Indian painter and film-maker, one of the best known and almost certainly the most controversial figure in the contemporary art of his country. Born in Pandha-pur, Maharashtra, he studied at the School of Art in Indore in 1937, then worked as a painter of cinema hoardings and as a toy designer. In 1947 he joined *Souza's Progressive Artists' Group in Bombay, which he saw as part of the independence movement, attacking both the British-dominated *Royal Academy and conservative revivalist art. Husain's own view of Western modernist art is that India had already passed the stages of *Impressionism and *Cubism and therefore had no need of them, saying that ‘they [the West] took it [modernist art] from Japan and from Africa’ (Frontline, August 9–22, 1997).