All India's religious traditions moved him. His family were from the Sulaimani Bohra branch of Shia Islam, which in India had absorbed many Hindu beliefs. His mother died when he was young, and his father sent him away from home when he was a teenager. 

"I used to have terrible nightmares when I was about 14 or 15. This stopped when I was 19. I had a guru called Mohammad Ishaq — I studied the holy texts with him for two years. I also read and discussed the Gita and Upanishads and Puranas. This made me completely calm." 

All of which is a long way of making a simple point. Husain is from the roots of India: an artist from "the soul of the nation", to use Nehru's phrase. He has painted for longer than the India republic has existed, and tried to tie its present to its past through his work. 

Until he was close to 80, the idea that he had no right to include himself as a part of the long tradition of Indian art and thought because he was a Muslim would have struck him and all who admired him as inexplicable, as would the notion that there was anything offensive about his nudes.

You only have to visit the temple of Lakshmana at Khajuraho to see the erotic strain in Indian culture. The presence of naked gods and goddesses tells the visitor that they are far from the taboos of the Abrahamic religions. Hinduism bears partial responsibility for the many crimes of the caste system, but its admirers defend it by saying that because it has no prophet or pope it has room for those who believe in thousands of gods or none. "You can cover up your goddess in the finest silk and jewellery," wrote Salil Tripathi, a sympathetic observer. "Or you can watch her naked. You can look at the beauty of her face and admire the divinity of her halo, a sari wrapped around her, and her face made up like a Bollywood queen. Or you can see her with ample breasts heaving, her luscious lips parted seductively carved, her thighs wrapped in supreme sexual ecstasy around an athletic god or even goddess — carved for eternity on the walls of a Hindu temple...At least that's the theory, and it has been the practice in large parts of India for thousands of years."

The sculptors of the Tantric and Shaktism cults openly celebrated eroticism. Others placed erotic carvings on the outer walls of temples not to excite visitors but as a reminder that they should leave their desires behind before they entered. More often, artists used nudity in religious painting and sculpture to symbolise purity. Their work carried no more sexual charge than the nudity of the sadhus who wade into the Ganges at Kumbh Mela.