On show, Cuban artist's love affair with India (Art feature with images)

It's the country's first brush with the works of late Cuban writer-painter Severo Sarduy. An exhibition of paintings, photographs and artefacts here documents his fascination with India and the orient. "The East of Severo Sarduy" has come to Delhi for a month after travelling to international cities like Madrid, Paris, Tangier, Tetuan and Rabat.

Sarduy's photographs of Varanasi, Khajuraho, Agra, Kullu, the Ajanta caves and Mumbai are striking in their details of Indian life -- in alleys outside the historical sites and temples. A series of self-portraits find Sarduy dressed in local Indian clothes, complete with turbans.

When Sarduy visited Varanasi in 1971, he was struck by the "strange people of the city wrapped up in colourful saris, dhotis and turbans". He photographed the city, its temples and the historic river bank bustling with pilgrims, devotees, women, men, children and even guards with spears.

"It took me almost 48 hours to travel from Delhi to Varanasi," he recalled later. Sarduy died of AIDS in 1993.

The exhibition, inaugurated Saturday at Instituto Cervantes here, has been organised by the embassy of Spain and the Spanish government.

Sarduy travelled across India on horses, cars and carts. His art is culled from India's diversity and his experimental novel "Cobra", which ended with a small "Indian Journal", is a personal recollection of his two journeys in the country during the seventies.

While he visited Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Varanasi, Agra, Mysore, Chennai, Bhubaneswar and smaller towns during his first visit, he explored the Buddhist lands of Himachal Pradesh, Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim in the late 1970s during his second trip.

Sarduy's art was influenced by Indian textiles, ancient calligraphy and Buddhist sculptures as well as the art of the Himalayas, where he spent months practising Mahayana Buddhism. He also went to China to study Taoism.

His journeys in the Himalayas inspired him to write "Maitreya", a book that starts in Tibet with a group of Buddhist monks who after the death and the last rites of their master escape to India.

Sarduy's friend and companion, French philosopher Francois Wahl, said "India to Sarduy was a conjunction of the multiple and the zero".

"Sarduy found similarities between India and Cuba. He was so much in love with India that at a point of time he wanted to live here," said Catalina Queseda, a Latin American literature expert.

The exhibition, divided into five sections, shows the complex relations that Sarduy had with the east.

Gustavo Guerrero, a Venezuelan writer and editor of Sarduy's works, who has co-curated the show with Queseda and S.P. Ganguly of Jawaharlal Nehru University, said the writer-artist wanted to break the stereotypes that people from the West had about India.

His photographs and writings used humour to express the typical western mind set about 'how far the east was from the west'".

His paintings are surrealist -- mosaics of scribbles and etchings with Chinese ink and even coffee dust where Arabian and Chinese calligraphies and Sanskrit symbols crowd in profusion like a "solid shape", almost like patterned cloth.

Sarduy, who was born in Camaguey, a village in Cuba in 1937, was preoccupied with the presence of Chinese and Africans in his homeland, but "it was India that always haunted him". He had first heard about the country from a group of Argentinian monks in his village, who had worked in India.

By chance, Sarduy first encountered Indian sculptures at a museum in Paris in the 1960s.

"In 1968, he finally decided to visit India after meeting former Mexican envoy to India Octavio Paz in Paris who told him to go and see India instead of reading about it," Guerrero told IANS.

Sarduy's works for the exhibition have been sourced from private collectors, museums and the artist's personal archive, he said.

Last updated on Jul 28^th, 2009 at 09:16 am IST--IANS