Important Notice

M.F. Husain’s large body of work draws extensively from India’s people, culture and history, particularly its artistic traditions and heritage. Having spent his early childhood in feudal Madhya Pradesh, it is no surprise that one of his Husain’s series of paintings deals with the characters and events of the British Raj in India, particularly with the royal house of Indore.

In the present lot, Husain extends the tropes of this... M.F. Husain’s large body of work draws extensively from India’s people, culture and history, particularly its artistic traditions and heritage. Having spent his early childhood in feudal Madhya Pradesh, it is no surprise that one of his Husain’s series of paintings deals with the characters and events of the British Raj in India, particularly with the royal house of Indore.

In the present lot, Husain extends the tropes of this well-known ‘Raj’ series of paintings that he began in the mid-1980s. Here, the artist offers viewers a window into his bemused take on feudalism and colonial rule in India by emphasizing their stereotypes and magnifying the vanities and eccentricities of the men responsible for the subjugation of the entire Subcontinent. In this monumental canvas, Husain paints a an almost formulaic colonial scene of a successful shikar or hunt, with an English Sahib posing over his kill, his turbaned Indian butler serving him tea, and his Memsahib standing at his side, with her shock of bright-red hair peeping out from under her large sun hat.

Not only does Husain satirize the characters in this piece, but also the ways in which painting was practiced during the period. “Typically in ‘The Raj’ series Husain simultaneously mimics two separate styles of colonial British-Indian painting: formal portraiture (using prominent imperial emblems and icons), and the ‘picturesque’ that exaggerated the ‘exotic” elements of the colony for ‘home’ consumption” (Shyamal Bagchee, “Augmented Nationalism: The Nomadic Eye of Painter M.F. Husain”, Asianart.com, 1998). In this painting for example, the vividly hued tiger and elephant are Husain’s exaggerated versions of symbols of exotic India, both virile creatures that have been rendered subservient by the foreign shikari in his sun hat and hunting boots.

Bagchee also notes that in these images, Husain “…does not historicize his subjects, both historicism and nationalism being notions derived from European modernity. Nor does he seek to give articulation to a subaltern position. His India has much authority, and it forms a rather bemused backdrop for the historic mutual incomprehension that the Raj embodied. He situates his presentation of the drama of the colonizer and the colonized within a discourse of equivalence” (Ibid.).

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