Gulammohammed Sheikh: 'A Painter Wants To Paint – I Want To Keep That Faith Alive, Hope Alive'

In his working life as an artist for over six decades, Professor Gulammohammed Sheikh, who taught at the Departments of Art History and Painting of the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda for nearly 30 years, has witnessed many changes. None is more marked than the slide into acquiescence with the powers that be that has taken place in recent times, with many artists giving up their role as critical interventionists; a stance that many adopted in the decades leading to independence and in the years that followed.

At Bikaner House, Delhi, where the artist recently held his latest exhibition, Kaarawaan and Other Stories, supported by Vadehra Art Gallery, a monumental painting, mural in scale, yet a portable canvas, greeted the viewers at first sight, with its bold palette of colours. Yet, even from afar, one could see that the work had many details that foreground a dialectical relationship with the history of images. A closer look revealed that this, as well as other works on view, were a reflexive take on artists and artworks that are considered to be pivotal to art history and to Sheikh’s own journey as an artist.

In 1947, on the cusp of independence, one of the artists that Sheikh cites regularly, Benode Behari Mukherjee, took it upon himself to paint the life of the medieval saints, of the Bhakti movement in fresco buono, an Italian technique, using the compositional elements of Chinese scroll paintings and Japanese screens, on the walls of the ‘Hindi Bhavana’ in Santiniketan, Rabindranath Tagore’s pedagogical experiment, where the public was linguistically mainly Bengali. This celebration of dissenters, using a wide variety of citations, is clearly a thread that Sheikh too wishes to foreground.

Besides large paintings on canvas, were other works, fashioned like stand-alone screens, with paintings on both sides. Another set of images referenced Kaavads, the folding portable shrines that were carried by traders from Rajasthan in the not too distant past, on their long journeys across vast territories, as they built their networks of exchange. Produced over a five year period with his assistants in his studio in Vadodara, the artworks on view, while visually sensual, also required an art historical unpacking to get to the depths of their meaning.

While the exhibition was on in Delhi from February 17 to March 12 – it is now showing at Mumbai’s Chemould Prescott Road gallery till May 15, 2024 – Sheikh agreed to artist and academic Shukla Sawant’s request for an interview. Before the interview commenced, Sheikh and Sawant did a walk through the exhibition, during which he introduced her to the various characters inhabiting his paintings. Other than William Kentridge, the South African artist who practises from Johannesburg, all other figures were of artists philosophers and poets of the past. But there are other figures that feature in his large narrative canvases. Often taken from canonical paintings, given a new context through repositioning, in Sheikh’s paintings they tell different stories.  It is an inverted image of the figure of ‘Peace’ from the mural, Allegory of Good and Bad Government, painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti the Sienese painter in the early 14th century that caught Sawant’s eye. Cupping her ear to listen, waiting patiently, ‘Peace’ in Sheikh’s flipped version appears without her metal armour which features in the original painting by Lorenzetti, lying near her feet and beneath her pillow.

The conversation that followed the walkthrough, flowed in many directions. Below is an edited excerpt from the interview:

Shukla Sawant (SS): India has changed a lot since you came of age as an intellectual and as an artist, a journey that  started in the 1950s. The title of your show, Kaarawaan and Other Stories, suggests that you are  in some sense  referring to the journey of life spanning over half a century of art making, made in the age of art history as a university discipline, with artists as your companions in this journey. Can you elaborate?

Gulammohammed Sheikh (GS): There comes a time in your life, when you have passed through hundreds of events in your life journey. How you have negotiated all the changes that have taken place socially, culturally, politically – there is a kind of desire to put it all together. How do you put it together? This is a journey of that kind and I thought I would do a large work. That was about four or five years ago. So, I began to scribble in my sketch book and I made some drawings. Then I thought it would be a horizontal piece, longer and wider, in a kind of a perspective. In both senses, literally and physically,  it would be a piece  that people could view from a distance and also go closer and see it. It had to have  multiple perspectives that would allow many ways of looking. You make drawings, but the drawings have to be translated on to the canvas. You then enlarge the drawings, and find that it works sometimes, but sometimes it doesn’t. So, you change it and start all over again. It is a long haul – a long process. You keep on working and then you find that something is beginning to gel.  Images begin to talk to each other. Then you find that some meaning may emerge out of it

The second issue is a need for assistants when you have a large work. Ever since I did the mural for the Bhopal Assembly (Vidhan Bhavan) in 1996, I have had assistants who work with me whenever I do a large work.  I have several of these boys and girls who come and work for me. They are like my hands while my mind is guiding them. I am constantly keeping a watch on their hands because I want the work to be the way I want. And if it doesn’t work then it has to be done again.

Now, acrylic is a medium that most young artists prefer these days. I used to prefer oil. My Bhopal mural was made in oils. There I had about ten assistants. I have several now. How do you deal with them? You have to enter their mind. When they do things for you, there is no exact replication of what you have asked them to do, because their own mind may intervene in the process. In a sense, it is a dialogue, but in the end, I want to bring the work close to my intentions. Their imagination will remain there in some sort of minor, marginal form. But I will be thereas a signature artist with my signature, my makeup, my figures, my composition, my space.

SS: My question was about art history and your relationship to it,your citation of portraits of painters aswell as fragments of artworks. Also, many of these people are not from your time span. They are historical figures, but  you have also included  your own contemporaries. Kaarawaan would mean a journey through a long span of time in the companionship of these artists.

GS: I have always said that we live in multiple times and cultures. We don’t just belong to this moment, this place. Your mind travels and even just now while we are talking, my mind may wander somewhere and come back. I have said that before when we travel in  this country, we experience people living in different times. Go to Udaipur and you are in 17th century Rajasthan, feudal times; go to the Sangam period Chola temples and you find you are transported there. All kinds of times are available, visible. They belong to us and are part of our being. So, it is not as if there is one singular time. If you want you can access different times. Your imagination allows you to enter into different periods of time.

For me art history has also been a journey into the past and the present. Going back and forth. As a practicing artist I was teaching in the morning and painting in the evening. Teaching art history meant teaching Indian Art, Chinese art, Western Art, besides aesthetics, critical writing, etc. At one point of time, I had 21 classes in a single week! I have done that for a number of years, but never regretted that. They gave me so much sustenance.

In the evening when I returned home, back to my canvas, I would continue working at night. I have no problem working in the day light or with artificial light. In actual fact, we live our life in both natural and artificial light. What matters is the image you construe. How do you construe an image, where does it come from? You switch off art history and then allow your mind to roam as you paint.

SS: There are references to events, some very disturbing, that have marked our times. Many of them would have entered this very space of your studio through television and so we see references to the migrants and their distress during the Covid pandemic, the CAA protests as well as  a  reference to what is happening in Gaza. The ruined cities of Gaza.

GS: All these have remained constant in my work right from  the 1970s, from the time I learnt that politics is part of our life. We as artists are not jumping into the fray of politics but we must have a sense of politics and sense of history.  ‘Speechless City’ (1975-77) was about the Emergency. ‘City for Sale’ (1981-1984) was about the communal conflagration in Gujarat where I was living. So it is not unusual for me to respond  to what is going on in Gaza or in Ukraine,  or when the migrants are travelling on foot for thousands of miles, or even to memories. I was very young when partition took place but it deeply moved me, so I keep going back to it again and again. That is why Gandhi appears. I keep returning to him for he is in a way a nodal star. He shows the way.

Every time I am lost, either it is Kabir or Gandhi or Saint Francis. They did something in their lives that keeps them relevant even today. In that sense, coalescing of different times is part of my makeup. It is not I who discovered this. All of us realize that we constantly move from one time into another. That is why our way of looking at the world, our way of looking at life is somewhat different from a place where there is little history. I wonder what happens to people living in a place like the United States of America. It has a very short history.

SS: I also had a question about the work on Gandhi you have made. In 1968 you were one of the organisers of the experimental photography exhibition, Painters with a Camera, at the Jehangir Art Gallery, in Mumbai. This particular work, which features in the current show, is the only work in the exhibition where you use a photographic referent.  It stands out in terms of its black and white documentary language.

GS: It was meant to be black and white except for two portions. One portion refers to the place where Gandhi  spent 13 years, I mean Sabarmati Ashram’s ‘Hriday Kunj’ (the grove where the heart resides). There is another quotation from a painting by Abanindranath Tagore where Charles Freer Andrews and Rabindranath meet Gandhi. I am interested in the period of 1915, when Gandhi came back from Africa, when he was somewhat lost. He had not found the way forward, until he travelled around the country. He was still wearing stitched clothes and a cap which he later abandoned. This is the decisive moment when I find him sitting in front of Rabindranath Tagore before he became a Nobel laureate. Something is to happen that has not yet happened. It is a moment of an internal stir that I wanted to capture.  It is also my tribute to Abanindranath because I am quoting him. How did Abanindranath choose that moment? Isn’t it fascinating? The original is a most beautiful painting, so beautiful that I don’t think there is another painting that comes anywhere close to it. It is portraiture at its best and it is about a dialogue, yet none of them look at each other. So, they are both lost in their worlds, their own minds. At the same time they are together. Abanindranath seems to have painted a seminal moment by bringing them together.

SS: I am also interested in the choice you have made regarding the format, because you have repeatedly spoken in the past about the Renaissance Sienese mural paintings and Benode Behari Mukherjee’s murals have influenced you as they are about collective gazing. You often combine this with references to miniatures that are about an intimate act of looking and the mural that is large scale. But your murals are also portable — like Kaavads, they make journeys.

GS: There are many questions in one question. I have said that  I am interested in doing something which deals with both proximate as well as distant viewing. To be able to grasp a large painting you have to see it from a distance to sense its whole. At the same time, it should attract you to go close, as close as a small, hand-held picture. I am interested in that moment, the journey of the viewer in both acts. If you keep goingclose and come back to view it from a distance, you may approach a moment of  time when you may contemplate what it represents. Then the painting would enter you, your psyche, to tell its stories.

I am equally interested in the formats, vertical and horizontal. It allows me to deal with space differently. In the horizontal, you have an expanse to see images gradually opening around you because it fits the optical vision of your eyes. In the narrow, vertical space, like the panels I have in this exhibition, your eye has to choose a different trajectory, moving from top to bottom and from the bottom to the top. Muralists of earlier periods who painted every part of the interior  of a building,might have come across tiny strips in a turning corner or in the space of  a door that made them invent images suitable for that kind of space.  I  find that fascinating and challenging.

The Kaavad came my way some thirty years ago at the Crafts Museum in Delhi. It was quite large. The usual Kaavads are about a foot tall and open on two sides. The performers wear it on their body because it is made of light wood. Its erves as  a shrine, a portable shrine. The performers open the doors to sing stories of deities and in the end point to  little images of gods and goddesses in the centre of the shrine for the audience to pay obeisance to and offer r alms to the performers. I was fascinated by the idea of opening and closing of a box-like structure of the Kaavad, so I decided to make a Kaavad of my own.

But unlike the Rajasthani Kaavad, my Kaavads would open in four directions, for it is not meant to be worn. And then I made a series of them including this one in the exhibition entitled Deluge, Water, Life which opens in eight directions.

I also made a life-size one for you to walk into. Mind you, my Kaavads have no religious connotations: they are open to contents of all kinds, wondrous, narrative, critical covering social, political, topical issues. In fact, I have made the central door as a loose piece in many a Kaavad to empty out the connotation of a sanctum that traditional Kaavads have. City Blues deals with mindless constructions of malls and skyscrapers pushing the poor and the marginalised into corners.

I began to work on my first Kaavad called Journeys using images of voyage from medieval and modern times. I quoted maps, quoted the itinerant and archetypal lover Majnu looking for his Layla, sites of pilgrimage but also of conflicts in which victims of communal conflagration return, searching for their homes. Journeys have been part of my life from childhood onwards. They say I have a little chakra in my feet. I like to walk. I like wandering. I have wanderlust. I remember when I went to Paris for the first time in 1963, I walked from the Notre Dame to the houses of Raza and Padamsee. Walking allows you to see the world in a way totally different from when you are sitting and watching from a car or a train: it allows you to stop, ponder, turn around at your pace and according to your will. So, the Kaavad literally became a motif for journeying into the world.

Kaavad is a box, a magic box full of wonders, full of secrets and surprises. The moment you close it, you don’t know what it contains. You do not know that there are images. Then you open a door and find a  wondrous site, another door leads you to a talking tree and  the third door brings you close to waters and sky full of flying creatures, including angels. You find that all doors of the Kaavad are connected, but not necessarily in a sequential manner. But they are. So, you keep on opening and closing to find that you can have multiple combinations and permutations of images.The fun of doing it is that  in opening doorsyou encounter enticing visages and closing them may leave you dreaming of what you encountered, even lead you to some contemplation.

The Kaavad ‘Deluge, Water, Life’ in the exhibition was triggered by the floods in Srinagar.  I saw a lot of TV footage; I was quite pained by it but didn’t know how to express that. I didn’t know that kind of floods. Baroda has seen floods but not the kind Srinagar was facing at that point in time, because everything was submerged. The river was entering your house and taking it over…

SS: I recall students of the Art School in Srinagar had made a work in the Kochi Biennale on the floods.

GS: I found some photographs and decided to paint them. But I began with pralay (cosmic deluge) and the images of amrit manthan when the  gods and demons fight over amrit and Shiva consumes poison. Next was when floods take over everything. People swimming, some half-drowning, causing a great deal of devastation. Then the waters recede, leaving debris and floating household goods. You recover when the waters gradually begin to ebb and life returns to normalcy. Some survivors by happenstance – a cat, a goat and a bicycle – find themselves floating on a raft. Water now means life, no longer an element of great danger and fright. Thus, the whole cycle is narrated in this Kaavad.

SS: So it is about putting together multiple views of a particular tragedy of the city going underwater. But there is another architectural form that you use, the Japanese screens which have a painting at the back and in the front. You are asking people to have a bodily engagement  by moving around. Is this also referencing the use of Japanese screen format  by  the Santiniketan muralists?

GS: I am using whatever comes my way. I have no problem borrowing and I try to learn as much as possible.  I am a great admirer of Japanese screens.  I have seen an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum (New York) very recently where great screens were on display. That was perhaps embedded in my mind, but I am also interested in the recto-verso format used in books — I have seen several Mughal paintings painted on the front and the back. Actually, there is nothing called front or back. There is always a front and a front. Every time you see it you are facing it frontally.  I am interested in looking at the opening up of spaces on both sides whether it opens up vertically or horizontally, whether it opens in the front or at the back. The panels painted on both sides in the exhibition are intended to  connect to each another yet remain independent. Each panel also speaks  its own story but at times it connects with other stories.

SS: Regarding your use of Google maps, it is interesting that someone from your generation is exploring new ways of looking at space produced by the impersonal eye of a satellite, which then is populated with other scenes. I find this quite fascinating.

GS: It happened to me when I was doing a large painting based on the city of Baroda. There is one way of making the city…by drawing it, another is by taking photographs of the city, the third would be to ask someone to find an aerial view of it.

But the fourth way was fascinating. One of my assistants asked if I had tried Google Earth. I said let’s try and we found the city of Baroda from thousands and thousands of miles away. It is a top view in which you could enter the spaces of streets. I was absolutely fascinated and glued to this new vision of the city. We got high resolution images and started. Then I felt we should draw from our imagination to build the city afresh rather than imitate the Google map. So I told them, let us  draw the streets of Baroda, the streets you and I have walked. The Google map came handy to locate the streets but then we added details from our imagination and knowledge of the city from one point to another point. We knew the city has a  body and these arteries are the streets. We decided to  paint houses— make houses  we knew from our experience  So we started drawing collectively.

Then I  pondered, what kind of people do we populate it with? When you see the city from the top, you don’t see people, you only see streets and large mansions. I wanted to see my city with the people to whom it belongs.  Who does it belong to? The cobbler who sets up a shop on the street corner? The cycle repairer who comes from somewhere and from morning till night he is there earning his livelihood. I want them to populate the city with such figures, these are my heroes. I may also have an Ambedkar who was in Baroda and Faiyaz Khan (the musician) as he was  from Baroda,  but [it is] ordinary  people to whom the city belongs.

In the end  there was a big surprise. Suddenly it occurred to me that we should recognise the buildings. We began searching  through Google Earth.  What is  the biggest building in the city of Baroda? Everybody thinks it must be the Baroda Palace, obviously because it is a large building, a large structure. But what we found was different. The biggest place on  our Google Map was the central prison. What does it tell you about the city? Google Earth gave us this kind of information which we would have never ever found. Nobody would ever tell you that the circumference of the city prison is much larger than the city palace. Your history, your way of looking changes completely. Anyway I was always interested in these kinds of historical  discoveries that you make on the way. I am indebted to Google Earth for opening for me that kind of perspective.

SS: I would like to end by referencing a recent programme in Jawaharlal Nehru University where we had a gathering of poets Amir Aziz, who came to the forefront during the Citizenship Amendment Act protests, Meena Kandasamy and Gauhar Raza. They were talking about how the younger generation is fascinated today by Kabir and Rumi.We see that there is a lot of relevance for their  ideas even today. We  see the violence of the State on the one hand and expressions of humanism that are also available to us through the way people are communicating today (through social media).

GS: We are surrounded by violence, totally taken over by violence. Whether it is happening in Ukraine or in Gaza.  But it is also happening around us.  The place where we live. We do not know when its effect would be on us, but it looks [like] it can be on any one of us at any point of time. Hence, we have to return to humanity in some form, in whichever form that it allows us to keep the hope alive.

Art is perhaps the only territory that has kept hope alive. Because it is always about moving forward. Creativity never dies. Creativity looks forward, produces the future of hope. How do you keep it alive, in which way do you do you keep humanity alive? You do it either by recalling the best from our  life or recalling inspiring icons from the past who have endeavoured to keep humanity alive. We know that they were also surrounded by violence – Rumi was surrounded by violence, Kabir and St Francis, too. These harbingers of hope kept the human voice alive, intact. So, it is important to quote them.

I am not thinking about the younger generation alone. I am thinking about all generations. Because we have forgotten our history, we have lost a sense of history.  We live only in one single moment of time as though that is all that matters. We feel about our homes, but homes too are not safe any longer as you know… The violent currents might reach you any time anywhere. Nobody is safe. So where do you go?

But the poet wants to sing, wants to write. A painter wants to paint. You may call us utopian but I want to keep that faith alive, hope alive. I want to keep that sense of being alive. Even in the darkness of dark times we will sing about the dark times, as Bertolt Brecht said a long time ago.

Shukla Sawant teaches art history and visual studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.