KERALA GOD’S OWN COUNTRY, PAINTINGS BY M.F HUSAIN , SHASHI THAROOR HARDCOVER, 2003

This piece was written by Shashi Tharoor on his book “Kerala – God’s own country” for “The Hindu” THE only time I properly met the incomparable M.F. Husain (discounting, that is, the occasional fleeting handshakes in crowded gatherings) was in New York in 1993, over dinner at the home of the then Indian Ambassador, Hamid Ansari. Sitting before the book-laden coffee table in the Ambassador’s Park Avenue living-room, I recounted to the Master the famous story of what the immortal Pablo Picasso used to say to aspiring artists of the avant-garde. Disregarding their slapdash cubes and squiggles, Picasso would demand: “draw me a horse”. Get the basics right, in other words, before you break free of them. Husain loved the story; he promptly opened the book in front of him, a volume of his own work from Ambassador Ansari’s collection, and proceeded to sketch, with astonishing fluidity, a posse of horses on the frontispiece. I have never forgotten the moment; watching the artist’s long brown fingers glide over the page, the horses’ heads rearing, their manes flying, hooves and tails in the air, as Husain left, in a few bold strokes, the indelible imprint of his genius. So to collaborate on a book with Husain, as I have just done, was an extraordinary privilege. And to do so on the subject of my home state, Kerala, on which Husain has just completed a series of astonishing paintings, made it a special pleasure as well. For horses, in our volume, read elephants. They are everywhere in Husain’s extraordinary evocation of Kerala: crashing through the dense foliage, embracing supple maidens with their trunks, and, in miniature, held aloft by triumphant womanhood. The elephants cavort by the waterside, drink, play, gambol, lurk. They are the animal form of the grandeur and gaiety of “God’s Own Country”. Elephants are indispensable to every Kerala celebration