The bard from Baroda
Courtesy kasauli art centre
Four decades of Nilima Sheikh’s art make for a massive, rich new book, finds Sonam Joshi.
N
ilima Sheikh’s work demands repeat viewing. Replete as her paintings are with stories and references from traditional crafts, mythology, literature and art history, they benefit from multiple perspectives and insights. Trace Retrace, a new book on Sheikh’s career from 1969 to the present, is a heavy and handy guide that makes this experience more accessible and intimate. Letting the art speak for itself, the book begins with an overview of Sheikh’s paintings, often with zoomed-in details that enable the reader to discover the smaller narratives embedded within the larger frames. Essays on Sheikh’s place in Indian Modernism, by academics Kumkum Sangari, Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Kaushik Bhaumik, follow these. Sheikh’s voice also comes through in the third part, in an index that pairs images with autobiographical writings, as well as poems, folk songs and stories referred to in the paintings. Sheikh, who lives in Vadodara, spoke to Time Out on the phone from Delhi, and in between shopping for pashmina shawls in Srinagar. You have consistently engaged with the writings of others, either by inscribing them in your own paintings, adopting literary ima ges or illustrating books. What is the rela tionship between text and your painting? It has been fairly intrinsic to my work from a very early time. Even as a very young artist, I was interested in the notion of understanding illustration, not as a bad word, but as something that much painting of the past is about. Stories and images have always gone together, whether you look at manuscript paintings or old murals. This was firmed up in my mind particularly by reading Abanindranath Tagore. I am specifically interested in illustrating.
My working on paper had an antecedent in manuscript painting, which was done on folio with writing and text alongside. In 1984, I did set of paintings called “When Champa Grew Up”: I used text along with painting for the first time and exhibited it like that. After that, I would use stories like the Jatakas. So I stopped thinking of text as external. You began working with hanging scrolls in 1994. You’ve also adopted a range of other formats: folios for the Champa series, sha miana kanats [scrolls that form a tent], and set design. How were these formal decisions influenced by the demands of the narratives you wanted to convey? Just because everybody uses canvas stretched on a wall doesn’t mean that is the only way of making art. I have been looking at Chinese scroll paintings and Japanese handheld emakimono for years now. They have influenced my art-making considerably. I am not inventing anything new there, but using forms that had fallen out of use and trying to invest them with some new meaning. I have been interested in working on handheld manuscript papers. But another part of my interest is large works, in which you can project a more bodily understanding of space than you do in a small work. I think the pendulum has swung back and forth for many years. It’s actually the middle-sized works that I am somewhat uncomfortable with. I see that the small-sized works have often been not so different from large-sized works in formal ways, but the bodily experience you get is different. For instance, I got interested in shamianas
14 www.timeoutdelhi.net April 12 - 25 2013
simply because I could make a space that one could walk into. The book concludes with an open letter you wrote in 1989 after finishing a research fel lowship, on the problems faced by tradition al tempera painters. You’ve also studied the pichhavai painting of Nathdwara, miniature painting, and Sanjhi stencils from Mathura – how has research added to your vocabulary? I do like to prepare myself when I am working on a new work. It extends my world and my understanding so that I am able to appreciate things outside my own narrow way of looking. When I started working on Kashmir, I knew that I couldn’t just do it on my own – I would have to read a lot. When I started working on tempera painting on a large piece of cloth or canvas, I would need to see how the pichhavai painters worked and understand their technology. Research is very important; it helps you get a better grip of things. I am married to Gulammohammed Sheikh, who is not only an artist but has been an art historian for many years. He contributed to the makeup of my language in art. I have also been trained by KG Subramanyan, who believed in the polyvalence of art. Yes, wherever I got the opportunity I studied and put it in practice, but I did not do it as a historian might. I was more interested, not in learning the technique of living traditions at Nathdwara, but in learning something of their technology that I could apply to my work.
Most women of my generation have had this sensuous pleasure in materials
Your interest in history is palpable in the series on Partition, on the medieval Bhakti
saint Akka, and on Kashmir. Tell us about your understanding of the relationship between studying history and painting? I did a BA in History before I entered art. I was interested in the art history courses when I was studying at Baroda for my BA and MA. There was this interest in using methods and materials, and in the kind of imagery that came from what people normally call one’s tradition. I have a problem with using a word like tradition, because I think that we are doing a disservice to our past by making it amorphous like that. For me, the interest is to see [tradition] as something which can be historicised, analysed, which can have a link with contemporary life. A considerable part of the essays focus on your Kashmir paintings. You have spoken about your childhood visits to the state, and their effect on your art. What led you to focus on the theme a decade ago? For many years, I wanted to paint on Kashmir, and somehow there had to be a right time to do it. In some ways, I have been painting Kashmir off and on over the years. [But] I was always looking for the right format, the right language. And then, reading the poetry of Agha Shahid Ali was very crucial to me. I was anyways planning a series on Kashmir when 2002 [the riots in Gujarat] happened. Having experienced the sectarian problems from so close, I felt that this was something I needed to engage with. You chose to interpret Kashmir through liter ature and mythology: as you said, Agha Sha hid Ali’s poetry, Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown, the poet-saint Lal Ded’s verses, and folklore. Did you also think of confront ing its violent present directly? It’s been one of my long-lasting interests to combine literary and historical references in my work. I don’t think they impinge on one another but rather add to one another. I had worked on the Jatakas, on the Partition, not only with Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence but the lore that went along with it, with Gujarati folk songs for “When Champa Grew Up”. This came together in a different way when I started working on Kashmir. My own clear understanding of what Kashmir had been going through needed some education. I cannot speak from an activist or political point of view. I can only use the language of other people who have better sense than me on these subjects. What was of concern to me that I make visible the layers of historical understandings of Kashmir. I was not capable of direct political intervention. You have had a consistent interest in traditional crafts and folk arts, right up to the Rozgar series from 2011, which you describe as your “tribute to the labour of the Kashmiri craft-workers”. This interest in textiles and different textile crafts, like carpet-weaving or shawls or embr oidery, had informed my work even before Kashmir. The connections [I have to] those and certain traditions of painting that I admire have been through the art-historical experience of looking at paintings. The way the
Portrait of an artist “Gathering threads”, a largescale painted scroll; (facing page) details from the Rozgar series on wasli paper; Nilima Sheikh at her workshop at the Kasauli Art Centre, 1983
Kashmiri carpet is designed and the way it moves from motif to motif, becoming richer, more complex and yet retaining its coherence, was something [evident] in painting traditions like Persian [art]. It’s funny; I am now sitting at a shawl shop while talking to you. Most women of my generation have had this sensuous pleasure in materials. Kumkum Sangari’s essay looks at your art in relation to women’s movements in India and you yourself write: “Discovering a feminine voice was never separate from my search for a painter’s voice”. How has your own con sciousness as a woman artist changed over
the years, from the Champa series on dowry and bride burning in the ’80s, to the Mater nity series on pregnancy and the Akka series in the 1990s? I was engaging with the feminist movement partly in a self-conscious way but partly as a parallel consciousness. These came out my life and experiences. I was feeling this because other women were feeling this way. I did not live in a big city where feminist movements were more proactive, but still, I was aware of things. Trace Retrace: Paintings, Nilima Sheikh, Tulika Books with Gallery Espace and Chemould Prescott Road, `4,000.
April 12 - 25 2013 www.timeoutdelhi.net 15