In an elegant quarter of south Delhi, sipping tea and sharing gossip with Kiran and Satish Gujral, violence is an unexpected guest — yet, it was suffering, brutality and mourning that first set apart the talented artist from among his peers, winning him a scholarship to Mexico and marking the start of his career. But Partition art has been rare, Gujral in Delhi and Rabin Mondal in Kolkata being two instances of artists who responded to the brutality with innate sensitivity. But like the famine pictures of Somnath Hore and Chittaprosad, they made unpalatable viewing — collectors, after all, want prettier pictures on their walls — and the genre remained more or less neglected, much like literature which has begun to revisit the horror of the world’s largest migration and our own holocaust only recently.
It has been 65 years, but when he talks about it, Gujral’s voice trembles in anguish and anger, his eyes well up in hopelessness and fury. The Gujral family experienced the flint of steel and saw the blood flow up so close, it became a scar in their collective memory. For a while, his father — who was in Lahore — had given up Satish for dead, and the sensitive boy fled to Simla to paint, where, spotted by Charles Fabri, he mounted his first exhibition of paintings in New Delhi, Fabri reporting subsequently that it was the work of a “genius”.
Just as it would be difficult to live with Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, Gujral’s paintings of mourning found easier appreciation than patronage — the wounds were, after all, still raw. They could have and did go into museums, and even though Gujral continued to paint in the style while away in Mexico and America, the elegant artist’s matrix began to change and evolve into a more decorative aesthetic. His popularity rose, he got commissions to do murals for prestigious buildings in the capital, and the renaissance artist who handled space adroitly, whether on canvas or in his architectural projects — never looked back again.
Gujral’s later works are playful, light, and certainly more attractive. In pandering to the market, did Gujral lose relevance as a serious artist? Perhaps it is not time yet to explore either his longevity or his legacy, but can we, as viewers, arrive at a judgement that was never ours to make in the first place? A few days after our meeting, I spoke to Kiran Gujral, apologising to her for having insensitively upset her husband in getting him to recall the worst degradations of Partition. “He remembers it like yesterday,” she shared in her dignified manner, “everything is still fresh in his mind.”
Expunging that evil, exorcising it from his soul, would perhaps have been easier for the artist, but ugliness is rarely pleasant, and in giving us a more beautiful glimpse into an artist’s métier, Gujral has possibly made the bigger sacrifice. He has chosen to keep the poison within himself, not letting it embitter either his art or his heart. But a glimpse into that earlier, melancholy-tinged work, is a privilege for which we — and I personally — owe him a debt of gratitude.
Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic. These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated