The Transformational Joy of Art: In memoriam of Shakti Maira
Images courtesy: HarperCollins India
‘Art starts with an idea… and eventually seems to have its own life and direction.’ Chintan Girish Modi recaps Shakti Maira’s life, art, and impact.
Artist and philosopher Shakti Maira was known to believe that art must integrate four aspects of experience: sensory, emotional, intellectual and spiritual. In his book Towards Ananda: Rethinking Indian Art and Aesthetics (2006), published by Penguin, he wrote, “One of the joys in making art is that one starts with an idea but the work of art eventually seems to have its own life and direction.”
He describes this book as “a call for beauty.” For Maira, beauty meant more than the capacity to grab eyeballs. He wanted to create work that moved people. The aesthetic qualities that he considered important were balance, proportionality, rhythm and harmony. He was critical of art that was purely cerebral, and did not engage the whole person. He had a soft corner for art that evoked ananda, which he translated as “transformational joy.”
He wrote, “If aesthetics remains a concern only of the art world and art academics, it loses its ability to effect social change…art must exist in everyday life and not just in museums, galleries and homes of the rich…aesthetics is an attitude and approach to life for all and not just for a small group of art scholars and specialists.”
Maira passed away in Delhi on May 9 at the age of 74, leaving behind a magnificent body of work exploring the place of beauty in human lives. His art took many forms. He was a painter, sculptor, printmaker and writer, who worked with worked with paper, silk, canvas, wood, stone, terracotta, oil, acrylic, bronze, and mixed media. His wife Swati Chopra, Executive Editor at HarperCollins India, broke the news of his death on Twitter, sharing that he died of “complications resulting from a long battle with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia.”
Maira’s disenchantment came from the view that Indian art has been colonised by Western theories and movements even after it became free of British rule. He was particularly troubled by the split between arts and crafts because it diminishes people who do not go to art school, but work with their hands and create beautiful objects of everyday use.
Though Maira was born in Shimla in 1947, he spent much of his life outside Himachal Pradesh. He studied at premier educational institutions such as Mayo College in Ajmer, St. Stephen’s College in Delhi, and the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. He lived in the United States for two decades, and moved back to India in 2001. Though his formal training was in economics and business management, he shifted gears and became an artist.
In the book Artistic Visions and the Promise of Beauty: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (2017), published by Springer—which he co-edited with Kathleen M. Higgins and Sonia Sikka—Maira criticised Subodh Gupta, Jitish Kallat, Bharti Kher, Atul Dodiya for making art geared to global art critics, international shows and biennales. He wrote, “They sell in the international market…their art is heavily influenced in style, purpose and materials by global art forces.”
Maira’s disenchantment came from the view that Indian art has been colonised by Western theories and movements even after it became free of British rule. He was particularly troubled by the split between arts and crafts because it diminishes people who do not go to art school, but work with their hands and create beautiful objects of everyday use. He brought these ideas into wider circulation by participating in various forums on arts education.
In the report Educating for Creativity: Bringing the Arts and Culture into Asian Education (2005), published by UNESCO, he wrote, “In Asia, traditionally, the purpose of the arts was not the making of ‘art’ in the contemporary sense, instead the arts were totally integrated with life functions.” He emphasised the role of art in the transmission of societal values, children’s cognitive development, and as a bridge between nature, humans and the divine.
He suggested offering “art intensives” to incorporate music, dance, theatre, storytelling and the plastic arts in teaching social and physical sciences and other subjects. Beyond the classroom, he recommended that these intensives be built around local festivals and traditions, heritage sites, and themes of interest to the children. He also wrote about involving artists, workers, musicians, dancers and family members in these interactions.
Image courtesy: HarperCollins India
Maira developed his ideas on beauty in dialogue with various people. For his book The Promise of Beauty and Why It Matters (2015), published by HarperCollins India, he interviewed writers, scientists, philosophers, environmentalists, activists and artists. Among them were Vandana Shiva, Fritjof Capra, Muzaffar Ali, Gautam Bhatia, Ruth Padel, Anjolie Ela Menon and Satish Kumar. Maira wanted to understand what beauty meant to them.
His pursuit of beauty was linked to his concerns about environmental degradation and sustainability. In 2011, while giving the talk View from India: Rebalancing Economic and Social Policy as if Aesthetics Mattered in Edinburgh, he articulated his lack of excitement about India’s high GDP growth as the model was “an extension of the same old resource intensive and consumption addicted economic system that exists in most countries in the world.”
His respect for nature, and the interconnectedness that permeates all ecosystems, seems to be influenced by his deep study of Buddhist psychology and philosophy as well as his meditative practice. However, Maira did not feel the need to identify himself as a Buddhist.
He was previously married to actor Kabir Bedi's sister Gulhima Bedi. Their mother Freda Bedi—a British woman—got herself ordained as a Buddhist nun and was known as Sister Palmo.
She ran a school for young Tibetan Buddhist lamas who came to India as refugees. Among them was Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. In a book titled The Lives of Freda: The Political, Spiritual and Personal Journeys of Freda Bedi (2019), published by Speaking Tiger, author Andrew Whitehead writes, “In 1971, Guli (nickname for Gulhima), married Shakti Maira, an artist. Their second child was born in Bombay just three days before Sister Palmo’s death.”
It seems that Sister Palmo stayed around just to make sure that her daughter had a safe delivery and to see the face of her grandchild. In Whitehead’s book, Gulhima Bedi recalls, “My mother was adamant about being with me, so my mother and I got to see a lot of each other in those days before her death…As it turned out, it was a complicated birth and my mother was in meditation outside the delivery room.” She now lives in the United States.
Maira led a remarkable life. The best tribute to him would be a continued engagement with his questions and preoccupations. He was bothered about India’s “aesthetic crisis” and the fact that India’s youth are seen merely as a “resource-engine to propel the Indian economy.”
In an article titled “Learning through the Arts” (2005) for the India International Centre Quarterly, he wrote, “Do we just want to create an army of worker-bees? Don't we also want our young to be fully developed, socially aware and aesthetically skilled?”
In Maira, we seem to have lost a man whose understanding of art was limited neither to the product of artistic labour nor the process of artistic creation, but, instead, focused on the consciousness that art fostered in those who sought an audience with it. He wanted art to find an intimate, restorative place in the lives of people and institutions, and not become esoteric and out of reach.
This might appear to be a lofty and old-fashioned, perhaps even naïve, proposition for those who champion art for arts’ sake or for socio-political critique and not for evoking ananda. However, Maira’s approach certainly has a strong appeal in our pandemic-struck times, where now more than ever, the heart yearns something to keep it tender and hopeful.
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Chintan Girish Modi has an M.Phil in English Language Education, and has worked with the UNESCO Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development, the Kabir Project, and the Hri Institute for Southasian Research and Exchange. His writing has appeared in Bent Book: A Queerish Anthology, Fearless L.ove, Clear Hold Build, Borderlines Volume 1, and more. He can be reached at chintangirishmodi@protonmail.com and found on Instagram: @Chintan_Connect and Twitter: @Chintan_Connect.
