Satish Gujral is no more. He was 94 years old. Born in
Jhelum, Punjab in the British India on the Christmas Day of 1925, Gujral was a
strong presence in Indian art scene even if he was not affiliated to any of the
art movements including the Bombay Progressives Artists Group led by Francis
Newton Souza. Gujral attended Mayo School in Lahore initially and then moved to
Sir J.J.School of Art in Bombay. An accident rendered him short at hearing and
he overcame that issue with his heightened sense of visual as well as spatial
art. He also had a short stint at the Art College in Chandigarh though his name
was strongly associated with the Palacio de Bellas Artes in the Mexico City
where he could work under the great muralists namely Diego Rivera and Alfaro
Siqueiros. Gujral also developed his taste for architecture and he designed the
famous building of the Belgium Embassy in New Delhi.
I met Satish Gujral sometime in 1998 at his self-designed
home in Defense Colony/Lajpat Nagar. I was supposed to write a cover story
based on Gujral’s life and art for the Malayalam Vaarika, a New Indian Express
publication. Hard at hearing though he welcomed me into home and his wife,
Kiran Gujral played the interlocutor’s role between us. She has been so ever
since she was married to him. A devoted companion to Gujral, Mrs.Gujral
accompanied him everywhere including the high end parties in Delhi. Gujral loved
life and also started working in various mediums including granite and marble
apart from his favorite mediums such as drawings and oil on canvas. During the
interview Gujral revealed to me that there were two traumatic incidents in his
life; one, the accident that rendered him hearing impaired and two, the
partition of India.
(an early painting by Satish Gujral)
Gujral was the son of a unified India. Though there were
rumors doing the rounds about an imminent partition of India, Gujral learned to
believe that nothing of that sort would happen. He remained optimistic despite
all the personal troubles that he was facing due to bad health conditions. He
had to shift cities and colleges, and he got back to his track only when he
found his voyage to Mexico. The city of the muralists filled him with a new
energy and he could put all his angst into the canvases and the drawings. The
works that he did during the partition years and till the early seventies had
all the gloom of the partition pangs. His canvases were dominated by black and
red colors that embodied the dark days that shrouded both the countries and the
blood and gore spilled everywhere. He had seen violence that shook the
subcontinent and painting them again and again was the only way to exorcise his
personal ghosts haunted him everywhere. Even the self-portraits that he did
during those days had this overall gloom.
In 1980s, Gujral seems to have overcome the traumas to
certain extent though his ears failed him. But by then he had been a settled
family man with a devoted lady to accompany him in all his tasks. This brought
sunshine once again to his life and his works started changing. He turned his
eyes to the life of the rural folk and the wandering minstrels who danced and
sang both in pain and joy. He developed a personal style in portraying them and
the emblematic figures thus created started defining the new Gujral paintings.
Like a master craftsman he went on drawing and only a few of them were turned
into painting. His contemporaries namely M.F.Husain, Kishen Khanna, Manjit Bawa,
A.Ramachandran, Paramjit Singh and so on gained their personal momentum in
1980s and even before the blooming of the art market, these masters could find
their patrons from among the business communities in India and elsewhere.
(painting by Satish Gujral)
Satish Gujral’s social relevance increased when his brother
Inder Kumar Gujral became India’s Prime Minister in 1998. My interview with
Satish Gujral had coincided with his brother becoming the Prime Minister of the
country. Though he became doubly influential in the art scene with the growing
political clout of the family, he remained grounded as before, working in his
studio during the day and going out for parties in the evening. His art opened
up further as he started experimenting with enduring mediums such as marble and
granite. He did not go for fully developed three dimensional forms; instead he
transported his paintings and drawings on to the durable mediums thereby giving
them the appearance of a relief. He also went back to his drawing practice
quite vehemently and surprisingly his drawings from the seventies and the same
from the nineties looked the same. It showed his consistency but at the same
time some kind of frozenness. Satish Gujral was turning more into a decorative
artist than an original innovator in art by the new millennium.
(Painting by Satish Gujral)
The new art market and the new crop of artists who could
aspire for global platforms left artists like Satish Gujral far behind. The
interval between his shows increased and there was a time when he almost went
absent from the art scene in early 2000s. A couple of shows here and there did
not attract much appreciation though he had consistent collectors. His health
must have been failing him also by that time. He has been out of action for
some time. The repetition of motifs and the relative decorativeness were
proving to be less competitive in the newly emerged art market. While his
contemporaries were making moolah in the auction circuit, Satish Gujral was
kept in waiting. Now with Satish Gujral’s departure, the art market and the auction
circuit could take a fresh look at his works and make certain reassessments
regarding the value. Satish Gujral was a tortured artist in the beginning and
slowly overcame the pains and when he crossed the threshold his art became
celebratory in all aspects. May be pure celebration in art is detrimental and
it could either fall into decorativeness or into shallow metaphysics. Gujral
did not go to the metaphysical way; he was too real to be spiritual and I do
not think he ever used such jargon to explain his works. He remained an artist
who found pleasure in the making, irrespective of its decorativeness. Was that
a problem? Only the time will tell.
n
JohnyML
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