Partition

you're kashmiri until they burn your home, take your orchards, stake a different flag,
until no one remembers the road that brings you back. you're indian until they draw a border through punjab, until the british captains spit paki as they sip your chai, add so much foam you can't taste home, you're seraki until your mouth fills with english, you're pakistani until your classmates ask what that is, then you're indian again or some kind of spanish, you speak a language until you don't, until you only recognize it between your auntie's lips, your father was fluent in four languages, you're illiterate in the tongues of your father, your grandfather wrote persian poetry on glasses, you can't remember, you made it up, someone lied, you're a daughter until they bury your mother, until you're not invited to your father's funeral, you're a virgin until you're too drunk, you're a muslim until you're not a virgin, you're pakistani until they start throwing acid, you're muslim until it's too dangerous, you're safe until you're alone, you're american until the towers fall, until there's a border on your back.

~ fatima asghar

Prejudices

An illustration I did towards the end of last year for The Indian Quarterly was for a story called The Circle, featuring the last of the Anglo Indians, the prejudices inherent in them and how it ultimately destroys them.
The print has turned out a bit darker than the original, so I am adding the complete original below along with a detail of the illustration.

The haunting story which makes us cringe at the extent of prejudice and perceived superiority that one community has for another reminds me of the remark made by a friend of mine after she had broken up with her Anglo-Indian fiancee. She said, "How long are these Anglo-Indians going to prefix "Anglo" to define themselves? They are Indians!" This is true of course, but try telling that to Anglo-Indians, you'd probably make them writhe in agony.

Once, some years ago, during coffee an Anglo Indian acquaintance of mine remarked that the father of her niece was a Malayalee. When I expressed surprise, my acquaintance hastily added, "But she (the niece) is not Malayalee! She is one of us! She is one of us!" I was perplexed at the absurdity of that remark and at the determination of my Anglo-Indian acquaintance to completely erase the Indian aspect from her family.

Some explanation for these mindsets can be found in William Dalrymple's The White Mughals and more briefly in City of Djinns.

Here are a couple of memorable quotes from City of Djinns -

'And they're a fascinating people, the Indians. I'll say that for them.'

I've always had friendly relations with them, mind. It's their country. That's what my father always used to say.'

'That's right. The Indians are a nice people. Provided you treat them as human beings.'

'You see we're not Britishers', said Mr Smith. 'We're something different.'

*

It's Raining Fish!

Happiest project I've ever done -

The Pleasure of Posting.

So much pleasure in carefully packing these beautiful and 
sophisticated prints. Just look at them! 
Much to my delight, the entire Post Office was empty this afternoon so everything got stamped and sent in just 10 minutes flat.Those in Bangalore will be getting their prints by tomorrow itself via Speed Post. Woohoo!

Partition

The illustration above is one of three I was commissioned to do by the Commonwealth Writer’s website, Adda, to remember 70 years of violent, bloody Partition of the sub-continent. While I was given complete freedom to conceptualize the illustrations, it was suggested that I make all three with some kind of connecting thread to them. For this I used similar colors, red, black and white and a certain similarity to the landscape.

The illustration above is for a powerful story called ‘Regional Division’ by Sidra Zia. In the image, to depict division and violence I’ve used dramatic colors – red and black and torn paper; to show migration, I've poured the mayhem of million birds in the air, I've splattered red for bloodshed; I want the dramatic illustration to draw out all the emotions in the story.

The second illustration is for the non-fiction section, Speaking of Partition is a complex piece about communication; language and words in relation to Partition - whether what comprises a language is adequate enough to describe what happened during the Partition, the author is on a train journey, she talks about how the moment you board a train you can sometimes arrive at your destination.

The third piece shown below, is for a poem called That Part of Us.

More and more when I read such stories, when I hear Urvashi Butalia talk about her book, The Other Side of Silence, when I read Shashi Tharoor dismantling false constructions that we were (and still are taught in schools), I thank heavens for the power of stories that hold up the truth before our eyes.

Dark and Stormy

These two images are preparatory drawings made for a book cover.They have nothing whatsoever to do with America.I dislike America thinking that it is the centre of the universe and I find it tiresome that people make it seem so. The best statement someone said to me in these two days is: Fuck T, now let's get on with ourselves.

After a long time I got to work with an art director whom I really like and respect and who gets the best out of me. Her responses are prompt and she knows what she wants. It was she who suggested I make some sketches first so that there was an option of clouds to choose from. We were all pleased with the way it turned out. While I cannot show the final cover yet, I am quite happy to share these with my blog readers.

An Exercise in Curiosity

 There is a lot of difference while working on large sheets of paper with charcoal and when working on smaller squares of paper and graphite. While working with charcoal, I am standing at my desk, exerting pressure and practically hurling my entire body onto the paper, cutting, tearing, blending, coaxing...The complete opposite seems to be the state that I am in while completing these 13 illustrations for a story about barbaric Witch Hunts in India.I have posted two other illustrations for these in the previous post as well. 
While drawing these I have been seated at all times during the last two weeks in the same position and the only movement has been my wrist as it builds up layer upon layer of graphite on textured paper (Cretacolor 6B graphite on 180gsm precut Canson). The only sound is the kich kich kich kich as the lead moves while shading yet another area.

I took on this graphic novel kind of short story for The Big Picture in Mint, out of curiosity, to see whether I could do this, if I liked doing it and if I had the patience. This platform is a great one for amateur illustrators and writers and I only wish I had had something like this to work on in my early years as an illustrator. However for professional illustrators this is a wonderful way to try out and experiment with what they have never tried before as I am doing now. I directly began the fair work without rough sketches or planning because you are compelled to work at a fast pace. In this case unlike the highly professional editorial illustrations that I do which involves so much thought, planning and conceptualizing, a completely different mindset is required. It seems that here the illustrator is a tool rather than a voice.

Will I attempt this again? I am not sure. I find sitting chained to my desk for lengthy amounts of time exhausting and frustrating. Also, there is not much if any thinking at all for the illustrator because you are told what to draw. I found the trite visual interpretations given to me tiresome and while I did what was wanted of me for some of them, I also did what I wanted for others. If I do attempt something like this once more, the story will have to be a very good one. However I must say this, doing this has left me with nothing but admiration for illustrators of graphic novels, their patience and tenacity is to be lauded.

Outside, the Bangalore winter results in cloudy weather and beautiful diffused sunlight in which I took the first three pictures at my desk. Naturally my thoughts go back to last year especially when I see blog posts of friends in the midst of winter. Some of the pictures are beautiful, like this post from The Cassandra Pages and these haunting and moody pictures from the same blog.  Winter can be beautiful when you are looking at it in photographs.
But when I look at my own pictures like the one above (this is a color picture btw), I am reminded of how I removed my gloves, quickly took a picture and quickly, quickly put the glove back on again over my freezing hand at -20 degrees in Montreal last year beside the St. Lawrence river. Immigrating to Montreal too was an exercise I took (a mega exercise perhaps) to satiate my curiosity and yet again, I wonder how I ever did it all.

The Indian Witch Hunt

The Village Headman

'Tis the time's plague when madmen lead the blind.
~ Shakespeare

Helping Hands

If there was any one consistent factor that characterized my adventures on the other side of the world it is this - time and again I felt that I was hanging by a hair's breadth and clinging for dear life on the edges of all kinds of strange cliffs when someone or the other would extend a helping hand and steadily haul me upward and onto safe and solid ground once more. This is a drawing to remind me of those moments and to remind myself that however inconvenient it is for me, when someone needs my help I must extend that helping hand. It is such acts of kindness that makes the world go round.

My entire life can be described in one sentence: It didn’t go as planned, and that’s okay.
~ Rachel Wolchin

Copying Gorey

The complete opposite of working with charcoal, or at least the way I work with charcoal, is to do cross-hatching with pen and ink. Somewhere along the way I decided I needed to work small and compact and easily manageable and mess free and clean and black and white so I thought I must at least try pen and ink. I decided not to use a dip pen yet and brought out my nice Lamy fountain pen with its fine nib. I decided to copy technique from BW drawings I had collected on Pinterest in order to teach myself, so first I drew this skull which I was rather pleased with. Naturally I instagrammed it.

Then this
I decided that wasn’t so bad either so I got more ambitious. I must learn technique from the best I thought so I brought out a book by Edward Gorey and decided I was going to copy technique from there. After flipping through the pages and feeling rather taken aback by the complexities of what I saw, I settled on what looked like the easiest drawing.

Somewhere along the way, when you copy drawing and technique from great masters, a cloud of humility descends on you and envelops you; not just because they draw as well as they do but because while you are following their lines in an attempt to recreate their image you come into a realization of how they solved a problem in the best possible manner while you laboured through it with gritted teeth. While copying Gorey, it begins to occur to you why this man's work is so much more superior to the rest. You also realize that 98% of all illustrators are bull-shitters who bluff their way through and it is only a miniscule 2% who not only really know how to draw but also know the art of illustrating well. These 2% are almost always grouchy bearded men who have a bottle of wine welded onto one hand while they draw ceaselessly with the other. Thirty, forty drawings a day I am told. They all swear. They are all atheists. Here, one of those bearded blokes has instagrammed Ronald Searle’s collection of pen nibs. After seeing this I want to bury my head in my hands that I attempted to copy Gorey using a Lamy. 

But still in the spirit of being positive and that kind of thing, I have promised myself that I will do at least one cross-hatched image a day so that in about a decade from now I can draw extra small size. Okayfine, now where did I keep that stick of charcoal?

Fish Curry

Five Lessons from Travelling

Extra Large

I have a hundred thousand problems to deal with but right now it feels damn good to draw extra large once more.

Back to Work

"And lastly, when other things in life get tough, when you’re going through family troubles, when you’re heartbroken, when you’re frustrated with money problems, focus on your work. It has saved me through every single difficult thing I have ever had to do, like a scaffolding that goes far beyond any traditional notions of a career."

~ Teresita Fernandez

What is it Like?

Being a new immigrant feels like a fish being compelled to ride a bicycle, in other words, you have to completely discard your identity and assume a new one and that is something which feels grotesque and unnatural, much like what the illustration portrays. My friends will vouch that throughout my entire stay in Canada the expression on my face was exactly like that of the fish on the bicycle. 

No country can give you everything that you want. If in one country you finally had the hard won life you created for yourself, centered on what you value most, another country might have eventually given me the quiet and dignity that I desired. However in my case, it seemed to be at the expense of all that I had striven for till now. ‘What do I value more?’ was the question that I asked myself frequently in the midst of my immigrant dilemma. The longer I stayed on searching for something which I began to suspect did not exist, the further away I kept moving from the path that led to all that I held close to my heart. The consequence was great unhappiness and an acute loss of confidence. Whichever part of the world you live in, the truth is what an illustrator who has also been through it all once told me – “The only happy place is inside our heads, when we are drawing and being kind...”

Strange Beliefs

*

On the last day of the world, I would plant a tree.

 ~ W.S. Merwin

                                           

Yearning          

When I am Back at my Desk

I can breathe easily once more

Suspension

When you take a flying leap, you expect to land with a thud, and then, after a period of dithering around, you expect to grow roots and stay put. But things never quite turn out how you expect them to; so here I am suspended in mid-air for what seems to be a very lengthy amount of time. When I look around me, much to my surprise, I find everything else is suspended in mid-air  too. I am told that this, what I am experiencing is called ‘Middle of Winter’. 

The sky turns the colour of snow and the bare black skeletons of nature suspend themselves within it. 

When water doesn’t turn into white ice, it turns into black pools, curious dark shapes floating in the middle of nowhere with wisps of smoke coming out of them. 

I look at this beauty with the same incredulity that one looks at outer space shots taken by NASA. 

But I will not idealize. The pristine snow outside Montreal turns into brown sludge within the city, the extreme cold gets maddening, the bulky clothes heavy and tiresome and the lack of sunlight goes interminably on until you forget that there was something called colour and life and brilliance. 

Burial Pods