V

Aspiration

G. R. SANTOSH
Avinash Chandra • Bikash Bhattacharjee • Dhanraj Bhagat • F. N. Souza •
G. R. Santosh • Hemen Mazumdar • Kshitindranath Majumdar • M. F. Husain
• Rabindranath Tagore • Radha Charan Bagchi • Ramkinkar Baij • S. K. Bakre
• S. H. Raza • Avinash Chandra • Bikash Bhattacharjee • Dhanraj Bhagat •
F. N. Souza • G. R. Santosh • Hemen Mazumdar • Kshitindranath Majumdar
• M. F. Husain • Rabindranath Tagore • Radha Charan Bagchi • Ramkinkar Baij •
S. K. Bakre • S. H. Raza • Avinash Chandra • Bikash Bhattacharjee • Dhanraj Bhagat
• F. N. Souza • G. R. Santosh • Hemen Mazumdar • Kshitindranath Majumdar • M. F.
Husain • Rabindranath Tagore • Radha Charan Bagchi • Ramkinkar Baij • S. K. Bakre •
S. H. Raza • Avinash Chandra • Bikash Bhattacharjee • Dhanraj Bhagat • F. N. Souza
• G. R. Santosh • Hemen Mazumdar • Kshitindranath Majumdar • M. F. Husain
• Rabindranath Tagore • Radha Charan Bagchi • Ramkinkar Baij • S. K. Bakre •
 Aspiration
G. R. SANTOSH
Masterpiece V
Masterpiece V
Copyright: 2016 DAG Modern, New Delhi
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SERIES EDITOR: Kishore Singh
EXECUTIVE EDITOR: Shruti Parthasarathy
PROJECT RESEARCH: Poonam Baid, Abhilasha Ojha
TEXT ASSISTANCE: Mansi Dhiman Mandhwani
PROVENANCES: Ruchi Sharma
DESIGN: Durgapada Chowdhury Contents
PHOTOGRAPHY OF ARTWORKS: Durgapada
Chowdhury and Saurabh Khandelwal
PRINT: Archana Advertising Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi About Aspiration 4
Artist Profile 12
Artist Milestones 14
All rights are reserved under international copyright
Biography: The Artist as Yogi 16
conventions. No part of this catalogue may be reproduced
- Kishore Singh
or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic and
mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any
Provenance 46
information storage and retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing from the publisher.
Masterpiece Series I - XVIII 48
 Aspiration
Gouache on paper pasted on board, 1957
48.0 x 59.7 in. / 121.9 x 151.6 cm.
Signed in Hindi and dated in English (lower right)
‘Santosh / 57’
Verso: Three labels giving details of the work’s
participation in exhibitions and a signature of the artist in
English
Published: Singh, Kishore, ed., Awakening: A Retrospective
of G.R. Santosh (New Delhi: DAG, 2012), pp. 60-61; Singh,
Kishore, ed., India Modern, Narratives from 20th Century
Indian Art (New Delhi: DAG Modern, 2015), p. 295

4 Masterpiece V G. R. Santosh
 about ASPIRATION
For an artist skilled as a portraitist, it should be no
surprise that G. R. Santosh made the transition as a
figurative painter with such ease. Trained in the figurative
tradition prevalent in Baroda, Santosh acquired acclaim
as a figurative modernist. His native Kashmir figured
frequently in his works, as in this early work from 1957,
Aspiration, which shows a group of women standing in
a circle as they sway with arms raised, in a dance. To a
lesser extent in his figurative works and in several of the
abstractions that followed this phase, Santosh employed
a cubist-inspired distortion of limbs, perspectives
and planes, to create compositions with none of the
disharmony typical of the style, but used in a manner that
indicated, instead, an integration of the elements.
The woman are stylised and elegant, their elongation
stressed, and each, wearing the traditional scarf-like
headgear of Kashmiri women – evoking their legendary
beauty – looks straight at the viewer, even the one with
her back to the viewer who turns her head around to
6 Masterpiece V G. R. Santosh G. R. Santosh
bring her droopy and somewhat doleful gaze to meet
the viewer’s. The large, expressive eyes, are a formulaic
placement, meant to echo the stylised, romanticised
beauty of women from Ajanta’s cave frescos, as Jamini
Roy’s figures – and the air of celebration echoes the hope
of the title.
The earthy palette of prominent black, browns, reds
and ochres plays off against the blues, and the textured
brushwork, the spray of pigment in places and the
flourishes of ochre break the turgidity and create much
movement in the work, one taken along by the decisive,
fine lines. The little spaces between forms filled with a
light textured pigment relieves the crowding of the
composition, which, leading upward to a brief but distant
horizon etched in an arc at the work’s upper edge that
shows dwellings, trees and the sun hint at poplars and
lakes, peaks and the stunning valleys of Kashmir, the
legendary heaven on earth.
– kishore singh
Masterpiece V 7
8 Masterpiece V G. R. Santosh G. R. Santosh Masterpiece V 9
 Quotes His immediate environment was steeped in a refined in addition to his many gifts People respond
understanding of the arts and marked by a non-orthodox as a painter, santosh was spontaneously. They
and deeply pious outlook. This, in fact, is the quintessence also a superb colourist. see the work. I tell them
of traditional Kashmiri ethos. All his life, Santosh remained his competence in handling to take their time over it.
a traditional Kashmiri at heart, albeit with a modern, colour with varying degrees And they come around
liberal mind. of delicacy or vigour is by many routes,
– Shantiveer kaul
in evidence right from his to the same basic point
earliest work, regardless of – linking these paintings
Even if one chose to see his His works the medium. to the contemplative life.
work in a broader context, it communicate a – shantiveer kaul – G. R. SANTOSH
belonged to an indigenised stillness within
school of geometric the dynamism His painting explored both figural and landscape subjects,
abstraction, which rested its of generative, and he built up his canvases into a deep impasto, a
case with high modernism. ovoid elements. technique that emerged from his time in Baroda.
– GAYATRI SINHA – Rebecca M. Brown – Rebecca M. Brown

10 Masterpiece V G. R. Santosh G. R. Santosh Masterpiece V 11

 artist profile
G. R. SANTOSH (1929-97)
Born Gulam Rasool Dar in a lower middle class Shia
Muslim family in Srinagar, Kashmir, this self-taught artist
took on his wife’s Hindu name ‘Santosh’ for his own in a
move opposing both patriarchy and religion. His father’s
death propelled a young Santosh into early work as a
signboard painter, papier-maché artist and weaver. He
painted watercolour landscapes for tourists in Kashmir
when S. H. Raza, already an established artist, spotted
him and arranged for his art studies at M. S. University,
Baroda. At Baroda, he studied under the eminent painter
N. S. Bendre.
In his native Kashmir, Santosh found inspiration in the
Hindu and Buddhist tantric cults that had coexisted
with the region’s Sufi mysticism for centuries. Already
a successful Indian modernist Santosh had a moving
spiritual experience at the Amarnath cave in Kashmir
12 Masterpiece V
in 1964, which turned him towards tantra. Driven by an
esoteric worldview, he created forms that fused the sexual
and the transcendental. He built his pictorial and poetic
world around this transcendental philosophy, writing on
the philosophy in English but his poetry and fiction in
Kashmiri and Urdu.
An acclaimed writer and poet in Kashmiri, G. R. Santosh
was recognised by the national-level literary institution
Sahitya Kala Parishad. As a painter, recognition
came to him from Lalit Kala Akademi, the state
governments of Madhya Pradesh and Jammu and
Kashmir, and the Government of India, the latter in the
form of the Padma Shri.
G. R. Santosh photographed in the early Nineties
G. R. Santosh G. R. Santosh Masterpiece V 13
 Artist MILESTONES

1929 Born in Kashmir to the practice of tantra and becomes a

prominent practitioner of a style that
1947-53 Learns painting, weaving, papier-mâché
comes to be known as neo-tantra
1950 Joins Progressive Arts Association in
1966 Holds his last show of works as a
Srinagar
‘modernist’ before the transition to tantra
1954 Goes to M.S. University, Baroda, studies
Executes Shiva-Shakti series and early
under N. S. Bendre as a non-collegiate
tantra works
student
1966-68 A tentative exploration of the symbolism
1956 Participates in the National Art
and language of tantric art shows
Exhibition with his expressionistic
abstracted bodies in copulation
landscapes
1979 The artist’s poetry collection, Besukh
Returns to Kashmir and continues to
Ruh, wins the Sahitya Akademi award
paint in the cubist vein till 1959
1997 Dies on March 10
1959- Abstract iconographies begin to emerge
early 1960s from a study of his Kashmiri approach to
the worship of Shiva

1964 Visits Amarnath cave in Kashmir, where

he has a deeply spiritual, epiphanic
experience. Following this, Santosh takes

14 Masterpiece V G. R. Santosh G. R. Santosh Masterpiece V 15

 A Biography: The artist as Yogi
He would have been eighty-two years old this year, had
a heart attack not claimed him at the young age of sixty-
eight, and there are many people who remember Gulam
Rasool Santosh still. Few knew him well – for he was
an intense and very private person – but nonetheless
many knew him, and of him. ‘I was a little girl sitting on
a window, my legs dangling from the ledge, as I watched
him painting a portrait of my mother,’ the enamel artist
Jyotika Singh recalls several decades later.
The portrait in question was part of a pair that the artist
painted of the royal couple of Kashmir, Maharaja Dr.
Karan Singh and his lovely wife, Yasho Rajya Lakshmi.
Reminded of the paintings, Dr. Karan Singh recalled
seeing them a long, long while ago, but remembered that
his wife had not particularly cared for them, which is why
they were probably put into storage ‘perhaps in the palace
in Srinagar’ in the former ruler’s residence. ‘My mother
didn’t like them,’ Jyotika agrees – strange, certainly, for
16 Masterpiece V
an artist who went on to paint commissioned portraits
of several Indian Presidents that still hang in Parliament
House and Rashtrapati Bhawan. Those portraits alone
would have assured him a place in the pantheon of Indian
artists, later hijacked by his more popularly recognisable
body of work on tantric art that almost subverted all that
he had achieved before that.
Dr. Karan Singh, who headed the Indian Council for
Cultural Relations in the recent past, may have a problem
recollecting the location of the royal portraits, but he has
no hesitation when it comes to remembering Santosh,
who used to ‘paint outside the palace’. He painted
buildings, signboards, and later the kind of landscapes
that tourists like to carry away from places they visit, not
the kind of person you might ordinarily dredge up – but
extraordinary fortune awaited the young artist whose
exhibition of drawings and watercolours, in 1967, would
be inaugurated by Karan Singh as minister of tourism
G. R. Santosh
and civil aviation. But, by then, Santosh was already an
established name, having overcome his early struggles in
both his personal and professional life, to create a body of
works that reinvented Indian modernism.
Those Early, Lonely Years
To understand Santosh, you have to go all the way back
to his childhood and the trying circumstances of his early
life. Born in 1929 to Gulam Mohammad Dar and Syeda in
a conservative Shia Muslim family in Srinagar’s Chinkral
mohalla, Gulam Rasool Dar – to give him the name his
family did – lost his policeman father when still young.
Family circumstances forced him to work, and though he
struggled to continue with his studies, eventually going
on to pass his matriculation, he found himself earning
his livelihood in the cottage industry trade for which
Kashmir is well known: silk weaving, making papier-
mâché handicrafts, and, of course, painting everything
from houses to billboards, from buses to the whimsical
landscapes that trucks then sported on their back.Even
before his father had passed away, Santosh had been put A contemplative
to work by him as a ghat-munshi, a clerk who wrote the G. R. Santosh
G. R. Santosh Masterpiece V 17

(Above) The artist with his teacher and mentor at Baroda,
eminent painter N. S. Bendre in 1974; (top, left) An early
watercolour landscape of Kashmir, View of Hari Parbat from
Chasm-e-Shahi, painted by G. R. Santosh; An early figurative
work by G. R. Santosh done in 1956 (left)
18 Masterpiece V G. R. Santosh
account books for businesses in the valley. Earlier, his
father would beat him for making sketches, something
Islam forbids. Writing account books wasn’t the sort of
work he enjoyed, and any money he saved would go into
buying books, paint and paper. ‘My grandfather didn’t
like it, but my father would escape to the Dal Lake, or the
banks of the Jhelum,’ there to draw, or paint, reminisces
his son Shabir Hussain Santosh. Eventually, Santosh left
his job, and when his mother realised that foreign tourists
were keen to buy his landscapes, she said it was okay if he
didn’t want to work so long as he sold what he painted.
‘I never wanted to do a white collar job,’ Santosh would
later recount to a journalist, ‘I would rather work with
labourers. But I always wanted to become a painter.’
Of course, his flair had been noticed even in school by
his drawing masters, as art teachers were then known.
‘They recognised his talent,’ Shabir, himself an artist and
an art teacher, remembers. ‘When one of them asked the
class to draw a ball, and while the other students drew
a circle with a compass, my father drew a ball freehand,
and then lent it perspective through shading.’ But gifted
G. R. Santosh
or not, there was only so much he could have achieved
in Kashmir, were it not for a chance meeting with the
eminent artist S. H. Raza.
Raza, himself then just beginning to make a name for
himself, had come to Kashmir to spend time painting
landscapes. While there, he was introduced to several
budding artists on the banks of the Jhelum, and whom
he asked to draw plein-air. ‘He was astonished to see my
father’s perspective of the houseboat,’ Shabir says, pointing
out that ‘the houseboat, in particular, is a difficult object
to draw…’ Raza, a member of the Progressive Artists’
Group in Bombay that had started in 1947, persuaded
Santosh to join the movement through the Progressive
Artists Association in Srinagar, in 1950. He also proposed
Santosh’s name for further study and a scholarship, which
the state government seconded, sending the delighted
lad, in 1954, to the Maharaja Sayajirao University in
Baroda to train under one of the foremost teachers of
Indian modern art – N. S. Bendre. In Baroda, Santosh
was part of a batch of artists that consisted of Jyoti Bhatt
and Shanti Dave – both well-established contemporaries
Masterpiece V 19
 – and eventually they would come together many times in
group shows. In Kashmir, Santosh had pored over works
by Braque and Picasso, while learning to paint landscapes
under the guidance of Dina Nath Raina. Even so, he
was largely a self-taught artist, and his experience was to
stand him in good stead in Baroda – even though, in that
dry, dusty part of the subcontinent, it was remembered
Kashmir landscapes he painted nostalgically. Till, that
is, Bendre, coming to his room one day, said to him,
‘You’ve painted enough landscapes, it’s time you did some
figurative art.’ ‘My father switched totally then,’ Shabir
says. ‘He never painted landscapes again.’ His figurative
art too was heavily inspired by Kashmir. Even though he
was experimenting with cubism by now, the figures he
rendered against the remembered Kashmiri landscape
could only have been from the land of his birth. In fact,
all his art – then and later – would lean heavily on the
rich tradition of Kashmiri Shaivism.
The Transition Years
To fully understand his art, it is important to know
Santosh, and for that it requires one to understand the
20 Masterpiece V
rebellions that made up his personal life. ‘All his life,’
wrote filmmaker and friend Shantiveer Kaul of him,
‘Santosh remained a traditional Kashmiri at heart with a
modern, liberal mind.’
He had already upset his family with his decision to
make a career for himself as an artist – a bold step for
a boy from the lower middle class in Kashmir. In 1956,
the year he participated in the National Art Exhibition
with his expressionistic landscapes, Santosh returned to
live and paint in Srinagar. His art was no longer tourist-
oriented – there was a freshness and boldness now, and
he was himself aware of the influences that were at play.
Under Bendre, he had learned not just figurative art but
also portraiture, and this would earn him handsome
dividends. Around the same time, he also began to flirt
with abstraction, and his canvases turned playful as he
unleashed his creative genius unrestrained by the rules of
(Above) Cover of the 1967 exhibition catalogue of
academic realism or form.
G. R. Santosh’s paintings at Cottage Industries Emporium, New Delhi,
inaugurated by Dr. Karan Singh, then minister for tourism and civil
In 1957, one Bombay newspaper reported his ‘third one- aviation; (right) A drawing of Santosh from an exhibition catalogue of
man show in India and his first in Bombay’ in which his paintings at Kumar Art Gallery, New Delhi, in 1964
G. R. Santosh G. R. Santosh Masterpiece V 21

The artist’s portrait of Odissi dancer Sharon Lowen painted
in the year 1970. Sharon was then an American student
and agreed to model for him
he exhibited only a single landscape, while another,
The Bharat Jyoti, went on to heap praise on the twenty-
eight year old, reporting, ‘Painters, like poets, are born,
not made.’ For the largely self-taught artist, in fact, the
lessons lay in his observation of Indian sculpture and
architecture. ‘He would say that it was ahead of Western
realism, for being stylised and having a bit of abstraction,’
Shabir recollects.
By now his painting, Peace, had won one of ten coveted
awards at the National Art Exhibition organised by the
Lalit Kala Akademi, and the work itself was acquired
by the National Gallery of Modern Art. (It must be
mentioned here that Santosh had a key role in designing
the galleries of the Lalit Kala Akademi, and was a
director in its formative years.) The following year, an art
critic noted that ‘one’s first impression is that of an able,
even powerful, craftsman’. The review criticised Santosh’s
‘contemporary idiom’ for being ‘not so new – it can be seen
in the work of any of Bombay’s progressive artists’, calling
his elongated styling of the figures and cubist influence
‘all too familiar’, but praising him for his ‘remarkable
grasp of the essentials’. Another critic was of the view
that ‘Santosh delights in making experiments in space.’
Even as he was establishing himself as an artist of calibre,
another storm was brewing, one that would physically
sweep him away from Kashmir. Santosh had been seeing
a Hindu girl for some time, and they were convinced
they would marry. Both households, staunchly Muslim
and Hindu respectively, were tethered by tradition, and
would not dream of letting such an event come to pass.
In the end, the two of them ran away, to appear before a
magistrate in Mussoorie, where, in the presence of her
brother, the Hindu bride married her Muslim groom. Back
in Kashmir, their marriage was deemed unacceptable, and
the two left the magical vale to come to Delhi, in 1960,
where Santosh would live for the rest of his life. But he
returned often to Kashmir – for inspiration, and because
he continued to live and paint according to its Shaivite
philosophy, which was to be the dominating influence on
his life and art. Santosh now did something truly radical: G. R. Santosh was exteremly fond of making portraits,
to mark his protest against the opposition to their inter- especially of people close to him. Seen here is a portrait
religious marriage, to uphold his belief in the oneness of of his wife, Toshi, done in 1983

22 Masterpiece V G. R. Santosh G. R. Santosh Masterpiece V 23

 humanity, and to lend support to his probably vulnerable
spouse, Gulam Rasool Dar did what few would have
imagined, he renounced his surname to take on that of
his wife, hereafter always referring to himself as Santosh
(and his wife Santosh who, from then on, came to be
known as Toshi). It was Santosh’s acknowledgement
of Kashmir’s syncretic culture and hoary Sufi tradition,
and it led the way for his children who would take their
mother’s name as their surname, thereby rising above
petty confines of caste, patriarchy and religion Yet,
Santosh never renounced his traditions and his beliefs.
‘His roots and his tradition were very important to him,’
Shabir says. A question that often bothered him was the
quintessential ‘Who am I?’ – not in a narrow sense, but
in terms of his art and whether it was communicating
anything to the people who came to see it.
He was, of course, still continuing with commissions of
portraits, a practice at which he was becoming increasingly
adept. ‘He was fond of making portraits,’ Shabir says, ‘he
would say that whoever knows how to make portraits
will know how to paint.’ Though he experimented across
24 Masterpiece V
styles, he would continue to make portraits till the end of
his life. Even the portraits of the Karan Singhs – the ones
Yasho Rajya Lakshmi did not like – were exhibited at
Delhi’s now-defunct Gallery Chanakya, prompting one
art critic to observe that they ‘must have taken months
and many sittings to execute, judging from the way
Santosh has portrayed them. Excellent portraits both,
by any standards.’ Perhaps the reason why the subjects
of his study were less appreciative might lie in one critic’s
observation that ‘despite his meticulous rendering of the
flesh tones of the subjects, the texture of the draperies,
Santosh, perhaps inadvertently, attempted a “cold
exactitude”,’ such as in the ‘metallic glint of Mrs. Karan
Singh’s ornaments’ and their ‘abstracted, preoccupied
gaze away from the eyes of the spectators’.
His other portraits from that period include studies of his
own family, consisting of his wife Toshi and their three
children, the latter causing the critic to exult over ‘the
innocence and beauty of a child’s face that Santosh so
intensely depicts’, but there would also be other paintings,
later, the artist’s J. Sultan Ali’s family, of his own mother,
G. R. Santosh
of Urdu poet Ghalib. There were portraits of important
politicians as well, and Presidents, such as Zakir
Husain, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, Giani Zail Singh, and
R. Venkataraman, and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru
and later Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Odissi dancer
Sharon Lowen, then an American student who had come
to India to learn classical dance – and who chose to stay
on in the country – was one of those whom he painted,
but Sharon reveals that ‘he made a second portrait of me
that he presented to me as my model fee’, and which she
has hanging still in her New Delhi home.
It must be left to the reader to imagine Santosh’s life
at this point. Living in Delhi, seeing the birth of his
three children, watching his career take off with solo
exhibitions in Bombay, Calcutta and Delhi, in New York,
Kabul, Tel-Aviv, Los Angeles and Chicago, even a second
national award in 1963 (he had won his first national
award in 1957, and would claim a third one in 1977),
it must have seemed like an amazing dream for the boy
who had begun his painterly life painting signboards in
Srinagar. The same year, in 1963, he had also published
G. R. Santosh
his first novel, in Urdu, Samandar Pyaasa Hai – in time,
it would be difficult to decide whether he was a painter
first, a playwright or a literatteur (writing prose and
poetry in Kashmiri and Urdu), and in 1979, he would
claim a Sahitya Akademi award for his collection of
poems, Besukh Ruh.
Through it all, Santosh kept returning to Kashmir, to
its beautiful sights and its culture, to the ‘rituals of the
pundits that intrigued him and to the rock carvings of
Hari Parbat which fascinated him’, according to his son
Shabir. It was on one such visit, in 1964 that his friends
suggested that he should go to Amarnath.
Amarnath, for those unfamiliar with it, is a famed cave
shrine beyond Pahalgam in Kashmir. According to
legend, it was here that Shiva had recounted to Parvati
the mantra of immortality, and a couple of eavesdroppers
who had overheard the tale were turned into pigeons
fated to spend the rest of their immortal life within the
cave precincts where a waxing and waning ice stalagmite
shaped like a lingam attracts hundreds of thousands of
Masterpiece V 25

Above: G. R. Santosh in Paris on a wintry day
Facing page: (top) G. R. Santosh seen with S. H. Raza (left)
and Tyeb Mehta (right) at artist Vishwanadhan’s studio at
Rue Ricaut, Paris, 1973; (centre) G. R. Santosh seen with
Shanti Dave (left) and Mahendra Jain (centre); (right) G. R.
Santosh seen with Keshav Mallik at his 1971 exhibition in
Gallery Chanakya
26 Masterpiece V
pilgrims annually during a month-long yatra or journey.
An interesting aside is that the region’s secular credentials
are evidenced by this Hindu cave shrine having a family
of Muslims as its caretakers, responsible for its upkeep
ever since the hoary legend has been known, certainly an
element that must have played on Santosh’s mind.
It was a year, and a pilgrimage, that would forever change
Santosh’s life. No one is quite clear about it, but everyone
agrees that he must have had some kind of a mystical
experience while there, perhaps gone into a trance,
or felt the presence of the gods, or experienced some
metamorphosis. Santosh internalised the experience,
becoming more inward-looking, reticent, quieter than
before (not that he was ever boisterous). He doodled a
bit, made some drawings which critics call his early tantra
works, he moped, read, painted in a desultory fashion …
… and then, one fine day, gave it all up. He had hit a
blockade, similar to a writer’s block; perhaps he was
burnt out. He no longer painted. Was his career, then at
its peak, over?
G. R. Santosh
The Meditative Stage
Shabir was two years old the year Santosh had his
revelation, too young to remember that his father seemed
to spend inordinate amounts of time not working. He
used it, instead, to read about the Shiva and Shakti
philosophy, the Kashmir Shaivism of which he would
become a proponent, which works on the principle
of managing energies to gain realisation. Here is how
Santosh’s biographer Shantiveer Kaul describes it as
different from other Shaiva schools: ‘It understands
existence on the microcosmic as well as macrocosmic
levels. It also considers the physical body to be a vehicle
for the attainment of self-realisation. It recommends
the use of mantra or chanting – consisting mostly of
phonemes rather than words – and the contemplation
of yantra or the visual – a schematic visual stimulus –
for sadhana (meditative practice). This is supposed to
uncoil and raise the inherent energy (kundalini shakti –
energy that is wound like a coiled serpent) from its basic
somnolent level (mooladhara chakra – level of the basic
foundation) through several intermediate stages, to its
highest level (sahasrar or sahasra kamaldal – cluster of
G. R. Santosh Masterpiece V 27

Santosh experimented with a wide
variety of forms, never leaving the
figural behind while reaching for
an expression of shared cosmic and
bodily energies. Santosh’s formal and
philosophical commitments emerged
within a large political and historical
context...
– Rebecca M. Brown
28 Masterpiece V
a thousand lotuses), resulting in the attainment of self-
realisation.’ One can only wonder how much of this
Santosh assimilated in the beginning, but there is no
doubt he immersed himself in rigourous research and
practice. He sought a guru who asked him ‘to face West
and meditate because my guru thought as a Muslim I
would be more comfortable facing that way, but I found
myself turning East on my own towards the sun, the
source of energy’. Speaking to Atul Mittal, he explained
that tantric philosophy pre-dated the Vedas and any
other religious treatise. At the heart of his belief was
Hari Parbat’s sharika – a rock face with esoteric symbols
carved into it, from which Santosh derived his purush-
prakriti philosophy, and which he would use as the basis
of his unpublished study on the characters and symbols
of the unsolved language of the Harappans of the Indus
Valley Civilisation. ‘There was a change within me,’ he
was quoted in a journal called Expressions & Impressions,
‘I stopped painting.’
Those years of study though were eventually directed at
what he would paint. ‘Technically,’ he said, ‘it took me
G. R. Santosh G. R. Santosh
two-three years to throw away the thick colours I was
used to’ as well, he might have added, of the ‘symmetry
and geometry of figures’. The derivative of this was
tantra, part of the subcontinent’s huge body of divinely
revealed texts with their own Buddhist narration as
well, and it was this that drew Santosh’s attention and
curiosity, and which led him on to paint the emerging
mantras and yantras in his own accordance, ignoring the
prescribed format, thereby earning it the description of
neo-tantric art.
Tantra, for him, was simple in its concept, if complex in
its rendition and understanding. ‘That which activates the
body by the exhalation and inhalation of breath is tantra,’
he explained. ‘We can’t talk of tantra without mantra and
yantra,’ he said to Atul Mittal. ‘Mantra is a pure sound,’ –
perhaps the best way to explain it is the primordial sound
of ‘Om’ or ‘Aum’ – and its corresponding image was the
yantra, ‘that which is conceived visually’. Long before the
development of a script, it was the image that recorded
these divinations, ‘a concept’, as Santosh explained, that
‘has to be transformed into a symbol but must correspond
Masterpiece V 29
 with the science of truth’. Nor was he the first to stumble
onto the power and imagery of tantra, for scholars before
him had explored this territory of classical learning –
‘from Sir John Woodroffe, Swami Aghenananda, down to
Ajit Mookerjee’, according to Ajit Kumar Dutta. ‘For the
neo-tantrics, as this particular set of artists is referred to,
the search implies a sort of inner realisation and visions.’
‘When he started painting tantra, he paved the way for a
lot of Indian artists to find their way too,’ Shabir analyses
years later about those artists who had lost their way
in the labyrinthine folds of modernism. ‘He influenced
many of them’, and after a pause, adds with delightful
irony, ‘among them (S. H.) Raza too’.
But Santosh’s own beginning was less than auspicious.
Those years of creative drought were followed by the first
experimental paintings, and the shows, at Kumar Art
Gallery in 1967, and at Dhoomimal in 1968, bore the
brunt of it. ‘Keshav Malik,’ – once one of his most ardent
admirers – ‘criticised it,’ recalls Shabir, not the only one
among critics who thought of it then as mere geometry.
30 Masterpiece V
Even in 1970, Malik’s discomfort with Santosh’s content
was palpable. ‘If you are not an initiate, as I’m not’ he
observed, ‘you mightn’t quite get the heartbeat of the
thing.’ ‘There was a lot of criticism, his paintings were
not selling,’ Shabir shares quietly, ‘people wanted him to
revert to his earlier style.’ Critic Santo Datta was among
those who praised his ‘disciplined handling of the formal
elements’ even while observing that ‘one does not share
the artist’s mystic message regarding [the] inner reality
of creation and the cosmos’. ‘Critics had no vocabulary to
describe my work and I did not have many buyers for a
long time,’ Santosh was quoted saying in The Hindustan
Times. The artist – and his family – all had to bear the
burden of those difficult times.
Not quite a bon-vivant, Santosh did have a lot of friends,
most from the world of art, music, dance, theatre,
literature, and they must have teased, than accepted, his
emerging vision. ‘There would be drinking, shouting,
fights, arguments,’ Shabir recollects, and among those
present would be Santosh’s buyers who then also
consisted of diplomats, expatriates – collectors who saw a
G. R. Santosh
similarity with the works of Paul Klee, and soon enough
Santosh had won over even the most vocal of his critics.
‘They found his neo-tantric art fascinating,’ Shabir avers.
Once again, however, Santosh’s family and those who
followed his art in Kashmir had difficulty in relating to
the chasm he was trying to bridge through his art. His
genuine belief in Sufism meant he saw no distinction
between the Hindu and Kashmiri ways of life despite
their different faiths, and it was he who explained the
origin of the deep-rooted philosophy of the sharika-
yantra at Hari Parbat to the Kashmiri Pandits. ‘For
him, Kashmiriyat [Kashmiri-ness], or the key essence of
Sufism, lay within oneself, it was a philosophy of self-
location,’ explains Shabir.
Collectors and art-lovers began responding to Santosh
through an awakening interest. There was already a huge
interest in Indian art, culture and philosophy in the
academic studies being undertaken by Western scholars,
and in the popular culture through the Beatles-finding-
nirvana in Haridwar and the transcendental gropings of
G. R. Santosh
the hippy cult. Santosh’s art fit right in bridging the two
divides, for as he would explain to art writers, in Kashmir
colour was associated with energy, and his use of that
energy created the tantric cosmos of his own vision of
Shaivite philosophy. ‘My paintings deal with yantra,’ he
pointed out, and its interpretation for him lay in the use
of pigment as light. ‘The presence of light in my painting
has been recognised by critics. Kashmir Shaivism speaks
of prakash and vimarsh (light and luminosity – the
philosophical meaning is light and the consciousness
of being light),’ he said. Manasij Majumder, a reputed
art critic, writing in The Telegraph, found the works
resounding with ‘a visionary glow’. In this context,
Santosh defined the use of borders in his paintings as
important because ‘it limits the space’. ‘My painting is
full of thinking,’ he clarified.
It was this openness that was at the crux of his philosophy.
Though based on Kashmiri Shaivism, Shantiveer Kaul
would point out that Santosh remained ‘highly receptive
towards the fine nuances of the other schools as well’ and
that ‘he was signally devoid of dogma’.
Masterpiece V 31
 Transition to Tantra
Nor must one forget that beyond being an artist, Santosh
was also a writer and a poet, acknowledged for both. ‘His
thinking was never superfluous,’ says Shabir, ‘but very
deep.’ If he was knowledgeable about Shaivite philosophy,
he was also naturally curious about the unknown, and
particularly interested in science fiction, especially sci-fi
movies. ‘He was impressed by the Star Trek series,’ Shabir
smiles, ‘and would try and relate science-fiction with
Indian mythology.’
As a neo-tantric artist, it wasn’t just studies and discussions
that kept Santosh focussed, for he would meditate too as
an essential aspect of his art. ‘He would have revelations
while meditating,’ Shabir recalls, adding, ‘You can
Critics lauded the use of a strong outline and deliberate
strokes of colour while evaluating G. R. Santosh’s
contribution to the emerging modernism of the time.
The use of earthy colours characterises this period most
strongly as seen in Pull (left), an oil from 1956
32 Masterpiece V G. R. Santosh
meditate in front of his paintings, go into a trance – there
is a lot of vibration in them.’ He remembers an occasion
when his father, at that time painting a Shiva ling, had
screamed in terror. He later told his family that he had
imagined a snake writhing aro und his body – a signal
he took to mean Shiva did not want him to complete
the painting, which was covered and tucked away and
never finished.
In 2001, writing for The Hindu, art critic Gayatri Sinha
lashed out at the thoughtlessness of those who referred
to Santosh’s painting as neo-tantric, insisting instead
that ‘it belonged to an indigenised school of geometric
abstraction which rested its case with high modernism’.
Rather than the metaphysics of sexualism, she saw in the
‘ascending and descending triangles’ combining ‘with the
circle to create images of a liminal energy field’ evocative
of ‘a sense of divine shakti’. She went on to say, ‘It is a
mark of his convictions as a painter that he continued
to paint in the neo-tantric style long after it had been
debunked as a bad pastiche of Indian aspirations in a
Western mould.’
G. R. Santosh
Viewers are attracted to Santosh’s tantric art for its
kaleidoscopic forms; more serious observers associate the
triangle, oval, circle and square with the yantra or visual
basis for tantra, several of them manifest as abstracted
goddesses; many find him a brilliant colourist; still
others are fascinated by the vertical mirror images he
creates, replicating the left and right sides in a diadem
of light. He would tell Shantiveer Kaul, ‘People respond
spontaneously. They see the work. I tell them to take
time over it. And they come around, by many routes,
to the same basic point – linking these paintings to the
contemplative life, to the practice of yoga-sadhana. It is
the feel of the iconography; in temples, at shrines, they
are in contact with it.’
Just how difficult the shift must have been is best
explained in the context of the success of probably his
last show before the transition to tantra in January
1966 in New Delhi. ‘Mr Santosh is a gifted artist who
has grown in stature,’ the art critic wrote rapturously.
The artist, he continued, had ‘perfected his technique,
avoiding everything that is obtrusive and unessential’, all
Masterpiece V 33
 the exhibited works were ‘of a uniformly high standard’,
and there was in them ‘a sense of peace and silence’.
‘I felt, being an Indian, when all my habits of thought and
action flow from this background,’ Santosh would tell art
writer M. K. Tiku later, ‘why not in painting?’ He had
taken a risk at the peak of his career – but it had paid off.
An Artist ’s Nirvana
In the late Sixties, Santosh executed a number of drawings
that, in popular fashion, showed nudes, drawn in outlines,
all of them missing heads. ‘This was because heads mean
individuation,’ he said in an interview to the Times
Weekly’s M. K. Tiku. ‘Without them, the connotations
become more universal.’ It was one such that Dr. Karan
Singh had inaugurated in Delhi in 1967, and which, in
1968 in Bombay, came accompanied by the artist’s verse.
‘Behold, and then you may well believe,’ he wrote, ‘The only
voice to trust is the one you hear,’ going on to finish the
poem thus:
‘but
eyeless,
34 Masterpiece V
I peeped into the mirror
and it cracked,
I listened
and the bounds of Earth
came crashing down,
and I felt like
an alien
to my deepest self,
my very own.’
Though some of the uneasy scepticism with tantra
remained till the early Seventies, Santosh had now entered
a more showman-like stage of his career. By 1969, he had
stopped signing his paintings because ‘I do not find the
space in the painting for signing’, he explained. Nor was
he titling them, choosing instead to leave a ‘blank space
in between two inverted commas suggestive of the title’.
This added to the artist’s mystique which was further
Santosh used the cubist ordering exclusively for his figurative style, rendering each figure as
accentuated when he opened an exhibition in 1970 not at a series of strokes that would be rounded to convey a sensuality that was Indian rather than
a conventional gallery but in a ruin, an Afghan hunting Western. The stylised form of each individual body and the extended eye, as seen in this work
lodge dating back several centuries in the city reserve Boat Women from 1955, became his signature style
forest, popularly known as the Ridge.
G. R. Santosh G. R. Santosh Masterpiece V 35
 For once, the critics loved it, full moon night and all.
‘The… secret chambers of the lodge and the medieval-
like massive arches of masonry which frame some of
the paintings lend the show an intended atmosphere,’
pointed out one, while Keshav Malik thought it ‘very
appropriate for the essential occult of G. R. Santosh’s
recent, very different painting’. The Statesman reported
on the ‘erotic element’ of the art – ‘the unambiguous
depiction of the “yoni”, the triangle, the phallic symbol,
the arched suggestions of levels of consciousness … the
orgiastic formulation of nude forms’ – while ruling that
the artist’s skill brought out ‘the essential erotic element
without the slightest vulgarity’. There is no gainsaying
that in the Seventies and even the Eighties, tantric
art was viewed as perverted and excited a voyeuristic
curiosity about the art and the artist. But Santosh’s son
Shabir believes that his father’s mystical experience in
the Amarnath cave which resulted in his effulgence of
tantric art was an intellectualised philosophy rather than
a physical affirmation of any ritualised or sanctioned
promiscuity. ‘My father’s physical bond with my mother
ceased from that point on,’ he says of the artist’s turning
36 Masterpiece V
moment. In this context, it is important to quote Santosh
in a conversation he had with his friend and writer
K. L. Kaul: ‘I have been practicing yoga now for the last
seventeen years, and some of my intimate friends know
it,’ Santosh told Kaul. ‘Yoga does impose a severe and
rigourous discipline, and, in my case, it combines both
The universal mind (Brahman)
sadhana and aradhana. As the practitioner advances, he manifests itself by its own will and
experiences newer and newer spiritual and mental states, when transformed in an artist’s mind,
even physical states.’ Of this experience of his act of
becomes self-creative. The individual
painting, he explained, ‘I do not know whether to call
it guided intuition or revelation’, that ‘symbols along mind of an artist has the potential
with colours have, on their own, got formulated on my to transform the visual concept into
mind’s eye, while my body and blood felt strange and the materialised creative expression:
intense pleasure’.
a world of art… My own self is
Just as in his art, he would sometimes have to preoccupied with the same
defend his writings too. ‘Some people accused me of universal concept.
using pornography,’ he said of a short story written
– G. R. SANTOSH
simultaneously in Urdu and Kashmiri. ‘It was purely
based on Shiva-Shakti philosophy and they could not
understand it,’ though it must be said that parts of it can
be fairly salacious. Talking to Renuka N. Khandekar in The
G. R. Santosh G. R. Santosh Masterpiece V 37

This Untitled oil from 1958 registers the mastery
G. R. Santosh had attained in various streams of Western-
derived modernism – from cubism to the elegant modelling
of the human form that traces affinities with Matisse as
much as Miró – before he arrived at his radically different and
groundbreaking neo-tantra work
38 Masterpiece V
Hindustan Times, Santosh explained the misconception
surrounding tantra. ‘In the public mind, with its borrowed
British idea of what is “decent”, tantra is something dirty
or lewd.’ Explaining its celebration of Shiva-Shakti, he
continued, ‘Tantra is not “jadu-tona”, though some may
misuse it – for everything has a good and bad value.’
He told Meera Warrier of Business Standard, ‘Tantra
has always been controversial. It has been associated
with magic. Black magic at that. And sex. And left hand
practices. But the pre-Vedic form is essentially scientific.’
Santosh himself, till the end of his life, would continue
to communicate the essence of his philosophy mostly
through his continued research and writings. ‘My
paintings are based on the male and female concept of
Shiva and Shakti and, therefore, construed as tantra,’
he would explain. ‘It is not just the man and woman
concept. Any semblance in my paintings in this respect
is symbolic, but my stress is on the more fundamental
male-female (Shiva-Shakti, purusha-prakriti) principle
with its infinite connotations …’ Elsewhere, he would
suggest that his canvas illustrated shunya or ‘the void,
G. R. Santosh
which is incalculable in time and dimension’, and that his
paintings were symbolic ‘of the infinite in the finite’. His
paintings sought to project ‘the One which is unknown,
which is beyond rupa, which is beyond value’.
In December 1971, at the height of the Indo-Pak war,
the scheduled opening of Santosh’s exhibition continued
inspite of a blackout. ‘He had the opening by candlelight,’
Shabir remembers of that occasion. ‘Everything was
blacked out, and guests walked around looking at
the paintings carrying candles.’ The show – by now a
powerful symbol of the artist’s importance, ‘was a sellout’,
according to him.
The transcendental nature of the age played a key role in
people’s understanding of his art. Abstraction and pop
imagery was popular at the time, and according to The
Patriot, ‘Santosh’s images, which previously overflowed
with geometric motifs, are now combined with subtle
representational elements, such as lotus flowers, whirling
clouds, shimmering flames, and pyramidical hills in
suggested solidity…’ The geometrical shapes were
G. R. Santosh
perfectly mirrored, and by now he would explain that
‘in the Tibetan thangkas, the male and female union
depicted is not physical, it is symbolic’. He would tell
Meera Warrier that the three bindus of the yonic form
represented the head and breasts of a woman, that
‘the woman is a devi because she is the microcosmic
representation of the reproductive quality of the universe’.
P. N. Mago, an art critic of note, suggested that ‘he creates
a symbology that leads to a harmonic unison with the
cosmic processes’. He also tried to explain his symbology
in simplistic terms: ‘His concept evolves from the number
1 generating the point, 2 the line and 3 the triangle which
is the first form to enclose space.’ The evolution of the
triangle as the basic foundation that would expand into a
hexagon, and with Santosh’s mesmerizing use of colours,
would result in the luminous quality of his paintings
that many now saw increasingly as reflective of the
meditative process.
This would be Santosh’s lasting legacy. Writing for a
broadsheet in 1989, art critic Ranjit Hoskote observed
Masterpiece V 39
 that in his experimentation, Santosh had ‘reverted to the
philosophical and artistic streams of pre-Islamic Kashmir’.
Hoskote noted, ‘It has struck many as inexplicable that
Santosh, who was born a Muslim, should model his work
in such a distinctively Hindu matrix; but, as he says, “To
the mystic and the artist, there is no difference between
languages”.’ Observing that Santosh deployed ‘an imagery
which flourishes on the border between the geometric
and the figurative; his leitmotif being an androgynous
Shiva/Shakti composite’, and that ‘the hiranyagarbha,
the celestial egg, recurs – in isolation, or in conjunction
with other ovoids rising on a throne of triangles from
the debris of half-formed planets’, his search would turn
into ‘an analogy of the Upanishadic vision of the quest:
Tamaso ma jyotir gamaya – from darkness lead me to
light’. He would tell art writer Manjula Lal, ‘An artist
makes an ideal reality visible. The communication of the
realised unknown is the retrieval of light from darkness.
It is visualising the hidden.’
To the end of his life, his interest, interpretation and
understanding of the sharika yantra on Hari Parbat
40 Masterpiece V
would remain the focus of his study. He had an interest
in Islamic calligraphy. ‘The more I look at the symbols
of the Arabic alphabet, the more I felt convinced that
there was something not simply similar but identical
between the underlying philosophies of Hinduism
and Islam,’ he told K. L. Kaul, explaining that the first
letter’s quintessence lay in the dot under the symbol of
the Arabic alphabet Bay, which is a cue for the bindu or
the beeja ‘where the female-male is submerged into each
other totally, representing shunya, the void’.
It was this that he spent eight years studying in his
unpublished Bahr-e-Taweel, an interpretation of
alphabets and symbols that, Shabir hopes, holds the key
to understanding the symbols – if not the script – of the
Harappan seals. ‘It’s not really a script, it’s a set of symbols
and related images,’ Santosh told Business Standard’s
Meera Warrier, directing them – and researchers –
to crack the code not through Sanskrit but through
‘Kashmiri and tantra’. Kumar Tiku, in a newspaper
article in 1991, said Santosh expressed himself ‘through
the highest form of geometry and pure mathematics’ and
G. R. Santosh
that his man-woman construct embodied ‘the Hindu
basis of existence’. ‘Geometry merely helps understand
the division of space,’ he told Tiku, ‘I, however, strive for
the realisation of space.’
By 1996, though, he confessed to ‘running out of time’.
That time came, unfortunately soon, in 1997, when at
the age of sixty-eight he succumbed to a massive heart
attack. The arts community poured in to express their
grief, many of them gathering at the Express Cemetery
off Bahadurshah Zafar Marg in New Delhi in tribute.
Longtime friend and fellow-student Shanti Dave pointed
out then that Santosh ‘pioneered the tantric movement in
contemporary art at a time when nobody dared venture
into it. Manu Parekh, another artist, shared that ‘all his
life, he painted what he believed in’. ‘Santosh in the end
turned out to be a true representative of a composite
culture,’ Ajit Kumar Dutta noted in The Statesman. At
an exhibition to mark the first anniversary of his passing
away, Shantiveer Kaul put forward that Santosh’s work
was ‘a bridge between purusha (manifest) and avyakta
(unmanifest)’. He wrote, ‘There is nothing ephemeral
G. R. Santosh
or present about his work,’ suggesting a universal
consciousness and timelessness.
He would work all the time,’ Shabir says, ‘when he was
not painting, he was writing. I never saw him merely
sitting. If nothing else, he would be meditating.’ A living
example of the syncretism of Kashmir that he believed
in, Santosh was inspired as much by medieval Kashmiri
mystic poet Lal Dedh’s Vakhs (oral poetry) on Shaivite
themes – writing poetry in response to some of her verses
– as by the marsiyas, traditionally written in Persian, about
the martyrdom of Imam Husain on the battlegrounds
of Karbala, a lament sacred to Shias – writing scores of
marsiyas in Kashmiri himself. These were performed by
the marsiya singers in the valley who were often unaware
that their writer sat in the audience, reveals Shabir.
Santosh writes:
It is said
When there was nothing
That, indeed, was everything.
Around there was that eye as well
Masterpiece V 41
 The cover of the award-winning
poetry collection in Kashmiri by
G. R. Santosh, titled Besukh Ruh

Catalogue of G. R. Santosh’s early works at Gayatri Sinha reviews an exhibition of

The cover of the Urdu novel by G. R. Art and Soul Gallery in 1999, featuring his G. R. Santosh’s works
Santosh, Samandar Pyaasa Hai early self-portrait

42 Masterpiece V G. R. Santosh G. R. Santosh Masterpiece V 43

 Where dreams of beginning
And the end, lay asleep
Lost within manifold dreams.
That world of half-sleep
Terrain of doubt between yes and no.
Vision that, tired, returns
The eye, wide awake but somnolent looking
Does not cry, nor smile
There was no rival in love
No love rite either
Neither heart nor beloved.
The illusion of Brahma broke
And the eye blinked
That which was not
Started happening all at once
The footfalls of silence became ‘alaap’
From the rhythm of breath
Issued the incantation of ‘shakti’
The even ‘anuswar’ of ambrosial ‘ni’
Kameshwari, Kalavati, ‘ragini’ awoke Then you are the end
The golden warp and weft of ‘vani’ was illuminated You, the ‘you’ connected with the ‘I’
The chain of time tightened moment I go:
by moment You will also return there someday
That, which was nothing, became visible Where there is nothing
The eye sees the light of day The nothing that is
Night is a dark fire, burning Everything.
The fire went out and a voice called out
Silence is that feeling of the unheard (A decade-and-a-half after his death, Shabir is still
Unseen truth: organising all the material – for Santosh was famously
Call it dream disorganised – looking to get his life’s work on the sharika
And you are the emperor of dreams and the symbols he claims will solve the Harappan puzzle,
Call it mirror published. He would like also, he says, to see his father’s
You the fair visage paintings – and with technology, it should be possible –
Call it musical scale rendered in the three-dimensional.)
You are the voice
– kishore singh
Call it time
You are the moment
Call it the beginning

44 Masterpiece V G. R. Santosh G. R. Santosh Masterpiece V 45

 PROVENANCE

G. R. SANTOSH

Title: Aspiration
Date: 1957
Medium: Gouache on paper pasted on
Masonite board This work has been illustrated in:
Size: 48.0 x 59.7 inches
Singh, Kishore, ed., Awakening: A Retrospective of G.R. Santosh (New Delhi: DAG, 2012),
Signed: Signed in Hindi and dated in English
pp. 60-61
(lower right) ‘Santosh / 57’
Singh, Kishore, ed., India Modern, Narratives From 20th Century Indian Art (New Delhi:
Artist’s Family, New Delhi DAG Modern, 2015), p. 295

46 Masterpiece V G. R. Santosh G. R. Santosh Masterpiece V 47

 MASTERPIECE I
I II III X XI XI I

MASTERPIECE II

MASTERPIECE III

MASTERPIECE X

MASTERPIECE XI

MASTERPIECE XII
Stars Above, Stars Below In His Office Christ Three Graces Queen Portrait
AVINASH CHANDRA BIKASH DHANRAJ BHAGAT M. F. HUSAIN M. F. HUSAIN M. F. HUSAIN
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BAI • NEW YORK
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IV V VI XIII XI V XV
MASTERPIECE IV

MASTERPIECE V

MASTERPIECE VI

MASTERPIECE XIII

MASTERPIECE XIV

MASTERPIECE XV
A Still-Life of Kitchen Implements
and a Rooster on a Table Aspiration Tantra Series Figure in Yellow Shakuntala’s Life Story The Poet
F. N. SOUZA G. R. SANTOSH G. R. SANTOSH RABINDRANATH RADHA CHARAN RAMKINKAR BAIJ
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BAI • NEW YORK NEW DELHI • MUMBAI • NEW YORK NEW DELHI • MUMBAI • NEW YORK NEW DELHI • MUMBAI • NEW YORK
TAGORE NEW DELHI • MUMBAI • NEW YORK
BAGCHI NEW DELHI • MUMBAI • NEW YORK
016, India • Tel: +91 11 46005300 11 Hauz Khas Village, New Delhi 110016, India • Tel: +91 11 46005300 11 Hauz Khas Village, New Delhi 110016, India • Tel: +91 11 46005300 11 Hauz Khas Village, New Delhi 110016, India • Tel: +91 11 46005300 11 Hauz Khas Village, New Delhi 110016, India • Tel: +91 11 46005300 11 Hauz Khas Village, New Delhi 110016, India • Tel: +91 11 46005300
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VI I V III IX XVI XVI I XVI I I

MASTERPIECE VII

MASTERPIECE VIII

MASTERPIECE IX

MASTERPIECE XVI

MASTERPIECE XVII

MASTERPIECE XVIII
Manas Kamal Expectation Shri Chaitanya Meets His Mother Mask Jala Bindu Bharatiya Samaroh
HEMEN MAZUMDAR KSHITINDRANATH KSHITINDRANATH S. K. BAKRE S. H. RAZA S. H. RAZA
Printed at Archana, www.archanapress.com

Printed at Archana, www.archanapress.com

Printed at Archana, www.archanapress.com

Printed at Archana, www.archanapress.com

Printed at Archana, www.archanapress.com

Printed at Archana, www.archanapress.com

BAI • NEW YORK NEW DELHI • MUMBAI • NEW YORK MAJUMDAR NEW DELHI • MUMBAI • NEW YORK MAJUMDAR NEW DELHI • MUMBAI • NEW YORK NEW DELHI • MUMBAI • NEW YORK NEW DELHI • MUMBAI • NEW YORK
016, India • Tel: +91 11 46005300 11 Hauz Khas Village, New Delhi 110016, India • Tel: +91 11 46005300 11 Hauz Khas Village, New Delhi 110016, India • Tel: +91 11 46005300 11 Hauz Khas Village, New Delhi 110016, India • Tel: +91 11 46005300 11 Hauz Khas Village, New Delhi 110016, India • Tel: +91 11 46005300 11 Hauz Khas Village, New Delhi 110016, India • Tel: +91 11 46005300
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Avinash Chandra • Bikash Bhattacharjee • Dhanraj Bhagat • F. N. Souza •
G. R. Santosh • Hemen Mazumdar • Kshitindranath Majumdar • M. F. Husain
• Rabindranath Tagore • Radha Charan Bagchi • Ramkinkar Baij • S. K. Bakre
• S. H. Raza • Avinash Chandra • Bikash Bhattacharjee • Dhanraj Bhagat •
F. N. Souza • G. R. Santosh • Hemen Mazumdar • Kshitindranath Majumdar
• M. F. Husain • Rabindranath Tagore • Radha Charan Bagchi • Ramkinkar Baij •
S. K. Bakre • S. H. Raza • Avinash Chandra • Bikash Bhattacharjee • Dhanraj Bhagat
• F. N. Souza • G. R. Santosh • Hemen Mazumdar • Kshitindranath Majumdar • M. F.
Husain • Rabindranath Tagore • Radha Charan Bagchi • Ramkinkar Baij • S. K. Bakre •
S. H. Raza • Avinash Chandra • Bikash Bhattacharjee • Dhanraj Bhagat • F. N. Souza
• G. R. Santosh • Hemen Mazumdar • Kshitindranath Majumdar • M. F. Husain
• Rabindranath Tagore • Radha Charan Bagchi • Ramkinkar Baij • S. K. Bakre •
 New Delhi • Mumbai • New York
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4 Masterpiece V G. R. Santosh