India, June 29 -- In his birth centenary year, a significant and previously undocumented, unexhibited conte drawing titled The Condemned (1957) from the Cyrus and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala family collection, now adds to Satish Gujral's oeuvre. Compositionally similar to the oil painting of the same name, which was also made in 1957, this work ranks among Gujral's finest condemnations of the effects of war and forced migration, with the kind of seething, tragic intensity that set Gujral apart from his peers. With a major exhibition of his works poised for later in the year, this work may be the newest inclusion in a positive reassessment of Gujral's position among independent India's modernists. Satish Gujral returned to India in 1955 in a blaze of glory after an apprenticeship for two years in Mexico under David Siqueiros. Training under the great Mexican muralists Diego Rivera and David Siqueiros against the backdrop of Mexico's response to the years of revolution, Gujral developed a temper for the nation as subject, as well as broad, free, open-handed strokes that he adapted to both his drawings as well as his paintings. As an apprentice to Siqueiros, the most politically radical of Los Tres Grandes (the three greats, Siqueiros, Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco), and greatly influenced by the murals of Orozco, Gujral's own inclination was to adopt themes of social realism. The decade of 1947-57 became for Gujral a foundational expression of his response to the violence that he witnessed during the chaos of Partition. In the midst of Partition violence, he had driven a truck bearing refugees from Jhelum to Indian Punjab, and witnessed the barbarity of a brutal conflict as it played out. Gujral's work has often been likened to his own condition, but to attribute the power of his early works to his hearing disability would be doing the artist a disservice. He painted the charming reflective portrait titled My Sister (1951) but also the agonised Partition paintings, of roiling rage, and the enactment of violence, all executed with a powerful monumentality. Writer and art critic John Berger reviewed his exhibition in London in The New Statesman. Berger wrote: "He is as single minded as Picasso. I am certain that his exhibition should provoke both humanly and artistically as many people as possible." The drawing mentioned at the beginning of this article, however, was made after his return to India and has its own interesting history. Cyrus Jhabvala, an eminent architect who also headed the School of Architecture in Delhi, was very active when the capital city was in the throes of intense building activity immediately after Independence. With his firm AAJ, Jhabvala not only designed public buildings like Kirori Mal College, Max Mueller Bhavan and Telecom Building, but also the sprawling Kurukshetra University, which was realised over 10 years. Jhabvala was also enthusiastic about commissioning art works for the buildings. One of the artists he chose to work with was the young Satish Gujral, who was growing a reputation for rugged originality. Gujral did not disappoint. He designed murals in relief in ceramic, painted wood, and with tiles. The actual forms drew from primitive shapes and toys, even as he imbued them with a particular grandeur. While Gujral would continue to enjoy the patronage of Jawaharlal Nehru, and made murals for important State buildings like Punjab Agricultural University, Gandhi Bhavan and the Secretariat, in Chandigarh, Jhabvala openly disagreed with Nehru on the design of Ashoka Hotel, and did not take on any government commissions during Nehru's lifetime. Jhabvala, who also acquired two small works from MF Husain, probably bought The Condemned in this phase of Gujral's career. An artist himself, Jhabvala was fascinated with the simultaneous histories that Delhi inhabits. Many of his drawings are exquisitely rendered panoramic views of the grandeur of historic monuments and the chaos of ordinary street life, as in his work, Fakhr-ul Masjid, Old Delhi. James Ivory, collaborator with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala on his films, commented that "Jhabvala's record is highly personal and subjective and at times, very precise - as precise as the 19th century photographs taken of the same are before and after the Indian Mutiny of 1857". Among all of his peers who witnessed Partition in Punjab and Bengal, Gujral's works are the most visceral. While he is often placed alongside the Bombay Progressives who also graduated from the JJ School in Mumbai, or the Delhi Shilpi Chakra artists who had migrated from West Punjab, Gujral probably is more akin in spirit to Somnath Hore and Chittaprosad in his reading of the catastrophic event. More muted than his oil paintings, his drawings on the subject, such as Days of Glory (1954) powerfully depict women in mourning. In The Condemned, the solitary figure, probably the victim of rape, her body taut with pain and mortification, fills the frame. In contrast to the flowing lines of the figure, Gujral added hard-edged abstract elements to the fringes of this work, thereby enhancing the sense of pervasive violence. In his centenary year, Gujral will be celebrated as much for the depth of his broad-based practice - as architect, sculptor, painter and muralist - as for his passionate depiction of the human condition....