First published in: Art and Letters, V. 29, 1955
One of the outstanding Pakistan to-day is Zainul Abedin, who was born in Bengal in 1917. He studied in Calcutta, but remained almost unknown outside India until 1943 when his sketches of the Bengal famine attracted widespread attention.
Abedin’s famine sketches demonstrated his genius as a master of the powerfully suggestive single line-as a cartoonist in the best sense of the word. His shrunken women and grotesquely swollen children lying without hope on the pavements, or grimly scavenging to survive, are unforgettable testimony of the horrors of that disastrous year. Jamini Roy, who believes that pictures should cheer the eye and comfort the soul, regards these vivid sketches along with other essays in “social realism” as an unwarrantable intrusion of political propaganda into art. The view is, perhaps, an extreme one. Abedin has never ventured into party politics, and there is no reason to believe that these terse commentaries in charcoal were anything but a sensitive and kindly man’s instinctive reaction to the calamities of his people. Not even Jamini Roy can deny his fellow-Bengali’s evocative brilliance in drawing. His economic use of strong thick strokes and good composition add to the drama of his subjects without once exploiting or cheapening them. Abedin’s famine sketches will be admired in India long after the famines themselves are forgotten.
Partition soon followed. After the initial disruption, Abedin lived for a period in Karachi. He was shortly afterwards appointed Principal of the Government Institution of Arts at Dacca, a post which he still holds. In the East Pakistan capital he lives, works and teaches his pupils. The pictorial arts are not well developed in the province which has always lagged behind West Bengal; for one thing the traditional Muslim antipathy to the portrayal of the human figure survives in the form of prejudice and in the difficulty obtaining suitable models. Abedin however is happy to teach in his own country, and was able to execute his serious work in congenial surroundings.
In his colour paintings Zainul Abedin has dabbled in many schools. There are portraits in the classical European manner, and there are formalistic forest scenes owing much to Bengali revivalism, and to Ajanta. In 1951-2 he visited Europe and exhibited pictures in most of these styles, including his famine sketches. They were well received. Eric Newton and other London critics spoke warmly of his exhibition at the Berkeley Galleries in London in January 1952. Subsequently he visited France, Spain and Italy, where he attended the International Conference of Artists in Venice in September 1952. He returned home by way of Turkey.
His European tour evidently inspired him to further heights. His work over the last two years clearly shows that he is the first artist of India and Pakistan successfully to assimilate abstractionist technique into the local tradition without relying on mere imitation.
Zainul Abedin is not the first of his country-men to use the abstractionist style. There is no lack of these paintings in the art galleries of Calcutta and Delhi. The difference lies in the use of the technique. Abedin has used it as a means of expressing more clearly and more satisfactorily what he wants to say about the Bengali scene. The others have used it in order to affirm that Indians and Pakistanis can use it just as well as its European originators. Abedin has seized on those qualities and aspects of abstractionism which emphasise the peculiar characteristics of the Pakistani countryside and people and ignored those which do not. He has cut it according to the Bengali cloth, and in doing so has revealed potentialities of the technique which the European masters never discovered. In a sense, his latest pictures mark the coming of age of Indo-Pakistani art in the modern world. The first reaction of Indian artists to the impact of the West was one of close imitation, in manner, in outlook and even in content. That was the India of Dadabhai Naraoji’s representation of the citizens of Central Finsbury at Westminster, the India of Michael Madusudhan Datta’s earlier and Sarojini Naidu’s later English poetry. The next stage was the expression of Indian subjects in western style, and the attempt to introduce something of the Indian spirit through the alien media. This was the India of the Congress-aiming at Democracy in Delhi instead of representation at Westminster-of the English version of Gitanjali, and, in art, of Abdur Rahman Chughtai, the painter of Lahore. There followed the revivalist movement, foreshadowed by Abanindranath and perhaps culminating in Rousualt-like primitivism of Jamini Roy. This was the India of ahimsa, of the panchayats, of the Nazrul Islam songs.
The attempt throughout has been to achieve a synthesis of Indian tradition and western technique. Chughtai reached this as far as the classical European style is concerned. The revivalists developed it, but were tempted into the paths of provincialism and tended to ignore developments outside India. The breakdown of classical ideas, initiated by the impressionists, was the most important of these developments, and India either passed it over or seized upon individual aspects of it without endeavouring fully to understand it. It will be suggested later that this failure to comprehend the development of modernistic western art can also. With many reservations, be detected in Zainul Abedin’s grappling with abractionism.
Concurrent with the revivalist movement was the school that chose to work in universal media. Amaresh Datta of Saugar is an example of a young living poet who prefers to reach the circle of Spender and T.S. Eliot and write in their style and language, and on their chosen themes than to voice the special messages of his own people in so far as the latter are different from those of other nations. The innumerable orthodox post-impressionists of India and Pakistan-cubists and surrealists and abstractionists all-whose works are indistinguishable from similar products of studios in Chelsea, Chicago, or Copenhagen, are of this school. Every Indian or Pakistani student goes through this stage, as do his counterparts in Europe. The sub-continent awaited an artist who would interpret these new and puzzling techniques for the Indian milieu.
Zainul Abedin has offered himself precisely as that interpreter, and there is justice in his claim. He is interested in design, and achieves intense drama in those of his new pictures which are concerned with movement. The groping of the legs of the two boatmen pulling a boat in his “Goon Tana” is a remarkable instance of this. But more interesting are his figures in repose in a more pure abstractionist style. In particular he has caught the melodic flowing lines of Pakistani life-the trailing edge of a sari covering a woman’s head, the contoursofthesariorlunghiwhen its wearer is squatting or sitting, the long rippling hair and the gracefully swaying arms and shoulders of a Bengali woman, the balance of the inevitable pot on the head or at the hip. All these are ideally suited to the restrained and imaginative use of the abstractionist method, with its emphasis on geometrical shapes of different tones or colour, its exaggeration of formal relationships, its seizure of the dominant line. Abstractionism as a style will probably find its true home in India and Pakistan, and Abedin has shown the way to a genuine contribution on the part of the sub-continent to the universe of art.
The danger with pioneering is the incidence of misunderstanding and of too much enthusiasm. One feels sometimes with Abedin that he has been carried away too fast by the excitement of his discovery, that he has overdone the lines and the assertive shapes of his new style, that there is too much design and not enough composition about his pictures of Bengali women, his children playing, his villagers lounging. But one can only admire his imagination and courage, and wish that his pictures will be shown to Europe as a manifestation of what India and Pakistan can contribute out of their own peculiar genius and without turning their backs on the world about them.