"The best part is the absolute isolation"
By Naeem Safi
Amira Farooq lives and works in Lahore. She received her BFA from NCA in 2004, followed by a brief adventure in print and electronic media as a model and presenter. Since then she has been painting and recently had her first solo exhibition at Nairang Art Gallery. She creates intense dialogues concerning the complementary nature of human relationships, emotions, and the existence, by juxtaposing the opposites in contrasting colours and forms -- usually, along with some elements from nature.

Remembering Gul
Dear All,
Yet again, a friend has passed away, and yet again I am full of regret at not having made more of an effort to see them and keep up with them in their lifetime.
Gul Hameed Bhatti was a person remarkable for his kindness and his wit. That is how I remember him; somebody you could sit and giggle, share all sorts of outrageous puns, and generally have a wonderful time with.

As India and Pakistan mull over whether or not to resume the stalled peace talks, Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, the founding ameer of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), wanted by India for his alleged involvement in the Mumbai terror attacks, has suddenly resumed his activities by taking to the streets, holding a chain of public meetings, mouthing venomous anti-India slogans, promising to liberate Jammu & Kashmir, and stoking jehadi passions with impunity. However, the most shocking aspect is that he has been allowed to do all this from the platform of Jamaatul Daawa (JuD), already banned by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in December 2008.

The first high-profile activities by the ameer of the JuD, which is accused of being a front for the now banned LeT, the jehadi group blamed by India for the Mumbai attacks, have coincided with a thaw in the Indo-Pak relations in the wake of the recent Indian offer to Pakistan for resumption of the foreign secretary-level talks.

For the first time after being banned by the UNSC in the aftermath of 26/11, the JuD was allowed on February 5 to hold a protest rally on The Mall in Lahore under its original name. It is true such rallies are quite common on the Kashmir Solidarity Day, observed officially on February 5 every year. But ever since the UNSC ban, this was the first time the Pakistani authorities had allowed JuD to hold a rally under its own name. Although the JuD had restricted its public activities after the UNSC ban, it kept appearing on important occasions, but using dummy names -- a common tactic used by the banned jehadi groups to keep them operational.

For instance, the JuD had observed the Kashmir Solidarity Day last year under the banner of the Tehreek-e-Azadi-e-Kashmir or Kashmir Freedom Movement. The Saeed-led so-called welfare group held yet another protest rally on February 6 last year under the forged name of the Tehreek-e-Qibla-e-Awwal (Movement to Safeguard the First Center of Prayer) to condemn the Israeli attacks on Gaza.

Almost a year later, on February 5, 2010, hundreds of JuD supporters who came from various districts of Punjab province, took out Yakjehti Kashmir Karwan (Kashmir solidarity rally) from the Markazul Qadsia to Faisal Chowk in Lahore, walking or driving in vehicles and shouting slogans against India and the United States - and in praise of the LeT. At the Mall could also be seen banners extolling Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, and makeshift stalls hawking literature on the ongoing jehad in Jammu & Kashmir.

Waving the black and white flag of the group and dummy Kalashnikovs and raising anti-India slogans, the JuD activists first gathered at Markazul Qadsia the new headquarters of Hafiz Saeed after the Muridke head office was taken over by the Punjab government last year, and began the rally after the Friday prayers. February 5 was also the first occasion Hafiz Saeed had made a public appearance since his release from house arrest in October 2009. The JuD ameer in his address to the rally said that militant groups waging 'jehad' in Jammu & Kashmir were considering renewing their armed struggle there. He then demanded, "Therefore, no talks with India should be held unless it pulls out its occupation forces from Kashmir and releases the water of Pakistani rivers... Any future Indo-Pak dialogue should include all contentious issues including unjust division of Punjab at the time of Partition, the Indian army's terrorism in East Pakistan, the demolition of Babri Masjid and Indian occupation of Hyderabad Deccan and Junagadh. As the Americans plan their exit strategy for Afghanistan, the Indian security forces will have to retreat from Jammu Kashmir in the same fashion..."

A day before the rally in Lahore, the JuD had organised a Kashmir conference on February 4 in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Azad Kashmir, which was attended by several key leaders of the pro-Kashmir jehadi groups, including the former ISI chief Lt Gen (retd) Hameed Gul, the Hizbul Mujahideen (HM) chief Commander Pir Syed Salahuddin and the Al-Badr (AB) chief Bakht Zamin. In his address, Salahuddin said the Kashmiri Mujahideen should flex their muscles to wage a renewed jehad if they want to get the Kashmir issue settled as per their aspirations. Rejecting Indian allegations about involvement of the LeT and the JuD in the Mumbai attacks, he urged the Pakistan government to lift the ban on the JuD and release LeT's Commander Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi.

"He (Lakhvi) is our aide and an active member of the United Jehad Council who is behind bars for quite long, though no charges have been established against him so far," he said.

The Kashmir solidarity conference further adopted a declaration asking Pakistan to revoke the ban on Kashmiri militant groups so that Azad Kashmir could once again become the base for waging the freedom struggle in Jammu & Kashmir. The declaration warned Islamabad that friendship with India won't be tolerated, and that the Indian army should be taken to the international court of justice for committing war crimes in Kashmir. "If the Pakistan government can't extend any political, diplomatic and moral support to the people of Kashmir, it should at least give a free hand to mujahideen to tackle India on their own", the jehadi declaration concluded.

Indeed, Hafiz Saeed was just about everywhere last week. On February 2, 2010, he attended a seminar organised by a conservative Urdu daily and warned India that it would be held accountable for every single Muslim martyred in Jammu Kashmir. He accused India of illegally constructing 62 dams on the rivers flowing into Pakistan, with the sinister aim of turning the country barren. But Indian design would fail because these dams are bound to become Pakistan's once Jammu & Kashmir is liberated - which, he said, has to happen one day. On February 5, the same Urdu daily published an article from the JuD ameer, stating: "India has been trying to malign the freedom struggle in Jammu & Kashmir by falsely implicating Pakistani jehadi groups in the 26/11 attacks despite the fact that it has miserably failed to prove any Pakistani involvement in these attacks so far. Under the present circumstances, the Pakistan government should adopt an aggressive stance and expose all Indian conspiracies besides internationalizing the Kashmir issue".

Most analysts believe that Hafiz Saeed's renewed activities couldn't have been possible without the consent of the Pakistani intelligence establishment which is still adamant to keep some of the pro-Kashmir jehadi groups alive and to use them as the civilian face of the Pakistan Army. They insist that the JuD and LeT are working in tandem, and cite the interview of the former JuD spokesman Abdullah Muntazir to support their contention. On November 24, 2009, Reuters quoted him as saying that the LeT had opened several new training camps in Azad Kashmir, and that Islamabad was tolerating it because it hadn't been involved in any terrorist attack inside Pakistan. The Reuters report said that the LeT cadres are seen as a kind of civil defence force in the event of war with India and going after the group could create a new enemy when Pakistan is concentrating on defeating the menace of Taliban.

The official JuD line remains that the organisation is being treated quite unfairly by the Pakistani authorities who have frozen all its bank accounts and banned all the six periodicals and newspapers besides shutting down its offices across Punjab. The JuD circles insist that the JuD has nothing to do with the LeT and that the government action against their group is creating hurdles in the way of charity work being carried out by the JuD.

However, diplomatic circles in Islamabad believe the renewed public activities by Hafiz Saeed and the JuD at a critical juncture may throw a spanner in the works and jeopardise the much-awaited resumption of the peace process between India and Pakistan. Indeed, the inconsistent stance of Pakistani establishment towards the JuD and its leader since the 26/11 attacks has done nothing concrete to restore international faith in Islamabad's willingness to treat all the jehadi groups active in Afghanistan and Pakistan as terrorist ones.

The subliminal message from the powerful Pakistani establishment seems: anti-India jehadi groups active in Jammu & Kashmir can't be hounded as the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Therefore, the Pakistani authorities have not yet taken any concrete action against the vast jehadi infrastructure of the JuD as well as its leadership which is actually the moving spirit behind the military muscle of the LeT.

As things stand, the LeT continues to survive and morph into something that threatens both India and Pakistan, amidst serious apprehensions that as long as the JuD leadership is allowed to move freely and the jehadi infrastructure of the group is there to exist, somebody is going to do something sooner or later.

William Dalrymple has become something of a superstar in the subcontinent. His stature is not unfounded for he has written marvellous books -- "White Mughals", "The Last Mughal", "In Xanadu', 'City of Djinns" and now with his recent publication, "Nine Lives-Sacred Music in Modern India-Pakistan" he has been on tour, holding a number of launches all over. He was in Lahore for a similar launch at the Peerus Café under the auspices of Rafi Peer Theatre Workshop.

It was a novel way of launching his book for as he read passages from the book interspersed with singing and dancing as if to illustrate the point he was making as well as to display the baffling diversity that characterises art in this part of the world. The coming together of the sacred and the traditional has been best exemplified in the performing arts and he selected nine examples to illustrate this view in the book while at the launch. Three were represented by Baul Fakirs of Bengal, Shahjorag Fakirs of Sindh and Thevaram Hymns from Kerala.

What had intrigued William Dalrymple the most even after twenty-five years in the subcontinent, researching and writing as indeed it has intrigued foreigners, is the coexistence of the sacred and the profane, the material and the spiritual, the modern and the traditional. And this book is principally an exploration of such characters that traverse the length and breadth of the subcontinent, living this apparent diversity and coexisting without batting an eyelid. The best demonstration of this has been in music and the performing arts. He had selected for his trip to Pakistan three representative examples mentioned above and through their art displayed the baffling coming together of diversity into some kind of a higher unity.

As a musical session it could hold on its own irrespective of the book launch. Baul Fakirs represented by Paban Das Baul are minstrels in the tradition of the many minstrels in pre-industrialised societies. They have roamed the countryside singing from place to place their amalgam of song, dance and music. They have been the embodiment of a coming together of the serious tradition, flowing from various religious strands but forming in the end a lifestyle or pattern very close to the way people live in the subcontinent. Though they insist on making a connection with the mystical side of formal religions, they are driven more by the need to integrate. It is the Bengali mystical tradition that they represent; it is in Bengali that they sing and it is the Bengali folk music that they use as their vehicle of spreading their message of love and peace.

Shahjorag Fakirs led by Juman Shah chant the wais of Shah Abdul Lateef Bhitai to the accompaniment of the dhamboori, an instrument that too was created by Shah Lateef. It is a peculiar chant, specific to the shrine where every evening and greater part of the night such sessions are held. These fakirs with matted hair and the drone of the dhamboori chant in turns and the crescendo is achieved in choral form. Their peculiarity is the use of octaves and exploring the range of human voice. This style of singing is very special and once initiated can be effective in its expression as the listeners get sucked and lose themselves in the trance-like monotony of the tone. For many centuries these Fakirs have expressed themselves from father to son, creating an aura and taking the believers to a point of release. Of late, they have started to perform outside the precincts of the shrine, and like other forms of music specific to place and time is becoming a concert item and maybe in the process of losing its pristine ambience.

The Susheela Raman Thevaram Dance Group Kerala was the least traditional of the lot. As an Afro-American initially trained in jazz, she switched to Thevaram hymns of Tamil Nadu and has been training and specialising in that form which too has followed the same general pattern and is imbued in the folk music tradition of the area. But in her intonation and in her movement she could not fully get rid of her jazz background. She captivated the audiences as a performer for she moved and dance with a particular feeling and rhythm without being fully coloured in the traditional movements and intonation. Her performance in which Chandu Panicker accompanied her was the liveliest part of the evening. The other two performances were truer in form.

"Whenever art's been good, it's always changed the notion of what art is". Damien Hirst

'Salon', the latest exhibition of Hasnat Mehmood at Rohtas 2 (Feb 4-15, 2010) offers many a surprise. Once you enter the gallery, you encounter Hasnat's works displayed on every wall; not sparsely hung in neat rows but put on top of each other to fill the display area. Apart from the space crowded with art pieces, two tables and four benches are also arranged inside the gallery. Snacks are served on the tables, ostensibly to encourage the visitors to sit and chat about art. He is obviously not looking for a quick glance at his works; he wants the viewer to stay a little longer than is the standard practice.

Thus, instead of being a mere collection of works created in the studio, 'Salon' becomes an independent art piece by Mehmood -- an extension of his art. By doing this, Hasnat has commented upon the current art practice and trends of separating art from life. Ironically, it's an attempt to bring the acts of admiring art, enjoying food and engaging in small talk as one, interconnected, experience. He wants the spectator to become a viewer who spends more time with art and keeps looking and discovering the work on display. He uses the gallery-going experience as an act of domesticating art – blending the gallery display with the sitting-room layout.

Through this, Hasnat probably wants to remind us of the conditionings of art-viewing that prevail in the art world. He appears to be challenging our fixed notions of placing art in separate categories. Today, art exists in three settings. It originates in the studio, is shown in the gallery as a transitory stage, and finally ends up in someone's living room or storage space. At each of these three stages, the work represents and transmits different meanings and messages. Much like a piece of writing which has a different significance and value as a manuscript, a newspaper article or as part of a published book.

Mehmood is an NCA-trained, accomplished and acknowledged miniature painter; enjoying a position in the mid-ranks of modern miniaturists (if there is some kind of subdivision possible among the practitioners of this genre) along with Tazeen Qayyom, Wasim Ahmed, Zeeshan Mehmood and several others. All of them have shown their work here and abroad and are recognised by their specific styles and imagery. Hasnat has been categorised with his contemporaries, who made small but significant 'inventions' in terms of technique, material and pictorial substance of their miniature paintings. In his present exhibition, though, Hasnat Mehmood has distinguished himself from other miniature painters.

With an interesting turn in his aesthetics, Mehmood has ventured into another realm and can be labelled as a conceptual miniaturist. Definition aside, if one examines the collection on display, one is able to decode the man behind the concepts. A total of 30 pieces are on display, and even though these are described as new works, several are from different phases of his artistic life. Like a few other solo exhibitions held recently in Lahore, the present show is like a micro retrospective of Hasnat Mehmood.

With plenty of works from various periods, showing diverse formal and pictorial concerns and revealing the impact of his contemporaries, 'Salon' invokes a meaning other than that desired by the painter. Hasnat Mehmood may have preferred the idea of European salon in connection to his exhibition but the show alludes to Salan, the nearest sounding word of English 'Salon' in Urdu, which means curry, a dish that includes several spices and meat or vegetable ingredients. Simply because the works collected in/for the exhibition lack coherence and strong individuality; so the show appears more like an effort to house everything at one place.

Besides the works gathered from various periods, there is something peculiar about how Hasnat Mehmood resolves ideas through his art work. The approach towards collecting pieces from different stages of his artistic career has a strange parallel in the way the imagery is employed. A range of pictorial concerns are visible in this body of work, which consists of Braille inspired visuals, crows, stamps, national heroes, and political and popular images. The artist has employed a variety of materials and methods to execute these works, which deal with the questions about the revival of miniature painting, act of rendering an image, the difficulty in deciphering a message and the contradiction between an original creation and its replicas. In a way all these concerns lead to the main issue -- the validity of miniature painting as a practice in this day and age, its status with reference to fabricating original art works and copies, and the shift in its meaning from court/folio painting to studio/gallery exhibits.

Hasnat has derived inspiration from his fellow artists. So one can identify circles of Mahbub Shah, photos rendered in pencils by Ayaz Jokhio and a few others in Hasnat's new works. The presence of other artist's influences in one's vocabulary is a not uncommon. It depends on how these outside currents are tamed and transformed, or even used as a critique on others' aesthetics. However, none of these positions is evident in the case of Mehmood.

Amira Farooq lives and works in Lahore. She received her BFA from NCA in 2004, followed by a brief adventure in print and electronic media as a model and presenter. Since then she has been painting and recently had her first solo exhibition at Nairang Art Gallery. She creates intense dialogues concerning the complementary nature of human relationships, emotions, and the existence, by juxtaposing the opposites in contrasting colours and forms -- usually, along with some elements from nature.

She is the fifth person to go to NCA from her family, and that too only to pursue fine arts. "Father is an architect, and mother is a designer. It definitely had an influence on me, because you see the way your house is kept; every little thing, like how to view things."

TNS: How has your major in printmaking at NCA influenced your work?

AF: It's all connected. I need variations in expressions, because you learn things that you might use in the other medium. Printmaking is a two-dimensional medium and I think that comes out a lot in my work. But the more I paint, the more I break away from that.

TNS: How has NCA affected your work, if at all?

AF: NCA, obviously, is an old structure, and has taught me some discipline that you can't work without. But apart from that, it is the exposure that I got there, by meeting people from all over Pakistan, which was a huge eye-opener and got me out of my own little bubble. It has influenced my work more, conceptually, rather than in technique or skill.

TNS: How do you conceptualise your images? Do you draw on ideas or memories?

AF: I just pick an emotion, focus on it and I paint the visuals that best describe it. Sometimes I sketch, but most of the times I am working straight on canvas. I have to have music to work; that really helps channelling the emotions and in focusing.

TNS: How much role the element of chance has in your work?

AF: I think everything that we do in life is half chance. When you start making a painting, you intend to do one thing, but during the process you discover things, maybe through the paint, or let's say something spills over, or all of a sudden you see something on the canvas that you hadn't intended to make before. So yes, there is the element of chance in almost all creative processes.

TNS: What famous artists have influenced you, and how?

AF: Michelangelo has influenced me for one sheer skill, prolificacy. And then Dali for his mind; you just can't walk away from Dali without reacting. I really love Van Gough because he was the rebel of the art world. I, kind of, relate to him in terms of feeling misunderstood. In order to achieve greatness, there is a certain amount of suffering involved, and nobody gets it better than Van Gough. And then when I'm sitting down and painting, in my space, my biggest influence would probably be the first cave painter. Because here was somebody who was free of conditioning and approval, and all he thought about was just making an image, and re-creating something that he had seen in nature. And I think you have to be really free in your head from the voices of other people while you paint. So, I channel that anonymous caveman -- or woman, we don't know -- who started painting on the cave walls.

TNS: You mean you paint without any inhibition and do not expect any sort of appreciation for your work?

AF: When I am painting, the viewers are not there. They come into the picture when I show them my work. There is a dialogue. Not every piece can be loved by everyone; but every piece is loved by someone. That is a sort of validation that you need, to keep working. Because there is so much isolation in this profession that without that feedback, sometimes, it's hard to see what you are doing is really important. The job description of the artist is to be the conscience of the nation. In order to love something, you have to be free of your own selfish desires.

TNS: Do you feel that your technique of rendering is a bit simplified for painting?

AF: One could look at my work and say that it's not as 'skilled' as it is expected to be, but that is exactly my point. I'm trying to create a stylised version of reality that looks very simple from a distance, and even child-like to some extent. But at a second glance, the concept is not child-like at all. The paradox I like to play with my work is to keep the visuals very simple and the concept a little out of the box. Lately I've gone back to the primaries; if it's a simple thought, I might use fewer colours. It depends on what I am trying to say.

TNS: What are the best and the worst parts of being an artist?

AF: The best part is the absolute isolation, and it is just addictive once you start expressing yourself on a daily basis. Being an artist gives me a licence to insanity.

But then, the stereotyping can be very inextricable. Because most of the people believe that I will automatically be liberal and open to everything and anything under the sun, which is not the case. I have very clear-cut preferences and very precise likes and dislikes. And being a female artist, there are a lot of sexist gender issues attached as well.

Dear All,

Yet again, a friend has passed away, and yet again I am full of regret at not having made more of an effort to see them and keep up with them in their lifetime.

Gul Hameed Bhatti was a person remarkable for his kindness and his wit. That is how I remember him; somebody you could sit and giggle, share all sorts of outrageous puns, and generally have a wonderful time with.

I knew his name long before I met him. I knew him as the editor of The Cricketer which I started reading in 1977 after developing an "aesthetic interest" in the game after seeing on television images of a youthful Imran Khan bowling in the Sydney Test. I admired the publication and its strong statistical base and was aware of the editor's name and his passion for the game. But I only met him about a decade later when I was recruited by his wife Razia Bhatti (perhaps Pakistan's most outstanding editor) to work at Herald.

Two celebrity journalists, they were a remarkably down-to-earth and sane couple. And two of the kindest, most decent and most hardworking people I have ever met. At their home one always felt a great sense of calm and order, despite all the professional and personal pressures of working in such a stressful field. Gul always tolerated the Herald/Newsline team's tendency to slip into 'shop talk' even at social gatherings, and even though he sometimes got fed up of being kept waiting at the office, and of the late hours we worked, he was always there for Razia, a pillar of strength.

Razia left us too soon -- her death in 1996 was a huge shock. She was a remarkable person: in her very quiet and low key way she kept a disparate group of people united, feeling that they were almost family. She was the one who made us into a dedicated team, she was the one who remembered the birthdays and organised the presents for weddings and births. She was the one who made everyone feel they had a role and that excellence was our goal. And she was a role model in the way she juggled her roles as editor and proprietor with those of wife, mother, daughter and daughter-in-law. Razia's death left anybody who had ever had anything to do with her feeling suddenly bereaved and bereft.

It is almost fourteen years since Razia's death (hard to believe, it still feels so painful), and I can't even begin to imagine how difficult that time must have been for Gul. But he held the fort, and he faced all the adversities with so much courage: the bereavement, the cancer, the later illness…. How sad that somebody I always associate with humour and light-hearted banter should have had to face so much ill-health. It seems terribly unfair. But I suppose despite the setbacks he was lucky to have had his children there for him: Sara and Kamil, the young children who we used to see at the Herald and Newsline offices, seem to have continued to live out their parents' values and put love and decency before all else.

I am haunted by Gul's recent photos -- the sunken eyes, the frail demeanour. I remember him as large and cuddly, a bit like a big teddy bear, slightly dishevelled, rolling his eyes, giggling…

Our friend Gul, the revered Bhatti Sahab of a whole generation of The News journalists has left us. God rest his soul.

Best Wishes

Umber Khairi