THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2020
A Kashmir where a Pandit named his house ‘Takhleeq’ never prayed in his life yet made a painting of Sharika Bhagwati that even the worst of turmoils could not dislodge from its place in the iconic Hari Parbat. That’s just one of his many contributions to the history of Kashmir.
Untold stories need to be told and heard, unless people want to learn more.
The painting of Sharika that still adorns Hari Parbat, is not the best of his works, it has many flaws, given he was quite young when he painted it. If art lovers would observe it closely one would realise how it lacks the strokes of a master. For the believers it’s the devotion towards the sacred that counts, the analysis and critique being misplaced.
My father was financially underprivileged with six siblings and a mother long gone. I wonder how he filled the void but when he started painting at a very young age plus became a school dropout, his father was aghast. It was unheard of in a Pandit family or was rare. My grandfather who was worried about his son’s future would hit him on his knuckles to discourage him from painting, but there was no stopping my father. He was a self-taught prodigy.
He was also an atheist. Why did he paint ‘Maej Sharika’ for Hari Parbat then? Maybe for money, maybe for love and respect for his community, maybe to give a message of compassion and inclusiveness, maybe to simply paint for the sake of art, maybe the subject was intriguing, maybe he missed his own mother, it could be symbolic, we can only speculate. Bottom line being his atheism never stood in the way of his values and magnanimity, his heart was in the right place and that was all that mattered.
As the Kashmir conflict grew and he was forced to live in exile; his style changed drastically from modernism to realistic abstract. He poured his pain into the canvas. Thus followed a series of paintings on exodus with titles like ‘Charging Rams’, ‘The Grief Within’, ‘The Smoldering Crocus’, ‘The Flying Kangri’ and many others. He also wanted to paint ‘Donkeys Grazing on Saffron Fields’ I thought that was quite powerful, he did not live to paint it.
He had come a long way from the ‘Sharika’ painting; his master strokes, the confluence of colours, the boldness of expression, were talked about far and wide. His community was extremely proud of him albeit they saw only what ‘they’ wanted to see.
He had understood that expecting the world to look beyond the painting of Sharika for the bruised knuckles, the rebellion, the talent, the passion, the struggle, the underlying message from the man whose heart was in the right place was probably not realistic, perhaps for people it was inconceivable and inconsequential. Precisely why it is important to look beyond.
A tragedy befell our community three decades back and nobody came to our rescue, we struggled yet survived, equally tragic is that we stopped looking beyond, we stopped learning from our experiences, we stopped listening to untold stories, the stories stayed buried inside turning into silent tombstones, slowly but surely we fell into well laid, systematically planted traps, Sharika was replaced by Pied Pipers.
We started imitating the ‘donkeys grazing on saffron fields’. Can a messiah rewind the clock and undo the fate, it is a tad bit late?
Originally published at https://www.facebook.com.
