Sakti Burman may be India’s Marc Chagall but his dreams have now changed. Symbols of violence now alternate with those of love, he tells Kishore Singh
It’s easy to relax with Sakti Burman, if only because the painter is so genial, so lovable, that he could be your favourite uncle. Several times during our meeting, he admonishes me for glancing through a catalogue. “It’s badly printed,” he chides, “it’s not like my paintings,” forgetting each time that he’s only repeating himself in his state of distress.
Artists tend to be self-absorbed: without that element of narcissism, their very existence, their art, becomes questionable. But Saktida is also a bit of a voyeur, not just the painter outside the canvas but just as often the painter within the canvas.
His wispy beard and spectacled face occurs often enough in his paintings — sometimes as the painter, a device he uses with almost trompe l’oeil-like effect to create paintings within paintings, at other times as observer. Within the canvas, his painted figures are the watchers, not just the watched, looking back at you — “with surprise”, Burman explains.
For some years now he has made his home in Delhi, so he spends a balmy winter here, escaping from the icy grip of his adopted home, Paris, where in the fifties as a student, and later as artist, he struggled to find inspiration from the Impressionist painters Chagall, Matisse, Monet, Picasso and Brecht. This was a time too when the West was experimenting with abstraction. “But I was so familiar with the human form…” Saktida gazes inwards, “I needed form, I couldn’t paint what was formless.”
He was also looking for a style that could be an extension of his own personality. Likened even today to Marc Chagall’s floating figures, he chortles, “Both of us paint memories, which is why we have been compared, but of course, our memories are different.” Still, footloose in France, having observed Western artists closely, and without a defined style of his own, married to a French artist, Burman must have felt the isolation that visits any creative artist whose oeuvre was refusing to evolve in any significant direction.
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He was rescued by two things, the renovation of a church mural in Italy where he experienced the effects of age and deterioration on the painted walls (and was later able to recreate through the use of water on ink, and the use of mediums in oils and acrylics), and a visit back to India with his wife on a trip that took him to Ajanta and Ellora, to Puri and Konarak and many other places where art, even folk art, had a dynamic rhythm and language. “Back in Paris, that experience came back to me,” he recalls, and Saktida was soon Paris’s own “alchemist of dreams”.
A scribbler — he sketches all the time, he says — his notebooks are full of his memories and observations: gypsies and clowns and everyday people, but also family members, his wife, his niece, a friend, a glimpsed visitor… Combined with mythical characters from both Hindu as well as Christian mythologies, Saktida filled his canvases with several images.
Men in hats and suits, actors from a harlequin, many-armed goddesses, birds and beasts — and so often that it established itself as the Burman leit-motif, Saktida brought in the nude, flawless, youthful. “It is,” he justifies, “a symbol of love.”
His Delhi home is well stocked with his easels and his paints and brushes, all the things he says he requires to start painting a day after he’s back in the city from Paris, where he continues to live. Certainly, since the time he acquired his Indian home, another quality is entering his canvases, of guns and swords, of — he himself suggests — “elements of violence”.
The Indian stays are also adding to his body of Indian myths. “But I don’t particularise,” he says, so the portraits, whether of gods and goddesses, or of people, could be “from anywhere and everywhere,” he rationalises.
Yet, it’s true, he agrees, that an accent on violence has entered his works. One of the paintings in his recent exhibition, Enraptured Gaze, at Art Alive Gallery in the capital, titled “Love and Violence”, has threatening gunmen in a palimpsest of miniature-like compositions, “each telling a story with no inter-relation or connection with the other”.
For Saktida, who drew Durga for a cover of Desh without weapons (but with flowers, and discovered his Indian form in the bargain), this is a moment of introspection. “I don’t like violence,” he almost whispers, explaining that though he lived through but perhaps resisted responding to the Vietnam war, “now all you hear are tales of violence and injury, you can no longer be indifferent.
I can’t solve any problems through my paintings but I want to give symbolic expression to the violence that is around us.” Nor is he sure that he will continue in this vein. “It may stop here,” he ruminates, “or continue — I don’t know. But I feel I want to paint reality along withpast images.”
Seventy-three years old, Saktida could shame you with his discipline, painting “from 8:30 in the morning to 9:00-10:00 at night”, listening to pop, classical or Indian music all the while, the radio in the background tuned in always to the news. On the occasions when he’s out, his sketchbook is always by his side. “Art,” he explains, “is religious”, a spiritual companion that he carries within himself at all times. “It has no logic,” he says — and he might be talking about his canvases — “it has its own feelings, it is without boundaries.”
Later, looking at a sketch, easily rendered in a book he has been solicitous about presenting me, I gaze at the free-flowing figure, a child riding on an animal — perhaps even Krishna on a cow. The outlines are simple, but without his distinctive colours or marbled effect, for a moment you mistake it for a work by Manjit Bawa. He might be India’s Marc Chagall in France, but with a giggle, you wonder if he might not be France’s Manjit Bawa in India?