Chandrakant Bakshi’s Journey through literary jungle

Tushar Bhatt

With 126 books already to his credit, the 64-year-old Gujarati writer,Chandrakant Bakshi,did not look like a spent-force,either physically or mentally. It was our first one-to-one chat.There were several surprises.
He smiled easily,laughed heartily,even at a joke at his own ex-pense,behaved what the British gentry would have described as correctly,and generally comes across as an amiable person. He might forget and forgive a physical attack,but never an insult.
Which profile,many of his detractors-- and they are in a legion --would testify,did not sit easily with his profile as an author.If his tongue was witty,his pen was generally barbed,and prone to drip-ping vitriol more often than not, or so it would seem to the detrac-tors.
That made Bakshi a highly controversial writer,and he positively loved controversies.Some say he chased a few if none came his way naturally.A man who took life as it came,and like to take it at a flood,Bakshi was a meticulous craftsman of words.
But,he was not a man with the gift of the gab and nothing to say.He backed up his skill as a wordsmith with an equally meticu-lous research,meshed with ideas designed to create an agita-tion.Simply put, he was a writer who hated to be ignored and did his damn best not to go unnoticed.
Bakshi divided his writing into two compartments,journalistic writ-ing,aimed at specific target audiences of the young,of women, of people in far-flung areas,striving to learn more, know more.It is studded with information and writing in a lively fashion-- a definite infortainment.His other writings,such as novels,short stories are what he said brought him into his element.But,in both types the backbone was a mix of research and experience.
He began writing for publication at the age of 18 and had never stopped,producing during the years 25 novels,12 collections of short stories,two collections of plays,seven travelogues,14 on his-tory and culture,41 anthologies of articles,two biographies,three containing excerpts,10 of translations and 41 anthologies of arti-cles in addition to three volumes of autobiography.Even his autobi-ography,begun in 1987,was an on-going work; more volumes were yet to come,till his last breath.The only branch he left alone is po-etry-writing."I did write some 20 poems but early on in my life, I re-alised poetry was not my forte."
A rebel,who was often at odds with the establishment,he was twice awarded first prizes by the Gujarat Sahitya Academy and the Gujarat government,but did not accept,contending these should go to younger writers.By temperament,he appears to be more at home in combat than in agreement with the powers that be.Many ridi-culed him as a one-man army,always itching for a fight; others think of him as a Don Quixote of Gujarati literature, forever tilting at real or imaginary windmills-- or windbags.
In reality,Bakshi was a warm-hearted person,with a strong sense of personal loyalty and a community sense of rebellion.He loved Calcutta dearly,although he left it many years. He disregarded the criticism of the eastern India megapolis as a dying city:"I spent the best years of my life in Calcutta.I have rich memories.Your friends may not happen to be the most beautiful people in the world,but they are “ your friends",he said, explaining his loyalty to Calcutta.
His growth as a writer was some kind of anti-thesis to the envi-ronment in which he was brought up.He hailed from a family that was not poor.
Born on August 20,1932,at Palanpur in north Guja-rat,Chandrakant did his matriculation from Bombay university in 1948,taking the first class.He did his B.A. from St.Xavier's col-lege,Calcutta with distinction in 1952,took his degree in Law in 1956 and finished his post-graduation from Calcutta university in History and Political Science in 1963.In 1970,he moved to Bombay as a college teacher,joining the Mithibai College of Arts,taking un-der-graduate classes in history and political science for a dec-ade.For five years between 1975 and 1980,he also taught the post-graduate students at the Bombay university in the same sub-jects.For two years he worked as the principal of L.S.Raheja Col-lege of Arts and Commerce in Bombay,till 1982.
But what made him take to writing? Chandrakant had no clear-cut answer,save the memory that he started writing very early.His first short story,in Gujarati,Makanna Bhoot,was written in 1950,when he was 18,and was published the next year in the pres-tigious Kumar magazine.
What prompted him to write in Gujarati was the location of his stores in an area in Calcutta,where no Gujarati was spoken all day."As it was my Gujarati was bad, it was atrocious,and I began to fear I will forget it altogether if did not write."
Remembered Bakshi of his olden days:"I did not know a soul in Gujarati literature,did not even know the language very well. But there was no looking back after I made a breakthrough in 1951. My writing contained the real raw experience of the river-side,of life in a decaying city, of murders and may-hem in day-to-day life, of fish.This somehow made an impact.Bachubhai Rawat told me in those days that for the first time a short story has come where there is real life,you feel the throb of it, feel it breathing.I think that was it.I feel art for me comes from real life.I believe the story con-tent has to be there in whatever you are writing,it should pertain to real life."
He did not think that he was avidly read because he loved to shock people,by being outrageously different."That is a misconcep-tion about me.Actually, earlier there never was any tradition of hard work in Gujarati writing,of marshalling facts, mounting meticulous research,doing a lot of home-work. I have fortunately had the disci-pline of history and law in my training,and I tend to do a lot of work before I put words on to the paper.I read up,move around,talk to people,look at landscape.Nothing gets out of my hands, my control in my writing.I am outcast in literature,am never called for anything, am not on any committee, no official accolade comes my way.The Soviet Union called me,but not in our state.That rankles me some-times,but only momentarily.There has been a conspiracy of si-lence".
"I have only one ambition; I want to be able to live as long as I do in the same way as I am doing now.I ask God to grant me that.I also do not want to die an invalid.I have no mandate to improve the world."He was full of joie de vivre and wished to be that way till the very last breath."I am I,and I want to be so till I am there".It requires superb arrogance or self-confidence to wish that,or perhaps both.
His wish was fulfilled and then one day in the dawn as the night hastily departed, it snatched Bakshi; he became He.

Niranjan Bhagat: A poet and a one-man university

y
Tushar Bhatt


The fingers of both his hands are dancing, as if making - or backing - the point that he is putting across; the eyes, with dis-cernible dark pouches underneath, are sparkling. The voice is loud enough not to need a microphone even in an auditorium, although full of warmth and friendship. The forehead displays the furrows time has made on a face that is otherwise noteworthy because of a largish nose.
But, the owner of these features,Prof.Niranjan Bhagat,poet and teacher,and a human being par excellence, seems to be hardly aware of all the visual impression he is making on his listeners. In fact, it would appear that rest of his body is merely a functional at-tachment to the extremely lively --and invisible feature -- that ticks under the greying hair combed straight, his mind
Prof.Bhagat has not written more than two or three poems in the past 35 years, and even in the preceding 15 years, his work could perhaps fill 200 pages.Yet, it is the profoundness of his poetry, and not his prolificity, that has made Bhagatsaheb, as he is known to countless students of literature in Gujarat, a pillar of post-Independence Gujarati poetry.
For some five years, he had been speaking for an hour-and-a half every Tuesday at the Gujarati Sahitya Parishad on poetry; in Gujarati on poetry in many a language ranging from Gujarati to French. Said a regular listener, one of the 30 odd-people who col-lected at the Parishad to relish the pleasure of his erudition, expo-sition, explanation and critique: "You could listen to him for five hours without ever feeling bored. It is like listening to the roar of the Niagra, ever enchanting. Mark his mannerism of closing his hands to his chest and outstretching them to his listeners, as if he giving them something from the depth of his heart. It is unlike so many others, notably politicians, whose far-flung arms close towards their chest, as if taking away something from those who came in touch with them."
That alone would make Prof Bhagat a unique teacher, a rare bird even in these days of proliferation of educational institutions, with all the Tom, Dick and Harry taking a tutorial tempted to call himself a professor. He is more than a mere teacher. Although he formally retired from teaching in college years ago, he has never tired of delving into the world literature, and meticulously preparing himself to give what he has excavated to others.
Niranjan has been hailed as a poet of restraint and conscious-ness, whose poetic creativity took place mostly between 1943 and 1958.Born in 1926, he calls himself "a child of the city, an industrial city”. At the time of his birth,Ahmedabad still lived mostly was a walled city; the western suburbs were still villages and Gandhiji had been in town with an ashram for a decade or so. The Mahatma's Dandi March took place when Niranjan was a child. On the eastern side of the Sabarmati,he recalled once, were the textile mills, spawning eddies of black smoke into the sky and on the west was the Gandhian establishment, with its subdued noise of the indige-nous spinning wheel, the charkha. The struggle for the country's independence, for the growth of its swadeshi industry, for freedom to go its own way of social, political and economic development was the backcloth against which the young Niranjan's childhood was spent, first in the walled city and later in the Ellis bridge area. His Bhagat surname was derived from an active participation in Magan Bhagat's Bhajan group by his grandfather, Harilal.But this was more of an accident, according to the poet.” I do not perform any religious puja at home, nor do I go to temples. I have never advertised my relationship with the Almighty either through thought in private, or through words of action in public. Even in solitude, I never take God's name without any rhyme or reason, either to my-self or others." Eldest of among three children of his par-ents,Narhari and Menaben,the young Niranjan had a taste of free-dom fight when he suffered a fracture on an arm during a police lathi charge near Gujarat college in 1942.He went to college at the L D Arts in 1944,and to Bombay for two years for post-graduation. He regards his childhood as a very happy period- a paradise. “I have tried to re-enter that paradise through my poetry, a failed at-tempt. Maybe I will still try to do it. I am looking for my childhood in poetry". His creative journey appears to have actually begun in 1942 when he wrote the first line of Mari Papan Ne Palkare. It was not a full poem, but the journey took him to the publication of his first collection of poems, Chhandolay, in1949.He was also given the Kumar medal for the best original contribution to the magazine, Kumar in that year. The next year saw the publication of Kinnari, another volume of his poetry. In 1950, he took up teaching English literature at a college in Ahmedabad, and continued to teach for-ever, even though he no longer goes to a college, having formally retired several years ago. After Pravaldwip, which came out some 35 years, Niranjan appears to have stopped writing poetry, partly because he never felt satisfied that his creation could be better than what it had been till 1958.It is not a writer's block in the sense that he does not have anything more to say; it has something to do with his quality consciousness.
Invariably, whether the visitor is a close friend or unknown ad-mirer, the question that comes up more often than not is: Even so, why did he stop writing poetry? "There is no definitive answer. I do not know why I wrote, I do not know why I stopped. I cannot even say that I will never write poetry again." He says: "Is it a matter in the hands of poet that he will or will not now or ever pen a poem? One thing is sure I will never write anything that looked like a dilu-tion of my earlier work, or a reehash, or a watering down." He gives an impression of being a wordsmith who produces when there is an inner call, and when there is no such call would not do a thing in spite of all the world telling him to produce.Art,in the eyes of a true artist, just happens; it can never be ordered about, or mass pro-duced.
His creative process, he frankly admits, is some sort of a mys-tery to himself. ” I wrote poetry for 15 years because I felt like it; it was all bursting out on its own." His work had never been a forced or disciplined output-- a formalised production process so to say. He has to spontaneously feel like writing and then only could he write. He has written some prose, mostly literary criticism; and more often, he has emptied his thoughts to his innumerable stu-dent audiences. He reads a lot, learnt French, has travelled to vari-ous countries and goes regularly to Paris. "I must have walked a thousand miles in cities of London, Athens Rome and Paris since 1982.Everytime I go to a big city, I roam around. I will always con-tinue to do it."
Actually,Niranjan is a loner. “I do not belong to any camp. I like both classical and modern, traditions and experimentation." Paint-ing,music,scupture,architecture do not seem to attract the profes-sor much; nor do the flora and fauna, birds and bees, animals, sky and the sea, the vales or dells, the plains or peaks. “All these are beautiful and I am aware of that fact, but personally these do not enchant me. I am interested in poetry, cities, and the nameless, faceless crowds roaming the roads in the cities." He is a voracious reader, who wants not to enjoy world literature himself, but enable his friends, acquaintances and even strangers to partake the pleasure. He would dearly love to translate the 164 poems of Baudelaire from French into Gujarati.He has lived a full life, and does not have any regrets. He sets a great store by his friends, who are innumerable in number. He sometimes quotes Yeats:" My glory was I had such friends".
He admits to finding some mystique in the crowds of human be-ings, unstable, unknown, formless crowds. Yet, this attraction is not without a curious detachment. “I am in crowd, but not of the crowd. His desire to translate Baudelaire into Gujarati also stems from this. But, he would like to dodge questions that would commit him to anything. When and how will its flight take place, the bird knows not.

A Barber spells out what haunts the Nation

Tushar Bhatt

His prematurely old face showed no signs of hostility. It did not betray any emotions at all. His voice also discloses anything. He spoke as if he was reading news on the Door Darshan.

The village barber had diffidently asked the visitor if he could take two minutes. He needed no permission because he and the visiting journalist sat on the same bench for three years in the village primary school before the barber dropped out.

But, the income divide creates a wide chasm in society and many people deny friends marooned on the have-not side. The journalist could not but acknowledge the friendship for more than one reason.

The barber’s father was horse-carriage man of a buggy owned by his doctor father. The barber’s mother was the Dai (a class of women who assist pregnant women at the time of delivery and then for days to come look after the infant) who was present at the visitor’s birth.

Yet, the fragile man sought permission to speak. The visitor nodded a wordless yes. The people seem to think that the scribes knew more than what they are telling.

The village barber, wearing a shirt with a torn collar and pyjama displaying loose endings of his customers hair-cut, began his quizzing in a matter-of-fact tone.

Was it true that the visitor had done well in his life? The visitor mumbled non-commitally: Cannot complain.

The villager returned the serve rather quickly. He said: Well, better than he had. The scribe essayed an affirmative, puzzled about the drift of the chat.

There came a query like a good length ball that often makes a batsman lose his wicked.

Was it because the barber had dropped out of the school and the visitor had gone ahead? The newsman again nodded yes.

Now a googly came. Was it not because the barber’s father was poor and needed his son to add to the family earnings quickly while the visitor had no such compulsions as his father was a middle class man. The scribe could not but say: Yes.

Why were the poor parents blamed when poverty was responsible for school drop outs? The barber followed up smartly: Do the middle and upper class babus and politicians really know poverty? How can one formulate policies to combat poverty if one didn’t know what it means to be a poor?

Reading the journalist’s mind, the barber said: you are wondering about my questions. Even though he had only a smattering of education, poverty made one think. Better education would have helped him think and understand better, he said.

The poverty in the barber’s house had been a hereditary reality, an empty virasat. The veranda of the mud house had now for three generations served as hair-cutting shop, sometimes half-mockingly called a saloon or still worse men’s beauty parlour. There was a single chair for hair-cut. One of its four legs was broken and had been kept in place by wrapping round pieces of a thin rope. In front of the wobbly chair, the mud wall was adorned with a mirror cracked in several spots. When a customer looked at himself in the mirror, he would see multiple images of his face. The razor and a pair of scissors dating back to the barber’s grandfather were still on active duty.

The razor was used to shave both men and buffaloes.


The journalist was feeling distinctly uneasy now. His barber friend went ahead mercilessly. He could not renovate his shop, buy new razors and scissors, acquire new furniture, and install new mirrors because that needed money. His grandfather, father and he himself had been unable to borrow from any source. Everybody asked for money, something called margin money. Some banks were said to be giving the full amount but you needed touts to get and touts demanded a cut.

In fact, everyone in the world was asking for money. He asked the scribe if there was a way out. Nobody gave money to poor to make them earn more. Again, in the past decade another threat for the poor had come up. Everybody said the government was getting out of education and health, allowing private money to make more money through hefty fees.

The village barber said now it appeared impossible for his grandchildren to make good in life because their parents would not be able to find money. The same situation prevailed in medicine. Even for traveling on some roads one has to pay toll.

Then came a rocket. How and where would the poor find money for all these facilities? His own reading was that the life of the poor had already become more difficult with the recent years’ pro-poor policies.
The barber did not know but he was echoing a question raised many a moon ago by the economist and at one time finance minister of West Bengal, Dr Ashoke Mira who had said that market economy was fine but what about those who were not in the market ?

A missile attack followed. If all the politicians proclaimed from rooftops that they are for the poor, how come the prices of foodgrains, pulses, vegetables and other day-to-day things were not going down and the authorities keep saying: mahengai kam ho rahi hay?

The barber now fired the mother of all the questions. Are the political parties saying something and doing something else?
Or, to put differently, are they using the poor as election winning pawns and after getting into power misusing their mandate to further worsen their plight? Sometimes he wondered if men and women in positions of power were working to eradicate poverty or to eliminate the poor.

The visiting scribe began to feel the burden of guilt and started perspiring.

Then came a nuclear-head salvo. The village barber quietly put in: Are you better-off people in a majority or are the poor larger in numbers? The hapless newsman murmured: the poor are more in number.

Now it was the turn of the barber to be bewildered. His voice trembling, he croaked. So far the haves were reaping the fruits of Independence. If the have-nots are more in numbers, why do they allow this topsy-turvy governance of our Republic?

Why, why, why?

What is the remedy?

The visitor was speechless.

Instead of going on with the chat, he did the only thing he knew to escape from the reality.

He ran away.

----Tushar Bhatt

An Unlikely Artist: Manilal Mistri

By Tushar Bhatt
On November 3, 1936,a young man stood nervously on the steps at the main entrance of the old Premabhai Hall in Bhadra area of Ahmedabad,clutching a sketch-book in his hand.He had spent the previous evening at a meeting at the Gujarat Vidyapeeth,trying to capture the likeness in a few bold pencil lines of the main speaker,Mahatma Gandhi.
The youth,Manilal Mulchand Mistri, was the next day at the Hall,waiting for Gandhiji.The intention was to get the Mahatma see the sketch and autograph it.
Always a punctual man,Gandhiji came ,walking briskly,almost running.Manilal meekly presented his work.The Mahatma, a man with infinite pragmatism too,turned to Mahadev Desai, as Manilal later remembered,asking him to take Rs.five for the Harijan welfare activities in lieu of the signature.Aware of the Mahatma's practice,Manilal was ready with the cash,no insignificant an amount in those non-inflation days.
Nearly six decades later , Manilal,himself a grand old man,fondly remembered those glorious years of his student days when he was chasing an unusual hobby of instantly drawing pencil sketches of great figures of the independence movement as also of the con-temporary society,and seeking their autograph on the sketches.
Seated comfortably on a sofa at his son, Vijay's house in Ah-medabad,Manilal, a lean,ramrod man in very good state of health for his age,gazed out of the spacious French window,as if trying to piece through the tiny cloud of dust kicked up in the garden outside by a hot June wind.Always a neat and dapper man,he was dressed in a khadi kurta and pyjama,topping the head with a Gandhi cap, a rarity these days even inn Gandhi's home State.
He recalled:"I must have drawn some 400 or so sketches in those years between 1934 and 1943".Most of them were with auto-graphs of the person sketched.
An engineer by training and a contractor building bridges in later days by profession,Manilal Mistri would have left his mark on the sands of time had he not done anything else but do sketches.
His collection of sketches includes those of leaders like Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel,Subhash Chandra Bose,Mrs Sarojini Naidu,Frontier Gandhi Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan,Mahdev Desai,Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya,Acharya J.B.Kripalani,Bhulabhai Desai,Jamnalal Bajaj,Indulal Yagnik,Yusuf Maher Ali,Diwans of Bhavnagar,Prabhashankar Pattani, and of Baroda, V.T.Krishnamachari,historian Dharmanand Kosambi, singer Pandit Omkarnath Thakur,artist Nandalal Bose,philosopher J.Krishnamurti,Sadhu Vaswani,K.M.Munshi,Kaka Kalelkar,Sir C.V.Raman,cricketers Vijay Hazare and Hemu Adhikari and many others of different disposition and vocations.Almost all the sketches were done as a student while Manilal was in Ahemdabad,Baroda and Karachi in the pre-partition days.
Critics have hailed these sketches as of immense value,both ar-tistically and historically. And,yet,Manilal Mistri never had any pre-tensions to being an artist; he did not even get any formal training in pencil sketching or drawing,although his being an engineer may have helped him view things in aproper perspective and dimension.
Said Mistri:" I never gave much thought to my sketches as work of art. I was drawing them because the activity gave me pleas-ure,and to add to the sense of achievement and satisfaction, I had hit upon the idea of securing the signature of the person concerned on the sketch."
Born on July 31,1912,at Chanasma in Mehsana district,in north Gujarat Manilal has spent a life-time in Navsari in south Guja-rat,pursuing several hobby horses in addition to sketching,but had never thought of projecting his work in any manner.The family had a timber business and the young Manilal had set his heart on be-coming an engineer." When I was very young, II used to see an engineer,donning a hat,and going about with great swagger,and getting the respect of all and sundry.I had made up my mind to be-come something like him."
Pencil drawing was a kind of innocent hobby Manilal had picked up without much serious thought of either pursing an art career or doing something artistic.It was just one of his several interests."I was doing these things- sketching, writing on archaeology - for my own pleasure, Niajanand,"he said.
This was no false modesty.His sketches had remained in files,stacked away in an attic for years and years,till in 1985,the Gujarati poet,late Hasit Buch,went to see Manilal at his home in Navsari.
Buch had gone to see him for a different reason.Decades ago,the poet had read a book,written by Manilal,on Modhera,the home of a famous sun temple,near Chanasma.It was an 80-page volume,published by the former Baroda state for the young read-ers.The poet had been so impressed by it that a good many years after he had browsed through it,he had remembered it in 1985.
Manilal put two three files in front of Hasit Buch,asking mildly if he could spare some time to glance through them.The poet thought it was a manuscript of something new written by Manilal Mistri.But,when he opened the opened,the files, brilliant pencil sketches caught his eye,"an attractive and impressive array of drawings,leaving a powerful imprint in the mind"
Buch wrote later: "While looking at the sketches, I shifted my eyes to look at Manilal.In front of me,there was this unassuming man in his seventies,smiling affectionately as he he watched me poring over the sketches." The poet called it revelation of two Manilals in that moment.
Why had he hidden them away in the files? Buch suggested:"Let us put them into frames and exhibit them in Baroda." Manilal did not reply for a moment.Then, in a voice,dignified and controlled he asked Hasit Buch : "Is there really much in the sketches? You see, I had done during my college days.And may I say that at this age,neither money nor fame would motivate me. Forget it."
When Buch returned to Baroda, Manilal rang up,saying that since he was not keeping good health,perhaps Buch should drop the idea of holding an exhibition of the sketches.
As luck would have,Hasit Buch himself was unwell when they spoke and so Manilal came over to inquire after his health. Buch wrote later that he told the old man: "Manibhai the holding of this exhibition is not a matter involving you alone. It is not even our matter; it is something in entire Gujarat is involved. My appreciation of visual arts is that of an interested onlooker.Even then, it seems to me that if we put these sketches on public view,the viewers will have something to gain. Do not say no now,please."
Gujarat ,and the world at large, came to know about these excel-lent sketches,which take the viewers on a visual journey down memory lane,nearly 41 years after they had been pencilled.Some more exhibitions have been held of the sketches since,and one more to come will be at the Jehangir Art Gallery in Bombay in Feb-ruary next.
Said Manilal of his own work: "Of all the sketches I have done, I like that of the Mahatma the best. For one thing, he was the tallest human being I am ever likely to encounter. For another thing, in a few economical lines,I ,even at that young age, seemed to have captured the essence of his greatness. I cannot describe it in words;I can only feel it by looking at the sketch.Others tells me they too experience a similar feeling." The Gandhi sketch showed a thin moustache,and a strand of hair,which many have taken to be a tuft.
Similarly,the pencil sketch of Vallabhbhai Patel, done January 6, 1935,in Baroda is also outstanding. It brings out the stern discipli-narian that the Sardar was.It also has Patel having a bush mous-tache.
The sketches of Subhash Bose,Frontier Gandhi,Mahadev Desai and Sarojini Naidu,too are of immense artistic and historic worth for the history buffs and ordinary souls alike.They together tell the viewers how did our national leaders look six decades ago.
Recalled Manilal: "I used to go to the school in Cha-nasma,always wondering at the excellent sketches and pictures done by the renowned painter Ravi Verma,which were on display at a shop in the village. I often felt tempted to copy them and when I became monitor of my class,I tried copying a few of them on the class black board.They turned out to be very good.Then, a teacher suggested that I draw more often ,and, there I was doing just that. In course of time, I developed an ability to draw exact likeness of an individual's face,without wasting too many lines and that too us-ing a soft black pencil. A pencil was then available in six an-nas.One day I got the idea of seeking autographs of the people whose sketches I had done to authenticate them,along with the date.Even than I did not think of it much beyond a hobby that gave me immense pleasure. I would do the sketch, get the signature and put it away-- perhaps for posterity." His hobby blossomed further when he went to Patan for further schooling.He went to Karachi in 1940 to join the engineering college to become a civil engineer.
These sketches were almost always done very quickly. Said Manilal: "I would go to public meetings and hastily draw the sketches, often standing up or sometimes sitting on the ground.Sometimes I would present the sketch to the speaker the same day,or if the person was to stay, the next day.It was some-thing done in some fifteen to 20 minutes."
Was ever any of his sketch rejected as an unlikely caricature by anyone? No,said Manilal. Most people who looked at the work, would be pleased and would put their signature happily. "Only in one instance I remember this did not happen. I had drawn a sketch of the writer-politician K M Munshi and presented it to him for auto-graph.Munshi signed it,but put at question mark near the carica-ture.I drew another sketch of him and took it to him the next day. Munshi signed without demur."
After taking the engineering degree, Manilal worked as an engi-neer in Baroda for a while, and then joined business in a bobbin manufacturing factory at Kosamba in south Gujarat. Some years later,he became a bridge construction contractor,making home at Navsari.Early in 1940s,he gave up doing sketches alto-gether,worldly matters of working, making money and raising a family becoming his major concerns. He took up the pencil just one more time in 1961 to draw the sketch of Nehru,and never touched it again. "I am now too old and not patient enough to do sketching. I do not have the requsitie strength."
The sketch of Nehru was also different from others in one sense.Manilal could not meet the then prime minister personally and had mailed the sketch to him for a signature,if Nehrru found it good enough. Nehru did find it okay,autographed it in April,1961,but forgetting to put the exact date.
Manilal has also been deeply interested in archeaology too,and had brought out a book on Modhera 60 years ago.At the ripe old age, he was busy updating it, and contemplating to bring it out in English too. He was also toying with an idea of amateur excavation near Modhera to test some of his hypothesis.
Said Pranlal Patel, famous photographer: "In addition to every-thing else, Manibhai was a very good pictorialist.Even at his age, he was interested in outings for photography.Whenever we could manage it, we set out for taking pictures,both in black and white and in colour." The photographs taken by Manilal are also of high quality,revealing a quality conscious mind.A few won prizes and awards in competitions.
Manilal,nearing 90,was a very affectionate family man.Why did he not pursue art as a career."You see,one could not live by art comfortably. I had become an engineer by choice and had plans to excel there too.I never even thought of turning into a professional artist." Even in the autumn of his life,Manilal,as head a family that included two sons and four daughters,was simply adored by his friends and family as a lively grand old man.His wife died in 1990, and he himself was not been keeping well occasionally.
But,Manilal never called it a day."If I rest,I rust" was Manilal's life-long motto,something he had picked up from an obituary of Sir Victor Sassoon that appeared in The Times of India when he was young.His friend,cartoonist Chakor said:" Manibhai was always busy with something or other.He was a true karma-yogi." He had always done things whole-heartedly,but also with a clinical de-tachment,and without any airs.
His sketches,which he never called art,pleased him while do-ing.And,so do they please all those who see them;after all,imparting visual pleasure is an essential ingredient of art.Yet Manilal gave up pencil sketching. How many can give up to-tally,doing something they were good at for a while? He has now gone to his Maker; one can only wonder if he ever picked the pen-cil to sketch Him. No third party will ever know.

A Mystic,an Officer and a Gentleman

By Tushar Bhatt


It was a little after 3.30 p m,but it felt as if the sun had been firing the oven called earth for ages,not hours.The winding road in the sprawling housing colony in Bopal was totally bereft of anything moving,and so are the trees. Beyond the Club House,a small hand-painted board catches attention:C\19 and an arrow,in the spartan military style. As one opened the small iron gate to the compound,a camel bell attached to it clangs.The door-frame revealed a man in dark glasses,attired in pale blue, loose-fitting kurta and pyjama.He did not look much beyond 60,although Lt.Col.C C Bakshi was then 82,if a day.His face did not have the pallor of the aged.Nor had his walk-ing gait the burden of his years.It would be difficult to imagine that the man had three heart attacks; he did not look cowed down a wee bit,even by the fierce heat.Chandudada,as Bakshi was almost universally knowns,gave an impression of a man in a different mould. And, he was.Not because,barely a matriculate,he rose to become the deputy director of the cipher bureau,the store-house of secret information,in the Indian Army,nor because as a lieutenant,Bakshi was adviser at the time of the liberation of the former princely state of Junagadh in his native Saurashtra whose Nawab had foolishly tried to join Pakistan.Not even because later even as he was slowly rising in rank,Bakshi was picked up and seconded to International Commission in Indo-China. There was something beyond all this in the personality of this grand old man that made him stand taller than the sum total of all the things he had accomplished.A soft-spoken,unassuming man,who would love to merge in a crowd and still would stand out.He had not only been a model of physical fitness but he had also excelled in exploring the mind,becoming something of a secular ascetic. If Chandrashanker Bakshi had just written Jeevan-Na Rang,a small book,he would have left behind a glittering memorial to him-self.The 120-page book is actually a bunch of letters to a young girl on the art of living, the culmination of a life-long journey in search of something that enables the human being to rise above himself. Says a reader: "Mind you,Bakshi does not write like a literary genius not even like a pundit.He writes as if a grand father is talk-ing to his favourite child,passing on nuggets of wisdom on how to live even as one evolves as a good human being." Books on self-improvement,whether of body or mind,have a tremendous following the world over.Many advocate therapies and methods that are good as advice,but hardly ever followed by the preachers them-selves.They invariably are good prescription,very lucrative to pre-scribe but damn difficult to digest and benefit from,the Catch 22 be-ing that it was really the fault of the reader that he or she could not derive much from the devices suggested. Bakshi's letters to the daughter of an acquaintance were not even written with an intention to publish.In the first quarter of 1992,he suffered a heart attack an was bed-ridden.The girl used to visit him and talk about herself,her problems,life around.The kindly old man,feeling as if living on borrowed time,was weak,not able to talk much,and yet eager to help.So he took to putting on paper what he had to say. The girl naturally was delighted;but so were others who came to know of the 26 letters. The upshot of it was Jeevan-Na Rang,brought out in 1993.Within three years now,it has gone into a second edition. Chandudada,say those who have come in contact with him,is a man who was very near realising the Self.This sounds like a mystical statement,but there just is no other explanation for his joi d' vivre at an age when many of his contemporaries are gone,some others may be in bed,losing all interest in the world around.Bakshi,on the other hand,had just learnt how to paint and was engrossed in doing caricatures of birds and beasts,seen from the windows of his son,Nikhil's house in Bopal.He never got bored,nor felt tired of living. What he is talking about in the letters is what he had distilled from a life full of ups and downs,a result of his spiritual bend of mind,something that took away the killer instinct one normally comes to associate with a life of physical activity as in the army.He had a curious detachment about everything.He was disinterested but not uninterested-- which means he would not be curious to gossip-ping for want of anything else to do,but he would be listening with rapt attention if one tells him something.He could empathise and sympathise with his visitor,and yet remained unaffected. Said Mr Narbheram Sadavrati, a veteran journalist who had known Bakshi for years,"He comes across as an eternal student,on a permanent quest, a totally centred man who knows what he wants." Bakshi himself said,rather dismissively,he did not want any-thing. "I have very few worldly possessions,a meagre bank balance and the pension as a retired army officer being two." Half-mockingly,he takes the visitor to an ancient bicycle which nobody can use today :"This is the only thing here I can call my own." In addition to Jeevan-Na Rang, there are 15 other books Bakshi had penned.Among them, Minara is again a small collection of profiles of un-usual people,mostly those who came in his life,such as Bajrangdas Bapu of Bagdana.The other is a volume with pen portraits of Sufi saints,including that of Pagal Baba of Ranchi,who was his Guru.A linguist,who learnt severa languages,Bakshi has made studied the traditions of sufism. The third volume is the biggest, a 435-page treatise on comsic consciousness,called Vaishwik Chetna.It has come out in Gujarati,although Bakshi wrote it first in English,soon to get published soon as Cosmic Contact.It is a bit esoteric for a lay reader since it seeks to explore spirituality and allied world,vibrations,swarodaya system of achieving unity with nature,drawing on work done else-where in the world in allied topics.It took years for the Lt.Col to marshal his material and arguments,and he admits it is only a be-ginning.The subject of cosmic consciousness required a deeper,and more scientific study. Born in 1914,Chandrashankaer had a chequered career, a career none could imagine then,and very few prepared to follow suit even today."I was an indifferent student,never learnt much.He passed matriculation in the third attempt,went to Shamaldas College in Bhavnagar for a month and a half and took a temporary commission in the army at the age of 31 in 1945.His father had been in the service of the former princely state of Jasdan."I cam more in contact with the Kathis,rather than my own community of Nagars.I learnt horse-riding,shooting,swimming,motor driving,but did not excel in routine subjects." His father's sudden illness compelled him to go with him to Bombay for his treatment and while there he learnt typing,short-hand,radio engineering and electrical engineering.He got married to Harshidaben in 1934 at the age of 20 and took up a job with the Jasdan ruler as personal assistant,including looking after the royal stable of some 50 horses and 20 cars besides looking after the correspondence. Nothing very exciting,but even then ups and downs came. He had to give up the royal service and went to Porbandar,working in a cement factory ,earning eight annas (fifty paise today) a day.He had also enrolled for training in the police in Jamnagar and was all set to become a police officer when he fell sick.Later he did a year and a half's course in police in Baroda.He had ambition to join mili-tary right from the age of 15 but the opportunity never came."Despite all these setbacks,I was a voracious reader and had a gift of learning languages quickly. I had a good command over the English language." He went to Ratlam in 1942 ,taking up a police job at Rs.40 a month,but fell sick again.Doctors in Rajkot had washed their hands off his case when by chance he came in contact with Swami Di-gambar at Kaivalyadham who cured his illness through yogic exer-cises and practices.In 1943,Bakshi joined service with another princly state ,Bantwa ,as teacher of the ruler's sons and personal assistant at a salary of Rs.50 a month."I was always ambitious and dreamt of joining the army.I went on trying and eventually in 1944 got selected for training as a commissioned officer at Mahu and was made a commissioned officer in 1945."But he was tenacious,if anything and quickly learnt cryptology and ciphers which took him as officer in Lord Mountbatten's headquarters in Delhi.After Inde-pendence,when the Junagadh problem came up,Bakshi made bold,and went to see Sardar Patel on his morning walk."I had heard the government was raising a Kathiawad Defence Force and wanted to see if I could have some role to play. I was just a Lieu-tenant then but nevertheless saw Patel's secretary,M C Bhatt,who said the best bet was to catch the Sardar's attention at the time of his morning." Armed with a brief note of who he was and what he could do,Bakshi met Patel and got sent to Junagadh as adviser for the army.Bakshi has a detailed diary of those days in Junagadh and its eventual liberation.Later he was posted on the Indo-Pak border in Kashmir, a posting given normally for a year since it was deemed to be a field area and which got stretched to four years. Recalled Bakshi,"I had hoped to be posted after this stint either in Bombay or Pune,nearer my home in Saurashtra but much to my dismay got sent to Ranchi.In retrospect,however,I think it was all for my own good because I met a Bengali sadhu,Pagal Baba,my Guru there.It changed my entire perspective on life,although from the very beginning I had attraction for spiritualism." A year later,he went to Indo-China,a job under International Commission chair-man,Mr M J Desai." I enjoyed the work a lot and had an opportunity to meet people like Ho Chi Minh as also witness the heroic battle for independence the Vietnamese waged." By the time he retired in 1969, Bakshi had risen to Lt.Col's level and had been a deputy di-rector of the cipher bureau, a strategic assignment in those days. Bakshi did not talk much about his spiritual evolution,underlining again and again that he is nothing.But his letters in his book reveal a lot.He counselled against allowing the tongue to talk loosely and endlessly."Learn to control it.Speak in lower tone,softly.Do not react to injustice,humiliation or insults hurled at you personally.Jealousy is common and one should not feel upset by it.Hold your temper and do not react.You cannot order the world to suit you.Nor do you have to get bogged down in argument about anything." Bakshi was a great believer in the power of the human mind and thought that if one learns how to concentrate it,one can do wonders.Anger,he felt,disturbs the mind and so do other tendencies such as craving for attention and praise,fear,greed and envy.He also put a great store by service to humanity."Help others without expecting anything in return and you will be happy,even without seeking after the happiness." He was all praise for the sufi saints whose tolerance of others was legendary and whose affection for others as also willingness to serve and help others were bound-less.He thinks that various religions and their basic practices lead to a common goal of making the human beings realise their own Self."I do not criticise any religion,nor do I say there is only one way.I can pray in a temple,mosque and church.What is needed is a faith in the Supreme Element that pervades everything." He did not make any claims of being a realised soul."All I have learnt is to be able to feel tremendously for everything around me. I see the manifestation of the Supreme Element in nature around us, in birds and bees,in everybody.The same cosmic consciousness manifests itself in all of us.Respect it,adore it,serve it." In so many cases,words like these sound hollow.Bakshi would desist from declaiming these as his original declaration.But he led a life that was a living example of what he believed.He was in a sort of bliss,never losing his temper and cool,never feeling put down or put on a pedestal.In fact, he would forbid anyone from doing a pranam to him,arguing that he was not worth it. His approach to life was to accept life as it was and as it came,both at flood and at low ebb,without preference for either.He rejoiced in both.He was fond of quoting Pagal Baba:"Bhutkal bhut ho gaya" (The past has become the past tense).Why remember it and feel upset.The future is not here yet and nobody knows exactly what it will be like.The future,of course, depends on what one will do today. Bakshi recommended a self-introspection,or monitoring,every night,before going to sleep: "Did I feel angry,jealous,greedy or in-sulted during the day? Why? Try finding an honest answer to these posers about our day to day action,and our entire attitude and be-haviour will change." Do these words go hand in hand with the de-mands of modern day living,where competitiveness is everything and failure is the modern equivalent of sin? They do.Said Bakshi:"The art of living does not change from age to age.In a faster moving world,in truth, one might require a more and more stabi-lised mind.If everything is spinning at a mad rate,you have all the more reason to strive for stilling the mind so that a human being is not overwhelmed by passing fads,desires,notions and emotions." He quoted Dr.S.Radhakrishnan who said in 1962-63:"The greatest valour is in conquering one's mind." The way to do this is through continuous introspection,added Bakshi,rather modestly. The old man suddenly realised he had been talking,"talking too much".In his introspection session in the night,"there will be hell to pay for this.Who am I to teach anybody,anything? I am nobody,do not know anything." Somehow,he speaks with full conviction,a visitor does not want to believe these last words because only those who are aware of their ignorance are the one who are in the know. Bakshi lived happily till 93, which he had been saying for five years coincided with completion of education of his granddaughter, Meghna. In the earlier years, he had said repeatedly about his desire. When that happened, he fell sick.He slipped into coma several times only to recover. Then, as the dawm heralded New Year,2008, he passed away.

A living and CLICKING legend, Pranlal Patel

By Tushar Bhatt

Seldom do we realise that photography uses light and time as its primary raw materials to serve the mankind in more than one ways. It not only captures a frozen moment of life and presents to us a unique authentication of history. The credibility of the written word can be easily suspected but the photograph is trusted as a reflection of truth. This makes photog-raphy more significant than merely a tool of capturing images.
Again, as an art tool, photography presents us with a challenging task of capturing the right moment and freezes it for posterity. There is a terrific thrill in doing this, which is why out of millions of people clicking away everyday around the globe. Yet,only a fraction would emerge as real artists. Photographers are a galore, but photo-artists are rare.
With the invention of photography we acquired a new means of expression more closely associated with memory than any other. A photograph constitutes another way of expres-sion or telling. It just does not depend fully on cinematic effect which helps trigger memory and it has little to do with reportage because it freezes a specific moment in time.
Propounding this line of thought two renowned theorists and thinking photographers, John Berger and Jean Mohr said that “A photograph arrests the flow of time in which the event photographed once existed. Every photograph presents us with two messages, a message concerning the event photographed and another concerning a shock of discontinuity.”
They further argued that “between the moment recorded and the present moment of look-ing, there is an abyss. We are so used to photography that we no longer consciously record the second of these twin messages”- except when the subject shown in the photograph is known to us and evokes memory or in case of unknown subjects, the image has a mys-tique of its own.
This mystique cannot be brought about save by maestros of the art of photography. They have a magic in the coordination of their body and the camera acquired through long years of intense practice. It is a semi-spiritual pursuit, a sadhna.
Even among these true photo-artists, Pranlal Patel, an Ahmedabad (Gujarat)-based lens man is the rarest of the rare. Active in photography for nearly 70 years, Pranlal in 2009 is in the hundredth year of life, and still kicking and CLICKING. He still wields a camera, walks upright, though slowly, and has most of his slightly yellowish teeth intact and in service. He enjoys food more than people half his age, is curious like a child, and again like an inno-cent small boy, gets easily absorbed into the present moment, here and now. Behind his spectacles, eyes sparkle with abundant interest in life. He is equally comfortable with the children, youngsters and oldies.
He is a simple person, though certainly not a simpleton, frugal with words but fluent in thought. What keeps him fit and full of zest for living? “I don’t know. I do nothing special. I eat normal Gujarati vegetarian meal, do padmasan, and eat five pieces of dates with ghee (clarified butter) every morning and drink milk. I regard myself as an eternal student, keen to learn newer things. I have many Gurus; even my grandson Piyush is my Guru because he taught me a lot about harnessing computer as a tool for photography. Among my clos-est friends are two noted young photographers, awards-winner Vivek Desai and Ketan Modi, who runs a highly-acclaimed photography training institution. Vivek is also my dear-est disciple. I am proud of them”.
Pranlal is very popular among young professionals and helps them a lot by patiently pass-ing on insights obtained through decades of photography. His photography has been mostly based on box cameras of the old genre and in black and white, without using the flash. He firmly believes that “the real art of photography does not reside in gadgets, whether a flash light or the modern-day digital cameras. It does not rely solely on composi-tion, light and shade, but on the eyes and fingers. There must be a perfect co-ordination between the eyes and the fingers. In turn the eyes and fingers must harmonise with the camera in such a way that they know simultaneously what unusual feature is there in the subject, compose in a way that highlights that feature and decide in unison when to press the shutter. They must become one with each other and the subject being clicked.”
Alas, there is no device in the market that can achieve this feat for the lesser mortals! Those who have learnt the secret are photo-artists, the Masters. The rest are slaves of technology.
Of course, people like Pranlal can throw some hints. “You should think before you pick up the camera to shoot. Most of us do not contemplate in advance. Before going in for shoot-ing, you should think of some unusual angle, slant, symbolism, colours, light and shadow in the composition. Almost every thing has been previously photographed. You have to bring out something that is different.”
He says “It doe not mean that you should ignore day-to-day life. It means you must learn to concentrate in the present assignment, not just take a fleeting interest in the subject of the assignment but view it as the most important thing in your life, here and now. Your mind should neither wander hither and thither nor waver. You must see what is in front of you at the present moment. Nothing else matters. This cannot be accomplished overnight. You have to practise endlessly. Like a music maker you must never stop doing the riyaz all your life.”
Pranlal quotes an example. Ages ago, he was on an assignment to create a photo portfolio of the new building of a local company. Says he, “I could have done it in two or three weeks. But I took nearly six months. I would go to the building, sit in different places outside and study the light and shade and the time. I wanted to find out the timing and season when there would be best sunlight. I did not even open my camera bag till I had decided that in the forenoon of May there would be ideal light. The portfolio was much appreciated.”
It all began in an innocuous way.
It was a hot day in May in 1940.The world was, for several months, at war for the second time in the 20th century. The Quit India movement was a good two years away in the future and the independence of the country as yet a dream.
Thirty years old then Pranlal, a Rolie-flex camera slung on the shoulder, set out for Kash-mir, long hailed as paradise on the earth, with a return ticket from Ahmedabad to Srinagar via Rawalpindi. Inclusive of the bus-fare from Rawalpindi to Srinagar, the cost per head was a meagre Rs.42.5. But the young man was not from among the rich in search of pleasure.
He was setting out to take photographs, in an era when a camera was a rare thing to pos-sess, more a hobby of the wealthy or the crazy. A Kodak 120 reel cost 14 annas. Like the anna coins, the 120 film too is extinct now.
The photographs taken during that trip continue to fascinate even today, not only because of their excellence but as a collection of historic value. It effectively brings out how much more enchanting was Kashmir just 70 years ago and what damage man has done to it.
The 99-year-old Patel is still in photography. He took it up as a hobby in 1932. In no time it became a supplementary profession and then got transformed into a life-long passion. He may be the oldest photo professional alive and still active in India, if not in the world. A rep-resentative collection of his vintage photographs at Jaipur (Rajsthan), in March,2009, has been dscribed by Pranlal as fulfillment of a long standing desire. “I have desire left unful-filled.Now, I am waiting for one way travel on God’s train.” He brushed aside protests from listeners. “I have had everything in life.”
The photographs are not only technically perfect, underlining the superb sense of composi-tion, and skilful management of light and shade but also are so evocative that they seem to have an enduring life of their own, vibrant, vivacious and memorable.
Another trait that separates Pranlal in the rare category is the habit of preserving and main-taining his thousands of negative, repository of images of over 70 years. Together they are a massive documentation of India’s march of progress and social change.
These images also seem to re-assert the prime position black and white pictures occupied in the art of photography, notwithstanding the rapid advancement of colour photography. There is a stream of defeatism about black and white photography these days and in many cities there are no studios that will wash, develop and print black and white pictures.
Pranlal Patel’s pictures celebrate the glory of black and white, re-inforcing what W.D. Wright, a British professor of Applied Optics at the Imperial College of Science & Technol-ogy, observed years ago. He contended that the black and white photographs may appear to the viewers more real than the colour pictures. Over the years, viewers have learned to supply their own colour information to a black and white photograph.” You may get closer to reality with colour but the closer you get the more obvious it becomes that it is a pic-ture,(and) not the real thing.”
Pranlal is reluctant to take to colour photography. He thinks that the black and white photo-graphs have an immense capacity for subtlety, rich sensitivity of detail and graphic urgency. To him it also is a stimulating mental challenge to transform every colour around us into two shades of black and white only and bring a still photograph to life.
Pranlal has, over the past 70-odd years of photography, earned a reputation as a pictorial-ist, extending far beyond the shores of India, bagging awards and prizes. His work has been published in international media for decades. Pranlal has an innate sense of history. For example, take his photographs of the Sabarmati River in Ahmedabad over the past half a century. They instantly tell you a visual story of the degradation of the ecology. Or take the images of a typical wedding in the Patel farming community over past half century. They highlight subtle changes in customs and attire, attitudes and behaviour over time.
At his age most people would be bed-ridden, if alive. Countless others would have hung up their professional equipment and sunk into senility. Pranlal continues to explore life with the same sense of wonder and romance that first made him give up his job as a teacher in a municipal primary school in Ahmedabad.
Born on January 1,1910, Pranlal has come up the hard way in life, but the harshness has left no trace on his personality. A man with a largish nose, twinkling eyes hidden behind a 25 per cent darkness goggles glasses, he is quick to smile and enthuse. Hailing originally from Jamnagar district, he traces his family home now to Kolki in Upleta taluka of Saurash-tra. He grew up at his maternal uncle’s place, working in Ahmedabad in petty jobs to help family. “I have sold peanuts, soda and lemon soft drinks near Victor cinema hall in Fuvara in olden days, delivered at home newspapers of Ahmedabad, which included at one time Gandhiji’s Navjivan. Remembering his childhood, Pranlal says: “I was, however, a bright boy from the very beginning, who was made to jump several years from Standard I in pri-mary school. I passed my vernacular final (which was not the final year of secondary stage in education but of the primary stage, but in those days, something of a qualification).I be-came a primary school teacher, with an initial salary of Rs.15 supplemented with one or two tuitions”
But,recalls Pranlal, he had an urge to do something different, something so well that people will remember him by.“This yearning brought me in contact with photography in 1932 when I acquired a box camera. In the early years, I learnt a lot from Col.Balwant Bhatt, an ace photographer himself.” He does not make any claims, but Pranlal must have had a gift from birth to identify visuals, compose them automatically and then capture them exactly as he saw them with his mind’s eye. He began to work as a free-lance photographer even while continuing as a primary teacher. A meticulous diary-keeper, Pranlal noted in 1937 that he had made an income Rs.710 in that year from photography. In 1938,the figure jumped to Rs.1,241. Not much by today’s standards, but as Pranlal notes humorously: “The rupee was not so cheap in those days.”
Remembers Pranlal: “I was debating with myself if I should continue as a teacher or do something else that will make me stand out. I had been going to Ravishankar Raval’s school of fine arts,dabbling in painting to see if that was going to be my way of life. I think it was around 1938-39 that I got an opportunity to see an exhibition of photographs of Kash-mir, taken by a famous photographer, Abid Saiyed of Palanpur. My mind was, as if, under a spell. I too wanted to capture in the photo frame the beautiful landscapes, natural scenes, snow-capped mountains, the serene life style and lovely Kashmiri people.”
Abid was a sympathetic listener to the young man and not only gave him all the dope, but also a promise to speak to Kodak people to give him film at the dealers’ rate. Three friends from Mumbai and Ahmedabad agreed to join Pranlal on the safari to Kashmir. Before they undertook the trip, something happened that landed Pranlal full-time into photography.
Recalls Pranlal: “ One day I was taking class III in Madalpur municipal school, teaching Gu-jarati to the pupils, A camera, as usual hung on the back of my chair. An Inspector arrived from the municipal administrative office for his annual inspection, saw my Super Iconta, and asked : ‘What is this?’ I told him politely it was a camera, to which the inspector re-torted loudly,’ If you are so fond of photography and the camera, then open a studio on Gandhi Road. Such things are no good for an ideal teacher.’ I was stunned.”
Pranlal could not sleep that night. The next morning, he went to his principal to tell him he was quitting. “I was rattled by the rude remark. I had the confidence that I would be able to eke out a living from photography, my obsession. Already I was making Rs.200 a month as side income from photography at social and official functions. It was a good enough amount to live on.”
The young man who went to Srinagar in May, 1940, via Rawalpindi, spent a month in the valley. “Among other things, at Srinagar we stayed in a shikara for three days, paying a princely sum Rs.2.50 a day, and then moved on.” The days would be spent photographing the heart-stopping beauty of the Kashmiri landscape and people.
They went to Pahelgam and to remote villages, mountainsides, water-falls and everywhere in the beautiful valley. “One could buy a hundred apricots for six annas. Oh, it was like liv-ing in paradise for a month.”
Says Pranlal :”What all we saw can never be described in words or even in pictures. It was an era of black and white photography, and of mechanical cameras, with no modern tech-nology available to aid a lens man. I took pictures of Kashmir with these limitations, expos-ing fifty rolls of XX film. These rolls were washed locally in Srinagar.On return to Ahmeda-bad, we started enlarging them into prints. Friends and others who saw them exclaimed words like Oh! Wow! Fantastic! Wonderful! Exra-ordinary! Balwant Bhatt helped and guided me into sending these pictures to national and international magazines, earning me a name as a pictorialist.That was a golden period, those days 30 days in Kashmir. I yearn to go Kashmir once more, and capture as it looks today.”
The lucky break into photography via Kashmir made the life for Pranlal. Scores of journals in and outside the country carried his pictures every now and then. He never looked back, becoming more and more famous as a pictorialist with rare sensitivity and dedication, trav-elling widely in the country, capturing events like the wedding in the Mysore Royal family in the fifties and that in the Royal family of Rajkot. He has a huge collection of rare pictures of cities, famines, landscapes and people.
Among the prized possessions are huge albums of photographs of the Iron Man of India, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel whose every visit to Ahmedabad whose mayor he earlier had been captured on his camera. His presence was so routine that when Junagadh princely State was liberated from the Nawab’s rule and merged in the Union, Pranlal was present in the city when Sardar arrived. He hailed Pranlal, saying,” if I come, you too should. Do you keep tracking me? Is it not so?” Pranlal did a lot of photography during the Quit India movement. His pictures were lapped up by photo-hungry newspapers and magazine. His earnings shot up and he filed his Income Tax returns in 1947, to the great surprise of offi-cials. It was hard to imagine so much income from free-lance photography only in those days. Nearly 90 per cent of surplus was used in buying newer equipment.
Along with still photography, he also undertook movie photography. He filmed extensively and in 1947 and 1957, recorded some 16,000 feet of movie of a religious head’s pilgrimage of Vrajbhoomi; it was so massive that the divine personality got tired of merely watching it. But the photographer was indefatigable.
He has dozens of albums and has held numerous exhibitions. His work was not just superb photography but also a social, visual history.
His wife Damayanti, their son, Anand, their two daughters and grand-children all have taken to photography. Damayanti was a self-made darkroom wizard who could rescue very fuzzy photographs by dexterously doing washing, developing and printing. She was a sort of record-keeper too.
Some 40 years ago when Queen Elizabeth came to Ahmedabad, the state government wanted a hundred copies of an old photograph of the Somnath temple. Pranlal was not at home when Manubhai Trivedi, an information official, came to their studio-cum-residence. Damayanti requested the officer to wait for five minutes during which she spotted the me-ticulously preserved negative. Within ten more minutes she came out of the darkroom with a perfect print of the old picture. The government got a hundred copies before morning. She passed away a few years ago, leaving a big void in Pranlal’s life. His grandson looks after the library work now
Today,Pranlal looks back with great satisfaction that he will leave behind foot-prints in the form of photographic prints to remember him by. But he has by no means called it a day. Tell him of a topic and his eyes shine. A routine day, till recently, began at 5.30 in the morn-ing when he would wake up. After breakfast at 9 a m he would set out on foot from his home for his studio, a distance of two kilometres. If the son and others were not using the studio, he would get into the darkroom, working up to 1 in the afternoon.
He helps youngsters willingly in learning photography, emphasing the importance of com-position, painstaking care for capturing details, judging light correctly and developing and printing the photographs meticulously.
He advocates working not only with body and mind, but also heart. His own involvement in the work is such that he does not remember time or gets tired or hungry when engrossed in photography. Some years ago the Kankaria lake in Ahmedabad had a huge fish population dying out suddenly and the stench of the dead fish floating in the water was awful. But Pranlal took out a boat, taking his own time in capturing just one memorable picture of the dead fish panned by empty boats on either side of the frame. He never noticed the stink, as he clicked away till he had captured the right composition.
He says “photography is something done with the eye, the mind and the heart. The equip-ment ,though important ,is secondary. With the best equipment in the world, you could turn up with lousy pictures. With primitive equipment but alert mind, you could transform ordi-nary things into photographs of extra-ordinary charm and beauty.”
He generally does not use a flash and none of his memorable pictures has had the use of artificial lights. He believes that the real fruits of good photography cannot be reaped unless one takes an equal amount of care in washing, developing and printing. His one-liner to aspiring photographers is “Do not compromise, either in quality, costs or time de-voted in getting a good picture. Quality always remains in the vogue, whatever the era, whatever the state of technological development. It was so yesterday, it is so today, and will be so tomorrow and the day after too.”
It is all pure Zen of photography.