https://www.heraldgoa.in/Edit/By-invitation/Souza-and-Moraes-in-1961/208518
Take a long look at the unforgettable masterpiece by Francis Newton Souza printed with this column, because it’s the first – and quite possibly last – time it will be freely available in the public eye, having surfaced from nowhere in the catalogue for this month’s auction of modern and contemporary Indian art from the Glenbarra Art Museum (in Japan) and the Pundole Family Collection of the eponymous Mumbai gallery and auction house (www.pundoles.com). At the time he painted ‘Hunger’ in the early 1960s – in its full extent, it is a full-frontal nude – the daring genius from Saligao had already successfully vaulted from Goa to JJ School of Art in colonial Bombay (from where he was expelled for outspoken nationalism) and then, via sheer guts, directly into London’s post-WWII artistic hothouse. He was the first international star of modern Indian art and championed by the likes of John Berger. From the Pundole’s catalogue: “Souza had achieved both fame and critical acclaim…in 1964, a leading critic, Mervyn Levy, described him as “one of the most vigorously stimulating and committed painters of our time.” Souza earned that reputation – directly alongside Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon – with blockbuster canvases, possessed with visceral power that must be experienced to be believed. But of even more interest to us in Goa is another item also on offer at this auction: an entire sketchbook from 1961, with 76 pencil-on-paper drawings of inestimable value to Indian art history. If we lived in any kind of just world, and the state of Goa had its act together even minimally, this sketchbook would be on permanent display in Souza’s beloved homeland, instead of merely winging in and out of sight. Next year is the great pioneer’s 100th birth anniversary, and it’s an incomprehensible disgrace his legacy continues to languish unacknowledged where it matters most. The 1961 sketchbook is beautiful and amazing: a proliferation of drawings vividly illustrating where Souza came from (classically rendered portraits), what was on his mind (Picasso! Toulouse-Lautrec! Religion! Sex!) and his playful, productive state of being: one drawing is by his daughter Karen (now Keren, the mother of next-generation Goan-British-Israeli prodigy Solomon Souza) ,and the cover riffs on the artist’s path-breaking little book *Words & Lines *(1959, Villiers) that had so recently made his reputation as one of the most interesting creative forces in the Anglosphere. Here's what the Pundole’s catalogue says about this tiny treasure trove: “these sketches are insightful, as they document an important process of systematic experimentation that reveal an artist confident in his skin, keen to stretch his own artistic boundaries, yet in a manner that remains true to his own artistic vision.” For sure, these drawings are an invaluable insight into an artist’s inner world, as Souza set himself up to paint supercharged canvases like Hunger to make him famous. Here is Edwin Mullins in 1964: “One cannot walk into a roomful of Souzas without at once being forced to participate in certain passions and fears which make these violent distortions of the visual world explicable and sympathetic. Frequently these passions are not only violent but destructive, as though each painting liberated the artist from a private nightmare…his most successful work seems to contain something of an emotional clash – vulgarity and tenderness, or agony and wit, pathos and satire, aggression and composure. They have some of the sheer inventiveness of Picasso – and the same unresolved tumult.” The auction catalogue doesn’t mention it, but Goa shows up early in this sketchbook, and there are shades of Souza’s ancestral culture throughout. We already know he was thinking about home a lot in that fateful year of decolonization, and the swift military decapitation of the 450-year-old Estado da India. He painted several important paintings as it was happening: an extraordinary grotesque of roses rimmed with barbed wire, and The General (1961), another rarely-seen masterpiece in the vein of Hunger. That isn’t all, as we know from Dom Moraes – whose father Frank Moraes was the pre-eminent newspaper editor of India in those years – from *Never At Home*, the second volume of his brilliant autobiography, “Towards the end of that year, 1961, there were rumbles in the English press about what was happening off the western coast of India. They evoked some echoes in me, since Goa, the place in question, had been the home of my forefathers.” Moraes has a highly dubious take on the history of his ancestral land: “The Portuguese had been slothful and slack for more years than anyone could remember. They had arrested and imprisoned a few people who had clamoured for independence, but they had been otiose rather than oppressive. It was reasonably clear that most Goans wanted the Portuguese out, but this was largely because under the Portuguese the area seemed doomed to decay. The Goans in the main did not want to be part of India. What most of them had in mind was an autonomous state free of both Portugal and India. They had their own culture, and their own traditions. They felt that amalgamation with the heterogeneous culture of India would destroy them. Many of their representatives asked Nehru for a plebiscite within Goa. The Indians moved in without any plebiscite being taken.” On the basis of that erroneous reading, these shambles occurred: “A number of expatriate Goans in London, including the painter Francis Newton Souza, talked to me about the matter before the Indian invasion, or liberation, or whatever.” Eventually, “I wrote a long piece in which I said, among other things, that since Nehru had refused a plebiscite and forced the issue, making the Goans Indians without consulting them, I was ashamed to be an Indian. I was wholly unprepared for the reaction, both in England and India.” The situation worsened, with other Indian students in the UK treating the poet “a little like Eichmann” and eventually Frank Moraes called: ‘I was speaking to Nehru and he’s very upset. He’s thinking of withdrawing your passport.”