Chughtai watercolour is a joy to behold even if it is just in a slideshow, such is its charm. This opportunity, with the added benefit to view the artist’s rarely seen works located in various museums in India, was among the highlights of Dr Marcella Nesom Sirhandi’s keynote address ‘Examining Chughtai: Meaning, Message, Motif’. Organised by KB17’s Discursive Committee the event centred on scrutinising the art of Abdur Rahman Chughtai through a slideshow account of his paintings and style variations spread over five phases from 1918 to 1970. Technique, colour, subject matter and iconography were examined in relevance to these periods as well as pre- and post-partition culture.

Chughtai is remembered today as possibly the most distinguished Pakistani artist of the 20th century. His work draws from a shared South Asian cultural heritage, and he was one of the few Pakistani artists to be recognised in India before and after the 1947 Partition. Sirhandi chose Abdur Rahman Chughtai for her PhD dissertation at The Ohio State University in the early ’80s when few South Asian art historians thought seriously about the art of the colonial period or beyond. Chughtai’s style and subjects were so diverse that the research required an investigation of art from Iran, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh from the Sultanate Period to the time of Chughtai’s death in 1975. In the research on Chughtai currently available, Marcella’s study is by far the most exhaustive. But is this sufficient?

Locked in museums or private collections, Chughtai’s paintings elicit praise and acclaim as masterworks. But to continue eulogising the eulogised is counterproductive because the need now is to go beyond plaudits towards an engagement with this art as was accorded to the Mughal Miniature when the Contemporary Miniature was born. Loosely situated between the Classical Miniature and the Contemporary Miniature Chughtai’s aesthetic also sourced tradition to coin new metaphors. Today when modernism has run its course and major exponents of the contemporary miniature are already mid-career, artists’ fresh directions need to be explored to retain the vitality of Pakistani art.

Every successive generation brings new interpretations to previous evaluations and a reread of earlier commentaries on Chughtai and his art can trigger new debates

Every successive generation brings new interpretations to previous evaluations and a reread of earlier commentaries on Chughtai and his art can trigger new debates, particularly the relationship between literature and art. A chapter in D.N. Maclean’s 2012 publication, Cosmopolitanisms in Muslim Contexts: Perspectives from the Past, by Ifthikhar Dadi is titled, ‘Abdur Rahman Chughtai: Cosmopolitan Mughal Aesthetic in the Age of Print’. It focuses on the critical reception of Chughtai by Urdu literary critics and authors from the ’20s and through essays on the artist in English. This complex interaction between Urdu literary concerns and the emerging understanding of Persian miniature, Mughal painting and other painting traditions in India shaped the horizon of Chughtai’s career. Dadi records views of prominent poets like Allama Iqbal, Faiz Ahmed Faiz and others such as M.D. Taseer, art historian Tamara Talbot Rice, etc.

Dadi writes that according to the prominent leftist poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz, “Chughtai’s contribution lies precisely in his recovery of tradition based on Persian, Central Asian and Mughal motifs. Rather than simply copying or reproducing this heritage, Chughtai gathered the ‘motifs, symbols, and metaphors’ of various Islamic decorative arts in his work, creating a new synthesis.” Regarding Urdu ghazal, Faiz further commented, “Chughtai rendered the beloved in line and colour in a more ravishing actualisation (alam-i-vujud) than that of the ghazal’s imagined beloved (alam-i-tasavvur).” He felt this opened “the door to the lost mirages of our civilisation, of which we had only a tenuous relationship, but whose forms were disappearing as if they were abandoned buildings.”

Viewing Chughtai’s career as, “the opening of possibilities for Urdu art criticism and their attenuation during subsequent decades”, Dadi laments that, despite heroic scholarly efforts by Chughtai himself and other isolated researchers, so far no sustained and collective effort to study South Asian Muslim visual heritage has emerged from within Muslim South Asia.

Published in Dawn, EOS, November 19th, 2017