Important Notice

“…Maqbool Fida Husain cast his painterly eye back half a century and more, to a time when much of the subcontinent was still under British rule. This sharp—and surprising—(re)turn to India’s recent colonial past resulted in some among the most insightful, and also most playful, of works in different media to emerge from the brush of this prolific and imaginative artist.”

The present lot belongs to a series of paintings on the... “…Maqbool Fida Husain cast his painterly eye back half a century and more, to a time when much of the subcontinent was still under British rule. This sharp—and surprising—(re)turn to India’s recent colonial past resulted in some among the most insightful, and also most playful, of works in different media to emerge from the brush of this prolific and imaginative artist.”

The present lot belongs to a series of paintings on the British Raj, which M F Husain began creating in the mid?1980s. Drawing from personal and collective memory, these works offer a satirical commentary on colonial rule in the Subcontinent by exaggerating stereotypes as well as magnifying the vanities and eccentricities of various colonial figures. Though critical of British imperialism, they are driven by a sense of ridicule and wit rather than outright vilification. As historian Sumathy Ramaswamy points out, “Yet even while intensely political and intimately personal in their take on British rule in colonial India, the Raj paintings are also exemplary of the spontaneous playfulness and whimsical mischievousness that ran through the long arc of Husain’s artistic career…” (Sumathy Ramaswamy, “Recalling Empire”, Husain’s Raj: Visions of Empire and Nation, Mumbai: Marg, 2016, p. 16) Ironically, many of the earliest paintings in this series were produced while Husain himself was visiting London, the metropole of the former empire.

Husain was born in the town of Pandharpur—then part of the Bombay Presidency of British India—in 1915, and moved to the princely state of Indore in 1920, where he came of age during the final years of colonial rule. Decades later, when India had emerged as a global power nearly forty years after independence, he returned to his early encounters with empire as a source for the visual commentary of his Raj series. Alongside his condemnation of British rule, he also censured the Indian rulers who allowed its systems to flourish. Speaking to his friend and biographer Ila Pal, he recalled, “Even as a young boy, I used to make caricatures of viceroys, residents general, and commissioners. But our Indian rulers were a laughable lot too. I remember how I used to feel ashamed reading about the sycophancy of the Maharajas of Patiala, Gwalior, and the Nizam of Hyderabad… The impressions I gathered over the years have filtered through and remained etched in my mind as if I was actually present there, observing, ridiculing the English, but more than that, our servility.” (Artist quoted in Ila Pal, “The Mighty McBull”, Beyond the Canvas: An Unfinished Portrait of M F Husain, New Delhi: Indus, 1994, p. 178)

In the present lot, Husain depicts an Indian maharaja watching a performance by a nautch girl with a British officer and his wife, who appear to be his guests. Though dressed in traditional Indian regalia, the maharaja prominently wears the Star of India on his achkan, indicating his fealty to the British Crown. Through him, the artist alludes to the many princely rulers who turned colonial lackey in exchange for maintaining a vestige of power. The two faceless Britishers are not intended as specific historical figures but rather stock characters that Husain created as stand?ins for the Raj. Christened Lord and Lady John Bull, they are possibly modelled on Lord Reading, a former Viceroy and Governor?General of India, and his wife Alice, who visited Indore in 1922. Six?year?old Husain stood with his grandfather outside the palace and watched the couple’s grand arrival in a Rolls Royce to the strains of the English national anthem, as the Maharaja and his family greeted them in full ceremonial garb, genuflecting to their imperial guests.

Emerging largely during the Mughal era, nautch girls were highly skilled courtesans renowned for their artistry and performances for the royal court. Though often the subject of Orientalist paintings, they became objects of both fascination and derision during the 19th and 20th centuries. Yet, even as British sahibs publicly denounced them, they continued to attend their performances in private, often in the company of their princely hosts. Commenting on this symbolism, Ramaswamy observes, “Here his feminist empathy with the subaltern native female converges with his well?honed patriotic sensibility to enable him to make the visual argument that while they were absorbed in pursuing the pleasures of the flesh, India’s royals had given away India to the white man in exchange for shiny baubles and empty honours.” (Ramaswamy, “Memsab and the Bearer: The Sexual Politics of Husain’s Raj”, p. 103)

To expose the conceits of the Raj and examine its contradictions with such insight and playfulness demands, in Sunil Agnani’s words, “experience, a historical memory, a fastidious intellect and above all an ample measure of total immersion.” Husain’s Raj series ultimately delivers a “postcolonial lesson in how one might hate and disavow empire in the right way, even while learning to live with it, mock it and laugh at it properly.” (Ramaswamy, “Last Vestige of the Raj: Laughing at Empire Properly”, pp. 138?139.)

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