If Karachi has come up as a major school of art on Pakistan’s cultural map during the past few decades, there is something about it that should make every Indian proud. For, one of the iconic figures of that pioneering movement is a native of the Hindi belt.
Rabia Zuberi was born in Kanpur in 1940 and was 21 years old when she, along with her family, chose to migrate to the Sindh capital. Karachi, with its busy seaport and traditional reputation as a financial hub, should have typically wooed anybody into banking, industry or trade, but Rabia’s quest was different. She went on to pursue sculpting and painting. Today, the 69-year-old is hailed as an icon who helped found the Karachi School of Art and, has been rearing it like her own child.
Having been involved with the evolution of her country’s plastic arts since 1964, she is also widely hailed as an eminent teacher. When she started her institution, it used to be called the Mina Art Education Society and was a private art school with limited resources. Rabia ran it from her residence, having managed to find some enthusiastic boys and girls as students in a city that was near-philistine, if not hostile to the arts. But then, the émigré status bound them, what with the coming together of passionately dedicated Mohajirs from India.
Cut to the 1940s, when Rabia’s native town used to be spelt Cawnpore by the imperial Britishers. The little girl was, right from her toddler days, interested in drawing, painting and clay modelling. Her father was an upright police officer and, equally admirably, a keen poet. Amongst nine siblings, Rabia and younger sister Hajra, showed a love of art and an aptitude for it — a trait that was to make a definitive mark in the cultural history of a nascent nation later.
The family migrated to Karachi in 1961. However, Rabia, a graduate of Aligarh Muslim University, was left behind to complete her course as a student of the Lucknow School Of Art. The same was the case with Hajra, also learning in the same institution.
Rabia did make her name in India before she crossed the western border. From 1960 to ’63, she notched the top prize in the All India Youth Art Exhibitions held in Delhi. Once with her family in Karachi, her talent to nurture students began showing as she, with Hajra, started sharing her knowledge of art with a few young peers and students.
Not much later, an arts school of reckoning was born. Karachi almost became a counterpart of Lahore — a traditionally culture-rich city even before the Partition in 1947. Over time, under Rabia’s guidance, artistes from Karachi began meeting their seniors from Lahore as equals. Sadequain Naqqesh (1930-87) and Ismail Gulgee (1926-2007) were already big names in Lahore and Iqbal Geoffrey, in far-off England, was soon to establish himself as a conceptual artist. But over time, quite a few Karachi artistes under Rabia’s guidance began enjoying a status on par with the Lahore celebrities.
Rabia’s work is enriched by her own life and experiences. Her travels have shaped her sculptures. Egyptian reliefs in stone have inspired her as have the artefacts of Mohenjo-daro. There is eclecticism in her work which, coupled with innate sensitivity, often results in a fruitful engagement with the viewer. Her sculptures, while belonging to the 20th-century Western tradition, is also rooted in the ancient image — making traditions in stone, clay and wood of the subcontinent.
Pakistani artists had a difficult time from the mid-1980s into the 1990s. General Zia-ul-Haq was an orthodox Muslim and the clergy formed a group of people who regarded music, dance and the arts as blasphemy. Sadequain did elegant works informed by Islamic calligraphy, while Gulgee made whirling sensual forms, perhaps from another world seen in a dream. Rabia too had to find her way out of an artistic impasse. There was no way she would allow herself to be stopped by unreasoning, arbitrary, official strictures.
She hit upon the idea of incorporating the folds of draperies into her sculptures, and even called them Draperies. The censors could not do very much. Her paintings and drawings have presumably been less under fire because they have not been shown in large public spaces as several of her sculptures.
Rabia has had to disguise her love of the human form using all kinds of subterfuge. She was a fine portraitist in clay, and given the opportunity, would have ventured farther afield in the rendition of the human face and figure. A pen and ink line — drawing of a mother and infant shows both her love and her gift for depicting the human figure.
And Rabia has quite a few students who have made it big: Nahid Afridi, Danish Raza, Shazia Qureshi, Babar Mogul, A Q Arif and Roohi Ahmed among others. Equally importantly, she has managed to inspire many young girls to take art in an Islamic country.
— The writer is an art critic based in Delhi.
parthfm@gmail.com