Dear Reader,
While going through the Frontline archives recently, I chanced upon an article titled “Shakila’s saga” (May 1995, by Tapas Ray) on the Bengali collage artist, Shakila. It took me back to an exhibition I had attended in 2012 in Kolkata’s CIMA art gallery which had works by Shakila, among those of other women artists. I remember standing in front of Shakila’s collage featuring goddess Durga, and being struck by the freshness of the depiction—her Durga smiled mischievously, while all around her, the world went to pieces.
This Durga was neither the sentimental mother figure of popular imagination nor the artistic expression of the philosophical idea of shakti. She was just herself, a woman in a sari and red blouse, whose beautiful, warm, girlish smile gestured at a mode of living that neutralised evil no matter how much power it wielded in the universe around.
Shakila Sheikh, who turned 50 in 2024, is a self-taught artist. The daughter of a vegetable-vendor mother, she was married off at the age of 10. The family lived in poverty in Kolkata. Shakila would have been one of the millions of poor migrants from the villages whom the city swallows up every day had Baldev Raj Panesar, an award-winning collage artist, not found her on the streets. To help her supplement her husband’s meagre income, he had given her paper sheets to make bags. But she made collages out of them and impressed Panesar (whom she called baba) with her artistry.
When Panesar introduced her to his art circles, they were stunned by Shakila’s freshness of vision. Her collages, made by tearing paper by hand and pasting the strips on canvas with homemade glue, spoke of the commonest things of life in an extraordinary way. Shakila was hailed as one of a kind, an unparalleled artist, and, in some ways, the artist since she had achieved the ideal: artless art.
Since then, Shakila’s works have travelled to Germany, France, Norway and the US, as well as within India (“Shakila: Artworks from 1993-2024”, a retrospective of Shakila’s art, was held at Bihar Museum in Patna earlier this year). Viewers and critics cannot stop gushing over how she creates her fine art without any formal training and makes profound statements without lengthy manifestos defending her position, which is markedly secular.
One of her most famous collages shows goddess Kali leaving her temple to save a cow tethered to a railway track. Detractors did not like the fact that a Muslim woman had used a Hindu goddess in her artwork. Their murmurs of protest had no effect on Shakila.
Shakila’s works have dealt with issues like the Babri Masjid demolition, water scarcity, daily labour. Only, you will not find her lecturing at seminars or art summits. A mother of three, she still lives a quiet, unobtrusive life in Nore village in South 24 Parganas district of West Bengal. When she is dragged into the limelight at her shows, she stays reserved, looking on intently and smiling warmly, like the Durga in her collage. As the Frontline article said, “…just as problems do not easily shake her, success seems to wash over her like water off a duck’s back.”
While Shakila is exceptional in her attitude, she is also one of the numerous invisible Indians struggling constantly at the margins. The struggle is harder for women because their labour goes unseen even within their own families. Neha Dixit writes about one such woman—a migrant Muslim labourer from a weaver family in Benaras—in her book, The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story of an Unknown Indian.
“She is a mother, a homemaker, a daily wager, a diligent worker with vast experience, a strategist, the glue holding her family together, a survivor, and an ant-like creature whose life is signified by incessant drudgery and the absence of hope,” says activist Zakia Soman in her review of the book. But Syeda has not crumbled under the pressure. She might not have the talent of an artist like Shakila, but she too is a warrior and a hero whose story deserves to be read and appreciated. Do read the book and the review.
Syeda did not think much about her identity as a Muslim till her brother was attacked by a mob in a cinema hall. Such incidents, absurd as they seem to a rational mind, have become commonplace in the polarised atmosphere of the last few decades. International Booker Prize-winning author Geetanjali Shree goes back to the 1990s, when intolerance reached a frenzied peak with the destruction of Babri Masjid, in her recently translated novel, Our City That Year. Tarun K. Saint reviews it here.
I leave you here to return to the archives, which is my home these days. But I will return soon, maybe with more stories from the Frontline archives.
Anusua Mukherjee
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