Incarnations

by Sunil Khilnani

  When urban critics failed to understand Husain’s abstract or symbolic work, his usual riposte was that the nonurban public did. “I had done paintings of Ramayana, about eighty paintings over eight years,” he once said. “We took them to villages near Hyderabad on a bullock cart. The paintings were spread out, and the people saw them, and there was not one question. In the city, people would have asked: Where is the eye? How can you say this is Ram? and so on. In the villages, color and form have seeped into the blood. You put an orange spot on a stone and the people will say it is Hanuman. They would never ask where the eye was and so on. This is living art.”

  He later said he had done his best work in the 1950s. But in 1971 the former billboard artist was asked to exhibit in São Paulo alongside Picasso, an artist whose work, when he first saw it, left him cold, but whom he slowly came to appreciate. He decided to paint his own response to Guernica: a series of large canvases based on India’s version of a war epic, the Mahabharata. Once the art world’s spotlight was turned on him, the charismatic sociability he’d developed in boyhood kept it there.

  “He is fond of the media glare,” his son once admitted. “He won’t say no even if he’s asked to wear leather and pose on a motor bike.” This fascination with glamour and fame extended to legendary women, from Mother Teresa to Indira Gandhi, whom he began to turn into subjects of his art. Of the three films he made, the most talked about was the one starring his great obsession, Madhuri Dixit. In his nineties, Husain still grinned at the thought of her hip-bucking backsteps before she burst into one of the film’s songs, “Didi Tera Devar Diwana.” With a lesser dancer, he thought, the moves might have been vulgar. Yet in Madhuri’s dance he said he found the sanctity of Indian womanhood, the ineffable ideal of the mother he had never known.

  By the 1990s the flamboyant bohemian had more rich patrons than he knew what to do with, and was basically living up to an old jest of Souza’s: that the secret of his success was “40% your beard, 30% your personality, 20% your friends, and 10% maybe your talent!” He was an easy person to caricature by the time he came into focus in the viewfinder of the Hindu right.

  * * *

  The upsurge of Hindu nationalism in the 1990s was articulated in the language of victimhood that Ashok Sharma still uses today: of injuries meted out by Muslims, Europeans, and India’s post-Independence constitutional state. In 1992 the grievances funneled into rage over a historic sixteenth-century mosque in the Uttar Pradesh town of Ayodhya. Many Hindus believed the mosque was erected on the birthplace of the god Ram, so it was destroyed in order to make way for a temple. In the ensuing riots, Muslims and religious minorities were targeted. Years of threats, terrorizing attacks, and uncertainty for minorities across the country followed.

  In 1996, amid multipronged Hindu nationalist efforts to redefine India, a Hindi weekly magazine printed a line drawing of the goddess Saraswati that Husain had made around 1970. “M. F. Husain: A Painter or a Butcher?” was the headline. To look at the drawing today is to see a sinuous and elegant trifle: the goddess faceless, with a river flowing over her arm, her small breasts bare and a veena covering her privates. Female Hindu deities were often shown nude, in far more erotic positions, in temple sculpture and in folk and miniature painting; Husain was toying quite innocently with cultural tradition. But what enraged right-wing Hindus was that a Muslim artist had done the toying. And so began the harassment that would drive Husain from his homeland.

  If he had been less popular beforehand, he probably would have been less hated—which is to say, his popularization of modern art helped create the very conditions of the subsequent fury. Controversy-averse, Husain tried to downplay the uproar. The tamasha, or commotion, was “a small thing,” he said, in a country that remained otherwise free. But, a decade later, when another nude, Bharat Mata (“Mother India”) was printed as the cover of a catalogue, the antagonism was too great for an artist in his nineties to dismiss. One extremist group announced a reward of about eleven million dollars for the painter’s head; macabrely, money and gold were specifically offered for his hands and his eyes.

  “Had I been forty, I would have fought them tooth and nail,” he said in an interview. Instead, he left for Qatar and London—never to return, yet still consistently, fundamentally optimistic. “This is about a few people who have not understood the language of Modern Art,” he commented while in exile. “Art is always ahead of time. Tomorrow they will understand it.”

  A liberal tolerance of a different point of view causes no damage. It means only a greater self restraint. Diversity in expression of views whether in writings, paintings or visual media encourages debate. A debate should never be shut out. “I am right” does not necessarily imply “You are wrong.” Our culture breeds tolerance—both in thought and in actions. I have penned down this judgement with this fervent hope that it is a prologue to a broader thinking and greater tolerance for the creative field. A painter at 90 deserves to be in his home—painting his canvas.

  In perhaps the clearest judgment we yet have on the freedom of art in India, in 2008 the Delhi High Court quashed legal charges against Husain in relation to Bharat Mata, charges that ranged from obscenity to violating religious sentiments to promoting enmity between religious groups. That Husain did not return to India after this decision left some of his staunchest defenders feeling let down. They wanted him to fight harder, at home, for the liberal space that had championed him, and for the idea of a diverse, mix-and-match Indian culture that seemed to be fast disappearing.

  Still, I think they were demanding too deeply political a response from an artist with a fairly apolitical nature, whose genial superficiality with regard to contemporary conflicts had allowed him, over the decades, to keep seeing India at her best. The real betrayal lies in the separation of Husain from the audience he once reached, and should reach in the future. Today, some of the Indians who buy his paintings, for one million dollars or more, keep them abroad, out of fear. The only big exhibition of Husain’s work since the controversy, and his death in 2011, was in London.

  Bitterness simply wasn’t one of the entries in Husain’s encyclopedia of emotional traits. In life as in art, he worked with what he had, accepted the inevitability of loss and change, and typically made the best of each new situation. But the fact that most of his work is now sequestered in the homes of the rich, while Indian museums quake to display it in spaces accessible to those of lesser means, feels bitter to me. It’s one of the sad, unexpected ironies in the afterlife of one of our most important modern Indian painters.

  Across the world in the twentieth century, the greatest threat to cultural freedom and expression was often the state. In twenty-first-century India, the threat comes also from within civil society, from groups and individuals who claim to defend the majority against insult, and who know that governments in Delhi and across India’s states are often ready tacitly to collude. It’s gutting to consider that, by present standards, exile may have been a lucky fate for Husain. Today, India’s writers and intellectuals are being murdered for their beliefs.

  Just before Ashok Sharma and I left the grounds of the gallery Husain helped make for his work, he mentioned that, when Husain died, his friends and defenders attempted to bring his body home to be buried. “We were successful in stopping that, too,” Sharma said, his voice hardening a little. “Whoever has insulted Bharat Mata, who has shown her naked—we will never allow him even six feet of her soil.”

  50

  DHIRUBHAI AMBANI

  Fins

  1932–2002

  Whenever I pass what may be the world’s largest private home, Mukesh Ambani’s twenty-seven-story Antilia in Mumbai, a boast made by his father, the founder of the Reliance Industries fortune, flashes through my mind: “I’m a bigger shark.” Although poor workers often linger at Antilia’s massive wooden gates, gazing up at the tower in reverent silence, this monument to moneymaking probably wouldn’t exist had Dhirubhai Ambani been an entirely virtuous man. His weal
th was, though, entirely self-created, which makes him an icon of economic possibility.

  Dhirubhai Ambani’s first home in Mumbai was nearly as humble as the ones the gawking laborers inhabit: a pigeonhole chawl four kilometers from Antilia, in the pushcart-clogged trading neighborhood of Bhuleshwar. The goods wheeling through Bhuleshwar’s narrow byways this season (candy-colored flip-flops, dreadlocked wigs styled after a Sri Lankan cricket hero) bear little resemblance to the fashion items sold here in 1960. Yet the energy of the place is much the same as it was when a restless young trader of spice and sugar heard a yarn trader in his chawl mention the killing he was making from a government antismuggling initiative. Ambani would spin this tip into dominance of the polyester market, and then into the most powerful business empire in the developing world. Today, 15 percent of all Indian exports go out under his company name.

  How did the son of a penurious schoolteacher pull it off? Ambani himself credited an “almost animal instinct” for trading. Add to that a steel-trap memory, an appetite for audacious risk, an elastic view of ethics, and an ability to charm a wide range of people, including fellow traders, retailers, bureaucrats, and soccer stadiums full of stockholders. But one of his most underrated talents, I think, was a gift for maximizing and monetizing inequality.

  Some of us may view great inequalities (say, billion-dollar, twenty-seven-story homes overlooking ones made of scrap metal and wood) with apprehension. Ambani, though, turned inequalities, primarily of information and access, into power tools. This strategy first occurred to him after leaving a Gujarat village in 1950, at age seventeen, to become an economic migrant in the rough port of Aden, then a British protectorate.

  A peon and ship refueler for a trading company, he was shocked one day when a superior spent a princely sum, equivalent to five thousand rupees, to secure, via overseas telegram, information his competitors didn’t have. Through trial and error, during lunch hours in the Aden souk, Ambani began to test his own ability to capitalize on gossip and stray bits of information about commodities and global economic trends. He was soon known as one of the souk’s canniest traders and a man so personally fearless that he liked to relax after a long week of work by taking a swim in the Aden port’s shark-infested waters. The nature of his majestic swimming companions would be incorporated into his persona: it was useful, in a competitive business, to be known as fast-moving and dangerous should anyone get between you and your prey.

  Reliance, now run by his son Mukesh, is the country’s most profitable private-sector undertaking, with interests in everything from refining and transporting petroleum to grocery stores and that crucial contemporary resource, wireless spectrum. Lately, it’s been expanding to Africa, Southeast Asia, the United States, and Latin America; where it isn’t already, it may be coming soon. Reliance has also spawned a second business superpower, run by Dhirubhai’s other son, Anil, a company whose interests range from telecoms to infrastructure to Hollywood film production. And despite the sons’ tendency to feud, clashes volatile enough to rattle the whole Indian economy, they’ve both honored their father in one way: by sustaining the dominance of bigger-shark values in twenty-first-century Indian life.

  * * *

  The first tiny Reliance office, in Bombay’s Masjid Bunder neighborhood, overlooked a fountain built by an earlier trader-made-good. Observing it, and the city’s grand Flora Fountain, Dhirubhai Ambani found another metaphor for his bifurcated style: let the splendor of the jet be marveled at; keep the ugly mechanics hidden underground. After his own corporate fountains began pumping cash, he and his sons and associates did their best to control what would get unearthed.

  “Coincidentally with disputes with Reliance,” the investigative journalist Hamish McDonald has slyly written, Ambani rivals were hit by government inspections, tax problems, bad press, deportation orders, assaults, and a career-damaging forgery caper. (In the late 1990s, the Indian publisher of McDonald’s biography of Dhirubhai Ambani was served with a legal notice not to distribute it; more than a decade would pass before an Indian edition was released, by a different publisher.)

  Still, it’s hard not to be moved by the image of the teenage Dhirubhai (born Dhirajlal) hungering for success when he was on his own, far from home, in Aden. As a small-town schoolboy, he’d been active in local socialist politics and anti-British campaigns. Once thrown into the world of business, he saw that he wouldn’t get ahead unless he taught himself the language of the colonizers. So he began poring over two books that happened to be on hand, Nehru’s Glimpses of World History and The Discovery of India. He turned them into a self-development course for an aspiring tycoon. From accounts of ancient sages, kings, and freedom fighters, he derived two related lessons: that what he described as a “delicate, sensitive, understanding human touch” helped you get ahead; and that building something big required not just cash, but also influence and power.

  When Ambani entered the synthetics business, it was an opaque, high-risk, high-margin field that suddenly became even more attractive when screen heroines began dressing diaphanously on film. To stop rampant smuggling of yarn for hot saris (a must for every dowry), the government decided to let firms import fixed quantities of nylon. Ambani, who’d developed global trading contacts in Aden, realized he could use them to exploit the scheme in a handsome way; soon he was a monopoly importer, mainly from Japan, of fifty thousand pounds of the shiny new material. As his wife later wrote, he “struck gold,” making a small fortune before India’s stately old textile families and other producers figured out how to enter the game. Then they all got shafted when India’s 1962 war with China caused the price of many commodities, yarn included, to crash.

  It wasn’t the first time Ambani took full advantage of a passing windfall moment. In Aden, to the authorities’ dismay, he’d started melting down Yemen’s silver riyal coins and selling them to London bullion dealers after he realized they were worth more as ingots than at their face value. In polyester as in bullion: by the time others caught on to the profit potential, or the scheme itself went bust, he would already have his hand in something new.

  According to his wife, Dhirubhai cut deals so fast—“The faster the deal, the sooner the goods could be delivered, and the quicker the investments could be realized”—that the business partner with whom he had founded Reliance got queasy and left. Dhirubhai henceforth surrounded himself with more like-minded people. “I needed gutsy, street-smart guys with a lot of common sense and bazaar skills for the sort of business I was doing,” he would say, “not young men in clean shirts.”

  * * *

  “Manage the environment you’re in,” Ambani liked to tell the people around him. This instruction would have been less arduous to follow had he been working in the United States, where the tax regime and the spirit of capitalism had long encouraged entrepreneurs to make money. But Ambani was operating in Indira Gandhi’s looking-glass socialist society, where personal income tax rates approached 99 percent at the upper end, and corporate taxes were also punitive. Like most of his fellow businessmen, he had to break rules to succeed. Yet he went further, managing the environment by convincing the babus of the Licence Raj that it was in their interest to benefit him. The sensitive, human touch worked wonders.

  “Ambani used the government better than absolutely any other businessman that we’ve ever had,” the journalist Mihir Sharma says. “He was the kind of entrepreneur that you get only in countries that have very, very closely controlled economies. He was someone who, rather than coming up with a brilliant idea, came up with a brilliant business method—which was talking to the right bureaucrats and the right politicians.”

  In 1966, the Gujarat government provided Ambani with 125 acres of land, at a giveaway price, on which he opened a textile mill to spin his synthetic yarn into cloth. He gave the fabric the brand name Vimal, which means “spotless” or “pure.” Not long after, gorgeous French chiffon saris he’d brought home to his wife disappeared from her closet. Their designs were being
copied at the Gujarat factory, on their way to becoming so commonplace that she would be embarrassed to wear the originals. To Ambani, they were just another kind of information to be parlayed into money.

  By 1975, the World Bank had declared the arriviste’s textile concern the only one in India on a par with international standards. Naturally, the old textile families detested him. Two years later, when rivals’ complaints convinced the government to ban the importation of polyester yarn because of “profiteering,” Ambani’s connections got the ban repealed in twenty-four hours. Around the same time, he secured a license to manufacture another valuable kind of polyester yarn—“an opportune move,” his wife recalled, for the government soon after withdrew all export incentives. This put him ahead of the field to supply the domestic market. By now, he manifestly possessed the influence he’d craved since studying Nehru’s books.

  As Vimal grew from a fabric brand to a large network of retail stores, Ambani’s ear for strategic information also helped him build foreign markets, which compensated for his occasional expensive local mistake. Early on, sitting on a great quantity of texturized fabric that the Indian market didn’t care for, he got wind of a Polish delegation visiting Delhi. He took them to his mill, applied his charm, and the Poles bought half a million meters of the stuff—a figure so beyond not only his excess stock but also his mill’s capacity that he had to fly in machines from Germany to meet the order.

  Later, inspectors complained that he had secretly developed far more capacity than he was licensed to have, evading a staggering amount of tax in the process. Yet for every government representative who protested against his tactics, there were several aiding his growth: first, low-level bureaucrats involved in textile regulation; then, up the chain—until he was sitting on a stage with Indira Gandhi (46) when she celebrated her return to the prime ministership in 1980. Over the next ten years, as private players were ushered into new sections of the economy, Reliance racked up licenses like business awards, including ones for chemicals, petroleum, and oil refining, which allowed it to become India’s first vertically integrated company.