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“Lost is the passage of sound in my jungle. Today the burnt bamboos have scratched the heart of silent sky, and greens sucked in elephant jugs. White tusks daggered inside the stomach of black mountain. They say: for seven days the passage of sound was lost.” ? M F HUSAIN

Restless in spirit and insatiably curious, M F Husain journeyed across the length and breadth of India throughout his career, immersing himself in its landscapes,... “Lost is the passage of sound in my jungle. Today the burnt bamboos have scratched the heart of silent sky, and greens sucked in elephant jugs. White tusks daggered inside the stomach of black mountain. They say: for seven days the passage of sound was lost.” ? M F HUSAIN

Restless in spirit and insatiably curious, M F Husain journeyed across the length and breadth of India throughout his career, immersing himself in its landscapes, people, and diverse cultures. His visits to places such as Khajuraho, Varanasi, Rajasthan, and Kerala during the 1950s and 1960s broadened his own artistic horizons and contributed greatly to the expansion of his visual idiom. Artist and writer Ila Pal explains: “His wanderings were not that of a traveller forever eager to see more, but of a collector, who, having located treasure spots, wanted to return again and again.” (Ila Pal, “To Hell With Everything”, Husain: Portrait of an Artist, Noida: HarperCollins, 2017, p. 69) The vivid imagery of Rajasthan’s desert landscape, made its way to his 1966 film Through the Eyes of a Painter, which was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and went on to win the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, as well as the National Award for the Best Experimental Film in India in 1967.

Around the same time, Husain also developed a deep affection for the lush state of Kerala, drawn to its rustic warmth and abundant natural beauty. “With its ancient matriarchal society, staunch Dravidian faces, and simple fisherfolk, with its lush vegetation and sun, sand, and sea, this southwestern extremity of India beckoned to him as an idyll of contained form and emotion.” (Shiv Kapur, Husain, Richard Bartholomew and Shiv Kapur, New York, 1971, p. 55) His fascination with the region inspired a number of paintings that celebrated its people and its wildlife over the years. Like his iconic horses, elephants became a recurring motif in his work, representing grace, exuberance, and unimpeded and unbridled power. As Shashi Tharoor notes, elephants are “everywhere in Husain’s extraordinary evocation of Kerala... The elephants cavort by the waterside, drink, play, gambol, lurk. They are the animal form of the grandeur and gaiety of “God’s Own Country”. Elephants are indispensable to every Kerala celebration, from weddings to religious festivals... [and] infuse the Kerala consciousness; they feature in the state’s literature, dance, music, films and art... And in their strength the elephants capture, too, the resilience of Kerala, its defiance of the Indian stereotype, its resolute determination to progress and, above all, its empowerment of women.” (Shashi Tharoor, Kerala: God’s Own Country, New Delhi: Books Today, 2002, pp. 3?4)

The monumental scale of this painting elevates the elephant to the same iconic stature as the horse, undoubtedly the most recognisable and celebrated motif of Husain’s career. Despite their massive, ponderous forms, the herd of pachyderms tumble playfully across the canvas with a surprising agility. Husain was a colourist who often devised distinct colour schemes in response to the themes he explored. Vibrant yellow and blue radiate warmth and energy, offset by earthy green and brown that evoke the dense tropical jungles of Thekkady and Munnar. The animals are further animated by the artist’s unique compositional approach of dividing the canvas into different sections, in this instance with stalks of bamboo that the elephants twist and wind around. These devices speak to the deep influence traditional Indian art, particularly Basohli paintings, had on Husain’s work. Art collector Chester Herwitz remarks, “...Indian traditional art was always in tune with these active and vibrant spatial dimensions… the Indian miniature with its concern for poetic detail, color and rhythm over ordered perspective, and the dancing contorted figures of Indian sculpture do resonate with Indian life. It is these very same resonances which Husain, himself literally a product of the Indian streets, has recovered from traditional Indian art. Accordingly, he not only energizes his spaces, he tends to split them, a formal device which activates the pictorial space by elaborating simultaneous lavers of activity contrapuntally. One wonders if he has not rewritten cubism in Indian terms, turning cubist planes into dancing, dynamized juxtapositions.” (Daniel Herwitz, Husain, Bombay: Tata Press, 1988, pp. 22?23)

Husain’s background painting movie billboards, a vocation he took up to support himself after moving to Bombay as a young artist in the late 1930s, also shaped this cinematic, larger?than?life style and his practice of painting swiftly and directly onto the canvas. Reflecting on this formative influence, he explained, “In the process of making hoardings, I trained my eyes, rather one eye, to see constantly the rest of the painting in the distance, and my hand simultaneously to make the necessary adjustments in scale. This helped me overcome the problems of foreshortening and of relating what is in the distance to the area one was working on. I do not recollect too many occasions when I have changed, repainted, or corrected my original drawing.” (Artist quoted in Pal, “The Billboard School of Art”, pp. 18–19)

In Husain’s oeuvre, animals came to embody specific qualities and developed into enduring visual icons he revisited time and again. The elephant and the horse—both revered in Indian mythology—signify strength, vitality, and fecundity in their many moods and postures. Noting their deeper significance, critic Richard Bartholomew observed, “When we look at these creatures we must remember that the animal is not the subject of Husain’s painting; it is the daemonic principle that he depicts which is neither good nor bad… the horses and elephants have become symbols of power and pursuit, or of mysterious encounters.” (Richard Bartholomew, Husain, Richard Bartholomew and Shiv Kapur, New York, 1971, p. 20)

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