Looking back at a friendship that spans almost four decades is no mean task but art critic, cultural theorist and poet Ranjit Hoskote has managed to do so with his trademark finesse in To Break and To Branch: Six Essays on Gieve Patel. Published by Seagull Books, it is a celebration of Hoskote’s long and deep engagement with the artistic oeuvre of Patel who was a painter, sculptor, translator, poet, teacher, playwright and a practising physician. Patel passed away last November at the age of 83. Hoskote recalls some fond memories. Edited excerpts:
What were your first impressions of Gieve Patel when Nissim Ezekiel introduced you?
I was in my late teens when I first met Gieve, was introduced to him by Nissim at his famous PEN All-India Centre office on the ground floor of Theosophy Hall in Mumbai, long a place of happy meetings, lively gatherings, and deep conversations. I’d read some of Gieve’s poems at that point, and he was already a name to conjure with, for me. Like so many of us, I’d studied his poem, ‘On Killing a Tree’, at school, and immediately found him congenial. He was a warm presence, friendly, engaging. We connected at once.
In your mid-20s, Gieve told you: “To write truly meaningful poetry, you have to go deep down, to where things are broken.” How has that advice helped you?
I must confess that, at the time Gieve gave me this advice, I found myself rebelling against it. It was a time when I was surging out of myself to engage with the larger things, the causes and urgencies. I was taking on big themes — myth, epic, history — and developing a rather baroque poetry. As I settled down — and, presumably, grew up — the large things and big themes began, increasingly, to find resonance and visceral reality in smaller, more intimate, everyday contexts. At this level, and as life and time began to impart their sad wisdom, Gieve’s advice assumed key importance and resonance for me. I believe — at least, I hope and trust — that my poetry has benefited greatly from his advice.
Gieve Patel’s ‘Embrace’ (2016)
How did Gieve’s encounter with J. Krishnamurti’s work and his time at the Mirtola Ashram in the Himalayan foothills influence the way he saw things, people and life itself?
Gieve’s acceptance of the reality of spiritual experience was part of a gradual process, during which he saw clearly the limitations of a scepticism that enshrined rationality above all other modes of approaching the world. Through his encounters with devotion and spiritualism, Gieve began to find ways of being in the world that allowed him to combine scepticism with wonderment, stoicism with joy in the beauty of the present moment, to think about belonging in a larger context of interrelationships among sentient beings and with the cosmos.
Gieve translated the Gujarati poet Akho. You translated Lal Ded. What were the overlapping themes that you found in the poetry of these mystics?
Despite belonging to different places, periods and spiritual affiliations, both Lal Ded and Akho were impatient with organised religion, with the cant of conspicuous piety. They sought to liberate the soul from ritualist conceptions of the religious life. They expanded the range of emotional expression available to the questor.
Gieve’s painting ‘Off Lamington Road’ is on the cover of your book. What does it represent to you?
Gieve’s Off Lamington Road embodies that memorable combination of the everyday and the phantasmagoric that imparted a distinctive quality to his paintings. At one level, it is meant to represent, quite literally, the view from Gieve’s clinic, which was situated on Lamington Road, round the corner from Mumbai Central station. But look closely, and mysterious elements announce themselves: a giant parrot hangs upside down in the top right-hand corner of this large work, above a group of revellers dancing and drumming up a storm in the street.
On the far side, a harnessed but riderless horse appears from behind a wall — we take a moment to register that a carriage may be following, but in itself, the horse strikes us as an omen, an augury. Everywhere, the currents and eddies of human life carry us along or bring us to a pause — and even as we settle into this evocation of a busy street in the middle of Mumbai, we recognise that the painting is in fact a visionary homage to the Sienese painters whose work Gieve loved — for instance, to the vastly populated civic panoramas of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s multi-part fresco programme, The Allegory of Good and Bad Government.
Gieve Patel’s ‘The Letter Home’ (2002)
You’ve acted in plays written by Gieve and directed by his wife Antoinette. Their daughter Avaan has directed plays written by you. How did this friendship grow to embrace other family members?
Both Nancy [cultural theorist and curator Nancy Adajania, who is married to Hoskote] and I were close to Gieve, and were embraced early into the family circle. We collaborated on cultural events in different ways with Gieve, Toni and Avaan; we would all attend the same screenings of parallel-cinema films in the late 1980s and through the 90s, participated both in the visual arts and in the literary arts together over the decades.
Also, Gieve and Nancy had a connection of their own, independent of me, based on the strong links that both of them shared with the specific lifeworld of rural Parsis in Gujarat. This gave both of them a very strong awareness — from the position of privilege but with a deep awareness of the need for reform — of the rural subaltern classes, especially those belonging to the tribal communities, encountered as help, or workers, or cultivators.
In Gieve’s case, this led to such compelling works as his play, Mister Behram, where one of its protagonists is a Warli boy adopted by a Parsi lawyer, and to the figure of Eklavya, the tribal prince cruelly wronged by his Brahmin teacher, in his late paintings. With Nancy, this has sustained a lifelong commitment to artists of rural, tribal or otherwise subaltern heritage — to situating them at the cutting edge of contemporary cultural expression.
The interviewer lives in Mumbai, and writes on books, art, gender, films, education, and peace initiatives.
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