A treasure trove -ANURADHA VELLAT, THE HINDU

An artist’s life and the definition of his/her work often changes posthumously. It is then the responsibility of his/her subjects, audience, patrons and most importantly, the family to preserve and ensure that they live on. Today, we have the multimedia to record ourselves, make sure we are heard, but 50 years ago, expressions meant decades of work on one particular drawing or a sketch. A modernist, Amar Nath Sehgal was an artist who perhaps best represented the times he lived in through his work, without bounding himself to one medium. His diligence ensured he found the right medium of depiction. And today, his studio has been turned into a world-class museum by his children and a team of professionals, connecting the dots of 60 years of the artist’s lifetime. The Amar Nath Sehgal Private Collection was thrown open to the public last week, with two floors showcasing his work – sculptures, photographs, letters, poems, sketches and paintings to name only a few. The process was tedious, to say the least, but a satisfying one that took almost ten years to put together.

Says Amar Nath Sehgal’s son Rajan Sehgal, “My father never threw a thing away. Every piece of paper is still available, so we actually have the luxury to tell his story through documents, and present it in this sort of a single artist museum. There are letters, photographs, poetry and what not. We have almost 300 poems we did not even know existed. It is only when we opened up all the boxes that we discovered them. And I discovered about my father more after his death.”

Along with his brother Raman, Rajan and a team of archivers, curators and designers have designed Sehgal’s erstwhile workspace-cum-house into the museum. The inauguration was held at the India International Centre, a space where Sehgal spent a number of his days chatting and working with his friends. The documentary called “Amar Nath Sehgal – A Portrait” directed by Rajiv Mehrotra was also screened along with the release of a catalogue titled “The Amar Nath Sehgal Project: Delhi NCR Chapter” which records three years of teamwork that went into finding and restoring public installations of the artist.

Says Shruthi Issac, resident curator-archivist for the museum, “It all started with 289 boxes of his stuff that we had to work out of. We have tried to accommodate everything from the kind of mediums he dealt with, his subjects, the times he lived in and the people he met.” A corner of the museum starts with the photo archival gallery, with original photos from Sehgal’s lifetime, candid pictures of his wife, Shukla Sehgal, his children Rajan and Raman Sehgal and the man himself. “We have also framed some of his poetry, we understand them as connecting everything for us,” says Issac. There are also pictures he clicked for portraiture, from S Radhakrishnan, Jawaharlal Nehru to Indira Gandhi.

Saga of Partition

Born in Cambellpur (Attock) in Pakistan, which was a military base, Sehgal came to India after Partition, before leaving for New York to study. Later he visited and parts of Europe, before coming back to India. He had very strong ties in Luxembourg where he lived for many years. “What seemed like a trivial act of reaching out to public and private institutions led to months of communications, dialogues and navigating through territories. It required an in-depth study of the archival material pertaining to the artworks, the artist’s relationship with the concerned institutions and the politics of the era,” says Issac. The trauma of Partition had a different impact on Sehgal. His sketches of “Human Heads”, for instance, depict the saga of Partition and its underlying trauma in the most reflective ways. “Anguished Cries”, a solid bronze that was completed in 1971, is perhaps a manifestation of the cry for help emerging from one slate, or the silencing of them. “Tyranny of Colonisation”, “Hunger, Cries Unheard” are all different takes on the angst of society as he perceived it. “You see, this process also helped us understand how to trace the work of an artist better. What started as a drawing in 1950 would change into a mould, and then a bronze,” adds Issac.

“The studio was in a mess, my father’s last few years were not very nice, in terms of his well-being, he’d developed Parkinson’s disease. After his passing in 2007, we did not know what to do or how to go about it. But now, when we look at it, the space is not a static museum, but a living, organic being in itself,” sums up Rajan.

(Amar Nath Sehgal Private Collection is located at J-23, Jungpura, New Delhi)