September 14, 2002

Entering the dimly lit, cool interior of Shahid Sajjad’s home in Karachi, one is greeted by life-size wooden figures — his extended family, as it were. From the loosely cobbled wooden floor to the very basic yet stunning pieces of furniture crafted by him, Sajjad’s home is simply original — much like the man himself.

“Because of the way we are conditioned, we can’t conceive of anything without measurements,” says Sajjad. “But fortunately, that no longer has any meaning for me.” Still if acclaim had not come his way it would surely have led to some dissatisfaction. He does not deny this but adds, “If I wanted, I could have set up a workshop, hired a few workers and could have been churning out pieces that I am always being asked to. But I chose not to”.

Many of the things Shahid Sajjad says would seem affectations coming from another person, but his laid-back lifestyle is proof of his sincerity. There is no hurry, no sense of urgency. “Life must be allowed to find its own rhythm,” he says. The last few months have been spent nurturing two unfinished figures from Sajjad’s early days in East Pakistan. He is now completing them as graduation presents to his two sons.

“For me, the act of sculpting led to the opening up of life at a different level,” explains the self-taught sculptor. He struggled first with wood carving and later bronze casting without the benefit of any formal art education or even an apprenticeship. “The fact that I was not associated with any institution freed me from the circle of ideas within which most of us are raised. Parents are more concerned with maintaining the security of those ideas rather than with their children. I was, however, removed from any such mechanical stream of life. And so I had that little space in which to explore my world. I think I was a little lucky but I can’t say whether this was good or bad.”

Shahid Sajjad gave up a lucrative career in advertising to ride a motorcycle and to tour the world. On his return, he held his first exhibition. “The fact that I was able to give up such a comfortable living is evidence of how deeply I was suffering,” he says. Later, he withdrew to the hill tracts of Rangamati in the then East Pakistan. This experience left a profound impact on his work. As the sculptor in him grew, the wanderlust began to retreat. Marriage followed, and then came children. “I was responding to the real things in life.

“When I got married and brought my wife to this house, there was not even a chair here,” he recalls. “But the years just rolled by. I realized with a jolt that my sons had passed their matric. You know parents speak of all the difficulties in raising children, but I can’t recall any of that.”

“Shahid thoroughly enjoyed the children,” agrees his wife, Salmana. “He would take our elder son to school in the morning and then sit outside the class the entire day. Our son became famous as the boy whose father waits for him outside.” Sajjad laughingly refers to himself as the ‘housewife’ in their marriage.

Someone who works with his hands, he is also very much the handyman around the house. He believes in understanding how even the mundane household objects work and not taking them for granted. “We have had a wonderful life, nothing is left to tomorrow,” says Sajjad. “I abandoned my job in 1970 and haven’t looked back since. And it has all just happened. I can’t claim I did it. It was not an act of will. There was just that space for it to happen.”

The concern with space and freedom at the personal level seems to be a recurring theme in Sajjad’s work. In 1994, he carved a series of figures based on the native men and women of the Rangamati hill tracts and exhibited them in a show called My Primitives. “We claim to be civilized yet we indulge in brutality; we are so insensitive, so alienated from our surroundings,” says Sajjad. “And these so-called primitives are so much more in harmony with their own needs and environment.”

In 1996, he participated in an international sculpture event in Australia in which sculptors from six or seven countries were brought together to work in a forest outside Melbourne. The condition was that they had to restrict themselves to whatever material was available in that forest. With the help of a chainsaw, chisel and brazing torch, Sajjad managed to put up vertical figures of three holding up a fourth. The state of chaos of the ‘civilized’ mind was once again reflected here.

Later, Sajjad spent two years working in Mansehra, where a friend of his owns a lumber factory. He produced four sculptures there and brought these to Karachi, where they ran into trouble. The friend who had agreed to store the pieces for Sajjad was threatened with dire consequences unless the offesive ‘un-Islamic’ figures were removed. Hastily evicted from that place, today the hapless sculptures lie somewhere else, unfinished and sometimes, with drying laundry draped over them.

Sajjad is uncertain about the future of these pieces, which were planned for an exhibition. But he shows me the maquette of one of the works and explains his idea. “The blocks stacked up behind the figure represent the perfect mathematical order on which our lives are based. But the head is open like the pages of a book. This reflects the chaos and alienation in our lives and thought. So we are caught between order and disorder.

“This was an idea that was touched upon in Australia but I did not explore it fully then,” he says. “So I picked up the thread and reconnected it here. It is interesting how the mountain stream becomes a river. These connections are rebuilt after you set yourself certain challenges and that is how I see the true creative process.”

He does not believe in taking an intellectual approach towards his work, which, he says is based on what we already know; on what is the experience of the past. “You must be ready to receive. Only when I don’t know can new knowledge come in. That is what I call living my life. And once a particular piece has played that role in my life, then it is up there to be shared by anyone.”

Despite his success in bronze casting, Sajjad admits to wood carving being his first love. “It is very interesting that in the subcontinent, negation is considered creation. It is not so in the west. And the act of wood carving is negation. In the west, even the most beautiful marble sculptures were produced from maquettes, which were mechanically enlarged. That is not the real carving experience. But you can find stone carvings in India or China, which were done directly from the material”. He is not interested in the quality of the wood. “Again, that becomes a value-added feature. The role of the material is that it can be chiselled and that it has certain limits. And only when you respect the limitation does it reveal its qualities.

“I don’t even look at myself as a sculptor,” says Sajjad when asked if he feels the need to pass on his skill. “An ustad is someone who has really mastered something. And I have neither had the opportunity nor the need to do that. Whatever I know or don’t know only fulfils my need. That much anybody can share with me. But everyone who is learning wants to go to an authority. And that has no meaning for me. For me, there is no end. I am not interested in expertise. What is important, is that as long as I live, I should be able to indulge in this activity, which gives me energy. That is my relationship with my work.

“The energy that goes into making a sculpture oozes out of it and can be perceived by the initiated,” explains Sajjad. “Of course, if you are uninitiated, it will do nothing for you. A work of art per se cannot move everyone.” He wryly acknowledges that the buyers may pick up his work for their own reasons, not his. “I can’t hope to change that,” he says.

“I wanted to do many things that have not come to pass: like setting up an art school with a difference, or at least a forum where matters could be discussed from different perspectives. But that has not happened. You can’t shove everyone into the same tunnel and then hope to bring about change.”