Keeper of secrets

Behind her gentle demeanour, artist Nilima Sheikh inhabits a world of unparalleled violence and loss, discovers Kishore Singh.

Women are keepers of terrible secrets. Within the folds of their garments and the creases of their memories, they carry the scars of unimaginable violence done not only to them but to all mankind. As they embroider a wedding garment or cook a family meal or embellish fairytales for their children, it is not resilience, or forbearance, but a universe of horror that makes them hide the many truths and lies of their lives.

Women like Nilima Sheikh should not have to concern their days and nights with death, dislocation, bride-burning, with funerals and breast-beating, with loss and absence. If she does, it is deliberately so, for Nilima is, she says herself, “a single-tracked person”. Over the decades, she has approached her art with a repertoire that is formidable; so skilled is her rendering of it that you absorb her many stories (and their pain) till they fill you so you can think of nothing else. “I’m happy to hear that,” she smiles gently, when you say that the poignance of loss that is inherent to her work, has a mellow suffusion that you carry with you long after you have stepped out of the gallery.

“My work,” she explains, “is primarily about dislocation” — and whether that happens to be in Kashmir, which has troubled her for a long while, or the hidden stories of Partition, or the everyday instances of gender discrimination — she grieves for these lost universes in her canvases, but remains herself on the precipice of hope. “I cannot claim to make a difference,” she recounts a report she read of travellers on the bus between Pakistan and India hidden behind waving hands, as though with that motion they might wipe away the Line of Control, “but one must try and wave one’s hand positively.”

Six years after she showed in Bombay, Nilima’s Drawing Trails at New Delhi’s Gallery Espace returns her to Kashmir and its little-known stories that highlight her formidable reading and travelling and absorbing. A father records the route that his son’s funeral procession takes; a son plans the route of his mother’s funeral during curfew; a writer is at hand to observe the destruction of an artist’s village — from fact, from life and from fiction, Nilima takes stories and turns them into visual documents where a carefree picnic serves as a memory of bereavement, where the soft tempera explodes with the anguish of loss. “Pain and beauty,” Nilima explains, “are not polar things, I don’t see them as contradictions. It’s just the way one uses language to articulate thought.”

A student of history in Delhi, and of fine art in Baroda, where she lives with husband Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, Nilima says her works “pay homage to historical sites in Asia” — particularly China and Central Asia, not only in her choice of medium but as places from which she borrows expressions, idioms and elements of design and architecture which, in turn, are translated into stencils by the Sanjhi makers of Mathura to be integrated into her paintings. Literary references from authors and poets finds place on her canvases, not to simplify the paintings but to give them depth, to root them in a way that sometimes lives are not.

Drawing Trails, she says now, has been in the making longer than the gap between her last and current shows. “I hadn’t thought of a Kashmir-centred, specific show,” she insists, though it had been part of The Country Without A Post Office, and has been part of another series that she has been working on for some years, some of which she has already shown, “but even without thinking Kashmir happened, though I would like to think of the works in this show as Kashmir-plus.”

Women are keepers of many secrets, sometimes terrible, but also sometimes hopeful. “Another ongoing series,” Nilima says of work she would like to turn her attention to, “is a tribute to Malyali nurses. They’re very professional and fairly unsurpassed in their work.” Some secrets don’t require women to keep them, they require artists to spill them.