When Stories, Colours and Ideas Cross Borders like Vagabonds: An Imagined Dialogue between Intizar Husain and Akhilesh, the Painter

Alok Bhalla.

Paintinigs by Akhilesh

 ‘Should we not say that we make a house by the art of building, and by the art of painting we make another sort of house, a sort of man-made dream product for those who are awake?’ Plato, “The Sophist”¹

‘Lao-tzu makes friends with the idea of space, he makes it companionable; he dwells on the uses of emptiness – “Clay is moulded into a vessel; the utility of the vessel depends on its hollow interior. Doors and windows are cut out in order to make a house; the utility of the house depends on the empty spaces. Thus while existence of things may be good, it is the non-existence in them which makes them serviceable.”’²

I

want to use a small selection of incandescent prints by the Bhopal based artist, Akhilesh, to speak about a visionary painter’s response to Intizar Husain’s fiction which he has read with admiration and sympathy. A painter and a writer, Akhilesh says that he is as mesmerized by Intizar Husain’s enigmatic texts as he is by their ironic wisdom which enables the writer to let his stories wander across cultural borders like vagabonds thereby claiming all cultural spaces as their own (‘kahni to awara hoti hai’ Intizar Husain said to me casually over lunch one day – Story is a Vagabond is now the title of a new book).³ Akhilesh is just as deeply impressed by the structure of Intizar Husain’s stories in which fragments suddenly appear, unsanctioned and unsanctified by any inquisitional authority, and refuse to let us follow a singular and unilinear narrative which moves from a known beginning to a moral, nationalist or religious closure.

In Akhilesh’s own work colours spill past frames (after all every rekha or line only makes an arbitrary demarcation of space), while endless and inexhaustible shapes of varied shades, tints and tones appear before us or vanish, calling upon each individual imagination to cast out inherited ideas or soiled pieties and find its own meanings. Just when we think we can identify and name a shape or a form in any of the paintings, it shifts shape, becomes a thing which is ‘other’ than what we had thought. Our empirical training may demand that we should be able to fix each thing that appears in these paintings with a known label: ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘it’, ‘here’, ‘there’, ‘now’, ‘then’. Unable to do so, however, we may turn away with irritation or bewilderment and so refuse to be seduced by anything which seems strange, arbitrary, unfamiliar, unexpected, and utterly different. But when we turn away, we turn away at the very beginning of an exciting journey of self-knowing; we turn away from an encounter with the ‘otherness’ of the world which alone will help us discover the self’s identity.

Intizar Husain claimed when we met for the first time in Lahore, “I have no idea what a purely Islamic culture is,”⁴ and rejected all kinds of identity politics, would have been delighted by colours which cross borders, live like shape-changers in luminal spaces, and refuse to reveal their meaning. “I have one foot in Mecca and one in Ayodhya,” Intizar Sahib said a few minutes later, and then added, breaking away from a rigidly home sapiens selfhood, that in his fictive world he has to think responsibly about the fate of a pigeon or a neem tree, a well or a ghost, if he is to realize his human selfhood in the present. That is why when he tells stories of men and women whose lives have been disfigured either by identity politics or by sexual repression, religious fanaticism or moral dullness, he also imagines a possible world narrated by birds, animals, or mythic beings.

Akhilesh responds to Intizar Sahib’s fictional world with empathy. He is not interested in illustrating an aspect or a character in any story. He wants, instead, to suggest the kind of visual and emotional pleasure which the beauty and mysteriousness that are textured into Intizar Husain’s prose give him; to find, in the loveliness of color and the exploration of form, the same strange delight and the same frisson that Intizar Husain discovers in the Jatakas about worldly sorrows told by the Buddha or in the kissas and dastans narrated by a demons or djinns who speak to human beings puzzled by the conundrums of law or sexual love, revenge or forgiveness.

Indeed, there is a correspondence between Akhilesh’s visual incandescence before it is darkened by time’s shadows and Intizar Husain’s idea of the ‘foundational’ human settlement which he sometimes calls Brindaban, Sravasthi, Karbala, or simply Rupnagar (city of beauty), that is, an imaginatively crafted artifice where beauty is first revealed. For Akhilesh too colors are incarnations in the same way as human communities surrounded by peacocks, neem trees, or mountains are in Intizar Husain’s writings. For both the painter and the writer, beauty is a sign of that moral good which has not yet been contaminated by the political and the historical or the merely theological.⁵ And because both are deeply troubled by time’s discontents, they seek, either through painting or verbal texts, ways of so expanding life’s sympathies that they can once again be coincident with the ‘good’.

That is why one’s first impression of Akhilesh’s paintings published bere is that the colours are so vibrant, so scintillating, and bright that they give immediate delight. Indeed, in his published conversations with Piyush Daiya, Akhilesh repeatedly says that most of us have never understood that delight or pleasure is primary, is primal, since all that is alive has its origin, its birth in joy.⁶ A canvas, he says, is only a ‘ranglila’—a field of dance or play of colors –where colors in their infinite variety have the imaginative freedom to create the shapes and forms that give them pleasure without offering a singular meaning or suggesting any particular social, political or ethical purpose.⁷ The compound word ‘ranglila’ is inspired and evocative not only of play, but also of enchantment, magic, maya, illusion, and the seductive circle of dance in the Krishna legends in which each woman feels (indeed knows) that she alone is dancing with Krishna and is the only center of his attention. It is the same with colors for Akhilesh. When each color is gazed upon more intently, each color seems to acquire a depth as if it is reflecting upon its own reflection without anxiety or conflict, without troubling itself about any other, more mundane reality where things decay, rust, age, crumble and wither. They remind us, again and again, that this worldly lila is irresistible even to the gods because, first and foremost, it is beautiful; that colors have the capacity to renew that beauty when it fades or is defaced. “When this play or dance of colors comes to an end,” Akhilesh tells Piyush, “that day will also be my last day.”⁸ But, then, if for Akhilesh the frame of a canvas is only a medium through which colors spread across the infinite, then for Intizar Husain the structure of a story is only an excuse for the imagination to wander, vagabond like, across histories of societies and the spaces occupied by heaven and hell.

Look at Akhilesh’s paintings and then consider the following enchanted opening of Intizar Husain’s Basti told from the point of view of a young boy listening with awe to ‘origin’ stories. The passage begins, typically, by creating a confluence of cultures, myths, folk-lore, and religious stories, leading up to two of Intizar Sahib’s favourite tales. The first is a folk-tale about Rama which does not find a place in the textual versions of the Ramayana by Valmiki or Tulsidas. Intizar Husain always maintained that ‘our’ squirrel was lovelier than the one found in the west because she had been blessed by ‘Ramachandraji’ (as Intizar Husain always referred to the hero of the epic). When Rama army of monkeys and bears was building a bridge across the sea to Lanka to rescue his wife, Sita, who had been abducted by the asura king, Ravana, a small squirrel decided to help. Full of gratitude, Rama ran his fingers down her back in blessing and left traces on her fur. The second story is from the great Sufi poem in Persian by Farid Ud-Din Attar, The Conference of Birds (1177). Birds of the world set out in search of Simorgh, the mythic bird of enlightened resurrection. They elect the Hoopoe as their guide not only because he is the wise and trusted friend of Solomon, but also because the holy sign ‘bismillah’ is etched upon his beak. The birds realize, after they fly through seven valleys of ‘yearning’, ‘love’, ‘gnosis’, ‘detachment’, ‘unity of God’, ‘bewilderment’, and selflessness and dissolution in God’, that they themselves are the Simorgh. Enlightened identity, Intizar Husain knows, is to be discovered and created in historical time through a dialogic relationship with those who are radically different.

“When the world was still all new, when the sky was fresh and the earth not yet soiled, when the trees breathed through the centuries and ages spoke in the voices of birds, how astonished he was, looking all around, that everything was so new, and yet looked so old. Bluejays, woodpeckers, peacocks, doves, squirrels, parakeets – it seemed that they were as young as he, yet they carried the secrets of the ages. The peacocks’ calls seemed to come not from the forest of Rupnagar, but from Brindaban. When a little woodpecker paused in its flight to rest on a tall neem tree, it seemed that it had just delivered a letter to the Queen of Sheba’s palace, and was on its way back toward Solomon’s castle. When a squirrel, running along the rooftops, suddenly sat on its tail and chattered at him, he stared at it and reflected with amazement that those black stripes on its back were the marks of Ramachandraji’s fingers…”⁹

 

If this is Intizar Husain’s exultant ‘calling out’, his jubilate, to stories to wander freely, to gather alms like a mendicant, to use and reuse, steal, copy, parody, or imitate whatever they have heard, wherever and from whomsoever so as affirm his wonderfully mischievous idea, “kahani to awara hoti hai,” (story is a vagabond), Akhilesh in his paintings responds by asking: “Don’t you know colours too go where beauty tempts them; they conspire with each other and with paper or canvas, to make every texture and form visible and so celebrate everything that is?”

One should add that both Akhilesh and Intizar Husain know, and know well, that colours turn opaque, dark and murky when the times are bad; that stories hide and fall silent when moralists, priest and ideologues seize words; that the self is always in danger of becoming so inextricably corrupt that it gives up hope of ever recovering life’s creative energies again. Both, however, share the confidence that the cadence of colours is rarely ever erased, and that the ‘’good” and “wise story”, as the great Buddhist poet Ashvaghosha affirms, goes to the forest and walks “along the path of the wind,” and waits to return when all the living and non-living beings are willing to listen again.¹⁰

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[1] Quoted by E. H. Gombrich, Art and illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (London: Phaidon Press, 1960), p. 7.
[2] Lawtrence Binyon, The Spirit of Man in Asian Art (New York: Dover, 1935), p. 77.
[3] See Intizar Husain, Story is a Vagabond: Fiction, Essays and Drama, edited by Alok Bhalla, Asif Farrukhi and Nishat Zaidi, Manoa (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2015).
[4] Alok Bhalla, “Introduction,” Leaves and Other Stories, by Intizar Husain, translated by Alok Bhalla and Vishwamitter Adil (Delhi: HarperCollins, 1993), p. vi.
[5] Cf. Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). The novelist in Intizar Husain’s story, “An Unwritten Epic,” says: “The truth is that politics does to a writer what a butcher does to a cow.” It is sad to read now,, after Intizar Sahib’s death, that there are attempts being made to reduce him into a Islamic thinker.
[6] Piyush Daiya, Akhilesh: Ek Samvad -- Akhilesh: A Conversation (New Delhi: Rajkamal, 2010). p. ix.
[7] Akhilesh: Ek Samvad, p. 17.
[8] Akhilesh: EkSamvad, p. 14.
[9] Basti, translated by Frances W. Pritchett (New Delhi: Rupa, 1995), p. 3.
[10]The Life of the Buddha (Buddhacarita), translated by Patrick Olivelle (New York: New York University, 2009), p. 33.


Alok Bhalla is a literary critic, poet, translator and editor based in New Delhi

 

  

  
Akhilesh is an artist , curator and writer,

 

Alok Bhalla in The Beacon
Akhilesh in The Beacon