In 2009-10, MF Husain was invited by the Kerala Tourism Department to visit the state in short stints over the course of three months to capture some of the sights and help promote tourism to the state. On his very first visit, the painter had a love-at-first-sight feeling which he did not care to keep a secret. "I am here to capture the ethereal beauty of 'God's own country," Husain said as he set about with his brush and paint, visiting the beaches, backwaters and hill stations of the lush region. These paintings were later published as a book titled “Kerala – God’s own country” for “The Hindu” with Shashi Tharoor's prose.
India Today described the book as: “This spiffy book demands of its readers much more than just flipping through it joyously and leaving it afterwards on the coffee table.M.F. Husain has brilliantly painted all cliched metaphors of tourism-from Kathakali dancers to ayurveda masseurs. At a time when his art was getting dangerously close to triteness, Kerala helped him redeem his painterly genius-a feat Madhuri Dixit could not accomplish. While Husain's paintings are limited to the depiction of present-day life, Tharoor delves into Kerala's history. His essay makes sense of the identity of Malayalees.”
“Kerala is a land of unsurpassable natural beauty. In its alabaster beaches, sylvan backwaters, misty hill stations, leafy ayurvedic resorts and bountiful wildlife parks lies an immense reservoir of beauty-a beauty heard of only in fables and exotic tales. God's Own Country is an Endeavour to capture the essence of this land extraordinaire by a great artist whose paintings in the book bear his signature in Malayalam, a language he cannot speak, and a writer who traces his roots to Kerala, a homeland he has only visited on his holidays! In a curious collaboration, these two avant-garde visionaries - one who is a veritable "outsider" and the other whose only "insider" claim is his ancestry-come together to salute their common love: Kerala.
M.F. Husain's paintings are an exquisite evocation of Kerala-its beaches, lagoons, forests, and above all, the startling, many-hued green of the countryside, with its emerald paddy fields and banana groves, and coconut and areca trees. Replacing his trademark horses with elephants, Husain embodies the magic of Kerala through the dazzling fluency of his brush. Similarly, Shashi Tharoor's essay is a nostalgic rendition by a writer who, despite having been city born and bred, seeks inordinate pride in the Malayali cultural heritage, the subtleties of which he wants to showcase to the non-Malayali. In a voyage that is as much self-discovery as storytelling, Tharoor presents a masterly vignette of Kerala's unique ethos and values.
For the information-minded, the book has a section, "Essential Kerala", packed with nuggets for the cognoscenti traveller, from premium accommodation to high-end backwater packages to choice ayurvedic resorts. All said, God's Own Country is an act of celebration by one of India's greatest artists and an affirmation by an exemplary Keralite writer who has understood once again why he is proud to be a Malayali.”
Here are some of the paintings by Husain from his "Kerala Folklore" series:
Kalyani in Green (2010)
Kalyani Kutty
Homage to Raja Ravi Varma
Thekadi
Performance of Fire
Arrival of Monsoon
Fish and Banana
100% Literacy
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A bit more about this series of art
Husain had earlier drawn a Kathakali scene as a part of his “Indian Civilisation” series that he was working on at the time of his death in 2011. The piece below is titled “Indian Art Form” (right most panel below)
Finally, here's an extract from of Shashi Tharoor’s writing in the book:
"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."
