Selective Amnesia to Euphoria: Some Not-So Stray Thoughts On Rs 118 Cr For MF Hussain’s Gram Yatra
M.F Husain’s Gram Yatra, a long panel work from 1954, fetches a whopping sum of Rs.118 Cr at the Christie’s auction held on 19th March. The winning bid was by Kiran Nadar, the founder director of the Kiran Nadar Museum, New Delhi, who has a huge collection of Husain’s works and was also instrumental in presenting a Husain Pavillion titled ‘The Rooted Nomad’ at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024. Vibing well with the post-truth scenario, in the same year, Kiran Nadar organized an exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi to celebrate the 100th Episode of Mann ki Baat, the Prime Minister’s weekly Radio Broadcast.
Surprised? I am not. But I am surprised at the way the media drooling over that amount. Everybody seems to have forgotten the fact that he was rendered a pariah who drove Ferraries in Qutar and died as an exile in London.
Thankless as we are, we celebrate his posthumous achievements in the market. Selective amnesia is a way to euphoria. That’s why Sunita Williams could meet our Prime Minister or speak about her personal faith. Decontexualised innocence is more dangerous than contextual ignorance.
Whenever Husain breaks his or someone else’s record at an auction, I remember his old face exuding no confidence. He had travelled a long way to Rs.118 Cr.
Gram Yatra, which is originally untitled has all stylistic specialities of Husain which would later flourish in many of his works. Like his contemporaries who became the founders of the Bombay Progressives Group, namely Souza, Raza, Husain, Ara, Bakre and Gade, Husain also came from a rural background and the initial motivation for their paintings remained nostalgia-ridden rural images executed in a modern western style. The 118 Cr worth painting revels in rural imageries.
Scene as a whole, one could say that the painting is a gridded narrative, a series of images contained in grids, not necessarily having sequential story telling or episodic progression, which has several vignettes of village life in India. The quintessential Husain characteristic of mixing the mundane with the mythical, a seamless movement from the real to the imagined, is strongly visible in this painting. A quotidian village scene in one frame transforms into a mythical scene in the other.
Husain is said to have done this work in 1954. Memories of the nationalistic art as popularised by artists like Nandlal Bose were very much a part of the cultural legacy of a newly freed country with all its complimentary confusions. Gram Yatra stands at a pivotal point between the post-independent art of India and the nationalistic art of the yester years.
In 1938, in the Haripura Congress Session, at the behest of Mahatma Gandhi, Nandalal Bose had painted a series of paintings using gouache on handmade paper, presenting the life and professions of the Indian rural folk. Husain seems to be inspired by these works as the images resonate with the Haripura posters in a different style.
Thinking of the prices that go beyond any meaning or logic, I remember Federico Fellini’s movie La Dolce Vita, the Sweet Life. The last scene is iconic; the filthy rich celebrities gather for a dinner party and get drunk. After all celebrations, when they realise that nothing more to be done, they rip the pillows open and fly the feathers all over and walk to the beach in am inebriated condition only to be confronted by the staring eyes of a dead fish washed ashore.
Auction results are always good. But each time the gavel touches the desk some egos are boosted and some shattered. Above all, secret smiles and silent guffaws fly across continents like lightning, indicating the deals done and patterns maintained.
As an excuse, we talk about ‘Gram Yatra’, which is a pillow waiting to be ripped apart for the heck of it, finding new meanings and dimensions verging on absurdity.
