June 22, 2002

A decade or so ago when Khushwant Singh published his epoch-rending novel Delhi, Bapsy Sidhwa in a tongue-in-cheek review had called him a ‘dirty old man’. Ten years on, he can safely be called the dirtiest old man on the subcontinent, his appetite for the profane anything but diminished. This is evident from a raving introduction he has written to a collection of Sadequain’s surely profane, if not truly erotic, sketches compiled by Aziz Kurtha and published in India and the UK simultaneously. One can tell from the superb translations done by Singh that he relished every moment of indulgence in what can rather shamelessly be flaunted as any man’s favourite pastime: dirty thinking.

We know that Sadequain had a brush for the erotica and a pen that celebrated the profane using the otherwise very respectable genre of rubai in Urdu. But then such were the acts that quite became the daredevil god of his own creations. We are told by Aziz Kurtha quoting Dr Akbar Naqvi that Sadequain “identified (the musings of) an artist’s soul with the (naughtiness inherent in the) images of Lord Shiva” of the Hindu theogony, especially his incarnation as Natraja performing the cosmic dance.

Given the artist’s magnetic pull that made beautiful women surround him, and his penchant for young men, this fascination for Natraja — the deity sports both the genders and is a supreme creator — is sufficiently explained. The drawings then created with a singular free flow of the pen and the rubayat thus composed, as if extempore, simply just gel in with the larger persona of Sadequain, the spontaneous crafter of image and word.

The collection under review contains 30 odd plates with pen and ballpoint drawings in black-and-white and Sadequain the poet’s musings in the form of rubayat handwritten by him on every plate. Aziz Kurtha tells us that Sadequain sent these drawings and verses in his letters to Professor Kadri in London from time to time during his stay in Paris in the early 1960s. The letters often accompanied Sadequain’s note saying he wished to publish these one day. But that was not to be in his lifetime. The drawings, simple in nature, may be a far cry from the real but rare erotica painted by the artist during his time in Paris and later in Lahore, but they surely depict his unmistakable signature style. Only those few of the latter paintings he sold or gave away as gifts to friends have survived in people’s personal collections, the rest having been destroyed by hooligans who attacked his studio in Lahore’s Bagh-i-Jinnah in the ‘70s. Rarely, if ever, his erotic paintings were accompanied by a rubai or a verse the likes of which are found in the collection under review. But then these were very special ‘spur of the moment’ drawings as is evident from the way they were drawn and innocuously dispatched as letters to a friend for safekeeping.

The collection seems to marvel at the beauty of the female privates showing an insatiable obsession, almost beyond redemption, with pubic growth. An allegory of sorts is thus explored through the highfalutin and receding ideals of Urdu poetry mockingly expunging the metaphysical with a feigned profundity. The result is both eloquent and sickening by turns and offers a spontaneous critique, though perhaps unintended, of the long-revered classical idiom. A Shiva-like defiance of, and grappling with, his own contradictory powers certainly seem to be at work.

The verdict: a case of repressed sexuality or a superficial celebration of the opposite sex, though guilty either way, is confidently left for the onlooker to struggle with and decide according to one’s own conscience. At places, the female figurative drawings as well as the accompanying verses are rather brash and ungainly, while the only male erotica in the collection does not suffer from any such parochialism. Consider the following quatrain, in Khushwant Singh’s words, on the female anatomy:

How moist and fresh it is, do not forget

As grand an adornment as one would expect

In this orifice of beauty, fragrance and colour

A silk-cotton flower that nature hath set

And while we are on the subject of pubic growth and parochialism, is it merely a coincidence that Aziz Kurtha should have chosen Khushwant Singh to translate, and to add to the glamour of Sadequain’s obsession?

Now this one is surely below the belt, and a strange reckoning either way, like so much else in the collection.