Whenever people mention poets, they never imagine someone wearing a stethoscope and a white coat.
Yet, Gieve Patel, a great poet, playwright, and artist, who was a medical professional, was indeed an exception. He started his journey as a poet and contributed to saving the world by joining the ‘Green Movement’, a campaign that aimed to safeguard the environment.
Gieve Patel documents his path to various forms of art, such as painting, poetry, and playwriting. In today’s post, we are taking you to visit Gieve Patel Biography, a renowned poet in Indian literature who has succeeded in shedding light on society.
Gieve Patel Biography
To start with, Gieve Patel was an Indian playwright, painter, poet, and physician. He majored in medicine, and as a practicing general physician for over four decades, he became keen to interpret human suffering, ethics, and everyday living experiences. It was then that his hobby interests shifted toward art forms, which led him to poetry and paintings. He did not have a literary background like other poets and was browsing through the pages of literature and medicine.
Gieve Patel Early Life and Education
Gieve Patel, born in a small, prosperous Parsi community of Mumbai, was a celebrated poet, painter, playwright, and physician. He was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) on 18 August 1940 and lived his entire life in India. He was the son of a dentist. It seems it was a heritage in his family that forced him to study medicine and practice as a general physician. He went to St. Xavier’s High School and Grant Medical College in Mumbai. After he became a doctor, he worked initially in a government health job in his native town, Nargol, in the southern Gujarat region. Thereafter, he remained a general practitioner in Mumbai till his retirement in 2005.
Gieve Patel, without making his personal life public despite the social challenges and realities, did not make his personal life public. Gieve Patel, being a public figure himself, was one to keep his personal life to himself. People eager to know about Gieve Patel’s wife will be disappointed because he never shared any details about her publicly.
If you are looking for Gieve Patel’s age, he was 83 years old when he died on 3 November 2023 of cancer. His literary and artistic heritage walks miles beyond words and colors, highlighting human suffering and examining how social norms affect life and nature.
Because even in death, his words linger, remaining in classrooms, in textbooks, and in readers’ hearts across generations.
Gieve Patel Famous Poems
Nissim Ezekiel published Patel’s first collection of poems, Poems, in 1966. Clearing House released his second collection, How Do You Withstand, Body, in 1976, and Patel brought out his third and final collection, Mirrored Mirroring, in 1991. A key theme in many of Patel’s poems is his wealthy Zamindar family’s relationship with the tribal Warlis who toiled on their land.
If you have ever looked up “Gieve Patel’s famous poems,” you may have come across some of the following titles, such as On Killing a Tree, From Bombay Central, and Licence. His poems are brutal, raw, and yet incredibly lyrical. Even though he never romanticized suffering or nature, he revealed the unpalatable truths hidden at their bottoms.
Besides this, Gieve Patel’s three plays, i.e., Princes, Savaska, and Mister Behram, were first staged in Bombay in 1970, 1982, and 1987, respectively, and came out in print in 2008.
Gieve Patel Paintings and Sculpture
Apart from poetry, Gieve Patel was interested in painting as well as sculpting. Firstly, he drew public attention after painting the Politician series of paintings during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Afterward, his best-known works include his Railway Platform series. Concepts for these were drawn from real life, from railway stations, and from observing the crowd at the platforms. During the later period, he created some of his most important works, Two Men near a Handcart, Vegetable Seller, Bus Stop, and The Letter Home.
Patel showed his sculptures in 2010 based on two themes: the legend of Ekalavya in the Mahabharata and the Greek myth of Daphne, a beautiful maiden who turned into a tree to escape the advances of Apollo. Patel’s sculptures show Daphne’s body half-transformed.
He certainly gained the stature of being a painter, having exhibited his paintings at numerous locations. His work, much like poetry, challenged the human body and city space against socio-political realities. At times, his work creates an unsettlingly surreal atmosphere, urging the viewer to believe that art cannot be savored but must be confronted as a provocation.
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