- Lived:
- 17 September 1915, Pandharpur (Maharashtra) → Indore → Bombay (Mumbai), then the world; from 2006, exile in Dubai, London and Doha; died 9 June 2011, London
- Field:
- painting — founding member of the Progressive Artists' Group, Bombay (1947), the movement that built modern Indian art
- The Big Idea:
- Take the broken, urgent lines of European modernism and make them speak entirely Indian matter — gods, epics, villages, horses, cinema — at billboard scale and billboard speed, so that a new republic could see itself in a new way.
- In their words:
- "I asked not for a paisa for my labour" — on the ten years he spent painting the Rāmāyaṇa
- If you remember one thing:
- The Muslim painter who spent a decade painting the Hindu epics for nothing died in exile, after years of protests and lawsuits over goddesses he had painted decades earlier — and India has still not decided which half of that sentence defines it.