The colours of silence

With members of the Progressive Artists’ Group leaving for foreign shores — Raza to Paris and Souza to London — the group gradually disbanded, spurring Ara to take the initiative in forming a new collective that would be called the Bombay Group. Ara persuaded KK Hebbar, an artist who had also studied at the JJ School of Art, to be the group’s mentor. Gaitonde recalled, “We wanted artists to come together, to form a union, talk, show their paintings, communicate and see what others were doing. That was the only purpose of the Bombay Group.”

A more pragmatic reason for the group’s formation was financial. Bombay was not an easy city to procure a solo show, and the artists were having a difficult time selling their works and eking out a living. By banding together, the Bombay Group could hold group shows and collectively defray expenses. But with little investment, the group lasted no more than a couple of years, during which they put up a few exhibitions before finally disbanding.

In the early 1950s, the art scene in the city received a fillip with the establishment of the Jehangir Art Gallery and the Bhulabhai Memorial Institute. The former was named after the late son of Sir Cowasji Jehangir, a patron of the arts, who also granted the necessary funds for setting up the gallery. One of the works that Gaitonde showed with the Bombay Group at the Jehangir was a small painting titled Prayer before Birth. The work made a tremendous impact on art critic Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni, who wrote, “It is moving for many reasons; not only for its epigrammatic quality, but also for the emotion suggested by the title.” Years later, Nadkarni revisited the painting: “It is strong in line and evocative in colour. A diagrammatic praying figure bending on its knees is simply and clearly suggested. It is not just a prayer, but a prayer before birth. It is a pregnant mother praying ... Or is it the (re) birth of the person praying?”

The Bhulabhai Memorial Institute, situated on 89 Warden Road in Bombay and later named Bhulabhai Desai Road, was a hotbed of creative activity. It was here that director Ebrahim Alkazi ran his theatre unit’s School of Dramatic Art and where Ravi Shankar established the Kinnara School of Music, in addition to providing studios to dancers and artists.

Headed by Madhuriben Desai, an archaeologist, art connoisseur and daughter-in-law of philanthropist and Congress freedom fighter Bhulabhai Desai, the institute was managed by a trustee, Soli Batliwalla, a man with communist leanings and a friend of Bhulabhai Desai’s son Dhirubhai. An old, two-storey family home was partitioned to offer much-needed studio space to Gaitonde and the other artists who worked there — Dashrath Patel, MF Husain, Prafulla Joshi, Madhav Satwalekar, Homi Patel, graphic designers Ralli Jacob and his wife, ceramic artist, Perin, and sculptors Adi Davierwalla and Piloo Pochkhanawala. Later Tyeb Mehta’s wife, Sakina, ran a little bookshop on the verandah. The artists who were lucky enough to get studios at the institute paid only a nominal rent of one rupee a day, and then only on the days that they came. There were apparently no locks on the studio doors, which allowed artists to drift in and out of each other’s spaces, exchanging opinions and ideas.

It was an atmosphere in which Gaitonde thrived. “Artists need to be in contact with other professions... With music, theatre, books,” he stated. “You can’t stop thinking. You have to go out of your way to listen to music. A writer must know what painting is, what music is, not just Indian music but world music. A dancer must know what theatre is.” 

The Bhulabhai Desai Institute afforded Gaitonde the space and the solitude that he yearned for, and which he could not get in the cramped chawl that he lived in. Very soon he was living out of the studio, returning home sometimes only to sleep. He continued to be estranged from his family, particularly his father. Even when the latter was seriously ill in 1961, Gaitonde did not visit the hospital, choosing to lock himself up in his studio instead.

Clearly the wounds inflicted in those early years were too deep for the father and son to ever become reconciled. However, when his father passed away, his brother-in-law and a friend managed to persuade him to perform the last rites.

Gaitonde’s favourite spot on the sprawling premises of the institute was a bench near the stairs, where he would spend hours watching the lapping waves and the setting sun in utter silence. Sometimes he was joined by Laxman Shrestha, a young artist from Nepal whom he had befriended. Shrestha remembers sitting with Gaitonde on several days gazing at the sunset. After one such session, the older artist turned to him and said, “You know Laxman why I like you? You know the value of silence.”Gaitonde’s equanimity could, however, also prove irksome to his friends, as Raza’s letter to Chhabda reveals. “Gai. For me he is a problem, though for him there are no problems. His placid, calm attitude exasperated me. Everything is alright. A compliment, a criticism, an abuse seem to leave the same effect. It is wonderful to see a man made so. But it is damn irritating. But I love Gai. In his work, he has real sensibility and intensity of pictorial thought.”

The silence and stillness that Gaitonde sought also permeate his work. In his paintings, we begin to fathom the infinite expanse of space and time signified by the perceptual joining of the sea and sky, an imaginary touching that is entirely illusory, yet no less an embodiment of oneness. Kolte suggests that the horizon captivated Gaitonde’s imagination. “We experience this duality of simultaneously existing on the horizon and viewing the same, miles away from us. It was probably this play of experiencing infinity that pushed Gaitonde back into the womb of that imaginary, evasive line.”Jatin Das, too, recalls standing with Gaitonde as he watched the sea from the institute. At low tide, when the water retreated, it thrust the black rocks on the shoreline into sharp relief. Das is convinced that it is this combination of black rocks juxtaposed against a shimmering white sea that sowed the seeds for Gaitonde’s abstract works.

Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde: Sonata of Solitude by Meera Menezes; Bodhana Arts and Research Foundation; Pages: 248