The Gulammohammed Sheikh Interview: Portrait of An Artist

Nawaid Anjum: Your 1970 photograph of Fatehpur Sikri, along with Mohamedi’s, provided the framework and the curatorial premise to Gallery Ark’s show, “In The Light Of”. Could you elaborate on the story behind these images in the light of your friendship with Mohamedi, whose work — which is all about absence, inwardness, silence and shadows — has evoked global interest and attention over the last decade? Do you see photography as an essential part of her distinctive aesthetic approach and artistic evolution, and as an art form that illuminates the principles at the heart of her paintings?

Gulammohammed Sheikh: The story of the Fatehpur Sikri photographs is plain and simple. We (Nilima, then Dhanda, Purushottam Dhumal, Nasreen Mohamedi and I) were in Fatehpur Sikri on a Sunday in the summer of 1970 as tourists. It was a day off from the Smithsonian Workshop on printmaking organised by the United States Information Service in which Nasreen, Dhumal and I were participating. I carried my Asahi Pentax K2 loaded with a Kodachrome roll but also carried a bxw Kodak (or Ilford) roll; Nasreen had her Nikormat, and Dhumal his Minolta. We all went our own ways photographing the architecture and the surrounding environment for an hour or two. If you look at my photographs closely you may find shadows falling exactly below the surface of each object or building denoting it was mid-day. I took a number of photographs from the 36 exposures that each roll provides. So, it was nothing unusual if two artists were to find themselves near the same spot a couple of times during a circuit of six dozen shots. It can however be seen that our approaches were quite different. Nasreen, with her minimal aesthetic, was interested in the bare form of a floor or detail of a corner. I was on the contrary more interested in the entire architectural environment as a whole. Nasreen’s was an a-historical view whereas the historical is part of my make-up.

Nasreen’s photographs were printed and exhibited all over, while I printed mine decades later. There was a little similarity between two or three snapshots which I shared with Shanay Jhaveri who was part of the curatorial team of the Nasreen Mohamedi show at the Met Bruer, New York (after the retrospective at Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid). The Guild in Mumbai made a portfolio of ten of my Fatehpur Sikri prints which triggered the imagination of Gitanjali Dang to conceive the exhibition. 

I had not felt the need to write on Nasreen’s work or photographs, since they had been written about in her catalogues and elsewhere, including by well-known critics like Geeta Kapur.

It would be relevant to note here that it was quite common for artists in Baroda (and elsewhere?) to own cameras and experiment with creative photography. It was part of the Graphic Arts discipline taught at the Faculty of Fine Arts where I taught art history. In fact a group of us Baroda artist-teachers: Jyoti Bhatt, Jeram Patel, Vinod Ray Patel, Feroz Katpitia, Vinod S. Patel and I, besides Narendra Mehta  who taught photography at the Graphic Arts Department, exhibited our photographs as art works under the title of Painters with a Camera (Jehangir Art Gallery, Bombay,1968).

Nawaid Anjum: As a painter-poet-pedagogue and an art historian, you have seamlessly transitioned between two worlds: the world of canvas and colours, and the world of words. How do you approach both these processes? What determines your choice of form? If painting allows you to look at life through art and look upon it as a catalyst to create concepts for living, what do writing poetry and prose offer? Can writing be as rigorous or as cathartic as bringing a painting into being?

Gulammohammed Sheikh: The practice of all art forms does serve the purpose of offering ways of living. Writing, too, brings the world into being as does painting, but perhaps different in the way that it is articulated. The practice of art emanates from complex inner callings, hence they are not necessarily cathartic, unless of course if such a need arises. The world of paint and the world of words are not necessarily antagonistic either (as is firmly established by the traditions of Indian painting) yet each chart simultaneously, parallel or conversely, independent paths. Despite the differences of form, paint and words can embrace a common content but the substance of the content gets invariably transformed in these different forms. In my case, the paintings of a lone horse in a desolate ‘landscape’ in my early  years (1960-63) carry an intensity to unravel unknown fonts of desire as do the poems of the same period burning with angst and ennui. A seminal painting of the late sixties ‘Returning Home after Long Absence’ (1969-73) deals with multiple and diverse imagery born of different sources. And the series of autobiographical writings in Gujarati Gher Jataan (‘Returning Home’) from 1969 onwards also deals with multiple genres of an essay, a narrative or a poetic meandering. I wrote earlier about the choices: ‘The world as it came to me, almost invariably manifold, plural or at least dual in form. In art, painting came in the company of poetry and images from life lived, from other times, from paintings, sometimes from literature, and often from nowhere, emerging together through scribbled drawings and words. The multiplicity and simultaneity of these worlds filled me with a sense of being part of them all’.  — (‘Among Many Cultures and Times’, in Carla Borden, Smithsonian...). 

Nawaid Anjum: The firmament of modern Indian art is studded with the likes of Bhupen Khakhar, Gieve Patel, Jogen Chowdhury, Nalini Malani, Nilima Sheikh, Sudhir Patwardhan, Vivan Sundaram, Ebrahim Alkazi, VS Gaitonde, K. G. Subramanyan, FN Souza, SH Raza, Jeram Patel, Krishen Khanna, and MF Husain et al. Having emerged on the art scene after Independence, they shaped the 20th century art in the post-colonial India in their own ways. Do you see yourself as a product of your time and your initial works as responding mostly to the Progressive Artists in Bombay, like Husain and Souza, with whom you had close associations?

Gulammohammed Sheikh: Each of these artists dealt with figuration differently. A majority of them remained within the orbit of ‘International Modern’ in comparison to our generation (especially Bhupen, Gieve, Sudhir, Nalini, Vivan, Arpita, Jogen, later Nilima) charted a path quite different by drawing upon contemporary realities of the times and places in which we lived. I have said elsewhere: We were all trained in the international modernisms of Cubist, Expressionist or Abstractionist modes practiced by the artists of the previous generation (i.e., the Progressive Artists) you have cited. Our own generation, including the artists of the Group 1890 (formed in 1962) that I was a part of, also began their careers with one or the other kind of these modernist options...We wished to disinherit those tried options and the binaries we were saddled with, because our concerns and orientations were quite different. It was a question of finding an alternative visual language,....My interest was to cull useful devices from diverse traditions,  from the Sienese to the Mughal, to render contemporary realities including current politics into a viable pictorial alternative. We consciously aimed at art foregrounding the human image without any sense of hesitation or guilt of it being dubbed 'illustrative'. Yes, it was a chosen form of the hybrid to stand against notions of purity, and seek a divorce from the dilemma of belonging to either the 'modern' or 'traditional'.  (Interview with E.V. Ramakrishnan, Frontline, July 2, 2021)

Nawaid Anjum: You spent your formative years in Surendranagar, a place that you have held onto as a talisman of belonging, as Sambrani writes in At Home in the World. As the place of your family origins, it forms an inseparable part of your character because it was here that you discovered the joys of friendship across faiths, a passion for poetry and art, and an abiding sense of being part of a multi-form culture. Could you talk about your cultural, linguistic, literary, religious, mystical and artistic encounters in Surendranagar that shaped your sensibility?

Gulammohammed Sheikh: I recall that the childhood I spent in Kathiawad was full of stories of different kinds. Many were related to belief systems. Most children learnt their beliefs at home, but we rarely talked about these to each other. We knew little about others’ beliefs, thus losing out on seeing ours from others’ perspectives. The non-sectarian educational system of the Nehruvian era was designed to exclude reference to religious practices. Our information or understanding of others’ beliefs was derived from observing public functions and festivities, often from a safe distance, so we cooked up stories about each other. Yet there existed a kind of mutual respect for each other’s beliefs despite the distance. This view grew out of the common belief about the presence of the ‘sacred’ in certain sites and practices. It was not unusual for a Hindu crowd to stop near a mazaar (mausoleum) of a saint, even if it was a religious procession, stop the bands, pass quietly and then restart. The marriage procession would do the same. In the Geban Shah Pir dargah (shrine) in Wadhwan I saw many families, not just Muslims, who came there to pay homage to the saint or have their children pass under the hollow of a tree near the shrine to get the blessings of the Pir. Or they tied a little doll-like figure at the shrine. There are many places where such practices are observed. Similarly among the Muslims there were practices which clearly referred to other belief systems. There was a Muslim singer called Abhram Bhagat who sang bhajans (devotional songs), mostly religious, mostly Hindu. In those days one could hear his voice everywhere: at public functions, in restaurants and even in cinema halls! Nearer home, I would notice practices within my own family which today would be branded un-Islamic. In other words, following multiple belief systems was a part of popular culture.

For me, to opt for Sanskrit as a second language (the option of Persian had been discontinued) at school was an opportunity to learn about scriptures and literatures of non-Islamic origin. Writing poetry in my mother tongue Gujarati added to that. In this way I became more familiar with belief systems other than the one into which I was born. There was no possibility of learning Arabic: one only learnt to recite the Qur’an from the madrasa (religious school) without understanding a word. (From Kaavad; Home, Travelling Shrine: Home, 2008)

Nawaid Anjum: What impact did growing up in small spaces in a squalid neighbourhood of a ghettoized community have on your understanding of space — physical, psychological and political? There were some physical locations — like the window of the street-facing room in which you would read and paint as an adolescent; the wall separating your neighbourhood from the cotton mill, and the mosque which would blare out the sounds of azaan that seem to have strong bearing on your consciousness. The wall became an important feature in your early narrative-figurative paintings, as well as a recurring symbolic and geographical motif in your later work. The images of the mosque, transmuted from physical location to symbolic marker and as a site of reverie and magic, and that of an adolescent boy at a window or doorway looking out on to the street, figure significantly in your work such as Speaking Street (1981). Do you see the window/street, the wall, the mosque and the nearby abattoir as part of your psyche, linked to your early sensory experience of the place?

Gulammohammed Sheikh: Yes, these images of the childhood and early youth became part of my living, artistic and literary world, hence they emerged in my paintings and writings in the course of time. Speaking Street in a way refers to the environment in which I grew up, a small town Surendranagar in Kathiawar, Gujarat. It shows a small narrow street with a mosque in the middle. The mosque has does not have the usual dome or large minarets, it is like a large domestic building with a red roof. The external sign of it being a mosque are two small minarets at the entrance. The stories are set inside and outside the mosque. Inside, some pray and outside, women sell fish to stray customers, there are vignettes of violence, of conjugal love: all kinds of situations simultaneously portrayed. On top, you have the street opening up further into the town. And there is a ground where there is, what shall I say, a tiny instance with two angels around which runs a little story. It is about a saying I heard when I was a child. The story went that angels do not cast shadows and that only dogs can see them. So you see dogs barking at three figures with wings but without shadows, picking up the figure of a man casting shadows. That kind of a story which was very personal but had certain relevance in the context of the ambience portrayed.

It is set in very warm colours, my Sienese connection: the deeply saturated greens I have admired in Sassetta’s works. But here, the effect of colour is meant to be thermal, something you feel at different levels of temperature. So in that sense, colour is not only part of a spectrum, it is seen in terms of touch, by feeling it. And that experience corresponds to sense of colour born out of living in the changing climatic conditions of India. (Interview with Suman Gopinath, exhibition catalogue, Horn Please, Bern, 2007)

Nawaid Anjum: Having been introduced to Gujarati-style water colours in Surendranagar by your middle-school art teacher Tuljashankar Trivedi, you continued with the ‘Gujarati’ idiom of stylised naturalism with romanticised Kathiawadi subject matter for a couple of years, but soon gravitated towards an expressionist figuration modelled after the Progressive who rebelled against the nostalgia of the older artists. Do you think your transition from a revivalist idiom towards a rigorous modernism was in keeping with your interests in literature and poetry?

Gulammohammed Sheikh: The change did not take place over night. What I initially had learnt from school became gradually redundant once I stepped out of my hometown and after being exposed to great works of art of the world through reproductions in Baroda. What I encountered in the courses of both pre-modern and modern art history at the college of Fine Arts was supplemented by one of the finest libraries of art therein. Annual study tours made it possible to come face to face with the incredible variety of art and architecture of our country. Also, watching our teachers and senior co-students at work was equally inspiring. The students of my generation were encouraged  to ‘experiment’ to evolve an independent idiom from international ‘modern’  as well as Indian resources circulating in the world of art. I do not know if those early years of education can be described as a period of rebelling against older modes of work because our education placed equal emphasis on historical and contemporary forms of art. Yes, the example of Progressive Artists was there but our own teachers were no less modern in their work and ideas. 

Similarly, exposure to world poetry (Federico García Lorca, Charles Baudelaire, Rainer Maria Rilke, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, etc) came to me with my literary mentor Suresh Joshi who was instrumental in opening multiple directions of exploration. Diving into the free-verse form by dropping poetic meters ran parallel to a quest for a personal idiom in painting.

Baroda was a second birth. Immersed/subsumed in the practice of art, day and night, my whole outlook to life changed. This was made possible by being on the campus of the Fine Arts college in the company of like-minded artists. We were all charged by an energy that made it possible to ‘live’ art. Whatever techniques or forms with which we experimented were part of a struggle to evolve a personal idiom or to follow the inner stirrings of one’s being.

Nawaid Anjum: The 70 odd paintings you finished between 1960 and 1963, the period during which you had your three solo shows in Mumbai and Delhi, featured faceless figures in a state of contemplation and the recurring motif of the horse, that are sometimes shown to be hitched to a tonga (horse-cart), caught in a desolate landscape, characterised by distant cityscapes rising like jagged hills on a far horizon, or parched, leafless tree forms. The palette in these paintings is dominated by tones of grey, black, white and brown, with occasional outbursts of earthy yellows, burnt oranges and sombre reds. The surface is built up in a thick impasto applied with brushes, fingers and knives. The improvised painting medium combines double-boiled linseed oil, wax, animal fat and industrial adhesives with powdered pigments sourced from hardware stores. How do you look at the choice of motif, technique and medium in these paintings in retrospect? Do you think they symbolise your conscious choice to chart your own path distinct from your contemporaries like Tyeb Mehta or Husain? Do you see them as investigations into the subliminal reaches of human existence?

Gulammohammed Sheikh: By describing well and in detail the works of those early years you have somewhat answered the question as well. Of course, it was a struggle to find my own path seeking to locate an inner self through these experiments, as I have answered in the previous questions. I do not know if I was conscious of ‘the subliminal reaches of human existence’ you have cited, but would now find it an interesting interpretation. I was trying to chart my own path, not necessarily in opposition to what Tyeb and Husain were engaged in. On the contrary, Husain’s work served as an initial anchor in my emotionally motivated explorations even if in the end, I found my ‘horse’ harnessed to a tonga in a local, albeit personal context, in comparison to his ‘timeless’ horses. 

Let me, however, reiterate that our generation of artists was using the linguistic norms inherited from the previous generation; but our ideas during the forming of the Group 1890 (around 1962) were ahead of our actual work, which got realised over the years after the dispersal of the Group.

Nawaid Anjum: Your years in London to study at the Royal College of Art between 1963 and 1966 and your extensive travel to Europe during these years had a significant impact on your trajectory as an artist. The swinging Sixties of London were marked by new developments in architecture, music, design and popular culture. Your stay brought you closer to Rajasthani and Mughal paintings, the works of Indian art displayed in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum as well as the European art of the early Renaissance. How did these as well as the painting scene in London at the time, dominated by developments in pop, geometric abstraction and Minimalism, affect your artistic vision? How was this phase crucial in accentuating your artistic preoccupation of making connections across time and space and reinforcing your desire to embrace diverse aspects of world art, the art of synthesis that became an important aspect of your artistic practice?

Gulammohammed Sheikh: I left for an England going through the last lap of the Pop and the heyday of the Minimal at the Royal College of Art in London, the nerve center of the avant-garde in the early- and mid-1960s in England. Much as I remained somewhat unconvinced, of the current trends, I tried both prevalent modes and effects (complete with photographic collage and color-stripes with masking tape, etc.) to get them out of my system and mixed them with the expressionist simulation of paint I was familiar with. This was my first — albeit unconscious and unsuccessful — attempt to play with multiple imagery and form.  (Among Several Cultures and Times, Contemporary Indian Tradition, Carla Borden (ed), Smithsonian, 1989). 

It became all the more clear to me — something I had always sensed that it is in traditional painting, both European and Indian, that I would find the richness and complexity I was looking for. I now travelled extensively to see these originals, both in India and abroad. I realised that this world of painting offers wider choices than the limited prescriptions I had been fed with. It opened a new dimension for looking at life. And my road, my journey, has been through art towards life. (Through Art to Life/Gieve Patel talks to Gulammohammed Sheikh, supplementary text to the catalogue of the exhibition Returning Home, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1985)

Nawaid Anjum: The violent and widespread riots in 1969 in Gujarat, including in Ahmedabad and Baroda, and the subsequent systemic discrimination against Muslim, including in academic circles, deeply affected your consciousness and left you scarred in some sense. What change did the 1969 riots, and later, the communal conflagrations of 1992 and 2002, bring about in your artistic consciousness? Did 1969 mark the shift from the numinous to the narrative on your canvas and propel you to respond to contemporary realities in your work? Has communalisation and polarisation altered your sense of home and belonging? Do you think it’s these convulsions that rekindled your interest in cross-cultural syncretism in Indian (and other) traditions and your enthusiasm for cultural interface has led to a series of engineered collisions between the familiar and the foreign, across temporal and spatial dimensions featuring figures from history like Kabir and Gandhi in your recent works? Is this also a process that lets you make history relevant to the present?

Gulammohammed Sheikh: You have asked a number of questions framed into one and I could give you a simple answer like “yes” because I have answered them all in earlier published interviews and writings over the years. But let me try with examples of paintings.

Yes, communal polarisation came as jolt in 1969 after having been brought up on Nehruvian syncretism: it also gave a political edge to a deeper involvement in the ‘historical’ in my work and ideas. ‘Man I’ was allegorical, but ‘Man II’ was clearly political; ‘Road Two’ referred to war in Vietnam; ‘Speechless City’ to Emergency and ‘City for Sale’ (1981-84) dealt directly with the communal conflagration. These concerns, however, did not eclipse my interest in other issues and I simultaneously explored other avenues during the period: ‘About Waiting and Wandering’ (1981) dealt with multiple narratives on a single plane, ‘Speaking Street’ (1981) and ‘Revolving Routes’ (1981) were autobiographical and in a sense confessional. The series of ‘Kabir’ works were a quest to locate the sense of the spiritual outside the ambit of organised religions. The Gandhi image, often quoted from a painting of Abanindranath Tagore, searched the alternatives to violence, colonialism and communal divides.

Nawaid Anjum: Your marriage with Nilima (1971) proved to be both a personal and professional experience for both of you. Her interest in ornament as narrative strategy stands parallel to your studies in the construction of spatial narrative in Mughal art. In the last fifty decades, how have you both influenced and enriched each other’s artistic approach and practice? How have your collaborations and associations with other fellow artists, like Khakhar, helped in expanding your artistic horizons?

Gulammohammed Sheikh: Nilima and I have lived a life surrounded by paintings that we have loved, shared, enjoyed, savoured from the histories of the arts of the world that  have made our lives worth living. We have done this through traveling to places wherever great art is situated; be it Ajanta, Dun Huang…or to great museums of the world, or through books and reproductions, which we guzzle with great relish. My forays are not limited to Mughal art as is often mistakenly understood. Our interests are in all areas of pictorial manifestations that we find exciting, enticing. Yes, we do share concerns and often use similar resources from our personal archives of reproductions. Yes, I do find it enriching to learn from her explorations. Bhupen was also a kindred soul with whom I shared many a common interest. It was a formative and abiding bond.

Nawaid Anjum: Your collection of poems, Athwa (1974), carries poems of ephemeral images — revolving around self, people and places — in varied registers of dialects. How did these poems, which heralded you as a pioneer of modern Gujarati poetry, come to you? What are the challenges of rendering visual memory into verbal language? How often do you write poetry these days? As a prose writer in Gujarati language, you have captured vignettes of people and places in a series of essays like ‘Returning Home’, ‘The Reminisces of Civitella’ or ‘Pages from a Notebook’. These essays reflect the delicate balance between perception and memory. What has writing these essays revealed to you about the workings of language? Did the literary and art journals, many of which you were a part of, strengthen your relationship with language? Also, has the linguistic understanding of art offered you greater mobility and malleability in the kind of historical interweaving you have always been interested in? Has language made the possibility of transmission and transformation, and the process of ‘borrowings’ and ‘citations’ easier?

Gulammohammed Sheikh: Again, you have asked far too many questions disguised as one and it is not easy to answer them all in a single answer.

Athawa (1974) or its appended version Athawa Ane (2019) carries poems written over several decades beginning from the nineteen fifties. Each phase carries a history, both personal and public which is revealed through terms, words, metaphors and similes used to evoke the sense of time and place. A book is a palimpsest of memories loaded with internal and external stirrings; from the deep urges of an erotic nature in the early poems of my youth, including a cycle of six poems written in the medieval town of Jaisalmer in 1963 (which Vanraj Bhatia set to music in 1977);  political poems on the birth of Bangla Desh in 1971; ‘personal’ poems like Father in Dream (1975) to the three poems written on returning home after the relocation necessitated by the communal conflagration in 2002. The prose  pieces Gher  Jataan (Returning Home) began around 1968 and continued intermittently through five decades in a series of attempts at exploring the idea of ‘home’ through multiple literary genres: some in essay form, others like little narratives digging into family histories or still others like poetic ruminations. 

Writing transports you to encounters lived, imagined, it enables you to conjure or create memories. A word leads into a word, at times melting, at other times begetting another; or leaving you in a wordless world known yet unknown...

In my writing, my imagination is fiercely independent, leaving no room for citations or borrowings; words are not vehicles alone, they are the world they create. They turn into images at times: at others they are totally naked, at times indecipherable, incomprehensible scribbles… you gravitate from your finger tips to traversing the entire world.

Nawaid Anjum: Sambrani writes how just as Jan van Eyck’s eye, in the words of Erwin Panofsky, functioned as ‘a microscope and a telescope at the same time’, your ways of seeing does something similar. The world that you conjure up is always made up of a layering of memory and fantasy, where the experience of travelling through Europe and the Middle East are palimpsested on to the minutiae of your childhood and adolescence in rural Gujarat. The minute examination of the ephemera of everyday life combines with vertiginous dives into art-historical imagery; it has continued to remain a feature of your work, from the mid-1970s to the present. Thus, your work not only narrates the world but, in fact, creates alternative visions of a world that could be, a world waiting to be born, as it were. How conscious are you of the ‘what ifs’ of history when you work on a particular series and of projecting the world on your canvas?

Gulammohammed Sheikh: This view articulated by Chaitanya touches the core of my concerns, yet there is a difference. I would cite the Mughal way of constructing the space of an outdoor scene where vast expanses are drawn with every detail as though it touches what is invisible to the naked eye. It does bring it closer to the idea of a microscope and a telescope at the same time’, but what a Mughal scene does is to go beyond that binary by  lifting up the space by shifting horizons beyond what a naked eye can perceive. This counters the principles behind the idea of linear perspective that Van Eyck was using which remains within the orbit of the naked eye. The Mughal artist goes a step further in including lands known (but not visible to the naked eye) by past experiences to construct a world of the mind. It is not a fantasy but based on human experience. My references are to the latter which enable you to make mindscapes out of 'landscapes' and leave you in an area of freedom which the logic of linear perspective may forbid. The palimpsest becomes more palpable in its various layers when you cross boundaries of the optical vision which the naked eye provides. In that sense, it is a perspective of multiple kinds that interests me.

Nawaid Anjum: In 1996, you embarked on one of the most ambitious projects of your career, the Tree of Life mural, commissioned by Charles Correa at the behest of the MP government, in Bhopal. This was the first time that you worked on a mural of your own design, though you had collaborated with Jyoti Bhatt in 1956 on an unfinished Ramayana mural. It was a collaborative project done in the karkhana style, with Nagji Patel, Ravi Kashyap, Bhupen Khakhar and Nilima Sheikh all contributing to the painting with figures from their own vocabularies. Did the process of working on this resonate with your practice of inclusivity and hospitality? What did you tap in to in order to depict the tree in the mural as a repository of stories and as witness to historical processes?

Gulammohammed Sheikh: To fact correct, I would say it is likely the idea of the mural was mooted by Charles Correa who had designed the Vidhan Bhavan (Legislative Assembly) but it was commissioned by the Madhya Pradesh Government. Nagji Patel helped in technical matters like producing clamps required for the structure and architect Ravi Kashyap served as advisor in the installation of the mural. Yes, ‘it was a collaborative project done in the karkhana style’ as you have put it. Although I went over almost every part prepared by assisting artists — there was an overlap of hands in the process. In fact, each of the individual hands that enlarged the image from the preparatory template or applied base colours left their subtle imprint despite the attempt at reproducing it identically. I invited Bhupen Khakhar to introduce a little old man in a space indicated by me and Nilima worked in tandem with me to formulate stances and postures of a few of the figures.

I had tried my hand at making a 42’ mural with six panels for the Times of India building in New Delhi, but ‘Tree of Life’ at Bhopal was my largest enterprise. 

The tree is a foil for the world inhabited or dreamt about. The arbour as habitat may be a primitive idea (as Italo Calvino conceived it in his mythical tale of ‘Baron in the Trees’), but thinking green is a life-line for the future of mankind. Don’t we see what we have done by denuding the world of its vegetation? In order to populate the tree as a pictorial habitat we took recourse to the fund of history by collecting samplings of life from art, music, architecture… focusing on the region. I sent out one of my assistants to travel in Madhya Pradesh to take photographs of important sites and life in general, while we collected stories past and present from books and other sources. For the political space in which the mural was located, the story from Simhasan Battisi came handy: the thirty two flying images (dolls or putalis in the original story) hovering around the seat of power (shown on top of the entrance) indicates a moral message that those who wish to occupy it must deserve it. Elsewhere sites like the Narmada Dam, Union Carbide were quoted. The project fulfilled my desire to make a mural in a public space inspired by and on the lines of ‘Allegory of Good and Bad Governments’, by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (1337 A.D.) in Siena that I have greatly admired; it also realised my dream of painting a life-size ‘tree’.

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Nawaid Anjum: Between 2015 and 2016, you worked on Ahmedabad: The City Gandhi Left Behind, the black and grey painting in casein on canvas that took the form of another kind of world-picture in which the satellite image of the walled city of Ahmedabad is used to present ruminations on the indelible scars of politically engineered communal violence and the deliberate erasure of the Gandhian creed of ahimsa (non-violence). The ashen expanse is only relieved by the burning rickshaw and silenced laneway of forsaken dwellings in the centre of the painting, and the museumized personal effects of the Mahatma Gandhi along the banks of the Sabarmati. Together with City for Sale (1981-84), it depicts the circularity of sectarian violence that has become commonplace in Gujarat. Do you see the painting making a political statement as Speechless City (1975) did in the wake of Emergency?

Gulammohammed Sheikh: Yes, the work is based on the map of the old city of Ahmedabad accessed through Google Earth, but painted freely with erasures of old structures and additions of new forms. Basically, it is a rumination upon both the idea of a city and its physicality: a part of my engagement with the City for several decades. The city is seen as host to a large and diverse populace and refers to its historical past and its life today. There are image ‘quotations’ from the architecture of the step-wells, iconic mosques and winding streets or ‘pols’ as they are called. It is visualised in ashen grey with the exception of a vehicle in flames taken from a news photograph of the riots of 2002. The figuration is focused on ‘ordinary’ people mostly from the working class, their images overlapped upon architectural units-indicative simultaneously of their being swallowed by the architecture but also be seen as rising from it. At the bottom of the painting, are the four worldly ‘possessions’ that Gandhiji had — his spectacles, his pocket watch, a thali with a bowl and his chappals-scattered around. There are image quotations of Hridaykunj, the place in Sabarmati Ashram where he lived and the Kochrab Ashram building from where the Satyagraha movement for the Independence of the nation began. You are right; it follows Speechless City (1975-77) and City for Sale (1980-83).

Nawaid Anjum: Mappamundi Suite, which deals with various kinds of sacral and secular mapping projects that originate in the borderlands between Asia and Europe, acquires relevance in a world where the discourse around borders never ceases. Do you look at Mappamundi Suite as a series of artistic experiments that skirt around the discovery of nations and the ideas of colonialism, subjecting the originary form of the world map to sustained interrogation? What have you been working on in the last couple of years, especially since the new normal had us all retreat into ourselves?

On uncharted journeys of the mappamundi, the chances are you bump into journeymen of various kinds.  Catalogue, Mappings, Mumbai 2004).

I have made a few water colours during the Covid interregnum and some drawings. An image based on a photograph of a man begging for his life to be spared which I had left unfinished in 2002 was reworked with drawings of the images of migrant workers and the women of Shaheen Bagh. 

Nawaid Anjum: We began the interview with images. To round off this interview, let’s go back to photography and image-making. In your London years, you started using your passion for photography to fuel your painting. Since then, you have often used photographs as a foil for your paintings. What possibilities does your practice of quotation, of reusing images from the canons of various art histories as well as from your own archives and, in recent times, the digitally scanned, printed and collaged images — with the attendant permutations and combinations that images undergo when transferred across media — throw open to you? What do they help you achieve? What role does image play in the construction of identities?

Gulammohammed Sheikh: I like to construct a world with images of maps as I have tried with the Ebstorf Mappamundi. They, in a subliminal way, evoke memories of human and animal footfalls imprinted on the heart of earth and its vast terrains that continued for centuries; these happened through pillage, devastations and slaughter but also of pilgrimage and an intense urge to make journeys. They continue to engage me even now, because by changing their form, especially when you erase borders, you have a chance of reconstructing a world of free passage. The utopia may eclipse the need for maps, but till then you continue to dream of a borderless world.

Let me tell you, photographs have not been mere foils or the Fatehpur Sikri photos are not isolated examples: I used to have (and perhaps still harbor) a passion for photography which I continued for several decades. I do not use photography per se, I make photographic images an artist would. In fact, I am in the process of transferring the hundreds of negatives and slides I have into digital format to be able to build an archive of my journeys through Europe, the Middle East, Mexico and various parts of India. It will be yet another palimpsest of sort. 

Possibilities? Yes, immense possibilities indeed. There is so much to explore. To re-do what has been done earlier, even to repaint pictures of the past, mine and those of others. I have done something of that earlier, but there is more to do. My latest project is to paint a large, wide canvas on the theme of a great migration, on the lines of the mythical Ark.