Badrivishal Pitti was born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth in 1928 in a wealthy Marwari family that had settled in Hyderabad nearly two centuries ago and had won the trust and confidence of the Nizam. His great grandfather Seth Motilal was given the title of Raja Bahadur, his grandfather Rai Bahadur Seth Bansilal was knighted by the British and his father Raja Pannalal Pitti was an honorary financial advisor to the Nizam and had played a significant role in his surrender after the famous Hyderabad Police Action.
However, Badrivishal came into contact with firebrand socialist thinker and leader Ram Manohar Lohia and became a life-long socialist. Despite his family’s close relationship with the Nizam, he took part in the first conference of the Hyderabad State Congress and spoke in favour of a democratic dispensation in the State. In 1951, he participated in an agitation for lowering the prices of food grains and got arrested. He played an important role in the founding of the Socialist Party in 1955 and went to jail once again in 1960 due to his participation in Lohia’s civil disobedience movement.
Badrivishal was also elected to the Andhra Pradesh legislature as a Sanyukt Socialist Party candidate and was a staunch supporter of the demand for a separate Telangana. Badrivishal Pitti passed away in 2003.
Had he been only this, well-known Hindi writer, journalist and art critic Prayag Shukla would not have edited a book to pay tribute to his memory and the who’s who of the cultural world would not have written about him. The significance of being Badrivishal Pitti can be gauged from the fact that the book contains affectionate, warm and grateful reminiscences written by such eminent Hindi writers such as the Jnanpith award winner Kunwar Narain, Krishna Baldev Vaid, Ashok Vajpeyi, Ajit Kumar and Ramesh Chandra Shah, writer-painter Ram Kumar, painters M. F. Husain, Laxma Goud, Akhilesh and Shamshad, dancer Swapna Sundari, vocalist Jasraj and fellow socialist Gopeshwar Singh among others.
Besides being a socialist, Badrivishal was also a great connoisseur, patron and promoter of art, literature and music. It was he who recognised the genius of Maqbool Fida Husain at a time when he was struggling as a young artist and opened the gates of his heart and house to him.
In his autobiographical account Husain Ki Kahani, Apni Zubani (Husain’s Story in His Own Words) where he refers to himself as “a lad”, Husain recalls that one evening in the early 1960s, he took Ram Manohar Lohia, whom he had met through Pitti, to Karim’s Hotel in the Old Delhi’s Jama Masjid area as Lohia was very fond of Mughlai food and sheermaal.
While discussing modern art, Lohia slapped Husain on his back saying, “Why don’t you step out of these art galleries of the cities and paint Ramayana which is the millennia-old story of this country?” And thus began Husain’s magnum opus, the Ramayana series of paintings, that was created in the guest house of Badrivishal’s mansion.
As Prayag Shukla notes, this proved to be a turning point in the creative evolution of Husain as a painter and ‘folk’ images started making their quiet appearance in his work.
In 1949, the 21-year-old Badrivishal launched Kalpana , a literary magazine in Hindi, that continued to be published till 1978. Its masthead was designed by Husain and most of its covers carried his sketches. Within a few years, it acquired the reputation of being one of the top literary journals.
Although a socialist by conviction, Badrivishal never allowed his politics to have any bearing on the magazine and it published a host of writers having different political views. The very fact that a poem or a short story was published in Kalpana was a guarantee of its quality.
As Ashok Vajpeyi comments, many a writer would not have been able to emerge as writers had Kalpana not provided them with a launch pad. The same can be said about many well-known painters, musicians and dancers who were encouraged and supported by Badrivishal when they were virtually unknown.
