Honourable President,

We, the undersigned, write to you to suggest that the arts and the nation would be made proud if the contribution of the distinguished artist, Maqbool Fida Husain, is recognized in the form of the highest award of the land: India’s Bharat Ratna. 
M.F. Husain has received national and international recognition in abundance; it remains for him to join the constellation of Bharat Ratna awardees — Satyajit Ray, M.S. Subbalakshmi, Ravi Shankar, Bismillah Khan, Lata Mangeshkar — to become one the most treasured artists of this country. A large number of artists, art historians and critics, as well as spectators in the general public, believe that M.F. Husain, the 91-year-old painter and filmmaker, most fully belongs in this constellation.
The Indian civilization, in all its diversity, has been Husain’s basic inspirational project. Since the year of Independence, through the Nehruvian decades and thereon, cognizant of all the challenges involved in nation-building, Husain has been steadfast in maintaining a most affirmative relationship with the Indian peoples’ consciousness of their national identity. Through him, we have learned to address a whole gamut of issues pertaining to the interactive dynamic of modernity with the country’s many-layered art and culture.
We believe that he has made a signal contribution in reworking the aesthetic traditions of India including especially the tradition of iconographic innovation. He is among those few modern artists who have focused on mythological and epic narratives, and, for over half a century, he has painted themes from the epics in literally thousands of paintings and drawings. This alone speaks of his passion for these narratives and, further, of his understanding that their literary,

performing and visual form has changed through the centuries, and therefore carries the mandate for new articulations within the contemporary.
Equally important, these series of Husain paintings have been shown in urban and rural sites through unique modes of public dissemination. And it speaks of the generous comprehension of this project by viewers all over India, viewers who cut across barriers of class and culture, that they have been received with the affectionate regard and playful participation they require.
Posterity will certainly name Husain as one of the most prominent post-Indpendence artists to shape the contemporary in the spirit of a living and changing tradition. More than any other modern artist in India, he has understood how a syncretic civilization and the dynamics of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious nation have together prompted these interpretations and empowered the community of artists to evolve a uniquely modern language consistent with the complexity of these civilizational narratives.
Indeed, Husain is such an iconic figure that we could use the very iconography of Maqbool Fida Husain, of the person himself, to forward ideas about Indian visual culture in the framework of a dynamic public sphere. Already, his life and work are beginning to serve as an allegory for the changing modalities of the secular in modern India — and the challenges that the narrative of the nation holds for many of us. This is the opportune, and crucial, time to honour him for his dedication and courage to the cultural renaissance of his beloved country.

Yours sincerely

Vivan Sundaram, Ashok Vajpeyi, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Krishen Khanna, Ram Rahman, M.K. Raina, Geeta Kapur, Arpita Singh