Book Review: Husain's Raj: Visions of Empire and Nation, by Sumathi Ramaswamy

Abstract

The artistic career of Maqbool Fida Husain (1915–2011) was characterised by a relentless ambition to represent India in its multiple dimensions. More than any of his contemporaries, Husain took delight in visualising his nation as an endless pageant. In this monograph surveying the artist's ‘Images of the Raj’ series of paintings, Sumathi Ramaswamy highlights Husain's lifelong project ‘of imagining the mosaic of India’. Husain sought to encompass the entire kaleidoscope of India—her people, rulers, politicians, mythologies, deities and animals—producing an enormous corpus of works on canvas, paper and film, which art critic and curator Geeta Kapur has termed ‘posters addressed to the world at large’. Perhaps, as Ramaswamy suggests, he was the last artist to either harbour such desire or dare such conceit. Show more