'Twixt Ma And Religion

Had bathrooms been peeping tom-proof for little boys, we may have had fewer creative geniuses. Watching his mother bathe was probably F.N. Souza’s most pungent childhood memory, triggering his enduring obsession with sex, and the female body. As a child cineaste, Raj Kapoor often bathed with his beautiful mother and said that "seeing her nude left a deep erotic impression on my mind". That image of water bouncing off a young, nude female body no doubt inspired his sensual celluloid heroines in wet, see-through saris. For Souza, those early sexual stirrings were responsible for his, as he put it, "pronounced oedipal complex" as a "young small boy whose father died prematurely young". Perhaps this explains his quasi-pornographic drawings of female nudes and ill-assorted lovers. Sex rather than sexuality defines the work of this powerful painter who is getting his due posthumously with his paintings fetching stratospheric prices in recent auctions. An exhibition of his paintings was also held at the Tate Britain in London last December.

If it was not sex, it was religion, rather the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church in Goa (where he grew up), that preoccupied the brutally frank Souza. The sacred and the profane cohabit, if a bit uneasily at times, the same space in much of his oeuvre. In his lavishly illustrated book, Aziz Kurtha explores this duality in the character and work of Souza, dwelling considerably on the inner demons that tormented the painter, and his savage tryst with religion. Souza’s Christ is scary—black and scrawny with his eyes high up on his forehead and huge teeth floating in two rows outside his mouth. "He upturned everything...including the benevolent, martyred image of Saint Sebastian," writes Kurtha. Even more sinister is his canvas Death of the Pope (1957) that points to the greed and duplicity of a seemingly corrupt clergy gathered round the dead pope.

Kurtha’s portrait of Souza shows a troubled genius struggling with alcoholism and melancholy, especially during his down-and-out days in London and New York. Souza left India for London in 1949, barely two years after he founded (and indeed whose intellectual muscle he was) of the Progressive Artists Group, having yoked together M.F. Husain, S.H. Raza, H.A. Gade and S.K. Bakre in a common cause to take Indian art down the path of modernity laid out by European artists. Kurtha sets out to place Souza in the context of the history of western art: he juxtaposes his work with those who "inspired" him, even if at times he strains too hard to find the similarities. 

With 200 colour and 60 black-and-white photographs, the book is a visual treat. One only wishes it was better put together. Repetitive and badly edited, it doesn’t serve Souza’s memory well. But there is a delightful ironic twist to the tale. Kurtha was novelist-politician Jeffrey Archer’s nemesis: he spotted him with a prostitute and informed News of the World, leading eventually to the imprisonment of the former deputy chairman of the Conservative party. Souza too, according to Kurtha, was fascinated by the ladies of the night.