Sounding A New Start
Nirupama Dutt
The colours are brighter. The mood of the compositions is playful. Singing sparrows, chattering parrots, bleating goats, blowing horns and tinkling bells have found their way onto the canvases as the native returns to his studio from the oblivion of silence to the world of marginal sound.
``I am more keenly aware of the sounds around me,’’ says Gujral. ``I cannot decipher voices, but merely hearing my own voice has made a difference. I am more in control of my voice and able to use a varying pitch. And I think the lightness that I feel is reflected in my paintings, too. Earlier, I had to imagine the world of sound. Now I am well within it.’’
Gujral chooses not to label his works and also makes no intellectual pretensions. Each work has resulted from a mood that in turn had evolved from an aesthetic experience. The ultimate expression is a celebration of life.
But the celebration is in no way superficial. It has its roots. Roots that run deep into a tradition of art. ``Artistically, as I grow older, my adoration for craftsmanship is becoming more intense, as does my search for a new identity,’’ says Gujral. ``For the past few years, I’ve been trying to re-establish the lost link with the Indian kalam (Gujral’s metaphor for old Indian styles). It is towards this direction that I seem to be turning to in this phase of my life. I seem to be looking more and more towards our tradition of miniature painting.’’
Gujral has been fully aware of the dangers of addressing the past. There’s a certain risk of seeming pretentious or repetitive. But the artist argues, as though with himself: ``Rejection of the past is worse than the imitation of it. I am not much attracted to futurism. All this futuristic talk of the new century or, still more, the next millennium, leaves me cold. The future has nothing to give you. It is you who builds the future. And what you build the future with is your past.’’
It is the dilemma of a creative person who belongs to a culture that has a rather heavy burden of traditions. There’s a hesitation that borders on fear the fear of referring to traditions, lest one is entrapped in them. ``No, I believe this to be absolutely wrong,’’ explains Gujral. ``The reward in harking back to the past is that by doing so, one gets an identity. And this can be had in no other way. Before me was the example of architecture. Architects stopped using the features of our great monuments of the past: the domes, the arches, the decorative details. These were shunned like the plague. The result was the architecture of today which has no identity. I tried to violate these rules by using domes and arches. They were made fun of an I was called a `pseudo’. But these lived to see acceptance.’’
His experiments with architecture made him bolder when he returned to his paintings choosing the way of the Indian Kalam, with its emphasis on detail, its decorative elements, its realism, and an exquisite order of craftsmanship. These paintings follow a style that is to be seen in his canvases of the past decade and have yet a great emphasis on detail as well as the joy of working minutely in the cult of a craftsman of yore. Not just the paintings, his granite sculptures, too, which are very modern in form and yet embellished with the fine work that comes from tradition. ``One of the casualties of modernism has been craftsmanship,’’ laments the artist. ``In the name of abstraction, workmanship was cast aside.’’
But what about his own experience, for abstraction is very much a part of his creative journey, and it is evident even in his present work? ``Abstraction, yes. But not at the cost of workmanship,’’ emphasises Gujral. ``I have never surrendered to this temptation. I started, in fact, with figurative work. The Partition paintings stand testimony to the fact that I know how to draw. In later years, just as a poet breaks lines to infuse them with rhythm, I mixed abstraction with reality. The point is that faulty language does not make poetry. A faulty drawing similarly, cannot get away in the name of abstraction.’’
Coming to the new thematic elements in Gujral’s work, which reflect the joy of hearing after a long silence spanning over six decades, one cannot but ask him this question. No matter how tormented he was by his disability, yet if it were not for this, he may never have been an artist.
Gujral is quick with a reply: ``Sure, I wouldn’t have been an artist. I would never have gone to Lahore’s Mayo School of Arts. Like any other middleclass family. Mine would have liked to see me in a profession that earned me a good living.”
Nirupama Dutt
The colours are brighter. The mood of the compositions is playful. Singing sparrows, chattering parrots, bleating goats, blowing horns and tinkling bells have found their way onto the canvases as the native returns to his studio from the oblivion of silence to the world of marginal sound.
``I am more keenly aware of the sounds around me,’’ says Gujral. ``I cannot decipher voices, but merely hearing my own voice has made a difference. I am more in control of my voice and able to use a varying pitch. And I think the lightness that I feel is reflected in my paintings, too. Earlier, I had to imagine the world of sound. Now I am well within it.’’
Gujral chooses not to label his works and also makes no intellectual pretensions. Each work has resulted from a mood that in turn had evolved from an aesthetic experience. The ultimate expression is a celebration of life.
But the celebration is in no way superficial. It has its roots. Roots that run deep into a tradition of art. ``Artistically, as I grow older, my adoration for craftsmanship is becoming more intense, as does my search for a new identity,’’ says Gujral. ``For the past few years, I’ve been trying to re-establish the lost link with the Indian kalam (Gujral’s metaphor for old Indian styles). It is towards this direction that I seem to be turning to in this phase of my life. I seem to be looking more and more towards our tradition of miniature painting.’’
Gujral has been fully aware of the dangers of addressing the past. There’s a certain risk of seeming pretentious or repetitive. But the artist argues, as though with himself: ``Rejection of the past is worse than the imitation of it. I am not much attracted to futurism. All this futuristic talk of the new century or, still more, the next millennium, leaves me cold. The future has nothing to give you. It is you who builds the future. And what you build the future with is your past.’’
It is the dilemma of a creative person who belongs to a culture that has a rather heavy burden of traditions. There’s a hesitation that borders on fear the fear of referring to traditions, lest one is entrapped in them. ``No, I believe this to be absolutely wrong,’’ explains Gujral. ``The reward in harking back to the past is that by doing so, one gets an identity. And this can be had in no other way. Before me was the example of architecture. Architects stopped using the features of our great monuments of the past: the domes, the arches, the decorative details. These were shunned like the plague. The result was the architecture of today which has no identity. I tried to violate these rules by using domes and arches. They were made fun of an I was called a `pseudo’. But these lived to see acceptance.’’
His experiments with architecture made him bolder when he returned to his paintings choosing the way of the Indian Kalam, with its emphasis on detail, its decorative elements, its realism, and an exquisite order of craftsmanship. These paintings follow a style that is to be seen in his canvases of the past decade and have yet a great emphasis on detail as well as the joy of working minutely in the cult of a craftsman of yore. Not just the paintings, his granite sculptures, too, which are very modern in form and yet embellished with the fine work that comes from tradition. ``One of the casualties of modernism has been craftsmanship,’’ laments the artist. ``In the name of abstraction, workmanship was cast aside.’’
But what about his own experience, for abstraction is very much a part of his creative journey, and it is evident even in his present work? ``Abstraction, yes. But not at the cost of workmanship,’’ emphasises Gujral. ``I have never surrendered to this temptation. I started, in fact, with figurative work. The Partition paintings stand testimony to the fact that I know how to draw. In later years, just as a poet breaks lines to infuse them with rhythm, I mixed abstraction with reality. The point is that faulty language does not make poetry. A faulty drawing similarly, cannot get away in the name of abstraction.’’
Coming to the new thematic elements in Gujral’s work, which reflect the joy of hearing after a long silence spanning over six decades, one cannot but ask him this question. No matter how tormented he was by his disability, yet if it were not for this, he may never have been an artist.
Gujral is quick with a reply: ``Sure, I wouldn’t have been an artist. I would never have gone to Lahore’s Mayo School of Arts. Like any other middleclass family. Mine would have liked to see me in a profession that earned me a good living.”
Satish Gujral on the Partition
Days of Freedom
Satish Gujral recounts the traumatic days of Partition and the paintings born out of the experience to Nirupama Dutt
It takes times for the images to crystallize in the mind and move onto the canvas. More so if one is right in the midst of the catastrophe. So it was with Gujral who thus recalls the holocaust: ``With unceasing catastrophes as the backdrop, millions were moving. With frightening regularity, the stress would be accentuated, much like the scratchy interruptions in an old movie, which blur the vision and distract the mind yet keep alive one's awareness of reality by giving way occasionally to short, clear footage.''
It was five years later that the artist gave one of the most memorable paintings on the theme: `Days of Freedom'. There is just the suggestion of the health in the background and two figures shrouded in shawls sit outside, their entire being distorted by grief. The hands of one figure are concealed and eyes covered. Yet, the twisted lips shriek out a silent scream. The hands of the other figure are exposed—one stretched out and the other holding back with the taut muscles and the bulging knuckles bearing witness to the humiliation.
``In August, 1947, I came back to Lahore after completing my course at the JJ School of Arts, Bombay. I was all set to open a Graphics' studio to provide multimedia training. My father was a member of the Constituent Assembly. With the Partition, his home constituency having fallen on the Pakistani side, his membership was transferred to Parliament of the new dominion of Karachi. My parents and all other family members were in Karachi. I was in Lahore with the old family servant, Partap, as companion,'' recalled Gujral seated at the long banquet table in the beautiful dining room of his redbrick mansion at Lajpat Nagar.
What was Lahore like then? ``It was burning. It seemed that nothing would be left of it. When Lord Mountbatten visited Lahore in the third week of July,5 per cent of the inner town and 1 per cent of the total city had been destroyed. Half the Hindu population had already fled. Many had just gone to drop their families and valuables on the safer side for no one knew where Lahore would go. In July, Jawaharlal Nehru had said the Ravi river be considered the boundary line so the Hindus continued to stay in Lahore,'' said Gujral.
But with the advent of the blood-soaked August, it became clear that Lahore would go to Pakistan. Gujral said, ``Things flared up and Hindus were fleeing with what they could on their heads. I decided to move too but to the interiors of Pakistan, my village Jhelum. Since there was no money with me, I asked our servant Partap to go to the railway station with our bags and I would arrange for some money and join him there. That was not to be. For whoever went to the railway station never came back as it was the scene of the worst killings. That was the last I saw of Partap.''
Gujra, made his way to the Lajpat Rai Bhawan, which was some three to four kilometers away from his home to meet Lala Achint Ram, a friend of his father's and also the father of Vice-President Krishan Kant. ``His home was overflowing with people who had moved there from other parts of the city. Lalaji was making forays into the subrbs to bring people to safety. The DAV college hostel had been converted into a refugee camp of sorts overflowing with some 50,000 people,'' Gujral remembered.
From that day Gujral's education had begun in human misery: death, destruction and desolation. The next eight months he spent with his father in rescuing abducted girls and taking them across the border. ``Every time we were able to rescue a girl, we drove down straight to Amritsar or Jalandhar. The tragedy was doubled when these girls would not be accepted by their families,'' said the artist who was to be nicknamed in the next few years as the Painter of the Partition.
Partition was the theme of the paintings Gujral did from 1947 to 1950 working with intensity and passion. Uma Vasudev commented thus on the work of this period, ``The material for his inspiration was at hand; the disaster of the Partition of India and its attendant personal tragedies for a multitude of uprooted people. This was no drawing room art. It hurt – could suffering be so inevitable? It offended – could man do this to man?''
Canvas after canvas, he relived the pain of the worst kind of bloodshed in history. `Mourning', `Return of the Abducted', Dance of Destruction', The Rehabilitated' and `The Condemned' are the very well-known works of these three years. He then went to Mexico and the sad experiences of these days followed him and were reborn with heightened intensity and a breakthrough in the form in works like `Snare of Memory' and much later `The Shrine'.
Years later Gujral wondered on contemplating on the Partition paintings whether the element of despair was induced by his experience of the Holocaust or whether it was the trauma of his own inner compulsions. He grew up speechless and ridiculed in a world which has little care for the deaf and dumb. Gujral's answer to his own query was that these works were born of his own compulsions within for no external happening could have triggered them. But what comes closer to the truth is that he internalized the external and thus these paintings of the partition were born.
Satish Gujral recounts the traumatic days of Partition and the paintings born out of the experience to Nirupama Dutt
It takes times for the images to crystallize in the mind and move onto the canvas. More so if one is right in the midst of the catastrophe. So it was with Gujral who thus recalls the holocaust: ``With unceasing catastrophes as the backdrop, millions were moving. With frightening regularity, the stress would be accentuated, much like the scratchy interruptions in an old movie, which blur the vision and distract the mind yet keep alive one's awareness of reality by giving way occasionally to short, clear footage.''
It was five years later that the artist gave one of the most memorable paintings on the theme: `Days of Freedom'. There is just the suggestion of the health in the background and two figures shrouded in shawls sit outside, their entire being distorted by grief. The hands of one figure are concealed and eyes covered. Yet, the twisted lips shriek out a silent scream. The hands of the other figure are exposed—one stretched out and the other holding back with the taut muscles and the bulging knuckles bearing witness to the humiliation.
``In August, 1947, I came back to Lahore after completing my course at the JJ School of Arts, Bombay. I was all set to open a Graphics' studio to provide multimedia training. My father was a member of the Constituent Assembly. With the Partition, his home constituency having fallen on the Pakistani side, his membership was transferred to Parliament of the new dominion of Karachi. My parents and all other family members were in Karachi. I was in Lahore with the old family servant, Partap, as companion,'' recalled Gujral seated at the long banquet table in the beautiful dining room of his redbrick mansion at Lajpat Nagar.
What was Lahore like then? ``It was burning. It seemed that nothing would be left of it. When Lord Mountbatten visited Lahore in the third week of July,5 per cent of the inner town and 1 per cent of the total city had been destroyed. Half the Hindu population had already fled. Many had just gone to drop their families and valuables on the safer side for no one knew where Lahore would go. In July, Jawaharlal Nehru had said the Ravi river be considered the boundary line so the Hindus continued to stay in Lahore,'' said Gujral.
But with the advent of the blood-soaked August, it became clear that Lahore would go to Pakistan. Gujral said, ``Things flared up and Hindus were fleeing with what they could on their heads. I decided to move too but to the interiors of Pakistan, my village Jhelum. Since there was no money with me, I asked our servant Partap to go to the railway station with our bags and I would arrange for some money and join him there. That was not to be. For whoever went to the railway station never came back as it was the scene of the worst killings. That was the last I saw of Partap.''
Gujra, made his way to the Lajpat Rai Bhawan, which was some three to four kilometers away from his home to meet Lala Achint Ram, a friend of his father's and also the father of Vice-President Krishan Kant. ``His home was overflowing with people who had moved there from other parts of the city. Lalaji was making forays into the subrbs to bring people to safety. The DAV college hostel had been converted into a refugee camp of sorts overflowing with some 50,000 people,'' Gujral remembered.
From that day Gujral's education had begun in human misery: death, destruction and desolation. The next eight months he spent with his father in rescuing abducted girls and taking them across the border. ``Every time we were able to rescue a girl, we drove down straight to Amritsar or Jalandhar. The tragedy was doubled when these girls would not be accepted by their families,'' said the artist who was to be nicknamed in the next few years as the Painter of the Partition.
Partition was the theme of the paintings Gujral did from 1947 to 1950 working with intensity and passion. Uma Vasudev commented thus on the work of this period, ``The material for his inspiration was at hand; the disaster of the Partition of India and its attendant personal tragedies for a multitude of uprooted people. This was no drawing room art. It hurt – could suffering be so inevitable? It offended – could man do this to man?''
Canvas after canvas, he relived the pain of the worst kind of bloodshed in history. `Mourning', `Return of the Abducted', Dance of Destruction', The Rehabilitated' and `The Condemned' are the very well-known works of these three years. He then went to Mexico and the sad experiences of these days followed him and were reborn with heightened intensity and a breakthrough in the form in works like `Snare of Memory' and much later `The Shrine'.
Years later Gujral wondered on contemplating on the Partition paintings whether the element of despair was induced by his experience of the Holocaust or whether it was the trauma of his own inner compulsions. He grew up speechless and ridiculed in a world which has little care for the deaf and dumb. Gujral's answer to his own query was that these works were born of his own compulsions within for no external happening could have triggered them. But what comes closer to the truth is that he internalized the external and thus these paintings of the partition were born.
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