I trapped my breath in the bellows of my throat:
a lamp blazed up inside, showed me who I really was.
I crossed the darkness holding fast to that lamp,
scattering its light-seeds around me as I went.
a lamp blazed up inside, showed me who I really was.
I crossed the darkness holding fast to that lamp,
scattering its light-seeds around me as I went.
- Lal Ded
Born in 1939 in Srinagar, Kishori Kaul spent her formative years listening to the vakh or the verses of the 14th century Kashmiri mystic Lalleshwari, popularly known as Lal Ded. They were often recited during the cold winter months by peasants who tilled her family’s agricultural land. When thick snow blanketed the countryside, forcing its habitants indoors, these songs as well as those of star-crossed lovers; Laila-Majnu, Rustam-Sohrab and Yusuf-Zulaikha, would help pass the long evening hours in Srinagar. The poetry and music would often be accompanied by the spinning of Pashmina yarn by Kaul’s maternal grandmother, while her mother and aunt would embroider sumptuous velvet with golden threads.
From a very early age the artist was deeply conscious of the significance of colour. “Our whole way of life was deeply connected with colour. Spring and the cultural festival of going to the almond orchards at the foot of Mount Hariparbat to celebrate Almond Blossom Time. The rich yellow of the mustard fields stretching across the field of vision, the vibrant vermilion used in ritual in homes and to drape the Goddess Shakti. My cultural background understood religion in a non-puritan way, as an aesthetic and creative experience closely linked with nature. Festivals and rituals were an extension of nature.”
A young Kaul would often accompany her grandmother early in the morning to the Hariparbat temple. Walking toward the shrine, she would be captivated by the magnificent sunrises, especially the blush-pink skies taking on more yellow and crimson hues. She once recounted that the temple with its polished black Shivalinga covered with yellow marigolds, “filled me with a happiness, which made me cry bitterly, as I wanted to express this feeling of joy, but had no means of conveying my experience.” Later in life she would get an opportunity to express nature’s wondrous colours in the way she knew best.
Kaul was brought up in a Kashmiri Pandit family that was steeped in the visual arts. Her great-grandfather, Shri Narayanju Kachru, was better known as Muratghar or sculptor as he created miniatures known as dhyan. These adorned the Thakurkuth or the small place of worship within Kashmiri Pandit homes. Her grandmother assisted her father in the process, grinding the colours to make the paints. She recounted these experiences to the young Kishori, who resolved that she too would one day become an artist.
However, she soon realized to her chagrin that society did not approve of women artists, and at the Annie Besant school in Srinagar they were only taught crafts and not fine arts. At the age of thirteen, she contracted tuberculosis and had to live in a sanatorium for a year. Her grandmother who accompanied her, nursed her back to health, and gifted her a drawing board and colours obtained from a papier-mache craftsman. But while these traditional craftspersons used fine brushes for their miniature-style work, Kaul was more interested in working on a larger scale to depict the expanse of the sky and the towering mountain ranges. So, she set about fashioning her own brushes out of cotton wool and twigs. When she finally returned home, she learnt the art of watercolour painting from Somnath Bhatt with encouragement from her sister.
The Baroda years
A major turning point in Kaul’s life came, by her own admission, when she read Irving Stone’s biographical novel, Lust for Life, based on the Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh. It inspired her enough to follow her calling as an artist, despite her family’s opposition. In 1959, at the suggestion of Kashmiri artists Triloke Kaul and G.R. Santosh, Kaul sought admission to the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda.
For Kaul, it was her first visit outside Kashmir—even the sight of a railway train proved a novelty for her! The journey turned out to be an eye-opener in more ways than one. She found the landscape barren and uninspiring in contrast to the verdant valley she had left behind. Her focus turned instead to the people around her and she was taken by their sheer diversity. This shift would also reflect in her artistic practice. All her life she would juggle these two major preoccupations: portraits and nature, particularly the landscape.
The Faculty of Fine Arts was started in 1950 and attracted the likes of V. R. Amberkar and Narayan Shridhar Bendre as teachers. Bendre, a widely exhibited and well-renowned painter, lived and taught at Baroda from 1950 to 1966 and was hugely instrumental in shaping its faculty. Kaul learnt life studies under Bendre and K.G. Subramanyan, and sculpture under Sankho Chaudhuri. At Baroda, the history of Western art was taught by Gulammohammed Sheikh and Dr. Ratan Parimoo, while Jyoti Bhatt and Vishnukumar Bhatt imparted the history of Indian art. The visiting faculty at the institution also included K. K. Hebbar and K. H. Ara, who gave the students lecture demonstrations. Laxmi Sihare, Naina Dalal, and Himmat Shah were her seniors while her contemporaries included Laxma Goud, Jyotsna Bhatt, and Bhupen Khakhar. It was in this vibrant, thriving atmosphere that Kaul had the opportunity to hone her talent.
Like many of her confreres, Kaul too came under the sway of her teacher, Professor Bendre. Bendre had studied at the Indore School of Art and was well-versed in the use of opaque watercolour and gouache. A versatile artist, he had also mastered charcoal, crayon and oils and possessed a well-defined technique. He imparted these formal skills to his students and was famed for his practical demonstrations both within the classroom and on study tours. During these tours, he would sketch and paint not just the landscape but also the sculptures at art historical sites. Kaul too was greatly inspired by these study trips to Ajanta and Ellora, Khajuraho, Konark, Badami, and Aihole as evidenced by her drawings from this period.
Besides these indigenous influences, cubism also left a deep mark on artists at the Faculty of Fine Arts and different artists mined the genre in their own inimitable ways. For both Bendre and Sankho Chaudhuri, it offered a means “to simplify through a stylization that aspired to reduce complexity and strive for what they would call a purity of form”. Bendre placed a great deal of emphasis on simplicity and encouraged his students to paint the essence of a subject. Kaul recalled that he was “very encouraging to beginners, and instilled in us that self-confidence, which is so necessary in the creative process. Always emphasizing the visual experience, he urged us to be conscious of colour, light and form in every waking moment.” These were teachings that Kaul took very much to heart.
Bendre’s interest in landscape and different cultures took him all over India and he even spent three years in Kashmir, working as a commercial artist in the Department of Tourism in Srinagar. He also travelled extensively abroad and was greatly taken by Rembrandt and the French Impressionists. According to Ratan Parimoo, “With the exaggeration of the hues and even the inclusion of black which are Expressionist traits, Bendre rather successfully attempted a sort of telescoping of the late nineteenth century French Impressionist style with the German Expressionist style of the second decade of the twentieth century”.
Bendre’s influence can especially be seen in Kaul’s paintings during her initial years at Baroda. This is evident in the paring down of forms, both humans and objects, in her oil on canvas works dating from 1959. By attempting to distill her subjects down to their very essence she strove to capture their spirit. For instance, in the painting of a lone, seated young girl with a single plait, the colour palette is purposely restricted to blues, blacks, and a yellowish-ochre. The girl’s facial features are practically erased with only two black smudges standing in for her downcast eyes thereby drawing the viewers’ attention to the play of her hands. In another painting, Bhil Dancers from 1959, a dark-blue drummer beats out a rhythm while the diagonal slashes forming the dancers’ legs impart a sense of movement to the work. Kaul’s oil on canvas, Worship at Jagannath Puri, of supplicant tribal women rendered in profile, is also reminiscent of Bendre’s depiction of women in his painting Jhabua Bhils. In both the works, there is a stylistic simplification as manifested in the elongated figures grouped together with the barest of detail. But while Bendre imparts more facial features to his female forms, Kaul prefers to depict only the women’s eyes.
Cubist influences can also be discerned in this phase of Kaul’s oeuvre. Fractured forms with their interweaving planes and lines make up the artist’s human figures as well as still life paintings such as her 1960 oil Big Still Life. This dissection of the form into planes served to emphasize the two-dimensionality of the canvas instead of creating an illusion of depth. Two of her paintings of fisherwomen with their catch are striking in their geometricity and restrained use of colour as manifested in a predominantly blue and white palette.
By the early 1960s however, Kaul was moving to a more expressionist mode of painting. She confidently employed the palette knife and a hard brush on thick slabs of pigment to impart an impasto-like feel to her canvases. Writing about Kaul’s student years in Baroda, artist Nilima Sheikh astutely observed, “She learnt much from Bendre, aspiring to catch each inflection of his harmonious palette and of his method of working. While she was at Baroda she painted several portraits and still-lifes. She loosened the academic hold on these conventional motifs by working with verve and gusto in impasto, verging even towards an expressionist bravado”. The influence of German Expressionism can be spied in Kaul’s portrait of a man—likely her senior Himmat Shah—seated on a wooden chair, which she painted in 1961. Expressive gestural marks, with their rawness and immediacy, are also evident in her portrait of Mona Bendre, her teacher’s wife, who she depicted ensconced comfortably in an armchair. In both these oils her subjects engage the gaze of the viewer in an oblique manner. The stylistic shifts in her painting are further underlined in her portrait of a woman seated at a table with a flower vase placed in front of her. Here one can discern the insidious influence of K.G. Subramanyan, especially in the rendition of the female face. Unlike her earlier portraits, the features of this oval-faced protagonist are clearly delineated, while her forlorn expression and vacant eyes are accentuated by imparting a greyish pallor to her skin.
Vale of Veils
Prompted by her father’s sudden demise Kaul returned to Kashmir after receiving her Master of Fine Arts degree in 1966. She began practicing in a studio on the banks of the river Jhelum but continued to exhibit in different parts of India. In 1968 she married the journalist and scientist Inder Verma and moved to Delhi. The early death of her husband in 1979 and other tragic events appear to have cast a pall of gloom on her paintings. Colour leached out of them and her portraits took on hues of white and beige. There is a minimalism that marks these works, with their evacuation of detail. Here again her palette is dictated by her memories of the winter landscapes in Kashmir. As she noted, “Faced with personal sorrow later in life, the introverted starkness of nature came home to me, and I produced white-on-white paintings with minimal suggestions of colour.”
But gradually fresh shoots of colour and optimism reared their head through the mantle of sorrow that had blanketed the artist’s life. Once again, she turned to her immediate surroundings and drew comfort and inspiration from the flora and the cyclical nature of the seasons around her. But equally, her memories of Kashmir with its green valleys, gurgling streams and majestic waterfalls fed her creative wellsprings leading to new leaps of imagination. “The sudden, swift flight of a bird, the limb of a tree cutting across space, the little world of my garden in the middle of the city—all become starting points for the reconstruction, through colour, of fleeting but profound sensations”. Her canvases, including her diptychs, from this period teem with bursting blossoms and verdant vegetal life. Her skillful handling of colour comes to the fore in her rendering of efflorescence as can be glimpsed in her paintings from the 1990s. Her technique of employing oil paint as she would watercolours impart a delicate feel to these works. Impressionist tendencies too can be spotted in the daubs of paint and her adroit harnessing of light. As ethereal forms arise, melt and dissolve they evoke transient, ephemeral sensations. The play of hide-and-seek in these artworks that border on abstraction was certainly intentional. As Kaul herself mentioned, “I believe in the art of suggestion; in the artist’s need to veil as much as reveal.”
text by Meera Menezes