Husain's monumental mural returns

For nearly six years, one of Delhi's most significant public artworks lay hidden from view, carefully boxed away in climate-controlled storage as if it had faded from memory. Now, at last, the monumental mural by modernist painter and Padma Vibhushan awardee MF Husain has come home again.

- Snehil Sinha

Painted in 1963, just a year after the original World Health Organisation (WHO) South-East Asia regional office was completed, Husain’s massive mural - The History of Medicine - is no ordinary artwork. Spanning 60 feet in length and 10 feet in height, signed twice by the artist in English and Hindi, it was a bold fusion of public architecture and modern Indian art at a time when such collaborations were rare.

Its journey, however, has been anything but straightforward.

In 2019, the WHO building — designed by legendary CPWD architect Habib Rahman — was declared structurally unsafe and demolished. A wall painting of this scale had to be extricated intact—a feat hitherto never attempted in Asia. The task was unprecedented, and the risks immense.

An unlikely rescue

Unlike a canvas, Husain’s mural was painted directly onto a plaster wall inside a conference room. To save it, a team of conservators from the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) spent around six months cutting through brick and mortar, slicing the mural into six massive panels before transporting them to a climate-controlled storage facility.

WHO itself acknowledged the scale of the feat. A 2019 regional committee document noted: “This was an ambitious and complicated project with the most modern technical procedures being implemented for the safe removal of the artwork, a feat hitherto never attempted anywhere in Asia.”