meethapani

Art and the Swadeshi Movement In my quest to discover the origins of the exquisite tiles in my aunts’ home in Karachi’s old Amil Colony, I stumbled upon a whole new dimension of the Swadeshi, and later Swaraj, movement, an important rallying point for the Freedom Movement. Swaraj is commonly identified with Non-cooperation, Civil Disobedience, and political rallies. Behind the public bonfires of European cloth, manufacturers, designers, artists, poets and journalists quietly built factories, established presses, redesigned art school curricula that not only spread the spirit of revolution across India but ensured there were locally produced alternatives. Jamshed Nusserwanji established Bharat Tiles with Pheroze Sidhwa in 1922 in Bombay with a manufacturing branch in Karachi, as his swadeshi contribution, saying “India needs both economic and political independence”.     Developing a new process using coloured cements, the exquisite tiles we see in all heritage bu...

Karachi City of Dreams Durriya Kazi ADA Dialogue II Do you know your city? Frere Hall Karachi May 4 2018 Karachi has been a bit like sand dunes that are constantly shifting and altering yet retaining their essence. It is difficult to define it visually by its built structures. There is no concept of the inner city spreading out to the suburbs in an orderly fashion.   There is no map book of Karachi, no history of the city for visitors, no calendar of events for its residents. It’s a city that is spread by word of mouth, a city to be experienced rather than viewed. This may be what makes Karachi feel like home. Home for those whose ancestors lived here, for those who were born here, for those who escaped the violence of partition, for those who come here for work, this city envelops and accepts all. As a Pathan labourer said we can only work in Karachi because no one asks where you are from, only what you can do. Architects and urban planners generally view a ci...

Owning and Disowning Cultural Heritage In the last chapter of William Dalrymple’s book The Last Mughal, he gives a harrowing account of a massacre parallel to the killing of supporters and family of the Mughals- the systematic erasure of Mughal architecture : havelis or homes, mosques, gardens, caravanserais, and of course the Red Fort, of whose magnificent halls, living quarters and gardens, only twenty percent could be saved by the intervention of John Lawrence, an English Officer, after whom Lahore’s   Lawrence Gardens are named   and to whom the world must be grateful   for saving whatever he could. History is filled with politically motivated destruction of art: The Egyptians destroyed statues of their predecessors, the Romans practiced   damnatio memoriae , the public destruction of statues and monuments of their predecessor. Religion was of course a major motivator for the destruction of art and heritage: the 8C Christian Emperor, Leo III, ordered i...

“Chal Nikal” “0 to 60 in Five Seconds”; “Drive it Like You Stole it”; “Lose Your Innocence in 3.9 Seconds”   are typical marketing slogans for the latest car models. And then a Honda 70 motorcycle has a flamboyant message in reflective stickers on a shiny CD number plate that says “chal nikal”. Chal nikal ( come, lets get out of here) is a collective call to escape, get out of an impasse, find one’s own way out.   Somewhere in this contrast lie the social challenges of Pakistani society. The global image of the biker: outlaw by choice, unfettered by society’s docile norms, is a far cry from bikers in Pakistan, and most developing countries, where the motorcycle is simply the most affordable form of transport. According to Arif Hasan the monthly costs are half of bus fares and cuts travel time in half. American   WWII veterans wanting to relive the camaraderie of the shared dangers of the battlefield, formed some of the first Harley Davidson biker clubs ...

Posters – Art for the people The posters I grew up with were the wonderful psychedelic pop art posters of the Sixties and Seventies. .  They were possibly the first posters made for youth. On July 16, 1966, impresario, Bill Graham went around San Francisco on his scooter pasting up Wes Wilson’s now famous “Flames” poster announcing a concert on July 23. It had orange flame shaped letters vibrating against a lime green background. The posters slowly disappeared from the walls as people started collecting them. Aaron Skirboll writes for the Smithsonian Magazine, what was an advertisement had become “a coveted work of art”. Postermania best describes what followed. Florescent colours, op art, pop art, all came together is a psychedelic explosion   that characterized art, design, and fashion of the time. Graham was instrumental in commissioning and marketing psychedelic concert posters by designers such as Stanley Mouse, Alton Kelley, Wes Wilson, Victor Moscoso, and...

The Gypsy Soul The first time I realized that gypsies were not just characters in a film but real people was as a child when my father, an orthopaedic surgeon, told us of a gypsy patient he treated. Of Irani origin, he was told his leg was to be amputated and he came to my father to see if it could be saved. The reason caught our imagination: in gypsy law, if a man was disabled, another could take his wife, as it meant he could no longer take care of her. His wife was beautiful and his cousin, who accompanied him, was keen to benefit from his amputation and marry his wife. My father managed to save his leg and the gypsy gave him a blanket with a huge tiger printed on it.  The next time I met a gypsy was more recent: he was from England and had come to understand truck art so he could paint a truck in London. As we shared experiences, I discovered many words in Romany, the language gypsies spoke, were similar to Urdu.  Andre: inside; angustri: ring; bal: hair; baro/ba...

Celebrating Jugaar The basti kids in front of my mother’s house have become avid snooker players, except the table is a cloth placed over a bit of wood with sides made of stretched tape wrapped around nails. With 6 pockets, the cues are simple sticks and the balls are marbles.  The whole fragile contraption is placed on a couple of plastic boxes well below waist level even for a child. But each player has focused concentration for the next shot and a silent audience surrounds the table. Every so often photographs of innovative low cost solutions do the social media rounds: the missing numbers of a broken clock written on the wall, a shower made of a pierced empty plastic coke bottle. These are what we would call jugaar. A jugaar is an innovative low cost fix or solution in response to a need. Almost every culture has an equivalent: gambiarra in Brazil, zizhu chuangxin in China, jua kali in Kenya, system D in France, trick 17 in Switzerland, chindogu in Japan.  ...