Artist M.F. Husain's death marks watershed for Mumbai cultural life

The death on June 9 of Maqbool Fida Husain -- sometimes called "The Picasso of India", and who influenced a whole generation of Indian artists -- has sparked debate in Mumbai's cultural circles.

"This past week, when I learned of the death of M.F. Husain, I felt that another part of Bombay had died, perhaps a final and now irretrievable piece," wrote Vivek Dehejia, an economics professor and Mumbai-based commentator on India on the death of eminent Indian artist, who started his career painting cinema hoardings in this city.

The article is titled "From Bombay to Mumbai: The Death Pangs of a Great City" and appears on The India Site, a young website for South Asian news with top stories hand-picked daily by India expert and author Patrick French, along with some original content such as this.

Deheija was able to draw some broad conclusions about how Mumbai is changing for the worse culturally and why. Characteristics of the city that its current residents, whether by birth or adopted, can see and feel.

Like how commercialism is eating up art. Like how a local political party bullies filmmakers for using the word "Bombay" and not "Mumbai" on-screen. Like how New Delhi is asserting itself as a more livable city of the future, in comparison.

Said Deheija, "Communal riots, bomb blasts, and a parochial local politics oriented around the grievances of a majority behaving as a beleaguered minority, had already signaled the death knell of a formerly great metropolis.

"The passing away of Husain, living in enforced exile from this city that nurtured his art, is thus a footnote in a long and perhaps inexorable process of decline. Today, cosmopolitan Bombay has already all but become provincial Mumbai.

"That lost Bombay, a romantic city of the imagination, that struggles to articulate its dying existence in the quotidian commerce of Mumbai, was always premised on the coexistence of its many founding communities, ethnicities, and faiths.

"It is the city not only of Husain, but of Salman Rushdie, and of the many other great writers, scholars, and artists who have flown from it. The literary critic Homi Bhabha, a Bombayite himself, writes of “this teeming hinterland of the city with layered communities” in his evocation of the old Bombay’s many neighborhoods, with Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jains, Parsis, and Jews, living cheek by jowl.

"My literary friends sometime forget that cultural efflorescence springs from economic dynamism, and very rarely the reverse."

Read the entire article here on The India Site.