Abdur Rahman Chughtai

After sixty years of hostility and several bloody wars it is easy to forget that Pakistan and India share a common culture. Partition has been an intolerable rupture - one of the great mistakes of the 20th C. - and yet the two countries still share more than what divides them. We are reminded of this fact in the life and work of Abdur Rahman Chughtai, one of the most significant South East Asian artists of the modern era. He is counted as the official 'national artist' of Pakistan, and yet he spent the first fifty years of his life in a united India and remains a revered artist in India, having drawn deeply from the Indian artistic traditions. In particular, his style owes much to the Bengali style pioneered in the early decades of the 20th C. which itself drew upon the miniature painting and illustration traditions of medieval India. Chughtai very consciously looked back to the indigenous (and Mughul) heritage of India, which is to say he overlooked the styles preferred and sponsored by the British. At the same time, though, he was a modern artist with a modern sensibility. His style is deeply indebted to Art Nouveau. He is one of the few artists whose work comfortably accommodates both the traditional and the modern in a seamless synthesis. 

His subject matter is taken from the myths and legends of the Hindoo  tradition as well as motifs from the parallel heritage of Indian Islaam along with subjects from the Mughul and Rajuput courts. This makes his work quite unique and unquestionably powerful. It transcends Indian/Pakistani particularisms. A resident of Lahore, it is reported that the painter sheltered both Hindoos and Sikhs in his home from rioters and murderous mobs during the chaos of partition and regarded his work as above the nationalistic divisions that tore the sub-coninent apart during the latter part of his life. 

There is an excellent website of his work sponsored by the Chughtai museum in Lahore which can be accessed here:

http://www.chughtaimuseum.com/index.php

And here are some fine examples of his work:

There are few greater tragedies than the partition of India. This fine work, with its delicacy, density of colour, lyricism and its balance between modern sensibility and faithfulness to tradition - the blend of Art Nouveau and Indo-Islaamic tradition - reminds of that an entire culture, a whole civilisation, has been abruptly bifurcated and a glorious wholeness has been lost. Even more so, the post-colonial rejection of all things Western has prevented the proper assimilation of the modern, an assimilation of which Chughtai is a brilliant instance. The greatness of Chughtai - quite apart from his impeccable draughtsmanship - lies in a vision that embraces the wholeness of the Indian tradition and the best of the West, and in that exposes the divisions of partition and the forces of a destructive nationalism as a loss of innocence, a violation of the sacred, an affront to history. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black