Barefoot Across the Nation

This book is the first inter-disciplinary engagement with the work of Maqbool Fida Hussain, arguably India’s most iconic contemporary artist, whose life and work are intimately entangled with the career of independant India as a democratic, secular and multi-ethnic nation.
The 13 articles in this volume – written by distinguished artists, curators, anthropologists, historians, art historians and critics, sociologists and scholars of postcolonial literature and religion – critically examine the artistic statement that Hussain has presented on the self, community and antion through his oeuvre. It engages with controvies that have erupted around and about Hussain’s work, and situates them in debates around the freedon of the artist versus the sentiments of the community, between ‘virtue’ and ‘obscenity,’ between an ‘elite’ of intellectuals and the ‘common man,’ and between a ‘work of art’ and a ‘religious icon.’