Roundabout| How green was my valley and greener still in exile
Meeting Bakshy, a younger friend of my Delhi days, one is enchanted by his collages in which he gives boots to animals; having made a name home and abroad, you do your friends of rum guzzling days proud and one waits to see more of your keen eye and delicate brush
It was with a heavy heart that painter Neeraj Bakshy, now counted as one among the best in the country, moved out of his spacious wooden home in Anantnag, in 1990, to Chandigarh. He had just completed one year of his art studies there. Then there was no going back. He missed the home, the mountains and more than anything else his animal friends among whom he had grown up.
The 20-year-old spent one year in Chandigarh hanging out in the College of Art, using the library and even selling his paintings in Sector 17 in the evenings. He finally got admission in Jammu and completed his Bachelor of Arts.
Then it was to Delhi with all its struggles but he exhibited and did all kinds of work including teaching art and got noticed for his work, winning several prestigious fellowships. But there was no going back to the lost valley. However, a few years ago the call of the valley came and Bakshy says, “I took a trip to ‘my valley’ to draw the graceful architectural, which I always used to as an art student.”
The result of this visit was a graphic memoir of Kashmir, “Premonitions”. This book took time to reach me but it has been acknowledged as ‘Ethnography at its best’ that brings alive the ominous dispossession of people’. The artist says of his experience, “I found everything changed. I had to struggle to re-establish connections between what I cherished as a memory and what I now came to see.” These minimal sketches of empty wooden homes hanging in the air speak a sad, eloquent language.
One of the most touching graphics is of a prowling tiger looking hapless at a balcony and finding nothing around for years and years, it becomes drowsy, as if sedated by human absence. Meeting Bakshy, a younger friend of my Delhi days, one is enchanted by his collages in which he gives boots to animals. Having made a name home and abroad, you do your friends of rum-guzzling days proud and one waits to see more of your keen eye and delicate brush.
Will the lost paradise be regained
A five-year-old accompanies his parents as they flee Srinagar to settle down in Chandigarh. As he grows older, he has very faint memories of where they had come from. But growing up a little, he wonders why he speaks English in school, Punjabi in the playground and Kashmiri at home in this strange mix of a three-language formula.
He is Karun Mujoo, 37, whose debut novel “This Our Paradise”, published by Penguin Random House, has received a warm response. The inclusive title of ‘we’ makes all the difference and the author has taken care to include the dilemma of the two major communities of Kashmir, Hindus and Muslims.
Mujoo tells the story of both Hindus being compelled to leave their homeland and Muslim boys of poor families being tutored and pushed into militancy.
The story is told by an eight-year-old who witnesses the communal drama unfold viciously. Mujoo says, “When I was ten, we went for a vacation to Kashmir and stayed in my maternal home in Indira Nagar which was safer and in the main city. I have drawn upon memories of those days to write this novel and pen the story of two families that intertwine tragically. In both cases, the boys are at the mercy of forces much larger than them. Both lose their Kashmir, in different ways.”
Trained in engineering, with an MBA added on, Mujoo chose the more creative area of advertising. His articles have appeared in several journals and newspapers. He had earlier drawn attention to Kashmir in a memorable piece of long writing titled ‘Home Alone’. When asked if he sees a possibility of regaining the lost Paradise, he says, “It seems unlikely but the poet, dreamer and writer will keep making an effort.”
nirudutt@gmail.com