How does one summarize, or bear adequate witness to, a friendship that spanned 37 years? I was 18 when I first met Gieve Patel, at our guru Nissim Ezekiel’s fabled office on the ground floor of Theosophy Hall in South Bombay. We represented two different generations of Nissim’s acolytes. The Rabbi, as I used to call him, only half in jest – the teacher was blended, in his personality, with the sceptic questing for wisdom, the healer seeking to mend the world’s brokenness and his own – had published Gieve’s first book of poems in 1966 (titled, simply, Poems) under his own imprint. A quarter of a century later, in 1991, he would publish my first book of poems (rather more dramatically titled Zones of Assault) in Rupa & Co’s New Poetry Series, which he edited.
I had already read Gieve’s celebrated poem, ‘On Killing a Tree’, of course: it featured in one of our high-school poetry textbooks, Panorama, published by the Oxford University Press. The poem’s sharp-edged tonality, its stoic irony and momentous sense of the tragic within the everyday – these qualities survived our teachers’ valiant efforts to domesticate it into a sententious cautionary tale. Gieve and I exchanged numbers and addresses, and soon began to correspond and speak over the phone. How swiftly the forms of communication that we then used have been consigned to the Museum of Superseded Technologies: the inland letter and the rotary-dial land line. Yet the thoughts expressed and the ideas discussed, the mutual trust that sprang up intuitively, the warmth of that friendship – all these remain as inspiring and invigorating now as they were then.
Over the nearly four decades since we first met, Gieve and I would present our poems together at readings, serve collegially on juries and committees, chair each other’s lectures or readings, hold public discussions on art and speak on art criticism panels together (he had been my predecessor as art critic to The Times of India, by many years). Nancy and I would make relatively more professional studio visits as well as regular, civilian visits to him, either at Malabar Apartments or, in later years, Cusrow Baug. Sometimes, I would drop by at his Lamington Road clinic, immortalised in a painting by his fellow Bombay artist Atul Dodiya. From Malabar Apartments, we would go on long walks in the Hanging Gardens, speaking of poetry, philosophy, art, and sharing plain old-fashioned gossip. At Cusrow Baug, we would circle this elegantly laid out precinct designed by Claude Batley, the English architect who came to Bombay as a young man and made it his home. We would pause to remark on a tree here, a bird there – and the Baug’s fire temple, its architecture and statuary intriguingly melded from Art Deco and Futurism, faintly reminiscent of the edifices that dominate Fritz Lang’s 1927 cinematic masterpiece, Metropolis. We travelled together to Jaipur when Gieve was working on his sculptures there, went to several editions of the lively Goa Art & Literature Festival together, and travelled to Venice with a group of common friends.
When Nancy and I co-curated ‘No Parsi is an Island’ at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), Bombay – as part of a constellation of exhibitions proposed by the visionary scholar-patron Pheroza Godrej – Gieve was one of the fourteen artists whose work we included; his expanded practice was one of the anchors of our show. We presented him in his creative fullness, with a series of his paintings from the series, ‘On Looking into a Well’, drawings of clouds, sculptures based on the twin themes of Eklavya and Daphne, archival black-and-white photographs from various performances of his plays, and – as a banner-like manifesto on the wall of the NGMA’s rotunda – his urgent, politically searing poem, ‘The Ambiguous Fate of Gieve Patel, He being Neither Muslim nor Hindu in India’. Alongside his work, we displayed works by his (and our) dear friends Sudhir Patwardhan, Atul Dodiya, and Anju Dodiya. Truly, this Parsi was no island.
I was privileged to be Gieve’s friend, his fellow poet, and a pilgrim accompanying him on his journey as a painter. Over a nearly twenty-year period, from 2000 to 2018, I contributed essays to the catalogues that accompanied the periodic exhibitions of his work; these six essays have been brought together to form the present book.
Gieve’s engagement with the arts was wide as well as deep, ranging across poetry and fiction, theatre and cinema, painting and sculpture, Western as well as Hindustani classical music, and dance. In every art, he found himself attracted to the virtuoso’s flawless command over technique – yet he was also greatly moved by the more experimental practitioner’s con brio gift for discovery and openness to revelation. Nothing was ever entirely fortuitous in Gieve’s understanding of the world of imaginative endeavour: he prized the role that training played in an artist’s refinement of intuition, the preparation that brought an artist to the threshold of unasked epiphany. Correspondingly, art works spoke best to him when they could be parsed through the intricate, replenishing interplay between expression and context.
Gieve’s mentor in the visual arts was Akbar Padamsee, a major, polymathic artist from the first generation of postcolonial Indian artists; Akbar was immersed in the study of Sanskrit and mathematics, and read French philosophers in the original. The paintings that Gieve showed in his first exhibition, held at the Jehangir Art Gallery, Bombay, in 1966, bore the impress of Akbar’s style; this would soon change, although the two remained friends all their lives. In 1969, Akbar received the Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship and used it to establish the Vision Exchange Workshop, a collaborative and transdisciplinary space that aimed to bring painting, cinema, psychoanalysis and literature into dialogue. He invited Gieve to join the Workshop; Gieve collaborated with the highly regarded cinematographer K K Mahajan to make a short film, ‘Chairs’, set in one of Bombay’s Irani restaurants.
In 1975, the critic DG Nadkarni put Gieve in contact with Sudhir Patwardhan, suggesting that they might have much in common, as medical practitioners who were also artists – this marked the beginning of a close and enduring friendship. Gieve would introduce Sudhir to the circle of artists whose work he admired and whom he regarded as kindred spirits, including, among others, Bhupen Khakhar, Gulammohammed Sheikh and Vivan Sundaram. This circle, which also included the already influential art critic Geeta Kapur, is often loosely described as the ‘Baroda group’; in fact, it had its moorings in Baroda, Bombay and Delhi, and announced the advent of a new, pan-Indian generation of artists. They had renounced the transcendental tonality and abstractionist preferences of the previous generation, in favour of a thoroughgoing engagement with the local and immediate. Each of these artists, in their distinctive manner – some were more ideologically geared, others were more playful – wished to represent the protagonists and scenarios of everyday, unromanticised middle- and working-class life, until then largely absent from the ambit of mainstream Indian modernism. In 1981, although Gieve had by then chosen to pursue these concerns independently of the circle, Sudhir was one of the artists included in the landmark, manifesto-like exhibition with which it mounted its challenge to the status quo, ‘Place for People’.
Much loved and admired as a painter and a poet, Gieve also made a seminal contribution to theatre. He wrote only three plays – ‘Princes’ (1971), ‘Savaksa’ (1982), and ‘Mr Behram’ (1987) – and yet each one was compelling, even unsettling in its subtle psychological portraiture; each one was intense in its delineation of the human appetites, the ebb and flow of affection, power, desire and self-knowledge in human relationships. Theatre had long been a crucial venue for Gieve’s creativity; his association with the stage began early, during his years as a medical student, when he signed up with the magisterial Ebrahim Alkazi’s Theatre Unit. Alkazi’s daughter Amal once told me how, one afternoon at their home at Vithal Court in 1961, the family found themselves disturbed by a rhythmic stomping on the terrace above. The terrace housed Alkazi’s legendary Meghdoot open-air theatre, but the performances were scheduled for the evenings. Going upstairs cautiously to investigate, they found Gieve marching up and down, rehearsing for his role as the Messenger in ‘Medea’. To be precise, Alkazi himself was playing the Messenger; Gieve was his understudy and took his responsibility to the production seriously.
Gieve would go on to marry Toni – Antoinette Diniz, though no one ever used her given name or birth surname – who founded Stage Two, producing and directing plays for a number of years, and holding theatre workshops. Her production of Gieve’s ‘Mr Behram’ was memorable, as was her production of Cyrus Mistry’s ‘Doongaji House’; coincidentally, both plays were studies in waning power, decadence and social change set in the ethos of Gieve’s birth community, the Parsis of western India. This train of thought takes me back to my own days at Elphinstone College and the University of Bombay: as a student, I acted in two of Toni’s enacted play readings, which were staged in Bombay and Poona. Many years later, their daughter Avaan would direct a triad of my own plays, showing them in Bombay, Delhi and elsewhere.
Gieve was the kind of friend you could turn to for advice, professional or personal, in the certain knowledge that his response would be carefully thought-out, measured and sensitive; he was never casual in addressing the problems and dilemmas that his friends brought to his door. I will never forget the advice he gave me when, as a young poet, I went to him with my anxieties about the directions opening before me: “To write truly meaningful poetry, you have to go deep down, to where things are broken.” My allegiance, at that point, was to a baroque form of articulation, and – regrettably – this advice did not immediately resonate for me. In my defence, I was only in my mid-twenties; the arc of life has long since demonstrated to me, with incontrovertible force, the accuracy of his sage counsel.
Gieve’s artist friends also profited from his meticulous reading of their work. I find myself thinking back to the brief and resonant text that he wrote for the brochure – as these publications were then known; galleries did not routinely bring out the lavish catalogues that they now do – accompanying Atul Dodiya’s debut solo exhibition at Gallery Chemould in 1989. Gieve concluded the text with the image of a horizontal line in one of Atul’s paintings, likening it to a note in a dhrupad recital, a minimal gesture reverberating in space, its perfect calibration altering its surroundings irrevocably. Gieve’s own remarks, whether in speculative or in emphatic key, would often cast a similar spell on a conversation.
Another moment comes back to mind, bringing with it the memory of Gieve’s impish, explosive laughter: some years ago, on reading the last of the essays gathered here, he called me to share his thoughts. He enjoyed my reading and contextualisation of his recent paintings – and told me that he was absolutely delighted that I had, as he put it, “caught on to my misanthropy!” I had argued that, in a series of portraits he had been developing, it was possible to detect a tension between his manifest and more empathetic attitude towards other human beings and a less evident “misanthropic impulse, alert to the foibles of the precariously perched survivor, asserting itself through gentle, carnivalesque mockery”. His compassion for his vulnerable fellow denizens of this planet was abundant – the maimed, the eccentric, the diminished often claimed his attention – yet he could also, on occasion, regard the vexed and circumstance-baffled human animal with dispassion, knowing well that the line between pity and self-pity can be blurred easily. The relay between these impulses imparted a robust emotional gravitas to his paintings.
Somewhat unusually in a field as vehemently secularised as the contemporary arts, Gieve and I shared an abiding preoccupation with the life of spiritual quest – not as an academic interest or a research topic, but as an existential reality. He had worked on his translation of the 17th-century Gujarati mystic Akho’s poetry for five decades (it appeared as part of his Collected Poems, 2017); I worked on the 14th-century Kashmiri mystic Lal Ded’s poetry for two decades (it appeared as I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded, 2011). At a crucial moment in his life, Gieve had found anchorage at the Mirtola Ashram, a Vaishnava retreat established in the Himalayan foothills of Uttarakhand by Sri Yashoda Mai (née Monica Roy) and Sri Krishna Prem (born Ronald Henry Nixon), and headed, at the time of Gieve’s visits there, by Sri Madhava Ashish (born Alexander Phipps).
My own pluralist journey has led me, variously, to profoundly replenishing meetings with Swami Niranjanananda Saraswati of the Bihar School of Yoga and Dhammachari Lokamitra (born Jeremy Goody) of the Jivaka Centre; to lifelong engagements with Kashmir Shaiva practice and the Yogāchāra school of Mahayana Buddhism. I served, from 1996 to 1999, as The Times of India’s first Religion & Philosophy Editor. Both Gieve and I were struck by the fact that, although a number of modernists were dedicated to the spiritual quest and even to outright religious affiliations – among others, Kandinsky and Mondrian were Theosophists, Mark Tobey was a Baha’i – the general tendency in the art world has been to regard the spiritual orientation and the religious imagination with scepticism. For Gieve and for me, it was important to secure a zone of reflection and inquiry into these subjects, away from the twin pressures of aggressive secularisation on the one hand and politicised religiosity on the other, each as dogmatic, reductive, intolerant and ultimately unproductive as the other.
What Gieve and I had in common in this sphere, above all, was our shared preoccupation with the thought of J Krishnamurti. Although K, as he was referred to by the circle around him, would have disclaimed the notion of ‘thought’, given his fundamental assertion that one must arrive at the cessation of thought with all its restless, comparative tendencies and its binaristic, polarising effects – which, in turn, would mark the renunciation of the ego and one’s sense of finitude in time, and could bring about a genuine freedom in the recognition of one’s interrelationship to all created beings and things.
Gieve and I had arrived at Krishnamurti by different routes. I had come to him through a family connection with Theosophy, with two great-uncles who had been members of the circle around Krishnamurti’s first mentor, Annie Besant. When Krishnamurti broke with Theosophy and rejected the messianic future that had been planned for him, they went with him, collaborating with him on the educational initiative, premised on creativity and experiment, which would bear fruit in the Krishnamurti schools at Rajghat in Banaras, Rishi Valley near Madanapalle, and Brockwood Park in Hampshire. Gieve came to K through his search for a space and a language in which he could explore his wonderment at what lies beyond, without being conscripted into an unquestioning devotionalism or a scripted path. For both of us, K was that rare spiritual teacher who emphasised beauty as a value in itself, and indeed as a replenishing horizon of being, a path to wholeness.
Thus began, for Gieve, a long-term commitment to the Krishnamurti Foundation’s school at Rishi Valley: every year, from 1994 until quite recently, he would be writer-in-residence at the school, holding an annual poetry workshop for the students. Accomplished work emerged from this workshop, with a number of the students honing their literary abilities and all of them being transformed by the experience; eventually, an anthology of poems selected from several generations of Gieve’s Rishi Valley students was published by the Sahitya Akademi, India’s National Academy of Letters.
Gieve’s investment in the spiritual dimension of life explains, perhaps, the dynamic brushwork, the manner of handling pigment that he evolved during the late phase of his artistic career. It allowed him to embrace figures and landscapes, trees and water bodies, animals and birds into a polyphonic unity. In such paintings as ‘Looking into a Well: A Spray of Blossoms’ or the series titled ‘Meditations on Old Age’, we feel the throb of a universal vitality, an unambiguous and palpable thingness that connects diverse orders of being across varied scales of time ranging from the ephemeral to the perennial.
As I come to the end of this introduction, I realize – with binding finality, really, for the first time since Gieve’s passing – that there will be no more studio visits to Malabar Apartments or Cusrow Baug, no more walks around the Hanging Gardens, no more conversations with Nancy and me, the exchanges punctuated with laughter and delectable Parsi Gujarati phrases. Our gentle ritual of lifting a large painting from the floor to the easel, each of us matching the other’s pace and pressure, resting it on dowels at the appropriate height, then stepping back to observe the surface with its shifting balance between detail and scale, to be startled by the bold colour combinations or comforted by the pensive palette – none of this will take place in life now; only in the re-runs that memory enacts.
The essays that follow were all written in the afterglow of such encounters with Gieve’s work. My attempt, in each of them, was to bear witness both to the blood-quickening viscerality of the act of viewing and to the processes of contemplation that it generates. My attempt, also, was to chart the artist’s flight path: the urgencies on which he had at various points focused his energy, the debates in which his images found their contours, the histories in which his oeuvre could find habitation. For myself, I shall always revisit Gieve Patel’s work and savour the ways in which it will continue to disclose aspects of itself; and I shall cherish the memory of the years we had with him. This book is an offering in remembrance.
Ranjit Hoskote is a poet, cultural theorist and curator.
Excerpted with permission from To Break and To Branch: Six Essays on Gieve Patel, Seagull, 2024.
Also read: How Sudhir Patwardhan’s art portrays Mumbai’s fractured political landscape