For over 50 years, no other artist has possibly been as influential as thinker and pedagogue, and as complex in his practice, as Gulammohammed Sheikh. In all areas that have preoccupied him, as curator, writer and painter, Sheikh’s engagement has been essentially dialogic: the interrogatory, even challenging, tone of his letters to modernists of the 70s is matched by his conversational engagement with art that has spanned centuries.
The Lorenzetti brothers of the Sienese school; the Mughal painters Basawan and Mir Sayyid Ali; Kabir and the poet patron Abdul Rahim Khan-i-Khana; the maker of the Mughal muraqqa or accordion book; the craftsman-narrator of the itinerant Rajasthani kavad: these are a few names from the fraternity of thinkers, artists and poets that Sheikh’s encyclopaedic world teems with. On his canvas, they have all found a place which is neither synthesis or pastiche, but a respectful hospitality, where they become part of a larger enactment. Into this mix, add a painterly attitude, of recapturing the delicate translucency of a 16th century Persian atelier’s brush, the poetics of a central Asian landscape that bears witness to poet travellers and Sufi saints, Christian saints and temple cities drawn in the finest detail, and the strands of Sheikh’s painterly inspirations become visible.
A new book, At Home in the World: the Art and Life of Gulammohammed Sheikh, edited by Chaitanya Sambrani, draws on both the artist’s life story and the manifold contexts of his thinking and curatorial work as pedagogue and artist. Sheikh’s humble beginnings in the small Saurashtrian town of Surendranagar hardly anticipate his appetite for a synoptic view of art. As a young student, he assisted Ravishankar Rawal, a doyen in the annals of art in Gujarat, with the painting of a history of world civilisation on the outer walls of a public library. Later at Baroda, and then at the Royal College of Art, his facility to bridge art impulses across centuries was honed further.
Sambrani writes that for over four decades, Sheikh’s work has sought “novel ways of making the world manifest through translation.” In itself, this may seem like an extraordinary claim, yet Sheikh’s central obsession has been with cartographic poetics, transcontinental journeys, with empires, and the voice of poetic resistance.
In retrospect, two broad impulses seem to have guided the artist, who worked with an extreme self-consciousness of his own place in Indian art history, as well as that of the pan-Asianists led by the Tagores, the internationalism of the Progressives, and the looping return to the indigeneity of his peers. His more recent vision of a medieval tapestry of saints, Sufis, imperialists and wanderers seems to stand at odds with the great flourish that Sheikh affected from about 1970 to the early 80s, where he appears as a painter of the city, its lusts and transgressions and the rising pitch of communal violence.
Interplay of time
Just as he worked with multiple perspectives in his paintings, he introduced different emotional registers of everyday life in Vadodara. What he achieves, however, is also an interplay of time, from reverie, a space for remembrance or dream, to the urgent gestures of the momentary, in the same painting. In the more recent ‘Mappa Mundi’ series, the space for temporal reality stretches across millennia: positing Majnun, Kabir, a whirling dervish, or a Christian saint as outside the periphery of the globe, he invokes the journey and the narrative as interchangeable.
India’s entire medieval period, for instance, with its conquests and social reform, may crystallise in the singularity of poet-saint Kabir. Cóilín Parsons’ essay ‘Mapping the Globe’ describes a moment of epiphany when Sheikh discovered the most famous of the mappae mundi, the Ebstorf Karte, reproduced on a postcard — a map that documents “the social, cultural and political landscape, not the topographic landscape.” Maria Kupfer’s essay ‘Worlds Enmeshed’ provides further details of the finding and later destruction of this unique document. As such, the mappa mundi was to provide Sheikh with a cornucopia of possibilities. The space of the globe became hospitable to a transhistorical narrative of his own making.
Seen in this light, the ‘Mappa Mundi’ images mount the terrifying contradiction that the history of the world has moved through the collision of religious dogmas; equally, it is these violently competitive faiths that produce the most exalted art. Sheikh re-energises symbols of classical art: Ram stepping forth with a raised bow and arrow, or St. Francis preaching during a deep personal crisis with markings of blood instead of a cluster of birds. They become redolent with meaning in troubled times.
The writer is an art critic and curator who runs www.criticalcollective.in