January 28, 2006

There is something eerily familiar about Ahmed Ali Manganhar’s latest work, displayed at the NCA’s Zahoorul Akhlaque Gallery in Lahore. The familiar part harks back to the Company-art, while the eerie bit has to do with a fresh interpretation of that celebrated genre, first appended to this soil, then hailed as new knowledge and interpreted by the odd local art historian as the harbinger of modern European painting in the subcontinent. In retrospect, critics also argued for the Company painting being the father of modern indigenous expression.

In the show titled Primary Lessons, Ahmed Ali’s is an attempt to revisit the Company art and begin the process of reinterpreting it from a native’s perspective — yet, perhaps, the intellectual process is not to be explained away with such simplification. In the artist’s doing so, while there is ample acknowledgement of the past, it’s the scathing twist as to how the native eye and intellect should be trained to perceive it that becomes the mainstay of this work.

The show comprises three broader executions through which the theme is explored: triptychs, with acrylics on slate, and two stand-alone series with oils on canvas as medium. The slate (triptychs) can well be taken as the first tool in primary lessons and the images thereon as the reinterpreted lesson now being taught by the artist, in which he donates equal space to the colonial images as well the native’s belated reinterpretation of these; the third of the triptych, often the slate in the middle, carries the potent symbol of reinterpretation.

This is how it works: In the triptych titled Iconography, the first slate shows a turbaned native, the middle one the outline of a golden, fancy picture frame, symbolically superimposed on a blood-red background, and the final slate shows the humbled, tamed native.

Another triptych titled Begum Sahiba begins with the fabled but fast-fading round arches of a haveli where the female nobility was relegated to the confines of a zenana behind the veil; the middle one shows the newly empowered begum of the emerging new order under the empire when the veil was cast aside; the final slate then interprets the change in the most cruel manner by likening it to the elementary drawing of a plant, as taught by the Company painting.

The final image of this particular triptych takes one back to Iqbal’s dialogue on the predicament of the colonized native: Tu shaakh se kyun phoota, mein shaakh se kyun toota/ Ik jazba-i-paedaai, ik lazzat-i-yaktaai (Why should you sprout, why I be shed by the branch? The zeal to be born, the pleasure to be one of a kind). Ahmed Ali’s is a similar quest in this work: to do the long overdue reinterpretation by having learnt the craft and now being entitled to the pleasure of interpreting the colonial interpreter, in a role reversal — to be ‘one of a kind’ amidst the many who practise the learnt art without questioning it.

Other interesting triptychs are titled Kipling’s Theatre and After Kipling. While the former present the colonial master’s view of the colonized, with all the glamour and glory which depended on the natives’ unashamed use as essential props, the latter show some nostalgia for the erstwhile colonial era, with an aptly left-behind ‘his master’s voice’ gramophone, playing to an empty corridor that once housed the colonial theatre. The submissive acrylic hues of whites on black and grey, with the rusts defining the contours, seal the mood.

In the oil on canvas series, five square canvases titled Piece of Land depict odd pieces of land, as if macrocosmed, by plucking them out of their natural surroundings — the remaining landmass. The idiom of land, as a fiefdom, as a possession in the indigenous feudal culture or as that allotted to the new nobility enriched by the colonial masters, emerges as the pivot from which all power flows. It can be further reinterpreted by using the cliche of ‘divide and rule’, where the land is the basic metaphor, whose chunks have been misappropriated for proving absolute power over those not in possession of any land.

Using the layered technique of the Company painting, the series is not particularly embellished to bring out the painting’s finesse. On the contrary, it is left deliberately as a drawing, painted upon but not quite done, to marvel at the crude division of the intellect and of the soil whose rightful owner is someone else: the native. The interplay of the independence of the chosen idiom and its execution in the Company style are indeed intriguing.

The stand-alone, remaining larger canvases, each one titled separately, explore other related themes, such as Concubines, Soldier, Boats, Memorandum and His Master’s Voice — the titles symbolizing the very manifestations of a colonized people. Of these, particularly haunting are Boats and Delhi Gate — After the Raj. The first shows a boat anchored in rusty, impoverished waters of some desert land (Deebul, Sindh?) as the symbol of sea invasion by a foreign, colonial power. The second depicts the symbol of King George’s mighty new capital (New Delhi), the India Gate-like structure, shrouded in a fading mist of whites, with the blue sky as the backdrop, with mixing hues of painted-over rusts, a soft, merging, green brush with the dark blue, a shine here, outdone by an overdose of flowing turpentine there... end of the empire, shall we say? What endless, moving drama, depicting the receding past.

Ahmed Ali’s new work is nothing like his old work, though it may be the logical culmination of his journey on which he learnt the ropes of the western painting technique. That this journey has also readied him for the reinterpretation of the ‘one of a kind’ variety is no small accomplishment. He should be watched out for by those who prefer an indigenous idiom over a barrowed one.