In 2017, a day before his ‘Trinity’ sculpture was to be unveiled at Delhi’s Bikaner House, Satish Gujral was chasing the administrative staff to move the nine-foot-tall work by a few degrees to set it at the perfect angle. It was past midnight and Gujral was 91 years old.
“He said, ‘the angle is not correct,” recalls his architect daughter Raseel Gujral. This was three years before he passed away in 2020. It has been another couple of years since, but his work still draws flocks of art connoisseurs like at the ‘In Memoriam’ space at this year’s India Art Fair, which pays tribute to great artists who died recently.
Gujral’s oeuvre boasts an unparalleled depiction of Partition paintings. But what the public saw recently was a rare aspect of his artistic practice, hosted as part of the Kiran Gujral Art Initiative. They were signature sculptures in burnt wood—a unique medium Gujral used despite a reportedly unfavourable reception by part of the art fraternity at the time—that offer a unique insight into the ideology of protest.
Created at different times in his life, they are a window to the artist’s state of mind. The early sculptures (circa ’70s) appear rigid in their aura. They seem to capture the sense of rage the artist was feeling at the time. The charred bodies of the sculptures are colourless, except for the sporadic specks of unsettling reds—an outcome of the burnt leather.
However, the pieces he created when revisiting the medium almost two decades later exude a distinct calmness with the sculptural form becoming fluid and seemingly taking the shape of god-like figures. Generous application of gold enters the colour scheme. These sculptures are almost celebratory.
“He started doing the burnt woods during the Emergency. They express the sense of pent-up burning fire, incarceration, and anger, with the sculptures almost resembling angry deities. He burnt the wood, he burnt the leather, which he had never done before. When you burn leather, it emerges red, like blood.
The sculptures were festooned with ropes and keys that symbolised bondage. A lot of his friends in the intelligentsia were being thrown into jail. His art was like a raging god,” Raseel remembers, adding, “After that period passed, the deities became benign and loving. One resembles Ganesha and another Shiva. They (the burnt wood sculptures) started from rage, and became something of a divine expression.” The work was displayed first at the Dhoomimal Art Gallery in Delhi.
Gujral lived and worked in halcyon days of Indian art’s dissociation from Western sensibilities. Along with contemporaries FN Souza, SH Raza, and MF Husain, he brush-stroked an ethos that was derived from the Indian gestalt. An early Communist, his art was meant to evoke, move, and inspire passion against injustice. And it did (and continues to do so). His early work, almost compulsively, depicted the suffering that ordinary men and women endured as India walked her path to freedom.
This continued through a large part of his illustrious career. Painted in rich earthy tones—browns and ochres with a little bit of grey and recurring hints of white, Gujral’s canvasses brim with emotion, bringing to life the agony and helplessness of one of the greatest tragedies faced by humankind. A large number of the Partition paintings are executed in sharp straight lines, their terrifying clarity screaming the horrors of 1947.
If one were to break down Gujral’s art to its smallest unit, the atom in question evidently would be emotion. It fuelled his entire career, which is perhaps why the art seems so effortless. Raseel, who used to watch her father at work in his studio as a young girl (an empty painting oil drum was her favourite spot), recalls the series of paintings he created after his wife Kiran fell critically ill, leaving Gujral emotionally shaken.
“There was a period where my mother was unwell, and she was his backbone. When she saw his work later, she couldn’t imagine where all the emotion was coming from. He created this entire series on ‘man and machine’, followed by an entire series on sports. Art was where my father could lose himself so that his current circumstances or environment could be set aside,” Raseel says.
Gujral was reincarnated at the India Art Fair exhibition—the first show after his passing. Even though only a limited selection, that was chosen by the India Art Fair, was on display, Raseel insists that the family couldn’t have asked for a better tribute.
“We weren’t able to give him a celebratory send-off (Gujral died during the lockdown), but my mother was very clear that she is not mourning him, because he led a full life. He died pain-free in his own home. We decided that whenever we do something for him, it would be a jashn. We are celebrating his life,” she says.