After a swimming accident on the river Lidder in Kashmir left an eight-year-old Satish Gujral deaf, he was taken to a school for the disabled. He refused to enrol. It was the first of many conventional paths Gujral would later reject. With formal learning difficult, his father handed him a pencil and paper to see if art might be something he could take to. He did, resulting in a legendary career that progressed from painting and sculpture to murals and, eventually, architecture.
Born in Jhelum, now in Pakistan, on December 25, 1925, Gujral would have turned 100 last December (he died in 2020). His centenary is being marked by a major retrospective at Delhi’s National Gallery of Modern Art, talks and shows across platforms like the Jaipur Literature Festival and India Art Fair, the reissue of his autobiography, and, most significantly, the opening of the iconic Gujral House in Delhi to the public.
A LIVING STUDIO
The house Gujral built for himself in Lajpat Nagar rejects conventional spatial logic, the shifts in level and structure rendering it a crafted, living form. When he began building it with architect Raj Rewal in the late 1960s, Gujral envisioned it as a living studio. “He wanted to show people how art should be displayed and perceived,” says his son, architect Mohit Gujral. “That required volume and scale.”
The house remained both his residence and studio for the rest of his life. Its rooms were never fixed. “They kept changing according to his moods and needs,” says Mohit. The Gujral House, Mohit says, will be part museum, housing his works, but also “a space with rotating displays and conversations aligned with his beliefs, constantly evolving and speaking to future generations”.
THE PARTITION SERIES
Gujral built the house decades after being forced to leave Pakistan during partition. He witnessed the violence up close, an experience that later found expression in his celebrated partition series. Pained, anguished faces of men and women dominate the series, enlarged as if pressing toward the viewer. They remain among the starkest visual records of the violence of partition. “That became historic because here was an artist who had witnessed a moment of history first-hand,” says Mohit. The paintings also won him a scholarship to Mexico.
OF MURALS AND ARCHITECTURE
Gujral arrived in Mexico in 1952, taking an unconventional route when the Progressives of that time, like M.F. Husain, S.H. Raza and F.N. Souza, gravitated towards London or New York. In Mexico, Gujral trained under the influential radical muralist Diego Rivera and formed a close bond with Frida Kahlo. Like Gujral, Kahlo was disabled early in life after contracting polio at six, and later, a serious accident.
In Mexico, Gujral also met the pioneering American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. “He asked Wright why his buildings had no murals,” recalls Mohit. “Wright replied that murals are needed only on dead walls, that art is used to embellish what is otherwise lifeless.”
The exchange stayed with Gujral and later shaped his approach to architecture, a discipline he took up in his 50s in 1977 without any formal training. “His architecture was very sculptural and had no art,” says Mohit. “He would say, ‘My building is my art’.”
BUILDING AS ART
Few artists have experimented as much with style, form and material as Gujral. “He understood materiality and he reacted deeply to what he saw,” says Mohit. “That is why his work kept changing. He had many phases—unlike most artists. He used to say, ‘If I repeat what makes me popular, I will die’.”
That refusal to settle carried him from painting to muralism, and eventually to architecture. The most famous example is the Belgian Embassy in Delhi, where he shed conventional architectural elements. Instead, he worked extensively with exposed brick and incorporated arches, vaults, domes and turret-like forms, giving the building the feel of an old fortress. For his work, Gujral was awarded the Order of the Crown by the Belgian government, becoming the first non-Belgian to receive the honour.
“He preferred materials like brick and stone, and earth tones—those that respond to the Indian climate and are not absorptive and harsh. He always felt that we must create a new Indian style in art and architecture,” says Mohit.
Over a four-decade architectural career, Gujral has designed several buildings, including the Ambedkar Bhavan in Lucknow, Al-Moughtara Farm in Riyadh, the Indira Gandhi Centre for Indian Culture in Mauritius, Goa University, and the Indian Embassy in Kathmandu. His art, whether painting, sculpture or architecture, carries a consistent signature—an underlying fluidity.
SOUND AS FORM
A sculpture by Gujral on view at his retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern Art looks like the inner ear. The motif appears in many of his paintings, too. The palette also noticeably softens. These works were made during the years when Gujral got his hearing back. In 1998, in his early 70s, he underwent a cochlear implant.
“I was like a child learning the world for the first time,” he told a newspaper then.
Yet, he got it removed, two years later. “It was very troublesome: You hear something and try to identify it. And the sounds! If a car door closed a block away I could hear it. A normal person learns to filter sounds; I could not,” he said.
Having produced a rich body of work across mediums, the centenary celebrations are but a fitting tribute to an artist who refused to be boxed into a single category. In a 2016 interview, he lamented, “Delhi hasn’t learnt to respect its artists yet.”
A decade later, has that changed?
“Art is more respected as a commodity,” says Mohit. “People buy it because they see it as an investment opportunity. I’m not so sure if we are deeply sensitive to the subject itself. I wouldn’t restrict it to just Delhi. We also don’t have enough art critics educating on the subject.”