Many years back, when I was flipping through the pages of Lahore: Illustrated Views of the 19th Century by Fakir Syed Aijazuddin, a compilation of wonderful paintings by the British painters on Lahore, the dedication page of the book was quite interesting: “For Komail; to compensate for your being born in Abu Dhabi”.

The words were moving enough for a reader to draw a father’s regret for his son to be born outside of the country, rather outside of Lahore. Many years later, the same Komail Aijazuddin surfaced with his paintings to negate that perception, as he possessed all the ingredients of a Lahore-born artist.

The recent exhibition “Grace in Hand” at the Khaas Gallery, Islamabad, showed evidence of diverse qualities, and integrants of a painter truly trained in the oriental tradition of miniature art. The blue, turquoise and red colours, and the usage of gold suggest the painter’s association with the traditional art of the illuminated manuscripts of Persia, widely known as the art of the book in the Western world.

Aijazuddin in the opening sentence of his statement certifies this phenomenon as: “These drawings are the result of the beginning of my engagement with the concept of illuminated manuscripts, an idea that grew naturally out of my interest in the various manifestations of religious and devotional art.”

The artist also admits the impact and the use of marginalia in the conventional manuscripts, especially when it allows an image to break out of its limitation to add dynamism in the collective feel of the page. The practice, of first imposing a border and then breaking it for the sake of potential kinetics of an image, helped the artist to experiment with his work, with change of the medium in many frames.

As the title of the show “Grace in Hand” suggests, the painter has emphasised the importance and reverence of the human hand. The artist, very intentionally, has elaborated the relationship between the earthy human figures and the divine world by virtue of rendering various positions of hands of average to selectively distinctive human beings.

One such painting ‘Turquoise’ exhibits this hand-connection by joining together Maharaja Dalip Singh, the youngest son of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, with a lying modern young man having a cigarette in his hand and a naked man stretched in a pleading position. Whereas, a Christ-like figure inspired by ‘the Creation of Adam’ by Michelangelo, has been rendered on the top right corner to add the religious factor. This may suggest the conversion of an ordinary human being to a Sikh Prince, then a Christian and then again, a Sikh; a cycle advocating the identity crises. There is also a teddy bear, a wine bottle and smoky barbed-wire; connecting the innocence, fragility and lifestyle the young Maharaja.

In ‘Black tree’ the artist has used the all-time popular Western image based on the crucifixion of the Christ and have again created the link through his hands to the roots of a bloomed tree; that may suggest the germination of Christianity — for which Jesus has to moisten its origins with his blood.

In most of Aijazuddin’s paintings, the figure is encaged in rectangular form and has been linked to the outer world through a divine connection through hands. By using the hands as the symbol of grace, the artist convinces the viewer for the value of hands in the progress and struggle of mankind that the human history presents proudly.

The revival of traditional techniques, like the art of the illuminated manuscripts and miniature style painting by the new generation artists, is a good omen. This practise, not only would link them to their glorious past but also establish their own original identity as practitioners of oriental art forms.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, October 4th, 2015

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