Serbjeet Singh: Artist and Alchemist

W. M. (Bill) Aitken

The secret of Serbjeet Singh's excellence as a painter lay in the embracing of the four-letter word 'life' (or perhaps more accurately, 'larger than life'!).

Serbjeet often immediately endeared himself by turning up in paint spattered clothes in order to declare his calling as the complete artist, ageless in talent and very much his own law maker. I called him Dr. Johnson because his opinions were forthright and telling (but not always printable). He referred to me as Boswell because I enjoyed recording the adventurous life of this one-off character. I firmly believe you meet a person of this calibre only once in a lifetime - and his views on art and the source of its inspiration are valuable for their originality. Totally dedicated to his craft from the tender age of ten when he sold his first painting to an Angrez (English) memsahib for twenty-five rupees in Dalhousie (later in his eighties, his book of sketches done during the Indo-Pak war were priced on the international market for twenty-five lakhs). The same mastery of line and colour are evident in both and it was this unfailing talent to transmute artists' materials into the golden realm of deathless art that made any visit to his Gulmohur Park home so energising.

Meeting an artist in a gallery and at work are totally different experiences. While their works speak for themselves, questions on the inspiration behind an individual painting can lay bare the artist's deepest thoughts. We are all to some small extent artists seeking to give expression to our sense of selfhood and the real artist is one whose efforts are recognised by the rest of us whether in painting or other art forms. When I paint the Himalaya the result is flat and stilted because though I have been granted the vision, I lack the technique to breathe life into the composition. The artist is the rare soul born with the godlike gift of bequeathing that seemingly immortal spirit, and in the process becomes a vehicle of the muse.

Discussing Serbjeet's offerings in his last years (remarkable for the artist's willingness to try out new acrylic paint and Japanese pen brushes) I was able to probe into his passion for painting. He was excited by the breakthrough in paint technology. Unlike the fugitive palettes that have plagued works of art in the past, the new metallic colours stay true for two millennia. It was refreshing to find someone in their late eighties not just open to new ideas but willing to dabble, for example, with the latest Paris hair dyes to discover their artistic potential (if any!). The artist's enthusiasm reminded me of the medieval alchemist's apparent engagement with base chemicals to discover Paras pathar, the philosopher's stone. In reality, alchemy at all periods of history has been an inner search for the beauty that inspires the fount of life. Sikhs are not associated with searching for the divine through renunciation but their life-affirming habits as demonstrated by Serbjeet Singh are channeled with devotional fervour to that higher end.

Fifty years ago while crossing the desert of Iran to reach Zahedan where a weekly train connected to the subcontinent I was astonished to find Sikhs in charge of the border money changing operations. Only their faith was brave and cheerful enough to withstand the hostile conditions. It came as no surprise when I learned that Serbjeet's grandfather who made a fortune from arranging military transport to the North West Frontier had in his time supplied camels to Lawrence of Arabia. The artist's life is liberally sprinkled with these larger-than-life anecdotes.

Serbjeet could look back on a long life of actual involvement in historical moments few of us can ever hope to equal. Pandit Nehru valued Serbjeet's company when he visited the Himalaya but found his trekking proposals on a Manali visit too energetic. An eye witness to two stunning Himalayan battles fought at either end of the range Serbjeet had savoured the joys of victory at the Zoji la armoured success that saved Ladakh and the sadness of withdrawal at Se la from poor preparedness. When Serbjeet visited Nehru's office after the latter Arunachal 1962 debacle he found him a broken man.

The paintings of Himalayan profiles by Serbjeet are distinguished by feelings for the animate soul in any given mountain mass. The Dhaula Dhar above Palampur is enlivened by a sprinkling of copper hues of human habitation that cling to the steep fall of rock, conveying the reality that life in these overwhelmingly harsh but sublime surroundings does seem to hang on by a thread. Changing gear to the Great Himalaya a large five-by-four foot canvas reveals an unusually detailed face of Dhaulagiri, most people's idea of the archetypal snow peak, both innocent and deadly and in whose sight the Buddha was born. See this mountain once and you can never forget its gigantic presence.

The immensity of the mountain's face is lightened by touches of light blue and pink tones giving an almost silky texture to offset the bronze and brown of weather-beaten rock which in turn is climaxed by the deep blue of frozen ice. Dhaulagiri in reality is an extraordinary mass of living matter and here the colour, form and texture are explored in an attempt to convey its aliveness, or (to use the artist's own words) 'to lay bare the body of the mountain.' I asked him why this huge close- up image should appear now and he shrugs, accepting the randomness of the human psyche to store and restore its cherished moments. He recalled how forty years earlier on a visit to Pokhara, this vision had smitten him. How long did it take him to paint it? One week working four hours each morning and with very special helpers. These turned out to be three smiling young maids with a village background who showed great flair as studio assistants. They were more cheerful and reliable than males, which reminded me of the chowkidar of the Roerich museum in Nagar I once met. She was also a doughty village woman and only let in those she felt would respond to the genius on display!

Continuing to probe how a forty-year old memory was reactivated, the artist replied that like many who emplane from Delhi to Kolkata, he always made sure to book a seat on the port side, so as to fly alongside the great range, to renew that unforgettable first encounter with the majesty of Dhaulagiri. In contrast to the large canvasses I was shown some early sketches which seemed thrown almost casually but displayed the same sure touch of the inborn mastery. Inspired by a military artist who did watercolours in Dalhousie, the young Serbjeet excelled in this medium. A true artist always displays nostalgia about his earliest work because it symbolises the self belief, which is so crucial to making a career choice. Several early Serbjeet watercolours done in Dalhousie and sold to the British military for a song have found their way to London galleries where their status now has been inflated from painting to investment.



One watercolour he was able to rescue from Lahore at the time of Partition is a small framed wedding procession in the Kullu valley crossing a bridge in the midst of a forest of tall thin tree trunks. Noticeably absent from his later larger canvasses the presence of human figures is vibrantly colourful and energetic, an authentic recreation of a Pahari barat (marriage procession in the hills). Nevertheless it is the natural elegance of the trees that linger in the mind. There is the hint of a Kangra miniature painting in this composition and the artist agreed that the magical world created by Pahari miniatures had an influence on his own style.

Many of the early sketches and obviously those in the military notebook (put up for auction) contained the human form in action but the reason why humans are typically absent from Serbjeet's classic Himalayan landscapes is that the subject lies far above human habitation and more often than not, beyond the tree line. Where you do find villages at high altitude in Ladakh? Zanskar has the lowest concentration of population in India and you can trek miles without seeing a soul. So what you get in a typical Serbjeet canvas are those magical symbols only monks and nomads get to see - the small iron trisuls offered at makeshift shrines atop the wind-grieved pass. On the other side of the Great Range, Buddhist chortens exude blessings to the tired wayfarer from the holy relics interred in them.

Many equate Serbjeet with the austere beauty of the Ladakh landscape for, once seen, it is hard not to get hooked to its bewitching aura. Whether it is the overwhelming blue canopy of heaven or the lack of oxygen in the rarified atmosphere, the effect is of mesmerising beauty, an experiencing of a portion of eternity that overwhelms the everyday senses. On a motorbike trip while standing overlooking the dramatic suture that marks the collision of Indian and Asian landmasses near the monastery of Lamayuru, in one hour I heard 'wow' voiced in a dozen different languages as foreign tourist jeeps and buses screeched to a halt to photograph the great void.

Like Dhaulagiri, these barren but ravishing high altitude slopes haunted the artist's deepest layers of sensibility and were a theme he constantly returned to. To render bare mountain slopes around a flat expanse of water is technically challenging and calls for some daring in leaving blank spaces devoid of detail. But this is precisely the art of Nature at altitude. Serbjeet's faithful portrayal of this mind-blowing scenery infuses a mood of meditation into his canvases and wherever one sees his depiction of the turquoise lakes of Pangong Tso and Tso Moriri the mind is immediately stilled by the confluence of Nature's and of human art.

This ability to turn the water of the outward eye into the wine of ennobled recollection was the secret of Serbjeet's appeal. It is not the largeness of his canvas but his enlarged inner vision that stops viewers in their tracks. The Himalayan peaks if you sweat enough to get as close as Serbjeet had, speak of something ineffable, hidden from our normal consciousness. To express this dimension was Serbjeet's special alchemical gift: transmuting the base contents of the artist's tube of paints into a transcendental presentation: the still turquoise waters displayed as a manifestation of the divine.

It was not easy to gauge Serbjeet's private beliefs but clearly they were derived from the devotional synthesis that Sikhism has made its own. Like many educated Sikhs (he got a first in history at Forman Christian College) although he cherished the tenets of his family faith, he had little time for the outward professions of religion. He felt deeply for the sacredness of beauty and the beauty of sacredness and was keenly aware that his gift was a grace he tried to honour in his work. Press him for more details and he would mumble about how just as the divine rejoices in finding itself, the artist's creativity finds satisfaction in self-expression.

The fact is that painting for him was a form of sadhana (penance)- for sixty years he devoted at least three days in the week to his easel - also working as a film director as well as championing the cause of the arts in general. Like the alchemists of old Serbjeet ploughed his own furrow seeking the source of harmony in nature through a dedicated study of the Himalaya in whose lap he grew up. Whether close up, as in the portrait of Dhaulagiri's massive face, or in a cartographic bird's eye views of sections of the Great Himalaya, his brush was a visionary tool reminding his viewers of an inspiration rootless modern existence is so badly in need of revisiting. There is a practical aspect to these therapeutic exercises and his overview of the layout of the Pakistan - Afghanistan border ranges (viewed from an imaginary height 150,000 metres above Bhuj) is a valuable contribution towards sub continental and indeed, world security.

Alchemists have always been viewed by the establishment as free thinkers who dared experiment with ideas before their time and chemical substances that despite the initial opposition have proved beneficial to the health of humanity. Dr Carl Jung spent years retrieving the reputation of the alchemists proving that the gold they sought was of the inner variety, namely to increase the free, creative, charitable and compassionate instincts of any given society. Power brokers, institutional religion and vested interests have always combined to thwart the human urge for free expression and this is why art as the ageless, symbolic language of the soul is valued by evolved citizens as it slips past the censors to remind of us of the inexhaustibility of human potential.

Throughout the tempestuous decades that brought so much change to the Himalaya and now (through climate change), threaten to deprive the abode of snow of its white mantle, the artist continued his daily tryst with the range, capturing details in sketches he would later work up into a full size canvas. Real things don't change and outlive their transient custodians. I always smile when I see a famous politician or businessman posing in his office in front of a large Serbjeet canvas because the photograph is usually accompanied by a long interview that says nothing. The painting, by contrast though it speaks nothing, makes a subliminal statement. In terms of shelf life (not to mention natural justice) it is the painting that deserves to occupy the front spot.

Once, as I was preparing to leave, Serbjeet's wife (the journalist and dance critic, Shanta Serbjeet Singh) arrived and summed up what I had been trying to elicit from the artist. Why do his paintings alone convey the profound inner impact that the Himalaya has on me? She answered the puzzle with the words: 'Serbjeet creates his own reality.' Shanta then asked if I'd noticed anything different about her husband's style of painting and I confessed I hadn't. I was momentarily flabbergasted when she told me an accident had forced him to paint using only his left hand. Serbjeet smiled when he confirmed the handicap. Then I realised to a master artist this is but one more challenge. Or as the eternally optimistic Punjabi would say: Ki farakpeinda? (What difference does it make?)











Summary :

A tribute to the legendary Himalayan artist Serbjeet Singh. He passed away on 28 August 2009, aged 85 years.