The free spirit

The life of M F Husain, whose birth centenary fell this week and was marked by heartfelt and genuine remembrances by his family and friends (in the absence of state and institutional ceremony), might just offer a template to creative people on how they ought to live lives of purpose and fulfillment.

Eccentric, prolific, maverick, iconoclastic and creative until well into his nineties, Husain was a bundle of contradictions and riddles - an enigma unto himself.

First, there was his appearance. Blessed with a tall and lithe physicality, Husain's attire, the way he wore his beard and hair, the long and exquisite paint brush he chose to often carry as his walking stick, his famous bare feet - all of them were as recognisable as his signature. They told you who he was and what he did.

If integrity means a committed adherence to a single unified cohesiveness, it could be said that Husain's outer and inner worlds possessed a remarkable integrity. He appeared as he was.

Many have written about the artist's unpredictability - how no one could pin him down, locate him at a given address or find him where expected. Get him to commit to a meeting in Mumbai and most likely you'd have to fly to Kolkata from where you'd learn he'd hopped on a flight to Prague, or maybe Beijing.

This might have been exasperating for his family, agents and patrons, of course, but think of how very liberating and creatively nurturing this trait must have been for his art.

Not to be bound down by anything, except one's inner whims and fancies, supreme in the belief that the world and its transactions and rules would wait, must have been a hard-won freedom.

Then, of course, there were his grand passions: his all-consuming obsessions with beautiful women, which rather than try and suppress or hide like most successful and famous men do, he celebrated in all their glory.

There was nothing sleazy or apologetic about his love for Madhuri Dixit, for instance. Such was the piety and devotion of this love that no one once denigrated the fact that a married senior citizen professed such ardent love for an actress young enough to be his granddaughter!

Then again, Husain painted exactly what he chose. It didn't matter to him that his themes often riled many, were controversial or even considered blasphemous or that his family and friends cautioned him to save his skin by opting for safer subjects.

This self-actualised and sterling belief in himself and his art might appear as selfish and even inconsiderate, but it was what best served his art and that, in the end, was what mattered to him.

Looking at the way Husain chose to work and live his life until his last, it comes across that at the centre of it all was a well-rounded playfulness, a childlike wonder. To wander the world barefoot as if all the earth was your sandpit; to celebrate your whims and fancies; to dress the way you wanted, which expressed who you were, regardless of what the world expected; to paint when and what you desired; to indulge your whims and fancies - appears to be the ideal way to live, especially if it resulted in such astonishing creativity.

But a hundred years after he was born, we are left with the question: did the way he chose to live his life result in his astonishing creativity and success or did his creativity and success allow him to life the life he did?

Malavika Sangghvi is a Mumbai-based writer malavikasmumbai@gmail.com