DELHI He may be India`s most famous living artist, but Maqbool Fida Husain was conspicuous by his absence from the country`s first art fair which opened on Friday in Delhi. Backed by Sotheby`s and the government, the Indian Art Summit is a sign of how quickly attitudes to art have changed in the country, while political views have not.

Prices of Indian art have skyrocketed in the past five years with paintings by Husain easily fetching $1m - staggering for a country where average incomes are less than $1000 a year.

But Husain has just spent his 93rd birthday in self-imposed exile, forced out by threats from Hindu groups enraged by his paintings of nude gods and goddesses.

Instead of his beloved Mumbai, Husain now lives in Dubai and London. He told this reporter that he would “love to return home” but faces “three thousand legal cases which have been lodged against me in the past eight years. I cannot speak about them because I would be in contempt of court.”

M.F. Husain, as he is known in India, began as an artist in Bollywood producing lush film hoardings. He went on to become a celebrated avant-garde painter, filmmaker and full-time Bohemian, who never wears shoes and carries a cane that doubles as a paintbrush. By 2005 he was the highest paid painter in India.

However, it was a little-known 1970 work of nude Hindu goddesses that, when published fifteen years later in a magazine article headlined M.F. Husain A Painter or Butcher, created a storm. Rightwing Hindus attacked his home and burned down his galleries. Two years ago the painter left India and his work can be sold in New York and London, but not Delhi.

Husain`s supporters say that his continuing absence is a “disaster” for the country and a test of freedom of expression in the world`s largest self-styled democracy. —Dawn/Guardian News Service