A gentleman and a gentle satirist: Vinod Bhatt

Tushar Bhatt*

    Hurrying slowly has been his hallmark all his life, a trait that appears even more pronounced after he recently out-stared death during a serious ailment of the kidney and liver.Vinod Bhatt has always been a contradiction of sorts, a satirist who has been so mellowed that he hates to offend.Yet,his satire,as also his humour,retain that element of wit that makes for the soul of the genre.He is at his best when self-deprecating and mildly,subtly,mocking the world even while doing that.

    In a self-portrait in words in his book of pen-portraits,Vinodni Najare,the humour writer wryly describes his own appearance thus: Small eyes,with dark eye-bags hanging underneath,bigger than necessary nose,harsh,sandpaper face, a voice that is not pleasant to the listener for a longer time than essential,giving an over-all impression of an innocent,if not highly attractive countenance.He is not at all gullible,It is a deceptive face."

    Remorselessly,he piles on: "He may think of himself as an intellectual,but he is not able to impress people as so intelligent a person.Poor in knowledge,having been below average a student from the beginning.His monotonous failure in examinations used to irritate his parents to the point of boredom."

    All of which is highly exaggerated,and countless fans will testify ,is simply untrue.He is putting on a mask to hide the real Vinod Bhatt, a warm-hearted person, a friend who would go miles just to say hello to another friend.

    A prolific writer,he has written some 52 books since 19062 when his first volume,Pehlun Sukh Te Mungi Naar (The first happiness of life, a dumb wife) came out.These are in addition to innumerable columns he has done for dailies and weeklies over the past four decades of so.Most fall in the category of satire-humour,but there also are compilations, and biographies, such as Sadat Manto.

    He is ,like other humour writers,acutely aware of what he describes as "tragi-comedy of life" that when they encounter a satirist the people expect them to reel off a joke or two.He recalls having gone,along with his wife,Nalini,to mourn the death of a friend's father once. The friend had not met Nailni.Vinod introduced her to the grief-stricken man as a woman of learning ,vidhushi,since she has done M.A.,M.Ed. The friend's eyes shone with genuine pleasure and he blurted out " what a pair.The wife is a vidushi,the husband a vidushak (joker)."It is ridiculous ,but there it is.Most think that a humour writer is a bottomless treasure of jokes for all occasions.If not that,one to validate one's own sense of humour.This is at once tragic as well as comic.A humour-writer is not a joker."

    Born on the kite-flying day, utran,January 14, 1938,Vinod has not only been frank but transparent as well.Never a bright student,he recalls that once when he managed to scrape through an examination, scoring 35 per cent,the minimum marks needed,his mother suggested they should hold an ice-cream party to celebrate the high-water mark in his educational career.Jashwantlal,his father who was a partner in a tax consultant's firm,who apparently a streak of humour in him,riposted: "Do you know what would that mean? That we are celebrating his having got 35 per cent marks,and having missed as much as 65 per cent of the knowledge that could be had." Nevertheless,the ice-cream party followed a week later. "I was a dull student", says Vinod,with utter modesty, a modesty so utter that it might smack of pride."A good for nothing."

    The suspicion about the pride arises from the fact that that boy of yesteryear has risen to be a popular satire writer,and come to occupy the chair of the prestigious body in Gujarati literature,which in the past had been occupied by people like Gandhiji. To be sure, there were only two other humour-satire writers,preceding him as president,Late Ramanbhai Nilkanth,who wrote the renowned Bhadrambhadra,and late Jytoindra Dave.

    Why did he choose to be a tax consultant, an area that a creative writer might find no end boring,since one has to endlessly battle with figures ? "There was no option.Actually, I did not want to be what I became.But having been forced to switch to the arts stream after flunking the commerce faculty exams,it was judged that I was no good to be anywhere else,but at father's firm." But, that is a half-truth only,or as satirists are prone to do,clothing truth in self-deprecation. He very much wanted to be a writer from his young days.

    "I had been writing stories full of pathos in the beginning. So full of pathos that while with one hand I wrote, the other hand would be continuously mopping up tears welling up in my eyes."

    Unfortunately,he did not find the audience to appreciate it."In the beginning,whenever I venture out with a sheaf of papers,looking for potential listeners,other boys would make themselves scarce from the Nav Tadni Pole in Ghee Kanta area in the walled city of Ahmedabad where we lived.Some will suddenly remember they had unfinished home-work,others will think of domestic chores their mothers had ordered them to.Some will disappear quickly,without offering any valid reason.That left me with a half-crack listener,a man called Chiman Badashah.As I would start reading,with tears streaming down on my cheeks,the half-mad would also get affected. By the time the story was over, Chiman Badshah too would be crying.Then,he would place a hand of commiseration on my shoulders,and begin loudly showering the filthiest homilies on the heartless world. At that point, I too would make myself vanish."

    He did eventually manage to take his B.A. degree with economics and politics as special subjects.During the student days, he loved to reads,but books other than those required for getting through the examinations. So,by the time he passed out ,"in the third class in B.A. and in the second (since that was the minimum for passing) in LL.B.",Vinod had read a lot of literature and had been dreaming of becoming an author just as Ramanlal V.Desai,Gunvantray Acharya,Dhoomketu,K.M.Munshi and Pannalal Patel had been. "Reading them I used to imagine how good it would be to know them personally, and to know an author personally, one had to become an author himself."

    Says Vinod:" I believe writing is a gift of nature. One cannot become a writer, if the maker had not endowed him or her with the required talent to put words on a piece of blank paper,no matter it would get readers or not." It was a sheer coincident that his aunt had named him Vinod, which is Gujarati for humour,wit.Among the first writings,there only were one or two pieces of humour.If he did not lack anything, it was tenacity.He is also a patient wordsmith,revising more than once what he has put on the paper.

    What is his creative process in satire ? "That is easy to answer",he shoots back. More than fifty per cent of the material needed for writing humour has always been provided by politicians,irrespective of their ideologies and the colour of their party flag.His writing in newspapers and magazines has also been partly responsible in keeping in touch with the day-to-day happenings and relate these up in his pieces,"things which readers can easily identify and understand."

    He says that he has found that readers from Saurashtra are more responsive to satire than other parts of Gujarat."This is because an element of wit may be in their blood.It also may have something to do with poverty.The poor are able to understand and enjoy humour much more than the better-off,simply because humour serves as an escape route from their humdrum existence." Human beings are the only animals in the kingdom of God who can laugh,espcially at their own plight."When a child is born and does not start crying immediately,the doctor would be worried stiff. If later on,while growing,the child cannot laugh,it would be a cause of equal alarm.Laughter makes man a social being.Never trust a man who does not laugh heartily;also never take such a person seriously."

    Humour ,which causes laughter,has a social function too,beyond the personal one. Says Vinod,"Humour can help us mock our weaknesses and lead to subtle reforms."Vinod's own humour tends to be more subtle now as compared to the time when he started out. He himself acknowledges that the way he wrote in a devastating manner,poking fun at all and sundry,he would not write in the same vein today. He would be much more subtle."I strive to progress from coarse to the more subtle all the time. I would word things differently now to drive home the same points." Age may have helped him to mellow,and view the fads and foibles of the mad,mad world around us more sympathetically,yet incisively.

    His personal favourite as an author is a satirist of avant garde,Manto."I have read and re-read him innumerable time,all my life.” Vinod is quite sentimental about Manto.A few years ago, late Adam Sumro, a Pakistani journalist and friend,had come to see him in Ahmedabad.He asked Vinod if he could do anything in Pakistan for Vinod.The humour writer asked him to light some joss sticks and put flowers on Manto's grave in Lahore,if he ever went to the city.

    But, says Vinod emphatically: “I am not writing humour as an escapist. I write it as a creative expression of myself.No doubt I have seen dire days of poverty in my childhood but humour is no escape land for me." He comes across as a man who enjoys life,does not take himself very seriously and take the world only a little more seriously.

    He relishes the fact that he was elected unopposed as president of the Sahitya Parishad,the two other eminent people in the field,Dr Harivallabh Bhayani and Dr Ramanlal Joshi having withdrawn from the field.Especially,since even Gandhiji was once defeated by a solitary vote for the position wayback in 1920. Vinod took over the presidentship of the Gujarati Sahitya Parishad at its 38th session in Jamnagar in December, 1995.

    He tried to make the parishad more people-oriented, a vehicle for cultural activities and a booster for literary ones. A high-water mark of his tenure  was a special grant of Rs.51 lakhs by the Gujarat government, chiefly because the chief minister at that time, Mr Shankersinh Vaghela was an old friend of Vinod. He and some other members of the parishad had called on the chief minister when Mr Vaghela quickly accepted the demand for some money. With a smile on his face, he asked them to name  figure and feeling nervous diffidence, they mumbled a low figure. Mischievously, the chief minister laughed and asked why were the writers miserly even in demanding? The solidly middle class men of letters weredumb-struck when Mr Vaghela named Rs.51 lakhs. Of course, it was not coming from his own pocket,but till todate,no other leader in power has been as generous even when the amount was to come government coffers. 

    What Bernard Shaw once said perhaps sums up how Vinod feels about himself and his craft.Said Shaw: " Although I have whip-lashed people with my satire,I am still alive because nobody takes a satirist-humourist seriously."

    On the other hand,thriving of humour,and high respect to humourist,is perhaps the inevitable symbol of a healthy democracy.Remember,the renowned Shankar's Weekly was closed down during the emergency,with its editor, Shankar,noting in the last issue: "Dictatorship cannot afford laughter because people may laugh at the dictator and that would not do."

    Satire has its awe-inspiring side.As Alexander Pope noted: "Yes,I am proud.I must be proud to see men not afraid of God,(but) afraid of me." Humourists are in a sense the high priests of the modern,secular democracies.

    -----

    (* Though they share the same surname Vinod Bhatt and Tushar Bhatt are not related)

   

A trip down memory lane with Pankaj Udhas

Tushar Bhatt        

The round face, topped by a mass of silken hair, did not show having put in any mileage at all,nor did it betray the hard struggle its owner had to wage to be accepted. Only the sparkling eyes spoke of late hours they have been accustomed to keep.On the forehead,partly covered by a lock of hair,there was a half-an-inch long scar,a memento of one of the numerous bleeding cuts he got as a boy in Rajkot while playing in the evenings,then mercifully devoid of the TV.The thick bush of his moustache,drooping a bit on both sides, stood out in the handsome face of Pankaj Udhas,the nice Gujarati boy next door till a few years ago,and now a renowned national ghazal singer ,the man with a velvet voice.

    Dressed in white kurta and chudidar,Pankaj,with his slightly diffident smile that revealed only a portion of his upper teeth,struck as a man who did not put on any airs of being a star.The unassuming nature had, in truth, given rise to a myth that he burst out like a meteor from nowhere, a fluke on the crowded firmament of ghazal singing, implying that he is a passing phenomenon. "This is not true",he said. "My victory in the eighties is built on many a defeat in the earlier period of my life."

    He vividly remembered how one evening in 1976,he stood alone,friendless and directionless at the JFK international airport in New York,with only dollars 150 in his pocket,a suitacase in one hand and a  harmonium in the other.He was there to try his luck in export business, setting up an office for a friend and manufacturer in Mumbai. Having failed to make a breakthrough in the career as a singer after struggling for nearly four years,he had decided to go in for business abroad. "I was 25,had cut a record for a film and had been successful as a ghazal singer in a small home circuit of
connoisseurs. But I was not progressing anywhere beyond, and not for want of trying."

    Earlier, he could not get admission to a medical college because he had not scored enough marks in the Inter Science examination. " I had dreamt of becoming a doctor because it was a career that carried a great prestige and work-satisfaction." The, he had graduated with Botany from Bombay and decided to pursue an MBA in the U.S.A. "I secured admission to the Illionois university in around 1970,but our middle class family did not have enough funds to finance my education there."

    He said he has come to believe that he was destined to become a ghazal singer. "Look at the happenings in my life and you will realise that through each setback my destiny was pulling me to become a full-time ghazal singing artist. It was ,as if,every defeat was designed to lead me on to build for my eventual success in ghazal singing."

    If destiny was playing a part,Pankaj too provided it enough support."I have toiled like a maniac,spending eight to ten hours a day,listening to ghazals sung by others such as Mehdi Hasan,learning Urdu ,trying to understand the finer nuances of words in a ghazal,or learning classical music from Master Navrang who has trained many a noted voice of yesterday and today."

    If he were not determined to pursue music as a passion, Lady Luck would not have smiled on him ever; "I could have ended up in a nice,cosy executive job or as a businessman,with interest in music,with an amateur's voice." His rigorous training made the difference and how could that be dismissed as a fluke success ?

    Destiny had earmarked for a singing career,right from the tender age of six,when he went to school No.20 in Bhaktinagar in Rajkot in the fifties.Hailing from a solidly middle class family of Mr.Keshubhai,a central government official in textiles department,Pankaj inherited an interest in music from his father. Keshubhai,himself a son an administrator in the erstwhile princely state of Bhavnagar,played Dilruba very well.His grandfather,Dosabhai,was one of the early graduates in Saurashtra, having got his B.A.in 1902 from Ferguson college in Pune and got a job as a top official in the Bhavnagar state which had good musicians in the court.Pankaj's elder brothers, Manhar and Nirmal,too got this interest from the father.

    His memories of his childhood in Saurashtra are green,and happy.Pankaj was born on May 17,1951,in Jetpur,famous for its sarees,while his father was posted there.Although the family shifted to Rajkot by 1955,Pankaj has in mind imprinted forever some sweet memories."You would not believe,but I remember Motibai,the old woman who used to look after me as an infant. Our house was in an area where there were many houses of Memon families and I also remember Zubeda,an 18 to 20 year old girl from a family where I used to go to play as a child,showing great affection ."

    There is no history of music in the family of Udhases,except that Keshubhai learnt Dilruba from Ustad Abdul Karim Khan, the been player in Bhavnagar."I can see only two factors that may have contributed to music in me,and my brothers,Manhar and Nirmal.One,the Udhas family belongs to the Charan clan,who have traditionally been called Deviputra,sons of the goddess of learning and arts,Saraswati.Two,the father had a life-long passion for his Dilruba.My father would play the instrument whenever he found time,especially in the evenings as a hobby.Life was a slow-paced affair then and he would mostly be home only in his spare time.By the time we came to Rajkot,when I was hardly four,my brothers had already started in music;both are noted singers today."

    Pankaj went to the municipal school No.20 in Bhaktinagar,where the family came to live.The ghazal singer affectionately remembers his teacher Shardaben and the school principal,Vyassaheb,who used to organise a school assembly every Saturday. "Boys and girls,from families in all strata of society from rich to modest,would be asked to make a speech ,or to do solo acting or sing. Then hardly six ,I would sing whatever I had heard and could remember-- one of these was: Aai gori Radhika,brijbala balkhati ...". The school assembly performances gave tremendous confidence to the boy ,who could sing in a thin voice songs both by female and male voice

    In 1962,during the Navratri festival,the family had gone to watch a garba programme in Jagnath plot in Rajkot.Someone spotted them and hailed the boy,clad in shorts and a shirt ,to come up on the stage and sing. Nervously,and without any preparation or accompaniment,Pankaj sang a song,which was a rage then in the aftermath of the Chinese aggression,Ay mere watanke logon...There was a thunderous applause from the crowd of more than 5,000,the first of the big audiences Pankaj Udhas was to face in his singing career.There was a roaring demand for a once-more and the dazed boy had to be re-assured by the organisers that all was well. He sang again; an overjoyed listener gave an on the spot prize of Rs.51 to him,which his family gave back to the festival fund.

    "As a youth,I hoped to become a doctor,and was disappointed when inadequate marks in the inter-science could not get me an admission." His family had now shifted to Bombay where elder brother,Manhar,was trying to get a break for himself in playback singing addition to working as a mechanical engineer. Pankaj went to St.Xaviers, studying botany and chemistry for his degree,but his passion for singing continued.He won the first prize in an inter-cllegiate singing competition."Circumstances were such that I had not put much store by playback singing. My brother,Manhar,had been by then trying to emerge as a playback singer and had got several breaks.The field was already crowded with such singers as Mohammed Rafi,Mukesh,Hemant Kumar, Kishore Kumar,and I did not see much chance for another Udhas." Perhaps,it was the plan of the destiny that I should go for ghazal singing,he says rather simply and yet philosophically.

    Pankaj used to spend hours listening to ghazals sung by Mehdi Hasan,Begum Akhtar and others when the Maulavisaheb,who used to come to coach Manhar in Urdu,encouraged him to do something on his own in ghazal singing. The Maulavisaheb was something of a phenomenon in the Bombay film industry; he had been teaching Urdu to many a famous people such as Saira Bano,and Pankaj's brother had started learning from him on a suggestion by Kalyanji,the music director,who insisted that one should learn proper Urdu pronunciation to make a mark.The Urdu teacher started coaching Pankaj in 1969,introducing him to the treasure trove of Ghalib.

    In the closing days of January,1971, another happy accident took place.All the noted singers ,including his brother Manhar,were out of town and Usha Khanna needed to make a recording of a song urgently.She telephoned their house and spoke to Nirmal,asking him to bring his younger brother to the recording studio the next day for an audition on the microphone.He was selected to sing a nazm by Naqsh Lyalpuri for the movie,Kamna.It was recorded a day later."I felt as if a hope had been rekindled." But,nothing came his way as 1972, 1973,1974 sank into history.Maxmium,he could do was to sing in a close circuit of people who would gather at a house on a Saturday night to listen to ghazal singing.Pankaj was as if stuck.

    In 1976,he thought of migrating to the west,going in for business.He left Bombay with a suitcase and a harmonium,not sure what he will be doing,if he would be returning home.

    Fate again intervened.During a stopover in London,he sang at a friend's place,was booked for some small parties and landed in New York,still directionless,but with some more confidence.The friend with whom he was to stay in New York was himself away and Pankaj, as he stood forlorn at the airport,made a reversed charge call to another friend, Ramesh Sahaney in Toronto.Ramesh told him to take a plane to Canada,where in a few days Pankaj became famous as a singer from India. Theree were a number of Indians who had made tracks to Canada,having fled Idi Amin's Uganda.Culturally starved,they lapped up the offerings by Pankaj hungrily. He stayed on for eight months,got a lot of self- confidence at concerts,but also with a realisation that ghazal singing in Canada would never take him anywhere. He would stuck again in a rut.He was also homesick and came back to his brothers and parents in Bombay. "Ours is a very close-knit family and we three brothers have an especially close rapport." On his way back,he met Mehdi Hasan in London and spent a month with him,listening to his singing.Some say there is more than a trace of Mehdi's style in Pankaj.

    Homecoming was comforting,but it was as if, "I was back to square one." He took up learning music again, noting that ghazal was becoming popular.The years between 1977 and 1980 slipped even as he debated with himself what to do."But this time ,I was more determined than ever to pursue ghazal singing as a career.I had a lot of confidence gained abroad,could sing for three hours at a stretch, was willing to toil and learn more.The competition was tough and there was a peculiar attitude about my being a Gujarati : 'Are yaar, yeh Gujarati ladka hai,pata nahin kya gayega or kya nahin.' Very patronising--also very demoralising. "I wanted to break this myth.I am proud to be a Gujarati.I applied myself with vigour."

    In 1979 only,another happy accident took place when at a neighbour's place,Pankaj met Farida Variawa, a parsi girl,whom he married in 1982."She has been a very positive and major influence in my days of struggle to establish myself in ghazal singing."

    A new music recording company was toying with an idea to manufacture pre-recorded cassettes in 1979.Pankaj got an offer.Destiny took a hand in the matters again.

    Even as the proposal was being discussed,the brilliant Gujarati poet,Sheikh Adam Abuwala,came to their house,to spend a few minutes with his brother Manhar,heard Pankaj and sat for three hours.Sheikh Adam stayed on for days,and together they pored over a large number of ghazals. The first recording Pankaj made was that of a ghazal by the late Sheikh Adam: Tum aye meri zindagi men to barsatki tarah...

    Some seven-eight ghazals were chosen for the recording.Pankaj's first album,Aahat, was made in December,1979.The poet,says Pankaj,introduced him to poetry in a different perspective.He had a vast repertoire of ghazals;" we must have read more than ten thousand ghazals and other poetry together,just so that a Gujarati youth could make a grade." He would stay with us,talk about poetry for hours,laying a solid foundation.

    "When my album,Muqarer,was released,I had finally arrived,being accepted as a ghazal singer of substance." Mehfil, which came thereafter,re-inforced his position further.By now,Pankaj has completed more than 25 albums of ghazal singing.His album,Aman, was premiered on TV,drawing applause.He was working on a new idea."I have an ambition to reach the younger generation  of,say 14 or 16 years old people. The kind of music that is popular among them is rap,disco which has neither meaningful poetry nor any music,save the beats. I want to reach out to this segment with my kind of music-- not at all loud,full of poetry and melodious.”

A golden voice, a golden man and his not-so-golden twilight

Tushar Bhatt


The years roll by easily as the chariot of time presses on relent-lessly. But some time-spots remain green in memory. This tête-à-tête took place way back in 1994 but it seems like it was yesterday.

This would, perhaps, be more difficult of the questions in any music quiz programme: Name a singer, who lived for a while in Ahmeda-bad, for whom the revolutionary Bengali poet, Kazi Nazrul Islam, specially wrote a song to make a debut as a recording artist ?
Even more difficult would be the poser: What was the first line of the song ?
No prizes are offered for the right answer, but the countless who might fail to answer correctly may also not feel so embarrassed. Very few as such are aware that it was Jagmohan Sursagar for whom the Kazi wrote the song in Bengali and its first line ran thus: Saono Ratey Jadi Smaraney Ashey Morey. And, what is more Jag-mohan has been a resident of Ahmedabad for sometime, living at D-8,Rajdeep Park Society, Baliakaka Road, Bhairavnath Road, Ahmedabad.
At 77 then, Jagmohan defied the customary description of being old. His face did not have the dull skin of the aged. It had a glow, reflecting the good health of the stocky body on which it sat. The balding head was held high, the friendly smile he flashed still showed teeth, and there were virtually no wrinkles on his familiar face, the familiarity springing from the fact that it has been seen on record albums and cassettes by lovers of the non-film light classi-cal music all over the sub-continent, both for his Bengali and Hindi compositions.
The drawing room in the ground floor apartment that Jagmohan occupies was rather spartan. There was a sofa set with a tea-table in front. A window at the back of the sofa set even did not have cur-tains.There were no trophies or other memorabilia adorning the room; none of the trappings through which the celebrities re-emphasise their celebrity status to their visitors. Dressed in a deep cream colour achkan and surwal,the singer-composer obviously was not a man who depends on external embellishments to under-line his towering music personality. Since 1958,he has not cut a single record. In 1950,he came to Bombay to become a playback singer in the films but the trends in music composition even at that time in India's Bollywood put him off so badly that he never sang in films. And,yet,the music-maker,the poet,the singer in Jagmohan stood the test of time; his non-film songs of yesteryear are still a big draw.More pertinently,the chosen path he took away from the filmdom did not push him into oblivion.
A dignified individual,Jagmohan never turned bitter,became more of an introvert,paying heed to the calls of none but his inner voice.After the deaths of his mother and his wife in 1981,feeling lonely,he had moved residence thrice-- from Bombay to Delhi for two years while he was a member of Censor Board,then to Cal-cutta and to Ahmedabad.
He did not seem to regard his moving from one city to another as something of great importance. He declared :"I crave for affec-tion ,respect and human warmth and go wherever my inner-self tells me to. I have followed the dictates of my inner-self only all my life."
"I can go away from a city,but I cannot go away from music",he said.Then,no place has really been alien to him. "I have been com-ing to Gujarat for nearly half a century,to cities and towns like Porbandar ,Gondal, Rajkot, Surendranagar,and ,of course, for countless times to Ahmedabad."
He would not talk much about the inner landscape of his heart. But it would appear that an event in 1991,when he was on a brief visit to Ahmedabad,moved him deeply.In April that year,says Mr Rajnikumar Pandya, a noted Gujarati writer ,who looked upon the singer as a father-figure,Jagmohan was at his house when news came that an aged fan of the singer,Mr Manubhai Trivedi in Isanpur suburb was critically ill, and was pining to hear a Jagmohan song. All through the years, Manubhai,whose son Niranjan Trivedi is a humour writer of note in Gujarati, had developed a habit of listening to Jagmohan before going to bed. He had one wish to see the singer personally and hear him sing,before he went into the eternal sleep.
Jagmohan took his harmonium and went to see the ailing fan.At the sick-bed,he rendered a Bhajan by Kabir Saheb,Ab tum kab sumiroge Ram,Jeevan do din ka mehman...and it seemed to many that the very air ,the ambience in the room echoed his deep,melodious voice,soothing the dying.They said Manubhai,who had been unconscious,briefly regained partial, flickering con-sciousness during the bhajan, and slipped back into a coma,perhaps with the satisfaction of having fulfilled his last wish. Everybody was stunned even as Jagmohan wept after completing the bhajan.
But,if Jagmohan was capable of melancholy,he was capable of recovering fast as well.Remembers Pandya:"He was again deeply moved when the same day,my daughter ,Tarjani,showed him her collection of dolls that included a doll bride.In the next visit,the singer had brought a bridegroom doll to celebrate the doll wedding.
That Jagmohan was a cut above the normal run of singers was an established fact even in the hey days of the stalwarts like Pankaj Mullick and Kundan Lal Saigal.But what is not generally known is that the singer is a deeply philosophical person as well.He did not sing in films after 1950 in Bombay was an act of conviction,but he has not run away from the battle. "There is so much of moral degradation everywhere,including in music.Music should not elevate you momentarily as the modern ones-- derived from rock-and-roll variety-- does. It should uplift the body as well the soul.I have always worked in my own way to propagate the music that would lead to the total uplift of human beings rather than providing thrills of transitional nature", he says,referring to the fast beat music that is the craze today.
"There is no reason to despair. This is a passinge phase -- or,craze and again the real music will take hold,"he asserts with confidence. As proof he cites a recent concert of light music he gave in Ahmedabad; not only the large half was full, they had to set up close-circuit television sets outsides to enable the crowds out-side to enjoy it all. "I get letters aplenty ,telling me how they love my songs and these are not old timers. A lot of youngsters also write to me."
Apart from the heavy dependence on ever quickening rhythm ,Jagmohan finds another major drawback in the modern day music. "It lacks poetry". He says that "poetry is at the core of music; first came the poetry,then the ras and then the music. It happens some-times that you have a tune,but unless proper words can be penned to fit it,it will never catch on for any lasting popularity."
His most precious gift, the lilting,soft and yet booming and deep voice that Jagmohan has,according to the singer,"is a gift of God". But he also admits to having tended it properly through riyaz or sadhna; he has an impressive array oof Gurus-- Dilip Kumar Roy, Bhishmadeb Chatterjee,Shambhu Maharaj,Ustad Zamiruddin Khan and master Gama.
Born on September 6,1918,Jagmohan whose real name is Ja-ganmoy Mitra coomes from a conservative family of land-lords.Sometime before he was born,his father died of a stomach ailment, while his mother was still in her teens. Though Jagmohan had no problems in childhood,he was to grow up an ardent devotee of his mother.When she died in 1981,and was followed by the singer's wife,in a few months time,Jagmohan felt a terrible void in his life,something that he appears to have been unable to fill ever.There was an atmosphere of music in his maternal grandfa-ther's house where they went to live after Jagmohan's father died.He literally grew up listening to dhrupad,khayal,thumri and tappa,surreptiously learning from his uncle's ustads ragas and raginis as also the tabla.It all paid off when after passing his ma-triculation examination, Jagmohan took part in all Bengal music competition ,topping the list in dhrupad,tappa,thumri,kritan and baul,religious folk music of Bengal.The year was 1937.In the same year,his professional singing career began at All India Radio.The next year,he stood first in khayal singing in an all India competition at Allahabad.A music recording company, HMV,grabbed him for recording.Says Jagmohan: " I had a tune and had been trying to compose a song to suit it.But,an acquaintance, Hembabu asked me to see Kazi Nazrul Islam,the great poet.Hembabu took me to him and left me with the poet.The poet was a very kindly man and my diffidence vanished after a while. I sang the few lines I had composed.He praised my tune and music but offered to write a song for me to fit them.I sang the tune several times as the Kazi sat writing stanza after stanza;his words, as if poured after,and there nary was a change or scratching out of a word here or there.That was the song Saaon Ratey Jadi.... on which my re-cording was made." It was a great hit.Then,in 1940,came two songs of Rabindranath Tagore,both approved by the Nobel prize winning poet.Tagore permitted him to record two more of his songs.
In 1945,Jagmoohan was given the award of Sursagar (ocean of music) in Bengal.The award has not since been given to anyone else,and the singer was only the second recepient of the honour.In fact, most people have forgotten that Mitra is Jagmohan's real sur-name; it has just become Jagmohan Sursagar, a name under which he also wrote an auto-biography in Bengali. It has recently been translated into Gujarati and brought out under the title of one his more famoous songs, Dil Dekar Dard Liya Hai Maine...
Gandhiji too had appreciated Jagmohan's singing and the singer recorded Sapt Kand Ramayana in six minutes at the Mahatma's suggestion.Another national leader fond of his singing was Jay Prakash Narayan.
Jagmohan toured abroad also extensive and has been to among other countries East Africa,the U.K.,the U.S.A.and Can-ada,earning vast fan following everywhere. Speaking at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto,Jagmohan held his audience spell-bound,claiming there essentially was no barrier to music.He sang a Bengali composition in Bhairavi and followed up with an English song ,rendered in the same raga.
Jagmohan has never regretted that he did what he did in abjur-ing film singing.In 1965, Mouni Baba initiated him into meditation, but Jagmohan has been rather clinically detached from the mad mad world of filmdom even before that time."Essentially,I sing for myself" he confesses. The involvement has been so total that any-time he starts playing on the harmonium and begins singing, a visible thrill runs through his body. He asked photographer,Kalpit Bhachech, who was clicking away as the singer talked to me,to bring the harmonium box to him. For,once he gets keyed up,he cannot but sing. And,he launched into a poetic description of Krishna and Gopi,the effects of music became visible on the tiny,grey hair on his hands. There is no English equivalent for it; but he experiences romaharsh when he sings.And, it was just two line that took him into the trance like situation.He was talking of the wonderment at Krishna playing ras with so many gopis and said there is a question in the first line."When you write or speak, the way you do makes it amply clear that there is a question mark at the end of the line. But how do you convey the impression in sign-ing without resorting to anything else."
He says: "This is how it is done",and launches into raising the question is it possible to play ras or have premlila even with one in a night? " The composition, obviously, his own, began with the ac-companiment of the harmonium,then the harmonium receded and his voice became a whisper,almost conspiratorial,with the notes of harmonium faintly echoing in the background.The listener would have no doubt there was a question mark at the end.
Innumerable songs have been composed and sung by Jagmo-han and he ,and his solitary discipline,go on bringing out diary after diary,full of notations written down in Bengali. In between ,he talks about his life now. How they presented him with a purse of Rs.five lakhs and how it has been made into a trust to help the penniless artistes in their twilight years and to promote music. He is not even a member of the trustee board. "My attraction to be in Gujarat is partly owing to my ambition to raise as much as Rs.50 lakhs for the benefit of aged artistes." He also went for performing concerts oc-casionally. "No I do not get tired even after singing for three or four hourse.I do not have blood pressure,my systems are normal. I do not consume alcohol,do not eat onions and garlic.My meal consists of two chapatis twice a day. I take milk, as also tea but without sugar. I have no chillies in my food,but would have raw green chilly, which contains vitamins."
Apart from this regimen,there is a stricter one in his lifestyle. He gets up att 3 a m and goes to bed at 11 p m.After getting up,he does meditation for three hours in the morning,and then some riyaz whenever there is mood.He derives immense satisfaction from the fact that his hit songs such as Mujhe na sapnose behlavo,Meri ankhen bani diwanee,Ye chand nahin teri arasi hai, Dil dekar dard liya.... The list is seemingly endless. But the curious detachment also shows up:he tells you he recorded his last song,titled Antim Gaan in 1958 and it goes something like this...My time to go has come,and while taking my leave I bow my head to everyone..
Yet,in the same moment he believes in doing whatever he thinks as his primary task till the last breath. One song he has never re-corded and which has been rendered by innumerable others ,ranging from K L Saigal to Bhimsen Joshi to Kishori Amonkar to Faiyaz Khan is Nawab Wajid Ali's compsition... Babul mora naiyar chhuto jaaye.. "Do you want to hear it?" He picks up the diary,leafs through the pages to come to the notation and begins. This man of 77 sang without any effort or strain,maintaining the breath for more than a minute in one particular line.His entire being seemed to sing -- not just his vocal chords.The effects are almost electric as the notes fill the room, travel out of the half-opened window,into the evening sky.Everything else stands motionless, rapt in listening.
After what appears like ages,he concludes,by which time his lis-teners are on the verge of tears. He feels at home in Gujarat where ,he says, there are innumerable fans of his.He recounts the experi-ence on his birthday a few days ago in Gandhinagar. He was at the Aurobido centre and got up as usual at 3 a m, going into the medi-tation room to find Happy Birthday written in large letters. At the vedi,there were 77 roses,marking his 77th birthday. They want to put 78 roses next years and one more there after and one more thereafter,and yet another,and on and on.Thirsting for affec-tion,Jagmohan appears to find it in abundance,an eloquent repu-diation of the myth that Gujarat is synonymous with money.
Jagmohan left Ahmedabad when he felt he should. He went away.never to come and died.

A prodigal who will never return; Adil Mansuri

Tushar Bhatt


He had been a rebel,but did not look to be one even an inch.In his younger days,he had heaped ridicule on anybody and every-body connected with the literary establishment.But his mellifluent talking,carried on in a low key voice, did not betray an iota of the fire that remained buried,and yet smouldering in the depths of his heart.
Poet and playwright Adil Mansuri, even in his 60s,remained as enigmatic as ever.It did not matter if he had been living for many years as an NRI (Non-resident Indian).
On a brief visit to Ahmedabad ,which he adored for all its dust,its dirt and discomforts,Adil never came across as a man who went away to the El Dorado of all Gujaratis,the United States of America.
He had ,in spirit,always been here,and Gujarat and Gujarati lit-erature had always dwelled his mind.It is as if,he was on a leave of absence; he had never gone away, cannot go away,and will not go away even on the day of salvation.
Time,meanwhile,had been whitewashing his beard,his hair,making him even more look like a Gujarati Ghalib.He himself was not unaware of the comparison;years ago he wrote some lines about it:
Apna Ghar bhi Milata Jhulta hai Ghalib ke ghar se,
Do ghanta barasat jo barse, chhe ghanta chhat barse.
As he walked in,there was nothing NRI-ish about Adil.Clad in sherwani,zabbha and a jacket,he appeared exactly the way he dressed when he was working in an advertising firm in Ahmeda-bad.He smiled easily,chatted amiably and spoke effortlessly about life abroad.
Said Adil:"I went to the U.S.A. a little late. I was already 48 when I left India.The prime thought behind the move was to ensure a bet-ter life for my children, especially my three daughters. I did not want them to have a life of domestic drudgery,without exercising any personal choice in their lifestyle,something that I had no oppor-tunity to get when I was young."
It was a difficult choice because for a quarter century Adil had taken deep roots in Ahmedabad and Gujarat,and suddenly he was transplanting his life in an alien environment. "In the beginning it was very tough.My writing came to an almost full stop. Nobody knew me there and I did not know anyone. I had to do odd jobs in the initial stages before I landed a good job at an insurance firm.You see, in a way, I was not equipped for the demands of the life there. I had in Ahmedabad my friends, my poetry,mushairas,the familiar situation all around,the bitter-sweetness of a culturally sat-isfying life which was otherwise not very satisfying for my children's future. So, I took an adventurous decision to go to the U.S.A. I am satisfied that things have panned out all right. My two daughters are happily married and settled there.My literary output has also been increasing.”
After a blockage of some time, Adil began to write in magazines brought out by Gujaratis in America and Europe. He wrote ghazals and plays about his American experience."In the course of time, my literary output really went up. I must have written some 60 po-ems in 60 days once.” A collection of his work abroad was in the pipeline,expected to be published in two or three months,called New York Name Ek Gaam(A village called New York). He said dur-ing a visit when we met
Adil warmly spoke of a tiny organisation of Gujarati-speaking people with a literary bent of mind,named 60 Din (Sixty Days). We are about 25 couples, who meet once every two months to ex-change notes, read new writings by members together,to enjoy and make merry."
The only change visible in him was the addition of countless thank yous to his courteous mannerism. He will thank you for tele-phoning him, for inviting him, for offering him a chair,a cup of tea,a handshake,anything.
It was so much of politeness,of exaggerated formality,that after a while one began to wonder if it should be Adil who should thanking us. Or should it we who should thank him for remembering home, for returning ever so briefly,for continuing to pen poetry in Gujarati even as he battled with the key-board of a computer at an Ameri-can firm in New York.
In his long literary journey Adil had written a lot of ghazals,but can now that those creations left unpublished would be brought out as a tribute to his memory. Five publications to his credit—earlier --Wank,Pagrav and Satat,all collections of poetry,and two collections of plays, had stamped Gujarati literary register with his name force-fully.
Born on May 18, 1936,in Ahmedabad Adil came from a family of traders of Ahmedabad.Dr Chinu Modi,another rebel in Gujarati lit-erature,who prodded Adil to write in Gujarati,remembered that the poet,then writing mainly in Urdu, had first come in his contact nearly half-a-century ago."I think he was working in a cloth shop at that time,but later shifted to advertising."

Adil was a self-made man; he had mastered computers later, but at one point of time,his friends recalled,he used to describe his edu-cational background as something more than an M.A. -- M.A.B.F.,an arbitrary abbreviation of Matric Appeared But Failed. That was not strrictly true,but Adil just did not care about append-ages to establish his own credentials as a man of letters,or even as a human being.
Said Dr Modi:"Adil read a lot,not just in Gujarati or Urdu,but also in English.He wrote spontaneously and exceedingly well,a man capable of expressing his feelings in the most appropriate words and a man who was able to feel intensely." In fact, he seemed to have written only when he felt intensely about something.
Add to that intensity,an endless,never-to-be-satiated curiosity about everything around him,most of all people.This led him to a very successful career as an advertising copy writing in Guja-rati.Many remember Adil as a copy writer at a national advertising agency located in Ahmedabad some three decades ago.For years,the custom at such agencies had been to translate into Guja-rati advertising copy created originally in English or Hindi.Adil changed the rules.Remembered a friend:"His original copy in Guja-rati used to be so good that often copy writers in English would be asked to take a look at it and translate it into English,if possible."
But,it was as a poet that the rebelliousness of Adil,along with Dr Modi and Manhar Modi,earned him a reputation-- some would say a dubious reputation.The trio was all for experimentation,a lot of which they did in company of Labhsankar Thaker,another noted poet.They scoffed at the literati of the day,campaigned against them,and started an organisation,and a magazine,called "Re Math”,whose address deliberately,with the intent of causing out-rage,carried the mention it was situated opposite a public uri-nal.What did it mean,nobody knows for sure.Even the English spelling of the now-defunct set-up is unsual.According to Dr Chinu Modi, Re was spelt in English as Zreyagh.It did a lot of good to the development of literature in Gujarati;to begin with,by declaring that the only rule worth following was that there was no rule worth fol-lowing.They would heap ridicule on the leading literary figures of the day,resort to pranks and gimmicks,and made themselves and their work taken notice of.
Though the mists of time have covered many things,Adil re-membered vividly those days,which again revealed the complexity of his personality. In literature,he had been known as a rebel,a man who did a lot of experiments of form in penning his output, a sort of iconoclast.But that appeared to be only one facet of his personality as was underlined by his career in copy writing; in advertising one needs to abide by what the client wants and still add flashes of imagination and colour of concept to make it all attractive to look at and read.Adil did that effortlessly,his literary image of a rebel not-withstanding.And what was more, he did not seem to consider his days in advertising as a by-product of the necessity to make a liv-ing.As he talked fondly about "those days", Adil spoke of warmly colleagues such as Sharad Suchde, who died later.
Dr.Modi said that Adil had always been a complex personality; a rebel in letters,a traditionalist in person.There was no frenzy in his dissent;there was fire."He was like an ocean,outwardly so calm and yet running so deep.He was like a dormant volcano.He wore a shy smile,spok in a sweet manner,was meticulously dressed,and was polite to the limit of making others feel uneasy."
Adil once described himself succinctly in one of his ghazals thus:" dharm,dhandho,janm ne jati:Ghazal"(By relig-ion,profession,birth and community,he is of ghazal).About his po-etry,said Dr.Modi, one could easily do a doctoral thesis."If you do not submit the thesis for a Ph.D. any university would bestow an honorary D.Lit.on you for the work.Such is the sweep,depth and appeal of his poetry." His language could be deceptively sim-ple,and still full of depth, a depth that can be perceived by readers easily.He had done ghazals in the traditional style, and then had-broken the mould and ventured out in different directions."Before going against the traditions, Adil mastered the naunces of the tradi-tions,tried his hand, and when found them inadequate to be his proper vehicle,struck out in newer areas",Dr.Modi said.
About ghazal,he sang:
Jyare pranayni jagman sharuat thai hashe,
Tyare pratham ghazalni rajuat thai hashe.
When love first made its appearance in the world,the first ghazal was presented.
And,then, he could switch easily to modern ways:
Ena patanne billina kudakaman joine,
Maro vikas thay chhe sherina shwanman.
Seeing his downfall in the cat's jump,my own growth takes the form of the street dog.
Or, he could cry out thus:
Makanoman loko purai gaya chhe,
ke manasne manasno dar hoy jane.
People have shut themselves up in houses, as if man was afraid of man.
The same Adil could be sentimental about his city,Ahmedabad.He himself had rated his piece on the city as the one liked the best.Why? "I find that it creates echoes in the heart of the readers and listeners exactly in the same way as it did in mine when it was first created", said Adil.

Wherever,away from home, it has been rendered,it has been known to bring tears to innumerable eyes.Reflecting the yearning of a man going away from his home town, Adil said in the piece:
Nadini retman ramatun nagar male na male,
fari aa drashya smrutipat upar male na male.
Bhari lo shwasman eni sugandhno dariyo,
pachhi aa matini bhini asar male na male.
Parichitone dharaine joi leva do,
aa hasta chehra,aa mithi najar male na male.
Bhari lo aankhman rastao,baario,bhinto,
pachhi aa shaher,aa galio,aa ghar male na male.
Radi lo aaj sambadhone vintalai ahin,
pachhi koi ne koini kabar male na male.
Valava aavya chhe e chehara farashe aankhoman,
bhale safarman koi hamsafar male na male.
Vatanni dhulthi mathun bhari laun Adil,
Arey aa dhul pachhi umrabhar male na male.
[ Maybe this city,playing in the sands,will not be seen again by these eyes,
Fill the nostrils with the ocean of its smells,maybe it will not be available to smell again.
Drink in the sights of the acquaintances to the content of the heart,maybe these smiling face will not be seen again.
Fill the eyes with the images of these roads,these win-dows,these walls,maybe this city, these bylanes,this house may not be available again.
Cry,embracing the kins of the place,maybe some one or other's even grave will not be seen again.
Faces saying goodbye will live for ever in the eyes as perma-ment companions, maybe in the life's journey hereafter not even one companion will be there.
Adil, put the dust of the city on the head,maybe this dust will not grace the hair in this lifetime again.]
Although successful in America too,Adil yearned to be back home again. "I had gone for the good of my children.I will come back once that objective is accomplished." Already,he had decided that he should come to Ahmedabad more often.If in the past ten years he came twice only,he now planned to come for four months every two years."Those will be the months when I will spend time nursing my roots, deriving sustenance for myself,enhancing my joy of living.My roots are here."
The experience in every brief sojourn had been invigorating for Adil. He would go to a gathering of poets and recite some of his latest. The crowd would be so happy with what he had to say that the programme which began at 10.30 p m may end around 3.30 a m."People just would not leave",recalled Dr Modi.Adil found that there now was better appreciation of arts and culture,and men and women of letters in Gujarat than was there earlier. He found Guja-rat more prosperous,but also more crowded,and with apalling pub-lic health conditions.But,more important than everything else,he found that Ahmedabad and Gujarat responded to him,and he re-sponded to them magnificently.No one is more welcome anywhere in the world than in his own home,and even if one has been a prodigal son.
This son was not a prodigal in with bagful of grievance.He was so intense sentimental that he would treat stay elsewhere as tem-porary. Adil’s birthday slipped by unnoticed in his beloved city on May 18.Not many remembered this literary badshah who wanted as his crown nothing but the dust of Ahmedabad. No city can hope for a better tribute. But then, Adil was Adil was Adil.
On the day of kyamat, the city will owe him much and he will owe nothing. Yet, charactistically he will offer to pay up on behalf of his beloved Ahmedabad.

A Forgotten Gujarati Gem: Krishnalal Shridharani

                                                                                  

Tushar Bhatt

                                                                                                               sketch:Nirmish Thakar                                                                                          


BHAVNAGAR:

    Some people are like an iceberg; only one-tenth of their personality would be visible. Krishnalal Shridharani, who would have been only two years short now of centenary, had he been alive, is a prime example.

    Known to Gujarat mostly as a very sensitive poet of the freedom struggle vintage, he is also vaguely recalled as having been a journalist. Even in the city of Bhavnagar that boasts of him as one of its own, most think of him as Kavi Shridharani, a poet in Gujarati. Yet, this was only one part of his warm, vibrant, radiant and multifaceted totality.

    Though little remembered today, Krishnalal's lasting contribution in the world beyond the boundaries of Gujarat, was in his pioneering efforts at explaining Gandhi and his tactics of fighting the British Empire, to the world at large in English, through writing and books. He was a follower of the Mahatma in strangely contrary ways. He did not believe in aping the Mahatma in his outward appearance and style; he loved pipe-smoking, was always nattily dressed and could easily pass off as a pucca Brown Sahib. But he was not. At heart, he was an Indian, who understood Gandhi and opted to tell the world about the Mahatma through words, rather than through clothes. In the process, he acquired the Western idiom, but remained a staunch Indian in values.

    It is perhaps ironical, as also symbolic of his home state, Gujarat, hardly anyone seemed to think of Shridharani, the youngest participant in the epoch-making Dandi March in 1930, save in Bhavnagar.

    The city Bhavnagar appears to particularly revel in nostalgia in a general way, and in remembering those who made a name for themselves in arts, literature and culture. It boldly takes pride, pleasure and initiative in reminding itself and others of the greats it had produced.Shridharani's alma mater, Dakshinamurti, the Bhavnagar Sahitya Sabha, his friends and admirers unfailingly think of the man, with gratitude and affection, on his birthday in September, something the rest of the State too ought to do, at least to erase the stigma that it is a land of the forgetful and the ungrateful.

    Although he studied at Dakshinamurti and Gujarat Vidyapeeth,Shridharani was apparently not cut out to be a conventional khadi-clad.He struck his own path and went to Shantiniketan.Rabindranath Tagore was highly impressed by the sensitive Gujarati and urged him to travel to the West. It was to be a momentous journey; it changed the course of his life.Gujarati literature was perhaps the only loser.

    Late Harindra Dave, another sensitive soul, poet and journalist, once introduced Shridharani as a man who would swim against not just the current but also the flood. Anybody can make speed with the current, but only those with a rare force of soul could do so against the flow. At Karadi, just before reaching Dandi for the salt satyagrah, Krishnalal wrote a piece, Saput, and earned Gandhiji's affectionate rebuke for spinning yarn instead of the wheel.

    His lifelong passion was writing. He was a journalist par excellence and an equally perceptive radio commentator, and in those days one of the rare breed of those who would wield their pens with facility both in Gujarati and English.

    His books in English, including his auto-biography, My India My America, became best-sellers in the early 1940s.Long before he went abroad and began writing in English; Shridharani had won recognition as a poet and dramatist in Gujarati.

    Born on September 16, 1911, at Umrala, Krishnalal's childhood passed mostly in Umrala, Bhavnagar and Junagadh. He lost his father, Jethalal, a lawyer with a roaring practice, when Shridharani was barely eight. The man that grew up did not remember much about his father, but a lot about his mother, Laheriben.

    Krishnalal wrote about his mother in a poem, Maari Baa

                 Aradhanaman smarun roop Baanu,

                Ne Baane smarine Prabhuroop pamun.

   

    In 1957,in the revised edition of Kodiyan, Krishnalal noted that the first thing he would see while doing dhyan, just before getting up and when retiring for the day, was that instead of Om,his mind will show him the image of his mother.

    His early days carried vivid memories of Girnar, the Gir, its flora and fauna. He joined an innovative educational institution, Dakshinamurti in Bhavnagar. The schooling, full of experiments, proved beneficial for Krishnalal. He would not only take interest in poetry, but also took a hand at painting. When he was hardly 12,he wrote a raasdo, a folk song ,Halya Talakchand Sasare Lo.He penned innumerable such things while in school, but his critical faculty was so sharp that he never included many of these in his collections published later, rejecting them as containing little of poetic elements. But some were really brilliant, such as when he wrote about Gandhi, Daahbhari aankhon Matani,tenu tun aansu tapakyun. His love for painting reflected in his poems too.

    Way back in 1941, Balwantray Thakore thought that Krishnalal's poetry was markedly different from that of either Umashankar Joshi or Sundaram, both tall poets. How and in what specific way,Thakore could not pinpoint but he underlined the language and art as having achieved a fusion in Krishnalal's poems.His diction, other critics judged , was superb and the sensuousness of his poetry reminded a reader of Keats.

    Poetry was not all. Shridharani also did considerable work in drama.

    He joined Gujarat Vidyapeeth and was with Mahatma Gandhi during the Dandi March. For his part in the freedom struggle, Krishnalal served a term in jail. He also spent a couple of years at Shantiniketan and was one of the Gurudev's favourite pupils. He then went to the U.S. for studies ,and during his 12 years there took  PhD in Sociology and Political Theory at Columbia University.

    He continued writing at a breakneck speed in America, and the outcome was spectacular. In 1939, he gave a book in English, War Without Violence, explaining to the materialist West,the spiritual onslaught of the satyagrah, a non-violent and yet deadly weapon against repression and injustice. In 1946, he returned to India and made Delhi his home, joined the External Affairs Ministry, then under Jawahar Lal Nehru as an officer on special duty. But the poet did not fit in with the Babu culture of government and left the job to become a journalist, writing for the  Amrita Bazar Patrika, travelling all over the country and world. In those days Delhi was not as crowded as it is today, and certainly not the madhouse of busybodies that it has become in the past three decades. He used to pen a column for the Gujarati daily, Sandesh too.

    He married Sundari, artist daughter of noted Sindhi writer,philosopher and nationalist,Dayaram Didumal,in March,1950.He had wide ranging contacts and was very friendly with a lot of leaders including Nehru, Mrs Indira Gandhi, her husband, Phiroze Gandhi,and Dr S.Radhakrishnan,as also a host of foreign dignitaries.

    When in Delhi and not doing anything else, he would potter around his flower-beds and lilly-ponds and read stories to children.

    His contribution to the Gujarati literature was immense, mainly as a poet and dramatist. Yet, he was recognised rather belatedly only. Even Gujarat did nothing. It was only in 1958, Krishnalal was suddenly discovered by the literary establishment. He was named for the Ranjitram gold medal for services to literature.

      Krihsnalal died  unexpectedly on July 23,1960,when he was hardly 49. It was not an age to go and considering what he had already written, much more was yet to come. That was not to be.

    Among the noteworthy literary creations of Krishnalal, besides Kodiyan, are Punarpi, Vadlo, Sonapari and three plays, Piyo Gori, Morna Inda and Padmini. His English books include My India,My America, War Without Violence, Warning to the West, The Big Four of India, The Adventures of the Upside-Down, The Journalist in India, Smiles From Kashmir and the Mahatma and the World.

    All his works in both languages have a common thread; all reveal him to be a highly sensitive and equally perceptive person. My India,My America won Shridharani ecstatic reviews in the American Press. Thomas Sigrue writing in the New York Herald Tribune hailed it as a "fascinating mixture of autobiography, biography, political analysis,philosophical exposition and fine writing." The 646-page book's writer was described by others as a young man who has the wisdom of the ages of his people.

    On his return to India, he kept on writing. His four portraits in words of Nehru,Rajendra Prasad,Rajaji and Sardar Patel,as also his monograph on journalism show him as a journalist far ahead of his time,in his style of wrting, his assessment of people and events and his perception of the future.He wrote of India's first prime minister,Nehru , as a man who seldom had intimate friends who was most of the time,"mangificently and dangerously aloof.The passing away of the Mahatma and Patel had removed from the Indian scene the last men who could admonish Nehu."Every individual,in order to keep his sanity, must have some people who can tell him when the occasion arises that ' you are making a fool of yourself'. The man who occupies too high a pedestal for anybody to stand on equal level with him,runs the risk of losing his sense of proportion", Krishnalal observed.Of Sardar Patel whom he called a practical man,Krishnalal said: "The death of Patel marked a sharper turning point in the infant career of independent India than did the martyrdom of Mahatma Gandhi....Gandhi left a universal void; the void created by Patel's passing away is purely national, and so it is felt more intensely...Patel was a strong man, and now India is without a strong man.The passing away of a strong man always creates a serious situation.For,when a strong man dies, he not only creates a void,but he also removes the lid. Pent-up, seething forces begin to find expression." These portraits were illustrated by caricatures drawn by late cartoonist, Shankar, who later started the celebrated, and now defunct Shankar’s Weekly, a world class cartoon journal.

    Most of Shridharani’s English books are not available now. Those few copies that are there are the possessions of pride for their owners.That Krishnalal Shridharani should have passed away so early in his life was a tragic loss not only to literature but also to journalism.The best way to commemorate his memory would be to republish some of his unavailable literature and scan the family archives to see if there was anything unpublished left behind.

(The End)

   

   

Moon Burns: Translation of a famous Gujarati short story

- By Rajnikumar Pandya

Rendered into English By Tushar Bhatt

The whiff of air brought it with faint sound of a garba song being
sung in the distance. The wind carried the sound for a moment and let it die, leaving behind the tentalising sensation, just like the touch of nippy breeze in the winter. Scanning the horizons all around did not reveal much. There was a vast expanse of moonlit meadow, broken here and there by a few trees and an occasional hillock or two.

“Where is the sound of singing coming from ?”

As if he wanted to rush to the spot in one giant jump of a glance, Pappu looked into the far distance. More expressively, Varsha spread her hand, pointing her fingers in the direction of the sound. “It is coming from a far off place. My friend was telling me that the singing goes on near the dam, along the river-bank. Shall we go there, Papa ?”

Without uttering a word, I started trudging ahead. Children followed me. Questions must be whirling around in Varsha’s mind and Pappu was raring to go, but I was the restraining presence. I yearned to be alone, a solitary figure standing in the midst of the meadow painted silver by the moonlight.



1

The children, however, would not allow me such an opportunity. They told each other, “Come on, let us go.” I followed suit, adding authority in my voice. “Make haste. Or else, it will be very late when we return. Hurry up.”


The sound of singing traveled on the back of the mild breeze and dissipated as the wind fell. It was not just a sound; it was a tapestry of female voices, women together by rhythm and rendered all the more enchanting by the breeze that carried it. The sweet notes rose and fell. “Very melodious, isn’t it, Papa ?”, said Varsha, her demeanour displaying the fact that she wished she was where the singing of the garba was taking place at this very moment. She would have picked up the words of the garba and joined in singing it to herself, had it not been for Pappu. He refused to change his place.



Irritated, Varsha tried to admonish him: “Look at him. He is coming with us for no purpose. He will go to sleep and will watch nothing. Huh.” Her eyes were silently airing her complaints to me. I was about to tell her something, when the lines of anger furrowing her forehead adorned by a red bindi stopped me in my tracks. I had begun secretly to fear this girl. She had grown up. True, not so much grown up that I could not tell her anything. But, she had grown to an age where I was bound to take note of her likes and dislikes.




I slowed down deliberately, letting the children forge ahead. I noticed the moonlight making mockery of my shadow cast on the swaying grass all around. My shadow was an entity by itself, a different person altogether.


The soft moonlight became even whiter, a pristine, translucent white that felt on my skin going unhindered through the clothes, giving thrills. My shadow appeared in agony. Perhaps soft edges pf the grass-blades were piercing its substanceless body. Or, perhaps the shadow was in agony because it was envious of my clothes. Whenever I put on white clothes, Vatsala used to tell me: “You look attractive in whites.” I had asked her once: “Just attractive or more attractive?” Pat came her reply: “You look good in whites and better in white, especially under the moonlight.”


“How do I look now ?”, I raised my eyes to the moon and asked, wordlessly. I insisted: “Tell me frankly.” The moonlight as though turned into Vatsala and showered the answer, soothingly: “Lovely, very lovely. But, not as lovely as my Pappu, running ahead there.”


I queried: “How do you mean ?”


“In Pappu, not only you, I too am present. We are all mixed up in him”, she said and laughed. The breeze, as if flowing out from the serene moon, had touched me to the core. My shadow still seemed in agony. But how long should I suffer with it ? The bouquet of female voices was getting nearer and clearer every moment, the breeze too had abandoned its tide and ebb pattern to become constant, yet mild, very mild. It was so mild that I could not differentiate it from the voices; the breeze could be discerned only through the sound. Vatsala had once asked me: “Why do you close your eyes when listening to a song?” I told her: “It is not that simple. Just think of the moment when entering the inner sanctorum of a temple, eyes close automatically. Do you get the meaning? Why do eyes get shut at the pinnacle of the honeymoon night?” Vatsala burst out laughing, as if her body was solely composed of the laughter alone. “I get it, I get it”, she said, again laughing.

Varsha and Pappu were waiting for me on the narrow path. “Why have you stopped walking ? We were woundering, where has Papa got lost.”

“Lost in the moonlight,” some one cooed the answer. Startled, I asked, “Hey, who spoke ? Pappu, my son, did you say anything?” I turned to Varsha to ask her. “Did you?” Both said: “No.” I suddenly knew who had spoken and cast an inquiring glance at my shadow busy turning the silver grass into a black smudge.



The breeze made the grass tremble a little. My shadow too trembled, as if in apprehension. Well, maybe, it was the moon who had spoken.



“You two go on. I will walk slowly behind you.”

Varsha said: “No. I am afraid, papa.” Pappu chipped in: “I too am frightened.”

“Frightened of what? What is there to fear? I am with you.”

Pappu looked at me, as if he was afraid of me only. His eyes had taken after Vatsala’s. Momentarily, I felt as though Vatsala was watching. We used to talk with our eyes, without uttering a word, silently. The irises of our eyes, facing each other closely, would come alive. Vatsala would say: “Aha, our eyes are celebrating a honeymoon night.” The very words, honeymoon night, made my face, hidden in the darkness, bathe in divine moonlight. I imagined Vatsala’s face was the moon from which came the cool, exhilarating light. Holding her face in my hands, I started explaining to her….


I told Varsha; “Go on, go ahead. I will come slowly behind you.”

My obedient daughter gave a little nudge to her brother to walk, her protective hand on his shoulders. After a few steps, she turned to make sure that I really was following them, even slowly. The children started walking ahead, getting immersed in the sound of music that wafted on the air, drawing closer every moment. Apprehensively, I felt the solitude of the ambience, looked at the moon and asked sternly: “Why are you frightening the children?” No sooner had the question left me, Vatsala seemed to leave the moon. She was annoyed with me and walked ahead to the children, as if to provide a shield. The palav of her sari was flowing in the wind in their wake.


Suddenly, Varsha and Pappu stopped in their tracks. They turned towards me, clearly worried. “What is it?” I asked.

Reluctantly, Varsha articulated: “Papa, did you call out loudly for Mummy a moment back?”

“Me? No, my darling, no.”


Tears were drowning her voice. “You did call out for Mummy.” She turned to Pappu and sought his confirmation: “Brother, did not Papa call out loudly for mummy?” Pappu nodded in agreement.


“Papa, let us go back home,” Varsha said. “We are frightened now.”


“Oh, my dear girl, you are needlessly worrying. Why should I call out loudly for mummy? It is now eight months since she died.”


“But, Papa, last year on the full moon day, she was with us.”


“That does not mean that I would call out for her this full moon….” My remaining words stretched out like ink spilling out from a broken pot. I had nothing to say, except smiling nervously. The smile brought a palpable relief on the faces of the children. “Come, let us go on. We are very near now. Do you understand?” The children started walking slowly. After a while, after a long while, I looked at the shadow. In trying to keep pace with me, on the uneven terrain, which had replaced the grass of the meadow, it was rolling up and down. I must tell Vatsala something about the shadow. “Look, look.” I told her. She was walking so close that I could hear her breathing. “If this shadow were not there, how perfect the moonlight would have been !”


“You would not change. You were always like that.”

“Like what?”


“Lunatic…. affected by the mere sight of a full moon.”

I mumbled something in reply, and started walking on. We were walking at the pace of dappled moon-beams ambling through a roof of tiles, slowly, unevenly, reluctantly. We were walking very slowly, like a snake slithering out of its skin, as if it never wanted to do it, but had to. All of a sudden, I pointed a finger at Varsha and Pappu walking ahead and kept my other hand on her shoulder. “Look there go our children.”

“Where?”

“There ahead of us. Don’t you see?”

“You are a gem. In front of us is a bouquet of sweet voices singing garba.”


“Varsha, Pappu,” I shouted. As if materializing out of the moonlight, the children came back, running: “What is it, papa? What is it?”

“Look, what is….” Suddenly, the name of Vatsala evaporated from my lips, like camphor touched by fire. I spoke out, spoke a lot, and apparently nobody heard. The children kept repeating: “What is it, papa? Tell us. Why are you silent?” How would I know what in the universe around had been so thirstly to drink up my voice dry. Why did not that black shadow get sucked up? And, where had Vatsala, who did not get destroyed even when these very hands lit her funeral pyre? How did she vanish in the moonlight? What even the fire could not do, how did the soft rays of the moon did?

The singing voices of women sounded very near. Varsha said: “We are almost there, Papa. Beyond this rise…”

“Yes, let us get on,” I said. The children started walking. Very slowly, I too started shuffling. Lovely, Very lovely. Very lovely in the white clothes. But alone. I brought my hands to the face as if I was washing my face with the moonlight. May be, it would bring the freshness of a wash with water. The very thought of freshness made me turn towards the shadow. It too had surreptitiously copied my gesture. Maybe, the children of the shadow too were walking ahead, just as my children were doing. They might even be about to join the garba dance.


At the top of the high ground, Varsha and Pappu had stopped, waiting for me, “Look, Vatsala, there our children are.” I turned to the moon to tell. But where was she? It was moon alone, a mere participant in the garba dance of the women. Now the sound of garba singing was very close. Maybe, Vatsala had run ahead to join it. I tried to distinguish her voice from the woven tapestry of many female voices that made up the whole singing sound like a bouquet of fragrant flowers. My search remained fruitless, like that of a man looking for a dear one in the stampede. In vain, in exasperation, I looked at the moon, and lent my ears to the singing. The hot breath of Vatsala touched my earlobes. It almost shook me to my very core when I heard her asking: “Why are you listening to music with open eyes?”


Startled, I told her: “You are a mischievious person. A minute ago you had disappeared. When had you gone? This day last year, you were present completely with us, with all the three of us. This full moon day should also be the same.” I had said so much that she had to put her hands to my mouth to make me stop. My own words laid a siege on me and under their weight my eyes closed.


I stood there on the high ground with half shut eyes, in the full moon light. I saw Varsha and Pappu run ahead. “Papa, we will come back, you stay put there.” The words came to me like an arrow. Varsha joined the group of women. Pappu sat down on the ground to watch the garba. Separated alone I stood there, away from them. I looked around. Vatsala, Vatsala. Why was she not anywhere here ? The funeral pyre I had lit eight months ago was burning me now. My palms were hot. The singing of garba became very loud, as if they were singing close to my ears. Slowly from the bouquet of many melodious voices, my ears detected one voice. Just like that of Vatsala, or maybe of Vatsala’s. My eyes closed involuntarily.


Through the closed eyelids, the moon got through and merged into my eyes, flooding me. I experienced the hot breath of Vatsala. It all became words. “Hey Vatsala, What kind of a honeymoon night we are celebrating now ? Burning ? Melting ?” Her breathing became quicker. I cried out. The moonlight was on fire. It enveloped me like the flames of a funeral.


(Translated from Gujarati by Tushar Bhatt)

AUTHOR’S CONTACT : rajnikumarp@gmail.com

A superb painter and a gentle soul: Vasudeo Smart

Tushar Bhatt

Surat:
Cars screamed past and two-wheelers zoomed ahead,mindless of others on the road.Traffic on the road near the modest house called Rupayan in Jay Somnath Society was so mad that one would think it wanted to reach the moon instantly, far ahead of the speed of light.In the midst of this gigantic madding crowd called Surat lived a physically old but mentally young man,Vasudeo Smart,who appeared to be working as furiously to take the tradi-tional Indian painting-in tact,nevertheless-into the future .He had been prolific all his life, documenting ,improving upon and innovat-ing newer symbols in the classical Indian style of painting.Over the past half a century,Vasudeo had done thousands of paint-ings,frescoes,scrolls,line drawing,panoramic colour pieces,mammoth compositions such as Ram Vivah,Independence,that are truly speaking inclusive of hundreds of works which can easily stand independently as works of art and together bring home an impact of magnificence, authentic,artistic and vibrant in every detail.
Born on July 17,1925 in Surat in the household of father Balwan-tram and mother Gulabgauri,Vasudeo was among the tallest Guja-rati artists.In the twilight years of his life,he was back in his home-town Surat, adding a lustre to the cultural life of the diamond city.
Though his home State,Gujarat,appears to have taken Smart for granted,Vasudeo carried on with his brush,his colours and his pur-suit of painting regardless.
It was shortly after 2 p m when many of his age would be in bed ,enjoying a siesta.In the autumn of life Vasudeo seemed to be a man of different genre.He was not only up and about,but alert as well.
As the footfalls approach the door of Rupayan,across the small foreyard which has a karan tree with branches hung with painted pots, a voice called out.In a jiffy,Vasudeo ,with a toothy bespecta-cled face,sporting short,white hair and equally grey bush mous-tache,right hand in a sling,appeared in the door frame.Even before a query was made,he perceived the question and said: "I slipped in the drawing room some two months ago and got a hairline crack in my shoulder.My hand is itching to work and I am hoping to be back at doing what I have always done,painting,in a day or two."
A lifelong art teacher who spent more than a quarter century as reader in Indian painting at the Banaras Hindu University (BHU),he was completely at ease with young and old alike.If total informal-ity,modesty and friendliness were his individual traits,the master could still turn out nattily-dressed for public occasions--complete with a Gandhi cap tiltingly set on his head, as neat and dapper a man as his paintings were.
Vasudeo Smart was a titan among painters in Indian classical style,living away from the limelight of public attention for some years now;yet, he had not sunk into inactivity.His friends say he appeared to be busier than ever,bursting with ideas,seeing oppor-tunities to do paintings. Where ordinary mortals will perceive chaos,noise,milling crowds and drabness, Vasudeo found pat-terns,beauty,texture and colours.A deep and throbbing sense of romance and wonderment at the day-to-day life and an ability to bring it all on into minutely detailed paintings,strong in lines,marvellous in composition and superb in colour selec-tion,were his hallmarks.
He was strongly rooted in Indian traditions of art,thanks to his upbringing and teachings of giants like Jagannath Ahivasi,his men-tor.His fields of specialisation are as vast as his repertoire in San-skrit literature. Innumerable frescoes,murals and line drawings done by him were in collections of various societies and individuals in the country and abroad.A restless man,he also authored several books on arts and paintings.Notable among these is Roop Sam-hita, a collection of 2,000 Indian designs and a book in Guja-rati,Bharatna Bhint Chitro.
Critics have hailed his works as very sensitive,true to life in the smallest detail,with a very strong line drawing,unity of colour and sense of proportions.Said Natu Parikh:"Many of his paintings are an assembly of a hundred of even two hundred works of art.In each detail,he has gone into its aesthetics painstakingly.He was not a man in hurry, rather he was a perfectionist who insisted of getting every little thing right."
His works also display a rare ability to afford a panoramic view,without having to use too much of perspective to tell a viewer what is the central or focal point in the mural.There is a breath-taking scale in his work and still there is a rhythm,as also move-ment that help a viewer easily grasp what is being shown.In a way, it is a very effective story-telling too.
Parikh noted another characteristic of Vasudeo,citing it as a proof of ever-growing process of his art.Vasudeo never tires of bringing out new symbols.He could draw clouds in a variety of ways,trees in so many different styles that one marvels at the grand mind of the man. All this was not work of his fertile imagina-tion; he had really absorbed minute points of subtle difference in each species of tree,or each span of an overcast sky to underline the identity of each cloud,lending it not only elements of art,but an identity of its own.
Not just this,he took his observations very seriously and could,years later, recall the nuances of subtle difference between the clouds or trees or even a water mass he had done in different paintings.A good teacher,Vasudeo Smart had never ceased to learn more to expand his artistic depth and horizon.
Vasudeo's father was a Sanskrit pundit who eked out a living as a Brahmin performing puja and other religious ceremo-nies.Recalling those years,Vasudeo's voice cracks "My mother was a deeply religious person who used to sing melodiously.I still re-member those days of childhood when I and she would be sitting on a swing as the dusk feel.There were no lights,just earthen oil lamps and mother would sing.I loved to listen to her as also the the Sanskrit strotras and shlokas.I used to remember many strotras by heart."
The love for Sanskrit language had been a lifelong pas-sion."There was some element of art as well in our Vaishnav home inasmuch as the various rites of worship of Krishna called for deco-ration.The Vaishnav temples were also having rich traditions in arts,be it in music,literature,or painting.A neighbour,Zinukaka,was a good portrait artist.And so was an inspirationa cousin,Late Bhanu Smart."
Said Smart:" The atmosphere in Surat too made an impact on me. It was then a great city of culture.During the Diwali days,women would compete with each other in doing colourful saathia (rangoli) in front of their homes.Cuitizens would go round the city in the night,looking at the magnificent array of rangolis and appreciating the works of art.
The child Vasudeo,by the time he went to school,had thought of what he wanted to become in life-a painter.He had passed inter exam in drawing while in school only and opted to go to Bombay in 1943 after passing his matriculation to study art,rather than going in for a degree like B.A.The family was monetarily in dire straits.Vasudeo's voice cracks as he remembers those days.: "There was no money.With difficulty my father could send me Rs.ten or so a month. I used to do tuition and some other work in Bombay to make both ends meet.Once my father even wrote to me suggesting I might think of doing a B.A. instead. I wrote back a Sanskrit strotra to the effect that I was determined to do what I thought was best for me." Tears welled up in Smart's eyes,his voice went hoarse and turned into a whisper; " When my father died ,this chit of mine was found in his pocket."
While in Bombay,he had also imbimbed some of the spirit of the Indpendence movement.That probably explains why his chosen dress is that of a nationalist of the freedom struggle days.In 1948,he took a diploma in painting,standing third in order of merit.For two years after 1949,he was a fellow in Sir J.J.School of Arts,after having worked for a year as an art teacher at Sarvajanik Education Society in Surat. In 1951,he came back to work for seven years at Jeevan Bharati in Surat.Between 1958 and 1960,he went to the B.H.U as a scholar sposnored by the Government of India to study in the fine arts section under Mr Ahivasi.Then,he spent a year in Ahmedabad,teaching at the CN college of fine arts.In 1962,he went back to Banaras as lecturer in painting and remained there upto 1985,rising to become a Reader in Painting.
Thanks to Ahivasi,his art mind got focussed on Indian painting and Vasudeo made a study in depth of fresco paintings of different styles and techniques,preparing the identical size paintings of mu-rals found in Ajanata and Bagh caves among other things. In 1954,he copied frescoes at Badsami caves for the Lalit Kala Acad-emy,New Delhi,and went on for documenting in a similar manner murals at Orchha and Datia in Uttar Pradesh.He travelled to many parts of India studying the traditional Indian painting and imbibing the best of it. He had been given innumerable awards and prizes and held many one-man exhibitions in different cities in the coun-try.
Mr Ahivasi laid foundation for the later greater flights in paintings of Vasudeo."He was so meticulous.He would call a pundit on Mon-days in the month of Shravan (the most rainy month) to read Meghdoot of Kalidas,just to bring home to us boys what it was all about.He would ask us to try capture in painting what the poet was saying in words."
The habit stayed with Vasudeo all his life. "For doing a painting on Ram Vivah,I read Ramayana several times. For doing docu-mentation of the magnificent Jain paintings in south Guajrat in re-cent years, I read up everything that was there about Mahavir."
Those were the days of nationalism in the newly independent In-dia."We had paintings being done under western influ-ence,method.We had great exponents in western as well as Ben-gal wash methods.We did portraits,life,landscape,but it was Ahiva-siji who impressed me most in looking for carrying forward the In-dian style of painting. I learnt a lot by going round the country.More than everything else, I learnt to imbibe what was aesthetically su-perb in various styles practised in the north, in the south,everywhere."
He said:"I have nearly 2,000 paintings of different Indian styles. I am toying with an idea to bring out a volume on it, A Study of In-dian Paintings.It is such a rich tradition,you see. I feel a small book can be brought out on the use of circles, squares and triangles alone in our traditions.And,the richness of colours.The Vaishnav padas will tell you a lot about colours and their vividness. There are three main seasons and their colours,and then there are the con-junction periods of these seasons and their colours,the evenings have their own colours,and so do the dawns." The voice became animated a great deal as Vasudeo went on narrating the potential of doing things about Indian style of paintings.
He fondly recalled his association while in Banaras with another Gujarati,and a long time resident of Surat, Pundit Omkarnath Tha-kur."Punditji would snarl at you,when you talk of trying to render the innumerable ragas and raginis into painting.I would join issue with him and tell him,these paintings were doine mostly on the basis of description available in shlokas.You want to paint something about Bhairav raga,then you take the time of morning when it is ren-dered,show a temple of Mahadev etc. For really bringing on to can-vas the true nature of ragas and raginis,one has to be able to transform the rendering itself into painting. I would ask Omkar-nathji,the singers should themsleves pick up the brush and attempt it."
The sense of wonder and romance have been becoming sharper with the passage of time.Age did not seem to affect Vasudeo's sense of visual pleasure and his ability to convert that personal ex-perience of joy into a painting. Some years ago,he was impressed by the vast variety of kites in the Rander bazar,then in the Barhan-puri bazar in Surat."There were hundreds of kites, each one with a different design.We knew a few names of kites such as Ladve-dar,Kagdi,Matki, although the younger generation is beginning to forget about it all.But the richness of design struck me.So I settled down to do a painting in which I included 350 kites, all of different colour combinations and design.If you really want to study design and its impact on one's sense of art,you should look at the kites more carefully." The moot point that he made,and yet did not spell out in so many words,was that there is so much vibrant and colour-ful in life around us only that one can derive ideas from it,if only one cared to observe it, think about it and explore possibilities,with all one's mind,heart and hand.
His own creative process,however,hinged more on his ability to feel,and capture, a central or focal point in doing any paint-ing.Years ago,he was in Nagaur,Rajasthan,when someone told him of a panghat where village women,dressed in colourful at-tire,came to fetch water.The man added that once upon a time,when women did not go out so often,every time a daughter-in-law came to the panghat to bring water,her mother-in-law would make her wear the best she had.That clicked in Vasudeo's mind and led to a lovely painting,with traditional Rajasthani mi-lieu.Again,when he went to the Himalaya,Vasudeo had taken a copy of Kumar Sambhav,just to see if what the poet wrote about different types of clouds was a figment of imagination or what. It turned out to be not fiction,but based on minute observations.
Vasudeo had done a large number of paintings based on Indian classical themses,often derived from Sanskrit classics,and striving to translate into the lines,and colours of what the writer was de-scribing in words.He had a deep knowledge of Sanskrit and thought that had he not become a painter,he would have become a scholar in Sanskrit.His friends assert that he is a pundit in San-skrit,nevertheless.
Vasudeo had just finished documenting the priceless paintings in the jain temples in south Gujarat.Till recently,he used to go every alternate day to Broach and Ankleshwar for this.
He was a rare combination of an erudite scholar,a master painter and an eternal student.Vasudeo Smart was on an endless quest that,with each passing day,appeared to be sharpening his senses of visual presentation.The ability was backed by his child-like innocence,and nurtured by the care his nephew ,Jagdeep,showered on him after the passing away of Vasudeo's wife,Pramila.The only visible gap in the grand master's life is the death of his wife in December,1987,which he tries to cover by working harder.In homage to her memory,Vasudeo brought out an album of paintings, Rasikpriya.Death had separated Rasik and his Priya,but memory was a powerful potion for him.It kept Vasudeo Smart going,and going great. Then in mid-90s he made a quiet exit from the world. In 2009, his nephew Jagdeep who adored him as a blood relation and Guru,too died at the age of 53.