It’s four in the morning as the young Kumar waits for the sunrise in his bed, rolling from insomnia. What a cursed world it is for a painter who has to earn his living from his abstract paintings in hustle of New Delhi, a brand new India. It was then that the flashback of his long walk from leaving the farms near Lahore, Punjab to Delhi had been instilled in his veins as a tragic trauma of partition. Most of his family had gone missing and the other half immigrated from Kashmir to restart a life from the world of farming to a world of financial gains.
What price would you pay for your freedom?
As the young Kumar set his destiny with his paintbrush, a new story had begun for his journey as an artist. The struggles of an artist in a new India was troublesome and weary. In thirty years of his artistry, Kumar had painted one canvas after another through the sweat and burns of the oil paint. Lajpat Nagar grew to be a familiar place to find European paint that costed more than a month’s ration of flour/atta and dal. The question for this artist was should I find paint or save the money for my family? He could hear his wife screaming in the background that she had married an artist who could not support their family of three children with his canvases. He painted with his pain and trauma a story through abstract realism that the new India could not understand and received an honor to represent Hindustan in Paris, France during the late sixties.
Later on, he took his first air flight out of India to visit an alien European world where his work was exhibited to hundreds of people, an opportunity so rare for a Hindustani. Over there, struggling with twenty euros, he survived the harsh wind of the winter with the warm Parisian bread, offered to the struggling artist at bistros and cafes. The beauty and warmth of the people of Paris had left him stunned and welcomed as he wrapped up what was India’s first entrance of abstract painting in Europe. He returned to a warm Hindustan, excitingly welcoming him to fame and a new job as an art teacher at a local school in New Delhi.
His wife with pride, recalls the story to their granddaughter at their heritage home who was studying art and with eager eyes, she took in the words of her Dadi-ma with love and grace. Her granddaughter asked her what exactly kept Dada-ji motivated all these years was the struggle of an artist and also the luck of a good human being. All the people that had supported Dada-ji from the established Kapoors in Bollywood to the Nehru family kept the family together in gratitude.
Dadi-ma noted, “He doesn’t speak now because of all the tragedies and stress but he is still my hero. He supported us all and got all his children educated in Delhi University. “ With a smile to our faces, we could hear Dada-ji’s eighties radio machine playing as he listened in his room closely to the news of our present-day India.