At the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) in New Delhi, modern artist Satish Gujral’s centenary retrospective opens with a video of a river rushing between rocks, and his voice recalling the swimming accident in Kashmir’s Lidder river that took his hearing at eight. “The pain was traumatic. It numbed my senses. Slowly, it took away my hearing.”
Then the galleries open, and the exhibition Satish Gujral 100 never stops insisting on more, refusing to resolve. Paintings, sculptures, burnt wood, tapestries, murals, architectural models, erotic compositions, horses, zebras, late luminous canvases full of rams and arced forms, made after a cochlear implant briefly returned his hearing. Over 160 works, seven decades, and every medium imaginable. The concentrated output of a mind for whom silence made the world explode outward into form, surface, weight, a voracious insistence on making.
The video of a river rushing between rocks
Exhibits at Satish Gujral 100
| Photo Credit:
Sachin Soni
The range hits you as affect — as pressure and sensation on the body — before it hits you as biography. Pain, whimsy, ego, arrogance, guilt, anger, eroticism, nostalgia for the future — it is all here, arriving simultaneously. Then the thought arrives as punctuation: all of this was made in silence. The restlessness of a man moving through every medium he could reach tells you that one lifetime was not enough.
Satish Gujral 100 at the NGMA
Summer of Partition
Gujral (1925-2020) was born in Jhelum, in what is now Pakistan, into a family of pronounced civic ambition. His father, Avtar Narain Gujral, was a lawyer who had remade himself as a Gandhian activist — trading the anglicised professional’s coat for the austerity of Lala Lajpat Rai’s Servants of the People Society — and a politician with connections on both sides of what would soon become an unbridgeable divide. His elder brother Inder Kumar Gujral would eventually become Prime Minister of India.
The family’s privilege was both insulating and real at a critical moment. When Partition arrived, Avtar Narain used political connections and police protection to organise safe passage for refugees. The young Satish Gujral, just 22, transported abandoned women and children across the border to camps.
Satish Gujral 100
Gujral held that summer in his body and his work for the rest of his life. The 1950s canvases, such as Mourning En-Masse and the Partition series, are made of that grief: compressed figures, faces pulled past recognisability, a sorrow so dense the canvas barely contains it.
Lessons from Diego and Frida Kahlo
His accident had already changed the nature of his relationship to the world. Progressive hearing loss through childhood meant that the world reached him primarily through touch and material. His canvases from the early 1960s solicit the hand as much as the eye. Everything carries the sculptural quality of a mind that thinks in mass and void, weight and temperature.
In 1952, he went to Mexico City, where he became friends with Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo’s husband, and the most politically charged muralist of his century. Rivera was a man of volcanic conviction and difficult temperament, who believed art’s proper place was on public walls — legible to everyone who moved through shared space. Kahlo, today considerably more famous than her husband, made a different and equally ferocious argument in paint: the body as primary historical document; damage and desire confronted without mediation.
Gujral absorbed the conviction: that art could carry history, grief, and politics simultaneously, at public scale. He came back a muralist, taking abstraction for the first time onto public walls across New Delhi.
‘Making things from pain and memory’
Midway through the NGMA exhibition, a short video plays. Gujral, in his later years, speaks plainly: “I made things from my reality, pain and memory, and people adopted me as their artist.” Around the screen is evidence of exactly that. He could not be contained by any single medium. He moved from figuration to abstraction, from canvas to mural, from flat work to ceramics. In the works made in response to the anti-Sikh violence of 1984, he built up charred wood in layers — memory suspended in carbonised matter. Curator Kishore Singh describes the series as embodying “the poignancy of freedom curtailed”.
His son Mohit describes a deeply human figure: flawed, frequently angry, particularly as a young father. Someone who felt betrayed by his deafness without ever making that betrayal his subject. Over the years, Gujral found ways to work alongside and push his children towards their own creative lives; his daughters are artists.
Satish Gujral with his son Mohit Gujral
He never learnt sign language, would not inhabit that grammar or allow himself to be read within it. His spoken Urdu and Punjabi had crystallised at eight, and he did not seek to update them. He translated himself through the act of creation instead, for 94 years.
Late in life he had a cochlear implant fitted and heard the world for two years, then had it removed. Sound fractured his concentration; the sensory conditions he had built his entire inner world inside were the conditions under which he saw most completely. He returned to them deliberately.
“Gujral’s studio was a place of reflection that allowed him to respond to the silence that engulfed him, affording him the opportunity to convert a disability into the ‘bliss of solitude’, thereby accentuating his skills of observation and deduction.”Kishore SinghCurator
Kishore Singh
| Photo Credit:
Rohit Chawla Photography
The house that Gujral shaped
There was one person who understood all of it without translation, his wife Kiran Gujral. A ceramic artist, his first and most trusted critic, his sole interpreter to the world and to their own children. She died in 2024, the year the house they shared opened to the public. The centenary wall text mentions her once, to note that she raised the children while he attended to his practice.
World of Architecture exhibition at Gujral House
| Photo Credit:
Sachin Soni
Gujral House was designed by Raj Rewal, commissioned in the late 1960s and completed around 1971, at a moment when Indian modernism was working out its relationship to material, climate, and International Style (that emphasised functional, minimalist design). Rewal’s structural vocabulary — exposed brick and raw concrete, split levels, internal courtyards, picture windows positioned to frame rather than merely admit the Delhi sky — belongs to that negotiation. Gujral subsequently treated the interior as an evolving studio, moving walls and functions as his practice shifted.
Gujral House
| Photo Credit:
Sachin Soni
Photographs and blueprints at World of Architecture
| Photo Credit:
Sachin Soni
At Gujral House in Lajpat Nagar III, a parallel exhibition, World of Architecture, unfolds — photographs, blueprints, films, and sketches spread across its basement, ground, and first floors. Inside, there is a cylindrical structure capped by a dome that was Kiran’s dressing room. She shaped the space and inhabited it. It stands now in a public exhibition of Gujral’s work, its intimate function dissolved, its authorship invisible. She made work that holds the building together. The archive remembers the man who filled the world with form.
A model of Kiran’s dressing room
| Photo Credit:
Sachin Soni
The architect inside
Gujral entered architecture in his 50s, self-taught, approaching buildings the way a painter thinks through volume. The Belgian Embassy in Delhi (1980-83) was his first large-scale commission. The building — an architecture of courtyards, thermal mass, and brick deployed not for structural transparency but for rhythm and relief — placed him in the International Forum of Architects’ list of the 1000 finest buildings of the 20th century. The Belgian government subsequently awarded him the Order of the Crown for it.
The vocabulary he developed there, of corbelled courses, sunken planes, masonry surfaces that choreograph shadow rather than reflect light, carried into subsequent commissions: the CMC Campus in Hyderabad, Goa University, and internationally, the Al-Moughtara Palace in Riyadh, built for the Saudi royal family. Each project argued for a modernism of the earth: brick and local stone over glass; forms that emerged from their sites rather than assert themselves above them. Architecture, for Gujral, was another medium. He did not so much design buildings as work them.
World of Architecture at Gujral House
| Photo Credit:
Sachin Soni
Gujral built a language inside his silence — made of surface and weight and mass and the pressure of a reality that kept insisting on being made into something — and it had turned out to be inexhaustible.
Satish Gujral 100 is on till April 15 at NGMA.
The essayist-educator writes on culture, and is founding editor of Proseterity — a literary arts magazine.
