Jehangir Sabavala's world was deceptively serene

Jehangir Sabavala invoked, in many of his landscapes, a homeland lost to historical vagaries and recoverable only in dream. It was easy for us, as viewers, to be seduced by the beauty of this imagined homeland: To lose ourselves among its windswept strands, crystalline lakes and cloud-hidden mountains. What called us back to an engagement with the anguish and uncertainty of this deceptively serene world was the figure, which, in Sabavala's art, was often the exile crossing wastelands in quest of anchorage; the solitary pilgrim following an elusive star; or the sorcerer conjuring up new geographies of forest and stream in defiance of the brutality of circumstance. During the last ten years, and certainly followingthe lifetime retrospective of his work at the National Gallery of Modern Art,Mumbai and Delhi (2005-2006), Sabavala has come to be identified with thegracious ease of success. But success had not, in fact, come easily to him.Through the 1970s, and later in the 1990s, he had been charged with being anelitist painter dedicated to romantic evocations of alternative worlds, out oftouch with what some of his contemporaries were pleased to regard as the‘real India'. Fortunately, these criticisms have been set in perspectiveas the strength and relevance of Sabavala's art have become more apparent.To paint as Sabavala did was not to be escapist, a charge routinelylevelled at him during the 1970s, but to address the human predicament in amanner that dramatised the paradoxical vulnerability and resilience of theindividual. It was a situation that the artist knew well. He was a member of theheroic first generation of postcolonial Indian artists, who turned their gaze,trained in the academies and ateliers of Paris, to a newly emancipated societyin need of sustaining myths. These artists were prepared to commit themselves toan uncertain future because they believed that art could transfigure experience,restore a lost dimension of awareness to everyday life, and to transmitsubliminal realities into the domain of consciousness. In addressingtheir own dilemmas as well as those of their compatriots, the artists ofSabavala's generation did not simply create a new set of pictorial languages.They also took up a specific stance towards the role of art in relation tosocial transformation. Some, like M F Husain, became the playful chroniclers ofthe great Indian narrative of transformation. Others, like Tyeb Mehta, dedicatedthemselves to the creation of archetypal images that spoke of the cataclysms ofa society divided against itself. And Sabavala, over the six decades of hispainterly career, chose to develop and deepen a body of images that had closelinkages with the thrum of the subcontinent yet opened up vistas of reverie andmeditative silence. Through the 1950s, he worked to make hispaintings legible to his viewers, adapting the Cubism of his Paris training tothe harsh light, the bright colours and the visual hyper-abundance of India.Through the 1960s, when he made his breakthrough discovery of what I haveelsewhere called the visionary landscape, he bestowed on the rivers andmountains of India an ‘auratic' radiance, an otherness that liberated themfrom the regime of time. And through the 1970s and 1980s, as his palette grewmore muted and austere, he seemed to be responding to a history of loss byevoking the elements as the ultimate home of the homeless. The sky, during hispaintings of the 1990s, is the wanderer's chosen roof. In many ways, theexpansiveness of Sabavala's paintings during the last 20 years reflects thecompelling 360-degree awareness that he exhibited. To be a painter,for Sabavala, was never to be the resident of an ivory tower. He believed thatthe life of the studio should constantly be replenished by encounter with thebroader currents of society and culture. In conversation, he was constantly andgenuinely attentive to the lives and practices of others, whether they wereartists, poets, critics, architects, politicians, gallerists, or auction-houseprofessionals. The world, to him, was not only a reservoir of images; it wasalso a place to be enjoyed for its music of surprise and revelation.Similarly, his acute knowledge of the secondary and tertiary artmarket did not grow from a fascination with the market as a source ofopportunities; rather, the market was a theatre of impulses and outcomes forhim, to be analysed and enjoyed for its own sake. If Sabavala has ever wanted amotto, he would perhaps have chosen Socrates' dictum, ‘The unexamined lifeis not worth living.' And life, to him, was not confined to the breath of asingular self, but stood for the complex polyphony of a society understood inall its amplitude, which made the existence of that individual self worthwhile.This awareness will be his lasting gift to those of us who had the privilege ofknowing him.In the '40s when he was at JJ School of Arts, hisdrawings were framed. They were very realistic academic studies which we weretold to look at carefully. He often used to exhibit in Bombay. I remember goingfor his shows. He had a cubist way of conceiving an image. It remained with himfor all his life. He had a kind of meditative approach to his medium—theway he would apply paint and conceive a figure. There was a controlled manner inwhich he approached subject matter and a certain serenity and balance that onesaw in his work. - Atul DodiyaHe was an immensely kind individual.Besides his unforgettable elegance, something I will always carry within me isthe many conversations we've had about new media and installation art, etc.Despite the fact that his own work had very little to do with thesedevelopments, he was always curious about where contemporary art was headed. -Jitish KallatHe was a definite guide. Till date, I had been consulting him regularly on matters of art and my work. What I admired was the artisanal quality of his painting. Sabavala worked in a small studio. The way he laid out his colours before he started painting was something I admired. And I tried to have that quality, tried to be as organized. I used to admire the monochromatic underpainting. Then he would glaze it. This is an old technique that was used in a contemporary way by him. The old masters did it. - Mehlli GobhaiHe was an artist who was passionately committed to his vision. He lived through times when the concept of art had changed dramatically. But he was never swayed away from his own central vision. He was extremely generous in his willingness to talk to younger artists, to give his comments on their work. - Gieve PatelHe was a senior painter whose contribution to modern Indian art was noteworthy. I am saddened to learn of his demise, my condolences to his family and the art fraternity who will greatly miss him. - SH Raza