S.Kalidas' Archive

Satish Gujral: Material Man

By S. Kalidas

“Khudi ko kar buland itna ke har taqdeer se pehle,
Khuda banday se khud poochay, bata teri raza kya hai”

“Make your self so tall that before every decision of fate

God himself asks of the man, what is your pleasure” 

                                                                                   Allama Iqbal

When the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) opens the Satish Gujral Retrospective on February 1, the nation shall be celebrating a man whom the writer Khushwant Singh has called “the most outstanding man I have met in my life”.  For straddling the fields of drawing, painting, mural, sculpture and architecture, Satish Gujral, 81, is a slight, short man who has towered over the Indian art world for over five decades with much determination, ever bubbling bonhomie and, periodically, some raging controversy.

As if inspired by Sir Mohammed Iqbal’s famous couplet, Gujral’s story is one of man conquering all odds that fate and history conspired to pile up against him. A childhood accident ensured that Gujral had a leg infected with painful and incurable infection of osteomyelitis and lost his sense of hearing for life when he was just seven years old. However, overcoming this handicap, he went on to study at Lahore’s Mayo School of Art and then at Sir JJ School of Art, Mumbai, before going to Mexico to apprentice under the famous muralist and painter David Alfaro Siqueiros. Between these stints of studying art came the partition with all its attendant horrors of communal genocide and displacement. Gujral has himself written eloquently about these in his moving autobiography A Brush With Life (Viking 1997).  To coincide with the present retrospective Roli Books is bringing out another book on him Satish Gujral: an artography with essays on his oeuvre by Santo Dutta, Gayatri Sinha and Gautam Bhatia.

Any retrospective of Gujaral’s should be interesting sheerly because of his vast output in a variety of mediums. From his anguished expressionist oils in the post-partition era to paper collages to burnt wood sculptures to ceramic murals to granite figures to buildings including the Belgian Embassy— Gujral has not only worked in a host of materials but also changed his imagery and style to suit his medium in each phase. In fact his main complaint against most other artists including his bete noir M.F. Husain has been that they tend to cash in on an established style mainly because of the pressures on the market. Nor has that been his only tirade. For a person with speech disability Gujral has been incredibly vocal in taking on virtually every other celebrated artist of his generation from Francis Newton Souza to S.H. Raza in his autobiography. He maintains that the claim of the Progressive Artists’ Group (PAG,  of which Husain, Raza and Souza were the leading lights) to having ushered in modernism in Indian art is both hollow and untrue as the Kolkata painters a la Paritosh Sen and Gaganendranath Tagore had preceded the Mumbai group. Besides, Gujral maintains, there was  Roop Krishna, a Lahore painter, who had studied in Europe in the 1920s and worked in the modernist style long before the second world war when American soldiers and European émigrés taught modernist fashions to the Mumbai Progressives.

Gujaral, having studied in Mexico, was hugely influenced – curiously not by his teacher Siqueiros or by Firda Kahlo and Diego Rivera with whom he interacted—but by Jose Clemente Orozco (1883- 1949) who had died just a few years before he landed in Mexico in 1952. The Mexican masters had grappled with the problem of modernism and indigenous cultural moorings at least one generation before Indian artists faced the same dilemma. Besides, the Mexican artists with their strong revolutionary leanings had a political involvement that was far deeper than Indian artist ever could aspire to, leave alone try and emulate or match. No wonder that Gujral has been most contemptuous of the simplistic and borrowed revolutionary rhetoric spewed by some of his contemporaries and juniors.

So what does this retrospective portend? Will it rake up all the old controversies and debates that this master of the brush has whipped up in past? Will it lead to a new reading of his work? Material Man still needs to be re-evaluated.