June 21, 2003

A monograph on Ali Imam soon after his first death anniversary this May is a befitting tribute to a man who remained a figurehead of the art community in Pakistan for more than fifty years. The distinguished tall personality with electric white hair, smoking a pipe, was a constant within the art circles, particularly at the Indus gallery where he held court since 1971, and before that as principal at the Central Institute of Arts and Crafts, Karachi.

The 96-page monograph, produced with the help of the trustees of Fomma, was the result of the immense admiration and respect for Imam held by his close friends, particularly Jalaluddin Ahmed and Marjorie Husain, and many others like Imran Mir whose initiative made this publication a reality.

Marjorie Husain presents Imam the painter and thinker in an intense manner because she has studied his work closely and written all through the years about what Imam did. As she explains in the introduction, Imam was reluctant to give interviews; he only consented to be the subject of a monograph in his very last year. He planned it as a close collaboration between them, where they were to meet over a period of time and map out the format of his varied lifetimes; but sadly that was not to be as Imam fell seriously ill.

Acknowledgements are due to Mr. Lutfullah, for whom Imam had spoken his thoughts on tape, for making them accessible to Marjorie. Thus the ‘strong opinions Imam held in 1988 are documented as he spoke them, candid and analytical was his style’, writes Marjorie.

When Imam’s mother Tahira Begum left his father for three months to deliver their sixth child, Imam’s father took another wife, the sister of one of the servants. This was truly heartbreaking. From then on, Imam who was always very attached to his father, lived separately with his mother and siblings in North India in the Tehsil Tamah district.

‘Forbidden by their mother to meet the new wife or visit the new home, the children waited for their father’s visits’, writes Marjorie. ‘I loved him and missed him terribly,’ Imam told the author. ‘Because of these circumstances a little distortion came into our personalities, all of us became solitary people, private and reserved’, he disclosed.

Giving an account of 1937 of Imam’s headstrong personality at thirteen when he was ‘reprimanded by his mother for some misdeed’, writes Marjorie, ‘he ran away from home with eight annas in his pocket. Without a ticket he boarded a train and travelled 200 miles. He camped for three days subsisting in chanas.’ Imam was later convinced to come back to his mother by his father.

Many such accounts give the readers facets of Imam’s character that remained hidden in his lifetime, as Imam rarely gave went to personal feelings so openly.

He spoke fondly of his teacher Mr Thapakji, who taught him the ‘love of animals and nature. He gave us a certain base and pedestal to stand on and enabled us to progress.’

This and then his formative years, of which Marjorie narrates: ‘travelling with his father through forest areas and glimpsing wild animals and exotic plants’ inculcated in him the love for nature. This reflected in Imam’s fearless expression and strong opinions.

‘I am by nature a lover. I did not seek to be with people but somehow or other I was fated to be with people in their predicaments in a very intense manner.’

As a young boy involved in his school magazine, he had numerous friends and he recalled that he never went to their houses; that they always came to his; the ‘habit continued throughout my life.’

The author traces the influences of Marxism in Imam’s student days, which shows him as rebellious and outspoken. There is the description of the “Lahore days’, when Shakir Ali, Zubaida Agha, and Zeinul Abedin were laying the ‘foundations of modern art in Pakistan.’ There were others in the ‘Lahore Group’, such as Anwar Jalal Shemza, Hanif Ramay, Ahmed Parvez, Kutub Sheikh, Moyene Najmi, Marium Shah (Habib), Sheikh Safdar, Razia Feroze who, along with Imam, formed the Lahore Art Circle. Imam referred to these individuals as the ‘first generation of Pakistani Painters’.

Apart from the other details revealing Imam’s London years and his views on his own painting, there is a very interesting and relevant commentary that Marjorie has chosen to include. This pertains to Imam’s criticism of his own self and his forthright views on the development of art in Pakistan.

There is a jarring gap between how a man as learned and profound as Imam viewed himself and what we see around us today in the attitude of artists. ‘Unfortunately there is a tendency here for the artist to accept himself and propagate himself to a height where he does not belong’, commented Imam. He spoke about the third generation of artists in Pakistan as being in ‘a state of mental lethargy’, who are ‘repeating’ themselves because they have not emerged from ‘the process of formula painting’.

Very telling, indeed. There is much here to chew on, make us think, and think hard about the state of art as it is today.

In the monograph we see a glimpse of the artist who was ‘driven by an inner yardstick that was seldom satisfied’. In his own words, ‘I am a very knowledgeable person and I should be creating works of art of higher discipline, but somehow or other, the muses of creativity never touched me. Somehow or other I got lost in the muses of creativity of others, and in the process of collecting other people’s knowledge I became so overawed and influenced by them that my own process of creativity could not flower as it should have.’

There are other accounts of Imam’s self-criticism woven throughout the text that make the reader all the more appreciative of the outstanding personality of Imam, who ‘was the arbiter of art issues, (and) the final word on authenticity’.

Marjorie has managed to bring out the inner and hidden personality of Imam through a careful selection of recordings by Imam on tape, with the help of articles written by him over the years, and through her own interaction with him over the decades.

There remains yet to be explored a critical analysis of Imam’s paintings and writings. As the Ali Imam files are sorted out and opened to the public and researchers at the Contemporary Arts Resource Centre in Karachi this winter, it is hoped that Imam’s own writings and art reviews will also be made available.

Ali Imam will stay with us as long as there is among us a genuine desire to evolve an authentic art movement in Pakistan. The present publication is a just one such step forward.