Painter Sohan Qadri

On form and the formless

Nirupama Dutt

From Chachoki village on the outskirts of Phagwara to Copenhagen was the long journey for artist Sohan Qadri, a person who refused to he dated whether in aesthetics or metaphysics. Journeying through the world of dots, lines, colour and form, his search was for the beyond. This was the theme of hislecture given at CRRID in Chandigarh on Tuesday evening.

A Qadri lecture is quite an event and so was this one titled `Aesthetics and Metaphysics'. For one Qadri invites a motely crowd of artists, writers, scholars, spiritualists and eccentrics. His old Doaba friends were there and so were younger artists. It began with a rather poor showing of a Jalandhar Doordarshan telefilm on him. But a film made very coherently by Harjit Singh brought forth a Qadri not obscure but alive and throbbing as he painted or spoke about his creative process or roamed by fields of sunflowers in his colourful kurtas. And Qadri himself was communicable in Punjabi.

To do him credit in his presentation, he was lucid and brief beginning with the primeval hunger of the human species and the invention of the sharp-edged exe going on to the sexual needs, then the yearning for self-expression and finally the ultimate in creativity which transcends into the metaphysical experience.

The question session which followed had more spiritualists rather than artists active in asking questions and sharing their own ethereal experiences making the whole affair an exercise in sky-walking. One of the more earthly persons tried to come back to the topic of the lecture which was the relationship of aesthetics to metaphysics. But that was not to be and he was scolded for being materialistic by the listeners Naturally, what is `Anand' when the ultimate goal is `Parmanand'?

The lecture over, the presidential remarks came from the poet and bureaucrat, Manmohan Singh, who said that he had got the invitation late or he would have written and brought along a poem on Qadri. He compensated with a two-liner, ``Qadri's life is a dance of dots. He is the darling of tiny tots''. One does not know about the tiny tots but the elders could not resist him and artist Balvinder caricatured him through the lecture with his receding hairline, fuzzy hair and the witch doctor look

Qadri's trip to the country this time was to attend the sexology conference in Delhi. ``The doctors were there to talk of their experiences with guinea pigs but I was there as a guinea pig.'' He promises to reveal it all in the next meeting. Until then it is metaphysically yours.