Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie orientale

Journal | Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie orientale
Journal issue | 56 | 2020
Research Article | MF Husain’s Hindi Autobiography Em. Ef. Husain kī kahānī apnī zubānī

MF Husain’s Hindi Autobiography Em. Ef. Husain kī kahānī apnī zubānī

Sketches of a Performative Self, Surfing the World in Space and Time

Abstract

Drawing from Elizabeth Grosz’s notion of the body as a socio-cultural artefact and the exterior of the subject bodies as psychically constructed, and Rosi Braidotti’s concept of nomadic identities, in this article I introduce world-renowned Indian painter MF Husain’s verbal and visual autobiography Em. Ef. Husen kī kahānī apnī zubānī as a series of sketches of a performative self, surfing the world in space and time. Bodies and spaces are envisioned as “assemblages or collections of parts” in constant movement, crossing borders and creating relationships with other selves and other spaces. People and places become a catalyst for manifestations of the self in art – MF Husain being foremost a painter – and eventually also in literature. I look for strategies that MF Husain uses in order to construct or deconstruct the self through crossings and linkages. I try to investigate how the self is performed inside and outside private and public spaces, how the complex (sometimes even contradictory) relationship between self and community is portrayed, and how this autobiography does articulate notions of (imagined) community/ies, nationalism, transnational subjectivity, nostalgia.


Open access | Peer reviewed

Submitted: Feb. 5, 2020 | Accepted: March 24, 2020 | Published June 30, 2020 | Language: en

Keywords Autobiography • Performative self • Hindi literature • MF Husain • Modernism

Copyright © 2020 Alessandra Consolaro. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/AnnOr/2385-3042/2020/01/013


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