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| 01/07/1979 |
| Obituary for Dr W.G. Archer |
BUT ABSENCE ACHING
Published in ROOPA LEKHA, Vol. LI (1979-1980).
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| I arrived at 18, Provost Road and stood outside its cherry-red door for a few moments to catch my breath. It has not been a long walk from Chalk Farm station. The house was within a brisk two minutes march from the station, provided one knew which direction to take. This was the first time I was visiting the Archers in their home, my previous meetings with Bill Archer having been at his office in the Victoria and Albert Museum. After walking distractedly for a while I was able at last to locate their house in a pew-like row opposite a church. I felt slightly winded partly from the unexpected exercise but more out of nervousness. I had wanted very much to be on time. It was exactly four o’clock. I rang the bell and heard someone approach the door. It opened. |
| “You are late!” my host said. “We were expecting you yesterday.” |
| I blushed with consternation. “I am sure we had arranged for today.” |
| “Let me check, I remember writing it down in my diary. “He brought out a small pocket diary and glanced through its page. “Yes, here it is. I am sorry. I seem to have muddled up the days.” |
| “Well, do come in anyway,” his wife Tim Archer, who had joined us meanwhile, said encouragingly. “It’s not your fault. It’s just that Bill and I waited all afternoon yesterday for you but didn’t know where to contact you. He was working this afternoon but I am sur4e he won’t mind showing you the miniatures. You take him in there, Bill”, she said, gesturing towards the drawing room,” and I’ll make some tea. We can have it while we are looking at the pictures.” |
| At first sight, the Archers looked an irretrievably British couple; he in his mid-sixties, dressed casually in carpet slippers, corduroy trousers and a woolen pullover, and she in a brown tweed dress. They looked as if they could never have ventured beyond the beach at Brighton, leave alone survive sixteen years in Bihar. |
| I followed him into the drawing room. India lay strewn everywhere—on the walls, on the floor, between the window frames, on the mantel-piece, in book cases, everywhere except the ceiling, Miniatures vivid and graphic, delicate water-colours, squat stone figurines, brass toys, wooden statuettes, tribal instruments, all jostling together in an unexpected melee, each piece a tangible expression of the discriminating taste of its joint owners. Dominating them all, like some relentless tropical sn, hung a large fiery canvas by the modern painter Avinash Chandra, glowing with a radiance which taunted the somber skies outside. I had arrived at their house naively expecting to see only their collection of miniatures, little realizing that their interests might have been far wider than I could have conceived. In the face of such a congress of civilization, my public school years deserted me and I was left untutored and gauche, wondering to myself how I could disguise an almost iridescent ignorance. Like most educated sons of the soil (which one had been exhorted to love but never to touch), I as a Pakistani who had spent most of his adult life in the United Kingdom, had in some languorous way taken my origins rather for granted. Complacently smug that I knew myself in a modern context, I hardly felt the need to disturb my forebears. It seemed enough to have been an heir to their endeavours. The shock on entering the drawing room was therefore overdue and entirely therapeutic. If Bill or Tim Archer were at all aware of the effect their objects were having on me, they never betrayed it for over tea, as we examined painting after painting; they shared the joy of my discovery with the pleasure they derived at a different plane from owing and studying them. With each picture, Bill would add a word or two of information, brief but never condescending, which would illuminate the painting before me. “That is Dipak Raga. It’s from a Basohli Ragamala series. You can tell from the small beetle-wing pieces,” and stimulate my attention with another different breath-taking picture. |
| It was odious to compare these paintings with the shabby portrait of the Emperor Akbar which I had seen in a shop near the British Museum a few weeks earlier and bought impetuously, my first proud acquisition. It became all too clear that I would never be able to view its minute detail with the same awe now that I knew over-concentration was a poor substitute for inspiration, nor would I admire its gold-leaf decoration again, rejecting it as a tawdry maquillage,. It was quite definitely not the kind of picture one would be proud to have in one’s collection. Bill had said upon seeing it, with the softest chamois stroke of tact, and this afternoon I knew why he was right. There were miniatures and miniatures, and I had begun by collecting the wrong sort. To be introduced to miniatures in this way in the intimacy of the Archer home over tea was one thing, learning about them particularly after I had returned to my home in Lahore quite another. The Lahore Museum I knew had one of the finest collection of miniature paintings which few persons had examined in their entirety since Gupta’s catalogue in 1922, I though it worth a try. During a lull in my professional career I applied to Museum authorities and was granted permission to catalogue the paintings. From a corner of the unoccupied Curator’s room in the Museum, overhung with a discarded Coronation portrait of King-Emperor George V in whose Imperial Service Bill Archer had first gone to India, I wrote to my distant tutor in Provost Road. |
| My immediate concern was to obtain information regarding the whereabouts of a batch of miniatures from the collection which had been sent for display at the famous Art of India, Pakistan and Ceylon exhibition held in 1947. They had not been returned to the Museum. As they had been used as examples for Bill’s pioneering study on Indian Painting in the Punjab Hills (London, 1952), he was the first and most obvious source to contact. That letter proved to be a sluice through which correspondence flowed uninterruptedly throughout the next nine years, before we were to meet again in person. |
| Letters written from a distance and over a long period of physical absence, like a conversation over the telephone with a person one has not yet seen, can result in an image one’s mind which may not be supported by reality. Returning to London in 1974, I felt exactly such a qualm as I walked up the stairs to the door of 18 provosts Road. Would the Archers be as I imagined them to be from their letters? Would they have altered? Had I changed? The ring of the door-bell, the door itself, the softfelted foot-fall as it approached the door was as I remembered them. The door opened and I was swept into armfuls of affection as if I had never been away. |
| We spent the week-ends checking my catalogue draft and the evenings before and after supper talking by the fireside, discussing any and every topic which had been provoking their interests recently. It might be the acquisition of another mouth-watering Basohli (this time a famous picture from the Ajit Ghose collection of the Devi riding in state) or the identity of a Hill raja or a newly discovered work by one of the artists about whom not enough was known or even on one singular occasion the name of an obscure demon referred to briefly in the Aranya Kanda of the Ramayana epic. It should have been one of two possibilities, either Viradha’ of formidable aspect, hideous, deformed, his eyes sunk deep in his forehead’ or Kabandha ‘headless, his mouth in his belly, covered in bristling hairs’. There was little to choose between them. Bill, though, wanted to be sure. The Ramayana text was opened and consulted. The demon was mutually decided upon as Kabandha. |
| “Isn’t it strange, “Bill said unexpectedly, “that we should be sitting here together, you a professing Muslim and I a Christian, discussing the identity of a demon mentioned in the Ramayana…” and here, the paused for a moment before continuing with obvious emphasis, “without the slightest diminution in our own respective beliefs?” |
| This aspect had not occurred to me, quite frankly. Familiarity with the Hindu religious texts had been academic necessity during my study of miniature paintings and though I respected the scriptures of other religions, it was with the same inert passivity with which I tended to honour my own. |
| Bill Archer’s profound response made me aware how deep-rooted a commitment to humanity there was in him, what a source of continuous nourishment to his life. His interest in others, in individuals, their culture, and their religion was not something cold and clinical. It formed a radial pattern which reached out in every direction touching diverse extremities of Indian culture. Without being a Vaishnavite he led his reader into Brindaban recounting ‘The Loves of Krishna’; far from being a Sikh, he retraced, the growth of Sikh supremacy in the Punjab and its effect on ‘Paintings for the Sikhs’; without being a hills-man, yet as sure-footed as any Pahari gaddi, he traversed the length and breadth and cultural heights of the Hill states to survey ‘Indian Paintings from the Punjab Hills’; and in the evening of his career, sitting far from the Santal Perganas he loved, he interpreted the delicate nuances of that primordial community to whom he administered justice and from whom he learned law as a Deputy Commissioner before he left India. |
| Was this mellow humanism the result of these Indian years? I wonder. He maintained once that the years he spent as a District Magistrate had trained him as an art –historian, in that he learned how to assay the weight of conflicting evidence placed before him, to examine it critically and to arrive at a detached and conclusive judgment. |
| No published work of his can evoke in the same representative way his life in India or his commitment to the promotion o its myriad culture while living outside it as his study of the tribal society, customs and folk-lore of the Santals which he published in 1974 under the title ‘The Hill of Flutes’. Few Indians are likely to read it; perhaps even fewer Santals can. It was not the usual Archer-type of book. It is a significant work though, for in it, framed in one of the Santal poems, is a window which opens directly into his heart. |
| In life what is happiness? |
| In life what is joy? |
| To be in love with others |
| For when we die, we go with no one |
| Bill Archer who spent his life ‘in love with others’ has gone alone, leaving behind a beloved companion and countless deeply-affected friends. Using one of his own poems, let me open a door, as he had done for me at 18 Provost Road, into my own heart as it mourns for his absence aching, ‘aching for previous presence’. |
Published in ROOPA LEKHA, Vol. LI (1979-1980). |
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| 01 July 1979 |
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