A personal apropos of impersonal Baiju Parthan

Encomium is in order when people begin to celebrate someone you have spent some formative years with and it is most fitting when it is an expression of deeply felt admiration for that person. This one from me is long overdue, and it is to Baiju Parthan.

To us then, back in the Goa of 1980s, he was just Baiju.

Goa college of Art was not a Slade or a Sorbonne. It was modest, in stature and spread, affiliated to The Bombay University. It was housed meters away from the beach, segmented department wise in two residential Duplex houses within a radius of hundred meters. The department of painting was on the 'other' side, whence a most captivating aroma of distilled turpentine eddied across your olfactory field of response.

On this, the more banal side, the canteen was. Students ate there and had cups of tea in glasses which I, rather abstractly for some reason, associated with jail cells. Students met in the canteen more than they ate: most hadn't the 'dough' to eat with. It was here that I first saw Baiju.

P. Baiju was slight, dark and bearded in the manner artists and art students are. His eyes were heavy-lidded and red rimmed. He was quiet, not aloof and often not alone. Always accompanied by his classmates, I reckoned he was much liked. And his quietness was offset by certain pertinent remarks he made. His utterance had often a ring of maturity to it, and what he said starkly stood out amidst the general blather of young undergraduates of his age.

I was much too young and impressionable, laud and eager to take centre stage, yet what brought me into Baiju’s ‘clique’ is uncertain. It may be Shashi Decosta, another talented adman friend of ours, who rolled long joints behind the small bidi shop we purchased our smokes from. It may be some other friend more akin to me then because of his easier accessibility and humour. Whatever it was, there was a time I spent in Baiju’s company almost everyday. Between the year 1981 & ’83 we were a regular clique, sure to be seen in the Panjim municipal park in the precincts of Mary Immaculate Church square.

Those years were crucial to me as a person and as an artist. Baiju did not teach me anything but I learnt quite a lot from him around this time.

There wasn’t a great deal of cerebral exchange between us; I was busy clowning and entertaining in many ways perhaps, but the few things he ever said have etched deep.

I remember that I could not probe much into his ‘background’. He never seemed interested in knowing mine. Yet I had a strong intuitive vision of his mother. I have not met her, not any other member of his family – they were in Kerala where he hails from. In an attempt to break through Baiju’s impersonal aspect I made a quick drawing of her and when I showed it to him, he looked at it for a long time. Then he said that there were elements of her character I had caught in that drawing. It was a pencil sketch on a sheet of my sketch book.

He was the best in his class and what he painted then, even as a student seemed different, rather like ‘his own thing’. Perhaps that is what is meant by being Original. Yes, Baiju was very original.

In 1983 He left for Mumbai. We lost touch.

In 89-90, Theodore Mesquita mounted a group show called ‘Circa’. When I went to Goa in that connection I saw Baiju’s work. He had a solo there, At Chase art Centre, a few days before ‘circa’. It was strong work. I particularly liked his blues and those amazingly dream-like orange-ochre-browns and the myriad little marks and things, forms and figures and numbers; an “A” here, a “Z” there and arrows. I did not like the work for its mystery this time but precisely for what they revealed. They revealed a certain old world meticulousness I associate with rectitude. I could trust this painter, I felt. They were very reassuring somehow, his paintings. Most of them were bought, the remaining I could not afford although they were priced way below 100,000 Rs.

I recently received a reply to a mail I wrote to him. Attached to it was a flier to his on going show in New York.  New York is too far, I thought, Baiju is much closer. That triggered this pouring out.