SECRET EXPERIMENTATIONS M.A. RAHMAN CHUGHTAI;
NOBODY REALLY KNOWS, YES PUBLIC FOR FIRST TIME.
THE HIDDEN CHUGHTAI ART NOBODY WILL EVER KNOW.

It was 1957, I was studying in 2B Saint Anthony’s High School, and a call came from the Principal’s office. Brother Henderson communicated that a Silver Cup had been received from India as an award for Arif Chughtai, for his work exhibited at the Shankar Children Competition in Delhi, India. And the Principal would come to the class of Madame Cooper to present it to me. I was not only frightened but also embarrassed, for I had done nothing like that at all. The secret was that my father had made a small children painting of a zoo, with a tiger and animals in it and some children watching the tiger from outside the cage. Totally childlike, and yet with exceptional talent. I had not done it. But the Indian judges in Delhi recognized it as an exceptional work of a 7 years old child. It was printed in colour in Shankar’s Annual but we miss it now. However the cup is still with me. And the load of its memory makes me uncomfortable even now.
My father Abdur Rahman Chughtai liked to experiment things. Not only that he used to secretly make some Western type paintings and he exhibited them in name of his guide and German lady friend Elza Huiffner. These works were exhibited at various shows in 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, and received accord for their aesthetics. A different technique and media tested by M.A. Rahman Chughtai in secret  experimentations.

Not only that, at times letters written in pseudonym names to express opinions about things they did not want to be referred to in their own names. The dialogue with Dr Munhsmmed Din Taseer is famous for such communication, as Taseer himself used a pseudonym. These are hidden aspects which with time no one will really know. It is best to write all things as a historical record for the future. But it does show the exceptional talent the artist Abdur Rahman Chughtai had. I have myself seen him correcting the composition of his friend Ustad Allah Baksh, not with malignancy but as an act of advice of loyalty. The artist actually posed for his portrait done by Ustad Aziz, adopted son of Ustad Allah Baksh, and not only that he corrected features of his own portrait. Certainly years of training and learning, but in all ways,  an inherited DNA programmed to aesthetics. People writing about him in the past knew little, but at present literally nothing. It needs a certain exceptional framework of mind to indulge in studies about Chughtai Art.