AT THE centenary exhibition of Satish Gujral at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) in Delhi, visitors are greeted not with his artwork but an immersive video of a river rushing between boulders, the sound of water echoing in the gallery. One hears words written by the artist on the accident that changed his life forever. He states: “The pain was traumatic… It numbed my senses… and slowly, it took away my hearing.”Satish was only eight at the time and that moment altered not just the course of his life but also the language of his art. The sudden silence that plunged him into solitude also pushed him into finding expression through art, adapting it as a means to communicate with the world that had suddenly become quiet around him.Restless, curious and determined, he moved effortlessly across disciplines, from painting to sculpture, murals to architecture, discovering a distinct vocabulary with each. “When I felt I had said what I wanted to through one medium, I shifted to another,” said the Padma Vibhushan artiste in a 2017 interview to The Indian Express.This spirit of experimentation finds resonance in the NGMA exhibition that brings together decades of his practice alongside archival material, photographs and personal correspondence as well as a recreation of his studio at Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar home, which has recently been restored by his architect son Mohit Gujral and opened to the public by The Gujral Foundation as a site for exhibitions and gatherings. Satish Gujral with wife Kiran (Photos courtesy: Gujral Foundation Archives/ Sa)Friend and fellow artist Manu Parekh says, “He immersed himself completely in the technicalities of any medium he chose to pursue and the vitality of his work remains unmatched. Warm and full of humour, he always made an effort to put those around him at ease.”This instinct to accept and adapt to unpredictability was perhaps forged in childhood. Born in 1925 in Jhelum, now in Pakistan, he grew up in a family that encouraged intellectual pursuits and was deeply engaged with the political currents of the time. His father Avtar Narain Gujral was a successful lawyer, who was later a member of the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan before migrating to India. Every summer, the family would travel to Pahalgam in Kashmir for a vacation. It was during one such trip that Satish slipped on a boulder and fell into the Lidder river, injuring a leg and developing a severe bone infection. Undergoing several subsequent operations, a botched treatment by a local quack impaired his hearing forever. Having only learnt to read Urdu by this time, his father surrounded him with literature, from stories of Munshi Premchand to the poetry of Mirza Ghalib and Muhammad Iqbal. Enrolled first in a school for the deaf and mute in Old Delhi, he was later admitted to the Mayo School of Art in Lahore, where he was introduced to a range of skills, from carpentry and clay modelling to wood carving and drawing. Detesting this multidisciplinary approach as a student, Satish later credited it for widening his horizons.The teenage years also laid the foundation for his political and intellectual sensibilities. Frequently visiting his older brother Inder Kumar Gujral, who later became India’s Prime Minister, he was introduced to a vibrant circle of writers. This included revolutionary poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, who was Inder’s teacher at Hailey College in Lahore.Story continues below this ad Mourning En-Masse by Satish Gujral showcased at Delhi’s NGMA (Photos courtesy: Gujral Foundation Archives/ Sa)Also Read | SRK’s first ‘screen mother’ Jayshree Arora on King Khan’s humility, and how discipline keeps her active: ‘I don’t give up easily’The graver upheaval, though, was yet to come in the cataclysm of the Partition, when Satish accompanied armed convoys of refugees from Pakistan to India over a period of eight months. The memories of bloodshed, trauma and dislocation that he witnessed during this time resurfaced in his canvases where men and women were depicted within whirls of anguish and despair in works such as Mourning En-Masse (1952), Snare of Memory (1954) and Days of Glory (1954). “Chronicling the Partition for over a decade, his response was never one of anger. Instead, it was deeply cathartic, an attempt to process the suffering and sorrow. His canvases evoked not the violence but the shared grief of a community and neighbourhood lamenting what humanity had done to each other. It was a very measured and nuanced position,” says Kishore Singh, curator of the NGMA exhibition.The Partition forms a crucial part of the exhibition, with Satish’s experience woven through it. The Gujrals migrated first to Shimla and later moved to Delhi, where it did not take long for Satish to find reckoning as an artist. He was associated with the Delhi Shilpi Chakra, an art collective established in 1949 to promote artistic freedom and the idea that art is not divorced from every day life. As early as 1952, Satish had been called a “genius” by noted art critic Charles Fabri.If Partition gave him an idiom of anguish, Mexico revealed a new grammar of possibilities. Though Inder was initially sceptical about Satish applying for a Mexican embassy scholarship — warning him that he was “living in a fool’s paradise,” given that he could neither hear nor speak fluent English — soon he relented, even offering practical advice, suggesting that during the interview Satish should speak only to the Mexican cultural attache and ignore the others. Before long, Satish found himself on a ship to Mexico with four pages of dos and don’ts typed out by Inder and on a journey that would prove transformative. Studying at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico from 1952 to 1954, he apprenticed with artists such as Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, who were considered leading figures of Mexican muralism. Developing a close friendship with Frida Kahlo, he was among the pallbearers at her funeral. Singh notes, “That pedagogy really set his practice apart from the rest of his contemporaries, most of whom travelled to Europe… Among others, the Mexican influence is evident in his brushwork, in the expressive swathes of paint and his nuanced control of white, which he deploys as both negative and positive space, something very few Indian artists of the time fully understood. By the ’60s, he also emerged as one of the pioneers of abstraction in India alongside artists such as VS Gaitonde, Shanti Dave and J Swaminathan.” Satish Gujral’s metalwork (Photos courtesy: Gujral Foundation Archives/ Sa)Also Read | ‘I am a Delhiite’: Sanya Malhotra opens up on stardom, not being a ‘foodie,’ love for the city, and entrepreneurial journeyHe was also to translate many of the lessons in muralism into a distinctly Indian context. Awarded the Lalit Kala Akademi’s national award for painting in 1958, the same year also saw him create his first major public mural in India, at Gandhi Bhawan in Chandigarh. The ’60s and ’70s had him produce landmark murals in materials such as ceramics, tiles and steel elements around the world, including the World Trade Fair in New York, Delhi High Court, The Oberoi and Shastri Bhawan in New Delhi. “I have always been an ardent proponent of public art. A painting can only reach an individual, it cannot reach the public at large. Earlier, we had art in temples and people had access to it, but times have changed, art has become a gallery business,” he stated in the 2017 interview to The Indian Express.Story continues below this adWhile critics in India acknowledged his talent, and he steadily found wide patronage — including painting portraits of political leaders such as Lala Lajpat Rai, Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi — within the art fraternity he remained notably distanced from the Progressive Artists’ Group, whose ideological positions he did not relate with.His differences with MF Husain are particularly well known, with the two sharing a quietly competitive equation at various points, including when both of them turned to architecture, a field in which neither had formal training. In the early ’80s, when Husain was designing the Modi house in Delhi, Gujral was working on the iconic Belgian Embassy in the city. In his autobiography, A Brush with Life (Viking, 1997), Satish writes about Husain: “I admired his commercial acumen but felt that the extent to which he compromised his gift and conceded to popular demand was unacceptable.”Satish was also an outlier in his experimentation with materials and form, turning in the ’80s and ’90s to sculptural works using burnt wood and cowrie shells, among others. Age was no deterrent as in the latter years he continued to work in mediums such as granite and bronze. Creating fantastical and hybrid forms of half-human/half-animal figures and bodies incorporating mechanical parts, his assembled fragments evoked both ancient artefacts and futuristic constructs, while also suggesting playfulness and an Indian pop culture sensibility.When he passed away in 2020, the world around him was still silent but this time it was a quietude he had chosen. Though a cochlear implant in 1998 restored his hearing, he had found the experience overwhelming. Opting to remove the device, he returned to the stillness that had shaped his life.