“Where there is lightning there is thunder, thunder of horses, and Husain’s horses early became his icon. For they were beings always catapulted into action, being whose every response was dynamic, whose power was that of fateness into motion.

American that I am, when I look at the painting, I have the sense that I am watching a John Ford film with a wagon train careening at top speed through thee big valley of the uncharted west, chased by Indians, a stagecoach with absent rider, a president maay be, or film director, or angry god. History is not only collapsed into the past, it is, in Husain’s monumental panels, rendered larger than life, cinema.”

Daniel Herwitz

Excerpted from page 50 and page 53, Lightning by MF Husain published in 2019