By Nirupama Dutt

It takes times for the images to crystallize in the mind and move onto the canvas. More so if one is right in the midst of the catastrophe. So it was with Satish Gujral who thus recalls the holocaust: “With unceasing catastrophes as the backdrop, millions were moving. With frightening regularity, the stress would be accentuated, much like the scratchy interruptions in an old movie, which blur the vision and distract the mind yet keep alive one's awareness of reality by giving way occasionally to short, clear footage.”

It was five years later that the artist gave one of the most memorable paintings on the theme: `Days of Freedom'. There is just the suggestion of the health in the background and two figures shrouded in shawls sit outside, their entire being distorted by grief. The hands of one figure are concealed and eyes covered. Yet, the twisted lips shriek out a silent scream. The hands of the other figure are exposed—one stretched out and the other holding back with the taut muscles and the bulging knuckles bearing witness to the humiliation.

“In August, 1947, I came back to Lahore after completing my course at the J.J. School of Arts, Bombay. I was all set to open a Graphics' studio to provide multimedia training. My father was a member of the Constituent Assembly. With the Partition, his home constituency having fallen on the Pakistani side, his membership was transferred to Parliament of the new dominion of Karachi. My parents and all other family members were in Karachi. I was in Lahore with the old family servant, Partap, as companion,” recalled Gujral seated at the long banquet table in the beautiful dining room of his redbrick mansion at Lajpat Nagar in New Delhi.

What was Lahore like then? “It was burning. It seemed that nothing would be left of it. When Lord Mountbatten visited Lahore in the third week of July, 5 per cent of the inner town and 1 per cent of the total city had been destroyed. Half the Hindu population had already fled. Many had just gone to drop their families and valuables on the safer side for no one knew where Lahore would go. In July, Jawaharlal Nehru had said the Rāvi river be considered the boundary line so the Hindus continued to stay in Lahore,” said Gujral.

But with the advent of the blood-soaked August, it became clear that Lahore would go to Pakistan. Gujral said: “Things flared up and Hindus were fleeing with what they could on their heads. I decided to move too but to the interiors of Pakistan, my village Jhelum. Since there was no money with me, I asked our servant Partap to go to the railway station with our bags and I would arrange for some money and join him there. That was not to be. For whoever went to the railway station never came back as it was the scene of the worst killings. That was the last I saw of Partap.”

Gujral, made his way to the Lajpat Rai Bhawan, which was some three to four kilometers away from his home to meet Lala Achint Ram, a friend of his father's and also the father of Vice-President of India Krishan Kant. “His home was overflowing with people who had moved there from other parts of the city. Lalaji was making forays into the suburbs to bring people to safety. The DAV college hostel had been converted into a refugee camp of sorts overflowing with some 50,000 people,” Gujral remembered.

From that day Gujral's education had begun in human misery: death, destruction and desolation. The next eight months he spent with his father in rescuing abducted girls and taking them across the border. “Every time we were able to rescue a girl, we drove down straight to Amritsar or Jalandhar. The tragedy was doubled when these girls would not be accepted by their families,” said the artist who was to be nicknamed in the next few years as the Painter of the Partition.

Partition was the theme of the paintings Gujral did from 1947 to 1950 working with intensity and passion. Uma Vasudev commented thus on the work of this period: “The material for his inspiration was at hand; the disaster of the Partition of India and its attendant personal tragedies for a multitude of uprooted people. This was no drawing room art. It hurt – could suffering be so inevitable? It offended – could man do this to man?”

Canvas after canvas, he relived the pain of the worst kind of bloodshed in history. `Mourning', `Return of the Abducted', Dance of Destruction', The Rehabilitated' and `The Condemned' are the very well-known works of these three years. He then went to Mexico and the sad experiences of these days followed him and were reborn with heightened intensity and a breakthrough in the form in works like `Snare of Memory' and much later `The Shrine'.

Years later Gujral wondered on contemplating on the Partition paintings whether the element of despair was induced by his experience of the Holocaust or whether it was the trauma of his own inner compulsions. He grew up speechless and ridiculed in a world which has little care for the deaf and dumb. Gujral's answer to his own query was that these works were born of his own compulsions within for no external happening could have triggered them. But what comes closer to the truth is that he internalized the external and thus these paintings of the partition were born.