a remarkable pace, completing 51 paintings inspired by the Bollywood classic "Mughal-e-Azam" in 2007 and working on a series of 99 artworks reflecting the 99 names of Allah at the time of his death in London in 2011.
Today, as global interest in Husain's work continues to surge, his legacy remains as complex as ever. The Qatar Foundation recently announced plans for an entire museum dedicated to his work, while a Delhi court simultaneously ordered the seizure of two "offensive" Husain paintings. This ongoing polarization reflects deeper questions about artistic freedom, religious sensitivity, and cultural identity in modern India, making Husain's story a compelling window into the country's evolving social and political landscape.
