A recent walkthrough at Delhi’s Ghalib Academy, held as part of DAG’s ‘The City As A Museum’ series, offered a closer look at the institution’s little-known modern art collection. Conducted by art writer Kamayani Sharma and Academy secretary Aqil Ahmad, ‘Ghalib and the Moderns: Part 1’ explored works commissioned around the time of the Academy’s establishment in 1969, when different artists were invited to respond to verses by Mirza Ghalib.
The walkthrough also turned into a round of guesses as members of the group tried to identify some of the artists behind the unidentified works.
Rather than simply illustrating Ghalib’s words, the artists had interpreted the couplets in different ways, using their own visual styles and approaches. The result is a collection that therefore combines modern art and Ghalib’s poetry. Some artists incorporated the poet’s verses directly into their works, while others responded to the ideas or imagery in the couplets without using the text itself. MF Husain, for instance, was assigned a Ghalib couplet and created a work titled ‘Jannat-e-Nigah’, using Naskh calligraphy.
The displayed works include those by J Swaminathan, GR Santosh, Laxman Pai, Biren De, Anis Farooqi, KS Kulkarni, and others.
Among them is a portrait of Mir Taqi Mir, one of the well-known names in the history of ghazal poetry. The painting, identified as being by Firoze through a signature in the bottom-right corner, depicts Mir with a soft, luminous quality created through delicate brushstrokes.
While Fatima Zafar’s work features Ghalib at a musical gathering, another work by an unidentified artist depicts the poet as a half-sparrow, half-human figure, caged inside a prison.
The collection also includes works by Pakistani modernists Sadequain and Abdur Rahman Chughtai. According to Sharma, having Indian and Pakistani artists represented together makes the collection particularly significant in the context of the decades after Partition.
A modern Ghalib
These works in the collection were part of an effort by Hakeem Abdul Hameed, who founded the Ghalib Academy in 1969, to build an institution centred on Ghalib and Urdu literature; the year 1969 also marked the centenary of the poet’s death. Archival material found by art writer Kamayani Sharma suggests that Abdul Hameed personally reached out to artists and assigned them specific Ghalib couplets.
The project even reflects the changes taking place in Indian art in the years after Independence. Sharma says the artists were “forging new languages in response to changing society” and looking at questions around “modernity, nationhood and secularism”. She places the Ghalib Academy commissions within this wider history of post-Independence modern art, when artists were also looking at mythology, literature and older cultural traditions for ways to develop new forms.
Additionally, Sharma views Ghalib as a figure representing India’s shared cultural history as well. “He had become a symbol of India’s syncretic Hindu-Muslim culture,” Sharma says, while noting that this was one possible way of understanding why Ghalib’s poetry became the basis for the project.
Yet much of the history of these works is difficult to trace today.
Piecing together the past
The paintings are decades old, and hence, the collection has gaps in its documentation.
Sharma describes some of the works as “misidentified or half-identified”. Her research, however, has offered some clues. Among the papers of Abdul Hameed at Jamia Hamdard University which was founded by the philanthropist himself, she came across a handwritten list from recording artists’ names alongside the Ghalib couplets they had been assigned.
The difficulty is that only a few of the paintings feature the couplets in written form, making it harder to determine who made the remaining works. Also, according to Sharma, there appears to be mismatches between the list and some of the paintings.
She notes that some paintings appear in styles very different from those established by the artists they are thought to belong to. “Scholarly work of this nature requires time and labour,” she adds, making support from cultural and academic organisations important.
Another possible approach, Ahmad points out, would be to carefully dismount the paintings and examine the couplet labels on their verso. However, given the fragile condition of the works, doing so may be difficult.
A delicate legacy
The uncertainty is compounded by the condition of the collection, too. The Academy does not currently have the funds for a proper conservation project, while the works have spent decades in an environment not designed for long-term preservation.
Delhi’s heat, monsoon humidity, dust and particulate matter may have affected the paintings over the years. Sharma notes that the collection has received limited attention over the years, partly because the Academy, as a small private institution, has minimal resources for conservation. The works could have suffered from “warping, flaking, moulding, discolouration” and chemical changes, although only an expert examination can establish the extent of the damage.