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| 24/02/2000 |
| TRIBUTE TO BASHIR MIRZA |
Obituary meeting of the Artists Association of Punjab, in memory of Bashir Mirza, Lahore Arts Council, Lahore, 24 February 2000.
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| I wonder how many of us actually knew Bashir Mirza. Many of you will remember him as a student at the National College of Arts, in the early 1960s. Others interacted with him after he migrated to Karachi, which is where I first met him in 1967. And, of course, by the time of his death a few weeks ago, there was no-one in the country who was not familiar with his name, artistic stature and reputation. |
| The public recognition that Bashir chased so keenly throughout his life will presumably be accorded to him after his death. That, I suppose, is the way of the world. That is also the cruel penalty that gifted artists such as Bashir Mirza have to pay for their talent. What God gives with one hand, he invariably exacts a price for with the other. |
| Bashir Mirza had a talent far beyond what we can measure. There can be no doubt that his drawings, his oil paintings and innovative acrylics are simply the visible reminder, the residue of that talent, not the sum total of it. I hope I am not doing him an injustice when I say that, although Bashir had enormous talent, it was a gift he never did not manage to exploit to its fullest potential. It was a talent significant to gain him entry into the National College of Arts. It was a talent – irrepressible and audacious - that drew him to tutors like Professor Shakir Ali, who recognised in him their own successor. And it was the sheer range and versatility of his talent that captured, and then commanded for over forty years of his creative life, the attention of a wide audience of admirers and art-collectors across our country. |
| When I first met Bashir in 1967, he had just opened his gallery on the first floor of a house in Kutchery Road, Karachi. It was perhaps not the ideal location commercially. For Bashir, though, keen on making an entrée into Karachi society, it possessed one unique advantage. The house belonged to Mrs Nusrat Bhutto. Even though the house was not particularly well-located, Bashir felt that through his better-placed and radially-connected landlady Mrs Bhutto, he would be able to access the drawing rooms of the privileged elite of Karachi. And he did so with a speed and a success which surprised even him. |
| Bashir held the view that although painters could paint anywhere, art galleries could survive only in the hospitable free-spending environment of Karachi. He gauged, with accurate prescience, that even the shy and retiring Lahori artists who enjoyed working within the protective ambience of the NCA or the monastic introspection of the Fine Arts Departmentof the Punjab University, would sooner or later need an outlet for their works. They would feel the need to go beyond the red brick walls of the institutions which provided them such cosy refuge. For many of you, Bashir Mirza’s gallery in Karachi became that outlet. |
| When Mrs Bhutto later sold her house, Bashir was forced to move his gallery. He shifted to more modest premises on the ground floor of a house in Sindhi Muslim Housing Society, on the path to the middle class concentration of PECHS’ suburbia. By this time, Bashir felt that he achieved recognition enough to amplify the name of his new gallery from simply The Gallery to Gallery BM. It was a small step for Bashir Mirza as a NCA graduate. It was a giant leap for Bashir Mirza the artist and social aspirant. |
| I will not dwell on Bashir’s subsequent career as an artist or as the proponent of the now famous Lonely Girl series, or as a print-maker or as a gallery-owner. That is the terrain I leave for other speakers to traverse. This afternoon being an occasion of remembrance, I would prefer to recall Bashir as I remember him. A warm, talkative, witty human being - all these characteristics certainly, but at the same time, and at all times, a desperately insecure person. |
| Like all creative persons, Bashir craved recognition. He hoped that somehow the transience of public adulation would substitute for the disappointment of the personal relationships in his life. That might explain why he chose to turn his face in whichever direction the sun happened to be shining from at that moment. And as the suns in his life kept shifting, he moved to wherever he felt the radiance of patronage shone brightest. Just as he had once migrated from Lahore to Karachi, he went from there to Islamabad, and then even as far away as Australia. |
| The last time I met him was in sometime 1993, when he and I travelled together from Islamabad to Karachi by PIA. We were both holding Business Class tickets. We joked about how far we had come from those early days in Karachi when he ran an insolvent gallery and I earned my living from an underpaid job in the ICP. From Bashir’s unstable walk and his slurred manner of speech, it was clear to me that I was not Bashir’s only companion on that early morning plane ride. His true companion, on that journey and for most of his solitary life, was something else. He insisted that it helped lubricate his senses. It overcame his basically provincial inhibitions. Occasionally, I suspect he felt it uncorked and released inspiration. Sadly, cruelly, and finally, it extinguished the fire in his soul. |
| Bashir Mirza was not an easy person to know. Perhaps not many of us really could or did. I believe the closest I came to knowing him was when we were sitting one day in his own room adjacent to the gallery. I noticed the ink sketch that you are looking at now, hanging on the wall. The picture exhibited a vibrancy that can come only from work done in a spontaneous moment of inspiration. |
| I asked him whether he had done it in on the spur of the moment. He replied: `You are the only person who has detected that.’ Then he began to narrate to me the circumstances in which he had done the sketch, of how he had been sitting cross-legged on the ground in his studio, with a pen and a bottle of ink in his hands, looking for something to draw, when suddenly he caught a glimpse of himself in the full-length mirror which stood propped up against the wall. The distorted elongation of the reflection caught his imagination. With limited, precise, masterly strokes – for drawing in ink is an unforgiving medium – he completed this sketch within minutes. |
| I offered to buy it even though I knew that Bashir had intended to keep it for himself. After a moment of two of reluctance, he agreed. Price was certainly not the consideration, for I still remember - but am too embarrassed to recall - how little I paid for it. To Bashir, what seemed more important was not the price but that it should go to someone who had recognised, and appreciated, the spirit behind its creation. |
| `Don’t ever sell it,’ he said to me. And of course, I won’t. I cannot. What I can do though is to share it with other admirers and friends of his, as I am doing today. |
| From here, this picture will be going to the U.K. for inclusion later this year in the Jubilee exhibition of works by Pakistani painters being organised by the Asia House, London. There, it will symbolise the place Bashir sought for his work, the place he is qualified for and the place he deserves, a place of pre-eminence amongst his artistic peers. |
| Bashir, thank you for being who you were. Thank you for drawing and painting the way you did. And thank you for being a talented Pakistani of whom we, and future generations of Pakistanis, can be justifiably and continuously proud. |
| Published in THE BARK OF A PEN. |
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| 24 February 2000 |
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| All Speeches |
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