The pursuit of Beauty

Though she was much older than I was, I am probably the only person in Pakistan outside the immediate family who knew Laila Shahzada during the Second World War and before the brittle and beastly days of Partition. In the middle of the 1940s we were both marooned at a boarding school run by Christian missionaries in the quixotic wilderness of the Western Ghats of India where in the monsoon the hill station was washed by torrential rains and we never saw the sun for three months. I was in St Peter’s, the boys’ school, along with her two younger brothers and a small band of princes from Bhopal. And she was in Kimmins, the girls’ school, with her younger sister Marium who later in life developed into a fine artist. Born in the United Kingdom and the   eldest child of an English mother and an Indian father, Laila blossomed into an attractive adolescent who developed at an early age a passionate interest in art.

While at Kimmins her beauty had smitten a few of the senior boys at St Peter’s who used to gawk at her in church every Sunday in the morning and evening service, Shahzada Ahmed Shah of Bhopal, who traced his ancestry to a warlike Central Asian tribe where the men spent most of their working hours on horseback, was her constant admirer, and when they migrated to Pakistan had to wait a considerable time before he became her (second) husband.

While at Kimmins her beauty had smitten a few of the senior boys at St Peters

In 1946, at the age of 20, after impressing her principal Miss Pearsall and members of the teaching staff with the quality of her sketches, she was hired as an art teacher. And so the girls at Kimmins discovered a new dimension of experience each time their eyes travelled over long corridors of art – the magnificence of Rubens where the laconic eye of the critic searched for the seedy and the sinful; Rembrandt with his relentless concentration and obsession with detail and Leonardo de Vinci, supreme artist, scientist, biographer and leading intellectual of the Renaissance who was a one-man fantasia.

Years later I learned that Miss Pearsall was not too keen on Laila showing the works of Leonardo de Vinci because he had been accused of committing sodomy, but she nevertheless agreed to let her introduce printed copies of The Last Supper and Mona Lisa. Of course, at that time research on the world’s most famous painting and national treasure was in its infancy and I wonder what the principal’s comment would have been if she knew that a researcher had pointed out that the woman who had posed for the world’s most famous portrait was probably not a woman at all but a man in drag with jaundice…

In Pakistan, Laila first came to the notice of the public in a national exhibition inaugurated by General Ayub Khan in which Shahid Sajjad and Jamil Naqsh also exhibited their works. It was to pay tribute to her talent and to acknowledge her place among the pioneers of art in Pakistan, searching for their place in the sun, that the Unicorn Gallery of Karachi held a Retrospective between the 10th and 30^th of December. In the contemporary world, with its fierce competition and bucketfuls of organic new-age anxiety, all kinds of movements are taking place in the world of art where it is increasingly being felt that traditional art has been kept on life support longer than its vital signs warranted.

In a world where constant experimentation is the order of the day the Retrospective looks astonishingly timely. After all, when Laila Shahzada first emerged on the art scene of this country she called her first exhibition which was held at the Karachi Arts Council in 1960, ‘Experiments.’ For that is just what the paintings were. Critics noticed that she had fully exploited all the qualities inherent in the medium, not least its transparency, its saturated colours and potential for spontaneous handling. The art works were shown extensively both at home and abroad in Tokyo, Paris and Monte Carlo. Collectors in London and New York liked her work. It was obviously different from anything they had seen before. Then in 1964 came ‘Drift Mood’ which used as a basic theme the driftwood tossed by the sea and the American deserts. Her impressions of the Indus Valley Civilization in a series entitled ‘Moenjodaro’ made waves in certain circles in New York, where she was awarded a gold medal and the Key to the City. Ever since that time she has been alive to changes in the lithe life of visual language.

The Retrospective was a collection of some of her works that gave an insight into her versatile, creative mind. Some of the more impressive exhibits were the tree with sturdy roots, the portrait which I think was supposed to be a likeness of Queen Elizabeth II, the bull which appeared to have stepped out of a cave painting, the woman with flailing arms, and the sultry portrait of a female in blue, heavily ornamented with a delightful cleft in her chin. Unicorn Gallery did a splendid job of taking a page out of the past and sharing it with viewers.

Her images appeared to lack that indefinable quality which makes one want to whip the canvas off the wall of a gallery

In spite of the fact that she was one of the first women painters in this country to have attained recognition abroad and had bagged quite a few awards and titles at home, not all critics liked her work. If one had to use just one word to describe the leitmotif of her exhibits, it would be…enigmatic. She certainly had an expressive style, loved to paint and had a flair for dispersing colour. But the swirling contours, fluid, twisted shapes and explosive images appeared to lack that indefinable quality, that urge which makes one want to whip the canvas off the wall of a gallery and slip it under one’s mackintosh. Perhaps she just didn’t have a leitmotif and wanted to paint as her mood took her. I did ask her once, shortly after the black-and-white photograph which appears on this page had been taken if her work had a basic theme. She just shrugged her shoulders and said, “My mood often changes. I am constantly searching for beauty. I see beauty everywhere.” That’s how I would like to remember her, a woman who never had an unkind word for anybody, who was generous to a fault, who was constantly striving to attain the unattainable. When she died of third degree burns in the summer of 1994, I was truly saddened by the loss of an old friend. For she was one of a kind.