Outliving life: The story of an 81-year-old painter
Positioned in a small house which was once his wada, lives Srinivas Vaidya, a painter completely unknown
Long before the modern-day Amar Chitra Kathas, there was the art of painting religious figures for book covers and the illustrations within. Artists painted religious figures out of devotion, or as commissions from wealthy patrons or royalty. With digital art, the profession of a painter itself has morphed into design and illustration. The skill of painting every fold and wrinkle of skin by hand on a canvas continues to become a rarity. There is one such painter who lives in the crumbling space of Shaniwarpeth, perhaps as one of the last symbols of an almost faded Indian renaissance epoch. His name is Srinivas Vaidya.
Srinivas is the oldest living member of the Vaidya lineage. At 81, this man still paints in his small workshop in his backyard. His room is mostly scattered with pencil sketches and half-done paintings of his spiritual gurus sitting cross-legged. This space is where he spends most of his time now. Finding Srinivas Vaidya was an element of fluke rather than a tip off. An electrician working outside this particular home told us about him. As we were welcomed inside his home by his wife and grandchildren, back to his workshop, he naturally felt a little unsettled by the sudden crowd. Eventually, the man narrated his story, in an English rich with vocabulary, something rarely experienced in these days of clipped communication.
A former government servant, he painted as a hobbyist, having spent almost all his weekends with brushes. “I used to have Saturdays off, which allowed me two days of useful indulgence,” he mentions. He has painted religious figures almost all his life, but has never accepted money for any of them. “I have 250 book covers to my name, but I don’t take commissioned work”, he says.
He describes the reason why most of his work remains either unpublished or lost, “Most of it got destroyed in the floods of 1961. We had a big wada and over 70 families used to live here. The house was half-submerged and everyone left except us, since we thought we would rebuild this place.” In light humour he indicates the level at which the water was, saying “I am short so don’t measure it by my height.” Srinivas seems like a man who doesn’t regret much. While the house is in the middle of a disputed plot, he only mentions it very casually, “yes, something is going on, I wouldn’t worry too much about it.”
“I follow Shri Narasimha Saraswati, who is the avatar of Dattatreya, and this painting,” he points to a huge oil on canvas, “is Shri Mahadev Akkal Goswami.” Most of his personal paintings are various acrylic renditions of the two figures, but the one which he points to is an oil on canvas, his first-ever attempt at oil painting. He talks about it with pride. “I was asked by a friend to paint this on the condition that I do it using oil paint. It was a challenge”, he smiles. The portrait is overwhelming, with its multiple folds and impossibly small details. He calls it his best work. From a distance, it looks like a digitally filtered photograph.
As he gives us a tour of his workshop he tells us, “I used to work in the room on the first floor before, but now I can’t climb the stairs because of my health, so I shifted my work here.” He talks about his health and old age with practicality and a certain comfort with the idea of mortality. When asked about his family members and whether they have any interest in painting, he mentions, “ Well, none of my children paint and apart from my father who was a painter too, no one in my family does this.”
He then calls his youngest grandson, pats his back and says in a tone pregnant with significance, “he paints.”
gulal.salil@goldensparrow.com
Originally published on The Golden Sparrow
