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M.F. Husain, patriarch of Indian art, turns 90
By Uma Nair, Indo-Asian News Service

New Delhi, Sep 17 IANS (IANS) Maqbool Fida Husain, the patriarch of the Indian palette, turned 90 Saturday celebrating as much the milestone in his life as the coming of age of Indian art in the world.

"Ninety years. That's the birthday to be celebrated," Husain had told IANS at the Vadheras art gallery in Delhi. And sure enough, the artist marked his birthday with his family in Mumbai.

Husain is upbeat these days. "It's time for the West to turn to India," he says. "Artists in the West do not know what to do. They don't know where they are going. This is a land that is rich in history." 

He doesn't want to talk about the controversy around businessman Guru Swaroop Srivastava who made news by commissioning Husain's paintings for Rs.1 billion but was embroiled in a forgery case.

What the artist wants to talk about was the success of Indian art at Christie's and Sotehby's, saying it was a watershed for Indian art. 

"The Indians are getting rich now and, like the wealthy all over the world, they will inevitably start chasing after a quality life and pursue art and culture with their wads of cash," he said animatedly. 

"It is clear that Indian art now enjoys a high tide and those who are sceptical about its future should be silenced," says Husain happily. 

Certainly, Indian art is reflecting a bullishness not quite seen before. 

Husain is back in India after launching his latest series entitled "Lost Continent" at the Victoria Albert Museum in London, and after the success of the Sotheby's auction, he is excited beyond the zenith. 

"Indian art is there, it's right on top, and people are now looking at our works and acknowledging that it is serious and it is a result of many years of intellectual and aesthetic experiences," says Husain. 

"Ours is an old civilisation, it has an enriched language, the world is waking up to contemporary Indian art." 

Any regrets? "No regrets, but I think of how over the years criticism has hurt me - it was honest in the olden days - but it also toughened and healed me. I look back on the last 70 years and think - there has to be some substance in my work otherwise how would it have sustained itself? 

"Can you fool people all the time? Is a Rolls Royce or a Cadillac merely something that is here today gone tomorrow? 

"Yes, in one way I am different - I have always wanted to share the process of my painting, nothing in my life has been hidden. I haven't deceived anyone. All through my life I have sought one image - the image of my mother whom I never saw. 

"Whenever I painted women who personified her there were no faces - only the outline - you saw in Mother Teresa, in Madhuri, in Madonna, in Saraswati, in Mohini. Images are evolved over a period of time - one lifetime is not enough. 

"Let me tell you that the Nataraja is the image that is the most highly evolved. It is a metaphor of the evolution of the Eastern mind that has gone beyond reality. 

"I want to get prints made of my works for the common man, I want to bring to the common man my inner psyche," he says. 

For the moment, he is spending the special day in his life with his family in Mumbai, leaving out the media, which he says "has no role to play in a an artist's life!" 

Britain used Jinnah to partition India for 'great game'
By Manish Chand, Indo-Asian News Service 

New Delhi, Sep 17 (IANS) Don't blame Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, for the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947; blame the British for creating Pakistan to protect their strategic interests in the Indian Ocean and the oil-rich Persian Gulf region, contends a new book. 

The book, entitled "The Shadow of the Great Game: The Untold Story of India's Partition" and based on top-secret British and American archives unsealed recently, reveals the hard-headed strategic calculations of the British behind dividing the country and how they used political Islam and Jinnah for the purpose.

Written by Narendra Singh Sarila, a former aide-de-camp (ADC) to India's last viceroy Lord Mountbatten, the book also provides an insight into the minds of key players in the drama of the partition, including Jinnah and Mahatma Gandhi.

"The British used Jinnah and political Islam to protect their strategic interests as, in their thinking, only a divided India could help them win the Great Game against the Soviets," Sarila told IANS in an interview.

"This policy was the mother of all causes for the creation of Pakistan," asserts the 79-year-old author.

"The fact is that the British had decided to partition the country and had prepared a blueprint before Cyril Radcliffe actually got down to the job of demarcating boundaries. 

"During my research, I came across a top-secret telegram of Lord Wavell, then viceroy, to the secretary of state in London dated Feb 6, 1946, suggesting the lines on which British India could be divided. I was struck at the uncanny similarity between this blueprint and the actual partition of India in 1947." 

Unravelling the hidden motivations of the then British establishment, the author documents in detail how after the end of World War II in 1945, the new Labour government of Clement Attlee and Wavell came to the big decision to divide India.

"They realised that India was no more a commercial asset, but remained a very important military asset - a base for Britain to continue their domination of the Indian Ocean and the oil-rich Persian Gulf with its wells of power," says Sarila, heir to the erstwhile princely state of Sarila in Uttar Pradesh. 

"Another factor that influenced the British decision to partition India was a realisation that the Congress would not play the great game with Britain against the Soviet Union."

"In these circumstances, they thought that the only way to protect the British interests in this region was to use Jinnah to detach the area of India, which lay along Iran, Afghanistan and Sinkiang and create a new state here," he says.

Wavell and Attlee finally succeeded in selling the idea of a truncated Pakistan to Jinnah.

The author, who successfully reinvented himself as a diplomat and served as ambassador to Spain, Brazil and France in a career spanning nearly four decades, is intrigued by the transformation of Jinnah from a passionate constitutionalist to a practitioner of communal politics. 

"Jinnah might have remained secular at heart, but he got stuck in the British game. In his early days he sincerely believed that Hindus and Muslims must work together to attain independence for India. But then hunger for power and vainglory took over," says Sarila. 

Switching from the politics of partition to contemporary realpolitik, the author delineates the new great game. 

"The great game started as a struggle for control of the region between India and Turkey between the two greatest empires of the time: the British and the Soviet. Post World War II, it turned into a cold war. The new great game is about the control of energy resources in the world." 

Indian origin writer in Canadian literary festival
Indo-Asian News Service

Toronto, Sep 17 (IANS) Indo Canadian writer Jay Gajjar has been invited to the 'The Word on the Street' annual literary festival in this Canadian city to read a chapter from his recently published Gujarati novel "Timirna Tej" (The Light in the Darkness).

This will be Gajjar's second invitation to the festival, which is being celebrated for the last 16 years in Toronto. Gajjar is a resident of Mississauga and a prominent Gujarati storywriter and novelist.

The literary festival promotes books, authors, literary activities and also hosts several book exhibitions. 

More than 200,000 book lovers are likely to descend on Queen's Park Crescent for the Sep 25 festival, Canada's largest outdoor book and magazine festival.

Gajjar, who came to Canada in 1970, has penned about 300 short stories.