Mystery of guru gobinD singH painting solVeD
The mystery has nearly been solved despite the continuation of a political controversy over the use of “Napoleonic” images in Congress-ruled Punjab government advertisements to mark Guru Gobind Singh’s “Parkash Utsav”. The Bhartiya Janata Party ruled Haryana government too had issued an advertisement with a similar image. The Shiromani Akali Dal has alleged that Napoleon Bonaparte’s pictures were morphed to create Guru Gobind Singh’s pictures and that the Punjab government had committed a sacrilege.
It has been discovered that Guru’s pictures in the government advertisements were based on an old painting by late Punjabi artist Gurbux Singh Theathi, who was inspired by a French painter Jacques-Louis David’s iconic creation, “Napoleon crossing the Alps” (circa 1801-05). The Amarinder Singh government has denied morphing the image. Government sources say that numerous wallpapers and posters “inspired” by Gurbux Singh’s work are easily available online, particularly on Sikh religious websites. The advertisement making teams had probably “copy-pasted these images without ascertaining their genesis”.Gurbux Singh’s painting shows Guru Gobind Singh astride a horse, with a baaz overhead. It finds a mention in an essay published in October this year by The Quietus, a British online music and pop culture magazine. In “Sikh Painting and Cultural Appropriation”, a Berlin-based writereditor Gurmeet Singh says: “David’s painting of Napoleon can look ridiculous to us—the lead-guitarist mid-solo— but that’s because it was painted as propaganda, not as a true likeness. When Gurbux Singh painted Guru Gobind Singh a century and a half later, he used David’s Napoleon as a model to convey a different set of ideas.”