Shanu-di

I am writing this from memory and from scribbles in a small notebook. What follows is not a biography of Shanu Lahiri -- Shanu-di, as I called her, the honorific suffix that in Bengali marks both affection and respect. To be perfectly honest I first became friends with her daughter Dodo and had, for quite sometime, no idea how famous Shanu-di actually was. There are proper biographies and retrospective catalogues for one of India’s most distinguished artists. What follows is something narrower and perhaps more true: what I remember of a woman I ate with, laughed with, and was sometimes gently scolded by, during the years I lived in Calcutta as a young PhD student, conducting fieldwork on medical pluralism in Bengal. She was already in her early seventies by then. She could not walk easily. But she was always smiling, and she was always ready to laugh.

I. The Apartment

The apartment was in Lake Town, in the northeast of Calcutta, on the first floor of a multi-storey building. Shanu lived there with her daughter Dodo -- Damayanti, officially, but nobody called her that, nobody has ever called her that. Shanu's husband had died some years before I arrived. I never met him. What I knew of him came in fragments: that he had held some high-powered position, that the family was wealthy, that he had been posted for many years in Assam, and that Shanu had loved Assam.

The apartment had the quality of a place that had been lived in thoroughly and without apology. There were dogs everywhere -- usually three or four of them at any given time, all of them street dogs that Shanu had adopted over the years. The floor was dusty. The windows were always open.

That last detail matters. Shanu never installed air conditioning. This was not an oversight or an economy -- it was a position. The windows were open to let the air circulate, which meant they were also open to everything else: the heat, the dust, the exhaust fumes, and above all the noise. Calcutta traffic had been intensifying on the street outside for years, and any conversation with Shanu was always syncopated by an incessant cacophony of car drivers honking.

Someone like Shanu does not close off windows and doors and live in an artificial environment. This was obvious from the first visit. She was a person who had spent the 1980s taking schoolchildren and street children and anyone she could mobilise out onto the walls of the city to paint murals -- the 'Love Calcutta Project,' as it became known -- and who had installed a thirty-foot fibreglass sculpture at a traffic roundabout on the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass that was so thoroughly absorbed into the city's identity that the roundabout was renamed after it. You do not do those things and then close your windows.

The food was always served buffet style at the larger dinner parties and receptions she held regularly for Calcutta artists and intelligentsia. And it was always presented beneath one of her large paintings. This was not incidental. It was a curatorial act: the food and the painting as part of the same proposition, the same hospitality. To eat at Shanu's was to be inside her aesthetic as well as her kitchen. The food was extraordinary. Dodo has since published a book -- Tabled -- compiling her mother's recipes, doodles, and memories, and I am glad it exists, because it reflects something that was very important: that for Shanu, cooking, like painting, was an act of creative experimentation, and that her legendary generosity at the table was continuous with everything else she did.

II. The Flood

I came to know Shanu-di's apartment as well as I knew my own rented room because, for a stretch of days that I remember as a kind of gift, it effectively was my own room. Calcutta was struck by catastrophic floods -- the worst in living memory, 247 millimetres of rainfall in twelve hours according to the Statesman newspaper -- and the house I had rented nearby was flooded to a depth of one metre. I waded through waist-deep water to reach Shanu's building. She was on the first floor. I was welcome.

I ate there every day and became, briefly, a resident of the household rather than a visitor to it. And it was during that period that I saw Shanu the most, and learned the most from her.

I still tell one story from this time in my anthropology classes at Edinburgh when I talk about fieldwork. What I tell my students is what happened at one of those lunch conversations, when I pulled out my notebook to take notes.

It was a very small notebook, half the size of a letter envelope. I had always used this size because I could put it into the front pocket of my shirt. Shanu looked at it and frowned. No one was going to take me seriously with a notebook that size, she said. A real researcher would have a big notebook -- at least A4, better even A3. It had to be hardbound. And it needed to be opened ceremoniously whenever I conducted an interview or took notes in front of others.

She had two reasons, which she stated clearly. The first was practical and social: if you arrive for an interview with a small shirt-pocket notebook, your interlocutors will not take you seriously. The physical scale of your equipment is a signal, and a small notebook sends the wrong one. The second reason was ethical: the people who agree to be interviewed are giving you their time, their knowledge, their memories, often their trust. A large hardbound notebook, opened with deliberateness, is a way of honouring that gift. It says, visibly, that what you are about to say matters and will be treated accordingly. A notebook you can hide in a shirt pocket just wasn’t enough.

I still smile when I remember this. Shanu had spent her career insisting that art belongs in public space, that aesthetic experience is not the exclusive property of the educated few, that the encounter between artist and audience should be visible, democratic, and worthy of the occasion. She was making exactly the same argument about fieldwork. The researcher and the researched are in an exchange, and the terms of that exchange should be legible to both parties.

I never took her advice. I kept using the small notebooks. The rest, as they say, is history -- including the many notes that record her own words, taken in those same small notebooks she found so inadequate. The irony is not lost on me.

III. Goli

Among the dogs, there was Goli. She had an off white fur and of no distinguishable breed. Goli was the most intelligent dog I have ever met. I say this as someone who did not particularly like dogs before coming to Calcutta, or before meeting Goli. Something about Goli changed that.

Goli was a street dog, like all of Shanu's dogs. And Goli looked at me in a way that was difficult to categorise. It was as if Goli was looking at you as another dog -- or perhaps as if Goli was another human. It is difficult to explain. Or rather, the difficulty of explaining it is part of the point. Goli occupied some category that our usual taxonomies of human and animal do not accommodate.

Shanu had a clear theory about this. She made the point, with complete conviction, that street dogs are far more intelligent and far more perceptive than domesticated dogs. How would a domesticated dog ever learn to be alert and fully attuned to what is happening around them? They are spoiled. They get everything. Whereas a street dog only survives by being completely attuned to what is going on. And Goli, she said, had never lost that attunement, even after years of living in the apartment.

I have thought about this argument in relation to much else that Shanu said and did. There is a consistent philosophy running through it. The domesticated mind -- whether canine or human -- becomes cognitively softened by ease, by the removal of the need to read its environment carefully. The street dog reads the world or dies. The corollary, which Shanu did not state but which her life enacted, is that the artist who keeps the windows open and refuses the artificial environment, who goes out to paint walls rather than retreating to the studio, who serves food beneath her paintings at parties for the city's intelligentsia, is engaged in a version of the same discipline: staying attuned, refusing the insulation of comfort.

Shanu had also, of course, lived for years in Assam. She spoke often and with great intensity about Assamese tantra, and she considered the Kamakhya temple at Guwahati -- the great Shakta pilgrimage site, where the goddess is present not as an image but as a yonic form in living rock -- to be among the most intense experiences of her life. This is consistent with everything else. Kamakhya is not an environment you can manage or domesticate. It is a place where the sacred refuses the comforting fiction of the anthropomorphic image and presents itself as something older and more demanding. Shanu chose, again and again, the more demanding thing.

IV. On Images

One of the longest and richest conversations I had with Shanu unfolded over many hours during the flood period, when the streets were under water and the city had paused. Shanu and Dodo were generous with their time. We talked about ghosts, about mythology, about the nature of deity images, about Calcutta's past and present. Some of the most striking ideas in my fieldwork notes come from that afternoon.

On the question of images and representation -- a question that fell naturally to Shanu, who had spent her life making images -- she was clear and consistent. Deity images, she said, exist for the devotee's concentration, not as permanent vessels of divine presence. The god or goddess does not reside in the image; the image provides the human mind with a form to fix on, a temporary anchor for attention. This is why images for pujas like Durga and Bisvokarma are used for the occasion and then immersed or discarded. They have, in her phrase, 'served their duty.' Earlier images of gods were more enigmatic; now they must be completely true to bodily proportions. What does not matter is how good a reproduction of an image is -- its function is to enable concentration, not to represent with fidelity.

The ghost, she said, is something similar: an optical after-image, like a television that has been switched off but still shows residual figures. 'If one is used to seeing a person every day, one gets so used to him or her, one sees him or her even if he or she is not there.' This is not superstition; it is a theory of perceptual habit, entirely consistent with a modernist painter who had also absorbed Shakta Tantric thought from years of living near Kamakhya.

At Kamakhya, the sacred is explicitly non-representational. There is no image of the goddess -- only the cleft rock, perpetually moist, perpetually present. Someone formed partly by proximity to that theology would think about images exactly as Shanu thought about them: as functional, temporary, concentrating acts rather than permanent objects of meaning. Her own public works -- the graffiti murals, the Love Calcutta Project, the street walls transformed by children with paint -- are the work of someone who understood images as events. The Parama sculpture stood at its roundabout for twenty-seven years and was demolished overnight by civic authorities in 2014, the year after Shanu's death, to make way for a new installation. The art world was outraged. I wonder sometimes whether Shanu herself would have been as devastated as her admirers were. She knew, better than anyone, that images serve their duty and are then released.

What she said about concentration in that conversation still stays with me. 'In India, one never concentrates on nothingness, always on a form.' And: 'Everything must have a name and a shape, otherwise it does not exist. Without impact, wind is invisible.' These are statements about epistemology as much as about religion. They describe a world in which the formless only becomes real when it has been given form -- which is precisely the work that artists do. Shanu was describing her own vocation.

V. Max Stern and the Road Not Taken

Shanu told me a story one morning, over breakfast, that I have never heard repeated anywhere -- not in any catalogue, not in any critical essay, not in the official biography that has since been assembled. It was a private story about the most consequential decision of her artistic life.

In 1972, she had gone to Montreal to show her work to Dr Max Stern, one of the most powerful art dealers in the world -- a school friend of Henry Moore, selling to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, representing artists whose works would eventually be worth tens of millions. Many artists came to Stern's gallery that day for assessment. He was famously frank: 'Come again in ten years, maybe.' 'Never come here again.' Shanu had only slides of her work to show. His response was precise and substantive: 'If you take out this line, you'll be great. Take this colour, not that colour. There is potential.'

And then he made her an offer that his own assistant described, on a walk outside the gallery, as something Stern had never offered anyone in thirty-two years. He would buy all her works, on one condition: that she stay in North America and sell exclusively through him. His reasoning was practical: once she became famous, the Indian government would prevent the export of her paintings. He showed her his apartment -- Van Goghs and Renoirs stacked on the floor, ready to be sold to museums across the world. He placed a blank cheque in front of her and asked her to fill in any sum she desired.

She said she had two children and a husband. She could not live in America. Stern offered to bring them all over. She declined.

She returned to Calcutta telling herself: if he thinks my work is good, that is enough for me at the moment. I know I can do good work in the future, whether in India or in America.

But then -- and this is what I remember most, and what makes the story more than a tale of artistic integrity -- she said that now she thought India was not the right place to concentrate on painting. The ambience was wrong. The kitchen, the dogs, the children, the constant visitors: the moment she found concentration, the bell would ring and the thread would be broken. Being one with canvas and colours happened for perhaps five minutes a day. 'The rest is horrible.' She wondered, she said, whether she should have married at all. For her art, it might have been better not to marry.

I have sat with this story for many years and I still do not know how to hold it. The public figure -- the Dean of Visual Arts at Rabindra Bharati University, the founder of India's first all-female artists' collective, the creator of the Love Calcutta Project, the woman whose sculpture renamed a Calcutta roundabout -- and the private voice saying the rest is horrible. Both were completely true. Shanu was not performing modesty or melancholy. She was telling me, as precisely as she told the painter everything about what was wrong with a line, exactly what the decision had cost.

The official biography notes that she, like many women of her generation, was often sidelined in the national canon of Indian modern art. What the fieldwork notes record, and what I remember from that breakfast conversation, is one woman's account of the exact moment and mechanism of that sidelining -- not imposed by the art world, but chosen, freely, for reasons of love and family, with full knowledge of what was being traded.

VI. Caste in the Household

There is another story from the fieldwork notes that I think about when I consider Shanu's relationship to the structures that constrained her. It is smaller than the Stern story but in some ways more precise.

Shanu was not a brahmin. Her husband was. This was known and unremarkable in most circumstances -- the family was wealthy, she was a celebrated artist, the household was one of the most culturally distinguished in Calcutta. But at the diksha ceremony of her sister-in-law's grandson -- the sacred thread ceremony that marks the initiation of a brahmin boy into his caste status -- Shanu was not permitted to let her face be seen by the boy.

Her husband's family had described the marriage, years before, as bongshodhor -- a broken line, a broken house. The Sanskrit term is oshoborno: not in colour, meaning outside the varna system, outside the proper order of things. Their children were considered half-brahmins only.

At the diksha ceremony, Shanu complied. Her husband left the party in protest.

I do not know whether this incident was unusual for her or whether it was one of many such moments over decades of marriage into a brahmin family. What I do know is that the woman who was not permitted to be seen at a family ritual was also the woman who had stood her work next to Van Goghs and Renoirs in Max Stern's apartment and been offered a blank cheque, and who had won India's most prestigious student art prize at twenty-three, and who had been to Paris on a government scholarship and studied at the Academie Julian and the Ecole du Louvre, and who had painted twelve pictures of Jesus for Mother Teresa because Mother Teresa remembered asking her years before and would not let the request go unanswered. The exclusion operated at one register; her achievements operated at another. Both were real. Neither cancelled the other.

This is, I think, part of what Shanu meant when she said that without impact, wind is invisible. The forces that constrain a person are not always visible until they make contact. The diksha ceremony was one point of contact. The blank cheque in Montreal was another. What she did with each -- how she read the impact, what form she gave the wind -- that is the story of her life.

VII. The City She Refused to Leave

Calcutta, Shanu said one afternoon, is like a children's birthday party that has been going on for too long. Everything messed up by too many careless people, populating the city for too long. Calcutta was lovely before 1940. Roads used to be cleaned twice daily. Drains cleared every night. Not anymore.

She said this with a precision and a sadness that did not tip into sentimentality. She was not romanticising a lost golden age. She was making an observation about infrastructure and public care and what happens when both are abandoned. The British-built sewer system, she noted, was over a hundred and fifty years old and still working, against all odds -- what grand engineering that was. No one believes in maintenance anymore.

And yet she stayed. She stayed and she kept the windows open and she went on making art about the city and for the city. The Love Calcutta Project -- taking students and street children out to paint the walls in the 1980s, when those walls were covered in political sloganeering and Naxalite graffiti -- was an act of civic love that could only be performed by someone who simultaneously held the city's decay in clear sight and refused to abandon it. The Parama sculpture at the roundabout was the same act, larger and more durable, until it was not.

I asked her once, in a different conversation, about what it meant to make art in a city that she found so diminished from what it had been. What she said was that in India one never concentrates on nothingness, always on a form. You find the form that lets you fix your attention. You work with what is there.

I think she was talking about Calcutta as much as about painting.

VIII. What the Official Record Misses

Shanu Lahiri's official biographies are accurate and generous. They usually record the Gold Medal, the Paris scholarship, the Academie Julian, the Elokeshi-Mohanto drawings, the founding of The Group in 1983 -- India's first all-female artists' collective, five women who called themselves the Pancha-kanya and who held annual exhibitions and demanded equal participation in an art world that had always managed to find reasons to exclude them. They record the Love Calcutta Project and the Parama sculpture and its demolition. They record that she donated her eyes on her death in February 2013, so that her vision, in the most literal sense, would continue.

What official records cannot hold is the texture of a life as it is actually lived. The laugh through the pain, when she could not walk easily but was always smiling. The apartment full of dogs and dust and open-window noise. The food under the paintings. The story of the blank cheque, told over breakfast, to a young German anthropologist who wrote it down in a small notebook she had already told him was inadequate.

There is a passage in my fieldwork notes, written the morning after one of those long conversations, where I try to summarise what Shanu had said about deity images: that they serve the devotee's concentration and are then released, that they have served their duty. I was writing about religious practice, about the Durga puja and the immersion of images in the river. But reading it back now I think she was also, without knowing I would read it this way, describing something about her own relationship to her work. The thirty-foot fibreglass figure at the roundabout. The painted walls of Jadu Babu's Bazaar. The twelve paintings of Jesus that Mother Teresa meditated in front of and that were enough. All of them made with full attention and then released into the world to serve whatever purpose the world found for them. 'She liked them,' Shanu told me, speaking of Mother Teresa and the Jesus paintings. 'That was enough reward.'

I think of that sentence often. Not as modesty -- Shanu was not modest about her work, nor should she have been -- but as a statement about the relationship between making and receiving, between the intensity of the act of creation and the moment when the created thing passes into other hands and other lives. She did not need more than that. She had done the work.

I returned to see Shanu and Dodo many times over many years. My research in West Bengal continued long after that first fieldwork year, and whenever I passed through Calcutta there was lunch in Lake Town, the same extraordinary food, the same gathering of artists and writers, the same dogs underfoot, the same conversation cut through by honking. The visits became shorter over time – I had two children of my own, my itineraries were constrained, and I could rarely stay more than a day. The last time I saw Shanu was probably around 2011, a lunch that I did not know would be our last, as one never does. She was in her early eighties by then. She was still smiling. The windows were still open.

She died in February 2013, aged eighty-five, and she donated her eyes. The Parama sculpture was demolished in 2014. Dodo published Tabled, the book of recipes and doodles and memories. Recent exhibitions -- the Bengal Biennale, the retrospective at Galerie 88 with over a hundred unseen works -- are finally doing for the public record what the public record should have done long ago.

But the things I know about Shanu-di that are not in any catalogue: Goli's particular way of looking at you. The open windows. The honking that never stopped. The small notebook that was not good enough. The blank cheque she declined. The thread that broke when the bell rang. The five minutes a day of being one with canvas and colours, and the rest being “horrible,” she said, laughing.