Interview with Nilima Sheikh and Shahzia Sikander

The exhibition Conversations with Traditions: Nilima Sheikh and Shahzia Sikander brings together two leading artists whose interest in traditional art reflects differing approaches and perspectives, notably Indian and Pakistani cultural backgrounds as well as generational differences. Sheikh's and Sikander's paintings are characterized by the reinvention of artistic traditions (namely the court painting known as miniature) which is explored in the following informal discussion. This three-way discussion between Vishakha Desai (curator of Conversations with Traditions and Senior Vice President & Director of the Museum and Cultural Programs, Asia Society) Nilima Sheikh, and Shahzia Sikander adds another dimension to the dialogue between the works in the show, allowing the artists to further elaborate upon their artistic influences and processes as well as provide a context for connections between their works. Specifically, this interview explores the differences between Sheikh and Sikander's training and technique, their relationship-conceptual and otherwise-to traditional miniature painting, the politics of art and culture in South Asia, and the art worlds both artists inhabit.

Genesis

Vishakha N. Desai (VND): Why don’t we start with when you began working in the miniature format, your sense of what this technique was about, and why it appealed to you? Let’s start with you, Nilima.

Nilima Sheikh (NS): I didn’t have any academic training in the techniques of miniature painting. I was doing oil painting because that’s what everybody did in the ’60s, but I was getting gradually more and more interested in miniature painting traditions as well as other Asian painting traditions. It was a looking and learning process but it wasn’t centered on the acquisition of technique. I developed a desire to explore this idiom; it seemed logical since I liked looking at these paintings. This interest has taken me to forms of traditional tempera painting like the pichhvai paintings (large temple backdrops) of Rajasthan or the painting of thangkas from Tibetan settlements in India. I occasionally went to watch miniaturist painters and learnt a lot by visiting Bannu’s studio in Jaipur. I still go to Jaipur, Udaipur or other centers for tempera painting to pick up pigments, papers, and brushes along with some know-how. I spent time at Nathadwara which is the center for pichhvai painting. We also had wide ranging and substantial courses in art history at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, where I studied in the late ’60s, which encouraged this interest.

Shahzia Sikander (SS): My introduction to miniature painting was quite different from that of Nilima’s. I grew up with them; they were the standard “drawing room” aesthetic. Images taken from the Mughal School were abundant on gift items everywhere, saturating the tourist market. My initial feelings towards the aesthetic was that it was kitsch but I saw the potential of subversion, not just in content and form but also in technique. A deeper understanding of the work occurred during my years at the National College of Arts (NCA) in Lahore. Even though miniature painting was not given a lot of prominence at the time, the school had a rich history of technique passed down by artists such as Haji Sharif. That is where my interest began. I wanted to explore an art form with a present that was based on the past. I wanted to question its relevance and critically understand its cultural and historical dimensions.

VND: Did you have training in traditional Indian techniques in art school?

NS: We did have a short course in Indian miniature painting of just one semester, but could choose not to learn the technique. We were given a miniature to copy and the option of doing an interpretation, just so that we grasped something of its structure and principles. This was in the mid ’60s but the practice of including traditional arts occurred when the school was founded in 1950 (quite soon after independence). A student could specialize in traditional mural and miniature techniques for postgraduate studies. In the ’50s and early ’60s students opted for traditional techniques and styles while painting miniatures, panel or mural paintings. By the time I came to Baroda in 1965 to study there was less interest in technique amongst the students. I became more interested in learning traditional techniques in the late ’70s.

SS: During the late ’80s when I enrolled at NCA there wasn’t any great interest on a grass roots level for a resurgence in miniature painting, even though it was offered as a major subject. Only one other student from my class graduated with me in this subject. At the time the focus was more on contemporary art forms and subjects like printmaking, sculpture, and photography, which were more popular. There was no conflict between technique and content or tradition and contemporary expression.

VND: It seems to me that in India, not just in Baroda, Indian artistic traditions were seen as peripheral.

SS: In Lahore too, it was peripheral at first. The only person teaching miniature painting traditions was Bashir, who introduced me to traditional techniques in a very rigorous manner. He had a great deal to do with bringing miniature painting to the forefront in Lahore. He alone argued for taking the genre seriously. Bashir was very young-he started teaching at twenty or so. He was coming from a different school of art with a different kind of training as compared to the others.

VND: Was he actually trained as a miniature painter?

SS: Yes, he was trained in a traditional manner, through an apprenticeship under Haji Sharif and Sheikh Shujaullah. He began teaching at the school because he was a master at the technique, but it still wasn’t seen as a very active way of developing self-expression, so one naturally wasn’t inclined to go in that direction.

VND: Was that because it wasn’t seen as “modern”?

NS: Baroda, in the ’60s, was certainly identified with modernism. There was an attempt to clear the deadwood that had accrued around the older Santiniketan experiment. At the same time, many of the influential teachers recognized the value of history and of reinventing tradition.

SS: For me modernism was a given, it was part and parcel of art making. It was the traditional that I wanted to revert back to and experiment with how both could co-exist. To me miniature painting never seemed restrictive; it existed with all the other so-called “modern” practices. I wanted to learn the technique and skill involved to clearly articulate genuine expression.

VND: Do you think it is partly because of the Progressives (a group of painters who sought to connect Indian art to international art movements) that people, even in Baroda, thought of miniature painting as an old-fashioned style?

NS: No, I wouldn’t say that, because Baroda saw itself as quite distinct from the Progressive painters of Bombay. After all, K.G. Subramanyan was very active in Baroda during my student days, as a teacher, ideologue, and as an artist. He was definitely as interested in exploring Indian craft traditions as in painting in oils. And his concerns were all about bridging these dichotomies. He was a great inspiration to me.

SS: I remember distinctly when I first read his writing in 1988, I had just started college. I was overwhelmed! Salima Hashmi (a teacher at the NCA) was the one who gave me the book. Reading it, I felt as if it transcended time! It didn’t matter that it was written by an Indian, it really spoke to me.

NS: Was the book Moving Focus?

SS: Yes! It was really a revelation. It allowed me to explore artmaking that went far beyond the Western techniques I was exposed to at the time.

VND: What was it in Subramanyan’s work that made you feel that?

SS: It was his description of the artmaking process, rooted in a very non-Western practice and in his own philosophy. It was a very genuine expression so one could relate somehow. I felt that he was articulating in words what I was beginning to feel in my work. I was starting to make distinctions between orthodoxy and experimentation. Reading him I was encouraged to understand the notion of craft and its function in modern expression.

VND: Clearly this connection was very important to you. Nilima, Subramanyan was your teacher, right?

NS: Yes, my guru really-he had a fundamental influence on my artmaking processes. And he was initially the main source of my discovery of Indian traditions.

Politics of "Tradition"

NS: I am part of the third generation of artists who have engaged with Indian traditions. There was the generation of Abanindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose and Benode Behari Mukherjee and then the generation of their student Subramanyan. Subramayan had already written about this unique trajectory of twentieth-century Indian art.

VND: Yes, there are strands in twentieth-century Indian painting that clearly show a desire to connect with indigenous sources.

SS: For me reading Subramanyan was no more than a theoretical experience. It was my visit to Northern India that allowed me to fully grasp the shared past of my culture and history. At the same time it put in context how unfortunate it was not to be able to experience one’s own heritage freely.

VND: In Pakistan, from a political point of view, it must have been hard to acknowledge the pre-independence Indian sources of twentieth-century tradition, except for, perhaps Abdur Rahman Chughtai.

SS: No, not really. From an academic position we were encouraged to place work in a historical context. I never let it become a political issue; it was always about the art. I think people in the arts within Pakistan have always tried to create some understanding of what is happening in India. It is the artists who go out of their way to build connections and foster communication. Pakistan’s identity is forever linked to its difficult relationship with its neighbor, vis-à-vis its past, and you can’t escape that-except by being in a neutral place, coming here to the United States, for instance. But I think you have just pointed out a fundamental issue for Pakistan. How do you live out a personal dilemma? How do you acknowledge your past or your traditions when they are really part of a plural, a melting pot that has been stirred over the ages? How can you own something that fifty years ago belonged to the so-called enemy? How do you decide which part of one’s own history is acceptable and which is not? When you’re focusing on miniature painting and you come across a Mewer painting from Rajasthan, do you ignore it because it is from a Hindu court or do you embrace it because your family is Rajput?

VND: This is especially important since Lahore has a history of not just Mughal painting but also exceptional Rajput painting done for the Hindu and Sikh courts of the Punjab Hills.

SS: In Lahore during the ’80s, one could study a miniature painting that illustrated the Mughal tradition, but if the subject matter was Hindu, its value was debated. Hindu mythology was not something one was exposed to-especially during the military era of Zia-ul-Haq. During that time a religion-based ideology disguised as nationalism took shape, and pursuing miniature painting was definitely not in vogue. In my four years with Bashir there were barely three or four students enrolled in his classes. What we started in school then has led to an exciting resurgence within the tradition. Bashir is still committed and fills classes every semester.

VND: I think that’s an important part of this question of “tradition” and how we respond to it. We generally look at tradition in a very conscious manner. At the beginning of the twentieth-century, Abanindranath Tagore asked, “But how are we going to come up with our own aesthetic?”, a question that prompted a fresh relationship to premodern Indian traditions. Part of this is a South Asian political dilemma, in an Indian-Pakistani context, but part of it is a colonial dilemma, vis-à-vis the West. How do we deal with issues of nascent nationalism and nationalist struggles when looking at our “traditions”?

Connecting to Tradition

VND: Nilima, when you began to paint, was the whole question of nationalism and indigenous style still an active discussion?

NS: Yes. For me, however, the issues were related to the modernism of mainstream Indian art. The presence of modernism sits squarely in the middle of the trajectory of painting in India in the 1950s and 1960s. It became a kind of block that I had to find my way through. Even while I was painting in oils, I was working in response to the types of painting I was learning to love, and most of these came from Asia, but also from European tempera and fresco painting traditions. My interest in these came as much from a gradual alignment with the lineage of the Bengal school and its pan-Asian engagement, from reading A.K Coomaraswamy, as from the opportunity of looking at tempera paintings. I came to use aspects of the miniature painting traditions as a move away from, or more precisely, a widening of, the “modern,” my “parent” style.

VND: You had to rebel against the parent to connect with the grandparent, as it were, in other words, the earlier Bengal school tradition.

NS: In some sense, but I should mention that apart from Subramanyan there was also Gulammohammed Sheikh and Bhupen Khakhar, who had already begun to paint with conscious references to Asian, particularly Indian, painting. Gulam began engaging with the miniature tradition while he was on a scholarship in London from 1963 to 1966 and began frequenting the Victoria and Albert Museum.

SS: In Pakistan, as important as the influence of Allahbux, Tagore, and Chughtai from the Bengal school were, postindependence artists had a different relationship with their predecessors. My inspiration was coming from modernists such as Shakir Ali, who paved the way for the next generation of artists like Zahoor ul Akhlaq, Ijaz ul Hassan, and Colin David, two of whom I had the privilege of working with. They were the few driving the Pakistan movement in a contemporary direction. My relationship to this was primarily as an onlooker since my interest lied in working with a traditional artform-deconstructing it, experimenting with it, both formally and conceptually. But inspiration came from the other direction as well-looking at Hockney, Polke, and Kahlo, reading Faiz, and Nietzsche among others. Zahoor played a critical role in a conceptual dialogue with the miniature tradition and my interest grew through watching him do the opposite of what I was pursuing-he was deconstructing miniatures in relation to larger-sized painting.

VND: What was Zahoor’s training like? Where did he get this idea from?

SS: Although he was trained in the Westernized form, he was committed to creating different possibilities at the college, and he operated on multiple levels. He had studied at the Royal College of Arts in London and was familiar with modernism but had not adopted it wholesale. He was always curious, and had a very special yet objective relationship to the miniature tradition. His own paintings remained fairly minimal and he was very aware of Western painting in the ’60s. Yet he brought the miniature into the school curriculum because of his serious intellectual commitment to the subject.

VND: It seems as if Zahoor was truly radical in that he wanted to find an alternative to Western styles. But it also seems that he talked more theoretically about the importance of having miniature painting studied at the college. Nilima, you said Gulam began looking at miniature painting via London and it is interesting that Zahoor developed this interest in the miniature tradition when he went abroad.

SS: I think sometimes these things happen only when you allow yourself to be fully exposed to other cultures and different environments.

NS: I think in Gulam’s case it wasn’t that he only got interested in Indian painting in London. Getting away from India, looking at miniature paintings with a view of actually using aspects of their pictorial language, he began to identify with them and their vision in a different way.

India and Pakistan: The Politics of Culture

VND: That’s the other part of it. You, Shahzia, had at least some desire to know about India and the Indian art scene. In India, I imagine people didn’t even care to know about art in Pakistan until recently.

NS: In our art world, we were beginning to feel anxious about not knowing anything about Pakistan. But somehow it didn’t seem possible to have such a connection. Marcella Sirhandi, an American, had written a book on Pakistani artists. She showed it to us when she traveled to India in the late ’80s. Salima Hashmi (a teacher at NCA) was the one person who helped bridge the gap and had made contacts with the art scene in Delhi. David Allesworth, who was living and working in Karachi, gave talks on two occasions and showed slides of the work of Pakistani artists at the school in Baroda in the early ’90s. Whatever connections I had with Pakistan were entirely familial. Both my parents had studied in Lahore and I had many relatives from the area of Punjab that is now Pakistan.

VND: How did Gulam’s family react to your marriage? Yours was among those Hindu families whose roots were in what is now Pakistan. Now, you live in India, and with a husband who comes from a Muslim family.

NS: I think his family was more concerned about which language I would speak to our children. Hardly anyone talked about my converting to Islam. It was more an issue of Gujarati culture.

VND: It’s very interesting that they were more concerned about the language and the culture of language than the culture of religion.

NS: It is perhaps the younger people whose views are becoming more polarised.

VND: If you think about it, there was probably greater flexibility about cultural and religious differences in the early decades of Partition. But in the past few years, Hindu-Muslim issues have hardened. Shahzia, do you feel this in Pakistan as well, that the issue of a religious divide has hardened in the last decade or so?

SS: I have not operated out of Pakistan in the last decade, so it’s hard to say. The perception, living in the United States, seems to be that for my generation the question of nationalism and national politics centers around religion, but that can be deceptive. The cultural ties between the two countries are strong, and living in New York, one is able to experience the similarities rather than just speak of the differences. We are in an age where there is a greater eagerness to understand each other but the tumultuous political scene doesn’t seem to help the relationship much back home. It makes for an uneasy relationship-being a Pakistani and being a Muslim in the West, one tends to be viewed as both simultaneously rather than just an artist.

VND: Right, ironically, because the very nationalism of Pakistan is tied to religion. Another thing that you have to think about is language-the culture of language versus the culture of politics, or the politics of language versus the politics of religion. For example, even today in Pakistan I sense that one of the divisive attitudes has to do with Punjabi versus Gujarati Muslims. In terms of your art, how does this notion of religion versus language, or religion and language play out?

SS: It’s always been of interest to me-the richness of such strong cultures and intricate histories that coexist is beautiful. But my interest in language is more from an aesthetic sense. From childhood there were a couple of strong relationships that existed multiculturally: my relationship to Arabic or to Persian via the script and my relationship to pop culture and Indian culture via media and films. At a very young age I questioned what the difference was between Hindi and Urdu. Of course, my exposure to the language when I was eight or ten was primarily through Hindi TV programs from North India.

VND: Changing the subject slightly, I would like to discuss the issues surrounding regional diversity in the context of religious affiliations and national definitions. For example, Shahzia, when you were learning from Bashir and others, did you find that there were certain themes that were more prevalent or that you would look at more? One of the things you have talked about is the notion of a relationship to Mughal paintings in Pakistan and specifically, rejecting Rajput painting. Clearly it is tied up with the Muslim heritage of the country and its aspirations to emulate high Mughal culture.

SS: In Pakistan there was a preference for Mughal paintings, but for me it was a bit different. If you have a teacher who looks at diverse things, then his diversity will influence you. My teacher Bashir was very interested in Kangra painting (court painting favored by the Hindu and Sikh rulers of Kangra) and so my relationship to Kangra became fundamental to the formal aspects of my work. In Kangra painting, there’s always a woman in a landscape or interior space that doesn’t clue you in to what’s going to happen-perhaps she’s awaiting her lover. I played with that theme and replaced it with the chaos of contemporary choices and used a mark-making process to inject these choices into the very ordered space of miniatures. In 1989 I traveled to Europe where I saw for the first time Anselm Keifer’s work which was incredibly moving-it inspired me to continue in the route I was headed, to continue to play and stretch the restrictions of ordered space. Also, Mughal painting was more available in Lahore than Rajput paintings-on calendars for example. And there was a certain amount of proprietary interest. After all, in Lahore, the architecture that you’re surrounded by, the culture at large, the claim to history, is primarily Mughal. In addition, Mughal painting tends to have a very refined sensibility and technique deemed superior to Rajput painting, so there was a bias in favor of the Mughal style. Technically, those Mughal examples of painting are really very wonderful. But then I came across all these Rajput school paintings, which are so very primal, in their gesture and the ink and the paint. Seeing them in India was very liberating. I was amazed that some of them were so large-almost four feet and with tons of people in them. This exposure helped me realize that the miniature painting style had the capacity to encompass enormous variety. I am exploring that still today in my installations.

VND: Seeing this variety was not only liberating for you, but reassuring that this style need not be confining. And you, Nilima? How would you describe your relationship to the miniature style?

NS: It became very personal, but that happened gradually. I think I like to sidestep the finality attributed to works of art. The desire is not just about form; it is equally conceptual. That is why the slippage between painting and drawing helps me. In fact, I often call my work painted drawings. By employing the language and the scale of the miniature, I seemed to be able to find a voice. I did not feel that I was being a rebel; from the artists around me I got both support and recognition. But sometimes, due to the centrality of the modernist terminology or the inherent pressure to engage with the political life of a nascent democracy, there seemed to be no space left within the definitive terms of radicalism for a quest as personal as the search for my feminine voice.

Perception of Tradition - Interrogating Modernism

VND: What did people say when they disparaged miniature painting?

NS: It was perceived as reactionary, belonging to a feudal past. Even to myself, I often needed to validate my concerns.

VND: I suppose from that perspective, miniature imagery didn’t suit modern India and its proposed egalitarian values.

NS: My rebellion, if it can be called that, was against the prevailing stereotype of prenineteenth-century painting as decorative, ornamental, flat, precious, sentimental, etc. For example, miniature painting was often called feminine.

SS: It is still like that. One of my close friends is a painter here and he still insists on saying, “You do girl painting”. Whether in jest or not, he’s implying that they are not strong enough. Stereotypes still persist, but it’s a very simplistic reading. For me the challenge lies in subverting them-I like that tension, remaining free of being prescribed while using a very prescribed and structured form. Miniature painting comes with a set of rules but it’s not only at a conceptual level that those rules are played out, it’s in the act as well, the act of violating those rules.

NS: Yes. Then I thought to myself that if that tradition could contain a woman’s voice even within the feudal, well, then there was something there in it for me. The other attraction was the additive structure of most miniature painting styles: their sections, compartments, and borders seemed to me ways of opening up the painted world rather than paring it down.

VND: So for you it was like picking a “tradition of the past,” that allowed you to go beyond the norm of the “modern.” The only way you could create your space was to rebel against that which was prevalent.

NS: Yes. There was an artist friend who said about me, “You paint well, but why do you always put your children in your paintings?” So I said to myself, “Why should I not paint domestic scenes and put my children into my paintings? Why should I not make my painting relevant to my life?”

SS: I was also interested in giving expression to experiences, but at the same time I was trying to tap into the discourse about representation versus abstraction and how that tension can be played out in miniature painting, which remains outside that discourse. Did people object to your painting as being too personal?

NS: Painting from that kind of emotional space was not acceptable at the time, it was conflated with sentimentality. I had to look for a language to contain and express my emotional needs. The intimacy of the miniature scale offered me several options.

VND: What both of you are talking about is a very conscious use of tradition. You’re aware that it can be used in a way that is not simply a nostalgic look to the past nor a romantic recreation of the past. In fact, it’s the opposite, claiming “tradition” in a new way becomes avant-garde.

SS: I also thought it was more about subverting modernism than being part of the modernist tradition, so in that sense, it’s interesting that we both recognize that rebellious impulse within our use of tradition.

NS: Yes. Although it might not seem the same in your case, Shahzia, I am uncomfortable with the term avant-garde in the Indian context and would be wary of forcing a category, especially retrospectively, where it does not really exist. For a long time I was not really very conscious of the implications of my choice. I knew that I needed to find a new language. I knew that there was the potential in the miniature tradition because modernism wasn’t really working for me. I felt constrained.

VND: It was the heyday of modernism. It must have been hard to chart an alternative course.

SS: (to Nilima) Do you think that with modernism being so prevalent in Indian painting at the time, you felt that the modernist style in India was too much an imitation of the West?

NS: That didn’t bother me. There are traditions and traditions. After all, India has a long tradition of modernism. Having worked with the conventions of the easel which are so firmly a part of Indian tradition, my move away from it freed me from its reductive grammar. But it wasn’t so much that I had rejected modernism, it was more that I was trying to develop my own language, more suited to my needs.

VND: Shahzia, did you find that in Pakistan what one would call the modernist tradition was about looking to the West for inspiration?

SS: I think the subcontinental milieu was also very important to artists. They knew everything that was happening in India and also in the West. But there was never an intention to adopt Western styles. On the other hand, perhaps because the Pakistani art world is small and exists within a nationalistic institutional structure, it has developed a very interesting relationship to the government. For example, during all the military regimes, many artists, including women artists, emerged with independent voices. In fact, in the art world in Pakistan, women have become the equal of men. There is less discrimination and, as Salima Hashmi has pointed out, art fell into the hands of women in Pakistan because there was less red tape. Now, a lot of the more eclectic and exciting work is being done by women, even women teaching at lower levels in schools. To a great extent, this is because art was never considered serious enough to be worthy of pursuit by men.

VND: Nilima, people are very aware of a strong presence of women artists in India today. How has the role of women in the art scene in India evolved since the 1970s and ’80s?

NS: In 1987 four women painters, including myself, came together to show our work on paper. It was a watershed year for me. We all knew one another and had been able to talk to each other about our work. However, even though most of us had some kind of reputation in India, our coming together didn’t initially get much encouragement, except from our families and other women artists. Our grouping together to show our work in an exhibition as women painters was seen as irrelevant. There was a feeling that it wouldn’t amount to very much. The fact that we were showing small works on paper in watercolor also seemed to reduce its significance.

VND: Perhaps we can bring into sharper relief the place of women painters in the two countries. Shahzia, you were saying that in Pakistan, because artmaking itself was not taken all that seriously, women could come to the forefront and not have to necessarily fight a male-dominated, serious establishment. Whereas in India, with its long trajectory of a modern art movement, a hegemony of male painters had been established. Until the 1980s, there seemed to be few women artists who became nationally prominent.

SS: My experience happened in the ’90s and outside of Pakistan or India. The bulk of my work was created in the United States and inspired by international artists-women like Eva Hesse, Mona Hatoum, Cindy Sherman, artists like Ross Bleckner, and Gabriel Orozco. It’s true that not many women reached a degree of prominence prior to the ’80s. However, artists such as Zubeida Agha and Laila Shahzada in the ’50s, Rummana Said, Anna Molka, and Hajra Mansoor during the ’60s, and Lubna Agha, Mehr Afrooz, and Salima Hashmi in the ’70s all paved the way for the current state of Pakistani women in art.

NS: With the exception of Amrita Sher-Gil, who was a major painter in the preindependence era (1913-1940), there haven’t been many women artists in India to achieve anything of her prominence since. She ensured professional space for future generations of women artists. However, there was a prejudice against eclecticism or diversity in forms of expression while the formal control intrinsic to modernist abstraction was often valorized. As a young painter, I was often told that while I was good with color, it didn’t count if my form was “weak”. I had decided by then that if strength of form could be of only one kind, I would look for what could be diverse, even if it was “weakness” I was looking for.

Personal Connections to Painting Processes

VND: It’s interesting that you both have such a strikingly similar relationship to the process of making your art.

SS: Yes, and even though our reality and relationship to the process is quite different, to some degree we both have had to respond to the stereotypes about miniature painting.

VND: How do you relate to the idea of intimacy in your work?

NS: Very strongly. When I started working on this scale, I had already become a mother, and I found it conceptually liberating and emotionally rewarding to paint my immediate surroundings on a small scale. Then I got involved in it formally and found ways to express myself. But I felt alone when I started on this route. So, Shahzia, when I first heard about your work I was happy to know that somebody else was working in an idiom that was important to me. There was a sense of vindication.

SS: That’s an amazing compliment because your work was part of my learning experience. I was exposed to it at school in Lahore through Robert Skelton, the art historian. He said that you were exploring aspects of miniature painting, and I was keen to meet you and learn more about your work and share ideas with you. But because of visa difficulties at the time, I couldn’t. I decided to break all ties and take off for America. I literally had no interaction with India when I was in Pakistan. And this is the first major interaction with the subcontinent I’ve had in the eight years I’ve been here. The fact that we can talk like this is very important to me.

VND: Shahzia, you’ve talked about the beginning of your exploration of miniature things as rooted not only in tradition but also in a literal sense of home in Lahore, and then, when you came to the United States “home” in terms of belonging. How does your sense of home play out in your work?

SS: “Home” for me is New York. Place has never been that significant, the focus has always been communicating with the environment. The work should speak to the people I live and interact with, so it’s beyond being nostalgic. Working within the miniature tradition has been a very conscious and objective decision; it was back in Lahore and continues to be in New York. It was already part of my vocabulary when I came here. To call it nostalgia reduces the understanding of the work to its most simplistic level. Often the work is discussed only as an ethnic issue. There is no understanding of the complexity with which work may or may not relate to ethnicity. You wonder why such simplistic discussions persist. Thinking minds in the art world have moved beyond those issues.

VND: It seems to me that one reason the ethnic issue remains is the lingering belief in the “international language” of art making, which is based on Western notions of creativity. When you subvert that language, people don’t know what to make of it. They can only appreciate art if they can label it in some way, such as “ethnic” on the one hand or “international” on the other.

SS: That’s why you, as Director of the Museum and Cultural Programs at the Asia Society, can play a major role in defining new ways of looking at the work of contemporary Asian artists.

VND: The problem is the persistent binaries, of modernism versus tradition and the avant-garde versus the technical, that make it hard for the discussion to evolve. The polarizing way of defining these forms makes it hard to appreciate the hybridity and the eclecticism of the work. While there are scholars who criticize these binary definitions, there don’t seem to be many artists in the subcontinent who are exploring other areas. Nilima, are there young people in India who want to break out of the “tradition” of modernism?

NS: Yes. People are now beginning to use craft as a source for their art. But it’s quite another matter to actually engage in a different process of making art as opposed to simply using alternative forms as add-ons to one’s work.

VND: Clearly, both of you have taken the idea of using the miniature form, style, technique or content to a whole new level. For example, both of you have been engaged in the process of copying. I think that it’s very interesting that both of you find the process of creating a copy liberating, as opposed to the notion people have that copying is mechanical, non-creative.

SS: Yes, but it comes with a lot of responsibility. I’m not interested in simply copying something and then changing it. On one level, copying can mean understanding. You have to look at someone else’s work very carefully and then relate to it in a personal way.

NS: Copying tends to get confused with nostalgia. But I try to explain that I am interested in relating history to myself and that by copying images with my hands and interpreting them I can interiorize history.

SS: The entire notion of copying needs to be clarified here. What are we referring to with the term “copy”? Is it understanding process, is it understanding the lineage or history of the medium, or is it appropriation? At this level, working within miniature painting comes with a lot of responsibility. For me ownership is part of the larger dialogue. I have always culled information and images from a range of sources (whether art historical or personal) and played it out through layers by constructing miniatures, large scale murals, and installation.

NS: Even today it is frustrating that we don’t look at many diverse traditions, including other Asian forms. That is why it has been so special for me to be with someone like Gulam, who has always been interested in all kinds of traditions.

SS: Copying can also mean understanding history. One has to look at someone else’s work very carefully before relating to it in a personal way, in the same sense as claiming a historical past. My trip to India allowed me to claim works by Indian artists for myself. It was political. Looking at earlier miniature paintings, I felt that I owned them as much as any Indian. Why should I be denied? I was claiming something that predates Partition; it allowed me to go beyond the restrictions of short-term history.

VND: But the problem is that looking to the past is considered retrograde and that having a relationship to the past that’s very personal is somehow wrong. There is a prejudice in favor of looking to the future, with creativity frequently associated with the future. In the West, now that there are people like Cindy Sherman who use appropriation as a means of creative expression, it is becoming accepted that there can be creative relationships to things of the past. I’m afraid that most people don’t understand that each of you has a very individualistic relationship to the miniature painting tradition.

SS: In the United States, the biggest challenge was providing an understanding of the complexity of the historical situation of the subcontinent and as it pertains to the arts. I couldn’t talk about certain artists because people were not aware of them. It was difficult to create a context for the work. I moved to the United States in 1993. New York has provided me with a diverse audience as well as a diverse platform that has allowed me to remove artificial shelter, giving my work a clearer global vision.

Future Directions: Self and Society

VND: I wonder if both of you would talk about where you go from here and what you see is the trajectory of the art world or worlds. Shahzia, obviously for you it’s about being here in the United States.

SS: I really don’t know if it is only about being here. But I feel that I’ve now got nowhere that I can call “home.” Initially I would think about home as being back in Pakistan, but I never really lived and worked as an artist there. All of that has happened here, so returning now to that “home” seems awkward. I believe that I can maintain what I have, and yet explore new places, not just in terms of having a studio in another city, but also in terms of incorporating different techniques. I’m also interested in collaboration, and I think it’s coming from the same desire to do something beyond a “frame,” like doing large-scale works in which the body is used differently.

VND: But when people look at your work, do you think it always comes back to placing it in a Pakistani context?

SS: I have always operated out of the personal. But to me, the personal is not just about indulging oneself. It is also about expanding the personal to incorporate the communal. In my early works I portrayed friends, experimenting with bringing the personal into a traditional theme. At the same time, I would create relationships between the people I portrayed. So the personal does play a part, but it is in terms of collaboration and not identity. Moving to New York after being in Houston was primarily to connect to a larger community and to tap into a younger artistic voice. Where is it? What is it? Are they interested in what I’m doing? Do we have parallels? Working in the city, I was able to meet and build relationships with counterparts and feed off that energy. This also led to the expansion of the typical audience, reassuring me of the intricate part each of us play in opening doors for future generations to follow.

VND: So Shahzia, your sense of community, whichever way you define it, is quite different from yours, Nilima.

NS: Completely. I’ve lived in India all my life. I divide my time now between Baroda and Delhi. Most of my working time is in Baroda, so I’m really grounded in one place, although I do enjoy traveling. I like to participate in theater productions and enjoy that collaboration, but most of my creative work is done in the seclusion of my studio. I have spent a good part of my working life overcoming a nagging guilt about painting. Maybe this is to do with living in a developing country or the politics of my generation, or even with being a woman within a family, but the self indulgence of the intensely private act of painting is a perception I have still not fully laid to rest. I want to get over this feeling of guilt.

VND: That’s a very Indian thing, too, and it’s also generational. This is a question with which women of Shahzia’s generation will have much less of a problem. I suspect that the whole convention of a woman’s role to serve others is not as operative as it was a generation ago.

NS: Perhaps it’s the right time to be reconsidering what painting is about. Even in India now there are growing questions about what painting means. So it seems to me that now is the right time to commit myself to it again.

VND: I find it interesting that in India there is still a strong insistence on the oil painting tradition. It seems almost old-fashioned when you look at it from outside. Many outsiders say, “Why aren’t they doing more?” And now in India some artists are beginning to go beyond oil painting. But perhaps they are just responding to the pressure to do something other than painting because the rest of the world is doing other things.

NS: Yet, the nature and range of painting in South Asia has changed over the last few years, even in response to this pressure you are talking about. When I showed my work in Johannesburg in 1994, I felt as if everybody else had forgotten how to paint. Many people paint in India with more commitment than other places perhaps because they access many more sources: traditional, historical, or otherwise.

VND: Of course now people are coming back to painting, even in America. In the context of oil painting, I wonder how you feel your work is perceived?

NS: It was not often considered proper painting, and this has allowed me to be freer.

SS: I always view my work as independent from oil painting, but that does not mean that I do not see myself as a painter. Primarily because of its scale, miniature painting does not register as painting in the heroic sense. But in terms of how certain imagery develops, my miniatures do share an affinity with gestural abstraction in that many of the organic forms evolve through gesture and a relationship to material.

VND: So it’s a decision you made in Pakistan. You came to America, and you solidified it.

SS: For me, artmaking is so much about creating your own world and language, rather than reinventing tradition. If tradition is a point of departure then it still has to have a very personal connection that will sustain me. Whatever I create, whether it’s miniature or something else, it has to be rooted in a personal connection to art and communication with others. This is what interests me as an artist: how you can create work that somehow transcends place and time.

VND: I want to shift our conversation to the last topic, the title of the show. I have called it “Conversations with Traditions.” We could just call it “Conversations” and drop “Tradition,” and then it’s conversations between the two of you.

NS: I think it’s important to have “Tradition” somewhere in there.

SS: It’s interesting, because you know how people want to associate tradition with Asia or with institutional structures. Emphasizing tradition as relevant to conversation may force people to think of tradition in different ways.

VND: I hope that this conversation and the exhibition will illuminate the very personal responses both of you have had to the problems and opportunities in engaging with tradition. Thank you.

This interview was recorded on 20th January 2001 in New York.