Behind the several expert identities of Prof. P.N. Mago were many individual elements, too. In any role in life– as a child, as a bro, as a partner, as a brother-in-law, as a papa, as an uncle, as a father-in-law, as a grandpa, as a pal, and as a coach– he invariably drew warm love, even love, from those around.
One could conveniently write a collection of articles on his multi-faceted life. On this online forum, however, I just desire to concentrate on his most public profile: as an eminent artist. And rather than describe him as Prof. Mago, an official and far-off appellation, from hereon I will call him Chachaji, the north Indian considerate term for an affectionate uncle. And to me and my brother or sisters, that’s what he was even as a prominent musician; the two elements were indivisible for us. Thus, I will certainly do without any type of pretense at “dispassionate objectivity” (that protean expression implies different things to various people in non-scientific contexts, anyway).
My understandings of Chachaji’s art have actually been formed by what I have intuitively really felt regarding his creativity or read about his work and art more usually. I do not have the know-how of a musician or a movie critic, however my inexperienced passion in art recognition is historical. It began in my secondary school, grown in college (art was, in addition to English literary works and government, a subject I chose for my B.A. degree), and later on, as I did my advanced work in the U.S., it obtained a more boost through my immersion in Oriental cultural background.
Chachaji was a multisided artist. He attracted and painted landscapes, pictures, and a full series of sad, pleased, and various other ordinary human task in both rural and urban contexts– in the Kashmir and Himachal hills along with in the northern levels. The media he made use of were oil and acrylic paints, charcoal, ink, watercolors, and pencil. I do not, however, recall seeing any still-life paint or a self-portrait by him.
A few of his art is extensively readily available in publications or short articles and some I bear in mind seeing in numerous Delhi homes back in the 1950 s- 1960 s. As my cousin Chandrika Mago stated to me a few years ago, several of his other precious paintings were left in Lahore as he became part of a desperate exodus from the city’s mass massacres throughout the 1947 Dividers of India.
Over the last decade or two, I have actually developed a close friendship with a Lahore-based teacher who is a skillful musician. He and I share a rate of interest in verse and art as well. At my demand he carefully tried to map those paintings some years back, but fruitless. With his contacts, 2 Lahore museum staffers likewise examined the matter completely for me, but developed no fruitful outcomes. They wrote to me about the efforts they made, and I shared to them our collective thankfulness, naturally. One can just speculate what those paintings were and in whose hands they wound up.
Something that sticks out for me today concerning the thematic focus of Chachaji’s art is that his really early work seemed to center greatly on the typical individuals: hardworking men and women growing crops, gathering and lugging the fruit of their labor on their heads, and capturing fish in hill streams; rickshaw pullers or day laborers catching a breath or having a siesta on pathways; ordinary soldiers leaving for war obligation; street children playing with marbles; women talking in the roads or gaming consoling each other in bereavement; country kids riding buffaloes lolling concerning in a fish pond; drummers heralding some welcome event with gusto, and so on. Even in the landscapes from his younger years, this human aspect appeared at the facility. It was all part of the dynamic activities that had brushed up throughout the Eastern art and literary scenes in the late 1940 s and early 1950 s.
Blog post- 1950 Communist China, influenced by the Soviet Union’s guidance in art and literature, promoted the genre called “socialist realism.” Developed to cultivate solidarity with farmers and manufacturing facility employees, art in particular acquired a stiflingly uniform and propagandistic pattern. It had a shouting didacticism. In the freer environment of India, artists and authors selected their topics of their own will and utilized their very own idioms. So there was a vibrant range and no in-your-face didacticism; the emphasis was straight on the various aspects of lives lived, and the lessons to be attracted, if any, were left to the visitor. Also somber styles in Indian art circles forecasted a durable, no-holds-barred individuality. Chachaji’s progressivism was directly in that classification.
Back in the early 1960 s, I would on occasion see a senior site visitor called G. Venkatachalam at Chachaji’s Delhi home. We more youthful Magos used to call him Uncle Venka. To Chachaji and Chachiji (Prema Mago, nee Mathur; an artist in her very own right), he was just Venka, the form of address he plainly favored among pals. He was a Bengaluru-based global tourist, a prolific art and literary critic, memoirist, and analyst on miscellaneous public individualities, both Indian and international, whom he had recognized or observed at close quarters. In 1966, when he was 75, he put together most of his pen pictures over the years right into a publication labelled “My Contemporaries.”
In it one locates essays on Annie Besant, R.N. Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore, Aurobindo Ghose, Subhas C. Bose, Mahatma Gandhi, J.L. Nehru, Devika Rani, Svetoslav Roerich, Amrita Sher-Gil, J. Krishnamurti, Uday Shankar, Ravi Shankar, Nandalal Bose, Raman Maharishi, A.R. Chughtai, renowned Japanese poet Yone Noguchi, and a host of other noteworthy figures in national politics, arts and letters. In the area listing painters and artists, one also discovers the name P.N. Mago. I noticed that Venka’s essay on Chachaji was composed in 1949, when Chachaji was just 26 years old!
To locate Chachaji from such a young age because book, among many luminaries from different profession, was exciting to me simply in itself.
After that, as I read that essay and related it to several of Chachaji’s very early job, I pertained to grasp why it was natural for Venka to include him amongst his admired musicians. The book itself doesn’t have any type of illustrations, yet I could easily imagine the paintings that may have attracted Venka’s praise. The foremost items amongst them would certainly have been Chachaji’s works labelled “Goodbye” and “Mourners”– the very first capturing the touching minute of Indian soldiers departing of their liked ones as they board a train to fight for the British throughout WW 2 in far-off areas of Europe, Southeast Asia, and North Africa; and the 2nd showing a group of veiled females crying and sympathizing with each other over some close kin’s fatality in the dreadful after-effects of Dividers.
Both works have actually been used in books and write-ups as included pictures taking a look at the misfortune of war and the subcontinent’s experience of Dividers. Allow me discuss these 2 at some size before I generate various other examples from Chachaji’s body of work.
The short article by Venka calls Chachaji a “modernist” plainly influenced by French Impressionism in a few of his early paintings and by Van Gogh in others, but additionally revealing facets of conventional Indian small style in a fashion that marks out his job as anything yet a copy of anyone or anything. Venka rightly saw Chachaji as an one-of-a-kind musician trying out and harmonizing different customs in a tranquility and reasoned way as opposed to mindlessly imitating contemporary trends as numerous others were doing at the time. It’s in the end the P.N. Mago design, pure and simple.
Impressionism, as the term suggests, looks for to stress not photo accuracy in forms or shades yet, like the Zen-based Japanese landscape painting that actually formed the early French and broader Western Impressionists, the leading feeling or mood in a provided scene as understood by an artist’s inner vision.
In Zen landscape painting (“sansui”), it’s called the “spirit” of a mountain or river or tree, and an excellent painter is seen as a skilled conciliator who intuitively recognizes when and just how to bring that spirit to the paper in fast, extra strokes that worry the representation of things and large, empty spaces as equally complementary. Profuse use different shades and shielding is prevented under an old piece of visual knowledge claiming “black can be ten colors.” Likewise, the single declining viewpoint is restrained, not noticeable, and occasionally numerous airplanes are utilized in the same work.
Western painters, in contrast, did protect the use of the solitary receding perspective, shielding, and vivid colors as they adapted the Japanese methods and fine-tuned them, so photo realistic look is muted yet not deserted. (Use of the sophisticated receding point of view in Japan, as in India, China, and Korea, came as a Western import at the same time that Western musicians were finding out the “spirit” part from the East!).
If one examines the painting “Goodbye,” one does see that Impressionist impact in the bold strokes, full types and fantastic shades in oil catching the essence of the moment but in a fashion that was refined by Chachaji’s added immersion in typical Indian miniature art. The receding viewpoint is intentionally deteriorated but not discarded. The outcome is that the form of the train areas, the height and size of the train, the engine, and the smoke are real more in symbolic representation and much less in the photographic sense.
And while the human numbers and their outfits do predict an images of modern realism, their locations in relation to the train and each other show the busy system more as a progressively increasing surface and less as a level surface set apart by perspective and shading and lessening into the much distance.
That’s the amount of traditional Indian miniatures were repainted, specifically in the Pahadi (“hill”) design that Chachaji shows up to have favored. Indian miniature paint was, naturally, likewise understood, unlike the Japanese landscape variation, for its exuberant use multiple colors– which we also see in Impressionism. When one takes a look at “Farewell” in its wholeness, absolutely nothing in the admixture shows up stylistically incongruent, for various practices are not delicately juxtaposed however are thoughtfully and skillfully fused. It’s as if two different practices remained in an ecumenical discussion and through depth and maturation became a syncretic yet unified union.
This tendency towards syncretism in Chachaji’s very early art, as for I can inform, came from the reality that after his education and learning at the Sir J.J. College of Art in Bombay (now Mumbai), he had immersed himself in typical Indian small painting under artist Bhabesh Sanyal’s mentorship in his Lahore studio. Also amidst the lively shades, this mixed design helps the audience’s eyes remain on the crucial theme of deep sadness at partings that could have unclear, understandably harmful, results– the dominant sensation in the scene. Not surprising that this paint has actually been duplicated so often. It engages us mentally, like poetry in motion.
That result is even better when we see the “Mourners.” There, the intimacy of the human bond momentarily of profound individual loss is even more poignantly shown and with an extra full-fledged use of contemporary realism– these figures perforce needed to be proportional in relation to each various other; the style mandates it. Additionally, to my inexperienced eye, the brushstrokes in this job do reveal traces of Van Gogh. I wonder if Venka had this paint in mind when he pointed out Van Gogh as one more impact on Chachaji’s early art. The strokes are once again bold yet fluid, and using dynamic shades projects once again. The effect on the customer is for that reason not unsettling despite the overwhelming sorrow being shown; one doesn’t prevent the eyes yet ends up being attentively attracted, touched, and understanding.
Two masterpieces. Each at some point came to be a different gallery treasure, naturally.
I should add a vital contextual factor right here. Shared sobbing while covering the head was a typical funereal practice among Punjabi women in the past. The mourning females would certainly sing dirges even as they sobbed to comfort the survivors of the departed. The veiling may have been a means to shield those women from humiliation who couldn’t shed tears on hint, in a manner of speaking, yet wished to participate in the cumulative catharsis also if simply ritually. There’s excellent authenticity in this painting. In its own method, it’s an effective social and cultural commentary on old Punjab.
A third painting that is worth thinking of as an instance of Chachaji’s very early experimentation is “Siesta.” As we see, it depicts two tired guys, most likely day laborers, one of them resting. This takes a various approach. The medium is the same, oil, yet the idiom is substantially different. Here, the human figures and their garments are painted with sharp, angular strokes, not fluid ones. The faces, including the eyes, and also the folds of the clothes are done in that design. The realistic look remains in the style, the poses, using shading. We can all quickly bear in mind seeing road workmen in such informal, devil-may-care states as they look for remainder after hours of labor (both monkeys lurking in the vicinity do not irritate them). I do not, however, recall any kind of other oil painting that Chachaji did in the very same style. It is as unique as any and it sticks with you due to a new daring identification that he as soon as created but then delegated proceed to yet newer panoramas.
Among the oils, I would love to state a painting that may make one intend to respond with an impromptu dancing. It’s called” Drummers.” In it, absolutely nothing is angular. Whatever is fluid and animated; the drummers look electrically charged in activity while the spectators sit in silent pleasure of their rhythms. I can virtually listen to the ear-splitting audios of the jumbo drums. This once again is life seen and recorded as it was lived. Another visual documentary of Punjabi culture. (This paint was done in 2 variations: one in oil, the various other in watercolor.)
The angular style, with some alterations, was used in an additional renowned job, in another medium, that made genuine art circles hail Chachaji’s vision and made Punjab specifically proud of him. These were the pencil and charcoal sketches that he made to recall the Jallianwala Bagh Bloodbath of 1919 The drawings were done at the behest of a legislative panel in the late 1950 s. Among the two drawings was blown up for a huge display at Ramlila Premises in Delhi and in Amritsar to celebrate the 50 th anniversary of that watershed occasion in contemporary Indian history– the occasion that transformed Mahatma Gandhi into a non-violent rebel against the British program of India. For the first time, Gandhiji used the word “bad” to describe the British system of federal government.
The fact that the legislative choice board, even after Chachaji made some suggested alterations in the initial illustration, decided not to use it for an irreversible screen in Parliament House was a source of terrific annoyance to him and to several artists and art movie critics. I keep in mind Chachaji informing me that the committee believed the dead and passing away revealed were also few when the casualties included a minimum of 400 eliminated and 1, 200 + injured, and the facial expressions didn’t share the feeling of horror sufficiently! Either the committee was entirely composed of thick-headed M.P.s, or the even more sharp and critical participants were cowed by the leading voice of some ignorant preacher that hadn’t the very first hint regarding importance in art. If a person had revealed that committee Picasso’s popular “Guernica,” a famous piece in international art history, they would have probably stated the very same point– that through his use of abstract images he had actually failed to effectively record the horror of the 1937 airborne bombing of that city in the Spanish civil war!
I can tell you this: When I was instructing, I commonly utilized photos of those sketches in my course on Indian background without telling the class at first that I was associated with the artist. Also my first-year students were awed by the power with which Chachaji showed, in strong, angular strokes once again, the dropped, and dropping, targets of Reginald Dyer’s unspeakable wrong and infamy. The parliamentary panel’s members in New Delhi might not realize the representational value of minority for several in art, though in politics they themselves declared to represent the several!
Charles Fabri, a Delhi-based art doubter to whom Chachaji introduced me at an exhibition back in 1965, simply said concerning this work to me: “What the Parliament lost, background obtained.” Amen to that!
Later in his life, Chachaji produced some beautiful hill views in charcoal and acrylic. He gifted the prints of two such jobs to our child Sangita with me when I was on another browse through to Delhi back in 1999 We treasure them a lot. One is in rich red tones, and the various other in diverse shades of gray stimulating the amazing elevations that only the hills offer us. The last work, showing a winding course puncturing tough granite rocks and embraced by simple huts, makes me wish to leave for an additional trip to Shimla or Mussoorie. Sadly!
Ultimately, an oil painting of a totally different nature that I initially saw in an additional aunt’s home back in the late 1950 s has actually persistently continued to be in my mind. It was a portrait of three sisters in salwaar-kameez and dupattas (lengthy headscarfs). It catches their faces in a now-rare type of simplicity and virtue. That (like the pencil portrait of a lady from Malta), was pure portrait: all realistic look, no symbolic brushwork there. If memory offers me properly, among the siblings came to be the better half of Inder Malhotra, the well-known editor and political commentator.
One can state a lot more regarding Chachaji’s art. As a matter of fact, a lot has been discussed it in numerous publications, papers, and magazines. This is totally my individual homage of a restricted range, highlighting a few of his variegated works that have actually provided intellectual and aesthetic nutrients to me for decades.
(Lots of many thanks to Chandrika Mago for sharing the art featured here and for valuable content pointers.)