Terracotta Tale

MUCH before we learnt there was an ancient city buried under a high treeless plateau in northwest Gujarat, two horsemen8212;one eight and the other probably in his 80s8212;often rode together for miles across the parched, undulating landscape.

Pointing his hand toward the horizon, Sura Bhagat, the wiry old guide and confidante to the little boy, Himmat, would often speak in whispers about a big town and a khazana lying deep under the sandy clay earth. Bhagat was bang on target.

Years later, in 1955, when Archaeological Survey of India officials pushed their plough, they discovered the Harappan town of Lothal, a few miles from the riders8217; village, Gundi. The Lothal site became international news and Gundi dropped off the map like a pinball and lost its name to the New Discovery, as people started calling all the places near the excavation site Lothal.

But the little boy8217;s enchantment with the rough terrain and the colours of the sesame and wheat fields never faded even long after his landlord family left the village.

8216;8216;You only gain experience during childhood. There is no other experience that you can count on for your creativity,8217;8217; says sculptor Himmat Shah, now 73. As a child, he remembers feasting his eyes on migratory birds hopping lightly across marshy grounds, leaving a trail of cross-hatched feet markings behind them, and the gay abandon of running around village ponds. He would jump into a well and thrust his head upward from underwater to gulp air. That memory has inspired one of the artist8217;s most recognisable images in The Head series.

Shah has spent a lifetime perfecting the technique of making his sculptures look extraordinarily time-worn, ageing them in jute sacks to gain their unique textures. The clay he uses is sometimes more than 10 years old and he leaves it out in the rain to rot, to achieve the finesse and plasticity he wants. 8216;8216;I know it8217;s ready when it starts smelling like a gutter,8217;8217; he says.

But it was with half-hearted zeal that Shah opened up his creative experiments of 25 years at Delhi8217;s Anant Art Gallery in a show titled Excavations: Evocations, last week. 8216;8216;This is probably the last time that I am holding a show,8217;8217; says the artist who lived in Delhi for two decades before moving to Jaipur.

The show, however, is special in many ways as it provides the viewer a glimpse of Shah8217;s inner eye. Utility objects become sources of the humorous interplay of his creative moods as he reduces them to simple forms, conveying a new visual meaning. A broken, upside-down teapot takes on the shape of an elephant calf with a raised snout, while a rum bottle that a friend gave becomes a fossilized background for his self-portrait.

In a sense, while Shah developed his own idiom, he never fell into the trap of convention. Until 2000, he was one of India8217;s most underrated artists. His works never sold, and having lived most of his life like a troubadour, he ran into huge debts. After living in the free quarters of the government-supported Garhi Studio, he sold the entire collection of his career8212;98 sculptures and 2,300 paintings8212;to the Delhi Art Gallery to buy himself a roof in Jaipur.

When he was 11, Shah ran away from home to live in a temple in the Girnar jungle, after a family squabble reached breaking point. 8216;8216;Once a rich man visiting the temple gave me Rs 150 for a painting.8217;8217; With that money, Shah embarked on a train to Ahmedabad and reached the doorsteps of CN Kala Vidhyalaya, where he trained to be an art teacher. Later, he gave up a teaching job and went to the MS Baroda School of Art. 8216;8216;I fell at artist NS Bendre8217;s feet and said I had no money and nowhere to go. He immediately took me in and helped me many times later.8217;8217;

For Shah, life, like his art, is an adventure led by experiments; an engagement that never ceases. Before this show opens, he places some freshly beaten cotton between his sculpture that resembles a terraced hill, splitting it into two halves. 8216;8216;It8217;s almost like the sky has finally met my art,8217;8217; he exclaims.