In many photographs, Satish Gujral sits or stands before his own creations—mural walls of ceramic and brick, charred wood sculptures, and the bold geometries of the Belgian Embassy—looking almost like a sculpture himself: compact, assured, silently amused. For more than seven decades, he transformed silence into form. A Century in Form, Fire, and Vision, a centenary celebration with the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), Ministry of Culture, and Government of India, brings this journey into national focus through exhibitions and programmes across India.
Born in 1925 in Jhelum, Gujral grew up amidst politics, poetry, and idealism. A childhood accident in Kashmir led to irreversible hearing loss—sound was replaced by a long quiet that sharpened his eyes instead. Partition soon followed. These two events, he later said, defined him. His early canvases—Mourners, Days of Glory, Madhubala, Village Women, and Snare of Memory—are among the most visceral images of Partition’s psychic aftermath, earning him a scholarship to Mexico where he apprenticed under Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. From them, he absorbed the conviction that art belonged to the people.
Gujral’s practice refused to stay still. The mural years expanded outward—monumental, political, and peopled with workers, refugees, and archetypes. His burnt-wood sculptures—Prophet, Man, Heads, Victim, Hunger—felt like ritual objects excavated from tragedy. Later decades softened: colour returned, performers and musicians entered the frame, and granite works such as Dancers, Harmony, and Musicians became lyrical rather than grim.
Architecture arrived without formal training. With the Belgian Embassy in New Delhi, he carved a monumental fortress of brick and shadow, hailed internationally as one of the outstanding buildings of the 20th century. It remains a landmark of India’s modern architectural story. He also designed institutions across India, including the Goa Shipyard Administrative Building, the Ambassador Hotel murals, and several public installations that fused sculpture with civic space.
Critics often remarked that while his medium kept changing—watercolour, bronze, ceramic, brick, granite, steel—his anchor never moved: India’s folk motifs, mythic archetypes, and the dignity of ordinary people. One French critic praised his “astonishing capacity to renew form” and creative energy that “never slackened.”
The persona only amplified the legend. A profile once described him “like a freshly uncorked bottle of champagne”—irrepressible, argumentative, and impossible to ignore. In the 1990s, after acquiring an advanced hearing device, he quietly stopped using it; the sudden flood of noise hindered concentration. The familiar silence, he explained, was better for work. Silence shaped him, but he built objects that speak—murals, buildings, charred wood, granite, and brick that continue to speak across borders and histories, on behalf of those who lived through upheaval, and for a country still learning how to narrate its modern story.