The missing nose, and other yarns

Artist Sidharth has a story and a painting for every phase of his life.

When he's being impish, he's also being philosophical. Somewhere, the child in Sidharth never faded away with age, or maybe he never quite grew up the way you and I did. Not that he hasn't had his shades of rebellion. There was the time when he grew his hair long, braided it in beads, and affected the mannerisms of a dude "" okay, a seventies dude.

This was soon after he'd emerged from his maroon robes, the garb of the monk initiate, from when he'd been drawn into Buddhism. And that was soon after he'd interned as a young boy with painter Sobha Singh in Andretta, in the Kangra valley in Himachal Pradesh.

If Sidharth's life is a series of flashbacks, take it that there is no easy narration of his life's story for, like the Jataka tales, one reminisce leads to another fable, another yarn, another memory, another story... And Sidharth is a man of stories, much more than he is a painter, for his paintings too are all about stories, and stories within stories within stories.

And yes, he is self-centred enough to cast himself in the central role, for the painter's ego is just as important a facet of his life as the extraordinary coincidences that have shaped it. A bit of a dreamer, the Punjabi lad found himself an apprentice at Sobha Singh's studio where he was universally addressed as Mundu, or worker.

The Mundu accompanied the portrait painter who lent a Western vision to his paintings of the Sikh gurus and of the legends of the land, to Namgyal monastery in McLeodganj to view some ancient thangkas. And a monk was born.

There, in the presence of the largest statue of Buddha that he had ever seen, Sidharth, mesmerised, started weeping.

"Buddha's eyes were cast down, he was looking at me, it was the most beautiful moment of my life," remembers Sidharth, his eyes dancing at the memory. And so Mundu shrugged off one school for another, deciding on a whim that he wanted to train in the discipline of thangka painting. 
 

Rate of the art "" CXXII               Sidharth
Average prices	Paintings Rs 50,000/sq ft, or Rs 15 lakh for a 5'x6' canvas;  drawings Rs 1.5 lakh for 28"x36"; painted hymns Rs 10,000-plus
USP	Makes his own paper and uses only vegetable and mineral colours
Strength	Traditional training has imbued him with a distinctive spiritual oeuvre
Weakness	Repetitive and, some would say, "too mystical"

Today, his studio in Delhi is a larger version of the room where he served his Buddhist guru, Dorje, "the next-best painter after Norgay", he says. Dorje's instructions to the novitiate might have the more sophisticated in splits, but Sidharth learned many things from him that on the face of it had little to do with art.

"Go listen to the falling leaves," his guru told him, "watch the seasons change colour, find out what the wind is saying." Young Sidharth looked out on the mountains and the streams, he struggled with his prayers, and he felt honoured when he was permitted to cook his guru's soup, following precise instructions.

Presumably it was at this time he learnt the art of identifying the rocks and shrubs and petals and sepals that neatly line the shelves of his studio. He is a little bit like a wizard who will pull out a wild form of turmeric to show you a colour even more beautiful than you had expected, point out a sharp shade of indigo and say it will become even richer when left to stand out in the sun.

Many of his shades are subdued through "frightening" them by keeping them in darkness. And in a jar he keeps the pollen of the Brahmakamal, a lotus that will bloom once in twelve years in the high Himalayan heights in water that must be exactly three feet deep, and which "" he is insistent about this "" does a "parikrama" or circumnavigation of the lakes in which it grows.

Other painters find it simpler to just buy their paints from a store. But Sidharth will pound and grind (or, at least, now that he is no longer a Mundu, have his assistants get busy with the mortar and pestle) and create colours that he will use in the intaglio process over sheets of gold or silver foil, painstakingly applied by the square inch and then quickly stenciled over in what seems like hieroglyphics.

"Yes," he grins, "it is rather like hieroglyphics." If you and I can't quite master the writing, it is because, like his stories, Sidharth writes in many languages all at the same time.

There's a bit of Gurmukhi, alphabets in Sanskrit and Prakrit, in Hindi and Urdu, in English and Japanese, perhaps even Swedish. Swedish? Ah, that comes from when Sidharth was directed by Dorje to teach a Swede who wanted to learn tangkha painting, the art of tantra to master her body. Loosely translated, it meant empowering her passion, directing her lust.

This is how Sidharth tells it: "I said no to my guruji, who was angry, so I told him I would teach the girl "" who was white like a cow and had blue eyes "" tantra only if she would marry me."

To his surprise, the cow-like girl (okay, he doesn't mean it in that sense) was delighted with his proposal, and before he could process his next lot of Brahmakamal pollen, he was in the land of the midnight sun, grappling with foreigners, a little lost, crying for his mother (I know, but that's the way he says it) and adoring the Madonna in the church next door.

He came back "" to Chandigarh and his wild phase, to enroll at the college of art there. By now his influences were Sobha's Singh's noble realism, Buddhist tangkha art, Western abstraction (which he dismisses outright), and the painful structuralism of formal education.

What you take away from his paintings are the influences from his life instead "" the downcast eyes of the Buddha and his half-smile of know-ledge, the piety of the Madonna, of "" in fact "" any mother, the spiritual calm of the Sikh gurus, and his complete submission to the world of nature.

No wonder he paints the seasons, the Barah Maha or twelve months, imbuing them with distinctive personalities, choosing his colours in accordance with seasons of plenty or periods of hibernation. And true to his self, there are stories within stories here too, paintings within paintings.

Naturally, it would be difficult for Sidharth to remain merely a painter, so diverse are his interests, so restless his persona, so he sculpts (birds, figures), he writes (and recites) poetry, he draws, he listens to music, and perhaps he escapes, even now, to a world in the mountains where rare flowers will blossom once in a blue moon.

But what visitors will notice "" though it takes them a while, strangely enough "" is that Sidharth's figures are always stooped, the shoulders small ("so you feel like stroking them", he says), and the nose is inevitably missing. The expressions, the movements seem to hint at a nose, but there is always void there.

"If you look at the Sphinx," he says, "the nose is broken "" whether by nature or mankind. Similarly, in Indian temples and forts, statues have their noses broken." Not an argument against noses, you stutter. "But noses get you into trouble," he says.

"A battle was fought over Surpanakha's nose. You avenge noses, your nose is a measure of your status..." But his overriding argument against noses, he says, is that they provide a distinct character, a personality to people ""something he prefers to avoid in his art.

But noses apart "" and, for the record, Sidharth has a whopper "" he tells you he is many times blessed, as yet again his train of thought weaves you into another story. This was when he was living in a farmhouse in Delhi "" a house that belonged, he says, to a patron "" when on a cold, winter night he drove headlong into the rear of a truck.

"I had my Buddhist training, I could see the inevitable, so I left my hands and feet free of the bike." The bike crashed into the truck and went underneath, to be crushed, a crowd collected but they could not find a body, not for three hours, till Sidharth, who had sailed into the truck to fall on a pile of tyres, regained consciousness.

"I had broken my shoulder," he says, "so I used the period in hospital to draw with my left hand." He drew gods and goddesses from the temples, learning to draft their shape, the rise of an arm, the slope of a shoulder, the curve of the ankle, till he had perfected it all.

He still has thousands of those drawings. He also does hundreds of works every year, writing hymns from the Gurbani in his ubiquitous style on gold foil and paint, money from their sale to be donated annually to charity.

To the religious they are prayers, to collectors they're works of art, to those linked to the culture of the land, they are a manifestation of Buddhist prayer flags, to Sidharth simply gratitude for existence...