Meditations on loss

For both these veteran artists who passed away recently, the pain and agony of Partition was often a leitmotif.

The passing away of two veterans within a short span came as a rude shock to the Indian art fraternity. Satish Gujral passed away in Delhi on 26 March 2020 at the age of 94. A month later — on 25th April — when Zarina Hashmi breathed her last in London, she was 83. Both the artists lived their lives fully and chartered their creative careers in uniquely different ways even as they carried within them the pain and agony caused by the country’s Partition.

Born on Christmas day of 1925 in Jhelum (now in Pakistan), Gujral did not allow his hearing impairment (caused by a freak accident in childhood) to deter his commitment for and growth in the world of art. A man of many parts, the eminent painter, sculptor and muralist believed that creativity had no name, no medium and no barriers. “Creativity is to give expression to the spirit of something you have observed. You may choose to do it in the form of a building, a line of poetry or a painting.”

Gujral’s series on Partition became legendary by reflecting the reality of the times and depicting the horror, misery, anxiety and tragedy of the country’s division. “I saw killings every day. My education was completed in January 1949, but I left Pakistan only after the last refugees had been transported. When I moved to Shimla, where I stayed for four years, I began to paint man’s cruelty to man.” The series brought him to limelight in the emerging art scene of free India.

Against all odds

In 1952, he won, against great odds, a scholarship to study at Mexico City. An apprenticeship with the internationally-renowned Spanish masters Diego Riviera and David Alfaro Siqueiros was richly rewarding and left a long-lasting impact on the young artist. In the following decades, Gujral was to diversify his practice into many artistic streams, while constantly experimenting on style, mediums, materials and varied themes. At the peak of his career as a painter and muralist, he turned his attention to architecture in which he had no academic training whatsoever. He made a success of it by designing a variety of acclaimed buildings and structures. Among others, the Belgian Embassy in Delhi in the mid-1980s won him national and international recognition. The Belgian king’s brother reportedly told Gujral: “When I saw the building from the outside, I felt like I was in India; and when I walked in, I felt like I was in Belgium.”

Gujral, who was awarded the Padma Vibhushan by Government of India in 1999, was known for his strong and uncompromising views on art, artists and institutions. For him, the artist was not only the vanguard, but the last barricade. “Artists might be humble but the power of art makes the world bow. Art is the last barricade of society. When values fall, society calls on art to redefine its values.”

His disdain for the ‘Baroda Group’ and Bombay Progressives was emphatic. He thought the former acted like a political group and an art trade union. As for the Progressives, he was particularly scathing of some of its leading lights. “Both M F Husain and S H Raza wasted talent on depicting a mythology, which they were not brought up on.” He also felt that government institutions and academies did no worthwhile work; they just played politics and indulged in cronyism. Interestingly, he believed that great art always came out of the darkest of times.

Sacred geometries

Zarina Hashmi actually studied Science and Mathematics at Aligarh Muslim University. Her father taught History at the University; the cultured household was lively and intellectually driven. “Our house was full of books. Literature and poetry were part of our life.” She did not go to art school, but discovered printmaking accidentally while in Thailand (where her husband was posted as an Indian diplomat). Her interest in the medium prompted her to train under Stanley William Hayter in his famous studio in Paris (1964–67). She later honed up her skills at Toshi Yoshida’s studio in Tokyo on a Japan Foundation Fellowship in 1974.

Zarina’s life was characterised by relentless movement and journeys accompanied by an intense yearning for ‘home’. Even after making New York her base in the mid-1970s, she kept herself on the move, crossing many borders. Consequently, over a long and meaningful career, her work came to be recognised for the intense, abstract and minimalist motifs, which underlined themes such as migration, displacement, geographical boundaries and memory.

Allure of paper

Zarina, who held a lifelong fascination for the delicate allure of paper, referenced from various sources, including the symmetrical patterning of Islamist architecture; the charming sway of Urdu poetry and the mystical depth of Sufism and Zen philosophy. Her richly symbolic and sophisticated works that offered spiritual perspectives on exile and dislodgment, were exhibited across the world.

Critics saw them as poetic meditations on migration and loss; and ruminations on sacred geometries and faith. “Zarina’s works are lyrical, sublime, and transcendent,” wrote a reviewer. “They communicate the ecstasy of inner experience, the esoteric vibrations of spirit; especially if one stays still long enough to savour the silence in which they are shrouded. Within the vast quietude of her interior worlds, there are words, verses, meaning… The outward simplicity of her work belies complex registers of allegory and metaphor; the personal and the political are so inextricable that to see each as separate entities is to detract meaning from the other.”

As a 10-year old girl in 1947, Zarina had seen villages around Aligarh burning in the aftermath of Partition. The experience left a deep impression on her mind and carried through her life. Even in the exhibition ‘Dark Roads’, which was set up in the autumn of her life (2018) at New York University, she commemorated the 70th anniversary of the 1947 Partition of India.