Anyone who has followed the career of MF Husain understands he does nothing that does not profit him. So his diatribe against Bengal artists that they only produce to earn a living is really quite uncalled for. Bengal art, whether we like it or not, was the first to come up with what we call contemporary art in India today.

A mixed media painting on paper by Rabindranath Tagore

Indeed, when many were aping foreign styles and techniques, an artist like Gagendranath Tagore presented us with his own experiments of the refraction of light and prismatic paintings that were contemporaneous with Picasso?s Cubist experiments but not derived from them. In the same way, we have an excellent artist trained in the best French technique of his time, Jamini Roy, who turned his back on it to follow an original expression, that of the Patuas or scroll-painters of Bengal. These works that he sold at Re 1 each outside factory gates now fetch Rs 20,000 or more. This is Bengal art.

Like Jamini Roy, we see a plethora of original artists emerging from Bengal, who inspired artists all over the country and influenced them. Husain was one of them, as is obvious from his signature in Bengali on a number of his works and his series on Satyajit Ray. Without his contact with and training under the artists at Santiniketan, like Nandalal Bose, Benode Bihari Mukherjee or Ram Kinkar Baij, I doubt if Satyajit Ray would have become the film maker he became.

Then there were artists like Chitta Prasad, Ganesh Haloi, Somnath Hore, Prodosh Das Gupta, Sunil Das, Rathin Moitra, Nirode Majumdar, Paritosh Sen, Shivaprasanna, Ganesh Pyne, Nikhil Biswas and so many others, who, in their turn, inspired a whole crop of young artists like Bikash and Sanjay Bhattacharya, Paresh and Somenath Maity, Debabrata De and so many others.

This does not mean that there is nothing other than Bengal art. There is. And the Bombay group to which Husain belonged or the Progressive Artists Group that FN Souza led, are proof of this. But this does not detract from the fact that Bengal art is still the best investment there is in our contemporary art today.

True, Husain is the best-selling living Indian artist today. But a swallow does not make a summer. He has a close competition with the reclusive Ganesh Pyne, with Anjolie Ela Menon making headlines no less than him. Both are from Bengal. Obviously Husain?s tirade against Bengal art has no ground to stand on. But what we do see is that he is irked by more and more collectors and artists looking East.

Anyone who wants an exhibition to catch the public eye flits off to Kolkata to get works. The reason is clear. The best works of quality at the cheapest prices are to be found in Bengal today. Recently, three gallery owners of Delhi have gone to Bengal and returned with excellent works for their exhibitions. The fourth, who teamed up with a Kolkata gallery, also gave body to his exhibition as a result of the collaboration. This undoubtedly arouses jealousy in artists from other parts of the country. But then, Husain is one man who I do not believe to be driven by that emotion. It appears to be a tactic of market warring. As people look East, even the better artists of Western, Northern and Southern India tend to get overlooked.

Husain, however, need not worry on that account. Young artists like Atul Dodiya, Jitish Kallat, Apurva Desai, Yati Jaiswal, Neeraj Bakshi, Neeraj Goswami, Rahul Arya, Kiran Singh, Seema Ghurayya, Manisha Parekh, Nataraj Sharma, Sambhavi, Sanjeev Sinha and Manisha Gera Baswani are doing well enough as artists. Where they will get to, their vision of life and the turn of events will tell. There is talent enough in India, but whether we like it or not, Bengal still carries the crown of laurel leaves. Its art, in general terms, is still the best investment we have in the market. It would be better to learn from the success of Bengal Art than to denigrate it.