Surveying the last fifty years of Women’s activity in the visual arts in Pakistan, one becomes aware of two distinct places. The first two and a half decades constitute a period in which women pioneered and widened the discipline of art education. In the newly founded state of Pakistan, art was hardly distinguished from craft at the official level, and the status of painting in the public domain was yet to be determined. Being a peripheral activity at that stage, it could safely be left to women.
The vice chancellor of the Punjab University was only articulating the pervasive assumption on the objective of fine art teaching that the aim was to train women to be ‘artistic’, not ‘artists’ when the department was reserved exclusively for women in 1940. Art education would ‘enhance the natural proclivities of women’, making them better ‘home decorators’, and nature the finer sensibilities expected of mothers, wives, and daughters.
Women could be indulged in their pursuit of art as a harmless bit of freedom, which was to be an ornamental, non-competitive, non-threatening occupation. The setting up of a university department solely for women implied a covert discrimination against both women and art, which becomes clear only in hindsight.
It was with the passage of time that what had begun as a safe educational pastime for middle class women became a vehicle for communication and expression in the public domain, and paved the way of personal and cultural insurrections. In this phase after partition, women art educators laid the foundations for the teaching of art all over the Pakistan, in schools, colleges, and universities. It is therefore surprising that apart from well-known exceptions, they were noticeably absent as practitioners. The discourse art therefore lay with male artists, either traditionalists and romantics like Chughtai, Allah Bukhsh and Zainul Abedin, or the emerging modernists like Shakir Ali.
As art educationists, women did not question the content of what they required teach. The’ Indian’ art school curriculum tem had been established all over the continent by the British in the 19th Century and has continued to be followed with minor changes.
The curriculum at the Punjab University Fine Arts Department adhered to the dominant colonial academic tradition, and replicated elsewhere as well. Influences from the Calcutta school and Shantiniketan had filtered into Lahore classrooms via Chughtai’s popularity and Anna Molka Ahmed’s well-meaning ambitions to make the teaching art more ‘Pakistani’. These endeavours remained mainly at a theoretical level; involving lecture courses in art history, with occasional demonstrations of the Bengali’s wash painting techniques. The main business the teaching of painting reiterated the established western genres of landscapes, still life, and portraiture, in the prescribed manner.
Outside the classrooms artistic concerns were being expressed somewhat differently. Artists of the Lahore Art circle A.J. Shemza, Moyene Najmi, and Ahmed Pervaiz hotly debated formalist issues, their painting echoing cubist models of the ‘International Style’.
Not surprisingly, women were excluded from this discourse, which was restricted to the ‘practitioners’ of art, rather than the ‘teachers’. Teaching came to be viewed as a lesser function, reinforcing the notion of artists as male trailblazers. The word ‘artist” therefore was hardly gender neutral.
An artist of those times, Zubaida Agha resisted the label ‘women artist’, aware of the dangers of being relegated to the ‘reservation’ that the label implied. She remembered the time when her achievements were ‘contained’ in the cultural ghetto marked out for women. In the fifties for her to be recognized as an artist implied a transgression of the defined female role to be seen as the ‘male’ women. She believed the term ‘woman artist’ to be patronizing epithet.
The better-known artist of the fifties and sixties Shezma, Ahmed Pervaiz, Murtaza Bashir, and Sadeqain were unconventional in their lifestyles, strengthening the popular belief which linked artistic creation with bohemian behaviour. For serious female aspirants to the title ‘artist’, access was also blocked by the apparent necessity for defying norms and conventions, a problematic proposition for the most.
The context in which art making was presented in Pakistan, as everywhere else, was inevitably tied up with its creators. It is not surprising that women involved in the teaching of art became cautious, almost apologetic, when it came to art practice and presentation. The pluralistic realities of the social order- husbands, children, in laws, domestic servants left little room for creative manoeuvres. Women could be indulgent to themselves as academicians of the art world, but as creators they would have to redefine the Production framework. A decade later, the Political and social imperatives drove women to do just that.
The deaths of both Shakir Ali and A.R. Hightail in 1975 closed the early chapters in the traditionalist /modernist debate. The social upheavals of the Bhutto years rephrased populist views on art Official patronage for the Regional Park and folk music, art, literature and other forms of cultural expressions, became an alternative potent source of inspiration. Women, having the primary reservoirs and transmitters of folklore and folk art historically, emerged on the national scene as important participants in the cultural landscape. Women artists were poised to move into the second phase of their development.
By the time the military coup of 1977 took place, women were responsible for almost the entire activity of art education in Pakistan. The teaching of art had given them a niche in the art world; it had allowed them to be ‘artistic’, and to promote art as a valid, commendable activity.
In order to comprehend the impact of General Zia ul Haq’s government on art in general, and women artists in particular, one has to look at the cultural climate that preceded it.
During the People’s Party government of Z.A. Bhutto, the extent of private and public art patronage ensured the social acceptability of art and artists as respected and worthy members of the society. Artists could be counted upon to reinforce the State’s image of itself and the identity of the people that resided within it. For the post 1977 military regime, to take on the role of the patron meant a modification of that image and a restructuring of that identity. Literature, being by far the most influential and widely identified vehicle for cultural communication, was the first to be carefully monitored by the regime, as was the mass media. The electronic media was censored strictly, and acceptable codes of dress, behaviour and language were quickly imposed. Dance was eliminated entirely from public view. As attention turned to the fine arts, as certain problems presented themselves.
Figurative painting and sculpture, although not forbidden, were frowned upon except where they employed images of acceptable political power, as of the ‘Father of the Nation’ or the President. As part of the new cultural construct, it became necessary to encourage fresh pictorial content in art, since the regime presented itself as a progressive conduit to the free world engaged in the Afghan war.
Calligraphy and the genre of landscape painting were swiftly appropriated as being suitable for several reasons. Both genres evoked a sense national pride, and a wider ‘Islamic’ identity. The celebration of ‘land’ rural, fertile, and undisturbed posed no challenge to the carefully maintained facade of political equilibrium. Paintings, which could not be ‘read’ either literally or in terms of convert symbolism, could not harbour hidden uncomfortable, suspect, or degenerate meanings. Calligraphy loaded with historical, traditional and religious overtones could also be manipulated into a ‘modem’ idiom. State patronage was available for the painter who adopted these or other ‘amenable’ genres.
Not a single woman artist took up calligraphy or changed her mode of working to bring herself in line with official State policy. The national Exhibitions in Islamabad and Lahore were important signifiers of the State policy on art. The ones held in 1977, ’81, ’82 and ’85 were noteworthy for the number of awards won by women artists.
Ironically, while women artists were winning national awards, recognition and acceptance of their achievements, discriminatory laws were being enacted against their gender in the legal arena. The 1981 National Exhibition was significant for the removal of works by Jamil Naqsh, Jamila Masood and Salima Hashmi, shortly before the inauguration. Naqsh’s female nudes were unacceptable for reasons of ‘social morality’, and the works of the two women artists were deemed to have unacceptable political content.
The number of women artists increased significantly after 1977. What women were painting was even more significant. Unlike many of their better-known males colleagues, women artists chose not to modify their creative vision, or to realign their focus.
Probably unaware of the feminist maxim of seventies ‘the personal is the political’, women artists intuitively disengaged themselves from the prevalent ideology of the time. Ideological dominance had to be challenged at a number of levels: in the retrieval of meaning, the construction of alternative imagery, the exploration of medium and scale, and in sensitising the audience.
By ignoring officially sanctioned art, women artists were challenging the assumptions being floated regarding the ‘national’, the ‘traditional’ and ‘identity’ in the arts. The substandard ‘official’ calligraphic work, based on a misreading of tradition, contrasted with the energy emanating from the works of Meher Afroze, Nahid Raza, and Qudsia Nisar. It was, perhaps not so coincidental that all three artists chose to work on paper. This was a trend, which linked many women painters, then and later.
Moving on from the pomposity of oil on canvas, a medium introduced and sustained by the British intervention in the subcontinent, women artists took up water based mediums as well as print making techniques. The medium and appearance of these works by women created problems of acceptance in the art world. Provoked by the reduction in scale dictated by these works, their seriousness was questioned by critics and audiences. The provincial and national exhibitions routinely herded these work a into the category ‘Drawings and, Watercolours’, entitled to prizes and awards of lesser amounts and presumably less worthy of recognition. The hierarchical superiority of works in oils continued to be maintained for a decade.
The retrieval of the tradition of Miniature also took place in Eighties, which helped to give credence to the diminutive scale in painting. Though not consciously questioning colonial mores, the rejection of the supremacy of oil painting opened up other issues for all artists, male and female. For women artists, the convenience and mobility of the smaller scale meant that the work could be produced in the comers of the home and kitchen.
The women artists of late seventies and eighties juggled marriage, careers and art production in an increasingly hostile political and social climate. Achieving quality for their medium and scale was not the only problem. Moving away form the obviously representational imagery, women were crossbreeding ideas from a variety of sources. Across the world, feminists were debating what Pakistani artists, driven by circumstances, were practicing.
In an economy bolstered by the war in Afghanistan, with money siphoned off from drugs and armaments, consumer appetites were flourishing and the art market grew apace. While the demand for the ‘superstars’ of Pakistani painting Jamil Naqsh, Gulgee and Sadeqain continued, a ‘hidden stream’ of the works of women artists grew and established its own demand.
An undeclared and tacit bonding among women artists was reaffirmed at the National Exhibition of 1983 at the Alhamara Art Centre in Lahore. Fifteen women artists signed a women artists manifesto drafted by Salima Hashmi, Lala Rukh and I.A. Rehman. Their experience of these discussions and putting their signature to this document gave an impetus to the work of many of the artists present. The artists looked to their own lives, personal narrative, psychological states and mystical predilections, for inspiration and direction. The diversity of experiences was reflected in the diversity of their imagery, medium, scale and idiom.
Literal references emerged from the social and political landscapes, such as the chaddar or veil, taken up by the artists such as printmaker Naazish Ataullah and sculptor Rabia Zuberi. Touted as an official symbol of protection of women artists, poets and writers focused on this symbol as a signifier of disenfranchisement and constraint. Exploiting its spiritual, physical, religious and mystical aspects stimulated a range of visual and literary responses. From camouflage and claustrophobia to ambiguity and rebellion, artists explored the masking and unmasking of the female form. Fuelled by political rage and satirical good humour, women used the chaddar as a symbol of their experience. The formal image became loaded with intensely felt emotions and statements about physical denial. Other schematic metaphors culled from a variety of historical and socio-cultural sources found their way into women’s painting.
The female nude, a constant and favoured subject of male Pakistani painters, as of painters everywhere else fulfilled the accepted function of the female as an object. The sexual positioning of the female in these works betrays the artist intention. Retrieving the woman from this universally accepted context was one aspect of the woman artist looking at the female body. In a social framework where women’s visibility is undesirable, the depiction of the female nude assumes potent meaning, especially when enunciated by a woman.
By uncovering the female form, women artists were taking charge the form. They were uncovering the duplicity and hypocrisy of the dominant fundamentalist order. They challenged the male gaze in a way that the male painter’s female nude could not. It became instead a celebration of self, an ode to her rights of ownership, an act of rebellion. Man and large has always been the context of the female nude, artists like Sumayya Durrani added both irony and humour to their exploration of this theme. Naheed Raza assumed the power of sensuality and acknowledged woman as both the victim and the slayer.
The evolution and the development of the visual vocabulary has matured radically in the Nineties and beyond and has widened the context of how art is to be comprehended and enjoyed.
The work of women artists who step into the new millennium is stronger and more confident than of those who preceded them. Unhampered by many of the conflicts that sapped the energies and emotions of the earlier generations, these women emerged with a clarity of vision and a sense of purpose. Entering the art world, the very process of art making which is generally supportive, and benefiting from a more accepting social climate, women artists are articulate about their right of self expression and of leading a productive professional life. Role models in teaching and art practice are accessible and well known. The making of art is recognized as a legitimate activity in cultural life, albeit not always an economically viable one. However, the idea that women have played and are continuing to play a crucial and pivotal role in the arena is now taken for granted.
SALIMA HASHMI
Salima Hashmi was the former director of the National College of Fine Arts, Lahore, Pakistan. She is an independent curator and artist.