L‘Offrande Lyrique (Gitanjali)

"My thoughts turn, as I write, to the exquisite suite of lithographic illustrations that Burman produced for a special limited edition of L'Offrande Lyrique, Tagore's Gitanjali, in the limpid translation of the legendary French writer Andre Gide (1869-1951), who was the Gurudev's contemporary and fellow Nobel laureate. Published by Editions Gallimard in October 1993, this book marks a high point in Burman's trajectory, and one of his finest and most extraordinary achievements [...] My argument is based on the abundance of sources and inspiration that Burman distils and charges into the small compass of the lithographic sequence of L'Offrande Lyrique. The autobiography of his practice is powerfully present here. In the images that scintillate across this album, we see the impress of Gustave Dore, master printmaker and visionary. Here we see the heritage of Marc Chagall, his logic of figuration always testing the push-pull of heaven and earth, gravity and flight. Here, too, we see figures in states of exaltation, ecstasy and disquiet, which incarnate migratory ancestries [...] Among the most delicious pleasures of this album is a frame in which the artist inserts a self-portrait into the flow, offering his salutations to Tagore, who appears costumed as a baul - one arm raised in a gesture of bliss, the other holding an ektara - a representative of that composite Bhakti-Sufi movement which developed stunningly beautiful poems and songs in eastern India between the 15th and 20th centuries. The baul inheritance inspired the Gurudev both in the composition of his songs and his understanding of the poet as a wanderer between mystical and material realities" (R. Hoskote, In the Presence of Another Sky, The Confluential Art of Sakti Burman, Mumbai, 2017, pp. 82-83).