Will be regarded counterfeit.
Your civilization will commit suicide
With its own dagger …
Later, after the horrors of the First World War had swept aside the belle époque and many of the intellectual certainties of the age of empire, Iqbal crystallized this critique. By 1930 he was able to say that Western societies since the time of Luther and the Protestant Reformation had been ceding the universal ethics of Jesus to a parochial ethics of nationalism that posed “the greatest danger to modern humanity,” engendering “mutually intolerant democracies whose sole function is to exploit the poor in the interest of the rich.”
To Iqbal, the West’s problem was one of love and desire. Like the devil, the West seemed consumed with an insatiable appetite. But the devil’s failing, like that of Milton’s Satan, was that he “declined to give absolute obedience to the Almighty Ruler of the Universe.” In the same way, the West, by turning away from God and the human brotherhood preached by Christ, had created a terrible inversion of the ideal society. Its desires, severed from the highest things, had become purely material. Islam presented an alternative, Iqbal felt, because it did not “bifurcate the unity of man into an irreconcilable duality of spirit and matter,” but put God at the center of man’s desire.
Nevertheless, individuals retained a devilish freedom, and it was up to them to choose God if they saw fit. “Man is a free responsible being, he is the maker of his own destiny, his salvation is his own business,” Iqbal wrote. The most important part of this freedom was ijtihad, or forming independent judgments, particularly on matters of Islamic law. It’s a deeply contested concept in Islamic thought, and the ulema, or religious scholars, claim prerogative over its exercise; but for Iqbal, its presence at the core of Islam meant “There is no mediator between God and man. God is the birthright of every man.”
Iqbal’s analyses, of the West and of the self, were founded on a crippling irony. In a letter to Faizi, Iqbal wrote about his frustrations at being forced into marriage, adding, “As a human being I have a right to happiness—if society or nature deny that to me, I defy both.” This may have been true in spirit, but in his actions he capitulated, and that capitulation, Faizi thought, determined the character of his life:
Iqbal, as I knew him in Europe, was never the same personality in India … In India his brilliance was blotted out, and as time went on this blot permeated his entire consciousness. He moved and lived dazed and degraded in his own mind, for he knew what he “might have been.”
So Iqbal, who had not felt himself free to shape his own life, imagined for human beings a nature, full of agency and desire, that was free to love God in its own way.
* * *
For the next three decades, after his return to India in 1908, Iqbal would continue to practice the law with one hand and write poetry with the other. In the mid-1920s he entered politics, serving as the Muslim League’s president in 1930 and 1932, and becoming a sort of moral preceptor to Muhammad Ali Jinnah (39) and the League’s leadership. As he wrestled with political developments, he expanded his critique of the West, and his vision of human nature, into a striking—and ultimately problematic—vision for Indian society.
I’ve sometimes wondered whether Iqbal is a good but also cautionary example of what happens when poets venture too wholeheartedly into politics—and politicians in turn embrace them. Did he aestheticize and idealize politics, in a way that bore little relationship to reality but had very real effects? At what cost, to himself and to the subcontinent’s Muslims, did he let his ideas get diverted from poetry and into politics?
In 1932, Iqbal warned the All-India Muslim Conference that the people of India were demanding the very secular institutions that he considered the downfall of the West. At the same time, he objected to the ethnic chauvinism of the “Arabian imperialism” that characterized earlier periods of Islam. Islam, he believed, should be above the building blocks of blood and soil with which Western and Arab nations were constructed and by which their people become walled off from one another.
Our essence is not bound to any place …
Neither is our heart of India, or Syria, or Rum,
Nor any fatherland do we profess except Islam.
That fatherland was rightfully governed by what he called the “Muslim political constitution.” This was a somewhat illicit construct, which slid between notions of law and character. It had two pillars, one of which was a belief in the “absolute equality of all the members of the community.” Because of this belief in equality, Iqbal held that the “best form of Government for such a community would be democracy”—though not Western democracy, based as it was on counting numbers, and for which he had nothing but contempt. It ended up trying, he said, to extract the thought of “one man from the brain of two hundred donkeys.” Nor did he have time for the version of secular democracy that Nehru and others envisaged: the other pillar of Iqbal’s political vision was that “the law of God is absolutely supreme.”
A spiritual democracy, Iqbal wrote, was the ultimate aim of Islam, designed to solve the problem of “how the many can become One without sacrificing its plural character.” Indeed, Iqbal felt that his political vision was Islam, which he convincingly maintained was not a private religion but what he called a “polity”: “a social structure regulated by a legal system and animated by a specific ethical ideal.” Bound by love among equals, it was a polity that could transcend materialism and national borders, infusing the entire world, he wrote in one of his verses, with the “the light of God.”
To achieve this enlightened community, Iqbal sought to transcend the dogma that had encrusted Islamic thought and practice. He challenged the strict literalism of the ulema’s interpretation of the sharia and instead endorsed “the freedom of Ijtihad … to rebuild the law of Shariat in the light of modern thought and experience,” imagining legislative assemblies that would exercise this freedom collectively, through a process of scholarly consensus. The truth of the Qur’an, unfolding through history, must be left open and available so that “each generation, guided but unhampered by the work of its predecessors, [is] … permitted to solve its own problems.”
* * *
It has been said that Iqbal saw Islam as the only alternative to the two other ideological systems dominant during his lifetime: nationalism and communism. But for Iqbal, who wrote that “Islam itself is Destiny, and will not suffer a destiny,” it had a sort of history-ending inevitability.
Though his profoundest hope was for a global Islamic society, his immediate proposal was for a federated India in which Muslims would have a territorially unified, semiautonomous state where they could freely enact his Islamic polity. India’s very diversity, Iqbal believed, could make it the paradigm of such a society. Its Muslims were not all Arabic, or all Turkic, but also Bengali, Andhra, Punjabi, and more. If they were able to “sink their respective individualities in a larger whole” in favor of an Islamic moral consciousness, and if they were given their own territory, Iqbal believed that Muslims (who already formed a significant part of the military) would in turn defend the rest of India.
Iqbal’s vision inevitably brought him to loggerheads with those, including the British government and the Congress movement, whose aspirations for India did not extend to an ideal Islamic polity. Partly as a result—although he died almost a decade before Partition—Iqbal’s work has often been read as an argument in favor of Pakistan. This is not quite right; as the journalist Aakar Patel has wryly put it, Iqbal authored “the thought that produced Pakistan,” but wouldn’t have wanted his byline on the country itself.
Today, that Islamic republic, far from the dream of a polity founded on fearless self-determination and love, and even of submission to the law of God, is arguably one of the world’s great oppressors of Muslim individuals and communities (to say nothing of its role as an incubator for ISIS). Of course, India can also be a harsh, alienating, even deadly home for Muslims. Yet, in his pursuit of poetic unities, perhaps
what Iqbal missed was that a messy, multireligious democracy, backed by a secular constitution, even in a Hindu-majority society, might—just might—be a better bulwark against the horrors of Western modernity, and a better buttress for the practice of a loving, energetic Islam, than a state devoted to upholding a single creed.
Though he defended a relatively strong conception of individual judgment in the form of ijtihad, for Iqbal, freedom was, in the end, possibly too redolent of the devil’s party. If his ideal democracy were to function, individuals would have to abjure an open-ended freedom in favor of submission to the law of God. Iqbal’s political beliefs, rooted in his poetic vision, asked his coreligionists to trust in one another and in their leaders. But in politics, trust beyond a certain point becomes credulity. Men are not angels, and government is necessary.
In India, where the argument over the relationship between religious identity and the state has been constitutive of the country’s politics, there was recognition, after 1947, of the need to create democratic institutions. Suspicion and mistrust had to be built into the Constitution; citizens could not entrust themselves to one another’s moral goodness, let alone to the moral qualities of their leaders. Keeping the debate alive has, on balance, given individuals of all religions more freedoms than a homogeneous Pakistan has managed. In India, too, people now wish to bring that argument to a close: to replace the ruckus of politics with the moralized ideology of Hindutva. But as Iqbal himself said, man and society are like a wave: “When I am rolling, I exist, / When I rest, I am no more.” What would it mean to bring the argument to an end? As the devil suggests of the falcon, such unity would signal death.
36
AMRITA SHER-GIL
This Is Me
1913–1941
“God please save me from the magnetic pull of this journey.”
—Amrita Sher-Gil, 1933
From Van Gogh to Dash Snow, an artist’s premature death may impart a bankable aura, especially if the persona of the corpse is as compelling as the canvases. The painter Amrita Sher-Gil, twentieth-century India’s first art star, became a prized commodity when, after a convention-flouting life, she died under shrouded circumstances at the age of twenty-eight. When the artist M. F. Husain (49) later noted her standing as “the queen of Indian art,” it was not without a certain edge; while alive, Sher-Gil was sometimes belittled by male contemporaries as merely an ambitious provocateur. “Rather self-consciously arty,” noted the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, with whom she had a brief, intense affair—a line that to my ear begs the question, what else can a working artist be? To me, her glamour and her tragedy are footnotes (if substantial ones) to the fact that she could really paint, and remains one of modern India’s great depicters of the jagged and imperfect self.
Frustrated by notions such as that of “the masses,” which blotted out individuality in society, Sher-Gil paid particular attention throughout her career to the poor, from Hungarian gypsies and Parisian consumptives to Indian peasants. But she believed firmly that it was the art, not the subject, that mattered most. Drawing on Western artists such as Cézanne, Gauguin, and Brancusi; Indian ones such as the Ajanta fresco painters (see 1, the Buddha); and the Indian tradition of miniature painting, particularly in the Pahari style (see 20, Nainsukh), she managed to do something doubly radical within India: to declare her own vision vital in the history of art, and to do so as a woman. Thus she endowed successive generations of Indians with something scarce in the culture: an example of an autonomous, creative female.
While some women artists and writers struggle in the well of depression before finding a voice, Sher-Gil worked from a seemingly innate belief in the validity of her first reactions. “You will say that I am a self-opinionated monkey, but I stick to my ‘intolerant’ ideas and to my convictions,” she wrote to her mother at age twenty-one, when she was already gaining recognition. Reflexively truthful and intellectually curious, she made her work to satisfy herself.
As usual in India, her gift was enabled by privilege. The daughter of a sophisticated Sikh aristocrat, she developed as an artist with the aid of her Hungarian mother, whose own artistic enthusiasms had devolved, after marriage, into parlor entertainments. Raised in both Hungary and India, Sher-Gil refined her skill with a brush while in Paris, and early on she chose women’s sensuality, labor, and relationships with one another as her subjects. Her many early self-portraits, often nude, would prove important images for others, too—made, as they were, in a time when women’s lives and feelings (including erotic feelings) were systematically shamed and denied.
“You can take those stories if you like, and you can run with them,” the leading contemporary artist Bharti Kher says about the many tales and myths that encircle Sher-Gil’s life. “But you have to look at the work. It’s essentially very powerful because she was a powerful woman, but still, she allowed her own vulnerability to come through … In the self-portraits, you see in her eyes a deep longing. She has a search in her, and she wasn’t afraid to show that, to actually show her body, to expose herself as vulnerable. To say, ‘I’m naked. I’m here. This is me.’”
* * *
“Poor little bride, you little know that perhaps you might live only a year. You are doomed and yet you don’t realise…”
—Diary entry of Amrita Sher-Gil, aged twelve, on observing a wedding
For all her sensitivity, even as a child, to the difficulties inherent in the lives of women, Sher-Gil saw herself as a member of no group and was known to slag off other women artists as “sentimentalists” lacking “passionate souls.” Nor was she interested in being a role model or cultural hero. “Pomposity or exhibitionism” is how she dismissed exemplary stories of important figures in a letter to her friend Jawaharlal Nehru. So it’s an irony that, as her fame grew after her death, she became so much an icon that some of today’s artists find her an oppressive, almost establishment figure.
Sher-Gil inherited from her parents both an artistic sensibility and temperamental unconcern for the censorious reactions of conventional people. Her father, Umrao Singh, sometimes forgot his own controversial past when berating his daughter for shaming the family. A close friend of Muhammad Iqbal (35), Singh was a Sanskritist, philosopher, and photographer of sometimes risqué subjects in experimental styles; he also maintained a radically anti-British politics that swung between socialism and Tolstoy-style anarchism. Meanwhile, his emotionally troubled wife, Marie Antoinette Gottesmann-Erdobaktay, loved bourgeois luxuries and was given to great public dramas. To offend was as natural in Sher-Gil’s childhood as to draw.
Precocious and acutely analytical from a young age, she spent her first seven years in and around Budapest, and endured the First World War in a cultured milieu where she was both the subject of art (her father’s photographs) and a maker of it. Current-day artist Shilpa Gupta sees superb draftsmanship even in Sher-Gil’s juvenilia, and believes Sher-Gil was well served, intellectually, by her plural upbringing: “What sorts of choices do you make? Where do you belong? Are you local, are you international? In terms of the family she’s born into, by default she’s born into a situation where she could pick and choose what she was interested in.”
As Hungary after the First World War suffered partition, economic collapse, and violent extremism, Sher-Gil’s father repeatedly petitioned the British, who were nervous about his underground political alliances, until the family was permitted to return to India. They settled in the British summer capital of Simla, in a house that was built for a viceroy. There, the family became prominent in the Indian equivalent of the Happy Valley set: her mother at the piano of an evening, singing Rimsky-Korsakov; her father, taking photographs. When she was about eleven years old, Amrita won her first prize, fifty rupees, for a painting. Before long, she would be assuredly telling her parents that she was giving up her many other talents to focus on the one in which she could be great.
Her art was erotic and dark from the beginning. Barely twelve, she painted a woman enraged,
her filmy gown rent to reveal bare breasts, a dagger clenched in her fist. Each time I see that painting, I change my mind about whether the dagger is bound for someone else’s heart or her own.
Another painting from her early adolescence shows a nude young woman on a bed, turning away from a Christian cross. Sher-Gil developed an intense distaste for European Catholicism, along with a love of Italian Renaissance masters, after her mother pursued a paramour to Florence, with Amrita and her sister in tow. Lodged in a convent school she found repressive, Amrita was relieved when the affair ended and they returned home. “All art, not excluding religious art, has come into being because of sensuality: a sensuality so great that it overflows the boundaries of the mere physical,” she later wrote to a friend.
Her mother saw that Simla wasn’t the place for an artist as ambitious as Amrita. So at sixteen, after her atheism got her expelled from a Simla convent school, she became the rare Indian girl whose family dropped everything to bring her to Europe to study art. At Paris’s École des Beaux-Arts, under the low-key tutelage of the postimpressionist painter Lucien Simon, she continued to explore erotic themes, as well as the relationships between young women.
The artist Krishen Khanna, now in his nineties, says Parisian studio-based training made a deep impression on Sher-Gil’s work. As the students painted models or arrangements of objects, the relationship between the eye and the hand became vital. “The communication, the correlation, between the two is very important in European painting,” according to Khanna, “whereas in India you see something, you brood on it, it stays in the mind, and distortions happen there.”
In 1932, three years after arriving in Paris, Sher-Gil painted her first large canvas, the boudoir-set Young Girls. Its composition and mysterious tension remind me of Balthus, although in Sher-Gil’s hands the knowing intimacy of two girls—one with golden tresses, déshabillée; the other neatly dressed, dark hair slicked, a bowl of cherries on her lap—feels natural rather than voyeuristic. The acclaim for this picture made Sher-Gil the youngest, and some say the first Asian, painter to be elected an associate of the Grand Salon. Yet her intense work in these years was occasionally interrupted by personal trauma.
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