Nek Chand, an outstanding outsider artist

Aditi Tandon

Tribune News service

Chandigarh, June 12

Nek Chand Saini was the happiest in the company of artists, who could relate to the spirituality in his works. So when Reshma, a famous Pakistan based folk singer, made a special stop over at Chandigarh in November 2001 to see her “dear friend who created the Rock Garden”, Nek Chand had told The Tribune, “What more can I seek than the love of fellow artists”.

Reshma, who too has passed away, had come to India to sing in the service of Khwaja Ajmer Sharief. But she spoke with passion about how her journey to India and to the holy shrine would have remained incomplete without the meeting with Nek Chand.

Asked how she saw her bonding with the man, hailed as the world’s greatest living “outsider art practitioner”, Reshma said, “Yeh fankaar ka fankaar se jo rishta hota hai, bada hi gehraa aur khoobsurat hota hai. Ise lafzon mein bayan nahi kiya jaa sakta. ...bas itna keh sakti hun ki mein aapke sheher mein Nek Chand se hi milne aayi hun (It is not possible to describe in words the beautiful and intense relationship one artist shares with another. All I can say is I am in your city today only to see Nek Chand).

Personally, Nek Chand never got tired of saying how he regarded himself neither as an artist nor a craftsman and that he was always only creating a “Kingdom of Gods and Goddesses”. It is a gift of God, he would say about Rock Garden.

But for the world his creation was the finest specimen of outsider art. In May 2005, when the Unesco decided to empty the Switzerland-based Museum of Outside Art to house Nek Chand’s creations exclusively, Nek Chand was elated.

“I am happy to share my fantasy with the world,” he had told this correspondent on May 21, 2005, the day Museum Director Lucienne Peiry arrived in Chandigarh to hand over the letter that said beginning October that year, the Unesco had decided to celebrate Nek Chand’s art through a five-month exhibition in Switzerland and four more European cities simultaneously.

The letter to Nek Chand said, “Measured by its human and economic impact, your work is an outstanding testimony of the difference a single man can make when he lives his dream.”

Peiry, along with the celebrated filmmaker Lespinasse Philippe, later authored the first of its kind book chronicling Nek Chand’s work. She called it, “Nek Chand’s Outsider Art”.

During her India visit to Chandigarh in 2005, Peiry told this correspondent of what she thought of Nek Chand’s art. “The technique and spirit behind Nek Chand’s Kingdom of Gods and Goddesses, as he calls it, has mesmerised the world of art. What’s striking to us is the artist’s passion for the spiritual aspect of his work. He hardly calls it a garden. For him, it is a temple.”

Peiry also said she had until then counted 2,532 sculptures in the Rock Garden and taken a picture of each.

An even better tribute to Nek Chand came from Philippe, who spoke to The Tribune in May 2005 about what he thought Nek Chand had evolved into having started his work in the 1950s, about the same time as Le Corbusier was preparing the first sketches of Chandigarh.

“Nek Chand has evolved into a classical artist. The finest part about his garden is its endlessness. The art is never quite accomplished. As for the works, they are awe inspiring. Someone can see this space as a cathedral, someone else can marvel at its landscape or its architectural excellence. That is why I call Nek Chand the biggest artist in the world,” Philippe said.

For Nek Chand, personally, the Rock Garden was a proverbial labour of love. He would love to go amongst visitors and overhear their response at the ingenuity of his art.

Happy in the small corner office the Chandigarh Administration had allotted him inside the garden, Nek Chand would often recall to this correspondent the many hurdles he crossed in the path of his passion. His most frequent memory of the hurdles faced was the one about the UT administration often stopping water supply to the garden when he was in the process of building Phase III, his favourite part of Rock Garden, his “fansaty world”.

“Every time they stopped water supply to my garden, I phoned my friends in the media to rescue me. They always came to my help,” Nek Chand would say when recalling the Chandigarh Administration’s initial reluctance to legalise Phase III, which was to later become the most important part of the of world’s finest outsider art specimen.