Two decades ago when sujata Bajaj was still a student at L’École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, the prestigious art school in Paris, she and her Norwegian husband, Rune Larsen, would often walk around the many galleries (about 70) that crowd the streets in that area. Among the most prestigious on the Rue des Beaux-Arts was, as it is now, the Galerie Patrice Trigano. Though Bajaj had shown only in a few group exhibitions in Paris until then, Larsen had hoped that one day she would hold a solo show here. “I dismissed it as a romantic dream of Rune’s because it was next to impossible then, as it is now, to get Trigano to show you,” says Bajaj, sitting back on the large sofas that line the walls of her sparsely furnished apartment in Boulevard Raspail in Paris.

It was with some pride and satisfaction then that Rune greeted visitors on that fine, if chilly evening in December when Bajaj’s solo exhibition opened in Trigano. There was the mayor of Paris, the Indian ambassador to France, publishers, art critics, writers, S.H. Raza and other artists, a whole Norwegian contingent that comprised not just friends but art collectors and gallery owners who had flown in from Norway for the opening, and, of course, there was Patrice Trigano himself. Patrice is a hoary figure in Parisian art circles. An astute art collector, he is also an art expert who is called upon to advise the French government in identifying works of art whose authenticity is in doubt. Gallery Trigano established in the early ’80s has shown big contemporary artists from Europe, America and China but this was the first time the gallery was showing the works of an Indian artist. Curious, you ask Patrice who is hovering in the background during the opening why he is showing Bajaj’s work in a solo exhibition.

He gesticulates, and is as effusive about her works as his European lineage will allow him to be. “We in France always felt that Paris was the birthplace of abstracts. And here were Sujata’s works, also abstract, but nothing like what we had seen abstract art to be,” he literally gasps, adding that he was happy with the response to the works on the opening day. According to him there were nearly 1000 people who had come that evening, which he said was a rare occurence. Bajaj was showing only 12 works and many were sold immediately.

“In recent times I have not had a solo show in Paris. And I wanted to hold back until someone big approached me. In Paris and its gallery circuit, it’s not as if you can move from one gallery to another; one wrong move and you will get stuck,” says Bajaj. She anyway does not believe in burning herself out by having too many shows in a year, even in different countries. This, she says, is because she does not want to produce mediocre works that she herself will not be able to look at years from now.

It may have been coincidence but of the most provident kind. At around the same time Patrice was working with her for a solo show, the publishing house La Différence wanted to publish a book on her life and works of 25 years in a series called Mains et Merveilles. “Initially my reaction was why a new book now since a big book was published on my work in Paris only two years ago? You know it’s a lot of work for me to put together a book. But when I was convinced this book was very different and that it was a great honour, considering the publishing house comes out only with books on internationally known artists who have made a difference to Parisian life and French culture, I agreed. And since the show was anyway coming up, we thought we’d launch the French edition of the book around the same time,” reflects Bajaj. The book features an introductory essay by Michel Waldberg, a well-known art critic and poet who says about the same things that Trigano has said about her works – that they are abstracts of a kind his Western sensibilities could not comprehend initially. In the essay, he admits to having been overcome by the “strangeness” of Bajaj’s oeuvre when he saw them for the first time.

The book was launched at La Hune, among the most important Left Bank book stores in Paris today. Located centrally on Boulevard St Germain in the Latin Quarter on the Rive Gauche, between cafes such as the Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots, which were the meeting points of French intellectuals from Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir to André Gide and André Malraux, La Hune grew into an institution, as it came to be associated with important literary figures of the late 20th century. “Until Rune told me, I did not even know it was an honour that my book was exhibited on the window of the store for a whole week,” says Bajaj with almost childish glee.

This is in fact the endearing quality about Bajaj – that she is far from the bohemian Parisian artist you imagine she has turned into since her departure from India. She has remained a vegetarian and wears her colourful Indian skirts and kurtis even in Paris. “Paris allows you to be what you are. If you don’t want to be like others, no one looks askance that you don’t dress or look like them. You know, I could carry all those designer bags, but I’d rather not, because they would not be me,” she says.

Her apartment in Montparnasse is almost hermetic: there is no overkill of furniture or funky gadgets. Only at the entrance are the bronze and wooden figurines from India that she likes to collect. Otherwise on the walls of her home there are only acrylics and paper works of one artist: Sujata Bajaj! The one concession made is to a few works of Raza. There are floor cushions, and on this sits almost like a minor princess, the family cat Nicy, who Bajaj claims understands Hindi! Incidentally, with her 14-year-old daughter Helena she speaks Hindi too, and Helena herself is fluent in Hindi, English, Norwegian and French.

If India is her spiritual home, she thinks of Paris as her artistic refuge. Though she denies she would have painted any other way, and would have painted the way she does even if she were living elsewhere in the world, she admits to Paris having given her a certain amount of freedom. “In Paris I feel free,” she says enigmatically, and when you probe, she says, “It allows me to work and paint as I feel”. Interestingly, at her atelier in her home, she actually sits on the ground, in front of the canvas to paint.

“In Paris, artists and writers are treated like Brahmins,” she says of the respect the city has for artists, writers and philosophers. Almost all the great names that have shaped the 20th century thinking have lived at least for a few years in the French capital. Picasso for instance had an atelier in Montparnasse in the very area Bajaj lives, and painted his masterpiece, the Guernica, not far from where we sit. Parisian cafés were an important part of the artistic and intellectual life of the times and artists who were often broke during their lifetime, used to pay for their cup of coffee or wine with drawings and paintings. The owner of the café La Rotonde, just a few steps away from Bajaj’s apartment, for instance, was given a few paintings by an impoverished Modigliani in lieu of payment. Why, even the park outside Bajaj’s house has a beautiful bronze work of Balzac by Rodin! Paris has 600 art galleries in ratio to its population of three million. There are even tax write-offs for companies when they buy art, both for investment and because they love art.

But the artist, whose parents Radhakrishna and Anasuya Bajaj were companions to Mahatma Gandhi (who even solemnised their wedding) never dreamt that one day Paris would be her home. She received her post-graduate degree from SNDT College’s Fine Arts department, Pune. For her doctorate she went to remote tribal areas to study art and its synergy with the lives of these simple people. It was while doing her paper on how tribal art influenced contemporary Indian artists that she met Raza, who was living in France. When she showed him her works he was so taken up with the energy of her paintings that he urged her to apply for a French scholarship to study in Paris. It was he who received her at the airport and he who spent time talking to her about life as much as about her paintings.

It was not Raza, but her teachers at Beaux Arts who showed how to set herself, her lines and colours free. For the rest, Paris took over. Colour, shades of red, blue, yellow drip on to her canvases, almost as if colour has engulfed her, just as it does the arid landscape of Rajasthan from where she hails. She uses colour as a form of meditation just as some of the best musicians use ragas and the pauses between them to fill space. “I am not a storyteller. I want to convey energies and subtle messages through colours and lines,” she says. “I want people to feel my works.”

Ultimately, her paintings speak of the person Bajaj is: and she is someone who feels as much at home in Delhi or Mumbai that she often visits, as in Paris or Stavanger in Norway, where she has another home. Her artistic sensibilities may be European, but in her roots she continues to remain the daughter of Gandhians who had brought her up with such strong Indian values.

As Waldberg quoting Kandinsky to discuss Bajaj’s works, writes: “The road we have very fortunately chosen is the one that moves us away from the appearances of things to bring us closer to the opposite base, that of internal necessity...”

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