Biography
Maqbool Fida Husain was born on 29 November 1913, into a Sulemani Bohra family in the temple town of Pandharpur in Maharashtra. He moved with his father, who worked as a timekeeper at a textile mill, to the princely state of Indore in Central India when he was just two years old, following his mother's death. Ruled by the Holkar dynasty, Indore was quite cosmopolitan, thus Husain attended Ramlila (a dramatised retelling of the story of the Hindu epic Ramayana, held over ten days) performances, as well as mourning processions of Muharram with exquisite Tā’ziah (a replica of the mausoleum of Imam Husain in Karbala) and images of Duldul (the heroic mount of the Prophet and later of his son-in-law, ‘Ali). These experiences had a profound impact on the future artist, who would draw upon stories and iconography of the Hindu pantheon and Islamic history and art throughout his career. Husain had a close relationship with his paternal grandfather, and after his father remarried, he was sent to Gujarat for religious instruction first with his maternal grandfather, and later at a boarding school in Baroda. In Gujarat, Husain learned to read and write Urdu, was introduced to poetry, and explored Kufic calligraphy. Returning to Indore in grade 9, Husain continued his education and attended evening art classes.
In 1934, Husain arrived in Bombay under the pretext of helping with his father’s business, while dreaming of becoming an artist. He was accepted at the Sir JJ School of Art, but financial constraints forced him to drop out. He acquired his craft through working: he earned a living making large-scale billboards for films, learning to work swiftly and with innovation. After training with an established artist, he founded Maqbool Cine Painting. His experience with monumental images and cut-outs prepared him for future commissions, particularly murals for public buildings. In 1941, Husain married Fazila and subsequently spent seven years at Fantasy Furniture Shop, designing furniture and toys to support his expanding family.
The year 1947 marked a pivotal moment for the Indian subcontinent, as independence from British rule culminated in the catastrophic Partition, which created two nations divided along religious lines. M.F. Husain (as he is widely known) elected to remain in India and, in December of that year, co-founded the Progressive Artists' Group (PAG) with contemporaries K. H. Ara (1914–1985), S.K. Bakre (1920–2007), H. A. Gade (1917–2001), F.N. Souza (1924–2002), and S.H. Raza (1922–2016). Growing up during colonial rule and embarking on artistic careers in the early years of independence instilled in these artists a sense of optimism and a commitment to Nehruvian nation-building, even as they grappled with the trauma of Partition. The group collectively rejected the restrictive norms of outdated Western academic painting, the imitation of miniature art, and the revivalist tendencies of the Bengal School. Instead, the PAG sought to adopt the language of modernism, adapting it to their unique context. Artists in Bombay benefited from the support and critical insights of Austrian and German collectors and critics such as Walter Langhammer, Rudolf Van Leyden, and Emmanuel Schlesinger, who had fled Nazi persecution in Europe. Although the PAG was short-lived, it introduced Husain to a diverse network of collectors and patrons, including Dr. Homi Bhabha and Mulk Raj Anand, theatre artists like Ebrahim Alkazi, and other intellectuals, poets, and writers. Over time, Husain developed close relationships with galleries such as Pundole, which showcased many of his experimental works, including theatre backdrops and calligraphic explorations. This dynamic artistic environment contributed significantly to the development of Husain’s distinctive voice. He produced work at an extraordinary pace across a wide range of media, including acrylics, oils, and watercolours on canvas and paper, as well as lithography and prints. His first mural, Zameen, completed in 1955, was awarded the Lalit Kala Akademi Prize.
Husain, inspired by the pioneering Hungarian-Indian modernist Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–1941), drew upon India’s Rajput and Pahari painterly traditions, particularly their use of colour and narrative techniques. The sensuous representation of the human form in the sculptures of Khajuraho and the Yakshis of Kushan art significantly influenced the development of Husain’s figures. Unlike his PAG colleagues, he was rooted in the rural landscape of India, rather than the urban environment of Bombay. Much more than an idyllic, idealised landscape, his depiction of village life captured the complexities and diversity of rural society. The Burlington House exhibition in New Delhi in 1948 introduced him to significant works of Indian art, while his 1960 visit to Benares (now Varanasi) with Ram Kumar left a lasting impression of the social dynamics of everyday life.
Towards the end of the 1960s, urged by freedom fighter Ram Manohar Lohia, Husain began creating art intended for a broader Indian audience. Recalling the stories he had seen performed as a child, and listening to the recitation of the epics by pundits at the philanthropist and socialist, Badrivishal Pittie's residence in Hyderabad, Husain depicted scenes from the great epics of the Ramayana and Mahabharata with energy and charm (when he was depicting the monkey-god Hanuman) and pathos (tableaus of war and death). His Mahabharata series was displayed in São Paulo and in the United States in the 1970s. Husain used several motifs—horses, the panja [palm representing the family of the Prophet Mohammed], umbrellas, a hand-mill—repeatedly in his work, mining metaphors from widely-understood and popular icons. In this manner, Husain was a painter for the masses, drawing from scenes from well-known stories and depictions of celebrated figures that circulated widely and were collected as prints. Alongside narrative work, Husain explored quiet geometric forms in a series of lesser-known works such as Theorem Thirteen (1973) and Raman Effect (also called Homage to CV Raman or left untitled, made in the 1980s). Husain did not just make subtle references to artworks he admired, but often reinterpreted them in his own way, as seen in the 2008 Last Supper in the Red Desert, where he absorbs Da Vinci’s painting into his own.
Aspects of Indian dance, especially elaborate mudra (gestures) and postures, became intrinsic to his treatment of figures. In portraits, he captured the distinct features and spirit of his sitters, for example, in a multi-faceted first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, or Mother Teresa, and indeed Indira Gandhi, as Durga. Husain’s favourable and martial portrayal of Indira Gandhi led to criticism from those who opposed her politics, especially her imposition of Emergency, 1975–77. His tacit support of the Congress came through in the portraits of Indira Gandhi, but most significantly in Lightning, a 12-panel, 60-foot-long backdrop for a rally in Bombay, featuring his signature horses and interspersed with icons celebrating the achievements of the Congress government. Nominated to the Rajya Sabha (the upper house of the Indian Parliament) in 1986, Husain served as a witness to parliamentary proceedings for six years but famously did not utter a word during his tenure. He did, however, keep a candid visual account, many of these drawings rendered on the Rajya Sabha letterhead, and published in the 1990s as a book, Sansad Upanishad. Husain responded to historical and political situations and depicted political figures in his work; for example, the Raj series depicted the British and their colleagues in pith helmets.
Husain’s creativity blossomed with collaborations. For example, in 1988, he “performed” alongside classical music maestro Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, painting as Joshi sang. Husain captured the essence of the raga (musical mode) in colour, form, and line, exploring the evocative relationship between music and visual art.
Husain’s negotiations with architecture and art can be studied in two distinct examples, only four years apart. In the 1991 installation titled Shwetambari (clad in white), Husain swathed the gallery in white khaki (hand-spun fabric, used by Gandhi to fight British oppression that created an alternative to English factory-produced cloth sold in the colonies), and the floor was covered with paper. Evoking impressions of the womb, or indeed, a shroud, there were no paintings, nor any colours usually associated with his work. The installation explored space, and, in hindsight, can be read as the precursor to his collaboration with the Pritzker Prize-winning architect B.V. Doshi. Completed in 1994, Amdavad ni Gufa (Ahmedabad’s Cave) is an art gallery far removed from the constraints of a white cube. Designed to feel subterranean, with organic curves, light filters in through skylights, illuminating Husain’s murals and cut-out sculptures placed on the floor. The impact is dramatic, and on the campus of CEPT, one of India’s leading architectural schools, the gallery is an intense and immersive experience of art and architecture.
Husain was a keen follower of world cinema and explored filmmaking. He was commissioned to make a film for the Indian state’s Films Division. Through the Eyes of a Painter (1967) won the Golden Bear award at the Berlin Film Festival and the Indian National Award for experimental cinema the following year. The film, with no dialogue after Husain’s opening monologue, is composed of vignettes featuring architecture, landscape, and people in the fort town of Bundi and rural Rajasthan, edited to peppy music and juxtaposed with his own work, creating a joyous exploration of sound and image. At the turn of the millennium, Husain’s practice ventured, once again, into filmmaking. Husain wrote and directed two films, Gajagamini in 2000, and Meenaxi: The Tale of Three Cities in 2004, and composed lyrics for a few songs. Both films had celebrated artists from Bombay cinema in the cast and crew. Gajagamini explored femininity and eroticism across time and space, with Madhuri Dixit, his most famous muse, as Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, and in the confrontation between science and knowledge, and drifted into the fifth-century poet Kalidasa’s Sanskrit poem, Shakuntalam. Considered more autobiographical, Meenaxi is the story of a writer struggling with a block and his tumultuous relationship with his muse. While neither film achieved financial success or critical acclaim, they allowed an animated glimpse into Husain’s view of the world.
Husain made a series of collage-prints reflecting religion and spirituality, almost clairvoyant in anticipating a flare of religious violence. Since the 1990s, Husain had been a target of the Hindu right-wing groups, who claimed to be offended by his portrayal of Hindu goddesses in the nude. Individuals and groups filed cases of obscenity and charges of blasphemy. The artist was routinely harassed and threatened, his home was attacked and his artworks vandalised, forcing Husain to leave the country on a self-imposed exile in 2006. The hounding of Husain was not limited to India. In 2006, the Hindu Human Rights Group vandalised two paintings in an exhibition in London and forced the show at the Asia House to close. The show's closure sparked protests from academics and thinkers in the UK and around the world, but it never reopened, as the artworks' insurance was withdrawn. It has always been clear that Husain was targeted for being a Muslim artist working on Hindu themes. However, his work received support, and in the year he left the country, the southern leftist state of Kerala conferred the Raja Ravi Varma award on him. The same year, he was nominated for India’s highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna, but in vain. Even after he was exonerated in most legal cases against him, there were still far too many for the artist to safely return to India. In 2010, he accepted Qatari citizenship, never to return to the land of his birth. Despite his advanced years and being forced to live away from India, Husain continued to be prolific: he accepted Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser’s commission of 99 works on a visual history of Islamic civilisation. Even on his 95th birthday, he worked from 4am to 9am.
In 2011, at the age of 98, Husain died in London, UK. His artwork continues to be extensively exhibited, fetches high prices at auctions, and his oeuvre receives scholarly attention. In 2019, Horses of the Sun, an exhibition covering six decades of Husain’s practice, was mounted at the Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha. In the winter of 2025, Lawh wa Qalam, a museum dedicated to Husain, opened in Doha. A painting by Husain was the inspiration for the building designed by the New Delhi-based architect, Martand Khosla, for the Qatar Foundation.
Husain’s story is now akin to a Bollywood tale, a rags-to-riches story of a humble poster painter to an international superstar. In popular memory, he persists as a flamboyant but enigmatic figure who wielded a long brush like a baton, drove fancy cars, hobnobbed with movie stars, wore well-cut suits, yet often walked barefoot into exclusive clubs, and was equally at home in roadside tea-stalls and plush restaurants. Maqbool Fida Husain’s legacy, as a larger-than-life artist and star, and his monumental oeuvre, towers over modern and contemporary art.
