Looking at the many portraits of the women and the young girls he has painted over the years, you cannot tell whether the subject is a sex worker or an emancipated woman who's agreed to be painted in her privacy. And that's clearly the distinguishing mark of the great painter with an unmistakable signature.

Look at the tens of the artist's canvasses detached from the subtext of Heera Mandi, where he situates most of his paintings in the 'offices', brothels and the living quarters of the traditional nautch girls, and the conclusion you can draw is that he's a secular painter who is documenting the private lives of women as seen from a keyhole.

Yet, voyeurism eludes his canvases, for the emphasis rests on his models being real life women, who dress up, dress down, undress, have a drink, play cards, take a shower, indulge in gossip and soothsaying amongst themselves or meditate in the privacy of the time and the space they can steal from the outside world.

Now everyone has those precious moments where the whole world squeezes into the here and now, with all its joys and sorrows, or, well, indifference.

It's only the subtext which makes Hussain's ladies' portrayal arouse many a conflicting sentiment, with the irony that the common thread running through the many portraits is a lack of compassion on the part of society for these ladies of flesh and blood — of passion for joy, of fortitude with which to bear pain, of sentiment and emotion — just like anyone else. It is here that the magic of the painter's brush shows the world that his subjects have the grace to bear even the ignominy of a lack of compassion so eloquently — they do it by just being themselves.

In Hussain's work both the Pakistani woman and her portrayal in painting really come of age. The nudes painted earlier by Colin David and Ahmed Saeed Nagi, of women not from a red light district, also map the coming 'out' of the Pakistani woman.

Hussain definitely takes that movement forward as he, as an angry young man, set out to challenge the social odds stacked against him, and to exorcise the many demons plaguing him on the inside.

In doing so consistently, he tries to set both himself and his community free of the cruel infamy that a society in transition such as ours nurtures so equally generously and wretchedly in its own midst.

The ageing women of Heera Mandi, and the like elsewhere, are in turn a metaphor for the rotten existence of a social order so irretriev-ably imbued in prejudice and hypocrisy that no injection of divinely ordained morality can salvage it.

Only the painter, his subject and the medium go hand in hand to establish the higher norms of aesthetics as therapeutic for a sick society afflicted with many burdens. And this is the veil that is not aimed at covering that which shames but revealing from behind its thin layers that which must show, namely, the human condition, come what may.

Definitely in keeping with any great artist's brief since the dawn of humanity.

Marjorie Husain's The Painter of Imprisoned Souls narrates the subtext of Iqbal Hussain's personal development from an urchin roaming the streets of Heera Mandi to an angry young man thrown out of school, to a budding artist, to a universally acclaimed painter.

It is an apt tribute to the man, his journey of seemingly insurmountable circumstances his own and those of his many subjects. The book's narrative is so riveting that it's hard to put it down till you've read it all from cover to cover.

It's also the narrative of Lahore's fabled Heera Mandi, often translated as 'Diamond Maket', but named historically after one Heera Singh who had revived its status as the district of dancing girls at the behest of Maharaja Rajit Singh after the Mughal-era Shahi Mohallah had lost its nautch girls under a receding empire.

Heera Mandi subsequently served as the launching pad for many a silver screen beauty that ended up in Bombay after adoring the stage of Calcutta in the 1930s and '40s. It has also served as a supply line to the Lahore-based film and fashion industry, which continues to be seen by many of Hussain's subjects as their way to fame and recognition.

The book comes with all-colour, very representative reproductions of the artist's entire body of work in a variety of mediums, comprising landscapes, drawings, impressionistic depictions of street scenes, cityscapes, portraits and self-portraits — Iqbal Hussain brings a rare passion, bordering on self-obsession, to the painting of the last mentioned genre.

That his own is the portrait of Dorian Grey in the reverse keeps egging him on to marvel at the grace with which he has aged and matured, both as an artist and as someone who grew to learn of compassion, bit by bit, and of the joy of sharing it.

Kudos for Marjorie Husain for another job so well done.

Iqbal Hussain The painter of imprisoned souls
(ART)
By Marjorie Husain
Self-published
ISBN 978-969-9251-07-8
238pp. Price not listed