Satish Gujral

Satish Gujral was born in Jhelum, in undivided Punjab, on Christmas Day 1925. An accident in childhood left him with permanent hearing loss, and schools refused to admit him because of it. Art schools took him. In 1939 he went to the Mayo School of Arts in Lahore to study applied art, and in 1944 to the Sir J J School of Art in Bombay, which he left in 1947 because of recurring illness.

That year he began the work that made his name: the Partition paintings, oils of exaggerated figures carrying the grief of 1947. Critics still treat them as among his most important pictures.

In 1952 a scholarship took him to the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, where he was apprenticed to Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, the Mexican muralists. Between 1952 and 1974 he showed paintings, sculpture and graphics in New York, New Delhi, Montreal, Berlin and Tokyo. He painted murals, including one at Punjab Agricultural University in Ludhiana. In 1957 he painted a portrait of Nehru.

Then he designed buildings. His Embassy of Belgium in New Delhi, built in the early 1980s, was named by an international forum of architects among the finest buildings of the twentieth century, and Belgium gave him its Order of the Crown for it.

He wrote an autobiography, A Brush With Life, received the Padma Vibhushan in 1999, and died in New Delhi in March 2020, aged 94. His brother Inder Kumar Gujral was Prime Minister of India.