Latest news with #M.F.Husain
The Print
11-06-2025
- Politics
- The Print
Hindutva grouse returns to haunt an MF Husain auction in Mumbai. Latest row & past controversies
The Hindutva outfit has also submitted a memorandum to this effect to Home Minister Amit Shah, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, and Mumbai Commissioner of Police Deven Bharti, warning of a public agitation if they refused to meet its demands. There are neither any new grouses nor any fresh grounds for the outfit to call for the scrapping of the auction. The HJS has claimed that Husain previously hurt Hindu sentiments, and the auction would be akin to a 'glorification of his criminal deeds'. Mumbai: The late Indian modernist painter, M.F. Husain, has once again riled up Hindutva activists ahead of a rare auction of his 25 paintings Thursday at Hamilton House, Mumbai. The Hindu Janajagruti Samiti (HJS) has called for the scrapping of the auction. ThePrint reached out to Hindu Janajagruti Samiti over a call, but the member who picked up the call refused to comment. Hamilton House, or Pundole Art Gallery was also contacted via calls and email for its comments. Once a response comes, the report will be updated. The HJS threats are nothing new. The illustrious art career of Husain, who died in 2011 in London at 95 years of age after a self-imposed exile, was marked with protests, police complaints, and legal tussles with Hindutva outfits back home. Controversies over Husain's paintings Maqbool Fida Husain, known as Picasso of India, was a revered artist who, at the same time, was a child of controversies. He produced nearly 60,000 works of art in his 95 years of life, covering subjects ranging from the Ramayana and Mahabharata to the British colonisation and motifs of urban and rural India. However, some of his works, especially in the 90s, landed him in the crosshairs of the saffron brigade and political outfits. In 1996, he drew the goddess of knowledge, Saraswati, nude. Hindutva outfits, such as Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Hindu Janajagruti Samiti, strongly criticised it. In the late 1990s, Bajrang Dal activists attacked his exhibition in Ahmedabad, destroying some of his paintings. Enraged again in 1998 by a painting depicting a nude Sita, sitting on the tail of Hanuman, Bajrang Dal activists attacked his home in South Mumbai. At the time, Husain had to apologise for things to calm down. 'We should find a way once and for all to establish what is art and what is obscenity. It is not an attack on me but on culture and the freedom of expression,' M.F. Husain told the media back then. His representations of Hindu gods and goddesses such as Shiva and Durga—allegedly controversial—led to legal actions and threats in the early 2000s. After years, nearly a decade later, he again landed in a controversy for painting 'Bharat Mata' nude. He had drawn a nude woman in red, in the shape of India. At the time, the backlash was severe, with multiple cases filed against him in several states under sections 153A, 295A, and 292 of the Indian Penal Code, which pertain to promoting enmity between communities, insulting religious sentiments, and participating in or promoting businesses selling obscene objects, respectively. The Bal Thackeray-led Shiv Sena attacked his exhibition titled India in the Era of Mughals in Delhi in 2007, vandalising two of his paintings. Though Husain then apologised for the portrayal, he left the country in 2006 and sought asylum in Doha. He spent his last years between Doha, Dubai, and London. In 2008, the Delhi High Court dismissed the criminal cases against him. In 2011, the Supreme Court consolidated all the cases in the lower courts. Then, it passed a judgment, extending protection to his art under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution, guaranteeing freedom of speech and expression. Also Read: Mumbra train tragedy: Call for automated doors, more trains after at least 4 dead due to overcrowding The auction Back in 2004, Swarup Shrivastava, a Mumbai-based art collector and chairman of Swarup Group of Industries, bought 25 paintings from Husain for a deal. Each painting cost Rs one crore each. The deal was to commission 100 paintings for Rs 100 crore. However, in 2006, the Central Bureau of Investigation initiated a probe against the Swarup Group and Srivastava for allegedly misappropriating Rs 150 crore from Rs 236 crore taken in loans from the National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation of India (NAFED). A tribunal in December 2008 permitted NAFED to secure the Husain paintings among assets of Rs 100 crore. Finally, the case reached the Bombay High Court, which asked for a valuation of the paintings from the Pundole Art Gallery. Last year, in May, Pundole submitted that the valuation was Rs 25 crore for 25 paintings. Subsequently, the Bombay HC, in a February 2025 order, allowed the sheriff of Mumbai to auction 25 paintings to recover the dues from Shrivastava. The auction, titled 'M.F. Husain: An artist's vision of the XX century', includes 25 canvases painted as a part of the OPCE, Our Planet Called Earth, series by Husain. The Hindu Janajagruti Samiti has submitted a memorandum to the government officials to raise objections. The memorandum stated, 'M.F. Husain, during the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, painted a nude and disrespectful image of Bharat Mata titled 'Rape of Mother India', which is a severe act of sedition. In other paintings, he portrayed Bharat Mata nude with names of Indian cities written on her body.' 'Holding an auction of these 25 paintings is tantamount to indirectly supporting his previous anti-national and anti-social acts. Glorifying such individuals under the guise of 'artistic freedom' is unacceptable. The Patiala House Court in Delhi has recently ordered the seizure of Husain's controversial paintings, and an investigation is underway,' the HJS added in its memorandum. In the past, there had been cancellations of his exhibitions in India and revocations of awards in his name, the memorandum further stated. (Edited by Madhurita Goswami) Also Read: Solo or together? The big question for Maharashtra alliances this BMC poll season
Hans India
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Hans India
Hindu Group Demands Ban on Auction of M.F. Husain's Controversial Paintings
Mangaluru: M.F. Husain paintings, Hindu Janajagruti Samiti, art auction ban, controversial art India, religious sentiments protest, Mumbai art galleryThe Hindu Janajagruti Samiti (HJS) has demanded a complete ban on the upcoming auction of 25 paintings by late artist M.F. Husain, scheduled to be held at the Pundole Art Gallery in Mumbai on June 12. The organisation submitted memoranda to Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde, Union Home Minister Amit Shah, Mumbai Police Commissioner, and the Mumbai District Collector, calling the proposed sale 'a glorification of anti-national and anti-Hindu sentiments.' In a press release issued here today the Samiti has alleged that several of the works being auctioned include controversial and 'vulgar' depictions of revered Hindu deities and Bharat Mata (Mother India), which sparked nationwide outrage in the past. Among them, they point to a painting titled Rape of Mother India, which HJS claims Husain created during the 26/11 Mumbai attacks. The group argues that this work amounts to sedition and deeply insults India and its cultural identity. 'Glorifying such a figure under the guise of 'artistic freedom' is unacceptable,' said the HJS in its statement, warning of public protests if the auction is not halted. 'Art that mocks national symbols and religious icons cannot be shielded as creativity. It is an assault on the spiritual and emotional ethos of a nation.' Maqbool Fida Husain, often referred to as the 'Picasso of India,' was one of the country's most celebrated yet polarising artists. Despite his global acclaim, his depictions of Hindu gods and goddesses in the nude led to more than 1,200 legal complaints across India. His critics accused him of deliberately hurting religious sentiments, while supporters defended his work as a bold exploration of mythology through modernist lenses. Notably, in one painting, he portrayed Sita seated nude on Hanuman's tail, and in others, Lord Ram, Sita, and Hanuman are depicted nude together — images that provoked widespread outrage. There were also paintings of goddesses Saraswati, Parvati, Ganga, and Yamuna in nude or suggestive forms, which many Hindu groups deemed offensive. In the face of mounting protests and legal challenges, Husain left India in 2006 and later accepted Qatari citizenship in 2010. He passed away in exile in London in 2011. The Samiti also referenced a recent directive by Delhi's Patiala House Court to seize Husain's controversial painting, calling it a legal precedent that should influence upcoming actions. 'Several of his exhibitions have previously been cancelled, and awards in his name were revoked. Allowing a public auction now undermines judicial intent,' the statement said. The HJS has urged the government to not only ban the auction but also declare Rape of Mother India as anti-national and ensure its destruction. They've also demanded legal action against galleries or individuals who attempt to sell or display such works, citing public harmony and national interest. When contacted, officials at Pundole Art Gallery offered no comments.
India Today
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- India Today
From the India Today archives (2011)
(NOTE: This article was originally published in the India Today issue dated June 20, 2011)"As I begin to paint, hold the sky in your hands; as the stretch of my canvas is unknown to me."—M.F. Husain With the death of Maqbool Fida Husain in a London hospital on the morning of June 9, India has not only lost her most iconic contemporary artist but also perhaps one of the last living symbols of the very idea of her modern, secular and multicultural nationalism. Born in 1915 at the temple town of Pandharpur in Maharashtra, Husain came from a lower middle class Sulemani Muslim family and rose through the ranks to become India's most famous painter of people, places and a visual artist-especially a mid-20th century modernist painter-Husain was precariously perched on the crest of a nascent and evolving national consciousness. In the post-Partition era, when he first burst on the Indian art scene, Husain became a much celebrated symbol patronised by the Nehruvian state looking to create modernist role models. Yet, that very celebrity made him and his works vulnerable to be hijacked, misrepresented and reviled three decades later by a semi-literate cabal claiming to represent the collective voice of a largely silent Hindu majority. In fact, the torrid love affair between Husain and 'modern secular' India and their eventual dismaying disengagement makes for a civilisational sociologist Veena Das remarks, this "impossible love" had an inherent fragility because the idol, the image and the word are all strongly contested entities. It is also further complicated by the illicit intimacy between history and the 'perception of history' in post-colonial imaginations. The tantalising and tragic relationship-between a nation's notion of the self and Husain's visualisation of it in his art practice-became the vexed terrain over which competing political alignments fought their proxy wars for a good two decades before it eventually led to Husain's self-imposed exile from India in 2006. Four years later, he accepted Qatari nationality, spending his time between Dubai, London and Husain was educated in the streets of Indore, a madrassa in Baroda, the Indore School of Arts and very briefly the J.J. School of Arts, Mumbai. He was an immensely talented and intelligent man with an enormous curiosity about the world who learnt effortlessly from life and people. He arrived in what was then Bombay in the early 1930s, penniless but bursting with enthusiasm and energy, traits that he retained all through his first started out by walking the streets of Bombay offering to paint portraits of people who could afford to pay him Rs 25. There were not too many commissions but some of these early portraits still survive. In 2008 in London, I saw a portrait Husain had done of Lord Ghulam Noon's elder brother in a Bhendi Bazaar sweet shop. Soon, he moved to painting cinema hoardings, first for V. Shantaram's Prabhat Studios and later for New perched high on bamboo scaffolding, Husain learnt to be able to concentrate amid the noise and chaos of the street below. He used to paint 40 foot hoardings for four annas a foot under the blazing sun in Mumbai for many years. From painting hoardings, he progressed to designing toys and painting children's furniture for Rs 300 a month. "But even at that time I knew I would be an artist one day," he used to say, adding, "there was a time when I painted furniture by day and my own art by night. I painted non-stop." Cinema held a life-long fascination for Husain and decades later, he went on to make several much-talked about films. Of these Through the Eyes of a Painter (1967) won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival but the most well-known is Gaja Gamini (2000) that featured Madhuri Dixit as his muse. In 2004 he made the semi-autobiographical Meenaxi: A Tale of Three Cities with Tabu in the lead role which ran into trouble with Muslim life started to change radically around the time of Independence. Francis Newton Souza (1924-2002), the prodigious enfant terrible of Indian art, spotted Husain's talent by chance and immediately included him in his Progressive Artists Group (PAG) in 1947. Husain's work was noticed right from that first showing and with the encouragement of Rudi von Leyden, the German Jewish art critic, he held his first one-man show in Mumbai in 1950. With prices ranging from Rs 50 to Rs 300, the exhibition sold out. As Husain told me with a chuckle, "I was a best seller right from start."advertisementWhat differentiates Husain from his Progressive contemporaries is his deeply rooted 'Indianness' and his celebration of Indian life and people. While his contemporaries were busily assimilating European art from Byzantium downwards, Husain sought inspiration in temple sculptures (Mathura and Khajuraho), Pahari miniature paintings and Indian folk the mid-1950s Husain got national recognition with two very seminal canvases 'Zameen' and 'Between the Spider and the Lamp'. 'Zameen' was inspired by Bimal Roy's Do Bigha Zameen (1955) but instead of bemoaning rural poverty and indebtedness, it presents a symbolic celebration of life in rural India with a vibrancy that had never been seen before. "I realised one did not have to paint like Europeans to be modern," he maintained. Nor did he, at any time, understand the angst of existentialism."Alienation as a concept is alien to my nature," he would joke. The next year he painted the more enigmatic 'Between the Spider and the Lamp'. This painting, considered by cognoscenti to be his best of all time, features five women reminiscent of ancient Indian sculpture with an oil lamp hanging from the top of canvas and some unintelligible words in a script that looks like ancient Brahmi, Magadhi or some long forgotten dialect. From the hand of one woman, painted as if frozen in a mudra, hangs a large spider by its thread. Some critics have suggested the women were the pancha kanyas (Ahalya, Kunti, Draupadi, Tara, Mandodari) of Hindu mythology. When this painting was shown, despite the ripples it created, no one came forth to buy it for Rs 800. It now hangs at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, on loan from the Husain became a living icon of Hindu-Muslim, gangajamni culture, his art acquired a quintessentially Indian form and content while being global in its relevance and appeal. Moreover, Husain invariably brought relevance to his paintings by making them topical. He was ever ready with the 'image of the day' whether it entailed painting the 'Man on the Moon' in 1969 or Indira Gandhi as Durga after the Bangladesh war in modern Indian art gained wider acceptance through the 1970s and 1980s, Husain was steadily scaling up his prices and using the media to create hype around his colourful persona and his escapades. "Life without drama is too drab," he used to say. Detractors screamed commercialisation and friends frowned in exasperation; but Husain insisted that "the fiscal worth of a painting is in the eyes of the buyer". And buyers came in Badri Vishal Pitti, the Hyderabad businessman for whom he painted 150 paintings, to Chester Herwitz, a handbag tycoon from Boston, who bought up anything that Husain produced through the 1970s. Two decades later, Kolkata industrialist G.S. Srivastava struck a deal for 124 Husain paintings for Rs 100 crore; not for love of art but as good investment. Indian art was appreciating at a higher rate than most stocks and brand Husain was now Husain Inc. After his emigration from India, Sheikha Mozah of Qatar was his last great all his fame and wealth, Husain was personally untouched by both. He could be as comfortable in a dhaba as in a five-star hotel relishing an expensive meal. He stopped wearing footwear as a tribute to the Hindi poet Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh in 1974 and he used to walk barefoot into the most exclusive and august gatherings as well as clubs the world epic saga is ever perfect. And Husain had more than his share of controversies and brickbats. However, it is in posterity that Husain's art and persona will get a truer reckoning. Perhaps the best tribute the Indian state could give would be to set up a museum devoted to the life and art of this most talented son of the to India Today Magazine
The Hindu
02-06-2025
- Business
- The Hindu
Twenty-five rare M.F. Husain paintings to be auctioned after Bombay HC nod
25 rare paintings of late Indian modernist painter M.F. Husain, secured by NAFED as part of the proceeds of an alleged loan default case, will be auctioned on June 12 pursuant to a nod from the Bombay High Court. The auction titled, 'M.F. Husain: An Artist's Vision of the XX Century', includes 25 canvases painted as part of Mr. Husain's Our Planet Called Earth (OPCE) series. In its February 17 order, a single Bench of Justice R.I. Chagla permitted the Sheriff of Mumbai to auction the 25 paintings, secured by the National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation of India Ltd (NAFED) in connection with the ₹236 crore loan dispute with industrialist Guru Swarup Srivastava's Swarup Group of Industries. Mr. Srivastava came into limelight in 2007 when he commissioned 100 paintings of Mr. Husain at ₹1 crore each. In May last year, art specialist Dadiba Pundole submitted to the High Court the valuation report of the paintings, as per which they were valued at ₹25 crore. Pursuant to the High Court order, the Sheriff of Mumbai in February issued an auction notice for the paintings through Pundole Art Gallery. The auction is scheduled on June 12 at the Hamilton House in south Mumbai. After the auction is complete, the Sheriff of Mumbai has been directed to file a report to the High Court by July 3 and obtain final directions for handover of the works. In 2006, the CBI initiated a probe into the Swarup Group and against Mr. Srivastava for alleged misappropriation of ₹150 crore from the ₹236 crore loans from NAFED. A tribunal in December 2008 permitted NAFED to secure assets of ₹100 crore, including the Husain paintings.
India.com
23-04-2025
- Business
- India.com
Mukesh Ambani and Nita Ambani ditch home food once a week to relish...; Street food owner's turnover will shock you
There is a 60-year-old snacks shop in Mumbai, a favourite of even the country's biggest billionaire, Mukesh Ambani, and painter M.F. Husain, Mumbaikars' own 'Swati Snacks'. In 1963, a woman named Minakshi Jhaveri started a small establishment called 'Swati Snacks', selling Gujarati dishes. Minakshi started the shop with four tables to earn a living for her children and her family. Initially, they had just four dishes. She could not have imagined that it would later become a large multi-outlet restaurant chain. 'Swati Snacks' is currently a restaurant chain with a turnover of about Rs 4 crore. Both Mukesh Ambani and Nita Ambani are true Gujaratis at heart, and they visit Swati Snacks once a week to relish their favourite street food like fafda, gathiya, jalebi, undhiyu, papad, chilla, and dhokla. Reliance Industries Chairman and billionaire Mukesh Ambani and his family have also enjoyed Swati Snacks. Mukesh himself once revealed that three generations of his family have enjoyed dishes from Swati Snacks. Famous painter M.F. Hussain's favourite dish at Swati Snacks was Sev Puri. Tabla player Zakir Hussain is a fan of Swati Snacks' Dahi Batat Puri. Apple CEO Tim Cook's vada pav from Swati Snacks was even in the news in the international media. Swati Snacks offers a wide range of traditional dishes for food lovers. After the death of Meenakshi Jhaveri, who started the establishment in 1979, her daughter Asha took over the restaurant. Swati Snacks was also listed in the list of the fifty best restaurants in Asia.
