We all know death will claim us one day. But still we live our daily lives as if we are immortal. That is why we are shocked to hear of friends? death as I am to hear that one of the most sensitive of our contemporary artists, Gauri Pant, is no more. It is sad to see her go for many reasons, but the most important one is that we are fast losing that quality of feeling deeply as well as of being considerate to others? sensitivities as a sign of the respect one has for one?s feelings. To feel that way one ought to have developed a strong sense of self-respect and the capacity to stand up for it. This is sadly lacking in a world of a handful of paste-board celebrities and a mass of marginalised people.

With the passing away of Gauri Pant, our contemporary art has lost a most original soul, one who has gifted her eyes to another human being so that he or she too can perceive the world afresh. Indeed, she is one of our last artists who carried with them the legacy of an intellectual existence lived out frugally in a beautifully evolved space that served both as a hermitage and a studio.

On its walls we can still see her characteristic figures of young men with beards and moustaches, delicate women, precocious children-and even a representation of herself as Parvati with her twin sons, Sudhir and Sunil, as two Ganeshas, the one red and the other green.

Each figure has been drawn with immaculate care, right down to the different expressions in each faced. Indeed, not one of her figures is merely a form.

Man with white hands by Gauri Pant

They are living beings, each with his or her own space in a pictorial world reminiscent of Byzantine icons. In fact, this choice of form is not incidental, for not only does a religion based on nature-worship coexist with those of the book, but also it has assimilated personal devotion (bhakti) into it, so that we can see the artist transformed from being a person with day-to-day problems to being a bhakta or devotee and the one with the deity itself, four arms, elephant head and all.

I do not think that many artists have in their works been able to present this transformation of being a householder, a devotee and then divine in such detail as she has.

Her importance in our contemporary art lies in the fact that even in a world of faceless producers and consumers, she gives us face, calls for self-introspection and then for us to rise to the level of immortals. This is art that resists our reduction to becoming battery chickens or corporate products with due concern for ourselves as human beings, devotion to improving our consciousness and becoming immortal by achieving that knowledge.

Her real contribution to our contemporary art is not that she has visualised this path, a sort of ?Pilgrim?s Progress? or the Stations of the Cross; but that she has made it relevant to our modern way of thinking in multi-centred spaces with each individual confined in his or her iconic space and gaining self-confidence to enter into social relations with sincerity and devotion, and finally, being immortalised in the memory of others, as Gauri Pant already is. She is like GR Santosh and SH Raza, a part of the spiritual art that developed among the Progressive Artists Group in Kashmir, but one who remained figurative, where Raza and Santosh moved to the symbolic.

As the resistance to standardisation and marginalisation grows, Gauri?s icons will be sought out. Already her works are there in the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi and in the Glenbarra Museum of Indian contemporary art in Japan.

She has exhibited in countries as far a field as India, Germany and Holland and has works in the collections of Masanori Fukuka, Ebrahim Alkazi, Sumaina Anand and many other perceptive collectors.

As time goes on, her icons of how to survive the process of dehumanisation – a crisis-ridden system – has condemned the vast mass of people to when the same productive capacity could free our lives from drudgery. Gauri?s art tells us how to survive marginalisation and for that she will be remembered and revered.