Does it matter that Shahid Sajjad is no more with us? Perhaps it does, perhaps it doesn’t. Is the art of wood carving and making bronze sculptures and graphite drawings limited to spatial and temporal dimensions? It is not. 

I had the privilege of listening to Sajjad Sahib on a few occasions, including when I met him for a couple of hours to interview him for this magazine in 2011. That’s it. But I was familiar with his creative endeavours. Let’s begin with that.

Once you look at a Shahid Sajjad sculpture, let alone touch it, you instantly know that its maker is no ordinary individual. (I shall come to his drawings later). He’s more extraordinary than his views. And this I got to know when I met him in person, first at an art gallery, then when I had a chitchat with him at his home followed by a chance encounter on the sprawling lawns of Frere Hall and then at another art gallery.

Shahid Sajjad lived on his own terms. His life was dedicated to art and particularly sculpture, a medium which has few takers in this country

Let me take you back to a meeting at Frere Hall. It was some glitzy function. I ran into Shahid Sajjad, who was accompanied by his son, daughter-in-law and their kid. There may be more than one kid but I noticed only one, and I will tell you why.

I hurled a few questions at him: why didn’t the artist community in Pakistan feel the pain of cataclysmic happenings like the Fall of Dhaka, the Karachi bloodshed in the early ’90s, the treatment meted out to our minorities, etc? He responded in his typical Sajjadian manner, philosophising the rift between the inner self of an artist and the external world and how the country needed a psychological revolution. This led him to explain the importance of the ‘circle’ in art (read: life).

A labour of love

Just when he was about to go deep into the conversation, animated like anything, his grandchild got hold of his ankle and moved around it as if his leg was a fun ride. Sajjad bent over and caressed the child’s head affectionately. The importance of the circle had given way to filial bond. The child stopped for a moment and Sajjad Sahib resumed his spiel looking into my eyes as if I had understood every word he had thus far uttered.

The kid budged once more and this time tried to get hold of his back by jumping in the air. The artist turned around and held him in his arms, helping the boy reach his shoulders. Sajjad continued the lecture from where he had left off, in dribs and drabs, looking at me for one moment and then swivelling his neck to make sure that the child was okay. This happened till the artist’s son came and took the kid away. Not for a single instant did he make me or the child feel we didn’t have his attention.

Why? He knew what life was all about. Therefore he knew what art was all about. If you look at his sculptures closely you will notice that it is this element of human bonding, of being aware of the importance of connecting with the other, even on the level of disagreement that you tend to get closer to life. His wood carvings show staid characters, but never lifeless. They are engaged, always engaged in activity. If sculptures bare themselves to the viewer, there too is an act of engagement in them. The physical is just as important as the spiritual.

This is where his drawings assume all the more importance. Art critics and lovers admire Sajjad’s wood carvings and bronze reliefs so much that they often overlook his artworks done in other media such as graphite work — the beautiful, sensual nudes.

During Sajjad Sahib’s retrospective at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture it was thoughtful of the organisers that they put up his wax and graphite drawings. They’re a cerebra-visual delight. The artist’s ability to have his artworks physically connect with the viewer was on song. The tactility that he was able to impart to those pieces was remarkable. It was unreal and real at the same time — the binary of art and life getting sucked into breathtaking oneness.

When I interviewed him he profusely quoted Ghalib and the concept of transience in his poetry. Main bhi hun aik inayat ki nazar honay tak (I shall live until the gaze of kindness turns towards me). His journey to the Chittagong Hill Tracts was an attempt at experiencing nature with all its fleeting glory. He found material — wood — to give his journey a corporeal meaningfulness. He was like that. Restless and always living in the moment. In death too, he seems to be experimenting with form and content, of a different kind.

Sculptor Shahid Sajjad passed away on July 28 in Karachi. He was born in 1936 in Muzaffarnagar and spent a good deal of his time in Lahore.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, August 10th, 2014