The Imagined Past

The Imagined Past

Paper presentation by Durriya Kazi, Head of Department of Visual Studies, University of Karachi

“The Future of the Past” Symposium for 23^rd Exhibition of Paintings by the Artists Association of Punjab

National Art Gallery, Islamabad May 29, 2009

One could say that all art is essentially about the past: an artist has experienced, thought, or observed something, and the artwork is his attempt to communicate what he has experienced, thought or observed. However, I will look at the idea of The Imagined Past firstly in a historical context.

The Pakistani nation in particular and the Muslim of the subcontinent in general has the distinct ability to live an imaginary life above mundane reality. This is seen in all aspects of social life, music, poetry, cinema. Perhaps one could date it to the fall of the Mughal Empire, when the Muslims of the subcontinent, as Ayesha Jalal has proposed, were rudely thrown off their pedestal by the British Raj. The larger Muslim population withdrew from the world of European dominance and Hindu Revivalism, turning to religion or anxious economic subservience. The comfort zone for thinking Muslims became a quiet pride in past glory, minimizing their humiliation by subsuming into the larger historical and geographical Muslim identity.

The creation of Pakistan restored some of that lost status, however we have not yet achieved those conditions that allowed for the memory of cultural glory to be restored. The mainstream society remains in anxious economic subservience, fearful, insecure, where cultural growth has been set aside for economic and political stability. While artists have, as artists always do, continued to make art, and have regardless established their presence both nationally and internationally, one can see the influence of these conditions on the character of Pakistani art.

Pakistani art can be roughly divided into two strands: Nostalgia and socio-political critique. The Grand Master of Nostalgia has to be Abdur Rehman Chughtai, who in his works, expanded space, transcended geography, and collapsed time. A product of the Bengal Revival Movement, while Abindranath Tagore painted a modern day multi armed Parvati, Chughtai evoked an ancient idyllic imagined past of timeless Saqis, lovers and travellers that emerged out of persio-arabic literary tradition. He established this visual tradition with such panache that it spawned a huge following that exists till today. We can see this nostalgia in the work of Hajra Mansur, the cityscapes of Ejaz Anwer, even the landscapes of Mugheez Riaz and the many paintings of Thari women of Sindh, and the calligraphic works across the decades, to give but a few examples.

The other strand of Pakistani art sets out to critique current socio-political issues. This strand too has a huge following from Ijazul Hasan through A.R. Nagori and Akram Dost Balouch right through to Ali Azmat and Rashid Rana. Most art schools have become proponents of this school of thought.

A few straddle the space between such as Zahoor ul Akhlaque, Anwer Saeed and Bashir Mirza. Rarely do we see artists engaged exclusively with the formal language of art such as Imran Mir.

The Neo-miniaturists put nostalgia on its head by using an old medium to convey issues of the contemporary world.

So, on the one hand we have historical form and contemporary content, on the other we have imagined histories pulled into modernist or post modernist form.

Most post-colonial societies have grappled with issues of pre-colonial identity. In many cases this is not based on first hand knowledge, but related histories as handed down through family or community narratives. They tend to be mythologized. These mythologies are as much a political stance as they are investigations into lost identities. Sometimes this leads to a reverse exclusion of imposed cultures. As such these works become transitional, and before long, themselves become historical documents.

One must, of course realize that history is rarely fact. Nations have, through mythologizing their pasts, either created pasts that never existed or erased them. The French Revolution is idealized ignoring the horror of 40,000 public beheadings in a month to cheering crowds, the forced feeding of the flesh of the hated Queen’s Danish guards to them as they were burnt alive. Civilized Europe chooses to focus on the social scientists, philosophers, poets and musicians of the 300 years between the 15^th and 18^th centuries when an estimated 1 million women were burnt alive at the stake as witches. America and Canada, the lands of opportunity, leave out the genocide of Native American Tribes, and would probably love to forget slavery. In Pakistan we begin our history from 711, as if the Muslims originally populated these lands.

Rewriting history is a way of determining the future since what brings people together is a shared history, so the history we choose will determine the future we plan.

But not all mythologizing is so instrumental. This argument does not explain that in the 30,000 year old history of human communities, there are artworks that are timeless, full of a magnetic power and that are rediscovered with awe, by each subsequent generation. What is it about these artworks that keep them so timeless?

The poet, T.S.Eliot, explored this phenomenon in his writings, both his poems as well as his critical writings, which, although written about poetry, offer some of the best theories about Art making. Eliot lived in a time of post WWI upheaval, a time of shattered values, of lost faith, of questioning the benefits of modern urbanism; something perhaps we are revisiting in our own time.

In Art, Dada and Cubism, the one nihilistically, the other with enthusiastic optimism, severed links with art history, and sought a new language for new times. Eliot, too, was searching for a language with which to convey the contemporary world. He developed what he called ‘the mythical method’. He wrote in 1923:

“ It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history” [1]

Tapping into mythologies of the past, from religion, literature, history was a way of making the experiences of the individual of his time, meaningful by suggesting that they are part of a larger scheme of things. It makes the individual feel his experience, his life, is significant and part of a generational experience. He wrote in 1918:

“The artist, I believe, is more primitive as well as more civilized than his contemporaries, his experience is deeper than civilization, and he only uses the phenomena of civilization in expressing it.” [2]

He addresses the dilemma of the artist facing new experiences, new events, new messages, who has to struggle to place these within the larger human history.

Primitive myth creates a pattern which establishes the relationship of the individual with mysterious forces beyond everyday experience. A lot of this thought grew out of the Jungian concept of the “collective unconscious”. By linking human experience, knowledge and endeavour with an immensely old unconscious psyche that Jung believed was at least 5000 years old, and was the “inherited wisdom of the human race”, not only did it make the vagaries of everyday life less mystifying and meaningless, but it also allowed analogies across cultures, across geography, across time.

I find some similarities with the sufi concept of man created out of four qalam or pens. The first, the pre-material state when the soul was one with God and had knowledge of all things, the second the transformation into a material existence as the human form grows in the womb, the process of which causes all previous knowledge to be lost, the third our life on earth and the fourth life after death. All knowledge gained in our life on earth, especially intuitive knowledge, is a recalling of that original past.

For the viewer or reader when the mythological situation is presented, writes Jung, the response has “an emotional intensity as though chords in us were touched that had never resounded before, as though forces were unloosed, the existence of which we hand never dreamed.” [3]

This is something we have all experienced when we respond to an extraordinary work of art, or poem or music. The end of this experience is a transformation, a new birth, a new way of existence.

Not all artists set out to do this, but all great art achieves this. Artist, viewer, and the larger humanity are connected into a collective meaningfulness linking our primeval experiences with the promise of continuity in an imagined future.

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[1] The Dial November 1923, Review of James Joyce’s Ulysseus

[2] The Egoist September 1918 Review of Tarr by Wyndham Lewis

[3] C.G.Jung ‘On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetic Art’