For the followers of Indian art, it has been a season of sadness. Himmat Shah’s passing on March 2 is like the loss of another pillar of Indian modernist aspiration. Hailed by Krishen Khanna as a “free spirit” and by J Swaminathan “as a bird who has forgotten how to stop migrating”, Shah’s position in Indian sculpture was unparalleled for the depth of meaning he was able to draw out of a single enigmatic form. Largely identified with his sculpted heads, in bronze and terracotta, which appear both cranial and phallic, Shah has used them to trace mappings, mark wayward journeys, fissures and features, as an enduring commentary on the human condition.

Born in Lothal, Gujarat, in 1933 in a family of Jain traders and farmers, Shah grew up around the dry flatlands of the historic Indus Valley archaeological site. A wayward child who refused to attend school, he was fascinated by the alchemical experiments of his grandfather who studied the medicinal value of poisons and natural minerals. Shah would hang around the potters’ colony or with itinerant Bhavai performers until his family dispatched him to Gharshala or the home school of Dakshinamurty, a centre run on Gandhian values that attracted boys from the Kathiawad region. At Gharshala, Himmat Shah studied under Jagubhai Shah, imbibing Gandhian values of economy and simplicity, which were to lie at the core of his practice.........

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