| SLIDE 1: I would like to begin with a heartfelt expression of thanks to Dr Narinder Singh Kapany for his generosity in instituting this series of annual lectures in memory of his father Sardar Surinder Singh Kapany. All of us are blessed with parents, but not all of us have been blessed with the opportunity of repaying, as Dr Kapany is able to do each year through these lectures, the obligation we owe to them. It is a very personal, very special form of seva by him, and of which his parents would have been justifiably proud. |
| My presence here symbolizes three strong affinities: at one level, between the two youngest religions in the modern world – Sikhism and Islam; at another, the durable relationship now beginning its third millennia between the Sikh community and the Fakir family, to which I belong; and finally, at a cultural level, between the Victoria & Albert Museum and myself. I have been coming here as a student since the 1950s. I have attended a number of lectures in your auditorium, and I have benefited from the tutorship of scholars such as Dr William Archer and Robert Skelton. |
| The pioneering work that Bill Archer did on Paintings of the Sikhs (1966) and on Indian Paintings from the Punjab Hills (1973) may have been updated by subsequent researches, but it has never been superseded. It remains a touchstone of intellectual integrity. If I am able to stand here today where Bill once stood, it is only because I had a better teacher than he did. |
| Bill’s book Paintings of the Sikhs is a perfect introduction to the topic I will be talking about this evening: Sikh Portraiture. I propose though to delve deeper than Bill did, and talk not simply about paintings of the Sikhs, but examine paintings by the Sikhs and paintings done for the Sikhs. |
| SLIDE 2: My reasons are that few visual art-forms in the Asian sub-continent represent a more perfect fusion of belief and symbolic representation, unclouded by dogma. Within that genre, paintings of or by or for the Sikhs developed a special vocabulary of artistic expression that is identifiably and uniquely distinct – in form, in colour and in potent symbolism. |
| ‘The symbol,’ Carl Jung had once written, ‘is not a sign that veils something that everyone knows. Such is not its significance; on the contrary, it represents an attempt to elucidate, by means of an analogy, something that still belongs to the domain of the unknown or something that is yet to be.’ |
| SLIDE 3: Guru Nanak-ji was the bridge between ‘the domain of the unknown’ and the ‘something that is yet to be.’ To understand the young Nanak, one would need to be re-born in 1469, when the Punjab was in turmoil. Guru Nanak described it as: ‘This age is like a knife. Kings are butchers. Religion has taken wings and flown. In the dark night of falsehood I cannot see where the moon of Truth is rising.’ |
| Nanak remained a man of the world (in fact, he began life as an accountant). At the mature age of 38, following a revelation, he assumed his ordained responsibility as a guru or teacher. The role of the Guru has been defined at its highest spiritual level as a voice of God, rather than His incarnation. At a human level, a guru becomes not an intercessor or intermediary to God, but an exemplar or guide, and it is this form that Guru Nanak is recognized today, in this painting by the 20th Sikh artist Sobha Singh. |
| SLIDE 4: Sobha Singh’s patron and subject for this bronze bust was Dr Mohinder Singh Randhawa, a Sikh technocrat who defied conventions because he lived his life above them. A believing but not a practicing Sikh, he did not adopt any of the five Ks in his daily rituals. But he added two more Ks: Kindness and Knowledge, and I was the personal beneficiary of both in equal, limitless measure, which is why you will understand why I dedicate this lecture to him as my teacher and mentor. |
| SLIDE 5: My talk this evening consists of four components. The first will focus on Piety – the centrality of Sikhism as a religion to its portraiture. The second, the use of Portraiture as a chronicle. The third will look at Patronage, and the manner in which the differing demands of patrons were fulfilled by the responses of malleable artists, and the last will be a consideration of Punjabiyat or the Punjabi identity, which I regard as a continuous cultural persona inseparable from the Land of the Five Rivers. |
| SLIDE 6: ‘The meaning of things lies not in themselves but in our attitude towards them’. And examples of early Sikh painting reflected an attitude of Piety and reverence. |
| SLIDE 7: One of the earliest representations of Guru Nanak is from an illustrated biographical manuscript of his life, known as a Janamsakhi. It is now in the British Library. This manuscript was dated VS 1780 (i.e. AD 1733) and therefore would have been completed within a quarter of a century of the death of the last Guru Govind Singh, in 1708. |
| One can imagine the imperative behind the production of such manuscripts, for not only did they narrate the various events and legends associated with the first Guru, they provided to a growing community of new adherents to this newest of faiths a common testament. |
| It is interesting that the artist – Alam Chand Raj – should have included the insignia of a fly-whisk or chauri over the figure of the royal visitor on the left; Guru Nanak did not need such support. His distinguishing symbol was inner grace. |
| SLIDE 8: Fifty years later, in 1780, a Swiss solider-trader named Antoine-Louis Polier commissioned a manuscript containing 64 paintings of Hindu deities, and included this spartan portrait of Guru Nanak listening to his favourite companion Mardana. From the composition, they might almost have been two Mughal nobles, which is not surprising because Polier was living in Delhi at the time and working as an engineer at the court of the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II. |
| SLIDE 9: Within another fifty years, the iconography of Guru Nanak as a spiritual monarch had been set in amber. He has the both the nimbus and the peacock feather fan. |
| This painting was done in Kashmir and although it bears an inscription identifying the main figure as the second Guru, Angad, the iconography is unmistakable. Wasn’t it the art-historian J Ph Vogel who cautioned that while inscriptions may lie, paintings rarely do? |
