Remembering Haku Shah, artist and Gandhian of a vanished generation

A few years ago, researching a project under which Indians received a Rockefeller grant to travel to the US, I discovered that Haku Shah had been its recipient in 1968. Several artists had led the way before him — Krishen Khanna, V S Gaitonde, Akbar Padamsee, Avinash Chandra, K G Subramanyan, Tyeb Mehta, all stellar modernists whose works fetch record prices at auctions of Indian art. Hakubhai didn’t strictly fit into this category; indeed, it is rare for his works to come up in auction at all. The mystery soon resolved itself. Shah had got the John D Rockefeller Fund grant not as an artist but in an entirely different (if related) category — that of craft. He was, at the time, co-curating an exhibition on folk and tribal art with the eminent art-historian Stella Kramrisch of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Funds were tight, so the Rockefeller grant — pushed along by Kramrisch who knew the director of the Fund, Porter McCray — helped defray his expenses for travelling along with the exhibition across America. 

That Hakubhai should have been involved in the promotion of rural and tribal arts and crafts hardly comes as a surprise for anyone who knew this quiet, self-effacing Gandhian who learnt to spin khadi, set up and served as the curator of Ahmedabad’s Tribal Museum at Gujarat Vidyapith, and worked with the Weavers’ Service Centre as a designer, at the National Institute of Design as researcher, and was visiting faculty at the School of Architecture in Ahmedabad. He conceived of several exhibitions in India and overseas involving tribal arts and, particularly, terracotta, of which “Form and Many Forms of Mother Earth” at the behest of cultural czarina Pupul Jayakar at Crafts Museum, New Delhi, in 1983 (and in Japan in 1985-86), is probably the best known. 

This is all part of Hakubhai’s impressive curriculum vitae, but who was he behind his khadi kurta and gentle smile? Shah was born to a landowning father who frittered it away by giving to the poor and preferring to spend his time in spiritual pursuits. By the time Shah went to art school in Baroda — that he was rejected by JJ formed part of his anecdotal repertoire — the family was so poor, he would count his few paise to survive on a diet of bhajjias and water to fill his stomach. Nor did he think greatly of his own art, ever-willing to share self-deprecating stories about it with acquaintances.

Perhaps that was his greatest weakness. When everyone was making a name for themselves, Hakubhai dabbled in too many disciplines for most to view him as a career artist. He taught, of course, as many artists did, got himself a day job, curated travelling exhibitions, practised photography, but mostly he preferred to paint in the figurative, refusing (or unable) to work in the abstract that, in the 1960s and 1970s, had gained significant currency. Drawn particularly to the human figure in his practice, he rendered his ideas with an endearing simplicity. “Man is a remarkable creature and I find beauty in his unfathomable depths,” he said. 

In time to be, he came to be known as “the artist from Gujarat”. There were other artists in Baroda and Ahmedabad — most eminently his teachers N S Bendre and K G Subramanyan, his peers Bhupen Khakhar, Shanti Dave, Raghav Kaneria and someone who, like him, preferred to record rural life, Jyoti Bhatt — but none of them qualified for the “Gujarat artist” epithet as Hakubhai did. Alas, this was more pejorative than laudatory. I have been guilty of using it myself when friends in Ahmedabad asked whether they should buy Shah’s work and I advised that they spend their money on another whose name would enjoy wider acceptability than an artist whose fame seemed confined to his native Gujarat.

Shah deserves better than that. The deceptive simplicity of his paintings is something he chose to work towards, dropping all particularities from the human figure to depict it in its most reductive form. It was seen as decorative, a charge that made Hakubhai laugh. Not only was this the essence of his work, beauty is what he sought. His colours were appealing. Krishna the cowherd, nature’s creatures, birds and foliage, these made up the sum of his paintings in oil, and he rarely departed from this. “In you lives the spirit of India and you awaken it and bring it to life again and again,” wrote Kramrisch in a letter to him.

Shah’s recent death should be reason enough to question his legacy as an artist, if not as a humanitarian. Subramanyan, his “guru”, had found him “a painter of considerable individuality”. Choosing the primitivist trope as his calling, he was able to bridge the rural-urban divide that polarises most artists. “Haku Shah’s men and women emerge from the long-enduring substratum of tribal-rural India, unaffected by fashionable obsolescence, yet compellingly contemporary in their tender gregariousness, in their moments of simple joys and wonder, sadness and hopes,” observed art critic Santo Datta of the artist’s work. “They stand wrapped in silence like icons in a vast area of darkness which is sporadically lit up with the ephemeral glitter of our metropolises.” 

Here was an artist who counted among his friends and collaborators the likes of writers Mulk Raj Anand, Kapila Vatsyayan and H Y Sharada Prasad, architect Balkrishna Doshi, educationist and designer Ashoke Chatterjee, sculptor Sankho Chaudhuri, potter Devi Prasad, dancer Mallika Sarabhai, art historian Geeti Sen, classical singer Shubha Mudgal — as eclectic a bunch as one was likely to encounter in a life rich with experiences. He wasn’t one to air his opinions freely, but teased into a conversation he could more than hold his own, though it was design — both utilitarian as well as aesthetic — that was closest to his heart. 

In an informal conversation with friends within the art fraternity, I heard him being jocularly referred to as a Nathdwara revivalist. I thought the description remarkably accurate, even though it had not been intended in that manner. The Nathdwara pichwais with their Krishnas and cows were, indeed, closest to his work, part of the artistic (and cultural as well as spiritual) tradition of the land. Traditional and classical art has influenced modern and contemporary artists all over, but we in India seem loathe to claim our past, even though it has one of the longest, unbroken continuities in the world. If S H Raza could be inspired by the miniatures of Basohli, Jamini Roy by the Kalighat patuas, and Amrita Sher-Gil by the Ellora frescoes, who are we to question Hakubhai’s debt to Nathdwara in whatsoever manner it is present in his work? 

There is much in his paintings that enchants. Art writer Prayag Shukla tells us that “his paintings and drawings would suggest that there is much to fathom and to decode in [his] seemingly simple and repetitive world. And that this world is offering something to the eyes which is beautiful, aesthetically appealing; and from one canvas to the other, an awesome gesture awaits us.” Haku Shah may no more be among us, but the gentle artist from Gujarat has left behind an impressive oeuvre of paintings for the world to admire.