Satish Gujral

Even the most vexed debates in India on art and nationalism in the 1950’s did not admit of the artist’s use of the body as locus for social history. The sole exception is Satish Gujral, a refugee of the 1947 Partition of Punjab who chose to paint in the heightened register of national history, rendering painting as social and personal document. In the interregnum of 50 years, Gujral has displayed a rare mastery over a welter of media, rendering him probably India’s first modernist who defies the limitation of disciplinarity in the arts.

The extraordinary biographical aspect here is Gujral’s assertion in the face of personal limitations. His art then is not only a quest of diversity of medium but mastery over a frequently disobedient and depleted physical body, even as his work paradoxically is emphatic in its evocations of authority and power.

Satish Gujral is conventionally identified in apposition to the Bombay modernists, who were training at virtually the same time he was a student at the JJ school in Mumbai, (1944-46) or else with the emergent loose fraternity of Delhi artists who exhibited together in the 1950’s seeking to set up alternate paradigms of an Indian modernism. In truth, it may be more instructive to read Gujral on the same register as other artists who engaged with social history, notably Somnath Hore and Chittoprosad, the other significant artists of the Partition. The other challenge within the Gujral oeuvre is to identify his uses of Indian traditional elements, particularly in developing architecture and sculpture, which he does without engaging in the vigorous ideological debate that has sporadically surrounded these issues.

Satish Gujral was born in 1925, the son of tough Punjabi stock that hailed from the town Jhelum, in present day Pakistan. The family that yielded one of India’s leading artists of the 20^th century and a future prime minister was rich in character, individualism and resolve. Gujral’s father Avtar Narain was a lawyer, who had lost both his parents by the age of ten. Countering these reversals by educating himself to study law he then proceeded to become an anglicized gentleman, shedding his Punjabi clothes to wear the striped trousers and black coat of the bar, and to join the local club at Jhelum. However, by the mid 1920’s Avtar Narain adopted Lala Lajpat Rai’s call for Swadeshi and followed the principles of austerity advocated by Lajpat Rai’s Servants of the People Society.

Satish Gujral speaks of the cultural transformations that such conflicting aspiration brought “Our house stood as a not so mute testimonial to our father’s anglicized years. The rooms were not just places to accommodate four charpais to sleep on, but divided according to function: one for receiving visitors, one to eat in, one for the parents and one for the children. We also had a garage which was shared by a car and two buffaloes which my mother had brought in her dowry. The buffaloes kept us supplied with fresh creamy milk morning and evening. The car, which was seldom used, gradually became derelict, until only its skeleton remained. My father found many uses for its parts. The chassis was jacked up and the wheels hung on the walls. We took out the tubes to use as life belts when we went for a swim in the river. My mother made good use of the car seats. Whenever she had guests, she retrieved them from the godown to be used as sofas for the more sophisticated visitors.”[1]

“I cannot hear myself speak.”

Gujral’s first school which was largely conducted in the bazaar roads of Jhelum afforded much hilarity, and is recalled with robust humour and the broad spirit of Punjabiyat. It was here that he studied with his elder brothers Inder and Raj with whom he shared a special bond. Each year the family traveled up to Pahalgam in Kashmir for its summer holiday in the hills. A sharp break in this childhood idyll occurred when he was eight during a swimming accident in the freezing waters of the river Ludder. Jumping between the rocks, one of Gujral’s legs was trapped and severely damaged in the rocky and freezing waters. A botched medical treatment by a local quack finally led to his permanent loss of hearing and the traumatic aftermath of living in a shroud of silence. In the months that followed, Gujral had to endure the taunts of other children, and his own rapidly diminishing self esteem.“ The failure to hear my own voice made me feel I was living in a phantasmagoric and surreal cocoon. At times, I doubted my own sanity”. Further his painfully infected leg and hip bone led to a series of operations that took their toll, and drove his mother to religious atonement while his father became increasingly reclusive. The boy’s agony was heightened when his closest companion and brother Raj drowned two years later in a swimming accident in the Jhelum.

To compensate his son for his isolation and enforced silence Avtar Narain introduced him to adult reading - Munshi Premchand, Sarat Chandra Chatterjee and translations of heroic stories by Lala Lajpat Rai. Gujral also read romantic Urdu poetry, and doodled endlessly, in what was perhaps inchoate preparation for his interest in drawing. To continue his education Gujral was admitted to the Lady Noyce School for the Deaf and the Dumb in Delhi. But here he determined that he would not be kept out of the mainstream, and for the same reason resisted communicating only through sign language.

A radical change came about when he was admitted to the Mayo School of Art in Lahore. Founded in 1870 as one of the four British institutions intended to impart instruction for Indian artisans, it was based on the South Kensington curriculum and aimed at reviving Indian craft and design traditions tempered by British sensibility and instruction. While the schools at Calcutta and Bombay succeeded in attracting the sons of educated upper class or bhadralok families, the Lahore school was much closer to the ethos of Punjabi artisans. The Mayo School taught its students carpentry, clay moulding, wood carving, drawing and design; it was a laboratory of practical applications which gave Gujral an essential foundation for his own practice as a polymath of multiple applications.[2] By the time Gujral joined, the school once run successfully by John Lockwood Kipling was now peopled by poor boys, several of them orphans who sought to learn skills that would lead them to a livelihood. To avoid the hostel’s indifferently cooked and badly served food, Satish began to eat at his elder brother Inder’s college hostel. Among Inder’s friends and colleagues were writers and poets who became leading voices of the subcontinent - Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Krishen Chander and Ali Sardar Jaffri who wrote with nationalist zeal and romantic fervour. In Urdu translation he read the western classics. The Mayo school also hadsome atypical teachers like Bhabesh Sanyal and SardariLall Parasher, both of whom Gujral admired and who were Gujral's first windows of opportunity into the larger art world. Parasher with his introverted nature and strong literary bent led him to the painter Roop Krishna, once an intimate of the Bloomsbury group, whom Gujral acknowledged as India’s first modernist.

There is an inexorable progression in Gujral’s academic career, one that belies the indescribable difficulties he must have encountered in the pursuit of institutional studies. With the advice of S L Parasher and his brother Inder, Gujral abandoned his long held aspirations of training in Santiniketan. Rabindranath had only recently died (1941) but the mystique of his unorthodox methods and the school’s identity as an Indian Bauhaus for the arts had given it a unique status. The JJ School in Bombay was chosen as a more progressive option. Inder’s friends, the writer Krishen Chander and the poet Ali Sardar Jaffri now lived and worked in Bombay’s popular cinema. Parasher’s interest lay in the fact that John Lockwood Kipling had taught at the JJ School before moving to Mayo; he saw herein an artistic integrity in Gujral’s academic development.

In Bombay the slew of artistic influences was much more complex and cosmopolitan. The school itself had a strong western academic orientation continued by its principal Charles Gerard. Gerard was resistant to the contemporary European forms of modernism and favoured the academic mode of British art instruction. However the second world war wrought its own unpredictable influences, as did the nationalist movement.

At the JJ School Gujral befriended V S Gaitonde and was supported actively by his fellow Punjabi art student Pran Nath Mago. A generation of Indian artists who constitute the early modernists - FN Souza, SH Raza and others were his close contemporaries at the school. Gujral’s acquaintance with American GI’S who had enrolled at the JJ School afforded his first introduction to western art. However, the need for another operation on his right femur in October 1946 at Lahore terminated his studies in Bombay.

After his operation Gujral set up a graphics studio in Lahore, which turned out to be a financial misadventure and a drain on the last of his father’s savings. At the same time the steady trickle to the newly conceived state of India had already begun; from his studio window Gujral could see the movement of the first waves of refugees. As the impetus towards Partition grew, Avtar Narain with his strong links with Mohd. Ali Jinnah was assured that he would be invited to join the newly formed Pakistani government. However, the scale and depth of the violence wrought about the conviction that the family would emigrate, but only after it had organized as many safe havens and transfers for Indian refugees. Avtar Narain’s political position ensured that he had police protection for the fraught forays across the border. It was Satish Gujral’s lot to physically transport refugees, abandoned women and children to camps set up in border areas. The horror and violence along the way constitute some of his worst experiences. With his father, who was later a member of the Indian Parliament, Gujral’s mother Pushpa established the Nari Niketan in Jalandhar for women who had been abandoned.

In the new nation state, Gujral’s own career options were limited; his father used his political contacts to place him in the Simla government as a graphic artist, in the Punjab Public relations Department in 1948. However, the unvarying monotony of such work and Gujral’s own individuality did not make for a promising career. After drawing an uncanny likeness to the state’s food minister on a poster intended to denounce hoarders and black marketers, Gujral found himself without a job.

Art in the Aftermath

Meanwhile he used his time in Simla alternating with Delhi to paint what have come to be known as the Partition Paintings. Arguably these paintings in deep earth and metallic colours are the most widely recognized works in his oeuvre. They were instrumental in helping Gujral earn a scholarship to Mexico to study mural painting occasioned at least in part by the direct intervention of the Mexican cultural attaché Octavio Paz, who enjoyed a unique position in Delhi’s intellectual circles. S H Vatsyayan and Kapila Malik first displayed these works at the annexe of Delhi’s Freemason’s Lodge, and the exhibition was inaugurated by Humayun Kabir. Charles Fabri, the leading critic of Delhi who had known Gujral since his days at the Mayo school saw these works and received them with heraldic enthusiasm. “The word genius has rarely been used in this column but it is the correct term for Satish Gujral, “he wrote.[3] This was Gujral's first experience with critical recognition.

“He is as single minded as Picasso….”

Gujral’s Mexico years (1952-54) have the quality of high theatre and extraordinary encounters. The fact of his handicap and the lack of any Indians in Mexico was compounded by an acute paucity of funds. His visit coincided with political uncertainty in Mexico in the early 50’s as the country underwent a period of political and economic restructuring. His left leaning which caused discomfort with official circles in India endeared him to the markedly leftist art establishment in Mexico. In particular, David Alfaro Siqueiros to whom he was apprenticed was a committed Marxist whose art practice frequently suffered on account of his politics.

In addition, Gujral’s long suffering with osteomylitis found a fellow traveler in Frida Kahlo whom he befriended in the last few months of her life. Gujral recounts her interest in the Upanishads and J. Krishnamurti for the mitigating influence that spiritualism may have had on her suffering. Gujral’s links with Frida appear to have been essentially sympathetic; it is unlikely that her highly subjective autobiographical painting, recently interpreted in the light of a vigorous nationalism had any influence on Gujral.

Gujral’s more definitive artistic association was with the muralists Diego Rivera and Siqueiros, who opened up a world of building façade decoration, the innovative usage of materials and what may be termed as imaging a national narrative. The 1950’s witnessed the continuing grand expansion of Mexico city, the commissioning of official buildings and the summation of the recent revolutionary history that such public projects afforded. If Gujral was in a political minority in his homeland, in Mexico he found a people that had been reared on ultra left politics that were an outcome of the Revolution of 1910. As the head of the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plasticas Rivera envisaged the national art school as a “national workshop that fused the Fine Arts and Crafts”.[4] Rivera’s determination to erase the difference between intellectual and manual work,between fine art and artisanal practice, was consonant withGujral’s own training at the Mayo School. Gujral was apprenticed to Siqueiros, perhaps the most ideologically dogmatic of Los Tres Grandes, who virtually created an artistic revolution in the mural of social realism in Mexico, of a national art with indigenous roots.[5]

Here in the context of Gujral in particular - and by extension the entire first generation of post independence Indian artists - the Mexican enterprise is of significance. As a parallel set of circumstances, India was emerging from the long shadow of imperial rule, just as Mexico sought to assert its cultural identity against a social fabric wrecked by revolution. The Mexican example was strongly affirmative: it brought out nakedly the issues around power, social responsibility and culture and Mexican history that formed the grist for Mexican art. Gujral’s training was analysed within this context. In a joint letter, Siqueiros and Rivera both wrote “the sojourn and practice of Satish Gujral will facilitate the revival of mural painting people’s art in India”.[6]

Of the muralists Gujral admits to being most powerfully influenced by Jose Clemente Orozco, who between 1926 and ‘27 painted 18 large frescoes in the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria. Among these are the famous La Trinchera (The Trench) which David Craven suggests, reveals Orozco’s indebtedness to El Greco, Goya and Austro-German Expressionism.[7] Orozco introduced the elements of both heroic resistance and a searing vision of man that is echoed so abundantly in Gujral’s oeuvre. The terrible churning violence in Orozco’s Padre Hidalgo (1937, fresco, stairway Palacio de Gobierno Guadalajara) sets the precedent for the seething tortured figures that Gujral was to paint on his return, in the Partition paintings (1952-54). The other strong influence on Gujral at this time was Rufino Tamayo, whose influence he believes is reflected in work that he did on his return from the US, in Europe and India.

Within a year of his apprenticeship, Gujral exhibited twenty five paintings at the Galeria de arte Moderna in Mexico. Their reception was widespread, as reflected in the number of reviews that sought to contextualize his work in the context of Indian engagements with a public art. One reviewer wrote “His work is primarily plastic and expressive, besides this he has a heroic sense and inclines towards monumentalism that will soon take him from the semiparalytic traditions of easel painting to the great public art that is mural painting.”[8]

Gujral’s return to India via Europe, where he met the printmakers Motiwala and Krishna Reddy was an exhilarating endorsement of his talent and a challenge to his concepts of modernism. En route he exhibited at London, and was well received by the press. Eric Newton, Chairman of the British art Critics Association admired his paintings as” fluent and admirably compact.”[9] John Berger was much more graphic in his praise when he wrote “He is as single minded as Picasso….. I am not certain how distinguished a painter Gujral is, but I am certain that his exhibition should provoke both humanly and artistically as many people as possible”.[10] Gujral’s return led to his rapidly crystallizing views on Indian modernism, and his rejection of the modernism of the Bombay Progressives. His own maturation as a painter was hailed on his return to India with his continued working on the Partition paintings. Gujral appears to have enjoyed this celebrity hood with its multiple ramifications of social recognition and political patronage. It also marks his own highly deliberated course of independence. In 1956 Gujral exhibited with Husain, KS Kulkarni, Ram Kumar, Mohan Samant, Krishen Khanna and his friend and colleague from the JJ School, Gaitonde. As his work was to prove, Gujral continually adapted and changed his work in virtual indifference of prevailing trends in art production. Unlike several of his peers, notably Krishen Khanna, Tyeb Mehta, Souza, Akbar Padamsee, Gujral did not come under the dominant Euro American influence of post war existential angst, or the influence of the schools of Paris and New York. Again his approach to indigenism appears to have been far less ideologically complicated than it was for many of his peers.

The Political Portrait

A distinct part of Satish Gujral’s oeuvre is the portrait, with its preponderance of family and political images. Nearly all of these bear the imprint of the strong expressionist brushwork that he had developed in his Mexico phase. They also reflect the political links that grew out of the careers of his father and his brother Inder Gujral who after an initial left leaning phase during his college years joined the Indian National Congress. In the mid 50’s, Inder Gujral was working with Sucheta Kripalani an active member of the INC and wife of the President of the Party, Acharya Kripalani. When Satish Gujral returned to Delhi from Mexico via New York, Europe and Bombay, he found his parents in somewhat difficult circumstances. His father had resigned his parliamentary seat and was working with his mother to run the Nari Niketan in Jalandhar. Satish shared Inder’s small flat in the heart of Delhi, and almost fortuitously embarked upon what amounted to an impressive body of portraits. The first of these was of his father’s mentor, Lala Lajpat Rai, which had a stormy passage to its final resting place, the Central Hall of Parliament. Rejected by the Parliamentary art committee under Barada Ukil, the painting was shown for a single evening by principal MN Kapur at Modern School in 1956. Charles Fabri’s glowing tribute to the painting on the front page of The Statesman the next morning brought the entire episode of the ‘rejected’ painting to Pt. Nehru’s attention. The prime minister not only invited the two brothers to his home, but also unveiled the painting before it was hung in Parliament house.

This single event brought public approbation to Gujral's work that was critical to his career. Indira Gandhi asked Gujral to arrange a private viewing of his paintings at the Prime Minister’s residence in Teen Murti. She also persuaded her father to sit for a portrait. Gujral’s portraits of Nehru (1957), Indira Gandhi (1957), Krishna Menon (1960), Maulana Azad (1956), and his own father (1957) , painted in a dominant palette of white, black, grey and ochre tones are unique as political portraits in the corpus of Indian art. Through these works, Gujral acknowledges the strong interrelationships between art and politics that existed in the heyday of the Nehru era, when both the Prime minister and Indira Gandhi, who had trained in Santiniketan, would support art activity. In 1954, about the time of Gujral’s return, Maulana Azad had articulated the need for a central Lalit Kala Akademi and Prime Minister Nehru had delivered the speech at the founding of the National Gallery of Modern Art.At the level of artist collectives, several of Gujral’sfriends from Lahore, like Bhabesh Sanyal, P N Mago and Harkrishen Lal had come together to form the Delhi Shilpi Chakra founded in 1949. In the history of modern Indian art the Shilpi Chakra has formed one of the most consistent artist initiatives. Satish Gujral was a natural ally to its causes.

Effectively the state sought direct involvement in establishing India’s modern art institutions by being vested in India's modernity project. Here Gujral’s position is of particular interest in that he was instrumental in persuading Nehru of the need to formalize public art projects for government buildings. Gujral also sought Pandit Nehru and Indira Gandhi’s intervention when the parents of his future wife Kiran were set against their marriage. Further, Nehru allotted the newly weds a two room apartment in Constitution House.

Signs in Space

Concurrent with his painted portraits, Gujral embarked on a series of abstract Space paintings which were dominated by tubular forms emerging from a textured background. The forms are constructed to appear mechanical and robotic - an effect that Gujral carried into the highly intrepid exercise of his ceramic murals, a medium which was to preoccupy him for the next two decades.

Gujral was a pioneer of this medium, rendered difficult by the lack of technical facilities. In Mexico, he had served as an assistant to Diego Rivera’s mural at the Teatro de los Insurgentes.. Rivera had decided to paint the mural in the recently developed medium of acrylic, and then cover the mural with glass mosaic. The new and complex process was an eye opener for the young Indian. He wrote “this experience influenced my later searches for material other than paint”. Murals were also to initiate Gujral’s first organic connection with architecture. In this sense, Delhi, the capital of modern India that developed in concentric circles around Raisina Hill represented similar opportunities for institutional building, or the conversion of former colonial or princely properties into institutions of the new nation.

Gujral is in the line of an avante garde that engaged in an active revival of the mural in the mid 20^th century, led by Picasso, Matisse, Leger and Chagall in Euro-American sites and the Mexican quartet of Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros and Rufino Tamayo. To these influences Gujral brought his own awareness of the possibilities of public interface in art. Prime Minister Nehru’s own position had been well articulated, wherein he suggested that two percent of the cost of all government buildings should be devoted to art. Examples of mural making sporadically flourished in centres as widely distributed as Chandigarh (SL Parasher), Lucknow ( K G Subramanyan), Bombay (Krishen Khanna), Santiniketan ( B B Mukherjee) etc. Gujral's murals present a different phenomenon because of their sheer numbers. Between 1962 and 1980, he had executed murals at leading locations like Punjab University Chandigarh, Odeon Cinema, Baroda House, Oberoi Hotels, Shastri Bhavan, Delhi High Court, Gandhi Institute, Mauritius, and World Trade Centre, New York.

The process that led to this efflorescence is a mark of Gujral’s innovativeness. Pierre Jeanneret, a French architect who was in India to put Le Corbusier’s ideas into practice first offered Gujral a wall in the Gandhi Bhavan in the University. This represented for Gujral an opportunity to break away from the Partition imagery into a preoccupation with ‘space and surface’. With a commission to create a mural for the Indian Pavilion at the World Trade Fair in New York, Gujral learnt the rudiments of ceramic tile firing at a workshop in Portchester, outside New York. He also imported a kiln and installed it in Okhla and in the next two decades created material that was used for five murals. Of these, two at the IBM office and the Oberoi hotel in New Delhi no longer exist.

With his experience in ceramics, Gujral now turned to other materials with spatial and sculptural possibilities, ranging from sculptures using found objects to architecture. In 1968, en route to the World Crafts Meet at Lima Peru, he made a museum tour through Scandinavian countries, as well as Spain, Brazil, Argentina and Mexico. This was to mark his last meeting with Siqueiros, who was in jail for anti state revolutionary activity. The visit afforded enormous artistic possibilities for Gujral, who developed a metal alloy of the kind used for bells on the necks of oxen, to combine with found objects to create a body of sculptures. Mirrors, industrial detritus and tubular metal forms were combined in neo tantric principles, suggestive of geometrically organized energy fields. Gujral’s approach to sculptural material is generally transformative: through processes of accretion, such as patinas, pigments, accretions or else through the process of abstracting through burning, moulding, gouging, or splintering, Gujral achieves his ends. The effect in the series of metal based sculptures (1968-76) followed by the burnt wood series (1981 - 90) Gujral arrives at forms that draw a dramatic authority from an iconic anthropomorphicity.

Perhaps the guiding principle of Gujral’s life’s work, that now stretches over five decades is a marked adisciplinarity. In his autobiography he writes lucidly about the difficulty of reception that every change of material and form evoked, from painting, to murals, to sculpture to paper collages to architecture. The shift into architecture in particular was resisted possibly because a framework for such interdisciplinarity in the arts did not exist, the examples of Picasso, and closer home, the Bauhaus of Santiniketan notwithstanding. He speaks of “the recurrence of those phases of depression” that preceded each change of medium. If Gujral remained undaunted it was because of his eclectic training at the Mayo school and in Mexico, as well as his own conviction in his potential. “Each time I was working on a building it crossed my mind that I would have done a better job designing it myself.”

Gujral’s emergence as an architect is through autodidact, as well as through his own intense questioning around Indian modernism. His cynicism towards Le Corbusier’s preoccupations with a western modernism that took no account of Indian architectural traditions found an unusual stream of support in his exposure to Iranian architecture. In 1974 Gujral was invited to Iran by the king’s wife, Shahbanu where he catalogued the architectural treasures of Iran. This experience was to prove vital when he was invited to design the Belgian embassy in Delhi, an assignment that introduced enormous challenges. Further, an onsite accident that damaged his right femur resulted in a series of operations. Much of the supervisory work was conducted with Gujral carried around on a palanquin. Nevertheless, Gujral’s effort was to prove an architectural landmarkin modern India. The Belgian government honoured him withthe ‘Order of the Crown’, the only non Belgian to be so honoured in the field of architecture. Assisted by his son Mohit, Gujral then embarked on a series of high profile architectural projects - a farm house for the Saudi ruler King Faisal, the residence of the Prime Minister of Bahrain, the Indian Cultural Centre at Mauritius, the Indian Embassy at Kathmandu, New University, Goa, the CMC Research Centre, Hyderabad, the Ambedkar Memorial, Lucknow.

In recent years, Gujral’s oeuvre had developed on distinct lines which perhaps reflects a quieter phase in his own life. The burnt wood sculptures with their inherent iconic authority have made way for sculptures in granite with strong primitivist features, and paintings that foreground the folk performer. Even in the absence of sound, there is an inclination towards the flow and quietitude of lyricism. Retrospectively his large oeuvre emphasizes Gujral’s values as an artist priviledging simultaneous and multiple forms of practice. He has allied with the concerns of a national art by building new alignments in third world practices, constituted of the ordinary as monumental. By embracing multiple forms of production Gujral has in fact engaged in most of the discursive issues within modernism, with what is now recognized as a characteristic affirmative heroism.

Notes