‘To Break and To Branch’: A gentle guide to Gieve Patel’s art, for first-timers and old admirers

Gieve Patel was announced to the world as both a poet and a painter in 1966 – with Poems (published by Nissim Ezekiel) and his first Exhibition mounted at Jehangir Art Gallery, Bombay. He had started practising medicine as a physician before this and would become an acclaimed playwright later. Among those who became intimately associated with him in his multiple avatars was Ranjit Hoskote, himself a man of many parts – poet, curator and cultural theorist. To Break and To Branch is his tribute to Patel – six essays collated in memoriam of his friend.

“How does one summarise, or bear adequate witness to, a friendship that spanned 37 years?” he asks in his Introduction. In effect, what he does is “to chart the artist’s flight path: the urgencies on which he had at various points focused his energy, the debates in which his images found their contours, the histories in which his oeuvre could find habitation”.

The collation of these essays marks a special publication by Seagull Books (who had earlier published Patel’s three plays in a single volume). The essays are Hoskote’s contributions to various brochures of Patel’s Exhibitions, spanning two decades – spread out at equal intervals, every few years – comprising a substantial part...

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