100 Years of Paz Indica

(left) Octavio Paz; (right) SP Ganguly and Vibha Maurya at the talk in IIC.

On a balmy day in 1965, artist Krishen Khanna received a strange phone call. It was Octavio Paz’s secretary and she asked him to urgently come over to the Mexican diplomat and writer’s residence. “I was told that it was a secret meeting. That got me worried, I’m a painter, not a secret agent. When I reached there, Paz told me that he wanted me to act as a witness to his wedding with Marie-José Tramini. Later, he wanted me to paint a portrait of her, even though I don’t normally do portraits. I have to say it was the worst portrait I’d ever done but Paz forgave me that,” said Khanna. His laughter reverberated through the conference room at the India International Center where writers, poets, artists and academics gathered on Monday to celebrate the birth centenary of Paz. Khanna was joined by poet and writer Prayag Shukla, Dr SP Ganguly, former professor, Centre of Spanish, Portuguese, Italian & Latin American Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Dr Minni Sawhney, professor of Hispanic Studies, University of Delhi and Dean of the Arts Faculty. Vibha Maurya, professor Spanish at the Department of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of Delhi moderated the talk.

Born in 1914 in Mexico City, Paz began writing as a young man. In 1933, he published his first volume of poetry Luna Silvestre. He entered diplomatic service in 1945 and was later appointed Mexican ambassador to India, a position that he held from 1962 to 1968. During this time, he came in contact with several artists and thinkers who were steering various movements in arts and the social sciences in India. Paz passed away in 1998. “In his poems about India, one can see that Paz had a universal conscience. He came with a backlog of a Western epoch but he acknowledged it and he was truly interested in Indian history,” said Ganguly, who read out a few poems by Paz.