Musharraf’s haveli on canvas

The artist realised that he had to mix real and imaginary elements in the painting to make the haveli look striking and nostalgic. For a fortnight, Harish Kumar’s daily routine comprised shuttling between his small painting studio outside the capital and a congested locality in Old Delhi area, all for the sake of presenting Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf with a souvenir. He made more than 40 trips to the now—famous Neharwali Haveli where Gen Musharraf spent some years of his childhood six decades ago. Speaking to the media Kumar said that despite the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) commissioning him to execute a work of his choice at a very short notice, he was able to meet the deadline by submitting two paintings of the haveli. Of the two, it was a mixed—media work, predominantly done in water colour, that the ICCR chose to hand over to the Pakistan President during his recent India visit. The 32’x42’ work, mounted on a brass plate, was presented by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to Gen Musharraf at the palatial Hyderabad House in New Delhi on April 17. Ironically, the artist failed to be present at the occasion as he did not get an entry pass and the cream colour sherwani he got stitched for the occasion lies untouched in his wardrobe back home at Eros Garden in Faridabad. “It doesn’t matter, my painting was well appreciated. It is more significant that a lesser—known artist like me was selected for such a major task,” he says. The ICCR had even let him choose the theme of the work. “Thus, right from using the haveli as the main subject to the framing and mounting of the painting, everything went the way I wanted it to be,” he says. Pressure involved Nonetheless, he admits that there was a lot of pressure in this assignment. “For one, you have a strict deadline. Secondly, it’s not something on which you can work the way you want. In a way this painting was to represent the nation,” observes Kumar, who has held about 15 exhibitions across the country and once abroad after completing his diploma from Sarada Ukil School of Art in Delhi in 1993. Kumar’s maiden assignment with the ICCR was a set of paintings on folk theatre forms for the council’s 2004 calendar. He says that he presumed that the council expected him to work on something that would project the country’s culture. His work on this assignment involved a lot of legwork as he, along with his art adviser and friend Chandan Chakraborty, would make an early morning visit to the haveli to take a closer look at some part of the building and go back to the studio to brush up a portion of the painting.