To Break and To Branch: Six essays on Gieve Patel by Ranjit Hoskote. Published in 2024 by Seagull Books Pvt Ltd, 36C, Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Road, Calcutta 700025. Pp: xx+105. Price: Rs 699, USD 25, GBP 19.99. Website: www.seagull.org, email: info@seagullbooks.org.
In this exquisitely produced monograph on Gieve Patel (1940-2023) Ranjit Hoskote, a poet-critic with impeccable credentials, has created a charming tribute to a friend who was also a sometime mentor.
Since they first met within the austere chambers of the city’s unofficial poet laureate, Nissim Ezekiel, it would not be out of place to borrow a well-known line from the Ezekiel repertoire to describe Gieve, as his friends addressed him.
"A poet, painter, playwright” when the mood took him, Gieve was also "doctor, dad to his daughter Avaan, husband to Toni who passed away before him; actor, teacher, water diviner digging deep into wells, or into bodies cleft open on the postmortem table ‘from chin to prick’ as he once wrote, finally an enigma for others to decipher.”
Ranjit Hoskote: touching tribute
As Hoskote reminds the reader, he first met Gieve on the page of his school text book in the best known of his poems: How to Kill a Tree. And we may be forgiven for reproducing a part of it for describing the everyday brutality or violence that accompanies the act. It captures the peculiar characteristic for which Hoskote coins a phrase to describe Gieve’s ability to be absorbed, as it were, into the subject matter of his work. He calls him a "complicit observer.”
Or to put it in another way, it’s the instinct that allows Gieve as a painter or a poet to create the often disturbing and unsettling images of people or situations that he transcribes on his canvas or on the page with a painful honesty that does not seem intrusive.
"No,
The root is to be pulled out —
Out of the anchoring earth;
It is to be roped, tied,
And pulled out — snapped out
Or pulled out entirely,
Out from the earth-cave,
And the strength of the tree exposed,
The source, white and wet,
The most sensitive, hidden
For years inside the earth.”
Even a superficial reading of this excerpt from How to Kill a Tree illustrates certain themes that recur in Gieve’s work. Or as Hoskote observes in one of his reviews: "Mud has always been important to Patel, it takes him back to his Nargol childhood; it appears in his poems and paintings.” One may also mention a particularly vivid passage in his play Mister Behram that revolves around a tribal boy being adopted by a well-to-do Parsi lawyer as his son. The image is a powerful one. The boy is seen plowing the mud in his ancestral field walking behind the plough and steeping his foot into the steaming hot mush of the bullock’s dung as it drops freshly on the earth.
Dr Gieve Patel and book cover
It’s probably from this period that Gieve also peered into a well and finding the reflection of the sky in the water deep inside its circular womb never forgot to recreate those images in the paintings that came to him in his painterly years. They appear like stethoscopes with which Gieve, the physician, listens in as he palpates the sounds deep from the earth on his canvas. Here again, this is a personal interpretation. Hoskote has a completely different interpretation for the numerous studies of wells.
In his repertoire essays Hoskote examines a series of sculptures that Gieve created much later in his life during a two-week residency at Studio Sukrit, Jaipur. As he writes, "The artist delights, especially in the passage of the image from one medium to another, as from terracotta to bronze, or terracotta to fiber glass, in this sense, the present exhibition is linked by acts of translation.”
Gieve’s imagery centers around two very different stories that Hoskote is at pains to transcribe. One of them is about the water nymph Daphne in Greek mythology who attracts the attention of Apollo, the Sun god. Just as he is about to overtake her she’s transformed into a branching laurel tree with her fingers becoming the leaves. It’s probably the theme of a missing digit that reminds Gieve of the sacrifice made by Eklavya, the tribal boy from the Mahabharata who watches Drona, the supreme archer, teach Arjuna of the princely Pandava brothers to bend a bow. As the story goes, when Drona realizes that Eklavya has secretly been honing his own skills as an archer by worshiping a clay image that he has made of him, Drona demands as repayment the sacrifice of his thumb.
The collection of paintings, drawings and sculptures has been brilliantly put together by Sunandini Banerjee of Seagull Books who has also adapted Gieve’s brilliantly choreographed painting Old Lamington Road, a lively multi-dimensional view of the Bombay neighborhood teeming with humanity, as the cover.
For this alone, the reader is advised to break out, branch and gather the leaves from Hoskote’s memories of Gieve Patel. GEETA DOCTOR
Doctor, a longtime contributor to Parsiana, is a writer and critic.