Tree of Fire: Baroda after the Gujarat carnage
This story was written by
Nirupama Dutt in the summer of 2002, based on the reaction of artists and writers to the unprecedented violence in Gujarat
There is an uneasy calm in Baroda this summer. The ancient, emaciated Vishwamitri meanders silently below the ornate bridge of the city. The old banyan trees with their long beards digging into the soil slumber amidst the shrieks of crows. These trees gave Baroda its original name. The Vadodara of today gets its name from the ancient Vatapadraka--`home of the banyan trees’.
But with the slightest caress of the summer breeze the banyans wake up startled, their leaves rustling. They seem to be deciphering the language of the winds. Does the breeze bring tidings of good seasons or of more sorrow? These wise old trees had never seen such a season of grief. Many a sad tale can be read on the green leaves, of the events that took place in this Sanskar Nagri (cultural city) of Gujarat.
Baroda is back in the business of living. But the grand dome of the university and the tall, embellished tower that crowns the sprawling Laxmi Vilas Palace, lending an old-world charm to the city’s skyline, now intruded upon by high-rises, have a forlorn air. They have seen the proud Barodans humbled and fear instilled in the very air they breathe. At Tandalja Road, sadly referred to as `Mini Pakistan” because it is a suburb inhabited by Muslims, one sees many new huts and shanties. They belong to the people who fled their homes in the walled city and nearby villages this March for fear of being lynched or burnt alive. The mosque in the heart of the colony wears a vibrant coat of green paint, but there is a note of anxiety in the voice of the Mullah as it rises in azaan at the evening hour. People sit around the mosque but there are no smiles, no laughter, only tired faces and vacant eyes.
Is life imitating art? For the scene has something familiar about it. In March this year, we saw two large paintings by Bhupen Khakhar, the famous artist of this city, exhibited in Delhi. Titled Muslims around the mosque I & II, these paintings in blue and green tones capture the everyday scenes of Muslim life. A woman in a burqa, elders in conference, a man eating a rumali roti, or yet another reading the holy Quran. The painted scenes are calm and the colour tones are of dreams and innocence. Yet the artist conveys a sense of apprehension with the scenes divided into frames, a suggestion of distant horizons and a few flowers fallen from a vase onto the tablecloth. It is as though the peace of this everyday life could be disrupted at any moment. What is visible may be lost all too soon. They are like painted prayers for the joy of living. Executed in 2001, these paintings came to Delhi after the carnage had begun in Gujarat. There was something prophetic about them. Poets and painters are prophets of a kind. Seated on a mat in his home in Madhuram Mohalla off Tandalja road, Aziz Qadri—a respected poet of the progressive tradition—recites verses against the khoon ki Holi (bloodbath). It was written months before the bloodshed actually took place. ``It is not as though I am a prophet. The mood was tense in Gujarat. And these tensions are created by politicians—otherwise what happened is unthinkable in our Sanskar nagri.’’
The sculptor nagji patel echoes Qadri’s sentiments. An alumnus of the famed Faculty of Fine Arts of the Maharaj Sayajirao University, he says, ``This violent Baroda is not the city we know. But the whole business is political.’’ Nagji patel gave a contemporary symbol to the banyan city. At the Fatehganj Chowk on the Ahmedabad road stands his tall sculpture of twin banyan trees, sculpted in pale pink sandstone. In the exquisitely carved foliage are birds, bees and monkeys in happy togetherness. Hailing from a small village in Karjan Taluka, Nagji recalls his days in the College of Fine
Arts: ``Every day, we would go to Kamati Bagh and do our exercises in sculpting birds and animals in the zoo. And these friends of my youth found their way into the banyan Tree sculpture that I made in 1992.’’
This princely town in southern Gujarat has nurtured many an artistic talent and been a home to some famous artists and poets. It is a beautiful city of gardens, campuses, museums, palaces, playing fields and libraries. The secular traditions of art is has nurtured make it difficult to associate Baroda with violence. But for the past few decades, this city too has been enveloped by flames the violated its essential character. The city came into prominence in the 18th century and most of its monuments were built in the following century, during the enlightened rule of maharaja Sayaji Rao Gaekward III (1881-1939). The Maharaja appointed two British engineers, R.F. Chisolm and Major R.N. Mant, as state architects. And the architectural landmarks of the city have a happy and picturesque blending of the East, with both Hindu and Muslim elements, and the West. Baroda’s artistic tradition dates back to ancient times: bronze sculptures have been excavated in the western suburb of Akota. This was the site of the ancient Ankotakka, which flourished between 2000 BC and 1100 AD. The Tambedkar Wada, built in the mid-19th century, has murals depicting both Hindu myths and the changing lifestyles of the Parsis, who became Westernised long before other Gujaratis. The list of luminaries in art, literature and other fields who were invited to live and work in Baroda is quite impressive. The M.S. University is unique in many ways —it is the only fully residential varsity with all affiliated colleges on campus, and completely autonomous since the chancellor is not the governor of the state, as in other universities. Aurobindo Ghose, the revolutionary freedom fighter who later became a seer, was on its facultyu and his residence in Baroda is now a museum. Hakim Kale, the poet who taught Emperor bahadur Shah Zafar, belonged to this city. The legendary Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib was his guest in Baroda for six months after the 1857 siege of Delhi.
Faiyaz Khan, the founder of the Agra gharana, was invited by the Maharaja to move to Baroda and he lived, sang and taught here till his death in the 1950s. The city paid him homage by building a mausoleum over his grave. Qadri recalls, ``It was a delight to hear Faiyaz Khan Sahib sing raga jaijaiwanti. Khan Sahib kept his doors open to all music lovers. You could just to in and sit by his side as he did his riyaz (practice).’’ It was his mazar that the riote3rs desecrated by flinging burning tyres on it. But that’s not as had as what happened in Ahmedabad, where the tomb of the much –loved poet Wali Dakhani, also known as Wali Gujarati, was completely destroyed by rioters. And the administration was quick to erase all traces of the tomb by laying a tarred road over it, right in the thick of the riots. Qadri reads out a poem called Wali Dakhani ka Shehar Ahmedabad, in which he reiterates that he has no desire, no wish and no intention of visiting the city. The poet Ehsan Jafri was killed along with eighteen people in Ahmedabad, and the house of another well-known poet, Kismet Qureshi, was burnt down.
Holding back his angry tears, Qadri says, ``When the situation returned to normal, I had someone calling on me and asking me to recite a poem at a qaumi ekta (communal unity) meeting. I told them that unity is fine, but do not use the word `communal’, for communal unity would now mean burning me alive at Liberty Fountain.’’ He points to rare manuscripts and books, the only treasures of his poor home, and says, ``My fear is that these too may be burnt one day.’’
The fear is not unfounded. Outside the city, in the posh and cosmopolitan area of Sama Road, Physics professor J.S. Bandukwala’s house—complete with its large library—was burnt down. An activist of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, he was a marked man. When the rioters first came to burn down the house, his Hindu neighbours prevented it. They the neighbours were threatened and all they could do was help the professor and his daughter escape, even as their home was reduced to ashes. The professor has gone to see his son in the US. Will he return, and will the house be rebuilt? Maybe, but something very vital has been burnt down for all times.
Fire has become the obvious symbol in the works of many Baroda artists who, like Qadri, seek catharsis through creativity. No, the muses are not silent in Baroda, for this is a city which has long nurtured the traditions of art. Unhappily, the frames today encase symbols of the stove, the gas cylinder or the burning cigarette. Vasudev Akkitham’s watercoour, Dawn, shows two people from two different faiths, holding onto each other and watching their city burn. While the work spells some hope in togetherness, there is also a feeling of helplessness in not being able to quell the fire. Debraj Goswami shows a uniformed phantom figure riding a white horse while a cigarette burns the very body of the horse. A mixed-media work by Vijay Bagodi, in which Gandhi is shown with his back turned to a scene of death and violence. The recurring image of Gandhi is only natural, for the land of his birth has seen the worst violence since Partition. Is it the land of the Mahatma who preached non-violence? Where and how does an artist find a positive image? In Trupti Patel’s mixed media work…that humanity forgot the pain is reflected in figures sprawled on the ground, each systematically burned with a lit agarbati. Fluttering birds, a pyramid of blood and a woman in water are images K. K .Muhammed uses with a touch of irony in A Course in General Guilt. However, artist Rekha Rodwittia offers hope in the symbol of a nurturing woman swallowing the fire that surrounds her, an invocation to mother earth, as it were.
That image has another resonance too. One of Raja Ravi Verma’s most famous paintings, Sita Bhumi Pravesh, which he painted during his stay in baroda, depicts mother earth coming to the rescue of Sita. The Baroda court artists have included well-known names like the Italian painter Augusto Felici and the mother and daughter team of Sass and Elizabeth Brunner. The German art historian and Indologist Herman Goetz refashioned the Baroda Museum and later joined the Faculty of Fine Arts. A very important phase in the art history of Baroda is the period of Raja Ravi Varma, who took up residence here on the invitation of the Maharaja. He painted some of his best-known works here. If the maharaja, on the one hand, patronized the Western, derivative art of Ravi Varma, he also had the vision to take note of the upsurge of talent in the Bengal school and invited Nandalal Bose to make the murals in the Kirti mandir.
The faculty of Fine Arts, set up soon after Independence, drew on the rich artistic heritage of the city to create one of the finest art institutions in the country. Hansa Mehta, the first vice chancellor, laid down the territory that contemporary artists were to explore: `We have lost our originality and either copy the Western forms of art or the ancient Indian forms. The student is expected to study both these forms but is also expected to strike out on a new path if he wishes to contribute his share in the advancement of art…’ The best names in the field of art and culture were associated with the establishment of the art college. In 1949, Markand Bhatt, who had done a stint at the Barner Foundation in Philadelphia, was invited to set up the faculty. Some of the most talented artists from all over the country were invited to come and teach. They included N.S. Bendre, Prodosh Dasgupta, Sankho Chaudhuri and, some time later, K G Subramanyan. It was the relentless effort of these pioneering artist-teachers and their successors that resulted in a contemporary gharana of visual art—the Baroda School.
It is interesting to view the artistic journey of two towering artists of the Boroda School – Gulammohammed Sheikh, who is today a father figure, and Bhupen Khakhar, a celebrated painter who charted his own course and remains a close associate and friend of Sheikh. A writer, critic and painter, Sheikh—after Behdre and Subramanyan – has been a major influence on the Baroda artists. Sheikh’s paintings have a rich narrative style with elements taken from Indian miniatures but intermingled with his personal and social concerns. Sheikh focuses on land-scapes, but they are never without human presence – there is either an actual human figure or part of the human dwelling:the hut, the door, the wall or courtyard. And there is a very interesting relationship between the outer and the inner worlds, beginning at a tangible point and suggesting the intangible.
Sheikh’s artistic journey, which began when he was a small boy in Kathiawar and took flight in the city of Baroda, has been a long one. Among his most significant works is City for Sale, executed on an epic scale in 1981-84, which is now in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Communal riots are its theme and the painter confronts the chaos, disaster and blasphemy. The irony of the situation comes through in the vegetables bouncing out of the pushcart and men being stripped to ascertain whether they are Hindu or Muslim! Discussing the painting, Sheikh says, ``our rich and valuable experience of diversity in faiths, ideologies, attitudes, has been brutalized by successive bands of Mafiosi, who have subverted the process of continuous transformation that this wonderful mix should normally lead to. My painting is about the irony and absurdity of this brutalization. This is how my city of Baroda, like other Indian cities, has been brutalized.’’
What makes it a sad journey for the painter or writer of the subcontinent is the fact that the brutalization is a continuous process with fires of communal discord moving from city to city, village to village. One painting is not enough, even if it is on an epic scale. The creative person is compelled to return to the same theme time and again. The historian, the activist, the journalist and the artist are forced to seek out secular symbols and throw them up to the world. The past and present, the inner and the outer mingle as they do on Sheikh’s canvas. The people of Gujarat have relived the terror of Partition this spring. Talking of the trauma, Qadri invokes Manto:``Manto had said at the time of Partition, don’t say five lakh Hindus have died or five lakh Muslims have died. Say ten lakh human beings have died.’’ Saadat Hasan Manto, chronicler of the horrors of partition in Urdu prose, remains relevant till date. Though I am a Manto fan, a question nags me every time I see yet another production of Tuba Tek Singh on stage, or yet another translation of his writings – is it the power of his pen that moves us or is it that we have refused to learn from history? Perhaps a bit of both. Or perhaps it suits the powers that be to repeat history, regardless of human agony?
It is here that the painter or the writer comes in, in the gap that even the historian shies away from. For some years, Sheikh has been contesting the claim of the political over the religious domain by reclaiming the sacred space. The result has been a series of evocative Kabir paintings in which the artist seeks to represent the saint as an icon of the age. But in times that are so brutalized that the unborn child is the target of rioters, the scheming fundamentalist is the hero, and all human values are up for sale, does anyone care for a Kabir or a manto? A burning tyre would probably have been the lot of kabir in India today, as the mental asylum was the lot of a Manto in the Pakistan of yesterday. But Kabir will sing a secular song, mando will write of rivers changing their course and Sheikh will pant The Flock and the Guardian, taking the cue from Kabir in which the wonder of a lion guarding a herd of cattle is reconstructed in the present context. It is a dismal canvas of life that Sheikh confronts in his Pratapganj home in Baroda: ``We may try to console ourselves by saying that what happened in Baroda is less in magnitude than what happened in Ahmedabad. Violence has become a part of this city. Baroda has a strong secular tradition but we artists, writers and academics are confined to art colleges, little magazines and seminar halls. We have little contact with the masses. The national press, however, played a good role in the Gujarat violence. The only ray of hope is that even through all this Saurashtra saw no violence.’’
Bhupen Khakhar was a chartered accountant in Bombay till he came to Baroda to study art criticism. And he stayed on to become one of the leading artists of the country. Free of a conventional art training, Khakhar dared to experiment freely, using popular images and materials. He delights in calling himself a completely apolitical artist and has shocked many by painting images of homosexual life. The human predicament shown in an ironic light is his forte. However, his recent works have strong images of violence. Commenting on this, the social historian Sudhir Chandra says, ``Never before was it so black as it is in the paintings here… Is there some threshold of pain beyond which – even for an inveterate teaser like Bhupen Khakhar – no alleviation, no laughing device, remains within reach? In our time, this is an unnerving thought: the exhaustion of the possibility to laugh or laugh off.’’ Committed, like Sheikh, to painting the Indian reality, Khakhar cannot but find violence and death invading the frames of his paintings. Along with his portrayal of the Muslims around the mosque, that was discussed earlier, are paintings like Bullet Shot in the Stomach and Beauty is Skin Deep Only in which death and destruction loom large. Recently, he also exhibited huge cutouts with garishly painted cine-stars on one side and images of violence on the other.
It is not easy for the artist to find the imagery to paint the terror of butchered innocents. One of the most horrifying instances of violence was the burning down of the Best Bakery at Hanuman Tekhri on March 1. All the Muslims had moved out of that area except the baker’s widow and his family, who were still running the bakery. The family stayed on because an influential person of the area assured them safety and protection. However, it was that very person who led a mob and 14 persons were brutally burnt alive or hacked to pieces while the police looked the other way. Zahira Habihullah’s account of the violence is repelling: ``My mother kept begging that she had no support except for her sons. Our three Hindu servants’ stomachs were slit open. Two of my brothers were burnt alive; two others were tied up and torched …’’ But such are the things that happened, and worse too.
Any artistic intervention in such a situation must go beyond cliché. And how do aesthetics figure in the orgy of death and destruction? However, the Baroda artists , many of them young, have shown sensitivity in dealing with the onslaught of violence and honesty in facing it. Accepting the reality of this one-sided killing of members of the minority community, Sheikh says, ``Some of us are condemned to live in terror and the divide between the two communities has become very deep.’’ Says Nita Thakore, an artist whose medium is fabric, needle and thread, ``Baroda had never seen violence such as this. The pushcart of my sabziwali (vegetable vendor ) was burnt. In an amazing show of courage and resilience, she was back on the street, and selling vegetables, within 24 hours. What is disturbing is that many people have stopped reacting and have started accepting the violence.’’
But not the artists, at least. An exhibition was visualized by Baroda artists Anandjit Ray and Nagji patel in early February, much before the violence broke out, for the local Nazar Gallery. Termed ``The Banyan City’, the group show called upon the artists to focus on their local environment. That is what they did but there is a great difference in the works painted before the Godhra incident, and those executed afterwards. The earlier works show the artists happy and at ease, as is seen in Ratan Parimoo’s work Aishwariya as Gaekward maharanim, a tongue-in-cheek take-off on Ravi Varma’s princely portraits. And then hot winds that scorched Gujarat in spring and do not spare the Sanskar nagri. Most of the works painted in this period protest against the violence in different ways and try to make some sense of chaos. The banyan is the obvious symbol, yet artists have dealt with it in differing ways. There is the very eloquent mixed-media work by Yunus Khimani, There stands our blackened banyan. Nita Thakore builds the trunk of the banyan by entwining calligraphic symbols – both Hindu and Muslim – and buds and leaves from embroidery motifs of Kutch and Saurashtra.
Thakore recalls, ``My mother had clearly told me not to bring a Muslim boy home or she would throw both of us out. I wish the generation after partition had encouraged social and family ties between the two communities.’’ Now, the guardians of Hindutva have started targeting couples of mixed marriages and members of the artist and intellectual community in Baroda too have been threatened. Sad, indeed, given the city’s secular and liberal tradition. In an easy, `A post-Independence Initiative in Art’ included in the volume Contemporary Art of Baroda, Nilima Sheikh writes, ``Education in Gujarat, more particularly at the M.S. University in Boaroda, was mainly in the hands of educationists who came from the Nagar Brahmin stock of administrators. Enlightened and progressive, they had led with the righteous assurance of those who believe they have the generic claim to mould the intelligentsia, their caste authority remained intact despite the pervasive Gandhianism … In the early years at Baroda, however, it had to take a back-seat, owing to the cosmopolitan ambience at the Faculty of Fine Arts. Its finest qualities got filtered through this ethos into a more progressive significance. As an amusing but not irrelevant aside, one might recount that Markand Bhatt, Bendre, Sankho Chaudhuri and Subramanyan, the four main protagonists at Baroda, had all married on the basis of their own choice, across caste, community and even religious lines. A multicultural secularism became quite the norm within the Faculty, and survived almost four decades.’’
Baroda’s lament is a soulful cry for multicultural secularism everywhere. The rise of fundamentalism first hits pride and progress. The self-appointed guardians of religion decide who one must love and what must one paint or create – recall the controversy over MF Husain’s portrayal of Hindu myths, or the row over Deepa Mehta’s films Fire and Water. It was Faiz Ahmed Faiz who had said the climate in his country demanded that no head be held high and that a lover must lurk like a thief. The artist community and intelligentsia are gearing up to remove the black stains that have encrusted their banyan by organising an exhibition of paintings by Baroda alumni scattered all over the country. Raga jaijaiwanti must be redeemed, so a concert is to be held at Ustad Faiyaz khan’s tomb in October.
The lovers of Baroda refuse to go into hiding, and there is a valiant attempt to hold the head high in spite of what happened. I return again to the home of Aziz Qadri off Tandalja Road. The poet is calligraphing dohas in Urdu and says, ``I have lived in Baroda before the Partition and after. There was no question of any rift between the Hindus and the Muslims. We all lived together in peace. Didn’t I tell you that ours is a Sankar nagri, even Ghalib lived here for full six months? And you know our Maharaj Mallerao was a nationalist and gave shelter to Tantia Tope’s soldiers during the First War of Independence in 1857.’’
Why do I keep returning to the poet? Isn’t he rambling, perched as he is on a precarious peace in `Mini Pakistan? He is like the character played by the late Kaifi Azmi in Sayeed Mirza’s Naseem, a film on the demolition of the Babri Masjid seen through the eyes of an adolescent girl. The changed times have rendered such liberals, who relate anecdotes of past glory and bonhomie, quite irrelevant. Or are they still relevant?
