How MF Husain immortalised Gandhi striding for India’s freedom

Indeed, the Mahatma in full stride appears to be Husain’s favourite manner of depicting Gandhi, although he has also painted the other iconic image of the father of the nation seated at his spinning wheel. In Husain’s oil on canvas titled Gandhi-Man of Peace, dated ‘Oct’69’ (and signed in Hindi and Urdu), the protagonist is faceless, but even if we did not have the helpful title, there is no mistaking his identity, the lower half of the spare body adorned in a pale dhoti, another piece of cloth flung across his bony shoulders. A brilliant orange staff is suspended in the air, almost with a life of its own, as it seems to elude the grasp of a bony hand, an essential prop that helps the viewer identify the Mahatma for who he was, a mobile man ever on the move.

Similarly, in another work that Husain completed in London in July 1985 as part of his satirical Raj series and titled The Arrival of Gandhi in the 1920s, he painted the bare and spare Mahatma wearing his white dhoti, a white shawl draped around his brown shoulders. He stands poised on the horizon, a staff in hand, a distant – but distinctive – figure in...

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