Shahabuddin Ahmed - Sbādhīnatā (Freedom)

Freedom from fear is the freedom
I claim for you my motherland!
Freedom from the burden of the ages, bending your head,
breaking your back, blinding your eyes to the beckoning
call of the future;
Freedom from the shackles of slumber wherewith
you fasten yourself in night's stillness,
mistrusting the star that speaks of truth's adventurous paths;
freedom from the anarchy of destiny
whole sails are weakly yielded to the blind uncertain winds,
and the helm to a hand ever rigid and cold as death.
Freedom from the insult of dwelling in a puppet's world,
where movements are started through brainless wires,
repeated through mindless habits,
where figures wait with patience and obedience for the
master of show,
to be stirred into a mimicry of life.
Rabindranath Tagore

Born September 11th, 1950, in the Narsingdi District of Bangladesh, Shahabuddin Ahmed had already exhibited his great strength of character, and zeal for freedom when taking time out from art school to fight as a platoon commander, in Bangladesh’s guerrilla resistance movement (Mukti Bahini), during the Liberation War (1971). Shahabuddin fought for his country’s eventual freedom from Pakistan and, at the age of 21, raised the Bangladesh flag (after a nine month struggle for freedom), on the roof of ‘Pakistan Radio’, December 16, 1971, at the culmination of the Bangladesh/Pakistan war. For this, in 2000, he received the ‘Shadhinota Padak’ (Independence Award - the highest civilian honour in Bangladesh).

In 1973, Shahabuddin finally graduated from the Dhaka Art College (now Fine Arts School of Dhaka). The then Prime Minister of Bangladesh (Sheikh Mujibur Rahman), encouraged Shahabuddin to go to Paris, France. Rahman (Bangabandhu, or ‘Friend of Bengal’) had suggested ‘…you must go, beat Picasso.’

Rahman’s suggestion, that Shahabuddin should become greater than Picasso, spoke not only of Picasso’s greatness as an artist, but also of Picasso’s ceaseless desire for peace. Picasso had spent many years painting of war and of peace. He had, after all, created one of the most memorable war paintings ever - Guernica, in 1937. Guernica, a painting which depicts the graphic horror of the bombing of a Spanish town, is as impressive in its size as it is in its content. Overall it stands at 25.6 feet wide and 11 feet tall, and its full impact can be seen in Museo Reina Sofia, in Madrid. Picasso’s ‘Dove of Peace’, his symbol for the First International Peace Conference, in Paris 1949, became ‘the international emblem of the Peace Movement and a symbol of hope in the Cold War period’ (it mentions in the Tate Liverpool exhibition ‘Picasso: Peace and Freedom’, 2010). It was in Paris, that Shahabuddin finally saw the works of Pablo Picasso, up close and personal.

Armed with that scholarship from the French government, Shahabuddin Ahmed arrived in Paris to study painting at the Ecole Superieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris. Coincidently, it was in the autumn of 1974, that Francis Bacon arrived back in Paris, and settled into a studio apartment, at 14 rue de Birague, in the Marais district near the Place des Vosges. Paris was a city beloved of Francis Bacon, and one he spent much time visiting, discovering his own love for Picasso’s work, in Pierre Rosenberg’s gallery (1927).

In 1977, while still in Paris, Shahabuddin suffered the fate of all displaced persons and, ironically (as Paris was seen as the centre of post-war French Existentialism), had an existential crisis. Shahabuddin was, like Jean-Paul Sartre’s character Antoine Roquentin (La Nausée, or Nausea, published in 1938) thrown into worry about his existence, his worth and the worth of his painting. Sartre, of course, is renown for commenting ‘Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. It is up to you to give [life] a meaning’ An obvious nod to Friedrich Nietzche’s ‘Freedom is the will to be responsible to ourselves’. Shahabuddin’s crisis dissipated upon experiencing the power of Francis Bacon’s exhibits at Galerie Claud Bernard, 5,7,9, rue des Beaux-Arts, Paris 6, galvanising Shahabuddin, once again, into action, but this time with a paintbrush.

In those traumatised images and the free strokes comprising Bacon’s imagery, Shahabuddin had found his meaning. He was encouraged to continue, to wrestle his freedom to paint, and Shahabuddin had recognised in Bacon’s imagery, a kinship. Shahabuddin was adapt Bacon’s style, style, discarding the obvious horrors and the inherent violence of Bacon’s paintings, as Shahabuddin had had enough violence during the war, as his 2018 exhibition ‘Shanti’ (Peace, May - April 2018)) attends.

Shahabuddin had found his expression, the freedom and the will to energise his will onto canvas.
Thomas McEvilley, in his book ‘Capacity: The History, the World, and the Self in Contemporary Art and Criticism’ (1997), when talking about the Dakar Festival for the Revival of African Arts, made this comment - ‘Bangladeshi Ahmed Shahabuddin’s expertly executed canvases seemed derived in part from Francis Bacon.’ Life has repeatedly brought Shahabuddin within the periphery of Bacon, and his work.

In time, due to the similarities in his work to that of France Bacon, Shahabuddin had earned the dubious title of ‘Little Bacon’ (according to an interview the artist had with Snehangshu Adhikari, in The Sunday Indian (April 3, 2011). It was a title Shahabuddin spent a lifetime dispelling, which he has by the sheer dint of his hard work and diligent concentration on moving forward with his style.
As Shahabuddin’s works matured, he too became exhibited in the very same gallery, in Paris, in which Francis Bacon's works had been exhibited. Bacon and Picasso had loomed large in Shahabuddin’s early life as a painter, but they were not the only Modernist’ painters who had shaped that borrowed style.

There is little doubt that Shahabuddin, this vital giant of Bangladesh painting imparts his the full force of his passion into his art, brimming with visual intensity and puissance, just as he had once flung himself into the fray to create freedom for his country. He and his work have also commonalities with Bangladesh artist Shilpacharya (great teacher) Zainul Abedin. As we witness in Zainul Abedin’s drawings and paintings, we have his sense of great movement, as that in Shahabuddin’s works too. This is shown in works such as  Zainul Abedin’s Rebel Cows’ (1975), ’Sangram’ (Struggle, 1976) and one untitled piece which was executed in 1967. It is an ink and pastel, on paper, depicting a group of figures in furious movement.

Shahabuddin Ahmed’s art frequently echoes the untamed organic landscapes imagined by British Graham Sutherland’s ‘organic’ surrealisms, such as ‘Green Tree Form’ (1940), ‘Twisted Tree Form’ (1944) and ’Sleeping Woman’ (1953). Bacon and Sutherland had been friends during the 1940s, with Sutherland advancing Bacon’s career, and with much painterly cross-fertilisation occurring. This becomes evident in paintings such as Sutherland’s ‘Gorse on Sea Wall’ (1939). It is no wonder then, that those ‘echoes’ occur, passed, as they had been, from Sutherland to Bacon, and to Shahabuddin. It is that metamorphosis, that evolving which is the product of freedom of the artist’s mind, freedom to experiment, for the artist to create without fear.

It is an arts tradition. ‘Apprentice’ (student) becomes a ’Journeyman’ at the completion of his/her apprenticeship and, eventually, a ‘Master’ in their own right. Although those antediluvian practices have evolved into studentship and teacher/lecturer/artist the relationship and its value remains. The Louvre in Paris (1793) and the Victoria & Albert Museum (1852) were created for the purpose of students gaining inspiration from past artists, who were considered masters of their trade and exemplars for students to learn from.

In 2017, Mexico’s Fine Arts Palace held the exhibition ‘Picasso & Rivera. Conversaciones a través del tiempo’ (Conversations Across Time). It charted a cross-fertilisation between two great artists, Pablo Picasso from Spain and Diego Rivera from Mexico, their similarities, their friendship and their ultimate falling out. Separately, they had both studied at the San Fernando Royal Academy, Madrid, and separately moved to Paris, finally meeting in 1914. Rivera had ‘sampled’ Picasso’s ‘Cubism’, while Picasso had ‘sampled’ Rivera’s ‘Muralism’.

Another great Spaniard, Salvador Dalí, countryman to and admirer of Picasso’s works, engineered a mutual friend (the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca) to obtain an introduction to Picasso. This occurred in Paris, in 1926. The influence of Picasso’s work, over Dalí, was chartered in the exhibition Picasso Dalí/Dalí Picasso at Museu Picasso, Barcelona, in 2015. Like Picasso’s relationship with Rivera, Picasso had a strained relationship with Dalí also. Picasso was to go on to influence many painters, including those from the Indian sub-continent, with artists such as F N Souza, Tyeb Mehta, M F Husain and, of course, Shahabuddin Ahmed admiring his freedom to create.

Shahabuddin’s paintings are about freedom. But not only the freedom from the act of war, or the ravages of war and the imprinting of such on the mind of a survivor, but a freedom of the spirit, of the soul (if we deign to use such language) and a freedom to experiment with creativity. Shahabuddin’s struggle has not been just to wrestle with the after effects of war, or to represent the horrors or war in a new fashion, but to present his work as his own, freed from the strictures of being a ‘Little Bacon’, or bound to another artist’s vision of the world.

It would be a mistake to consider Shahabuddin’s work to be simply a ‘working out’, in his psyche, of the traumas and dislocations of war, as some have intimated in the Indian press (Daily Sun). Even with his last exhibition (in Kolkata’s Ganges Art Gallery) ‘Shanti’, there was an underlining murmur of his days at war, Bangladesh’s liberation, the struggle etc. While this is undeniably true, and Shahabuddin has never denied the impact of the ‘Liberation’ war on him and his work, nor the fact that he had been galvanised into action by the repressions inherent with the rule of Pakistan over his country. However, this should not be allowed to define the past four decades of this artist’s work. Shahabuddin’s vitality, seen in his paintings, has moved him on from war to peace (‘Shanti’, or Peace is the name of his exhibition).

Of course, it is difficult to talk of peace (Shanti), without talking first of war. One dictionary definition tells us that ‘Peace’ is ‘a state or period in which there is no war, or a war has ended'. Another speaks of ‘no violence’. It is perfectly understandable why so much emphasis has been laid on Shahabuddin’s connection to a series of events which culminated with Bangladesh being created, freed from oppression, yet that is not the entire story.

As Shahabuddin (in an interview with Zahangir Alom, in The Daily Star, December 16, 2016) reminds us, artistic freedom is ‘….a difficult thing in the world. It is protected (by law) only in France.’ the French had that liberty, that freedom, enshrined in law from July 2016. While in other (South Asian) countries (according to The State of Artistic Expression) ‘Artists practice a degree of self-censorship for fear of losing state patronage’. Srirak Plipat Executive Director of Freemuse (an independent international organisation advocating for and defending freedom of artistic expression) recently stated…

‘Freedom of artistic freedom and creativity does matter. It is recognised as a human right in key international human rights laws. But what makes artistic freedom matter is that it makes us who we are as a human being in society.’

Artists, or in common parlance ‘creatives’, may be identified as human agents having autonomy, or free-will, to decide (what to do), and the ability to act upon that free-will without repercussions. To be truly free, to be liberated in the mind to paint, free from the pettiness of social strictures, politics etcetera is, sadly, becoming rarer across the globe. Countries which once embraced the idea of equality and freedom, change, and revert to old ways. France is the exception, hence Shahabuddin’s oscillation between his newly found home in Paris and the home that he fought for in Dhaka. Freedom has its own price.

Maksuda Iqbal Nipa

Art lover Nuruzzaman Kaiser had been in contact with me for a while, expressing his joy for art, more espeically by Bangladeshi artists. We agreed to meet on an unexceptionally hot day in Kuala Lumpur, to talk about art from Bangladesh, while Kaiser was still in Malaysia on business. The venue was IOI Mall Starbucks, convenient for us both.

Before he was due to leave Malaysia, Kaiser had wanted to pass a book to me. It had the intriguing title of ‘Maksuda Iqbal Nipa: Episodes of her Gaze’, and was a retrospective collection of images by the non-figurative Bangladeshi artist Maksuda Iqbal Nipa. The book had been published, with much acclaim, in Dhaka, the year before last (2016). That volume was replete with testimonies from fellow artists and well wishers, as well as featuring a concise background on the artist. On seeing such amazing images, I promptly agreed to execute the following write up for The Blue Lotus magazine, and was deeply honoured to discover that the book was signed by the artist herself.

Maksuda Iqbal Nipa: Episodes of her Gaze, is an imposing book which captures something of the artist’s thought provoking image making. It is a hard bound book and runs to over 250 pages. It is replete with a colourful dust jacket which features this artist’s exciting painting ‘Sounds of Austere Perceptions (2013), on the front cover, and is published by Enyetullah Khan’s Cosmos Foundation’s Cosmos Books, in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It is Maksuda Iqbal Nipa's first publication.

Before enquiring too far into Maksuda Iqbal Nipa's work, there are some salient details a reader, fresh to Bangladeshi art, might want to be apprised of. As you might recall, after independence from British rule (1947) several Muslim art teachers (from the Calcutta Art School, founded by the British in 1854) had moved into what eventually became known as Bangladesh (formerly East Bengal and East Pakistan).

Zainul Abedin, Safiuddin Ahmed and the student Quamrul Hassan (all previously from the Calcutta Art School) moved to Dhaka. This eventuated in the creation of an art institute called the Dhaka Art School, in Dhaka, 1948. It was run along similar lines to that of the Calcutta Art School, and underwent several name changes over the years until, finally, in 2008, it became the Charukola, Faculty of Fine Art, which until today continues its emphasis on the mastery of naturalism.

Since those early days, the art of Bangladesh has moved from the pioneering ‘Modern’ figurative work of Zainul Abedin, characterised in paintings such as ‘Harvest’ (1934) and ‘Santal Couple’ (1951) to those exquisite socially conscious and earthy figurative works of Sheikh Mohammed Sultan (S.M.Sultan). Quamrul Hassan’s ‘Three Women 1’ (1955) leaned heavily towards the social figurative, but incorporated aspects of both Western ‘fauve’ and a latter day ‘Cubism’.

In more recent times, Maksuda Iqbal Nipa followed in the esteemed footsteps of Tahera Khanam, Rowshan Ara, Hasina Ali, Jubaida Akter Khatun and Syeda Moyeena Ahsan, the first women to be admitted to the Dhaka Art School, in1954. Following her heart, and seeking a more spiritual way of painting, Maksuda Iqbal Nipa has created an art not required to be dominated by either socially conscious figurative painting, nor to be held by conventions of subject and object, contrary to the teaching at the Dhaka Faculty of Fine Art.

You might remember that in ‘Dialogue on the New Plastic’ (‘Dialoog over de Nieuwe Beelding’), published over two issues of De Stijl magazine (1919), the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian argued that his new direction of painting’s aim was ‘To express relationships plastically through oppositions of colour and line.’ and ‘To be expressed plastically in a determinate way, relationships must be represented only through colour and line.’ Mondrian favoured the interaction of line and colour over the need for a definitive figurative subject and object. Maksuda Iqbal Nipa, in her post Japan works, demonstrates this most effectively and is shown in her collected acclaimed works, within the pages of that book ‘Maksuda Iqbal Nipa: Episodes of her Gaze’.

Maksuda Iqbal Nipa, or more commonly ‘Nipa’, as she is known, was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh in 1975. In 1996 she completed her BFA (Drawing and Painting), at the Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, and in 2002 she undertook a Post-Graduate Research Course (Oil Painting), at the Aichi University of Education, Japan. In 2004, Nipa achieved her M.Ed. in Fine Arts (Painting), also at the Aichi University of Education. During her sojourn in Japan, Nipa’s artistic direction changed radically from the figurative to her own way of abstraction, like many Asian artists before her.

Japan, you might remember, was the prime motivator of Western ‘Modernism’ in Asia. It began with the Meiji Restoration, in 1868, and has influenced Asian countries such as China and, later, South East Asia with concepts of ‘Modern Art’ drawn from the West.

In Japan, Nipa’s move towards a chromic abstraction freed her to experiment with line and colour in much the way that those giants from the Bauhaus, Kandinsky and Mondrian, had advocated. Her colours spring, dance and vibrate, sometimes on very large canvases, weaving their own spiritual magic from cosmoses of colour (Pigmented Dream of Hard-edged Clarity, 2004), to ever flowing fields (Pondering Search, 2016). Nipa’s works are themselves transcendent, moving beyond mere paint on substrate, skilfully providing visual portals inciting observers to move to other planes. Nipa’s works are a triumph, a resounding crescendo of colour and line. 

Nipa’s chromatic compositions bring to mind the essence of Wassily Kandinsky’s philosophy of art. Kandinsky (in his 1910 essay ‘Concerning the Spiritual In Art’) spoke about an artist’s ‘inner life’ being expressed, its awakening and a transcendence through the medium of art. These self same spiritual expressions are evident in many of Nipa’s works, with titles eluding to their visual construct such as ‘Cerulean Wonder’, ‘Colour Haze’, ‘Traces from the Orange Botanic’, which subsequently bring to mind Kandinsky’s ‘Yellow, Red, Blue (1926), ‘White Line’ (1920) and his ‘Dreamy Improvisation’ (1913).

Though some have likened Maksuda Iqbal Nipa's works to those of the late Bangladeshi artist Mohammad Kibria (1929-2011), it is an unfair comparison. The only similarity is that both artists had inclined towards the abstract, which in itself is a large category. There are, seemingly, no other points of reference between the two artists to draw the conclusion of their similarity.

Collections of Nipa’s work may be discovered at the National Art Gallery of Bangladesh, Shilpakala Academy, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Bangladesh, at the Bangladesh Bank, at the Bengal Foundation, also at the Embassy of Bangladesh in Vietnam. There are  her works at the Bangladesh National Museum, and many private collections at home and abroad.

Nipa has held numerous solo and group shows in Bangladesh, and outside, especially the National Museum of Bangladesh, UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, France, the Toyota Municipal Art Museum in Toyota, Japan, and at the Las Vegas Art Museum, USA, as well as the Youngone Corporation in Seoul, Korea. Nipa has been honoured by Bangladesh Mohila Porishod (Bangladesh Women’s Association) and has received numerous awards and grants from Japan, China, and Bangladesh.

Rokeya Sultana's 'An I for Buddha'

 “A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the
sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is therefore a risky and unfeeling
act to send it out into the world. How often it must be permanently impaired
by the eyes of the vulgar and the cruelty of the impotent who would extend
their affliction universally!” Mark Rothko (Tiger’s Eye, December 1947, vol. 1, no. 2, p. 44.)


Rokeya Sultana, or to give her full title Professor Rokeya Sultana, at the Department of Printmaking, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Dhaka, Bangaldesh, is an artistic phenomenon, of that there can be no denial. From a Western perspective, Rokeya Sultana artwork’s have all the visual reminisces of  Odilon Redon, the French Symbolist painter, as well as the strange beauty of Marc Chagall, the French Russian artist, and the early, spiritual works, of the Russian - Wassily Kandinsky. Rokeya Sultana intimates Kandinsky and has leanings towards the deliriousness of colour which exploded with ‘Fauvism’, and a decidedly French Symbolist aesthetic (the poetry of Baudelaire and music of Claude Debussy) informing her works.

That colour alone can manipulate our senses is not a modern phenomenon. Kandinsky, in ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’ (Über das Geistige in der Kunst 1911 [Concerning the Spiritual in Art, English version 1914], writes…

 “There occurs a purely physical effect, i.e., the eye itself is charmed by the beauty and other qualities of the colour. The spectator experiences a feeling of satisfaction, of pleasure, like a gourmet who has a tasty morsel in his mouth. Or the eye is titillated, as is one's palate by a highly spiced dish.  It can also be calmed or cooled again, as one's finger can when it touches ice.”

Sultana presents a Western aesthetic albeit with distinctly Indian forms, gleaned from her stay (for her MA in Printmaking, 1983) at the renown Vishwa Bharati (communion of the world with Indian) University, in Shantiniketan, India, founded by Indian’s foremost creative -Rabindranath Tagore. Sultana shares her place in that alumni with Satyajit Ray, Amartya Sen and Indira Gandhi.

 There is both light and darkness in Sultana’s works as she becomes closer to Kandinsky’s notions of a spirituality in art, with her own adventurous colouration, and freestyle line work.

Michael Sadleir (aka Michael Thomas Harvey Sadler or M. T. H. Sadler), in his father’s publication ‘Rhythm’ (1912) had written in his article ‘After Gauguin’ suggesting that ‘An art intent on expressing the inner soul of persons and things will inevitably stray from the outer conventions of form and colour. That is to say, it will be definitely unnaturalistic, anti-materialist.’ Many years later Sadleir, as M.T.H. Sadler, in his introduction to a fresh edition of ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’ (1977), originally titled ‘The Art of Spiritual Harmony’, suggested that with the ‘Fauves’  Kandinsky  ‘…saw the liberation of colour, and the artist spent the rest of the decade absorbing and incorporating the implications of this freedom in his art.’

With Sultana, we see this ‘freedom’ of art. She incorporates images of the lotus bud and flower, along with other figurative elements, aquatic denizens, orchids. In a comparatively recent work ‘An I for Buddha’ (2010) the viewer’s eye is immediately drawn to the blue figure projected out of a background which is predominately red. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (in The Visible and the Invisible 1968, pp132) remarks that…

‘Claudel has a phrase saying that a certain blue of the sea is so blue that only blood would be more
red. The colour is yet a variant in another dimension of variation, that of its relations with the surroundings: this red is what it is only by connecting up from its place with other reds about it,
with which it forms a constellation, or with other colours it dominates or that dominate it, that it attracts or that attract it, that it repels or that repel it.’

The Claudel here is the French poet Paul Claudel.

Alternatively Kandisnsky expresses…..

‘…red, as is seen by the mind and not by the eye, exercises at once a definite and an indefinite impression on the soul, and produces spiritual harmony. I say "indefinite," because in itself it has no suggestion of warmth or cold, such attributes having to be imagined for it afterwards, as modifications of the original "redness." I say "definite," because the spiritual harmony exists without any need for such subsequent attributes of warmth or cold.’ (pp28 Kandinsky)

In the title ‘An I for Buddha’ Sultana reminds us how fragile the ego is, how the blossoming lotus, finally freed from the mundanity of its mud, is quickly subsumed into the fierceness of desire if we let it.

Kandinsky also relates (Concerning the Spiritual in Art) that “…the colour red may cause a spiritual vibration like flame, since red is the colour of flame. A warm red has a stimulating effect and can increase in intensity until it induces a painful sensation, perhaps also because of its resemblance to flowing blood.”

In other of Sultana’s works we see intimations of the female form, swirling, standing, dancing, mothering. At times a female form suckles, goes about her daily chores, rides buses. Sultana revels her care for the female in the forms she presents. Yet other aspects arise. Buddhism, joyful, yet sometimes foreboding, intermingling of colour and form reach out from canvases and paper to the unsuspecting viewer of Rokeya Sultana artwork’s.

At times her work is wholly abstract, as in her ‘Earth Water Air’ series of colourations, with contrasts of colours - red, the colour of the Bangladesh flag blood of martyrs, counter balanced by the Bangladeshi flag’s green field, amidst a reflective sea of blue ( ‘Earth Water Air 3’). Colours speak for themselves, such as a swirling haze of yellow, orange and red graced by a hint of spiritual blue (‘Earth Water Air 4’). At other times there maybe hints of the figurative (‘Relation 12’), where figures ‘walk’ on serene blue anchoring the viewer’s eye amidst what is otherwise a wash of muted colours, from white to yellow.

I have quoted extensively from Wassily Kandinsky, and his writings, in “Concerning the Spiritual in Art”, to draw parallels, or intimations, concerning Sultana’s use of colouration, and raised questions about its affect and effect, understanding and misunderstanding across our cultures.

Farida Zaman - Blue

I will be inspired only by the sensation that the season arouses in me: the icy purity of the sour blue sky will express the season just as well as the nuances of foliage.
Henri Matisse, 'Notes d'un peintre’ originally in La Grande Revue Paris, 25 December 1908.


Dr. (Professor) Farida Zaman, Professor and Chairman of the Department of Drawing and Painting, at the Faculty of Fine Arts, of the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, is one of Bangladesh’s most significant artists. For well over three decades she has diligently reflected her homeland, her people and the complex interactions between them. Farida Zaman has been honoured multiple times at home and abroad, and continues to produce artworks which intrigue, delight and demonstrate the continuing inequality of the sexes in Bangladesh.

In exhibition catalogues, online, and in magazine and newspaper articles, much has already been written about Farida Zaman, and her innovative artworks. She has both championed the under trodden, and the role of women in her society. Dr. Zaman has frequently exhibited with other women, thereby adding to a broad spectrum of works by women for society, and thereby extending our insight into those differing worlds. Here, I have sought a fresh insight into the works of Dhaka artist Dr. (Professor) Farida Zaman, focussing upon her intense use of the colour blue in her works, trying to connect the dots, as it were.

Anyone familiar with Dr. (Professor) Farida Zaman’s oeuvre, may come to realise that for this artist blue becomes revealed as an evocative azure, an enthralling, beguiling blue, an amazingly rendered and poignantly placed colour which as a catalyst for reflections and triggers to our enlightenment.

For the knowledgeable, the enquirer, or the quester it may come as no surprise that blue, so familiar in Farida Zaman’s works, was a great favourite too of that great Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagore (Rabīndranāth Ṭhākur). Tagore was a painter too, and produced somewhere in the region of 2,500 paintings and, it has been said, blue was his favourite colour, one which he poignantly expressed as ‘rup’ (form), ‘lavanya’ (loveliness), or ‘ananda’ (joy), and a colour which had been introduced (through the purple/blue Petrea flower), into Tagore’s place of learning, in Santiniketan, India.

That flower, planted by Tagore’s friend W.W. Pearson, delighted Tagore’s senses; for that grand master of words had a colour perception difficulty, and perceived no red hue in purple, but perceived it as a deep blue. “Neel ronge aamar gabheer aanando” (Deep is my joy in the blue colour) Tagore would often say, he must, therefore, have been delighted at seeing those dark blue flowers blooming all around his house (Konark) in Santiniketan, which they still do until today. Farida Zaman may have seen them before collecting her Ph. D. (1995) from that very Visva Bharati University, in Santiniketan, which Tagore had initiated back in December 1901.

An enquiry into the colour blue’s entanglement with Farida Zaman would be remiss if we dismissed those shades of the stunning ultramarine (from the Latin Ultramarinus, literally beyond the seas) which sparked Yves Klein’s ‘International Klein Blue’, following Klein’s fascination with the philosopher Gaston Bachelard, who had written “First there is nothing, then deep nothing, and finally blue depth”.

We must also tilt our metaphorical, or art critical, hats to the lapis lazuli (Latin -lapis, stone, and Persian [lājevard], later Lazuli meaning blue), stealthily ground to make the glorious (ultramarine) blue of Giotto (Giotto di Bondone) and later of Titian. Lapis Lazuli has been mined in Afghanistan for over 6,000 years and its discovery had fuelled the use of that stunning, deep blue across Europe. 

Between 1901 and 1904, the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso had painted his way through a melancholic Blue Period. This was, effectively, a period when he produced a number of mute, almost monochromatic, paintings in shades of blue and blue-green which he had begun after the death of his Catalan friend, the writer and artist, Carles Casagemas i Coll, in Paris, February 1901.

Those paintings, however, drew nothing from ultramarine, nor Lapis Lazuli, but were developed from mixtures of Prussian blue, Navy and Cobalt blue and, according to Picasso’s biographer and friend Pierre Daix, the maestro Picasso had indicated that “It was thinking about Casagemas that got me started painting in blue.”

In 2012, Farida Zaman participated in the Bangladesh women artists’ association SHAKO exhibition, in tribute to Pablo Picasso's ‘Blue Period’.  For that exhibition, Dr. (Professor) Farida Zaman tendered ‘Sufia's Blue Heaven’ alongside paintings from Kanak Chanpa Chakma, Naima Haque, Rokeya Sultana, Azadi Parvin, Afsana Sharmin, Kuhu Plamondon, Nasreen Begum, Fareha Zeba, Sulekha Choudhury, Rebeka Sultana Moly and Farzana Islam Milky. It was an exhibition of paintings inspired by Pablo Picasso’s ‘Blue period’. Of her involvement with the ‘Picasso Workshop Art Camp’ at Athena (in Uttar Badda, Dhaka, Bangladesh), Professor Zaman was quoted (by Fayza Haq, in Bangladesh’s newspaper The Star), as saying “I wanted to use the blue in the context of Bangladeshi women. I was forced to use them as a guide.”

At this point it would be easy to address a dialectic regarding Farida Zaman, and that infamous Bengali blue, known world wide as Indigo blue. Dark Indigo blue is rendered from the species of the Indigofera (tintoria) plant (an evergreen shrub native to regions such as India and Bangladesh), which produces what has become known as ‘true indigo’ (which the Greeks had named indikon, or from India), and which has become deeply enmeshed into the psyche of Bangladesh.

Indigo, was a blue so beloved of royalty and aristocracy that it was a main item of international trade from the 16th to the 19th century. Kathinka Sinha Kerkhoff (in her book Colonising Plants in Bihar 1760-1950, p122) has indicated that all was not well in the production of this colour, and that “Indigo cultivation had since long been a source of contention between the English planters and 'the natives’. The resistance in 1860 was referred to as 'the Indigo Disturbances' by contemporaries, and was later on described by scholars as the 'Blue Mutiny’”. The Blue Mutiny was one of the first movements, in Bengal, where the local peasantry had combined to rise up the raising of rents, cheap prices and extra legal sanctions. This historical farmer’s revolt of 1859-60 (known as Neel Bidroho) slipped into the creative imagination to become reimagined in Dinabandhu Mitra’s play, Nil Darpan (or Mirror of Indigo, published in 1860, with the English translation being published as Nil Darpan, or The Indigo Planting Mirror, a drama translated from the Bengali by ‘A Native’ and published by C.H.Manuel, Calcutta Printing and Publishing Press, 1861).

Through lapis lazuli; through indigo; through the growing of Bangladesh flax and its delicate light blue flower; through the stunning blue of the Bay of Bengal, being the mirror of the sky, we can debate the predominance of blue within Farida Zaman’s motherland, and its influence, over decades, on that artist’s creative work.

Bangladesh (formerly East Bengal) is a ‘riverine’ country, with at least 700 rivers and tributaries seeping into its land. One long river bisects the country. It enters the country and is known as the Brahmaputra, easing its way out of India. That river flows south. Slowly it becomes the Jammna, then the Padma and eventually, as it draws towards the famous mangrove forest (Sunderban, said to be the largest in the world), it forms the Ganges Delta and eventually the Bay of Bengal. Due to the plethora of water seeping its way through the country, in autumn, misty mornings in Bangladesh become blue, following the masking blue of the evenings and having taken over from the luminous blue skies of Bangladesh’s summer.

The audience gets a sense of this, within just a few seconds of film director Anwar Chowdhury’s film documentary ‘Joler Shilpamonjory' or ‘Waterworks’ (2006-2007)as a boat is propelled down Bangladesh’s River Meghna.

Within Chowdhury’s film, Farida Zaman returns to the land of her birth (Sachiakhali in the Chandpur district within the Chittagong Division of Bangladesh). We are shown that scene where the blueness of the sky reaches to touch its mirror in the sea. The difference between sky and sea are all but indistinguishable, save for an essence of pinkness developing within what we recognise to be clouds. Two crafts come into view. The scene is still cast over with blue. The blue eventually dissolves to reveal the artist (Farida Zaman) sitting in a fishing craft relaying her biographical story, speaking of fisherfolk, of casting nets, of how those memories become painted onto canvases, or work with water on paper. The sky and the river are both blue, broken only by the boatman’s shirt of pink and the sky gradually becoming roseate in its dawning. Skilfully the blue ebbs away to reveal Farida Zaman speaking “I am told that I was born in Chandpur”. She gazes towards the changing colour of the horizon, as if reflecting on her past.

In the synopsis for the film ‘Waterworks’, you can read how Farida Zaman “…describes how her childhood memories of boats, fishing nets, fishes, fishermen, water dots and other subjects (are) reflected into her painting canvas.” It give an insight into the importance  the concept of ‘the motherland’ on this artist.

In 2010, Farida Zaman presented a predominantly blue acrylic painting centring on a young woman, dressed in an orange sari. The character has a bird in her hand and is titled ‘Sufia in Joy-1’. The exhibition is ‘Rooted Creativity (2)’, the second gala exhibition held at the Bengal Gallery of Fine Arts, in Dhaka. Interviewed by Fayza Haq, Dr. (Professor) Zaman explained “My pictures are spun around a girl called Sufia. I've brought in boats and water which play such an important part of our lives. Fishing nets are suggested then actually brought in.”

In many of Faridah Zaman’s latter paintings, ‘Sufia’ is rendered in green, or orange, at times her black hair become blue, recalling Charles Baudelaire’s poem ‘Her Hair’ (La Chevelure, 1857).

Blue tresses, like a shadow-stretching tent, 
You shed the blue of heavens round and far. 
Along its downy fringes as I went 
I reeled half-drunken to confuse the scent 
Of oil of coconuts, with musk and tar.

From Her Hair, Poems of Baudelaire (Roy Campbell trans, New York: Pantheon Books, 1952)

The name ‘Sufia’ is possibly Arabic in origin, and suggests a person who follows the Islamic spiritual religion, Sufism. Someone called Sufia has a clean, or pure, heart.

The Sufi mystic saint Semnani (1280-1386), when reiterating the seven mystical veils (centres of personal progress from egoism to a divine centring), suggested that the second veil was ‘blue light’, which was an indication of the soul. He did not speak of an orange veil, but pointed to a ‘red light’ veil which indicated heart and a ‘yellow light’, that of spirit. In the the Sufi fable ‘The Conference of Birds’ also known as the Mantiq Ut-tair, by the twelfth century Persian poet Farid ud-Din Attar, the ocean is asked why it is so blue. The response …..

“ I am troubled because I am separated from my friend. Because of my insufficiency
I am not worthy of him, so I put on a garment of blue as a sign of the remorse I feel. In my distress the beaches of my lips are dried up, and because of the fire of my love I am in a turmoil. Could I find but a single drop of the celestial water of Kausar, I should be in possession of the gate of eternal life. Lacking this drop I shall die from desire with the thousand others who perish on the way.”

The water filled, ’riverine’, land from which Farida Zaman hails; her ever closeness to the sea, water, and endless skies give some credence to the notion of her blue artworks stemming from her environment and her fond attachment to those enduring, hard working, female figures like ‘Sufia’. Those industrious women are the backbone of any society, Bangladesh included. The blue in Farida Zaman’s paintings is not just emotive, but the byproduct of practical observation. Her blue is historical (maybe a tad nostalgic too) as well as being societal and, at times, controversial in what continues to be a male dominated South Asian society.

Farida Zaman’s ‘Sufia’ is seen in the artist’s works as far back as 2006, (in a catalogue for her solo painting exhibition ‘My Country, My Love’, shown at the Bengal Gallery of Fine Arts, Dhaka). The character ‘Sufia’, the embodiment of the Bangladesh woman, is named in ‘Sufia’, ’Sufia’s Dream’ and ‘Sufia with her Bird - 1’ though, in essence ‘Sufia’ is all the female characters within that catalogue and many more throughout the artist’s oeuvre, with or without blue.

Farida Zaman’s ‘Fish and Net’ (2009) demonstrates the artist’s skill in colour usage, with fish rendered in hues of yellow and orange/red against an ultramarine background of water, and a threatening mass of dark blue/black spreading from above. Another ‘Sufia with Bird’ (2009)  weaves various blues with green and dashes of red. The girl wears a white sari to match the white of the bird, while ‘Rain’ (2010, but included within her 2013 exhibition catalogue ‘Bound to the Soil) sparkles with blue, both the deeper blue of the rain bespeckled water and the lighter blue of the rain itself. Of course the blueness is offset by flecks of yellow, some turning green, and just a hint of red giving the blue its blueness. In that same (2013) catalogue ‘Marshy Land’ 3 (2012) and 6 (2012), though in a more abstract form, render the blueness of water as it seeps into otherwise dry land.

From 2006, through to more current times, Farida Zaman has portrayed her central character, Sufia, from ‘Midnight Dream’ (2006), to ‘Sufia with her Bird - 1 (2006), ‘Sufia with Bird’ (already mentioned, 2009) ’Peace’ (2010), ‘Love’ (2010) and through to ‘Sufia’ in 2015. One non-Sufia painting ‘My Beautiful Country’ (2017), renders a mere glimpse of that artist’s country in a splendid (predominantly blue) semi-abstract work. There are, of course, many other works where artist Farida Zaman delights in her use of blue. I have mentioned but a few, from her oeuvre.

Red, green and gold are the official colours of the country of Bangladesh. They are the colours of its nationalism, the colours of the proud flag fought so courageous for. And yet the aforementioned blue has its place of mention too. Blue is the colour of indigo which Bangladesh people grew, fought and died for. Blue is the morning and the evening of that riverine country; the summer sky, the simple flax colour and of Farida Zaman.

Where is the Cat - a brief review

Last evening, my hard working spouse (literally) drove me to see ‘Where is the Cat’ at Petaling Jaya’s PJ Live Arts. That oft used venue is ensconced within The Square at Jaya One. On route we discovered that we had left our tickets at home. Dear spouse u-turned, and headed back home to collect them, whilst making a deft telephone call (using the onboard loud speaker system to avoid cries of illegal use of handphone whilst driving) and was notified that extra tickets would be provided for us at the main door. Technology is wonderful isn’t it? Another u-turn, and deja vu ramped up a notch.

Simon, our go-to Waze instructor, guided us through mazes of Malaysian streets to shave a few seconds off our arrival time and, despite the complexity of the route and the various u-turns, we arrived before time. Time enough to grab some water to quench thirst during the ninety minutes of performance.

I admit to trepidations. Virtually untrained young persons, let loose on a stage for 90 minutes was not my idea of fun but, maybe, a tad closer to one of Dante’s outer rings of hell. My spouse, who is an educator of several decades standing, was positively drooling with anticipation. I, not so much. And then it started.

I also admit to having to place my scepticism, negativity and propensity to a short attention span to one side. I had nothing to do for the next 90 minutes, except exist. My Samsung life saver was switched off. The theatre darkened. I listened, watched and was quickly captivated by the boundless energy and enthusiasm generated by a small troupe of 14 year olds (I only became aware of their ages after the event). Such was the professionalism engendered by the young actors that I could hardly believe that they were Waldorf schoolchildren (Class 8).

Boundless energy pranced across, and around, the stage. There was a sense of city. Bustling. Vibrant. Yet there was also an undercurrent too, of potential disconnect, as an elderly mother looses her cat. Pandemonium ensues as said elderly mother, perhaps touched by an elderly mental fatigue, goes off in search of her one, solitary, companion. The perceived loss of the ‘mother' promoted the young actors to seek, to call and to worry about the ‘aunty’. Aunty, perhaps, represented all mothers and all attachments which John Bowlby suggested are prone to become insecure. The performance was exhilarating, even more so when you consider the ages involved and their short experience as actors.

As an individual who has only been able to absorb scant snatches of languages other than English, and who continues to struggle with that too, I did find the multi-lingual aspect of the ‘play’ (English, Malay, Mandarin, Tamil, Hokkien, Cantonese, Teochew, and Hainanese) a tad disconcerting, not to mention confusing. My spouse, bless her, did try to keep me informed, but gave up at Tamil (from which I knew only one word - the one for cat- Punai).

I did struggle following the plot, not to mention wondering what the significance of no 226 in the Perry index of Aesop's Fables (The Tortoise and the Hare) was, gave up, and accepted the whole as a dance experience. That worked for me. I’ll not give away the ending but, there again, I’m not too sure what it was anyway.

Bravo to the cast, teachers, director et al who helped bring this performance to fruition.

‘Where is the Cat’ was adapted from Singaporean writer Kuo Pao Kun’s 1988 ‘Mama Looking For Her Cat’.

The Blue Lotus magazine issue 14. The Bonn issue.

My short story 'Bourgainvillea' in this Singapore anthology