The Other Gujral Doctrine

But in this sumptuous book brought out to coincide with a retrospective of Satish Gujral that the National Gallery of Modern Art is hosting this month, art critic Santo Datta puts up a valiant defence for what many consider Gujral’s weakest phase: from the late 1990s to now. "I’ve heard Satish’s critics resenting his escape from the contemporary human situation.... But then, I don’t need to say anything in his defence, because I have seen many ‘committed artists’ responding to the ‘free market economy’ of art in the same manner and with as much alacrity as others who are not burdened with any ‘progressive ideology’." According to Datta, what Satish is doing in his latest phase is "counterbalancing the horrors he has known".

It’s true that Satish has had his share of horrors: a swimming accident at the age of eight left him with a badly mangled leg and permanently damaged his hearing. He also witnessed the horrors of Partition at close hand when he helped transport Indian refugees, mostly women and children, to safe havens across the border. This later inspired the series of Partition paintings that many consider to be his best work.

Datta is also right about artists of the progressive school succumbing to the times. What does an artist do when he finds that a painting that used to fetch him Rs 100 or less a few decades ago suddenly becomes the hottest commodity in these acquisitive times? They can either go the way of M.F. Husain, churning out the stuff faster than a machine or choose Tyeb Mehta’s mode, retreating from a market oblivious to all artistic considerations. But Gujral’s critics insist that the problem with his paintings is not in the quantity he produces so much as the fact that he is not, conventionally speaking, a painter at all.

The tag of "intruder-artist" has been stuck on Gujral for almost all of his artistic career spanning five decades. His early schooling at the Mayo School of Art in Lahore lacked the upper-class touch of the J.J. School in Bombay which he later joined. The students, mostly orphans training for a livelihood, were taught skills such as carpentry, clay moulding, woodcarving, drawing and design. This blurring of lines between artisan and artist marked Gujral out from his contemporaries. In defiance of the existing trend inspired by European impressionism and cubism, Gujral took to painting portraits in a neo-realist style and the Partition series where the muralist in him was already peeping out. A stint in Mexico on a scholarship changed Gujral forever. There he met muralist Diego Rivera whose determination to blur the lines between intellectual and manual work, between fine art and craft, found a resonance in the young Gujral. The muralist in Gujral was freed, of course, but more than that, he was freed forever from the "semi-paralytic tradition of easel painting".

In his life-long search for material other than paint, Gujral moved restlessly and inimitably into an astonishing range of arts—from painting to murals to sculptures to paper collages to architecture—and experimented with an equally wide assortment of materials: acrylic, automobile paint, burnt wood, bell metal, granite, paper, ceramic tiles and even junk.

It isn’t easy to be an intruder: Gujral confessed in his autobiography to a phase of depression that preceded each change. But there was no ignoring his contribution to each art. What a US architecture magazine said about Gujral’s first foray into architecture, the Belgian Embassy in New Delhi, sums up his unique status as an artisan-artist: "...inventive rather than imitative...full of strong sculptural forms and colours, sensual and mysterious on the outside, yet full of surprises, airy and light on the inside...very old, pragmatic and wise, yet very new, vibrant and creative—all at once."

How did this vibrant and innovative artist, this passionate explorer of art and its materials, get stuck where he is now—struggling vainly against the sticky-sweet web of the P3P? The answer, one suspects, lies in us rather than in the artist who has dominated our art scene since Independence.