His religion is the only reason why Husain is a target, incidentally: no other explanation makes sense. He was born into a Muslim family in Maharashtra in 1913, and his career as a self-taught artist began under the Raj. 

His family moved to Bombay when he was in his teens, and he started out as a painter, going door to door to paint portraits for a shilling. "But what I discovered was that everyone, regardless of their looks, wanted to have their cheeks rosy. I could not do all these rosy cheeks, so I decided to paint Bollywood cinema hoardings instead."

He painted his posters for nearly 20 years, scaling scaffolding and sometimes sleeping on the pavement. He didn't mind. "I loved it, that street life. All art in India is viewed as celebration. That is what I've tried to put into my work." Husain's friends tell me that he travelled round India, and when he ran out of money, he laid out his drawings on railway station platforms and invited the public to pay what they wanted for them.

He was well into his thirties when Jawaharlal Nehru told the Constituent Assembly of India in New Delhi on the night of August 14-15, 1947: "At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance."

In 1948, Husain joined the Bombay Progressive Artists Group, which greeted independence with the cosmopolitan project of making a new art for a new country by combining Indian traditions with the Western avant-garde. He has stayed true to the progressive promises of the 1940s all his life. German expressionism and the modern movement influenced him, and Western critics called him the "Indian Picasso", but he never lost his ability to straddle high culture and popular culture simultaneously, which is as good a definition of greatness in art as I can find.

In his paintings, gorgeous Bollywood stars — for whom he still has an appreciative eye, even at this late stage in his life — appear alongside gods and goddesses of the Hindu tradition. "For me, India means a celebration of life. You cannot find that same quality anywhere in the world," he told an interviewer in 2008 when he was well into his nineties. "I never wanted to be clever, esoteric, abstract. I wanted to make simple statements. I wanted my canvasses to have a story. I wanted my art to talk to people."