framings of a national tradition:modern masters and national art history in pakistan

8/3/2019 Framings of a National Tradition:Modern Masters and National Art History in Pakistan

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Framings of a National TraditionDiscourse on the Reinvention of Miniature

Painting in Pakistan

Nadeem Omar Tarar

The contemporary invention of traditional Indian manuscript paintingas an index of a national art form rests on an under-nuanced view thata traditional medium exists simply as a transhistorical object readilyavailable to be retrieved from history. The notion of an unchangingtradition thriving in royal ateliers as well as in artisanal workshopsused to invoke a singular national identity of miniature painting inPakistan is an outcome of nationalist history, which traces its stylisticevolution and iconographic variations according to the political chrono-logy of Indian ruling dynasties and patterns of feudal patronage indifferent regions.1 From its imperial origins in Timurid kitabkhanas

(royal book-making workshops) and Safavidi courts, Persian paintingarrived in Mughal ateliers, transforming yet retaining its essence underthe influence of European pictorial conventions, as well as those ofindigenous-Hindu aesthetics. As if it needed the hothouse of theMughal court to flourish, manuscript painting declined with the fall ofthe Mughal Empire in India in the eighteenth century, dispersing theartists, who took refuge in smaller regional kingdoms in Rajasthan andthe hill states of Punjab. Under British rule, it degenerated into a pictorialart for the pleasure of the British elite and the Indian bourgeoisie, and itwas only due to the advent of revivalist movements in Indian art in thelate nineteenth century that manuscript painting reasserted itself as thetraditional art form.

What holds this Orientalist nationalist narrative together is an uncri-tical subscription to the sociology of the unbroken life of Indian paintingin South Asia. It is only by policing the borders of an objectified genre,which is always already locked in an ageless past, that one can begin totalk about an Indian miniature tradition, whereby a variety of regionalstyles caught in the same logic are seen as permutations of its timelessessence. By reading the workshop practice of copying as a symptom ofeither an enervated culture or one that does not distinguish clearlybetween the past and the present, Indian painting has been consigned

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1. See Percy Brown, IndianPainting under theMughals, A.D. 1550 toA.D. 1750, ClarendonPress, Oxford, 1924;Pramod Chandra, On theStudy of Indian Art,Harvard University Press,Cambridge, Massachusetts,1983.


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to a world in which time has no meaning.2 Given the static notion oftime attributed to Indian manuscript painting, it is pertinent to unpackthe relationship of Indian manuscript painting to the past, envisaged inthe idea of a tradition, rather than assuming it as a matter of logicaldeduction.

In the course of its institutional career in South Asia, manuscript

painting has moved from eminence in the Mughal court as the medievalart of book illustration to its degeneration as a declasse handcraft in theBritish colonial period; its ascendancy in the post-independence periodas the traditional fine art of Pakistani Islamic culture was followedby a postmodern renaissance as contemporary art practice, which to use Homi Bhabhas words is the re-evaluation of tradition tothe extent that tradition is no longer opposed to modernity. Thishistory offers penetrating clues to the taxonomic shifts that havetaken place in the construction of Indian painting in the past fivehundred years.3

A NEO-ORIENTALIST DISCOURSE OF REVIVALISMS:TAGORE AND CHUGHTAI

By the dawn of twentieth century the two pioneering new Orientalists, EB Havell and A K Coomaraswamy, had invented an ontology of theunbroken life of manuscript painting in India by painstakingly recon-structing the continuous process of unfolding of various schools ofpainting, which had evolved over time by accepting and injectingstylistic influences from one another.4 In this chain of transmissions theprovenance of manuscript painting was made with reference to courtlypatronage which, in default of individual inscriptions, stood as the

only methodological option through which it could be historicised. Inthe process of the invention of a tradition, implying a continuity with asuitable historical past that framed the discursive formation of Indianmanuscript tradition in India and Pakistan in the last quarter of thetwentieth century, modern Indian artists such as AbanindranathTagore, and Abdur Rehman Chughtai were active contributors to theneo-Orientalist discourses through their art practice as well as scholarlywritings.

Working with a mandate to discover an authentic tradition of Indianfine arts, and in active defiance of British colonial aesthetic judgementsthat found scant merit in Indian painting and sculpture, there was littleconsensus in the Orientalist ranks as to the configuration of a suitable

historic past. It was Havells discovery of the aesthetic merits ofPersian and Mughal manuscript paintings, though, that from 1896obliged him to collect, with missionary zeal, specimens of Indo-Persianmanuscripts for the Calcutta Government School of Arts gallery, toserve as models for emulation by Indian students. For him, it was onlywhen the Persian element in Mughal art was transformed by thegreater force of pre-existing Hindu traditions that Mughal paintingscould qualify as a wholly original, Indian school of painting.5 Inmany ways his successor Coomaraswamy went a step further, with hisdiscovery and study of medieval Rajput paintings in 1916, in arguingthat this Hindu religious genre of painting was projected as more

578

2. See Daniel Ehnbom, TheCopy in Mughal andRajput Painting,conference paper, CollegeArt Association, New York,1996, unpublished.

3. See Shahzia Sikander inconversation with Homi KBhabha at http://www.shahziasikander.com/essay03.html

4. E B Havell, A Handbook ofIndian Art, John Murray,

London, 1927; KCoomaraswamy,Introduction To IndianArt, Kessinger Publishing,Whitefish, Montana, 2007

5. Tapati Guha Thakurta,Orientalism, Nationalismand Reconstruction ofIndian Art in Calcutta,in Catherine B Asher andThomas R Metcalf, eds,Perceptions of South AsiasVisual Past, Oxford andIBP, New Delhi, 1994, p 51


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purely Indian than Mughal court painting and could be placedwithin an unbroken line of an Indian art tradition that stretchedback to Ajanta.6 Chughtai entered the debate at a later stage, when therevivalist movement in Indian art had began to harden into orthodoxy,to mark his subject position in the delineation of a suitable historicpast.7 Although his early work tries to synthesise multiple styles of

paintings from the Indian historic past he was keenly aware of the needto create a Mughal-inspired sensibility. Claiming Persian descent fromthe architects of the Taj Mahal, he invented his relationship to traditionby claiming an unmediated link to Mughal and Persian manuscriptpaintings.

The Orientalist discourses on Indian visual traditions constitutedhistorically fragmented and culturally contested fields of aestheticresistance, increasingly intertwined with Swadeshi politics (meaningself-sufficiency, one of the principles adopted by the Indian Independencemovement) and cultural nationalism in the early decades of the twentiethcentury. As critic Geeta Kapur has stated, the discourse on tradition andmodernity in India can never be fully understood without considering the

struggle and ideology of the nationalist agenda.8 If, to some degree, it isfair to say that if Abanindranath Tagore and Abanpathis (followers ofAbanindranath) of the Bengal school invented a uniquely indigenous tra-dition of Indian art which became synonymous with the independencemovement, then Chughtai and his coterie from the Punjab school ofartists self-consciously chose to invent an Islamic cosmopolitanism inthe service of Muslim nationalism, aligning with the cause of theMuslim independence movement in India.

That said, I should enter a caveat here. One must be careful in readingtoo narrowly a play of communal politics into the struggle for the masteryof Indias past along the lines of inter-religious conflict. Tagore had drawn

on Mughal paintings much earlier than Chughtai; his Passing of ShahJehan, for which he was awarded a medal at the Delhi Darbar exhibitionof 1903, can be cited as case in point. Painted in oil on wood, the work iswidely known for its successful evocation of emotion and held as a mas-terpiece of modern Indian art. The artists empathy with the deposedMuslim King, who is dying in despair with the lonely figure of his daugh-ter at his feet, watched over by the Taj Mahal in the background, is notcoloured by his religious beliefs. Likewise, if Chughtai illustrated theverses of Omar Khayyam, a twelfth-century Persian poet, for the IndianEmpire Exhibition of 1924, so did Roop Krishna, an Abanpathi andscion of leading Hindu booksellers in Lahore. The cultural formationsof Indian art history are far too complex and overdetermined to be con-

fined to a national register.Vishakha Desais exhibition catalogue essay Conversation with

Tradition, intended to provide a cultural introduction to two artistsfrom India and Pakistan, Nilima Sheikh and Shazia Sikander respectively,offers a teleological reading of Indian history inspired by nationalist andreligious imagination. Citing Chughtai as the cultural antecedent to Pakis-tani artists, she reads Chughtais assertion of Islamic identity as a directresponse to the aftermath of the partition of Bengal. In her account, hecame to the Bengal school in 1905, after the partition of the state intoEast and West Bengal, and highlighted the divisions between the Hinduand Muslim identities through his work. He continued to focus on this

579

6. Ibid, p 51.

7. Marcella C Sirhandi,Painting in Pakistan:19471997, Arts and theIslamic World 32, specialissue, 50 Years of Art inPakistan

8. Geeta Kapur, When wasModernism: Essays onContemporary CulturalPractice in India, Tulika,New Delhi, 2000.


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after he returned to Lahore, his birthplace, and had a major impact onthe development of miniature painting in Pakistan.9

Notwithstanding the factual error, as in 1905 Chughtai, who wasborn in 1896, was barely nine years old, her reading of Chughtais iden-tity politics in communal terms feeds into the ideological dictates of thetwo-nation theory. Chughtais encounter with tradition, which began in

the years preceding his pan-Indian success in the second decade of thetwentieth century, was fuelled by his personal ambition to carve aniche for himself and cannot be seen as a reflection of HinduMuslimconflict engendered by the aftermath of the partition of Bengal. Hisforay into traditional styles of painting was underpinned by a sense ofnostalgia for the glory of the Mughal imperial past, which he sharedwith the Muslim intellectual elite in North India. At Lahore he was inthe company of progressive poets, writers and artists like Sir MuhammadIqbal, M D Taseer, Mary Krishna and Roop Krishna, whose culturalnationalism was more cosmopolitan in outlook.10 Chughtais sense ofcollective identity was premised less on an antagonistic sense of religiousconflict with his fellow subjects than on inventing his own distinct cul-

tural identity within an Indo-Islamic literary and painting tradition.11

Denying a Persian pictorial influence in Chughtais painting, which ismore of a mannerism than a distinct influence, Abduallah Chughtai, ahistorian of Mughal visual culture, is quoted as locating his brother ina broader intercultural and cosmopolitan context:

He has observed the beautiful legends of Hindustan. At the same time he isa glorious product of Muslim culture. In his paintings, one comes acrossold Hindu gods and Persian Sufis in a happy company.12

Despite a formal and thematic correspondence between Chughtai and theartists of the Bengal School, Chughtai claimed to be the representative

of what he called the North Indian School of painting, a claim dulyacknowledged by Lionel Heath, principal of the Mayo School of Art inLahore and curator of the Punjab section of the Indian Empire Exhibition,in his report on the Punjabi paintings:

The Punjab artists, whose works are exhibited in these galleries, may becongratulated upon having set a high standard of merit and also uponhaving formed a very definite and distinct style of their own. One ortwo of these artists were, I believe, pupils in Tagores Calcutta school inthe past, and will not deny the value of their training; but they withtheir Punjab contemporaries are showing. . . a beauty of form. . . trulyIndian in character, and which promises well for the future formation ofa strong North Indian School of Painting.13

To be sure, the regional specialities on display in London had beenfamous for centuries for their distinct styles of painting, but before thenineteenth century they had not been considered together as representinga single, coherent Indian character. The fuzzy categories of localproducts came together in the late nineteenth century into a boundedentity of national art and a single category called Indian art.14 To perpe-tuate their aesthetic vision of cultural differences, formal aestheticborders of the historic styles of painting were painstakingly constructedthrough meticulous connoisseurship around regional schools of Indianpainting, and policed by museum officials and exhibition organisers,

580

9. Conversations withTraditions: Nilima Sheikhand Shahzia Sikander,exhibition catalogue, AsiaSociety, New York, 2001,interview by VishakhaDesai

10. Abdul Rehman Chughtai,Lahore Ka Dabistan-e-Musswari, ChughtaiMuseum Trust, Lahore,

197911. Iftikhar Dadi, Miniature

Painting as MuslimCosmopolitanism, ISIMReview 18, autumn 2006;and Dadi, Modernism andthe Art of Muslim SouthAsia (Islamic Civilizationand Muslim Networks),Chapel Hill, 2010

12. Abduallah Chughtaiquoted in Wazir Agha,A. R. Chughtai: Personalityand Art, Lahore, 1980,p 58.

13. Lionel Heath, Examples ofIndian Art at the BritishEmpire Exhibition 1924,India Society, London,1924, p x

14. Abigail S McGowan, Allthat is Rare, Characteristicor Beautiful, in Design andthe Defense of Tradition inColonial India, 18511903, Journal of MaterialCulture, vol 10, no 263,2005


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Letter from A R Chughtai to Lionel Heath, Principal, Mayo School of Arts, 1929, NCA collection, cour-

tesy National College of Arts Archives, Lahore

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and in the training of hereditary artisans in traditional workshops inBritish India.

HAJI SHARIF: THE ENCOUNTER BETWEEN TRADITIONAND MODERNITY

If for Tagore and Chughtai tradition was evoked less in terms of particu-lar styles and modes than through rarefied ideas of beauty, sublimity andspiritualness of form that marked the essence of Indian manuscript paint-ing, for Haji Sharif, a hereditary court painter from the Patiala family ofMuslim painters, who sought employment in Chughtais alma materMayo School of Art three years before partition, a faithful adherence toparticular historic styles of the past came to define a notion of Indiantradition. Seen as a living embodiment of the quintessential traditionof Indian manuscript painting in the annals of art history, it is withthe legacy of Sharif that contemporary painters from Pakistan came tonegotiate.15

Although Sharif was part of the artistic neo-Orientalist milieu, hisexposure as a court painter to the revivalist art movement, both inPunjab and Bengal, was rather limited. While he was serving the prin-cely court in relative isolation the rest of the Indian artworld was rever-berating with the resurgence of Oriental styles of painting as thesupreme Indian tradition. The work of Nandala Bose, scion of theBengal School and father of the Bengali revivalist art movement whoinstilled the commitment to work with traditional Indian painters andartisans to produce new works to be sold at village fairs, led to the reju-venation of historic styles of paintings in the leading centres of Indianmanuscript paintings.16 Building on this commitment, Shailendra

Nath De, who became principal of Jaipur School of Art in the 1920s,trained another generation of students in the classical styles of Rajputpainting. One of his students from the school, Ram Gopal Vijaiwargia,a collector, art dealer and artist rolled into one, was to dominateRajasthan painting into the twenty-first century; he died aged ninety-eight in 2003. He was also to be one of the youngest educatedcandidates, who, having achieved pan-Indian fame, competed for, andlost to Sharif, an old and uneducated artist, the post of Artists in oldindigenous style in Indian miniature painting at the Mayo School ofArt (MSA) in Lahore in 1944.17

This rather obscure event of the selection of an artist at the Lahore artand craft school three years before partition is something of an anomaly

in the history of colonial education but also offers a clue as to the natureof the Indian miniature tradition that was to be invented later at theNational College of Arts (NCA), the foremost art school in Pakistan, adevelopment that would in turn spawn the contemporary reinventionof miniature paintings in South Asia.18 Suspending the governmentservice rules, which required formal educational qualifications and setcertain age restrictions, the job advertisement required no academic qua-lifications or age-limit; rather the ideal candidate was to demonstratehis or her grasp of the technique of Painting of the old IndianMasters. The only evidence of mastery of the visual past that wasspelled out in the criteria for selection was familial or hereditary: an

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15. Established as an industrialart school under thetutelage of John LockwoodKipling in 1875, the MayoSchool of Art wasrestructured and upgradedas the National College ofArts (NCA) in 1958 to

provide art and designeducation to the modernartists of a newlyindependent nation. For ahistorical study of MayoSchool of Arts, see NadeemOmar Tarar, ColonialGovernance and ArtEducation: 18491920s,doctoral dissertation,University of New SouthWales, Sydney, Australia,2007. See also, NaazishAtta-Ullah, StylisticHybridity and Colonial Artand Design Education: A

Wooden Carved Screen byRam Singh, in TimBarringer and Tom Flynn,eds, Colonialism and theObject: Empire, MaterialCulture and the Museum,Routledge, London, 1997;and Sajida Vandal andPervaiz Vandal, The Raj,Lahore, and Bhai RamSingh, NCA, Lahore, 2007.

16. The invention of authenticOriental styles of Indianmanuscript paintings andtheir continuation through

carefully guidedreproductions, often madethrough photographs ofpaintings of old masters inthe later part of thetwentieth century, wereanalytically distinct fromthe invention of a rarefiedIndian aesthetic traditionby the founders of theBengal and Punjab schoolsof painting.

17. On 21 September 1944, I BQuershi, Secretary, Punjab-NWFP Joint Public Service

Commission, advertised atemporary post, for anartist in the old style ofIndian [miniature]painting for the MayoSchool of Art Lahore.Originally intended to lastfor a period of six months,the post was non-pensionable, and could beterminated at one monthsnotice. With fixed pay of300 rupees, it entailed nospecial benefits such as freehousing or medical


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artist with a family tradition will be given preference.19 No wonder thatRam Gopal Vijaiwargia, despite his education, experience and fame, lostto Sharif, who was selected as a hereditary painter without a formal art

education on the strength of his unadulterated association with theOriental styles of Indian manuscript painting, and distance from theneo-traditional revivalist school. His origin as a court painter in Patila,where painting with multiple themes was based on illustrations frommanuscripts, miniature paintings on paper, cloth or canvas and muralsor wall paintings, was patronised by royal decree, granted him an auraof authenticity. A myth of the authenticity of a tradition had to beinvented through a discourse on old masters and original techniques,untainted by foreign influences, and Haji Sharif was seen as the livingembodiment of a quintessential tradition.20

In contemporary Pakistani art history Chughtai is perceived as amodern Western-educated artist whose individual signature of creativity

relocated access to a suitable historic past for Indian Muslims. Sharif isseen as an unlettered traditional painter who succumbed to the encounterwith tradition through his strict adherence to and copying of the historicstyles of Indian manuscript painting. The formation of Pakistan came as aboon to fifty-five-year-old Chughtai who, having illustrated the poet SirMuhammad Iqbal in addition to his other manuscript publications andhad earned the unofficial title of Painter of the East, was keenly patron-ised by the young state. Haji Muhammad Sharif Patialvi, teaching theold indigenous style in Indian miniature painting at Mayo School ofArt, continued to languish in relative obscurity. In his professionalcareer at the Mayo School of Art, which was upgraded and restructured

Haji Muhammad Sharif, Furrukh Sair, undated, watercolour on paper, NCA collection,courtesy National College of Arts Archives, Lahore

583

treatment. The post wasopen to British Indiansubjects and subjects ofnotified Punjab states, butPunjabis and Sikhs were tobe given preference. Evenwomen were eligible toapply, though none came

forward. See NCAA BoxFile no 133-E, PersonalFile of Haji MuhammadSharif (1944 89).

18. Nadeem Omar Tarar,Aesthetic Modernism inthe Post-Colony: TheMaking of a NationalCollege of Art, Lahore,International Journal ofArt and Design Education,vol 27, no 3, November2008.

19. Of five candidates, twowere educated artists, butwithout a family tradition.Gurdit Singh had a

diploma in painting fromMayo School, and theCentral School of Arts andCrafts London, andKanwal Nain Kotra hadstudied painting at VisvaBharati Santiniketan andwas a lecturer at the SikhNational College,Amritsar. Jogindera Nathwas a self-taught Hinduartist, but without a familytradition. MuhammadSharif and Aftab Ahamdwere the only two Muslimcandidates with a family

tradition. Aftab Ahmadwas young enough to beMuhammad Sharifs son,and lacked the experiencethat was required to qualifyfor the post. NCAA BoxFile no 133-E, op cit.

20. Virginia Whiles, MiniatureManoeuvres: Tradition andSubversion in PakistaniContemporary Art,doctoral dissertation,SOAS, University ofLondon


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as the National College of Arts in 1958, and in his art practice, he wasbesieged by problems of survival. Like the provisional nature of hisnon-pensionable post as a Miniature Artist, which was initially intendedonly to last for six months on fixed pay of 300 rupees (but was laterextended on an annual basis), the career of manuscript painting in theLahore art school remained precarious and peripheral to mainstreamart education.21

The student interest in miniature painting in the early years at MSAwas negligible compared with their eagerness to learn modern painting.

Over a period of thirteen years, from 1945 to 1958, only twenty-one stu-dents entered Sharifs studios, and many left without completing thecourse. To revive this special art, the Punjab government granted twoscholarships of twenty rupees per month to students. However, asShakir Ali, a leading artist and principal of the NCA, explained, prospectswere dismal for a special art at the old MSA whose traditional sources ofpatronage had dried up:

Due to lack of patronage from the public, the qualified students could notget any employment in this line of work. Some of them took petty jobs asDrawing Masters or as Commercial Artists and gave up this professionaltogether.

The National College of Arts building during the 1950s, NCA collection, courtesy National

College of Arts Archives, Lahore

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21. NCAA Box File no 133-E,op cit


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With the formation of NCA, miniature painting was introduced as one ofthe courses in the fine art department, so that students know the basics ofthis discipline as well.22

It was an indication both of his distance from the exhibition andgallery circuits and of his marginal position as artist-craftsman in the art-world that it took the combined efforts of Mark Sponenburgh, the first

principal of the NCA, and the poet Faiz A Faiz, secretary of the ArtsCouncil, to mount Sharifs first solo exhibition at the advanced age ofseventy-five, marking his official entry into the Pakistani art scene. Motiv-ated by a nationalist impulse, to revive the art of old-style Indian minia-ture painting in the province, the exhibition was inaugurated in 1962 bynone other than the President of Pakistan himself, Field Marshall AyubKhan, who, duly impressed with the show, granted a lifetime pensionof 200 rupees per month to the artist. The success of the Lahore artexhibition was followed by another exhibition of Mughal miniaturesby Haji Sharif in Rawalpindi on 29 June 1963, arranged as part of aninitiative by the Small Industries Department to promote and displaythe handicrafts of Pakistan to the world outside. Introducing the artist

as a craftsman, the General Manager of the Small Industries Division,M Mahmoud, lauded Sharifs art as a source of inspiration to ourpresent day artisans, mentioning the fact that eight of his paintingswere sold for 6000 rupees on the spot.23

The institutional location of Sharifs two exhibitions points to twodifferent sets of opposing demands on his painting practice. No doubtSharif was selected on the strength of his mastery of the historic stylesof the past and the vast amount of cultural information required to prac-tise them, and not on the basis of his personal style as an individual artist.However, with the formation of the NCA as a premier art institution hisart practice was found to be lacking in individual creativity. His alleged

adherence to and grasp of his ancestral styles, which had provided thevery basis for his eligibility for the post and his artistic renown, becamea liability in the community of modern artists, given the prevailingmodern aesthetic sensibilities that put a heavy premium on individualcreativity. In the rhetorical words of the academic Ijaz ul Hassan, Whycannot our miniaturists create original work which depicts their ownexperience and perceptions? Has the technique become archaic to dothis or have they become mere craftsmen?24 In contrast, for the Depart-ment of Industries that controlled the NCA until 1963, he was a prizedcraftsman who had excelled in his folk art. An artisan among artistsand artist among artisans, his hereditary art practice was caught up inthe conflicting demands of modern art and a nationalistic state. To be

recognised as an artist he was obliged to forgo his hereditary trainingto learn new tricks, but as a craftsman he was expected to preserve hisskills and conform to authentic styles, techniques and subject matterconsidered an important part of the repertoire of the national culturalheritage.

Despite the fact that Sharif had little success at the art schools inattracting students to learn the old style of Indian painting, by the1960s he had acquired sufficient visibility in official quarters throughhis early exhibitions. A high-profile bureaucrat, G Mueenuddin, analumnus of the Indian Civil Service (ICS) who was present at his first exhi-bition and became an avid collector of his paintings, expressed his

585

22. Ibid

23. Ibid

24. Exhibition catalogue forthe Fifth NationalExhibition, PakistanNational Council of Arts,Islamabad, 1984, p x


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concern over the future of Indian painting in Pakistan, referring to Sharifas the last painter in a tradition of the Mughal miniature who had tosalvage it to save it from oblivion.25 It would be a great pity, he wroteto the Principal of the NCA, if [given the artists advanced age ofseventy-five] this form of painting is to be permitted to die with him. Toforestall this, his collectors instinct stressed that it is all the more impor-

tant that during the rest of his life Sharif should be enabled to produce asmany paintings as possible. To facilitate this he suggested that Sharifshould be allowed to retire, accumulate gratuities, a pension and a grantof land so that he could live comfortably and produce a substantialamount of work. This paternalistic and preservationist view did not losesight of pedagogic considerations. Some promising students should beapprenticed to him on a full-time basis. That is to say, they should learnnothing but miniature painting and work with him daily to become realexperts in this form of painting.26 In view of the larger interest of thecountry the paternalist bureaucrat pleaded to cut through the red tapeand make some satisfactory arrangements under which Haji Sharif isenabled to produce a lot of work during the rest of his life and is able to

leave behind one or two pupils to carry on the tradition.Shakir Ali adopted a cautious tone by acknowledging the contribution

of Sharif who was highly respected by his colleagues due to his age andposition as miniature painter. His presence there was considered asource of inspiration for students as well as beneficial to him in theway that it has promoted the sale of his work to many visitors fromabroad, who visited this college. However, he took exception to thesuggestions of Mueenuddin, and considered the practice of miniaturepainting beyond redemption:

As regards placement of Haji Muhammad Sharif, I am afraid, no youngman will come forward for this career. Haji Muhammad Sharif has

taken a life-time to achieve a proficiency in his art, and any short cutarrangement to revive this art will not solve the problem.27

Inhabiting a space between technology and art manuscript painting wasseen by Shakir Ali as an art/craft whose evolutionary time had run out.As an art of book illustration it was bound to disappear due to the wide-spread use of mechanised visual reproduction in printing throughoutIndia. The ascendancy of modern art on the Pakistani art scene also ledto diminished commercial prospects for a special art, even at the artschool. However, Alis observations omitted the fact that one youngman, Jamil Naqsh, having studied at the Fine Arts Department at theNCA for a year, dropped out of the Mayo School in 1953 to take up

voluntary apprenticeship at Sharifs home studio for several years. Con-cealing his real identity, he used to sign his paintings in his formativeyears as Shagird Haji Sharif. In later years, he worked by combiningthe techniques of miniature painting with postwar abstraction andpainted by drawing on his subconscious. Pigeons, a pictorial motifwhich he repeatedly used in the picture frame, were borrowed fromIndian manuscript painting. At the same time, he managed to pass onthe painting skills he had learned at Sharifs studio to a younger gener-ation of miniature painters. Today he is cited as one of the modernmasters of Pakistan for whom manuscript painting provided a point ofdeparture and not a point of closure.

586

25. Ibid

26. Ibid

27. Ibid


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Alis modernist slant cast a shadow over the future of miniature paint-ing at the NCA as it was not able to fulfil the revivalist dream of an evan-gelist bureaucrat. Neither did it serve Sharif who, dismayed by dwindlingprospects of state patronage, made desperate pleas for privileges as aright he had earned through his years of service to the nation. In hislast appeal to the Governor of West Pakistan he tried in vain to use

two hundred years of hereditary painting practice as a bargaining tool:

I am a hereditary artist as my forefathers for the last two centuries wereattached to this profession. I started my career as an Artist in PatialaDarbar at the age of fifteen and remained in Maharajahs service, up tothe age of fifty-five years. . . At the present my age is about seventy-sevenyears, and the Government is not able to find a miniature Artist of mycalibre and therefore my services are continued from year to year. . .Neither was I allowed a promotion nor was my pay increased during thelast twenty years. I had applied for the purchase of agricultural land sothat my children might get maintenance after me.28

Despite his pleadings, his case was dismissed by the government, and the

decision was communicated to him rather unceremoniously by a sectionofficer:

It is observed that a life-time pension of 200 Rupees [awarded by the Pre-sident] is adequate recognition of the services of Haji Muhammad Sharif.In the circumstances, it is not possible to grant land to him.29

Sharif, the last painter, left the institution distraught a few months later,never to come back. He died in obscurity ten years later in 1978 andremains to this date a mysterious character. Miniature painting had tosurvive on the margins of fine art instruction at the NCA as a traditionalcraft for another few decades because of its alleged emphasis on copyingand craftsmanship. It was not until miniature painting was reinvented by

modern Pakistani artists, freeing it from the stigma of copying, that it wasaccepted as equal in pedigree to Fine Arts.

THE DISCOURSE ON OLD MASTERS AND THE MYTH OFTRADITION IN MINIATURE PAINTING

Despite the unprecedented success of contemporary miniature paintersfrom Pakistan in the international artworld, all of whom, includingShazia Sikander and her renowned Ustad (master), Professor BashirAhmad (currently Head of Fine Arts at the NCA), are context-bound to

trace their lineage from Sharif, there is not a single essay, not tomention monograph, on him. Although his paintings are also kept inPakistans National Gallery of Art, connoisseurship around his paintingsis singularly lacking. The information on the provenance of Sharifs paint-ings is scarce and left open to speculation; it is obvious that his style andsubject matter continued to change with the passage of time. By the timehe was retained at the NCA in 1958 he had come a long way from hisgrandfather Allah Ditta and father Bashrat Ullah, both Patiala Courtpainters in the nineteenth century. They painted murals depictingscenes from the Mahabharata, incarnations of Vishnu, Shiva, Lakshmi,Krishna Leela and Janamsakhis of Guru Nanak Dev (stories about his

587

28. Ibid

29. Ibid


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life and work), along with poetic illustrations of scenes from RadhaKrishna, Gita Govinda, Nayak-Nayika and Raag Mala, according tocustomary courtly practices.

In a post-independence Pakistan, Sharif painted exclusively on paper, aspainting on other supports was no longer in vogue. In terms of formal prop-erties, an element of minimalism came to pervade his images, which showed

denuded landscapes and an emphasis on the figure. No longer were themesof Radha Krishna or Sikh Gurus relevant to his immediate viewing public,who were more favourably predisposed towards illustrations of Mughalsubjects. Nevertheless, folk tales of Punjab, which were popular themesfor painters, continued to stimulate Sharifs imagination.

However, most coffee-table books on Pakistani art history thatreproduce his paintings as illustrations of a traditional art form do notlocate them historically along the axis of time and often omit dates.Time as a measure of the moment does not seem to have any bearingon a traditional artist who, to use John Fabians concept, existed onlyin Typological Time, divested of its vectoral, physical connotations.30

It is by utilising a temporal metaphor of tradition existing in an-Other

time that Indian manuscript paintings produced by Sharif in the presentare systematically excluded from membership of the category ofmodern art. The construction of Indian manuscript painting as existingin an-Other time renders it susceptible to the full import of the concept oftradition in contrast to modernity, divesting it of the association withwriting and future orientation inherent in the latter.

Western modes of connoisseurship, inherited by Pakistani art histor-ians and art critics, locate the tradition of manuscript painting on theevolutionary map as art/craft of the premodern period tied to royalpatronage in a feudal society. The oral transmission of visual, tactileand empirical information in Indian manuscript painting from Ustad to

Shagird, and reproduction through copying from archetypal examplesof the past were construed to be the distinguishing features of premodernforms of knowledge or part of the decadent traditions of India. As theconcept of tradition was interrogated in national art history for itsassociation with the feudal past and primitive forms of knowledge, theworkshop/studio practice of copying was singled out to illustrate thereductive nature of traditional modes of knowledge transmission in anenervated culture. In the contemporary re-evaluation of traditional artin Pakistan, the workshop practice of copying is held singularly respon-sible for the preparation of repetitive old forms and for suppressing theagency of artists in the creation of art, rendering them anonymous.

In this context, Sharif and his successor at the NCA, Sheikh Shujaul-

lah, who had earlier taught at the Punjab University, Lahore, have beenroutinely rebuked for being essentially copyists by almost all leadingPakistani art critics, without, however, an adequate analysis of eitherthe copying process or their paintings.31 American art historian MarcellaSirhandi, who did pioneering work on Chughtai, offers a half-pageaccount of Sharif in her book Contemporary Paintings from Pakistan,reproducing in colour two of his historical portrait paintings (of GuruGobind Singh, the last Guru of the Sikhs who created the Khalsa, the mili-tant brotherhood of Sikhs, and Bhadur Shah Zafar, the last emperor ofthe Mughal Empire who died in British incarceration in Rangoon) witha note that like many of Hajis paintings, the former is a copy of an

588

30. Johannes Fabian, Time andthe Other: HowAnthropology Makes ItsObject, ColumbiaUniversity Press, NewYork, 1983

31. As an indicator of theirmarginality, SheikhShujaullah is rarely cited inart historical publicationson Pakistan.


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original (which is never cited).32 The most unsympathetic dismissalcomes from a young evangelical curator of Pakistani contemporarymanuscript paintings, Hammad Nasar of the Green Cardamom artsorganisation, in the catalogue of a Pakistani art exhibition in India,Beyond Borders, where he notes with pronounced disdain that, alongwith his successor Sheikh Shujaullah, Sharif:

. . . formed a cryogenic chamber, where the essence of miniature paintingwas frozen: to be retrieved by a later generation and giving time for artisticimagination and pedagogic attribution to catch up.33

British curator Timothy Wilcox offers a more dramatic description ofthe deconstructive gesture of contemporary miniature painters, whilereading the faith in the copy as the defining feature of traditional artpractice that restricts individual creativity, originality and the evolutionof a personal style.

Until recently, it was the subjects and images of miniature painting thatprovided an important stimulus; the cherished techniques, preserved

through the execution of copies, exhibiting an almost obsessive craftsman-ship, seemed the epitome of antiquarianism. Then came Shahzia Sikanderand The Scroll. The work is a kind of visual diary, a painted autobiography,set in modern Lahore: the very shape of it proclaims that the medium is inno way limiting but offers unique possibilities of self-definition. No longerconcerned with the distant past, the work is both present and personal.34

At the same time, for critics and art historians Sikanders attempt to expressmodern and very personal themes in a preserved antiquarian art formderives its legitimacy through her very rigorous and traditional trainingunder an apprenticeship system by a traditional Ustad whose teacherswere the last of a line of traditional painters going back to the well-springs of Mughal painting.35 The appreciation of her work is coded in

a language that is sustained through a myth of authenticity attributedto traditional manuscript painting as a prized imperial art form as wellher acquiredassociation with an unbroken chain of hereditary transmit-ters of painting skills and techniques from the Mughal royal ateliers. Bythe same token, Sharif, the grand Ustad of Sikander, is referred to in thecatalogue of the 125th anniversary exhibition at the NCA Zahoor ulAklaq Gallery as having descended directly from a line of court paintersin Patiala. By assuming the continuity of traditions holding the timelesssecrets of an original technique the myth of authenticity is sustained.36

The reinvention of miniature painting is made possible through the re-creation of a traditional art practice in which the workshop practice ofcopying became synonymous with the traditional method whose excessiveconcern with the past blocked the possibilities of self-expression. Anontology of unbroken continuity of tradition through copying had to bepresumed before the modernity of Sikanders work could be establishedthrough innovation and change.37

MINIATURE PAINTING IN PAKISTAN AS KITSCH:SHAHZIA SIKANDERS INNOVATION

In marking the cultural space for a traditional form of painting,Pakistani artist Sikander, who is best known for her innovative style

589

32. Marcella Sirhandi,Contemporary Painting inPakistan, Ferozsons,Lahore, 1992, p 23

33. Beyond Borders: Art fromPakistan, National Galleryof Modern Art, Mumbai,2005

34. Timothy Wilcox, Pakistan:Another Vision: Fifty Yearsof Painting and Sculpturefrom Pakistan, exhibitioncatalogue, PNCA,Islamabad, 2000

35. Apollinaire Scherr, Smallwonders: miniaturepaintings with big ideasabout gender andtradition, Elle 194,October 2001

36. Celebration Folio, NCA125th AnniversaryExhibition, NCA Gallery,2000

37. At a geo-political level,Shahzia Sikandersreception in themetropolitan artworld ismediated through arepresentational index thataims to salvage non-Western identities from theone-dimensional view ofthe Other. The hybridity ofartwork produced by theartists, which is partlyextended by his or herlocation in the West, israrely theorised.


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in modern miniatures, deplores the debasement of miniature paintingas kitsch in Pakistan.38 She observes that the images taken from theMughal school were abundant on gifts items everywhere, saturatingthe tourist market.39 She specifically mentions miniature paintingreproduced on calendars for mass consumption. While kitsch inWestern art history has negative connotations and refers to cheap paint-

ings that are found in suburban shops and working-class homes, minia-ture painting was never industrially mass produced, nor has it the folkbase to become kitsch in Pakistan. Although in the early decades ofthe twentieth century miniature painting enjoyed brief spells of individ-ual patronage from collectors and connoisseurs, including high-profilebureaucrats, industrialists and foreign dignitaries, traditional Indianpainting was condemned by the countrys progressive artists as theremnants of a decadent and feudal past. To cite an example, Sharifspaintings were reproduced on a calendar, perhaps once in his lifetime,in the 1960s by a leading industrial group in Lahore whose owner,Syed Babar Ali, was a highly acclaimed patron of arts and incidentallythe largest collector of paintings by the artist in Pakistan. After a span

of forty years, Merck Marker, an international pharmaceuticalcompany, chose three traditional miniature artists for its calendartheme of 2008; like its predecessor, it was only circulated among thenational elite and foreign dignitaries. Do the images, reproduced on acouple of calendars forty years apart as examples of royal art of theIslamic Mughal dynasty in India, qualify Indian painting to be con-sidered as excessively kitsch in Pakistan?

There are more historical and cultural reasons for contesting the appli-cation of kitsch to Indian manuscript painting in Pakistan. India fullyexploited the symbolic capital of traditional Indian paintings by officiallymass producing, under artisanal workshops, the traditional Mughal,

Rajasthani and Pahari styles. By extending patronage to a large numberof hereditary artists and artisans in Rajasthan and Himachal Pradesh,among numerous other centres of art/craft productions, India has ren-dered traditional Indian painting as kitsch (what Virginia Whiles hascalled curio-miniatures).40 The National Handicrafts and HandloomsMuseum or Crafts Museum Delhi patronised a wide range of Indiancrafts for mass production and export, including miniature paintings.Unlike India, where artisanal artist communities in the Himalayanregions and Rajasthan practise miniature painting in villages, Pakistanhad no comparable folk base. As a result, miniature painting, thoughconsidered one of the traditional arts of Pakistan, does not figure promi-nently in Lok Virsa (Heritage) Museum, a counterpart to the Crafts

Museum Delhi managed by the National Institute of Folk and TraditionalHeritage in Pakistan. Without a strong folk/artisanal base in the region,its patronage remained confined to individual itinerant artists who hadleft their ancestral homes to come to urban centres such as Lahore insearch of better opportunities. There was once a large number of familiesof artists in Lahore who adhered to regional styles in Indian painting andcould claim direct descent from the Mughal artists of Akbars ateliers,such as the Chughtai family or the Murtanawala family, as late as thetwentieth century. Owing to increasing social mobility, education andcommerce and the influx of cheaper technologies of reproduction andprint, they discontinued their hereditary practices and graduated to

590

38. Shahzia Sikander receivedher training in miniaturepainting from the NCA and

later studied at RhodeIsland School of Design.For her biographicaldetails, see http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/sikander/.

39. Order, Desire, Light: AnExhibition ofContemporary Drawings,Irish Museum of ModernArt, Dublin, 25 July19October 2008

40. Whiles, op cit


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other styles or moved into professions sometimes not related to what isconsidered traditional art practice.

THE ORIGINAL AS COPY: CREATIVE PROCESS ININDIAN PAINTING

While reflecting on the copying process in Indian manuscript painting, itmay be instructive to apply the distinctions made by Vishakha Desaibetween two types of copying practices, which are generally conflatedby art historians and curators in their condemnation of the copyingmethods in Indian painting. She argues that a process of copying by repli-cation of the original arose in nineteenth-century India to meet thedemands of art dealers and British collectors for authentic copies ofseventeenth-century Mughal originals, and should be distinguishedfrom another type of copying method integral to the manuscript paintingpractice. The latter model of copying, glossed over in Indian art history, isachieved by emulating an archetype or model following faithfully icono-

graphic conventions and formal compositions while updating the pictor-ial details of the painting. This method becomes significant in the contextof a literate viewing public that could read the painting like a book bydrawing on conventional motifs in manuscript paintings as culturallyshared codes from which meaning is produced.41

Despite the fact that they have always been lumped together as twinfathers of modern miniatures from Pakistan, Desais distinction allows usto understand the different historical trajectories of modern masters ofIndian manuscript painting at the NCA. One can begin to conjecture theways in which the two Ustads have led very different lives and brought adifferent sets of approaches to the teaching of miniature painting to the

Fine Arts departments at the NCA and Punjab University. Sharif, whosefamily had found employment at the court of Patiala in the eighteenthcentury and worked on royal commissions by drawing on ancestralexamples of archetypes for a literate audience familiar with the icono-graphy of their paintings, was closer to following the Indian method ofcopying as described by Desai. In contrast, Sheikh Shujaullah came of alineage of manuscript painters who had gradually been forced to cometo terms with the loss of sustained feudal patronage and a dwindlinglivelihood due to the rise of mechanical processes of book and pictureproduction worked in an Orientalist fashion. Surviving as itinerant com-mercial artists in Lahore and Delhi, in a bid to survive in the changingtimes they had adapted to making portraits by copying from photographs

for a largely European clientele and thereby re-learning their role ascopyists. The documentary evidence from a family member of Sheikh Shu-jaullah, Shakir Ahmad Khan, studied by Virginia Whiles in her pioneeringstudy of contemporary miniatures, primarily illustrates how the practice ofcopying arose in response to demands for representation in traditionalstyles in the nineteenth century.42 Furthermore, the emphasis on copyingfrom photocopies of images from art books that gained ground at theNCA under Bashir Ahmad, which modern artists saw as a sign of a deca-dent tradition, was not the product of the age-old method of copying inthe Indian manuscript tradition but arose in response to a very differentset of conditions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

591

41. Vishakha N DesaiReflections of Indias Pastin the Present: CopyingProcesses in IndianPainting, in Asher andMetcalf, op cit, pp 135148

42. An example from ShakirKhans press book was a

letter of recommendationsent by G Bourne in 1860which described one of hisforefathers as a picturepainter who does veryclever copies fromphotographs. Anotherdocument is a commissionto his grandfather for twoivory miniatures from thetwo photographs enclosed.Whiles, op cit. See alsoNCAA Box File no 302-F,Personal File of SheikhShujaullah (1966-1979).


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The canonical art historical model, in which the teleological progresstowards mimesis relies on artistic agency, overlooks the material aspectsof court production, be it Mughal or Rajput-Pahari. In most cases paint-ings were not signed, and copying was a cultural practice; generic conven-tions often transcended personal styles, adding weight to the view thattraditional artists had no agency in the creation of art. Given the strength

of the disciplinary framework, even a highly accomplished Mughal arthistorian like John Seyeller finds it difficult to construct an art historyof the artist as a creative individual. He identified Mughal Karkhana(court painting workshops), for instance, as a site of hegemonic imperialideology that left little scope for an individual artist to develop his ownvisual ideals or habits.

Although a full treatment of the workshop practice of copying inIndian manuscript painting is beyond the scope of this article, a briefreference to a historical study of Indian manuscript paintings that seeksto address the copying process in its own right can lead us to furtherexploration of the cultural context of what is constituted as traditionalin Indian art history. References to the unimaginative adherence to

formulaic compositions and a repudiation of past conventions intraditional miniature paintings both serve a devolutionary model ofart history which is communicated through language in which thepassive voice predominates, so that artists productive contributions aresuppressed.

While the workshop practice of copying is generally regarded as astimulus for seeking the original or serves as the justification for a nega-tive valuation of traditional miniature painting, several recent studieshave addressed copying in its own right. Drawing on semiotic approachesto painting, Debra Diamond has read conventional motifs in Rajputpaintings as culturally shared codes from which meaning is produced.43

Rather than considering copying as a mindless expedience by relating itto the perpetuation of tradition, she reads copying as a process of citationand active interpretation and artists as active interpreters of the imagesource. This is achieved by closely analysing the process of copyingwhich obliges an artist to act on the image source, by first selecting itfrom the pool of signs, and then tracing it wholly or partially onto anew sheet of paper. In doing this the artist reuses the sign as a commen-tary on the source of previous meaning. In this account of court paintingfrom Rajasthan, the historical viewer is a literate courtier who interpretsthe motifs as signs in reference to their visual source, as well as to thecontext in which they appear. Thus Diamond argues that a portrait ofa king derives its semantic authority not only through awareness of the

Kings power in the world, or through an active appreciation of the paint-ings formal qualities, but through indexical and iconic referencing toother paintings. Courtier or historical viewer may have understoodcited motifs and almost identical paintings as semantically texturedrather than tediously repetitive. By offering a pleasure similar to the plea-sure of tracing a poetic metaphor through its appearances in various textsthe citation and recontextualisation of a canonical image in a paintingwould have motivated literate viewers to follow a chain of associations.

Art historians and artists from Pakistan continue to frame traditionalart practice as a constrained operation that suppresses individual creativ-ity, evolution of style, artistic growth and personal volition, restricting the

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43. See Debra Diamond, ThePolitics and Aesthetics ofCitation Nath Painting in

Jodhpur, 18031843(India), doctoraldissertation, ColumbiaUniversity, 2002.


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artists to a slavish submission to the aesthetic demands of the patron orthe visual conventions of the past. The past appears to be part of acultural straitjacket that has to be abandoned in order for the modernartist to proclaim his/her individuality and originality. The limitingview of tradition is not restricted to a place but is projected onto entirecultures, religions and geographies. Therefore Islamic artists from Iran

and Central Asia are perceived to be tied up with a tradition as muchas the artists who subscribe to the tradition in South Asia, both Muslimand non-Muslim, are restricted by it. It is only by side-stepping the cano-nical model of history that frames the contours of a national tradition thatwe can begin to understand the discursive nature of traditions inventedand reinvented long before the present generation of miniature paintersfrom the NCA began to deconstruct the genre through their post-modernist renderings in the age of global capitalism.44

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44. Homi Bhabha(interviewer), Alter/Native Modernities Miniaturizing Modernity:Shahzia Sikander inConversation with HomiBhabha, Public Culture:Bulletin of the Project forTransnational CulturalStudies, vol 11, no 1, 1999,pp 146152

framings of a national tradition:modern masters and national art history in pakistan

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