“More than one world”: An interview with Gulammohammed Sheikh

Abstract

Gulammohammed Sheikh is one of the most important contemporary Indian painters. He is also an acclaimed writer, an art historian and critic, and a poet in Gujarati (Athwa). In this conversation, which took place on August 13 and November 3, 2015, he discusses the centrality of Bombay for writers and artists of his generation, and his own connection with the city. He also reflects on the influence of poetry and translation, and on the transactions between poetry and painting which are both emblematic of his own work and of little magazines like Vrishchik, which he started in 1969. Retracing the history of Vrishchik and of “Group 1890”, he recalls his formative years at the Baroda Faculty of Fine Arts, and his lifelong engagement with the bhakti tradition, especially with the figure of Kabir. He also discusses the way modernity was reinvented in India, and the extraordinary cosmopolitanism of his generation of modernist artists, and of the Bombay they inhabited.

Keywords:

• Bombay/Mumbai
• modern Indian painting
• Baroda Faculty of Fine Arts
• little magazines
• Vrishchik
• Kabir
• bhakti

Acknowledgement

The images of the special Vrishchik bhakti issue were made available by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra during a visit in Allahabad, and the author of the interview would like to thank Gulammohammed Sheikh for permission to publish these images. All issues of Vrishchik are today digitalized and made available by the Asia art archive. See http://www.aaa.org.hk.

Notes

1. “Warden Road” like many other roads or monuments of Bombay/Mumbai has been officially renamed and is now called “Bhulabhai Desai Road”.

2. Bal Chhabda (1923–2013) was also the brother of Darshan Chhabda, Arun Kolatkar’s first wife.

3. The devanagari script which differs from the Urdu alphabet – itself derived from the Perso-Arabic script – is used to write Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi and Nepali languages.

4. The Progressive Artists Group (also known as PAG) was founded by F.N. Souza and K.H. Ara in 1947 in Bombay, and is generally acknowledged to be the first school of modern art per se in India.

5. Marg, one of the most important art magazines of India, began in 1946, with Mulk Raj Anand as founding editor.

6. See Gieve Patel’s interview in this issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

7. Akho is a 17th-century devotional Gujarati poet who can be broadly included in the bhakti movement.

8. J. Swaminathan (1928–94) was an influential Indian artist and writer. He was instrumental in “discovering” tribal artists such as Jangarh Singh Shyam; he founded and edited the little magazine Contra 66.

9. Nilima Sheikh is Gulammohammed Sheikh’s wife and herself an extremely important visual artist.

10. The house where “Group 1890” was founded was located on1890 Atabhai Road in Bhavnagar (Gujarat).

11. Vivan Sundaram (b. 1943) is a prominent Indian artist. He was educated at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda and is married to noted art critic Geeta Kapur.

12. Many different forms of medieval devotionality are known as bhakti, which first emerged in South India around the 6th century before spreading to the rest of India. Bhakti represented a compelling movement of popular devotion, which included men and women from all castes, classes and stages of life. “Bhakti poets” such as Tukaram, Namdev or Jnandev from the Marathi tradition, or the 15th-century Kabir from North India, rejected Sanskrit to produce extraordinary compositions in the vernaculars.