When Asif Shaikh was exhibiting in Malaysia some years ago, one of his frames was stolen. It was a work on a special fabric woven from peacock feathers on which were stitched iridescent, blue-green beetle wings. The police had to be called and the tapestry recovered. It’s not hard to see why his exquisite work might attract thieves.
When Shaikh was young, each time someone told him, ‘you can’t,’ he went on to prove them wrong. As a child, he showed a passion for embroidery and taught himself all the rare and difficult stitches.
His parents didn’t mind, but there were people who said, ‘You can’t do a woman’s job. Learn something useful.’ “But I kept at it because that was life to me.”
When Shaikh enrolled for the interior design course at CEPT University in Ahmedabad, he went on to top the class. His passion was fabric, and he soon earned a name as an embroiderer-designer of international repute.
It’s been 25 years since Shaikh began his career, and he is now ready to launch his show of embroidered Mughal miniatures at the William Siegal Gallery in Santa Fe, U.S. Unlike his vibrant designs, Shaikh is a soft-spoken and unassuming man. But he feels strongly about the predicament of the embroidery tradition in India.
“People have forgotten to be exquisite. India is set to lose forever its 2,000-year-old heritage of variety and richness in needlework, weaving and dyeing but hardly anyone cares. Paying for handcrafted original textiles is considered meaningless luxury. Machine embroidery, cheap threads and dyes rule the market,” he says. The artisans and their families live and work in grimy, suffocating rooms in slums or remote villages with little or no amenities. Though designers use their work, Shaikh says very few give artisans any credit. Naturally, many artisans have quit their craft. “I have made it my mission to promote artisans in India and abroad, make people understand and appreciate the beauty and elegance of embroidery,” he says about setting up CDS Art Foundation in Ahmedabad.
Every year, CDS organises a fashion show where designers and artisans walk the ramp together to showcase their work. Shaikh aims to revive forgotten crafts and artisan communities, and organises master classes and workshops for artists.
Through the looking glass
Someone once compared Shaikh’s embroidery to the works of Attar, the Sufi master. And it is not hard to guess why. The embroidered Mughal miniatures he will display at Santa Fe bring together ornate curtains, jaalis and tents, and immaculate paintings whose rich colours are embellished with gold leaves and precious stones. Some frames are so small that one has to view them with a magnifying glass.
Fine silk or gossamer net are embroidered with delicate yarn—a glossy green tree of life or pristine white embroidery on a white veil, suddenly birds fly in all directions and the fine silk on which they are embroidered is nearly invisible. If in one frame the breeze tousles flower heads, in another, the flowers are like the traditional floral motifs on monuments and Mughal paintings, only so vibrantly in bloom it is hard to imagine they are made of chain stitch.
Ask Shaikh how he achieves such precision and he reveals a secret passion: stippling. “I never knew there was a name for the technique,” he says, recalling the half-tone dots in old newspapers that prompted him to draw using pencil dots. At 18, he had an exhibition of dotted pencil drawings that were widely appreciated. “I tried painting too, but it was horrible, so I stuck to drawing. Then embroidery took over,” he says with a grin.
Fittingly, the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion has just nominated the artist to the India Design Council.
The Kolkata-based writer is passionate about the arts, past and present.
