Sarduy's friend and companion, French philosopher Francois Wahl, said 'India to Sarduy was a conjunction of the multiple and the zero'.

'Sarduy found similarities between India and Cuba. He was so much in love with India that at a point of time he wanted to live here,' said Catalina Queseda, a Latin American literature expert.

The exhibition, divided into five sections, shows the complex relations that Sarduy had with the east.

Gustavo Guerrero, a Venezuelan writer and editor of Sarduy's works, who has co-curated the show with Queseda and S.P. Ganguly of Jawaharlal Nehru University, said the writer-artist wanted to break the stereotypes that people from the West had about India.

His photographs and writings used humour to express the typical western mind set about 'how far the east was from the west''.

His paintings are surrealist -- mosaics of scribbles and etchings with Chinese ink and even coffee dust where Arabian and Chinese calligraphies and Sanskrit symbols crowd in profusion like a 'solid shape', almost like patterned cloth.

Sarduy, who was born in Camaguey, a village in Cuba in 1937, was preoccupied with the presence of Chinese and Africans in his homeland, but 'it was India that always haunted him'. He had first heard about the country from a group of Argentinian monks in his village, who had worked in India.

By chance, Sarduy first encountered Indian sculptures at a museum in Paris in the 1960s.

'In 1968, he finally decided to visit India after meeting former Mexican envoy to India Octavio Paz in Paris who told him to go and see India instead of reading about it,' Guerrero told IANS.

Sarduy's works for the exhibition have been sourced from private collectors, museums and the artist's personal archive, he said.