Memories and dreams well up in Katayun Saklat’s paintings.
They seem to be created in a state of quiet reverie, though Saklat is quite grounded as an artist and as a human being, now and then she doesn’t mind drifting into the realm of fantasy. Her colours glow with a gauzy radiance that comes naturally to a stained glass artist.
Strains of mysticism surface in her work, but her forte is human beings. Despite their pretty appearance, her reflections on ageing and mortality are real and evident in her paintings.
Even her current severe illness could not still her hand. At a time when she struggled to write full words with a pen, she continued to paint.
Her latest exhibition, Abol Tabol and Other Paintings, presents 29 works, both new and old, at Arts Acre in New Town, where it will be on view till January 5. It is organised by the Arts Acre Foundation.
Shuvaprasanna, founder of Arts Acre, recalls: “We have had a long relationship with her. Her house with a spiral staircase in Grant Lane was a meeting place for so many artists. She and her elder sister launched the careers of several artists, including Bikash Bhattacharjee and Paresh Maity. Yet they always stayed behind the scenes. And her stained-glass lamps once lit up many Calcutta homes.”
What he didn’t mention is how pioneering she was as a gallery owner. Saklat’s Gallery Katayun, launched on May 28, 1989, in her earlier flat, was the second art gallery to open in Calcutta after Chitrakoot (now she lives on a different floor of the same building to which she shifted from Grant Lane decades ago). At its second exhibition, a young Paresh Maity presented his watercolours.
When I met Katydi — as she is better known — just before the exhibition started, she was a fragile version of her once energetic self. She moved from bedroom to living room with the help of a walker. Here, her paintings are stacked. Many reflect what she calls the “endangered species”: the Parsis, a community to which she belongs.
Cancer returned after three decades, and she needed stents for blocked arteries. She rolled her eyes as she expressed scepticism about her severe ailment.
Born in 1938, Saklat grew up at 9 Grant Lane, near Lalbazar. The home’s huge, grille-less terrace is a recurring motif in her paintings. “It was so safe we didn’t lock the
door at night. We could see the sunrise, the sunset, the Parsi fire temple and the changing seasons. It was an important part of our lives,” she reminisced.
The neighbourhood was a tapestry of communities. At No.8, next door, lived the Jewish Arakie family. “They taught me English. Daddy wanted us to speak Gujarati,” she said.
“My uncle was the first priest of the first temple,” she said, referring to the Parsi fire temple at 91 Metcalfe Street, established in 1912. It has about 11 stained-glass windows depicting Zoroastrian themes and motifs later designed by her.
The locality also had Bohra Muslim families, Mangalorean Christians and, at her school, Calcutta Girls’ High School, she befriended a Chinese classmate from the Au family of Nanking restaurant fame. A Japanese boy studied there too. “When the Japanese bombed Calcutta (in the early 1940s), a bomb exploded behind our house. There were glass crumbs all over our floor,” she said. Her father had Japanese monk friends — “robust men who had become monks because they had thrown bombs,” she recounted.
Her father was employed with Singer sewing machine, and he never stopped Saklat and her two elder sisters from visiting temples, synagogues and churches.
Saklat began drawing at four, she said, to keep herself occupied because her elder sister refused to play with her.
She joined the Government College of Art & Craft and later the Indian College of Art & Draughtsmanship in Dharmatala. Aware of the institute’s culture and determined to fit in, she taught herself Bengali by listening to radio plays in the afternoon and thereby befriended
many Bengali students of the college.
Her father gave her a room as a studio, and her classmates would drop by to paint over snacks and adda. She recalled the names of her Bengali friends, many of whom were close to her but most of whom were dead now. Among them was Bikash Bhattacharjee.
She remembered with warmth her mentor Arun Bose, the US-based artist who taught at the college.
She held exhibitions in Mumbai and Delhi, and in 1973, she travelled to London to see her ailing niece. There, thanks to Frank Taylor of the British Council, she won a grant to train under Patrick Reyntiens, UK’s leading stained-glass artist. “Here, I could work from cartoon stage onwards,” she said. “Light was used as a pigment. Light changed everything.” The experience transformed her paintings.
She returned in 1975. From 1980 1990, she sat on the floors of various workshops in Howrah and Beleghata to get glass fitted to grilles. “The money from the gallery paid for the stained glass,” she said.
Though physically frail, Saklat never gave up. She illustrated Edward Lear’s limericks with her own drawings. She belongs to an invulnerable species.