First published on 23rd May 2024
How should we determine the size of a story? Can it be assessed by its length, its expanse across time? Or its capacity to occupy space? Or should it be measured by its impact, a metric that has persistently resisted definition? Or is there some other metric, one that measures how the story actively extends an audience’s experience of time and space?
Kaarawaan and Other Stories, an exhibition of Gulammohammed Sheikh’s latest work, appears to arrive at a system of measurement that declares loudly that every story is large: if only its ability to impact and extend itself is gauged alongside, and not against, other stories.
Curated in collaboration with Vadehra Art Gallery, the exhibition opened in New Delhi’s Bikaner House in February 2024 before moving to Mumbai’s Chemould Prescott Road in April. The exhibition features several large paintings and kavaads. A storytelling device found in Rajasthan, the kavaad is a folding wooden cupboard that typically doubles up as a mobile Hindu temple. Typically, about one foot high with 12 to 16 panels on wooden pivots and metal hinges, these devices are made from the wood of mango and semal trees. Kavaadiyas or Kavaadiya Bhats traditionally carried these portable cupboards with them on their travels and stopped to narrate stories with them to various audiences on the way. However, while traditional kavaads open only on two sides and are rife with religious connotations, the ones that Sheikh designs open on all four sides, and by the artist’s own admission, “to contents of all kinds, wondrous, narrative, critical covering social, political, topical issues”. [1] The paintings, on the other hand, are more like murals in both scale and design.
None of the pieces at this exhibition are ever content with following set forms, or being just one thing or telling one story. They combine endlessly. While canvases such as “Kaarawaan”, the 80 x 257-inch centerpiece of the show, gathers several famous stories in unfamiliar constellations, small kavaads such as “Shehr ke Shor/City Blues” layer unfamiliar stories into an arrangement that has been familiar to Indian audiences for over 400 years. [2] Then there are works such as “Majnun Jungle Mein”, “Khwaab/Majnun in the Forest” and “Tree of Sleep”, in which the recto and the verso of a single canvas are imagined as dialectical.
Sheikh does not merely juxtapose, combine or collect stories; he experiments with them so that they never seem to start or end, but simply coalesce to remind us that our understanding of past and present is as warped as our understanding of a here and there, a self and an other. Indeed, as the 87-year-old artist tells The New Indian Express, “I like to play with the idea of multiple times set in multiple situations to create a new multi-dimensional world.” [3] So St Francis of Assisi shares space with Indian mystic poet and saint, Kabir, in “Francis aur Kabir/Francis and Kabir”; numerous luminaries from different (even warring) countries find their way to the same boat journeying across deep, tumultuous waters in “Kaarawaan”; and Gandhi still walks on among us in “Ab Bhi Gandhi/Still Gandhi”.The inspirations behind each work are as diverse as the Vadodara-based artist’s interests. While “Kaarawaan” is inspired by the 18th-century Pahadi painter Nainsukh’s “Boat Adrift on a River”, “Francis and Kabir” is a reinterpretation of the Ebstorf Map, a 13th-century circular mappa mundi of the world made by Gervase of Ebstorf that was destroyed in World War II. Sheikh reworks the map to depict contemporary episodes of violence and political conflict, flanking it with images of saints drawn from archival references. As art historian Shukla Sawant observes, Sheikh’s “Kaarawaan” also includes an allusion to the figure of Peace from the Sienese painter Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s early 14th-century mural “Allegory of Good and Bad Government”.
The exhibition design respects Sheikh’s propensity for playing with stories: grand paintings are displayed along with sketches and digital copies of works in progress. Kaarawaan and Other Stories, therefore, not only allows the artist to tell his stories, but also nestles the story of each piece within its canvas in an endless mise-en-abyme. After looking at the work-in-progress sketches, it is impossible to unsee the stories of selection and erasure that mark the narrative being woven into the final work. Similarly, tales behind the genesis of popular legends continue to frame the stories that each artwork is attempting to narrate, and are given contemporary relevance. It is easy to question the politics that might have given rise to the the episode of the samudra-manthan (The Churning of the Ocean of Milk) from the Vishnu Purana, when it is used as a visual frame for a kavaad representing the Srinagar floods (“Baadh, Paani, Jeevan/Deluge, Water, Life”). “Majnun in the Forest” leads the viewer straight to the heart of the politics of surrender that characterizes Qais’ love for Layla: one that paradoxically was meant to breed a detached desire for the beloved, but eventually earned him the epithet of Majnun (literally, possessed or crazy) and led him to wander for several years in the wilderness. While Majnun is typically imagined in a desert setting, Sheikh’s painting places him in a lush green forest, reworking the folktale while opening up questions about how the story has altered over time.
In a career spanning more than four decades, Sheikh has walked miles in different kinds of shoes: as an artist, historian, writer and educator. It is no wonder then that the stories he tells with his art are equally well-travelled. It is also perhaps the kavaad’s history of travelling tales that makes it the perfect vessel for Sheikh’s stories. Borrowed from and shifting between a range of sources -- from myth and legend to history and fable -- they also move with varying degrees of agility across different countries and cultures. Made wise by endless travelling and adaptability, these stories never seem to fight with each other for space: they know exactly where and how to tuck themselves in, seamlessly arranging themselves in rhythms and patterns that intuitively make sense. Large canvases offer comfortable lodging and boarding for several small stories that encourage audiences to draw close, and small kavaads fold in several sides with sprawling, complex stories, making audiences walk back from the work to take in its full scope. While the former scatters the seeds of stories across wide landscapes and waits for them to gently take root, the latter grafts and cuts a range of branches that might flower in unexpected and unpredictable ways. But each kind of story hopes to make the world lusher and kinder.
While it is replete with references, Kaarawaan and Other Stories seldom discloses these elements clearly or wears them sharply on its sleeve. The exhibition note itself is sparse, reluctant to divulge the stories behind the details in the paintings. This strategy compels audiences to observe carefully not only the paintings which seem to possess something of the uncanny in their ties to other works and characters, but also to their own memories. Without Kaavadiyas to ventriloquize the many stories that Sheikh’s cupboards can tell, we must search our brains, hearts, minds, and oftentimes, even our conscience. It is not only the artist’s signature that finds place on each canvas; all members of the team that has worked on these pieces are named and acknowledged in the exhibition. The intense collaborative effort behind most of the paintings reminds visitors that it takes a village to raise and nurture a story, so that it continues to impact us and expand our sense of space and time.
Damini Kulkarni is an Assistant Professor of Media and Film Studies at the Symbiosis School for Liberal Arts, Pune. She has a PhD in Media and Communication Studies from Savitribai Phule Pune University.
Kaarawaan and Other Stories is on view at Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai from April 6 to May 31, 2024.
Notes
[1] Shukla Sawant, “Gulammohammed Sheikh: A Painter Wants to Paint -- I Want to Keep that Faith Alive, Hope Alive,” The Wire, April 21, 2024.
[2] Ishita Roy, “With Kahlo and Husain on Board,” The New Indian Express, February 24, 2024.
[3] Ibid.