Years ago, artist, poet and educationist Gulammohammed Sheikh eloquently sketched out his universe of art and life in a talk at the Sahitya Akademi: “The feeling is, let me spread out the chequer board of all times and places; let me gather a world found in momentary glimpses or embedded in deep recesses – at home in Ghanchiwad or riot-torn Baroda – and in wanderings round the world; let me instigate the thousand sensory instincts homing around one’s experience. It is a moment to confront the totally personal and the entire.”
The integrity, and intensity, of 74-year-old Sheikh’s gaze in confronting the totally personal and the entire, shone through in his recent show of epic proportions – City, Kaavad and other works (October 12-24) – organised by the Vadehra Art Gallery at Delhi’s Rabindra Bhavan. The Baroda-based artist’s concerns were familiar: searching for the human, humane presence across the convulsions of time. But the magnitude of articulation, aided by a team, marked a new high.
It was as if the artist had summoned from the very core of his being every experience, association, story, fable and philosophic concept that has made him who he is: a firm believer in the plurality of existence and syncretic culture, who holds “the entire consciousness of history, the place of the artist in it all is raw material for my use”.
Vibrant contrasts
One’s pulse quickened the moment one stepped into the gallery. Drenched in vibrant contrasts was a 24 feet wide, eight feet high wondrous structure, titled “Kaavad/Travelling Shrine/Home”. A kaavad , traditionally, is a portable wooden shrine used as a storytelling prop, with painted devotional narratives on its doors. Each door opens up a new layer to finally reveal the inner core, the deity. When shut it looks like a box.
How beautifully Sheikh had grasped the Kaavad format to enable pluralistic trajectories. The many door panels contained different, yet interlinked, narratives. Folding or unfolding these doors would create many new permutations, each signifying a new journey with the ‘power’ to question established discourses of power in history.
This Kaavad had a passage in the middle. One could walk around the shrine, see all sides, walk through and stand at the empty centre – and, perhaps, be its human core, making the journey her own.
It was a magical universe, with images drawn from diverse sources of the history of art, ranging from the artist’s own 1970s work (Returning Home) to medieval pilgrim’s maps, a Mercator projection of a strife-torn planet, a love-struck Radha and a map of the Kaaba, with a shackled Majnun searching for his Laila.
Elsewhere, Sheikh had seemingly done the impossible: he had brought together believers and unbelievers, sadhus, fakirs and skeptics. Other than St. Francis’ iconic image, most were anonymous sages and doubters from Mughal miniatures, Japanese scrolls and pre-Renaissance paintings – some originally as small as one inch and literally on the margins – who were blown up to human scale and physicalised. It was the artist’s way of making a new history, of having a dialogue with those on the margins.
Unlike the painted doors, the two inside walls and roof of the central passage in the ‘home’ featured luminous digital collages on the theme of elements. One wall had a golden ark floating on swirling dark waters with its precious cargo of fakirs and sceptics, flanked by a reflective Kabir and Abanindranath Tagore’s Gandhi; above it a medieval township designed out of photos of the artist’s hometown.
On the opposite wall, the lush canopy of an exquisite ‘speaking tree’, a golden chinar reconstructed from Persian paintings, was dotted with small Rajput and Mughal miniature images of musicians, dancers and derwishes. It also had images of Gujarat riots, Abhu Ghraib, Iraqi refugees and a scarred Bamiyan Buddha in a cycle of life and death. At the base stood two female figures from a Fra Angelico painting, their faces turned away in unbearable grief. The roof, a backlit sky, populated with angels and demons, was bordered with photo images of Baroda and the artist’s hometown, somewhat rundown.
A different world
It was fascinating how in Sheikh’s world as home, personal histories conversed with figures from real life and art. “You use historical images which you have enjoyed all your life, and resurrect them – in a way constructing a world, but a different world,” said Sheikh
Further inside, a monumental map in muted hues caught the eye, reminiscent of satellite images and archaeological drawings. “City: Memory, Dreams, Desire, Statues and Ghosts – Return of Hiuen Tsang” was created for a 2010 Shanghai show exploring India-China ties. The theme: a map for the traveller, were he to visit India today.
The 24 feet wide City, ‘raised’ on a largely recreated grid of Google Earth images of Baroda, with hand-drawn or hand-painted images sourced from hundreds of photographs, suggested a city cleaved in two – the standing panels as the living city marked by the 2002 orgy of violence: the vandalised tomb of musician Ustad Faiyaz Khan (in the Gaikwad court), and Best Bakery. The floor panels, akin to an archaeological site, reflected a part of the city amnesiac about its past.
The City’s most significant human presence for the artist: images of ‘ordinary’, marginal, people on the streets, “who after every rupture mend the city by mending a shoe, umbrella or cycle tyre, or through physical labour. Working is a way not only to live but to live for hope. Ultimately, the city is an abode which will survive you, just as life will survive you.”
It was a testimony of Gulam Sheikh’s ‘power’ that his act of imagining, building, rebuilding and recreating the city and the world in the exhibition created as inexorable a flow of art and life, resurrecting the organic idea of plurality. To do that by confronting the personal and the entire, in today’s times, constitutes the single biggest act of resistance.
