Sohan Qadri - Early Years in India

Early Years in India

Sohan Qadri was born in the village of Chachoki, in 1932, in British India. Chachoki is near the industrial town of Phagwara in the Kapurthala district of Punjab. He grew up in a wealthy farming family—his mother was Hindu and his father was Sikh. With no electricity, running water, roads or cars, Chachoki was only a few miles from the more cosmopolitan city of Kapurthala, with its many palaces and official buildings in the French Neo-Classical style, which were built by a Francophile maharajah.

As a boy of about seven, two spiritualists living on the family farm entranced him. The first was Bikham Giri, a Bengali Tantric-Vajrayan yogi. The second was Ahmed Ali Shah Qadri, a Sufi, who lived within walking distance of Giri. Both gurus taught him spiritual ideals through meditation, dance and music. Though neither was a teacher in the traditional sense, nor were they interested in proselytizing, their impact was profound. Qadri’s association with them heralded a lifelong commitment to spirituality and art.

Qadri’s artistic talent was first expressed in the village pond. Before bathing, he would play with lumps of mud, shaping them into various toys using sticks and stones. He gouged, scratched and marked the forms— techniques that still prevail in his work—to define features such as eyes and noses. His visual influences came from village life where nature is pervasive. Qadri grew up encircled by the Kangra hills, lush woodlands, gushing streams and a patchwork of cotton and wheat fields.

Qadri continued his schooling in until the eighth grade when he sat for his matriculation exam. His mother wanted him to take charge of the family farm. Initially, he did not display any distress over this, but the anxiety eventually prompted him to run away to the Himalayas. He made his way to Karnaul and into Tibet, staying in monasteries for several months, living among spiritualists and forest dwellers. Meanwhile, his mother dispatched a cousin, a wrestler, to bring him home. He tried to run away twice more but was compelled to return. Eventually, Qadri stood his ground. His refusal to take over the farm dashed his mother’s hopes of extending the family’s upward mobility. Qadri who was the first village child to have gained matriculation, instead completed his three-year undegraduate degree at Ram Garhia College and pursued his art by apprenticing himself to Pyara Singh, a photographer with a studio in Jullandhar, Punjab.

After Pyara Singh immigrated to England in 1952, Sohan left Jullandhar for Bombay. Modernism was an urban phenomenon, and in order to pursue his interest in art he felt he had to leave village life behind. Qadri settled in Parel and worked as a still photographer in an early Bollywood studio in Andheri, Bombay. Unable to find the artistic fulfillment he was seeking, he resigned after completing only two films. While in Bombay he discovered the renowned JJ School of Art and the work of modernist artists Krishna Ara, K.K. Hebbar and Shanti Dave.

Through Ara, Hebbar and Dave, Sohan learned of the existence of fine art colleges where one could receive specialized training, and in 1955, he enrolled in the Simla College of Art, Simla. Satish Gujral, a noted modern painter, was teaching at the college after having spent time with Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and David Alfaro Siqueiros in Mexico. The curriculum was modeled after the Royal College of Art in London and also specialized in the Rajput and Mughal styles of painting.

While a student, Qadri visited the art galleries of Delhi. He met the renowned artists Sailoz Mukherjee and J. Swaminathan, who were in the process of starting the group Unknown. He became immersed in the artistic milieu of the pioneering Indian modernists M.F. Husain, Syed Haider Raza, J. Swaminathan, and Ram Kumar. The postwar period was a productive time for emerging artists like Qadri who faced modernism in full bloom. Their predecessors, including the Calcutta Group (1942) and the Progressive Artists Group of Bombay (1947), had already defined a vocabulary of modernism based on certain Indian modes of expression and Western modernist syntax. Qadri and his contemporaries were able to build on this vocabulary and even reject their predecessors’ reliance on figuration, which, these earlier artists believed defined them as authentically Indian.

After finishing his degree, Qadri returned home to Phagwara and joined the faculty of the Phagwara Teachers Training College for three years. In 1961, Dr. Mulk Raj Anand, the founder and editor of the art journal Marg, and associate of the Bloomsbury Group of London, recognised Qadri’s talent. After viewing his work at a faculty exhibition, he singled Qadri out and promised to visit his village. Anand spontaneously supported young talent throughout India, and he became Qadri’s first major patron. Anand arrived in Phagwara in 1963 with Pierre Jeanneret, an architect and cousin of the architect Le Corbusier, who acquired a painting for his collection.

Anand and Jeanneret invited Qadri to bring his work to the newly built city of Chandigarh, capital of Punjab and Haryana, designed by Le Corbusier. Qadri’s first exhibition was the second exhibition to be held at Gandhi Bhavan, the Punjab University Library art gallery designed by Jeanneret (the first was MF Husain’s). During this time Sohan changed his last name from Singh to Qadri as a sign of devotion to his Sufi teacher.

After gaining critical acclaim, Qadri began to paint seriously, and in the small town of Jullandhar, began to teach himself about the School of Paris. As was often the case with artists living outside European artistic centers, modernism appeared through secondary material – particularly print media. Sohan educated himself by looking at the magazines Studio International, Illustrated Weekly of India, and Modern Review, as well as reading lectures and books. While reading about Francis Newton Souza, an enfant terrible of Indian art, and his adventures in Paris, Qadri dreamed of visiting modernity’s capital. In the meantime, he built a studio of mud and straw bales in Chachoki and began to teach himself about the Indian and international art scene.

Qadri started creating figurative works, slowly veering toward abstraction, and ultimately abandoning representation in a search for transcendence. “When I start on a canvas,” he says, “first I empty my mind of all images. They dissolve into a primordial space. Only emptiness, I feel, should communicate with the emptiness of the canvas.” Instead of using subject matter drawn from the disaffected, gritty urban world like many of his contemporaries, he searched for subject matter that inspired spiritual feelings and turned to an Eastern mode of expression full of bhava or mood. “I was focusing purely on color and form without distraction from figure,” he says.

Qadri developed the methodology of painting during this period that he still uses today. He divided pure colors into three categories or parts: dark, warm or cool, and light. Dark colors form the earth element or lower level. Warm or cold colors denote energy, each of which possesses a different vibration (vigorous when warm and mild when cold), and form the middle level, and light colors, the upper level. This allowed for a tripartite arrangement that could be organized in descending or ascending order.

In 1962, Qadri had his second exhibition at Sridharani Gallery in New Delhi. After the Sridharani exhibition, and with the help of Randhawa and Dr. Anand in Delhi (then chairman of the Lalit Kala Akademi), several galleries took interest in his work. At the time, Indian artists largely found patrons among the diplomatic or expatriate community, along with a few Indians interested in modern art. Among the collectors of Qadri’s early art were the Belgian Consul and the Canadian and French ambassadors to India.