Mar 03, 2025 07:50 PM IST
With his human head sculptures, Shah has conferred Man with a lasting grandeur, inscribing them with the unity of human experience
For the followers of Indian art, it has been a season of sadness. Himmat Shah’s passing on March 2 is like the loss of another pillar of Indian modernist aspiration. Hailed by Krishen Khanna as a “free spirit” and by J Swaminathan “as a bird who has forgotten how to stop migrating”, Shah’s position in Indian sculpture was unparalleled for the depth of meaning he was able to draw out of a single enigmatic form. Largely identified with his sculpted heads, in bronze and terracotta, which appear both cranial and phallic, Shah has used them to trace mappings, mark wayward journeys, fissures and features, as an enduring commentary on the human condition.
Born in Lothal, Gujarat, in 1933 in a family of Jain traders and farmers, Shah grew up around the dry flatlands of the historic Indus Valley archaeological site. A wayward child who refused to attend school, he was fascinated by the alchemical experiments of his grandfather who studied the medicinal value of poisons and natural minerals. Shah would hang around the potters’ colony or with itinerant Bhavai performers until his family dispatched him to Gharshala or the home school of Dakshinamurty, a centre run on Gandhian values that attracted boys from the Kathiawad region. At Gharshala, Himmat Shah studied under Jagubhai Shah, imbibing Gandhian values of economy and simplicity, which were to lie at the core of his practice.
Following his propensity for drawing, Shah was attracted to the growing reputation of the department of painting at MS University, Baroda, led by NS Bendre and KG Subramanyan, where other Gharshala students like Jyoti Bhatt and Kishor Parekh had enrolled. Between 1955 and 1962, Shah as a student at Baroda gained from Bendre’s teaching of the principles of cubism and abstraction, and Subramanyan’s wry folkloric view of India’s cultural traditions. Baroda also became the site for the historic formation of Group 1890, a large group of artists that included Ghulam Muhammad Sheikh, Nagji Patel, and Jyoti Bhatt, whose aspirations were largely articulated by the artist-ideologue Swaminathan. By opposing the influence of the school of Paris that was pronounced on the Bombay artists, Group 1890 sought a return to indigenous, even primitive forms and materials. At this time, Spanish writer and later Nobel laureate, Octavio Paz, who was then Mexico’s ambassador in India, prophetically wrote of how the artists in the group would address the challenge of the “inherited image”. Paz wrote: “Contemporary Indian art, if this country is to have an art worthy of its past, cannot but be born from this violent clash.” Shah’s travels in Europe from 1965-67 were to sharpen his propensity to address this clash. Though unable to speak English or French, he nonetheless visited hundreds of museums, drawn particularly to Paul Klee, Picasso, Brancusi and Giacometti. Paz, who had visited Shah’s barsati to view his work, recommended him for a French government scholarship. In France, he learnt printmaking at Atelier 17 under Stanley Hayter and Krishna Reddy.
Yet, it was in his native Lothal that Shah may have found his enduring inspiration. The site invoked in him a kind of racial memory, of the making of terracotta sculptural forms. An ancient port city and the southern-most outpost of the Harappan civilisation, Lothal renders its own narratives. Excavations at Lothal have yielded the abundant use of terracotta in painted ware, wells, bricks, seals, beads, figurines and so on. But even more than the material remains, what Shah may have drawn on is the air of enigma that permeates the Harappan archaeological legacy. In its undeciphered seals, the symbols of an uncertain authorship, that suggests the exchange between the ancient cultures of Mesopotamia, Africa and South Asia.
Shah’s works oscillate in scale, between his small free and lyrical draws, burnt paper collages, his works in terracotta and bronze, plaster and ceramic and his large scale works in cement, brick and concrete. Between 1967 to 1971, Shah made large murals with geometric, even cubist surfaces in relief at the St Xavier’s School in Ahmedabad. Living and working in cramped quarters and barsatis, and in Delhi’s Garhi studio, for several years, Shah found inspiration in the waste of the city’s detritus. Krishen Khanna, another long-time Garhi-based painter wrote about Shah’s studio: “Old bottles, bits of metal, knives of all sorts, wires, ropes, pots and pans, all resuscitated and given a new status coexisting happily with clay, pigments and chemicals.” Shah refashioned and revived this discarded treasure trove, even as he breathed life into clay. Retrieved from the banks of the Yamuna and covering everything in fine dust, Shah worked and shaped clay like an alchemist coaxing life out of inert material.
Shah continued to work well into his 90s, even in the face of failing health. In his later years, he moved to Jaipur, closer to his casting foundry, seeking to share his knowledge with students. At the apex of his vast output is undoubtedly the sculpted head, and the many interpretations that he could draw from it. Invoking a primitive past as much as an existentially fraught present, its surface bore the furrows and fissures of slow ageing, the map like pathways of inner and outer journeys. Like the severed heads of the Buddha that line Indian museums, with these heads, Shah has conferred Man with a lasting grandeur, inscribing them with the unity of human experience.
Gayatri Sinha is a curator, critic and art historian. The views expressed are personal
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