September 28, 2002

Many decades ago, in England, Gallsworthy wrote a novel which he titled The Forsyte Saga. Now the exciting account of a saga has been written and published in Pakistan which is not fiction but fact, and which arouses both thought and emotion. The book is titled Unveiling the Visible — Lives and Works of Women Artists of Pakistan, and the author is Salima Hashmi.

Salima Hashmi is of course an artist herself, an art critic, art educationist, and life-long promoter of the fine arts — all of the highest order. But her book is above all the work of a person with a profound insight into the human condition, and a profound empathy with it. Reading the book is a revelation, as the book’s title itself suggests.

Artists, creative persons — in whatever medium they express themselves, whether literature or music or painting or the craft — are not computerized automatons. They are beings of flesh and blood who have gone through the process of being born, and of then being influenced by father and mother and brothers and sisters, and by the society in which they live. They have then come to acquire a formal education (or been denied it). Thus are shaped the feelings and thoughts of all ordinary human beings, and equally those of the artist.

But the artist is set apart from the ordinary run of us human beings by virtue — and virtue is the mot bon — of her and his insights into nature and the human condition. The evocative word for this insight, in Urdu, is deedaar, and hence Faiz’s poetic expression:

Ab waqt hai deedaar ka

Dam hai ke nahin hai”

(The time for Insight is now/Have you the courage?)

In looking at the saga of Salima Hashmi’s own life and work, the two words which arise in the mind are insight and courage. The creation of a work of art demands the ability of insights into the living world, and then the ability to articulate those insights. That is precisely the value of art to society, so that the recipient of the work of art is inspired to ‘see’ all of life’s manifestations in the world of nature, and not just to look at life with the physical eye open, but with the eye of the mind and heart shut fast.

Art inspires the opening of the eye of the mind and heart. Hashmi possesses the gift of a profound understanding of art, and a profound understanding of the human being who creates it. I can think of no one who could have been better equipped to write this saga.

And a saga it is. It took her a decade to research, and a lifetime dedicated to the fine arts before that. With characteristic modesty, she writes thus in her brief Author’s Note:

“This book... by no means claims to cover the lives and works of all Pakistani women artists, nor is it exhaustive in scope or detail. There are many notable artists whom one would have liked to include, but for a number of practical and incidental reasons, they had to be left out. As such, this may be considered a work-in-progress. It is an attempt for women’s voices to be heard, and their lives and works to be shared with those who have yet to make the journey.”

There you have the kernel of Hashmi’s deepest concerns — the journey of life, and the ways to prepare oneself for it.

Some readers of this remarkable book might say that as an art critic, Hashmi has not been critical enough. That, of course, implies that such a reader would have liked to see the ‘running down’ of this or that artist’s work of art.

Certainly, in the western tradition of art criticism, the critic makes his or her own value judgments, and then audaciously proceeds to impose them on the public: “I judge this work as good. Therefore it is good.” And the viewing public follow like tame lambs. If the critic, oracle-like, pronounces a work of art as ‘good’, they rush to buy it. If he pronounces it bad, that artist is doomed to penury.

In our eastern tradition, happily, art criticism does not divorce the creation of art from the imperatives of the daily life of the artist. And it is in this tradition that Salima Hashmi lives and writes. In one particular case, she has this insightful comment:

“The dynamic and explosively uninhibited statements of the sixties have evolved into quieter and sadder works. The rebel seems to have been tamed in Siddiqa’s work, raising myriad questions about life swamping art, especially when it comes to women.”

In Hashmi’s writing, there are no personal value judgments. Some good artists fail to reach their artistic goals, others achieve them. In each case, their subjective conditions determine the result — and specially in the case of women.

The author’s critical understanding of the workings of the artist’s mind asserts itself. Thus this brief quote illuminating the profundity of her artistic insight:

“That ability to sublimate emotional and intellectual experience to extract essences and deny particularities remained with Siddiqa’s painting.”

It can fairly be said that in the writing of this book, Salima Hashmi emerges as the faithful inheritor of a specially ‘human’ gift of her great humanist father, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, who never spoke a harsh word about any person, nor made any personal judgments, in conversation or in his writings.

One last comment on a particular shortcoming in this book. There is one significant omission: an account of Salima Hashmi’s own work as an artist. There is no chapter on herself and her own work. This is yet another testimony to her characteristic modesty. But this remarkable book itself is the lasting testimony to her own life and work as an artist, and as one who understands art, and specially those who bear the birth-pains in the labour to create .