Walk into Punjabi homes in Southall, Surrey, Yuba City or Ludhiana and you will find, somewhere near the entrance or above a doorway, the same face. An elderly man in a saffron or ochre robe, one hand raised in blessing, eyes half-lowered, an expression of settled calm. Most people who grew up with that image never thought to ask who painted it. The answer is a soldier's draughtsman from Gurdaspur district who spent the second half of his life in a mud-walled house in the Himalayan foothills, and who did more than any other single person to give the modern Punjabi imagination its visual vocabulary.
Sri Hargobindpur
Sobha Singh was born on 29 November 1901 at Sri Hargobindpur, a small town on the Beas in Gurdaspur district, in a family of modest means. His mother died when he was young. His father, a soldier, was away for long stretches.
Formal art training in colonial Punjab was thin. What existed was technical, and the boy went to the Industrial School at Amritsar, where he studied drawing and craft rather than fine art in any academy sense. In 1917 he joined the British Indian Army as a draughtsman, and from 1919 he served in Iraq, drawing plans and technical illustrations in Baghdad and Basra for several years. It was an unlikely apprenticeship, and it left a mark: his later work is disciplined about anatomy, drapery and the structure of a face in a way that self-taught devotional painting of the period often was not.
He left the army in the early 1920s and set up as a working artist, first in Amritsar and Lahore, then in Delhi, taking portrait commissions, doing illustration, and painting the mythological and historical subjects that a growing Punjabi print market wanted.
The Move to Andretta
In 1949, after Partition had emptied Lahore of the world he had worked in, Sobha Singh moved to Andretta, a village in the Kangra valley below the Dhauladhar range in what is now Himachal Pradesh. He stayed for the rest of his life.
Andretta at that time was an unusual place. The Irish theatre teacher Norah Richards had settled there and drawn a small colony of artists and writers around her, among them the painter B. C. Sanyal and the potter Gurcharan Singh. Sobha Singh built a studio in the local style, mud and slate, and worked in the mountain light with the Kangra hills in front of him. Visitors described a courteous, unhurried man who painted every day and talked about art in terms of devotion rather than technique.
The Gurus
His most consequential work was his portraiture of the Sikh Gurus, above all Guru Nanak. No contemporary likeness of any of the Gurus exists; the tradition is explicitly wary of image-worship, and what earlier art there was came mostly from the Pahari and Sikh court miniature schools, small in scale and stylised in convention.
Sobha Singh worked instead in oils, at scale, in a naturalistic idiom that owed something to European portrait painting and something to the devotional print. He painted Guru Nanak repeatedly over decades, and the version that entered universal circulation, the serene half-length figure with the raised hand, became for millions of people the definitive image. He painted Guru Gobind Singh, mounted and armed, with the same conviction, and produced portraits of Bhagat Singh and other figures of Punjabi memory.
It should be said plainly that this was not without controversy, and remains a live discussion among Sikhs. Some hold that giving the Gurus fixed faces cuts against the tradition's insistence that the Guru is the word and not a body. Others regard the paintings as a legitimate act of devotion that gave a scattered community, particularly the emigrating community, something to carry. Sobha Singh described his own work as an act of worship and said he painted after meditation.
Whatever the theological verdict, the historical fact is unambiguous. Cheap lithographs of his Gurus travelled with Punjabis to East Africa, Britain, Canada and beyond, and the images arrived in the diaspora before the gurdwaras did.
Sohni Mahiwal
His other great subject was love, and specifically the Punjabi romances. His painting of Sohni Mahiwal, the drowning girl and her lover on the Chenab, is probably the most reproduced secular image in Punjabi visual culture. He painted Heer and Ranjha too, and a series of studies of hill and Punjabi women, including the widely loved Gaddan, a portrait of a Gaddi shepherd woman of the Kangra hills.
What distinguishes these from the mass of folk-romance illustration is restraint. Sobha Singh's lovers are painted as people, not as decorative motifs: there is grief in the Sohni, and the composition gives the river real weight. He understood that the tragedy in these stories is what makes them last.
Recognition and Last Years
He was awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India in 1983, and had by then received honours from Punjab institutions and Sikh bodies. Universities in the region hold collections of his work, and his paintings were installed in public buildings across Punjab.
Sobha Singh died on 22 August 1986. His studio at Andretta was preserved by his family as an art gallery and museum, and it remains open to visitors, a small building in a village of a few hundred people, holding originals whose copies hang on several continents.
The Wall
There is a particular kind of fame that belongs to artists whose work becomes so common that it stops looking like art. Sobha Singh has it. The image above the door in a Punjabi living room is not usually thought of as a painting by someone; it is simply what Guru Nanak looks like.
That is a strange achievement, and a considerable one. A boy who learned to draw so he could produce technical plans for an army ended up supplying the pictures by which a whole people imagines its own founders and its own great love stories. Very few painters anywhere have been read that widely, and almost none of them so anonymously.