Exploring how Indian modernist Shanti Dave scripted life on canvas

Back in the 1960s when Shanti Dave, one of India’s leading modernists, reached London for work from the US, he realised that he had run out of money. Frantically, he reached out to F. N. Souza, India’s enfant terrible, who was, at the time, living there, and borrowed cash from him. “Souza ne badi madad kari (Souza helped me a lot),” says Dave sir (I’ll call him ‘sir’ in deference to his age, he is 91-years-old), still remembering the gesture of his fellow artist. Dave sir’s conversations are nostalgic—living with Mohan Samant in New York when his passport, air tickets, and other belongings got stolen; forming a bond of friendship with author Ved Mehta in the US (“Ved bhi acha dost bann gaya tha mera (Ved also became a good friend of mine”).

Each time that I’ve met Dave sir in the last few years, we have ended up spending hours, talking not only about his art but also life, spirituality, travels, relationships, responsibilities, health, old age, pain, loneliness, and “that thing called love”. Doesn’t all of the above, however, also get intertwined as art? “Life, beta,” says the nonagenarian, gently tapping my hand, “is art”.

Having spent close to two hours with this iconic artist in his south Delhi home on a cloudy, rainy morning, Dave sir (dressed in an orange kurta and ecru-coloured pyjamas), I find, is both, strong and vulnerable. He’s unafraid to cry when he talks about his wife Sushila ji who passed away, barely a few days after they returned from Art Dubai in 2019. “She was 13 and I was 18 when we got married. Grahasti ke bare mein kuch nahi pata tha (we didn’t know anything about how to run a household / build a home).” In time, she became not only Dave sir’s sangini (wife) but also the painter’s helper of sorts, cleaning not just the paint brushes but also heavy cement moulds that her husband used in his art, helping him in the kitchen as he melted bees wax through a labourious steam process. 

India’s first significant abstractionist to incorporate beeswax into his practice, Dave sir had a bull run of sorts in the 1960s and ’70s in the art market. Besides getting commissioned by Air India’s offices to create murals in Los Angeles, New York, Rome, Frankfurt, Sydney, and Perth, he had several exhibitions in India and abroad with patrons and critics taking note of his encaustic or hot wax painting technique that the artist read about in the art school in Baroda where he studied and later saw in Cairo via the mummification process. “I was itching to experiment with the technique on canvas,” says the artist who would, in the years to follow, become widely recognised as the Indian master artist in encaustic with a focus on colour and mysterious calligraphic scrawls and script. 

Having won accolades from the government, including Lalit Kala Akademi’s national awards over three continuous years (1957-59), and the Padma Shri in 1985, Dave sir has come a long way from being a billboard painter in Ahmedabad to becoming one of India’s leading modernists who dared to go on a path with the encaustic medium that he made his very own.