THE FIRST PAINTING OF M.A. RAHMAN CHUGHTAI
NUR JAHAN MOURNING AT JAHANGEERS TOMB

A teenager’s fantasy and birth of Chughtai Art

Art activity was in full swing in Lahore. A Punjab Fine Art Society was established here and various exhibitions shows were being arranged at the Lahore Museum. A show of paintings was held and that was seen by M.A. Rahman Chughtai. Instinctively he felt that he could do better than the acknowledged Masters of Hindustan, which included the Bengal School, as well as the great Master, Abindaranath Tagore, the accepted giant of Indian Art. Indeed his assertion was simple, those people had no concept of Muslim Culture and depicted it wrongly all the time.

After his Eighth Class Certificate and education at Railway Technical School Lahore in 1911, the artist had joined Mayo School of Arts for diploma in Photo lithography. Samarendranath Gupta was too vain and arrogant to teach to a Muslim set of students. And there was personal dislike between the two persons at Mayo School of Arts. A three piece English suit Gupta was versus a Sherwani shalwar and turban phag of Master Abdur Rahman, as he was called at that time, and ethnic and religious bigotry was self evident.

It was the years of the photography of M.A. Rahman Chughtai. Armed with a wooden Box camera of his own and a set of glass plates, he was experimenting all the time. His portrait of the Director Education became very famous for its portrayal at that time. Also busy with stone work for his lithography, and printing same in one form or the other. Designing of Eid cards was there as well as aero work for some of his portraits of people. He used to colour the photographs himself, and there is a record of same to this day.

The idea of a painting with Nur Jahan mourning at Jahangeer’s tomb came to his mind. He first did something which he never did all his life. Asked his wife to pose in a praying posture, and photographed some poses of her. These photographs he kept on one side.

Next was to be a factual record of the tomb itself. The artist was a regular visitor to the Mausoleum of Emperor Jahangeer with other boys to frequent the place. There in early years M.A. Rahman Chughtai copied the sarcophagus of Jahangeer for his proposed painting. We attach here an image of that earliest drawing of the artist. Writings state the colour of the stones used for the purpose. Indeed a unique record in our archives.

Armed with both a photograph of his wife praying and a sketch of the sarcophagus, he completed a painting of the great Queen of the past mourning the loss of her husband. With big fanfare M.A. Rahman Chughtai exhibited the work at a neighbour’s house in Chabuk Sawaran and the family of the neighbour still remember the event. Everyone liked it and praised it. But the artist himself was unhappy with it for his own reasons. Finally he got tired of it and tore it himself. He was also sincere in tearing things that he did not like, much to the regret of family and friends. Children used sneak in his studio to steal torn paintings but he would not allow that. So a cousin of ours had a torn painting but he lost it in a ship wreck in the sea when coming back from England.

The first painting that got published in Modern Review in January 1916, can be compared to his first painting, that was created but could not remain. Other works on the same subject came afterwards but never that painting itself.

THE AESTHETIC IMPULSE
THE CHILD M.A. RAHMAN CHUGHTAI

Things hardly known by anyone

The first marriage of Mian Kareem Baksh Mimar was within the family. The wife begot him a son, and he named him Muhammed Hussain. The father even with his meager circumstances gave the best education possible to his son, who was a graduate of those times. Then his wife died, and father and son were left alone. Mian Kareem Baksh married for the second time, Chiragh Bibi, and Chiragh Bibi gave him three sons, Abdur Rahman, Abdullah and Abdur Raheem.

The Quranist view of life was there in Chinay Wali Masjid, near Mohalla Chabuk Sawaran and there Abdur Rahman received his Quranic education.This was before the mosque was captured by the Al Hadees group in Lahore. There Abdur Rahman started the lessons to HIFAZ the Quran that his internal desire to become Hafiz ul Quran, just like his elder half-brother Muhamed Hussain. Soon after Baba Miran Baksh volunteered to Mian Kareem Baksh to start teaching naqashi to the three boys and all three enrolled in the Masjid Wazeer Khan hujra class of the Baba. Baba Miran Baksh was married to the sister of Kareem Baksh, that is Karam Nisa and they lived in Kocha Buzurg Shah. For few years these lessons were the first lessons that Abdur Rahman Chughtai learnt in the traditon of aesthetics. Later the brother of Chiragh Bibi, the Mama (uncle) Elahi Baksh enrolled him in the Railway Technical School, near Railway Station, which was in fact the site of the mosque of Qudsia Begum, wife of Prince Dara Shikoh. Creative impulse would not go away.

One day Abdur Rahman was working on his home work for school, that a Crow came and sat on the minaret of the Mullah Ghaus mosque opposite their home. The crow intrigued Abdur Rahman as a subject and on a paper he drew a crow on the minaret of a mosque, and later had the courage to show his drawing to his father. Mian Kareem Baksh was a busy worker, and was absent from the house from Morning till late night. The boys used to play but as soon as the wooden kaaparas (shoes) of the father would sound in the galli, all three would jump n the bed. Mian Kareem Baksh had brought a Muhajir couple from Kashmeer, Ama Tabbi and her husband to the house to give them shelter. It was Ama Tabbi who was more of a mother and father to the kids. One day Abdur Rahman had caught a baitara (bird) on the roof and put it in the kameez of his father. When the father came home to put it on, he was shocked to see the Kameez jumping up and down. Abdur Rahman was obviously caught and reprimanded but things were smooth. In one incident a hundred rupee note got misplaced and the boys were blamed for putting it somewhere. It was later found by chance that a mouse had taken the note to his hole in the wall and it was discovered there, much to the relief of all, for 100 Rs at that time was in all terms a great sum for the family.The past times were enormous, as when there was nothing to do,the brothers with horde of girls and boy cousins, would go over on the roof in the Havelli of their Mama Elahi Baksh and used to bath in the rain and frolic with each other. There was no gender consciousness and at that time, the girl cousins used to jump in the rain, after removing their shirts. A proper romp, naughty but never amorous.

A physically active child, Abdur Rahman Chughtai was fond of swimming in the river Ravi, in the canal Degh, visiting Mughal monuments, hunting, fishing, flying kites on his roof top, and even just playing cricket, outside the mosque of Maryiam Zamani, wife of Emperor Jahangeer. Picnics were often held at Jahangeer’s mausoleum. But these physical activities, never impaired his aesthetic impulse.

Abdur Rahman himself recalls that on his way back from School, he used to see a painter paint in the Gumti Bazaar and used to stop and watch the man paint at his shop. The Gumti Bazaar painters were a famous painting family which had migrated from Kabul a long time back and were called Moortian walay. A section was called Bindari-ghar, and the artist’s first wife was from that section of the family.

The first aesthetic impulse for the child was that when the mother made him wear a RED JORA to attend a marriage and MARC refused to go out in that jora. He rejected its bold colour, as well as style. He thought it unsuitable for wearing. He was scolded, reprimanded but went on crying and would not budge an inch. So they left him on the stairs crying. When the parents came back from marriage, he was still on the steps, where he had cried for hours, just at the thought of an inappropriate dress for him. His aesthetics were showing their colour.

The death of his father in 1913 made the brothers do many things. One was the opening of a FIREWOOD SHOP in their owned shop inside Yakki Gate Lahore. The two brothers used to sell firewood while Abdur Rahman seated on a charpai at the back of shop used to write dramas, imaging himself to be a great playwright for dramas one of these days. Photography and photo-litho work became his obsession. And he used to paint them with his AEROGRAPH pen giving a coloured work to his clients for his bread earning.

At the Mayo School of Arts, he saw a show of National Paintings at Lahore Museum and felt the inadequacy of the works. He thought he could make better works than that. That led to a spurt of making paintings. The first work was NUR JAHAN MOURNING AT JAHANGEERS TOMB, which he tore after exhibiting in his Mohalla home to friends. Later on some paintings were made while he was in Gujranwalla and sent for publication in Modern Review Calcutta, courtesy of Chatterjee Sahib, the Principal of the Govt Mission School Gujranwalla. And orginally he found fame at the first show of his at Lahore Museum in 1920.

The question always remain. What made him stand outside the common environment? Was it genetic? Was it environmental? Was it a combination of both. Here in Lahore, it is simply said that it was a GIFT OF ALLAH.

A SERIES OF EXPOSition OF CHUGHTAI ART;
FOR THOSE WHOSE EYES AND PERCEPTIONS;
LOST IN TIME WITH TOTAL BIGOTRY OF RACISM..

The exposure of Chughtai Art on the Indian scene came with the printing of the 1916 work, in “Modern review” in January and February, 1917. We still have it. The work PASSING OF SHAH JAHAN in 1918 had broken all records And then there was the exhibition at Lahore Museum in 1920, and with all the other Indian Masters there, all the works of M.A. Rahman Chughtai were not only appreciated but also sold. It led to bigger things like the publication of MURAQQA in 1928. The rest is art history.

A lot of Indian art critics were famous for writing their bullshit about him, but those are forgotten in history. After partition a new wave of ignoramus critics were created, who found fault in everything. To the extent that they were blinded with fury of racial hatred, and promoted by lobbies to undo our ideological content.  The division of Lahore and Karachi was created when the capital moved from Karachi to Islamabad. A wave of anti Pakistani lobbies were created in Lahore, but here they could not do much. Criitics like Dr M.D. Taseer, Malik Shamas, and Dr Abdullah Chaghatai, were here to disband them.  They moved to Karachi. Karachi the capital of Pakistan supported Abdur Rahman Chughtai and his art, at that time. To the extent that Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan called him the National artist of Pakistan. The Lahore group moved to Kaerachi included Ali Imam, who opened a gallery there. Ali Imam spun his own stories. The modern artist, turned  critic, was busy smoking his pipe, in a French beard and in his blue jeans, he cast aspersions on the artist. One sees ridiculous copies of Chughtai being endorsed by him.  In the end he did start seeing originals, but casting doubt on them was his forte.  It is said that final years, his perceptions cleared too. Then there were persons like Dr Akbar Naqvi , the Beatles boy from Liverpool, and Patna, considered Chughtai as irrelevant after partition. Then he stooped so low that in an article in Dawn, he criticized our presentation of the magnum opus Amal e  Chughtai, to loved and respected ones on behalf of the late artist, as an act of desperation, for there were no buyers of the book. So being given free. It is perhaps the most valuable book created in Pakistan. Was it a deliberate act or was he really ignoramus? And who rose his pedestal to being doyen of art criticism. In fact most of these people had no idea of  Chughtai, as they had no chance to see Chughtai Art, nor did they make efforts for same. I invited Dr Akbar Naqvi to visit us and get acquainted with Chughtai Art. A saying comes in mind from our culture, “Put a load of books on a donkey, and the donkey remains a donkey”. I Hope it was  not true for these people.I made this offer to many others.  In London a lot of forgeries passed through the auction houses, mostly made by a Karachi maverick artist, as well as by a Christian advertising artist, where both innovated methods that would perplex people.  And no ability to understand the intricacy technique and symbolism of Chughtai art. One wonders if it is individual racism or lobbies undermining the fear of ideological strength of the artist. The famous critic Basil Gray in a confession in 1977, blamed it on British lobbies in perceived threat of ideology. Eventually everything gets exposed with time. Basil Gray wrote the article on Chughtai, which we published many times. Another person Dr Marcella Nesom Sirhindi, did write a sentence, which we can quote here:

“The art of A.R. Chughtai must be recognized as the earliest and truest form of national expression. Chughtai use of colour, skill  as a draftsman, originality, imagination, and sense of humour (in his art) have yet to be equalled in Pakistan.  Ohio, 1992.  

Enjoy our first presentation of pencil sketches of Abdur Rahman Chughtai. Seen by thousands here. Critics do not have time to see original art, but rely on misgot perceptions to generate their attempt to spit on the moon, and the spit falls on them. Enjoy!