Our grief, our shame - MF Hussain (a noble Indian Artist) passes away in London

MF Husain, India's best known contemporary painter, has died in London. India should grieve for two reasons. At 95, he was active and had lots of painting left in him. And he died in exile, unhappy with the way his home country had treated him.

Husain had been in exile since 2006, when he was attacked by rightist groups angry with his portrayal of Hindu deities. Last year, he was offered Qatari citizenship. But his heart remained in India, and in interviews, spoke fondly of what this country meant to him.

Arun Vadhera, a friend who visited him at Royal Brompton Hospital yesterday, said he had been cheerful, talking about eating out at a restaurant soon after his discharge. "He really really missed India a lot," he told a TV channel.

I never met M.F. Husain. And I am not among those lucky ones, of whom there are quite a few, who received as a priceless gift from him a sketch or a drawing to hang with pride on their walls.

But I grieve his death as I would almost no other. For it is not that he has passed away; after all he was all of 95. What breaks my heart is that he had to breathe his last in distant London, where this country, which he loved so much, had driven him in the last decade of his life.

And driven out this genius for what? For the crime of being an artist, who gave rein to his imagination in the most glorious traditions of Indian art as inscribed on every temple wall and every mural painting.

It was that mindset, a belief that M.F. Husain’s quarrel was a private quarrel, one moreover that was of his own making, and therefore no business of the state, that where he lived or whom he fled from was his affair, and that those provoked by his paintings should not be further provoked by action against them, that rendered the great M.F. Husain a refugee from his own land. If I were the Prime Minister (which is why I probably never will be) I would immediately fly out to be at his grave as his body is lowered for ever into the earth he loved so dearly. That would be true prayaschit.