Back in Calcutta

Divorce!

A little money to go into a hotel for a few days. It ate up the money like mad. Then I found a flat for Rs 150 per month; Rs 150 being paid in advance + Rs 150 as deposit. Money gone! Sold my gold ring, given as a present by a friend. Tried my hand at fabric-designing. Only sold one design. Borrowed Rs 300 from a comparative stranger to face further rent and was soon in a dilemma as to what to do next.

“Get three pictures framed with the remainder of your money and enter them for the Calcutta Academy of Art” advised a friend.

I did that. My first and only borrowing worried me no end. Paying that back was my first consideration. I priced each picture Rs 300 irrespective of whether one was better than another, thinking that if one sold I’d be able to get out of debt.

I had ascertained the position of my entries and was slinking back close to the wall hoping to make an unobserved exit when a man stood in front of me.

“Are you Stella Brown?” he asked

“Yes, why?”

“I little thought the adjudicators would agree with what I said on radio last night.”

“What do you mean?” I asked bewildered

“Don’t you know?”

“What”

“You have won the gold medal for the best oil painting in the exhibition.”

“How do you know?” I said, hardly believing him.

“It is in the catalogue”

I returned home and told my friend, the adviser, that I had won a gold medal.

“We’ll go to see the pictures this evening” he said.

At the entrance, the girl who sold the tickets greeted me with

“You should have entered more. You have sold two already”

My first thought was ‘I can pay back my debt and have Rs 300 in hand.

The picture that had won the gold medal was Tibetans Loading Mules. The other one sold was “Coolies carrying Coal through Ferns”. The first was sold to a Tagore, the second to a Solicitor living in Chowrunghee. Anyhow, who bought them mattered little to me. The Maharajah of Burdwan bought “Tibetans playing Dice” a couple of weeks later. All the papers were speaking of me. This success gave me heart enough to paint again, though Calcutta’s people did not inspire me as the hill people did. I went to the Zoo and did some sketching of the elephants there, the keeper making them curtsey to the visitors by going down on their front knees. It was far from an enjoyable experience. Male loafers crowded around me, their bodies’ right up against mine. In annoyance I swayed from side to side throwing them off with my shoulders.

“Careful!” whispered my companion

“You’ll create trouble”

The sketching was quick and cursory. My eyes had taken in enough to serve me and resulted in the picture of three elephants with a small keeper “Salaam Karo” The picture was eventually given to a doctor for services rendered.

I was still in the flat, its rent melting away money like snow in the sun, when Gandhi was murdered. At this time I was shocked as any of his supporters. I had come to admire him towards his end. During the terrible communal riots when other Congress leaders had only dared fly over the affected areas, Gandhi had walked into them with his two girl supporters and had lived among the persecuted. He had come to Calcutta, too, and lived fearlessly in the bustee among the threatened, frightened Muslims. He was a man who had something more than any other leader.

I listened to the sad funeral music playing over radio throughout the day, displacing all programmes.

The next day was the overwhelming funeral procession and cremation ceremony.

This was reported on in great details on All India Radio. The body was laid on the pyre, placed high above the crowed on a plateau surrounded by steps. People began running up the steps to perhaps throw themselves upon the pyre.

Mounted police were driving them back down into the crowed. I was idly sketching this scene of horses negotiating those steps to keep off the maddened mourners, when suddenly the picture came into my head of the assassination. Myself I actually felt the way the two girls had tried to hold his slumping body up as if their slender strength could keep him alive; I felt the way the crowd had been paralysed into shocked inactivity not knowing, at that instance, what happened, I felt the way the murderer had been, still on his knee, aghast at what he had dared do, expecting the crowd to fall on him, I began to work out a small composition.

The money problem again began to rear its ugly head. I was literally down to one anna and one potato. What was I to do? Would something turn up, or would I have to end it all? My thoughts turned to the trams.

There was one avenue I had not tried – Art in Industry, run by an erstwhile friend of Nirmal’s and mine; the one who gave me the Railway Trade union covers.

“Do you know of any work for me?” I asked him

“Go to this address and ask for Mr. –“

It was the address of a commercial art firm. I walked to Dalhousie Square, not having enough for a tram fare and met a very pleasant man – head of the office.

“Could you paint that wall?” he asked me”

“Yes” I said bravely, eyeing a space about 20ft by 12ft high.

“Then go home and make a rough suggestion and bring it to me. You can work here only in the weekends. We will give you a year in which to complete it, we will pay you Rs250 per month. Here’s and advance”.

Wealth untold! From one anna in the morning to Rs250 in the afternoon. My potato could be joined by luxuries.

Circumstances occurred that made me decide to leave the flat suddenly, calling in a trader to make me an offer for the furniture. He gave me RS200, a paltry sum. There was a period of upset for health reasons, during which I was loitering over the rough cartoon. I found a large room for Rs100 in Alipore in a fine house surrounded by largish garden. It was here I began the canvas on the assassination.

One day I had a visitor to my empty room in Alipore, its only furniture a camp bed and an easel. He said he was the French Cultural Attaché and had seen some of my work. He wanted to meet me and see more. I was working on the assassination. I did not ask him what he had seen of mine or how he had found me. I was always short of word.

I heard later that he had asked the Gov. of India why they went to the expense of getting Topolski from England to do a mural when they had an artist in India (he mentioned me) perfectly capable of handling it and could portray the Indian people and their life better than any Indian artist. He died a few month’s after; unfortunately; my one influential voice.

The manager of the Commercial firm got in touch to ask why I was delaying. I took him the rough cartoon- “Primitive Agriculture throttles the Life of the People”.

He said I could begin at once. There was a platform for me that I could raise or lower or move back and forth at will, to reach any level on to any part. I told him my problem was insomnia. It was getting me down. I could not sleep for longer than one hour in twenty four; that hour was between seven and eight in the morning.

“Our doctor will put that right,” he said.

So the firm’s doctor gave me some injection and I was ready to fly.

A busy life began, Gandhi in the week-days, the Mural at weekends.

There is a wild plant in Bengal, succulent, growing in places where there is water. It is forever thirsty and where there is water it drinks it up and thrives and spreads until it has covered the whole surface of any pond or pool it has settled in, sucking up all the water to the point leaving the land parched. This is the water Hyacinth. My Mural was of this flower, magnified many times, each bloom five feet high in the picture. I painted the flower in all its delicate, pale, heliotrope beauty, so attractive a flower yet so pernicious a weed, greedily guzzling up water, wrestling with the peasant for that which is so necessary for his crops and hence his survival. In the spaces between the blooms were groups of peasants, on a smaller scale; a family grieving over a child dying of malaria; peasants standing in water, bending over, planting rice seedlings, one straightening up, overcome by on-coming illness.

No photograph was taken of the Mural, the rough cartoon disappeared, and the firm was taken over by another- no record remains.

My Gandhi picture, for which I had gone to the press to get photographs of the man so that I could be correct in detail of face and limb, was completed and entered for the following Calcutta Academy (1948). I had named it “Father Forgive Them”

I was surprised not to get an invitation to the opening and in the Statesman on the opening day I read “Stella Brown’s unfinished version and controversial picture was not hung for reasons beyond hers and the Academy’s control. I was surprised.

I waited until the opening day was over, but went the following day to find out what was amiss. I was met by Lady R. who said

“Oh Stella! Your picture was rejected, it was not up to your usual standard, and the composition was bad!”

I was flabbergasted, tongue tied, humiliated, belittled. What did she know of composition!!

Just then passing by was the artist Sailosh Mukherjee, who had won that year’s gold medal. Taking no notice of lady R. he said

“Stella! You are a great artist. I have not seen your rejected picture, but you are incapable of a bad composition. I salute you”.

His tribute put the lady into a state of flummox. This from the tongue of their gold medallist!! Her partner, a Tagore, came to her rescue.

“It was not because it was a bad picture” he hastened to explain,

“It was the subject”.

“We could not exhibit it for fear it would cause riots”.

“Yes! You put in Godze” added Lady R in shocked reproof, as if I had urinated over the thing.

The Statesman, for their mention of it, was told they were no longer welcome to come and report future Academies.

I carried the picture away with me that day and was surprised to find the museum attendants all saluting me as I passed them. I heard one say

“The memsahib who saw Gandhi killed”,

Art in Industry asked me to exhibit the picture at a convention dinner they were having.'

Soon after, Gandhi’s son came to Calcutta looking for anything connected with his father’s life; portraits, photographs, pictures for a commemorative exhibition. Lady R said there was one but she did not know whether he would like it or not. “The assassination was part of my father’s life.

“If it’s a good picture it’s alright.”

“But Godze is in it!!”

“Godze was part of my father’s life”

So the picture was seen by him, readily taken off by him to New Delhi, was eventually spoken of as ‘The most controversial picture in the exhibition’. The only record I have of the picture was kindly sent me by a newspaper. It was a photograph of Pandit Nehru, looking with expressions of awe at the picture.

I had priced it modestly at RS1500. The Gandhi museum offered RS1000 saying they had very little money. Unfortunately I did not accept the offer.

Some years later, a journalist came to me and asked if I would let him take a photograph of my picture of Gandhi’s assassination, He was doing a series of articles on famous assassinations. I readily agreed and was surprised when he did not come again. He had seen me in the office where I was working. The picture was at my father-in-law’s home, in the garage, so he had to meet me there if he wanted it.

He came, a long time after.

“Do you know why I did not come?” he asked.

“It was because of a curious co-incidence; I was passing through Orissa and was spending the night in the Forest Officer’s Bungalow. I was telling him of my proposed series of articles on ‘Famous Assassinations’, when he said ‘I’ve got the very thing for you’. Going into an inner room he brought out a framed photo of your picture. I got my illustration from that”. So my picture had become something of an icon!

What happened to the original eventually? In my unsettled, nomadic life, changing addresses and occupations, I left the picture in the garage of my father-in-law’s house. There was no place for all the pictures that were accumulating. When I came to leave India finally, for England, I told my sister-in-law she could have it and sell it when the Gandhi centenary came round. When that occurred she wrote and asked me where the picture was. It was for her to find out and she should have done it ages ago. Her son said it had been stolen and later he came to know by whom.

He told me this when I once more visited Calcutta as if I would go to claim it, but I said that if the fellow stole it he must have valued it and so would look after it better than those with whom it has been left behind.

I was finding the life of an independent artist too frenetic. The changing renters of the flat in the Alipore house had each tried to oust me for one reason or another, the last because the lady thought her husband was only interested in me. I had been unaware of it, if it was so, and was puzzled when she asked me to leave.

I found a room with studio in Park Circus. Just when the first bit of rain disclosed its vulnerability, leaving only one little space dry for my camp bed, the water coming through the ceiling elsewhere as though through a sieve. I applied for a temporary job that was advertised- to replace an Art teacher on leave. It was in Kurseong. ‘The Dow Hill School for Girls.’