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Lot Essay
Gulam Rasool Santosh’s neo-tantric paintings are inextricably tied to the artist’s syncretic Kashmiri roots and layered philosophical development. Born into a Shia family in Srinagar in 1939, Santosh had to support his family from a young age, working variously as a sign-painter, papier-mache craftsman and weaver, while saving what he could to buy pigments for his own experiments with painting. In college, he received a government scholarship to study under N.S. Bendre at the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda, for two years before returning to Kashmir in 1956. In his late twenties, Santosh, born Gulam Rasool Dar, married a Hindu woman, subverting cultural norms and embracing Kashmiri pluralism by adopting her last name. The artist’s relationship to Kashmir’s multifaceted cultural and religious heritage intensified dramatically after a 1964 visit to the Amarnath cave, made in the hope of finding inspiration for an interfaith romance novel. Santosh’s transformative interaction with the ice-formed Shiva linga there left a permanent mark on him, and from then on, his art would focus on the union between Shiva and Shakti, traditionally opposing male and female energies.
Diving deep into the world of Kashmiri Shaivism, with its focus on meditation and the senses, Santosh reinterpreted age-old artistic traditions by adapting their vocabulary to aid him in “visually actualizing our ancient thought process” (Artist statement, K. Singh, ed., Awakening: A Retrospective of G.R. Santosh, New Delhi, 2011, p. 40). In his works, basic geometric shapes come together in divine symmetry in the manner of yantras, or visual manifestations of energy, while concentric layers suggest growth and infiniteness. Light also plays a critical role in these compositions; the artist described his method as treating color not as color, but as light. As Kishore Singh noted, “While looking at Santosh’s work, it is important not to be seized merely by its form. For the painter, one of the characteristic elements of his art was the use of colour, which according to Kashmir’s Shaivite philosophy, represents different forms and flows of energy. (K. Singh, ed., Ibid., 2011, p. 148). In this way the light and dark fields in the present lot relate “to various states of being and experience,” while the outer border uses color to “define the canvas within cosmic space” (Artist statement, K. Singh, ed., Ibid., 2011, pp. 19, 42).
The present lot compels the viewer to participate in the artist’s sadhana, or meditation, through their contemplation of yantra. Alongside the repetition of mantra, the use of visual stimuli is a core part of the journey towards the attainment of self-realization within Kashmiri Shaivism. “Santosh’s work seeks out the modern and the universal in a specific religious tradition of the subcontinent. Much like modernists in Europe and elsewhere who turned to the art and philosophies of cultures outside their own, Santosh too turned to a source outside his own experience and family history. That he did not have to look far from home to develop his own modernist idiom, and that his modernism grows from rather than rejects religious philosophies and practices, demonstrates the rich variety of options Indian painters explored as they created a ‘modern’ Indian art” (R. M. Brown, K. Singh, ed., Ibid., 2011, p. 35).
Diving deep into the world of Kashmiri Shaivism, with its focus on meditation and the senses, Santosh reinterpreted age-old artistic traditions by adapting their vocabulary to aid him in “visually actualizing our ancient thought process” (Artist statement, K. Singh, ed., Awakening: A Retrospective of G.R. Santosh, New Delhi, 2011, p. 40). In his works, basic geometric shapes come together in divine symmetry in the manner of yantras, or visual manifestations of energy, while concentric layers suggest growth and infiniteness. Light also plays a critical role in these compositions; the artist described his method as treating color not as color, but as light. As Kishore Singh noted, “While looking at Santosh’s work, it is important not to be seized merely by its form. For the painter, one of the characteristic elements of his art was the use of colour, which according to Kashmir’s Shaivite philosophy, represents different forms and flows of energy. (K. Singh, ed., Ibid., 2011, p. 148). In this way the light and dark fields in the present lot relate “to various states of being and experience,” while the outer border uses color to “define the canvas within cosmic space” (Artist statement, K. Singh, ed., Ibid., 2011, pp. 19, 42).
The present lot compels the viewer to participate in the artist’s sadhana, or meditation, through their contemplation of yantra. Alongside the repetition of mantra, the use of visual stimuli is a core part of the journey towards the attainment of self-realization within Kashmiri Shaivism. “Santosh’s work seeks out the modern and the universal in a specific religious tradition of the subcontinent. Much like modernists in Europe and elsewhere who turned to the art and philosophies of cultures outside their own, Santosh too turned to a source outside his own experience and family history. That he did not have to look far from home to develop his own modernist idiom, and that his modernism grows from rather than rejects religious philosophies and practices, demonstrates the rich variety of options Indian painters explored as they created a ‘modern’ Indian art” (R. M. Brown, K. Singh, ed., Ibid., 2011, p. 35).