Astute courtiers in medieval times rarely watched the king when they wanted to know what he was really thinking. Instead, they looked to the monarchs jester. Beyond the antics and the laboured practical jokes, the best jesters of the age mirrored the kings true moods.
In our times, its the secretaries of the well-heeled who reflect not the moods of their employers, but the levels of activity they are currently engaged in. So while Satish Gujral relaxed in the understated opulence of his New Delhi residence, his harried secretary fielded appointments, staved off inopportune callers and displayed the appropriate signs of agitation when 12 oclock struck and his employer showed no signs of moving on to the business of the day.
Into his seventh decade, the man whos been perched on the cusp of almost every major Indian art movement cant find the time to slow down yet. Apart from the mandatory art exhibition, Gujral is working on three monumental ventures simultaneously. Hes the architect for the mammoth Indira Gandhi Cultural Centre which will open its doors in Mauritius next year, and side by side, hes working on the final blueprints for an Ambedkar Memorial in Lucknow. The 120 feet high Memorial, as envisioned by the artist, will sprawl across 20 acres of land.
But its the third venture that promises to lend a splash of colour to the Indian art world. In another three months, the artist will unveil the first self-portrait of his career in the form of a 300-page autobiography. To be published by Penguin, the portrait of an artist as a young and not-so-young man is a collaboration between Gujral and the redoubtable Khushwant Singh, whom the artist describes as much more than a co-author, more like an active contributor.
The man who embraced sprawling canvases throughout his career has chosen large themes for his memoirs. The first brushstrokes outline the portrait of a family against the backdrop of the temper of a nation. My family was at the centrestage of the freedom struggle, says Gujral. Not every Congressman at the time subscribed to all of Gandhis edicts, but my father was a true Gandhian, a true believer.
When Gandhi launched the Swadeshi struggle, the upheaval it caused in the Gujral household was a microcosm of the domestic battles being waged all over India. Like many Indians of his generation, Gujrals father was Westernised down to the last cuff of his bespoke suits. Though he saw the light virtually overnight, his wife was not thrilled about being ordered to burn all her Paris dresses. My mother wept, but she obeyed her husband, says the artist. Over the years that followed, she started to take pride in that decision and she began believing that shed done it of her own free will!
The Gujral household saw a steady stream of visitors through the turbulent years before Independence Madan Mohan Malviya, Pandit Nehru, Lala Lajpat Rai, Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan, not to mention the faithful brigade of policemen who followed like so much plankton in their wake. My father and mother used to court imprisonment frequently when they were in jail, wed call it summer vacations, chuckles Gujral. And the police used to raid our homes so frequently that we really missed them if they hadnt dropped in for a while.
One of his happiest memories is of the time Nehru came to Jhelum to deliver a speech from the Gujrals roof in 1930. I was about four or five years old, smiles the artist, Nehru took me in his arms and carried me upto the roof, and delivered the speech holding me.
His siblings were enthusiastic advocates of Indian independence his two younger sisters were practically brought up inside prison walls since the laws of the day allowed political prisoners to keep their children with them. Gujrals cousin had been adopted by the family; he aligned himself with Bhagat Singh, keeping it a secret from his adoptive father, who was a believer in non-violence. Satish Gujral, who was about four years old at the time, remembers how his mother used to sing a Punjabi song when she was doing household work: Those who treat handcuffs as though they were ornaments, would treat the gallows as if they were a swing.
I grew up knowing that song, says Gujral reflectively. An impassive bronze Buddha of the Kushana period stares down at him. My adoptive brother was arrested and sentenced to seven years imprisonment he escaped the gallows because of some lacunae in the evidence. When the verdict was read out, my mother walked out of the courtroom singing this song.
As for his brother, the present Prime Minister of India courted arrest for the first time when he was 10 years old! After both his parents were arrested for taking an active part in Gandhis non-cooperation movement, young I K Gujral led a demonstration of children on a protest march past the police station. He was detained overnight and released after 48 hours.
The young Satish watched somewhat wistfully from the sidelines. I was the only one who never went to prison, he confides, like a child who missed out on a treat. At the age of eight, Gujral had a major accident that kept him bedridden for the next six years. He endured repeated surgery on his leg, but the high dosage of chloroform he was administered during the first operation made him permanently deaf.
He knew just a smattering of the Urdu alphabet, so his father brought him Urdu books to study at home. Since there were no childrens books in Urdu in those days, the young Gujral read books meant for far older people. By the time I was 12, Id read through almost all of Premchand and Iqbal, he says with pride. But his view of the world had changed completely, particularly since he spent most of his time in the company of adults. Elders cannot think like children, he says ruefully. What they achieve is to make children think like elders.
His incessant doodling caught his fathers attention, and Satish was sent to art school when he was finally able to leave his bed. He was disappointed at first. I was being put aside from the freedom struggle, says Gujral now, but I realised that perhaps I could depict the struggle in my paintings. The result led to him being dubbed the Painter of Partition when he began his career seriously in the 50s.
Those paintings kept depicting the tragedies of Partition, I dont know of any other painter of the time who dealt with the subject, comments the artist. I think I identified strongly with the inner compulsions of both the victims and the freedom fighters. And I found in Partition a theme par excellence! He shifts, and an exquisitely crafted glass strawberry on the table casts a translucent red shadow on his face. It was an outlet for my illness, my own inner pain, Gujral continues, a little more subdued. Had there not been a Partition I might have had to invent one.
The Partition series marked the beginning of an extraordinary career though not instantly. Gujral finished art school in the year India gained its freedom, and had made a name for himself by 1952. But I sold my first painting only in 1964, he grins. It was at my first proper exhibition in India as expected, it generated a lot of publicity and not a single sale. Indira Gandhi came to see it on the last day, and she bought two paintings for Teen Murti House. The champagne may have come in a tad late, but it was quite a way to launch a career.
Gujral had developed strong leftist leanings in the years he had spent in art college at Lahore. Big brother, who was also studying in the same city, introduced him to leftist intellectuals and political activists. Notable among them was Faiz Ahmed Faiz, a teacher who was only a little older than I K Gujral. Now, in the aftermath of his first successful exhibition, Satish Gujral was to meet another of Marxs heirs a young Mexican diplomat and poet called Octavio Paz.
Paz, who went on to win the Nobel Prize for poetry, saw a striking affinity between the young Gujrals style and the paintings of the Mexican artists who dominated the Latin American landscape in that decade. He organised a scholarship that allowed Gujral to spend three years in Mexico. They ended up being the most formative years of the artists life.
I was the only Indian there literally, there was no Indian embassy at the time! Gujral laughs. He worked with Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Sequiras, two of the greatest painters of their generation. The third, Jose Clemente Orozco, had died shortly before Gujral arrived in Mexico.
Because of my very leftist bent in those days, I got closest to Sequiras, who was a staunch Communist, he says. Rivera was an apostate who had become disenchanted with communism after having an argument with Stalin on a visit to Russia.
When Trotsky left the Party and he was looking for shelter outside the Soviet Union, Diego offered him a home, reminisces Gujral. Stalin entrusted Sequiras with carrying out Trotskys execution. The artist arranged for an assassin, drove him to the house where the Soviet leader was hiding out, and waited. Unfortunately, in the commotion that followed the assassination, the assassin was accosted and Sequiras fled, he continues, and for one year, since no country would give him a visa, he lived on a ship.
Before Sequiras exile, Gujral got to meet a lot of interesting Latin American writers, poets and revolutionaries. There was one friend whom he got to see on occasion as part of a larger group. It was only during my second visit a few years later that Sequiras told me, You remember that tall student? Know who he was? Fidel Castro!
Looking back, Gujral sees his Latin American interlude as one of the most germinal experiences of his life. My artistic resolve in that period was affirmed, he says slowly, It set my painting on a highly individual path, apart from the mainstream of the other Indian artists. Most of my contemporaries went to the US, to Europe and so they imbibed another type of influence.
How strongly does his autobiography reflect his career as an artist? Ohhh, Satish Gujral sighs happily, of course Im the central figure. Its all there after all, I am one of the founding members of Indian contemporary art. Roughly two-thirds of the senior artists today are my classmates.
Instead of rewriting history, Gujral hopes to present the authorised version in his autobiography. I saw the foundation, I saw the struggles, I saw the dominant sub-movements, I saw the eventual rise of a body of work that could be called Contemporary Indian Art, he says. Its always been a controversial story. Though bookshops sport colourful arrays of coffee-table books, Gujral doesnt think that a great deal of serious documentation has been done.
Everybody has created his or her own version, Satish Gujral sighs, frequently from hearsay. I have tried to tell what actually happened, to give credit to those painters whose work shaped the movement.
But for that story, youll have to wait for the book to come out the life and times of a very well-known Indian. And this is a promise from the artist: mostly unexpurgated.
I was the only member of my family who never went to prison during the fight for freedom, confides Gujral
