Important Notice

Rural Indian life remained at the heart of Husain’s visual language. Born in Pandharpur, Husain’s earliest memories were of crowded village fairs, decorated bullock carts and women in dark nine-yard Maharashtrian saris. During visits to his uncle Murad’s general store in Ranipura Bazaar, Indore, he filled his sketchbooks with the charwoman and labourers carrying sacks of wheat grain. Recalling his formative years, he later wrote, “Not only did I... Rural Indian life remained at the heart of Husain’s visual language. Born in Pandharpur, Husain’s earliest memories were of crowded village fairs, decorated bullock carts and women in dark nine-yard Maharashtrian saris. During visits to his uncle Murad’s general store in Ranipura Bazaar, Indore, he filled his sketchbooks with the charwoman and labourers carrying sacks of wheat grain. Recalling his formative years, he later wrote, “Not only did I paint scenes from films... I would make several small watercolours of a bullock cart and a farmer-my favourite theme then...” (Artist quoted in Ila Pal, “The Prodigy of Pandharpur”, Husain: Portrait of an Artist, New Delhi: HarperCollins Publishers India, 2017, p. 9) In the 1940s, village life continued to inform his creative practice. While designing nursery furniture and wooden toys for the Bombay‒based company Fantasy, Husain developed “a whole range based on themes from Indian villages and folklore, with the cupboard doors painted like the entrance to a hut.” (Artist quoted in Pal, p. 26.)

In 1947, Husain participated for the first time in the Bombay Art Society’s annual exhibition, where he exhibited Sunehra Sansar. The painting depicted a farmer’s family travelling by a bullock cart, carrying hay with a goat walking alongside. Although Husain was still searching for the right mode of expression, Ila Pal identifies Sunehra Sansar as “different both in terms of theme and treatment” and “a precursor to the distinctive style he was to evolve later.” (Pal, pp. 35 – 36) Reflecting on the work years later, Husain recalled, “In a way it still embodied my ideal of a Sunehra Sansar... a mud house in the midst of a farm...bullocks and buffaloes tied in the yard…a woman drawing water from a well.” (Artist quoted in Pal, pp. 34-35)

Husain continued to develop a visual vocabulary rooted in rural India through works such as The Potters (1947), Marathi Woman (1950), Peasant Couple, and watercolours and preparatory sketches of village life. Geeta Kapur notes that from about 1953, Husain entered what she describes as his “folk” period, a self‒ conscious search for a style in which he explored village motifs through watercolours, wooden toys and murals. (Geeta Kapur, Husain, Bombay: Vakil & Sons Private Limited for Sadanga Publications, p. 4) These recurring themes would later find monumental expression in Zameen (1955), described by Yashodhara Dalmia as a panoramic vision in which images of rural India simultaneously become real, mythical, and symbolic. As Dalmia observes, Husain’s principal concern during this period was to evolve “a pictorial metaphor for the myriad reality of India.” (Yashodhara Dalmia, “A Metaphor for Modernity”, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001 p. 102)

The present lot depicts a male and female figure seated upon a recumbent bull, their wooden, angular forms recalling the geometric language of the nursery furniture and wooden toys Husain designed for the Bombay‒ based company Fantasy. Writing on Husain’s practice, Ebrahim Alkazi identified the Indian landscape as one of the three principal sources of the artist’s creative energy, defining it as “the cultural climate of a region, the amalgam of geographical feature, architectural style, costume, physiognomy, colour, texture, rhythm, legend and folk expression... as reflected in its most representative class, the peasantry.” (Ebrahim Alkazi, M F Husain: The Modern Artist and Tradition, New Delhi: Art Heritage, 1978, p. 7) The present lot brings these influences together. As Alkazi further observed, Husain drew “the form of the woman and the oxen from ancient sculpture,” while adapting the treatment of space and colour from miniature painting and the simplifications of folk art. (Alkazi, p. 31.) Rendered in hot yellows, ochres and earth browns reminiscent of the Basohli and Mewar palettes, the composition reveals Husain’s remarkable ability to translate diverse artistic traditions into a cohesive modern idiom. The mosaic‒like treatment of the ground may also recall Husain’s childhood fascination with the broken‒china and coloured‒glass mosaic floors of his grandfather’s house, an early memory that continued to resonate throughout his artistic practice.

As Geeta Kapur observed, Husain’s villagers are often “surrounded by their tools, their animals, their magic signs and symbols” and are rendered “truly alive, secure and rooted in their environment.” (Kapur, p. 127) Yet Husain cautioned against reading such motifs as fixed symbols, arguing that their meaning arose not from the individual image itself but from the relationships established within the composition. (“M.F. Husain”, Richard Bartholomew, The Art Critic, Noida: BART, 2012, pp.153‒154) The bull, therefore, forms part of a larger pictorial language through which human, animal and mythic forms coexist. Bartholomew drew a parallel between Husain’s bulls and one of his most recognisable motifs, the horse. “Like his bulls…Husain’s horses are subterranean creatures. Their nature is not intellectualized: it is rendered as sensation or as abstract movement with a capacity to stir up vague premonitions and passions, in a mixture of realistic fear and exultant anguish.” (Richard Bartholomew and Shiv S. Kapur, Husain, Abrams, New

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