A week past his 76th birthday, Sunil Das need not have died this young - not if he had cared for his health and abused it a little less - but when his body was taken to the Government College of Art & Craft in Kolkata, it was a homecoming of sorts. It was while here that he had been awarded the national Shiromani Kala Puraskar as an undergrad student - a rare privilege. People were quick to react to his obvious talent, and he was laid to rest in his beloved, beleaguered city with the respect and homage that was his due, but did he get the accolades that he richly deserved?
When artists become victims of their own image, they have little recourse for escape. Das's love of bulls and horses, which he did mostly in charcoal and conte, overwhelmed much of his career. He became identified with these (literally) moving drawings of bovine and equine quadrupeds, often at the expense of more serious work. From the 1960s on, they have enjoyed high currency but drawn attention away from his extensive body of work. Like many Bengal high modernists, Das concerned himself with society and its immediate environment, which led to his engagement with deeply unsettling encounters with prostitutes from Sonagachi, the city's red light district. The narratives that emerged were haunting at an obvious level, but underlying layers painted their lush, violence-ridden presents with symbols of tenacity and courage. You needed to have the stomach for these paintings just as the women portrayed on his canvases needed to have the resilience to ply their trade. In their degradation, they found empowerment; even though used by men, they refrained from being subservient to them.
Portraits of women and, sometimes, of men with deeply accusing eyes, his experiments with tantra, evocative abstract works and his amazingly complex erotic drawings pointed to Das's amazing skill in his craft. Technically, few artists could hold a torch to him. He enjoyed a position of prominence nationally, but in Kolkata in particular, though his star started to dwindle a little, perhaps because his subjects continued to remain dark. Coincidentally, Bikash Bhattacharjee's melancholic paintings too began to suffer from disaffection. Bengal's fascination for the morbid seemed to have had its day, and for a while it appeared to eclipse even Ganesh Pyne. But while the reticent Pyne held his own in the market as an exponent of the wash style, Das's ascendant star seemed to wane a tad. His penchant for flying off the handle or sending out peeved notes because of imagined slights or suspicion of chicanery added to a growing sense of frustration when dealing with him.
But mostly, there remained something endearing about him. Kolkata residents will remember him for his frequent appearances at the racecourse, paper and pencil in hand as he sketched his familiar horses. He seemed to visit Mumbai a little more often than Delhi, though even these appearances had become infrequent over the years. I remember him at an art camp where he was by turns affectionate and cavalier, a not unusual trait. Conversations with him were inclined to end in acrimony, though he was lavish with his endearments, referring to almost everyone as "darling".
Recent years have seen his works appear at auctions, mostly on the lower nub of the scale. Collectors have held on to his paintings in equal measure for their quality as also for the absence of a benchmark value in the secondary market. Das deserved a more dazzling sign-off, but as with many artists, that day lies ahead. That he carved a place for himself in the annals of Indian art is a given, but how well Dame Fortune will favour him depends on the cupidity of the art market.
Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic. These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated
