The image on the masthead of my blog above is a part of the painting - Battle of Ganga and Jamuna by Husain. It is one of Husain’s most significant works to appear at Christie’s auction.
Originally in the Chester and Davida Herwitz Collection, this work is part of a series of 27 paintings he began in 1971 for the 11th Sao Paolo Biennial on the Mahabharata, the Hindu epic detailing the cosmic civil war between forces of right and wrong with the subject mater of morality and duty at its core. The epic prefaced the founding of ancient India. Husain was specially invited to the Biennale to exhibit alongside Pablo Picasso. Though Husain has since revisited the themes from the Mahabharata, the 1971 series was the first time he attempted the subject matter. Other works from this series are currently housed in the collection of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.
Husain has always felt free to find his images and symbols in the cultural heterogeneity of his native land, and the Mahabharata, unlike its sacred twin, the Ramayana, is essentially a secular epic. It also occupies a unique place in the Indian national consciousness, one that lends itself remarkably well to artistic reinvention. The epic allowed Husain to take characters and images that are laden with epic resonance, and to alter and shape them to paint a contemporary canvas.
Here is what the painting is all about or rather what the artist wants to depict using the elements and principles of Art.
The goddesses, Ganga and Jamuna, are the personifications of the holy rivers originating in the Himalayas and here are depicted as a conjoined being labeled in Sanskrit on both sides of the split. This treatment of the figure is a highly complex and brilliant conceptualization of the internecine strife between the warring factions of the Kuru lineage; the Pandava and Kaurava cousins, each descended from these River Goddesses. The mass of figures on the right foreshadow the toll of war and pay subtle homage to Picasso, whose Guernica remains a formative influence on Husain. Also evident in this work are the strong influences of classical Indian painting and sculptural traditions. The division of space into four distinct colour planes is a feature derived from the narrative style in Rajasthani miniature painting, while the heavily delineated figures are reminiscent of Indian temple sculpture in their dynamic contortions. The abstract hand serves as a protective mudra and is a motif that appears frequently in Husain’s body or work. With age-old themes of jealousy and competition that divide females and nations, Husain achieves a remarkable feat as he distills the central feature of the Mahabharata into a single moving image that is monumental in scale and yet very human in scope.
On 20th March 2008, Husain's ‘Battle of Ganga and Jamuna: Mahabharata 12’ went under the hammer at Christie’s in New York. The 189.9 x 273.7 cm diptych was valued at US$ 600,000 to US$ 800,000 by the Christie’s. Painted in 1971-72, the painting fetched a whopping US$1.6 million, setting a world record at that time at Christie's Southeast Asia and Contemporary Indian art sale.
Here I would like to quote Shashi Tharoor writing about the Mahabharata series by M. F. Husain, "Looking at the Mahabharata-inspired work, it seems to me that Husain is simultaneously honouring and appropriating the epic. If there is a message to the work, it would be that of the continued relevance of the stories, issues and images he has derived from the Mahabharata. That, in turn, is a twofold message: first, of the need to re-examine the received wisdom of the epic in today's India, to question the certitudes, to acknowledge the weight of the past and face its place in the present; and second, to do so through a reassertion of the epic'sdharma, defined not as religion but as the whole complex of values and standards — some derived from myth and tradition, some derived from our history — by which India and Indians must live. In offering his vision of theMahabharata to India and the world, Husain has paid a fundamental tribute to his own civilisation, one which he has, through his reinvention of the past and his reimagining of the present, immeasurably enriched".
At the age of 96, now in Qatar as part of the Resident Artists Programme, under Qatar Foundation’s Cultural Development Centre, Husain is at work on three major art projects, covering the Arab and Indian civilisations and a history of Indian cinema.
