The way it was: End of a graceful innings Mian Ijaz Ul Hassan
Ali Imam could hold forth on almost any subject. He was an ‘incorrigible
talker’ as he put it himself once. But he was also quite uncompromising. For
him to be aesthetic was equal to being moral, clean and good
They are all dead and gone on to new hunting grounds. First, Safdar, then Ahmed
Pervez, followed by Shemza, Moyene Najmi and now Ali Imam.
These artist in the fifties formed The Lahore Art Circle which inspired and
sensitised a whole generation of painters to the ideals of Modernism. I will
always remember them as spirited young men, angry and a bit lost to themselves
and others.
They were restless and always on the move. Ali Imam who outlived them all is
also back in the pavilion. He played a steady inning, kept his eyes on the ball,
played on the front foot and kept a steady head. In the game of life, though,
unlike cricket, the rules are slightly different. Everyone is declared ‘out’
in the end.
It was in the mid-fifties that Moyene Najmi introduced Ali Imam to me and a
group of other “geniuses” at Aitchison aspiring to greatness in the field of
painting. Moyene Najmi was our teacher and had an infectious way of provoking
our imagination towards endless pursuits of creative experimentation.
Ali Imam in those days had employed himself as an art teacher at Lawrence
College Gora Gali. In those days Murree was a different place. Everybody who
considered himself of any intellectual or social consequence, at least from the
Punjab and the Frontier, came to Murree to spend the ‘season’ or a good part
of it. Ali Imam visited Murree almost every day because it was not an unbearable
walking distance from the school. Moyene, Safdar and Shemza came all the way
from Lahore while Ahmed Pervez would come from Pindi.
In Murree, these artists stayed at the Marina Hotel. The rules of hospitality
were very clear to everyone. When the money ran out, no one was to borrow but
quietly leave. Getting money in those days was not easy; it has only become more
difficult today.
Luckily, one of Ali Imam’s painting, perhaps titled ‘Marina Hotel from the
Murree Mall’, was reproduced in colour in a foreign magazine. The artists
invaded the office of the proprietor of the Marina Hotel and insisted that he
give them special rates because they have been instrumental in making his hotel
internationally famous. Those were good days and the proprietor gracefully
agreed to their demand.
In those days Mariana Hotel was visible from the Mall. It was situated on a
mound about thirty yards away across a depression. In order to reach the hotel
one had to go up a winding road adjacent to the church on the Mall and then turn
left on a friendly slope, which led straight to the hotel entrance. Next to the
hotel were gravel tennis courts where you could rent a racket and play a set or
two with the marker. Payment was by the hour and not by the number of sets.
After a long absence when I was there the last time I discovered that the pair
of tennis courts had been converted into a car park, Marina Hotel incidentally,
is no longer visible from the Mall, because some offensive structures have come
up blocking its view. This part of the Mall was once called the ‘sunset
point’ where people made a point of coming to see the sun go down behind the
distant hills, never doubting that it would not rise again to usher in another
day, little knowing that everything comes to an end at its own appointed time.
I cannot imagine that Ali Imam did not pause and ponder over a sunset. In those
days Ali Imam painted common sights in an impressionistic style leaning towards
greater simplification and stronger palette of the post-impressionists. I
enjoyed Ali Imam’s work of that period immensely. He demonstrated a great
flair in application of colour and a firm grasp of design. His paintings of the
Murree period are extremely chaste in both their conception and execution.
Almost all the paintings are in watercolour done on paper.
I am reminded of another painting that is now in Shahid Jalal’s possession,
which presents a most cheerful prospect of Murree. I wonder who owns a small
watercolour of Murree Brewery that was burnt down by the patriotic locals, who
could not think of a better way of making their contribution to the struggle for
independence. I don’t mean to offend Minu Bhandara, who I claim as a friend
after only three recent encounters at Nathiagali, but thank God they didn’t
burn down the Lawrence College hidden behind the pines, further up on the same
hill. I think the memory of this small elegant work has remained embedded in my
mind because of its brevity of conception and simplicity of contrasts. The walls
facing the sun are expressed by lemon and the shaded side of the broken
stonewalls, with their collapsed wooden roofs, rendered in aquiline blue, which
endows it with a tangible presence.
From the hills, Ali Imam descended to Sadiq Public School at Bahawalpur, where
he taught for a while. It is quite interesting to observe how a simple change of
place and environment can alter a person’s aesthetic ambience. In the Hills
there were painted wooden houses with sloping tin roofs and pines with mountain
winds coursing through them. At Bahawalpur the houses were built of mud and
ochre bricks with dust storms blowing into them. At Bahawalpur the colour and
mood of his paintings changed dramatically. Cool arboreal prospects with bright
habitations made way for dusty buildings with their stoic demeanour thriftily
enlivened by wooden balconies and incidental architectural decoration. In the
closing period of his stay in the Murree Hills Ali Imam’s interest in
structures had become visibly evident. In these paintings one finds him
forsaking vivid colour and tones of impressionism for his cerebral interest in
form. These forms were usually simplified and defined with the minimum of means
as employed by cubism.
At this point of his life I believe Ali Imam must have felt the desire to more
closely acquaint himself with modernism. I presume he must have by then also got
quite fed up with Sadiq Public School where the students spoke Punjabi in an
even more peculiar manner than those around Lahore or even Pindi. I met Ali Imam
only once in London when I was enrolled at St Martin’s School of Art.
Unfortunately, St Martin’s and I could not appreciate each other. The school
head, without giving me an opportunity to express what I thought of him,
unilaterally terminated our association.
With a sense of relief I left London and proceeded to Cambridge for a degree in
English Literature. How Ali Imam gained from his presence in England is a matter
of conjecture as far as I am concerned. In his paintings of the late sixties his
interest in form had shifted from structural aesthetic interest in buildings to
the human figure. Like the buildings, the human figures, mostly women, were
huddled together in pictorially engaging compositions. Later in the seventies
the tangible reality of human form dissolved into colour and texture. The viewer
could now only catch glimpses of the human images through an ivory façade. Ali
Imam’s work of this period is extremely chaste and deftly crafted and can be a
source of immense satisfaction to a patient observer.
Ali Imam could hold forth on almost any subject. He was an ‘incorrigible
talker’ as he put it himself once. But he was also quite uncompromising. For
him to be aesthetic was equal to being moral, clean and good. He was an
aesthete, an art critic, owner of an art gallery that held art above commerce.
But above all, he was one of our great artists who must be separated and
salvaged from all else that he achieved in his long innings before gracefully
striding back to the pavilion.
Prof Ijaz-ul-Hassan is Pakistan’s leading painter. He is a teacher, art
critic and political activist. He was awarded the “President’s Pride of
Performance” in 1992. He is currently the president of the PPP Punjab’s
Policy Planning Committee and Chairman of the party’s Manifesto Committee