Satish was still lucky to be born in a family which would not admit defeat. His father, Avatar Narain Gujral, was a lawyer in Jhelum in what is now known as West Pakistan. The family was uprooted by Partition, they settled down in Delhi but the father refused to be intimidated by his young son's affliction. Both he and Satish's elder brother, Inder Kumar Gujral, were influences in his life which kept him glued to achievement. The father saw to it that Satish should not be relegated to the field of the deprived, and function like a disabled person. He saw his potential for the visual adventure of line, form and colour so he sent him first to join the Mayo School of Arts in Lahore and then to the J.J. School of Art in Bombay. He knew that after that, Satish could hold his own. To bolster that, there was also the Left-leaning, articulate and very protective older brother, Inder, who not only introduced Satish to the world of letters in Bombay through his coterie of fellow intellectuals, but has remained a protective inspiration throughout Satish's traumatic journey to turn his handicap into an inspirational force.

The world of silence became the golden gate to the world of fame. But it could be done only by someone who refused to be intimidated by the first or seduced by the second. Unutterable pain still remained for Satish the password for creative expression. The Partition of India and his direct experience of it through helping his father and mother in the resettlement of victims of riots that had destroyed the foundations of a nation, led to his famous paintings that shook the spectator with pain. Exhibited in Delhi in 1952, they inspired the then acknowledged dean of art critics, Charles Fabri, to declare the advent of "a genius". Satish says now that what he depicted was not the agony without, but the agony within. "Had Partition not happened," he says, "I would have invented it". The enlarged proportions, the tormented, bloodredscapes of men and women in pain, the traumatised white, the defiant blacks, all contributed to an imagery of such scathing hurt, anger and torment that it seemed to explode from the canvas. Satish Gujral became famous, but he did not sell. People did not want to buy such overwhelming pain.

But Satish remained a painter who answered only to the inner voice. So he never took up external causes. The fifty or more exhibitions that he has held so far signify the trail within, in conjunction with the events that have marked the different stages of experience in his life. A Mexican sojourn made him familiar with the turbulent world of Orozco, Sequieros and Diego Riviera. But when he returned to India it was his discovery of love, the bond with Kiran who was to become his wife, that turned the imagery in subsequent works to a play with exuberance. The pain within softened. The silence within turned golden. The blacks, the stark reds, the searing whites turned to warmer shades, the lines did not feel as if they would explode out of the canvas in despair. And yet, you could not take a Gujral work for any other. One, its basic dimension is on a large scale, even if the size of the canvas is small. Two, it has a definitive structure; the colours, nor the lines spill over. Third, the colours follow the discipline of expert draughtsmanship. The passion may be searing but the composition is controlled, well-defined, and does not run away with itself either from exuberance or despair. In fact, it is the controlled line which makes the feeling it exudes so much more intense. Satish, as an artist, does not let emotions run away with themselves. He disciplines them to an abstract-cum-realistic form which exudes its own intensity.

When he was 72 years’ old, Satish went through a surgical operation which brought the world of sound back to him. He could hear but he could not decipher. Each new sound was like a strange onslaught on his ears. Like a child, he had to relearn the alphabet of sound. In his work he found instead of colours he could be alive again to greater rhythm. In his first exhibition after the operation his paintings swung on the canvas with dancing convolutions of form and colour. But gradually, over the past year, he began to find the compulsions of learning to hear and decipher, too demanding. He was still working from 7 am to 7 pm in his studio. But the cacophony of sounds which demanded deciphering was taking up too much time. He was nearing 78. He felt he needed more time. So he took still another daring decision. He had the implant, which had brought sound, removed. It was a homecoming to silence.

With the experience of sound, he had gone on a visual revelry. But in his latest work,’Back to Silence’, you see the canvas come alive with a different resurgence of colour and line, a new mix of sound and rhythm, the abstract almost conferring with figurative, not overlapping it. The superimposition of one compositional whole does not blot out the other behind it. He allows it to seep through, like the world of sound he chose to leave behind, but which remains in his memory; it has smoothened the edges and softened the colours.

Satish Gujral's current phase, seen in his latest works, is in a comeback genre, so much the richer for having scoured experience briefly in the world of sound. It contours the dimensions of a paradise regained, reaffirmed, reinvented. The artist is at peace with himself.