Paintings and Painters, in the eyes of the uncles

 

I am an elementary disciple of many poet-uncles, chiefly Shakespeare, the Bard, and chachā (uncle) Ghālib, of course. I also harbour modest pretensions of being a lover of visual art. But how did my uncles look at painters and their artworks?

Although Anglo-Saxon art had developed into a unique English style and, later, the medieval period had a strong tradition of religious painting, the advent of the Anglican Reformation was not particularly supportive of art as such. Nicholas Hilliard, “the first native-born genius of English painting,” was a contemporary of the Bard, and many painters had begun to make their mark, but painting was still not an art form that commanded universal respect.

The arts were always patronised in India, particularly by the royal courts, and great traditions of cave, temple-wall and mural art flourished through the ages, from prehistoric times onward. Mughal emperors were known to be great sponsors of the fine arts. Individual artists, however, rarely attained the status accorded to great poets or playwrights. Recognition of individual artists began in the late nineteenth century, largely after proponents of Indian art such as Raja Ravi Varma adapted Western conventions and techniques, including oil painting. Ghālib, therefore, would hardly have seen painting as High Art.

I will begin with this favorite sher of mine:

Ye mo.ajiza bhī dekhā hamne kamāl-e-fan kā

Chup ho agar musavvir tasvīr boltī hai

(mo.ajiza: wonderment, kamāl-e-fan: excellence of skill, musavvir: painter, tasvīr: painting, picture. I am a witness to this wonderment of excellence of skill; if the painter is silent, the painting speaks.)

So, the painting speaks, and it is up to us to interpret it the way we would. Shakeel Badayuni expressed this beautifully in another context, though entirely about the eyes of the beholder (and, incidentally, the last resort of terminally tenderfoot art-lovers like me when asked to explain a modern artwork):

Bhej dī tasvīr apnī un ko ye likh kar Shakil 
aap kī marzī hai chāhe jis nazar se dekhiye 

Chachā Ghālib perhaps regarded the musavvir as a mere drawer of portraits, and hence this tongue-in-cheek sher:

Sīkhe haiñ mah-ruḳhoñ ke liye ham musavvirī

taqrīb kuchh to bahr-e-mulāqāt chāhiye

(mah-ruḳhoñ: moon-faced, musavvirī: art of painting, taqrīb: occasion, ceremony, bahr-e-mulāqāt: for meeting)

Ghālib says that he learnt the art of painting for the sake of the beautiful ones with moon-like faces, in order to afford himself an occasion, or a pretext, to meet them. The first misra conveys an earnest act of extolling, and being utterly wonder-struck by, ravishing beauty, so overwhelming that to capture it he claims to have learnt painting. But he turns elegantly into ironic jocularity in the second misra, clearly revealing his lack of genuine interest in becoming a trained painter and exposing painting instead as a clever practical excuse for proximity to such beauties, a stratagem to try and win their love.

Why is Ghālib pretending to have learnt painting at all, when he is already a supremely gifted poet-wordsmith who can portray alluring beauty with effortless grace in words? Because the intention, disarmingly, is not artistic excellence but physical proximity—something a painter can obtain more easily than even the most gifted poet. As we all know, lovers can go to extremes, often ludicrous and occasionally heroic, to win the favour of the beloved. Musavvarī (practice of painting) is an art that offers excellent opportunities to remain in close proximity to the beloved under the perfectly respectable pretext of painting her portrait. Painting was, after all, still not as exalted an art form as poetry in Ghālib’s time, at least not in his unapologetically poetic universe, and this lends a faintly condescending tone to his treatment of the visual arts themselves.

The sher may also be interpreted metaphysically. Devotees learn music to sing bhajans (devotional songs) or learn poetry to compose divine verses in praise of the Almighty. These pursuits are merely means of approaching the Lord, not ends in themselves. Consider this sher in the context of visual art, which again functions only as a means to a specific purpose:

Aañkh kī tasvīr sar-nāme pe khīñchī hai ki tā

tujh pe khul jaave ki is ko hasrat-e-dīdār hai

(tasvīr: picture, sar-nāme: letterhead, tā: until, hasrat-e-dīdār: yearning for a sight. Instead of writing a letter, I have drawn a picture of an eye on the letterhead so that it becomes clear to you that the writer is possessed by an intense longing to behold you.)

Ghālib has not made many references to the art of painting, but a few striking examples do exist. One such sher refers obliquely to an undercoat of paint:

Kiyā yak-sar gudāz-e-dil niyāz-e-joshish-e-hasrat

suvaidā nusḳha-e-tah-bandi-e-dāġh-e-tamannā hai

(yak-sar: completely, gudāz-e-dil: melting of the heart, niyāz-e-joshish-e-hasrat: offering to the fervour of longing, suvaidā: the black spot of the heart, nusḳha-e-tah-bandi-e-dāġh-e-tamannā: prescription for laying the undercoat of the wound of desire. The pressure of desires melt the heart; its black essence spreads like an undercoat upon which the dark wound of unfulfilled desire can then be applied.)

In this extended painterly metaphor, the ebullition of longing melts the heart, and the molten suvaidā spreads across it like an undercoat, which itself is black, it prepares the surface upon which the dark wound of unfulfilled desire can be laid. The image is almost technical in its precision: the colour of grief is so intense that it expects a ground of similar darkness beneath it.

On the power of drawing, I recall another sher we have encountered earlier in a different context:

Naqsh ko us ke musavvir par bhī kyā kyā nāz haiñ

kheñchtā hai jis qadar utnā hī khiñchtā jaa.e hai

(The artwork plays endless coquetries with its painter; the more the painter draws it, the more it draws, or pulls, itself away.)

And then there is this clever sher, which grudgingly acknowledges some merit in painting, albeit with saucy reasoning:

Kamāl-e-ḥusn agar mauqūf-e-andāz-e-taġhāful ho

takalluf bar-t̤araf tujh se tirī tasvīr behtar hai

(kamāl-e-ḥusn: perfection of beauty, mauqūf-e-andāz-e-taġhāful: dependent on styles of indifference, takalluf: formality, bar-t̤araf: set aside. If the perfection of beauty depends on your studied indifference to me, then, dispensing with all formality, your picture is better than you.)

 

Thinking beyond the oft-quoted line from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “The object of art is to give life a shape”, and reflecting more broadly on visual art, I was reminded of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 24.

Mine eye hath played the painter and hath stell’d,

Thy beauty’s form in table of my heart.

My body is the frame wherein ’tis held,

And pérspective it is best painter’s art…

…Mine eyes have drawn thy shape, and thine for me

Are windows to my breast, where-through the sun

Delights to peep, to gaze therein on thee;

Yet eyes this cunning want to grace their art,

They draw but what they see, know not the heart.

In the opening lines of the sonnet, the lover fashions his eye as a painter who has quietly stolen a painter’s pen and used it to inscribe the image of the beloved upon the table of his heart. The heart becomes a living canvas, animated by blood itself, while the body encloses it like a protective frame. Shakespeare thus turns the act of loving into an act of painting. The speaker’s eye does not merely gaze or admire but works with deliberation and craft, engraving the Fair Youth’s likeness with care and control. The heart functions at once as canvas and mirror, carefully prepared to receive beauty, much as a painter primes a surface before applying colour. This conceit also gestures towards the highest skill of visual art, the ability to capture true perspective, suggesting that love, like painting, demands both technical mastery and imaginative precision.

Yet this painterly triumph comes with a limitation that Ghālib would have relished. The eye can paint only what it sees. It can capture form, posture and radiance, but it cannot penetrate the heart of the beloved. The Fair Youth’s eyes serve as windows into the speaker’s breast, but the exchange is unequal. One heart lies exposed, the other remains inaccessible. Like Ghālib’s painters, Shakespeare’s painter-eye turns out to be less an artist and more a endearingly hopeful conspirator, devising clever means to approach beauty, while knowing fully well that the deepest truth will always elude the brush.

A little later, in Sonnet 53, the Bard places the beauty of his beloved above that of both Adonis and Helen, the paragons of male and female beauty from Greek mythology, and beyond the capacity of painters or writers alike. Any attempt to paint Adonis or Helen to resemble the beloved would result only in a pale imitation—or at best, the beloved awkwardly draped in borrowed Grecian costume.

…Describe Adonis, and the counterfeit

Is poorly imitated after you.

On Helen’s cheek all art of beauty set,

And you in Grecian tires are painted new…

Ghālib again, from the ghazal with the matl.a, “Muddat huī hai yaar ko mehmāñ… charāġhāñ kiye hue”:

 

Phir bhar rahā huuñ ḳhāma-e-mizhgāñ ba-ḳhūn-e-dil

sāz-e-chaman tarāzi-e-dāmāñ kiye hue

(ḳhāma-e-mizhgāñ: pen of eyelashes, ba-ḳhūn-e-dil: with blood from heart, sāz-e-chaman: music of the garden, tarāzi-e-dāmāñ: style of hem. I refill the quill, the pen of my eyelashes, with the blood of my heart, adorning the fringes of my garment with the colours and patterns of a blossoming garden.) 

Ghālib’s portrayal employs imagery as deft as that of the Bard, though less intricate in construction. Shakespeare allows himself a certain vanity, if one may call it that, by imagining that the beloved perceives this painting through the window of her eyes, thus initiating a reciprocal chain of gazes. The lover in the sonnet speaks of stealing a painter’s pen, from which patterns in blood flow upon the canvas of the heart, imagining himself looking into the beloved’s eyes, then into the image of his own eyes reflected there, and finally into his heart where that image resides. Ghālib, by contrast, imagines an image carved indelibly by a pen, like a painted garden, yearning to be glanced at by the beloved’s eyes. The idea that the beloved’s gaze itself completes and sanctifies the artwork recurs in this sher as well:

Chāhe hai phir kisī ko muqābil meñ aarzū
surme se tez dashna-e-mizhgāñ kiye hue
(muqābil: matching, in front (of), in comparison (with), aarzū: wish, desire, longing, surme: kohl, dashna-e-mizhgāñ: dagger like eyelids. My yearning wishes to stand face to face with someone whose dagger-like eyelashes have been sharpened by the darkness of kohl.)

As is evident, I have digressed, largely because explicit references to visual art are relatively scarce in the works of these two masters. Ironically, neither Shakespeare nor Ghālib would have consciously set out to inspire painters. Shakespeare treats the visual arts with courteous restraint. Painters appear in his work chiefly as metaphors, their language of canvas, frame, perspective, and counterfeit readily borrowed, yet their art quietly placed below poetry in expressive power. When beauty or inward truth exceeds depiction, painting is the first to fall short. Ghālib, who repeatedly turns painting into a pretext rather than a vocation, would have found this hierarchy entirely sensible. For both poets, painters are useful intermediaries, but ultimately dispensable once poetry arrives on the scene.

Yet the universality of their poetry has done precisely that. Artists have repeatedly sought to capture scenes from the Bard’s plays and the emotional landscapes of Ghālib’s verse, thereby creating a distinctive and enduring visual tradition. About that, and more, inshallah, someday, in another book, if the uncles permit.

…