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In 1947, one of the last trains from Pakistan brought with it a 43-year-old man named Sardari Lal Parasher who, like hundreds of others, had left his everything behind to start life from scratch in an unfamiliar land. Back in Lahore, Parasher had been the vice-principal of Mayo School of Arts (now National College of Arts). The artist, writer and philosopher had made his way to India through the horrors of Partition with one rumpled set of clothes and a newspaper clipping with his sketch of Rabindranath Tagore. In this pencil sketch, Parasher had captured, with remarkable insight, the absorbed expression of the poet listening to the music of minstrels.
This sketch and several other powerful works, particularly those created right after Partition, are now out of the trunks in which they lay for years. Parasher's children - four daughters and a son - have put many of them on display in the newly-created gallery at the artist's house in south Delhi. Many others are still waiting to be framed, archived and exhibited. The Parasher Art Gallery is now open to public.
There is a good reason that this place is a must-visit for anybody interested in art - and history. The gallery houses images of that traumatic period of India which has often been depicted in words but seldom captured in images. Soon after arriving in India, Parasher took up a job as commandant of a refugee camp at Baldev Nagar in Ambala. In the evenings, as he walked around the camp, grief, agony, frustration and homelessness jumped out at him from every corner. And he recorded it all on whatever bits of paper he could lay his hand on. There are pencil sketches and ink drawings of people in transit, on bullock carts with whatever few belongings they could salvage. There are groups of women sitting huddled together, seeking small comforts. There are screams and cries and heavy despair. There is also a terracotta head of a refugee woman (1948), created with the soil of the Baldev Nagar camp. What Saadat Hasan Manto was doing with his pen in Pakistan, Parasher was doing in India with his paper and pencil. Some of Parasher's sketches, especially those of women at the camp, carry a strong hint of Amrita Sher-Gil's study of rural women.
Happier and colourful works follow in the later years, many of which depict the myriad moods of the charming hill town of Shimla, where Parasher helped set up the Government School of Arts and Crafts in 1951 and was its founder principal. But it's those Partition sketches which stand frozen in time and often give a sense of works yet to be completed, that remain the most poignant.
It's a wonder that Parasher never shot to limelight, though there are people who recognised the significance of his work. Among them was Le Corbusier, the French architect who designed the city of Chandigarh. Corbusier used a steel sculpture created by Parasher, its undulating form depicting the undivided Punjab, when giving shape to Chandigarh. The prominent steel mural with triangles - solid and skeletal all at once - on the wall of Government College for Men in Chandigarh is also Parasher's creation. So are the murals at Nirman Bhawan and Kidwai Bhawan in Delhi.
Parasher never sold any of his works during his lifetime. He never wanted to. His family has also never tried to bring his work into the art market. His son, Raju Parasher, says that in 2004, when they wanted to exhibit some of his creations, a piquant situation arose. "We wanted to get some of his works from the Chandigarh Museum, but the museum said it could not let them out unless they were insured. But their valuation had never been done. We called an art historian for that, but it wasn't easy."
Parasher died in 1990, at the age of 86. It's a good thing that after all these years, his work is finally being rediscovered and recognised.
