I must be one of the last of the dinosaurs who loves to watch the Republic Day parade in actuality on a purely voluntary basis — meaning I want to, and unlike netas and some officials who don’t have to. For 22 years, we lived on Ashok Road that is less than a kilometre from Rajpath and we would all make it a point to troop to the parade and the Beating the Retreat ceremony year after year with unfailing regularity. I would wheedle with my father to take me to the President’s At Home on Republic Day. Once, he relented and off I went to the Rashtrapati Bhavan.
Subsequently, I have been fortunate to visit the President’s House several times, but the excitement of the first time is still etched in my mind and will always be special. This year I was very keen to take my five-year-old niece to the Parade but the security was such a deterrent. The worst is trying to call the driver when you don’t have your cellphone. I wonder what the netas do — use pigeon mail or send out smoke signals (oops! I forgot — no matchboxes)!
This long Republic Day weekend I did some catching up on my other love — cinema. One of the films that was on my list was a short documentary Keshav Malik — A Look Back. Keshav is a senior critic and poet who has been an intrinsic part of India’s art scene for over five decades. Made by poet-painter Sangeeta Gupta, who makes no bones about her unabashed admiration for Keshav, has directed, scripted and shot the film, and Prithvi Fine Art and Cultural Centre has produced it. Gupta has captured some vignettes of Keshav’s life and the people who have been part of his journey. She must have had a tough time finding material, for I don’t see Keshav keeping too much logical track of his life and times.
But kudos to her for trying to piece it together by prominently featuring artists like Rameshwar Broota, Anjolie Ela Menon, Arpana Kaur, Shobha Broota, Usha Malik his wife, and former secretary of the Sangeet Natak Akademi and cultural czarina Kapila Vatsyayan, who also happens to be Keshav’s younger sister, to share their reminiscences of Keshav. The poet himself speaks about the various influences and important intellectual landmarks of his experiences as a poet and critic. The 29-minute film is bilingual (English and Hindi) with English subtitles, which tend to be distracting at times. “Keshav’s unusual, almost seismographic sensitivity to life, time and the body of arts is frequently regarded as a watermark that registers the upward mount of the aspiring human spirit has been captured in the film,” said Sangeeta. Keshav has been highly decorated over the years, including with the Padma Shri for Literature in English, All India Fine Arts & Craft Society bestowed the Kala Ratna award on him, he was elected Fellow of the Lalit Kala Akademi, Ujjain University conferred the Kala Vrat award on him and he was honoured with the Lifetime achievement award by Jamia Milia University. He distinguished himself as an art critic of leading dailies like Hindustan Times and Times of India for several years. He essayed the role of an advisor to the National Gallery of Modern Art and an executive board member to the Lalit Kala Akademi. He was nominated to the Jury of several awards for Art and Poetry at the National as well as at the state level. He served as the personal secretary to the first Prime Minister of India, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru during the historic period of 1947-48 — I would have liked to hear about this phase in the film. The film shows some breathtaking views of the Himalayas especially Kashmir, which have had a huge impact on Keshav — the person and the poet. There is a lovely clip when Usha recounts how he had drawn black and white sketches of the mountains on all the doors of their Connaught Place flat. Like many from his generation, the Coffee House that was a veritable institution of sorts and the references to it triggered
off a trip down memory lane! And one of the greatest upheavals of all times, the Partition that displaced many more people than even Hitler, and the heartbreaking impact on an entire generation, finds a mention in the film.
The one person I would have liked to see in the film is author Uma Vasudev, who has played such a pivotal role in changing the story of Keshav’s life by propelling him into reviewing the arts finds reference only in the conversations. It was Vasudev, another die-hard Coffee House aficionado, who bullied him into reviewing and writing and personally took him to the then editor of Hindustan Times, and got him space to write. The rest as they say is history.
In the late 80s, I had just launched the Marquee page on the arts in the Times of India and Keshav used write on visual art for it. There were times when his writing would be so intellectually charged that it was difficult to decode it for the average reader and I would often rewrite his copy, trying to retain the essence of his writing. Already a giant of the art world, Keshav never complained, unlike some other critics who would come and do tandav if their copy was changed. I have attended many art camps and served on several committees with Keshav, including a national one that decides on fellowships to artists, and it was wonderful how Keshav would be the first to arrive and the last to leave, go through the details of the junior artists, and what was especially endearing was his supportive and sympathetic stance for the women artists. He has also written some nice things about me in the catalogue of one of my solo shows. But then that is what Keshav is all about — sensitivity and geniality — qualities that are getting rarer in this day and age. But then Keshav is a rare man.

Dr Alka Raghuvanshi is an art writer, curator and artist and can be contacted on alkaraghuvanshi@yahoo.com