Gulammohammed Sheikh retrospective at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art: People, places, histories

Artist Gulammohammed Sheikh (Photograph by Kiran Nadar Museum of Art)

Padma Bhushan Gulammohammed Sheikh's paintings are auctioned for crores today. But the retired Maharaja Sayajirao University (MSU) Baroda professor had humble beginnings. In interviews as well as his own writings, he's talked about his home and family life in Saurashtra, how he went to MSU Baroda on a scholarship, exploring the world with his friends and his wife Nilima Sheikh (nee Dhanda), and making art in media from oils to gouaches and photography, kawad boxes to murals, and printmaking to poetry. A retrospective of his works, 'Of Worlds Within Worlds', at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) in Saket, Delhi, looks back at his work over the last 60-plus years, across media. The retrospective is on at KNMA Delhi, till June 30, 2025.

Painting his world

Summer in the Indian plains, captured in shades of yellow selected and layered to indicate temperature and luminosity. Red earth, and trees that grow spectacularly tall and thick with memories and visions. The hubbub of small-town India in peace time. A mosque in Wadhwan, often with supplicants in prayer. Scrawny horses pulling tonga carts down dirt roads. The chaos and eventual desolation of streets after riots. Indian saints and global influencers. Photos of iconic places and architectural landmarks in Indian cities. Artisans and commoners around India – many of the figures and things that populate Sheikh's canvases are drawn from every-day life in India.

'We Two' by Gulammohammed Sheikh, on view at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in Saket, Delhi.

Much has been written about how these objects, creatures and activities contribute to the narrative quality of Sheikh's work. About how they pull you in, and tell you a story - often contextualising the work, fixing it through historical, (auto)biographical, mythological, and even literary references and details.

Consider his densely populated oil-on-canvas ‘City for Sale’ (1981-84) that is now in the Victoria & Albert Museum collection in London – the original painting is 6.7 x 10 ft and weighs a whopping 78 kg; the KNMA retrospective has a lifesize print of the same on display. In it, cyclists and pedestrians seem to be running away from a movie theatre even as a billboard painter is painting the eyes of a Bollywood actress on a poster for the 1980s film ‘Silsila’ – an act reminiscent of Chokshudaan or the ritual of painting the eyes of goddess Durga so she can see the plight and pleas of her devotees.

As people spill out onto the street in the painting, there’s pandemonium. A vegetable cart is toppled. Children seem confused about where to go or hide. But the chaos is localized. Whereas the top of the canvas – the cinema hall balcony seats – is crowded with people, some of whom seem to be screaming, tumbling and jumping out of their seats to get to safety, the panic doesn't seem to have spread to the lower-right quadrant of the painting, where three men can be seen smoking outside what could be a pleasure house, with women seated in balconies.

Elsewhere, Sheikh has talked about the three life-sized men being a possible entry point into the painting. The match they light for their cigarettes could be incendiary or a source of light, given that Sheikh made this work in response to communal riots in Baroda.

Detail from a digital print of 'City for Sale'.

In August 1980, riots in Moradabad in Uttar Pradesh had spilled over into other parts of India, including all the way to Baroda in Gujarat. In December 1982, riots broke out in parts of Gujarat when Dussehra and Muhurram coincided; the violence continued over the next 10 months with a spate of killings and arson in 19 riots over this period.

To be sure, these weren’t quite isolated incidents. The 1969 communal riots in Vadodara are still considered among the bloodiest in India, with the official toll exceeding 500 people. In 1985, a riot in Ahmedabad left 300 dead after wage earners – especially Dalits and Muslims – went to work despite a bandh to protest reservations. Things continued to worsen through 1990-91, with over 1,500 incidents of communal disturbance including over 100 riots, according to one source.

For Sheikh, who draws on world history, mythology, literature, to convey something about the present-day sociopolitical, it would have been impossible to overlook these communal clashes. Much has been written about the narrative quality of Sheikh's work. How, he's responding to the sociopolitical movements of his time. But Sheikh’s paintings, of course, are also incredibly detailed. Look closely at the theatre “screen” in the painting, and it looks like it might be playing ‘Sholay’ (1975) – specifically the iconic scene where the Thakur’s widowed daughter-in-law Jaya (Jaya Bachchan) offers the keys to the safe to Veeru (Amitabh Bachchan), to steal the family jewels. Now, ‘Sholay’, of course, played in some single-screen theatres for years. Outside this theatre in the painting, an eyeless Rekha sits on a poster for a movie which released six years after ‘Sholay’. The juxtaposition pointing to a bit of explosive Bollywood history – IYKYK, and most people who watch Hindi cinema know.

Pop-culture references occur in other works by Sheikh as well, as do biographical details. Consider, again, the work titled ‘Inmates of Shivmahal Compound’ (1967), where the then newly minted Indian-origin Miss World Reita Faria shares canvas-space with his art school friends. Shivmahal was the home of KG Subramanyan, where Sheikh along with art school friends Nagji Patel, Krishna Chhatpar and Bhupen Khakhar stayed for a few months in the 1960s.

(‘Inmates of’ is also a great example of how Sheikh experiments with materials. During a walkthrough of his retrospective at KNMA, Sheikh explained that he’d originally cut out a photo of Faria from a newspaper and stuck it onto the canvas and then taken it off so that the sky could be seen through her body. “We were all mad about it – here’s a girl so beautiful, she’s become Miss World,” he said. He then “stuck an oleograph of the abduction of Sita”, as a play on the “abduction of both Sita and Rita’.)

A photo with friends, attributed to Jyoti Bhatt. Sheikh is the second person on the bike, to the extreme right.

Violence and rioting are also the subjects of works like ‘Speechless City’ (1975), created in response to the Emergency, as well as ‘Ahmedabad: The City Gandhi Left Behind’ painted decades later, in 2015-16. Whereas in ‘Speechless City’, Sheikh takes us through streets emptied out by fear till only dogs and vultures move through the deserted lanes, in ‘Ahmedabad: The City Gandhi Left Behind’, we get a bird's eye view of a charred and blackened city with pockets of illumination and action – an automobile on fire, and the five articles Mahatma Gandhi carried with him at all times in this work.

Speaking of ‘How Can You Sleep Tonight?’ (1994-95) – which Christie’s auctioned for over USD 2 million in 2022 – at the KNMA walkthrough, Sheikh said: “There are things that happen in the world that leave you with big scars… so many things happened in the early 1990s. The mosque (Babri Masjid) was demolished. How many riots, I don’t know… Bombay, my own city, saw what are called ethnic riots. What do you do? Can you ever paint it? You can paint… but you struggle from image to image. The images overlap, literally hold you in some kind of haze through which you have to make your way. This painting came about like that. I tried something, I removed something, I added, then removed, and finally found that it was a painting that was giving me sleepless nights…. I had read a poem by Suryakant Tripathi Nirala, I remembered the title kaise so-oge?... It is neither imaginary, nor fictional, but real life lived… you try to articulate yourself in a situation beyond your control.”

Mahatma Gandhi and Sant Kabir make several appearances in Gulammohammed Sheikh's art.

Drawing from life, and history, and mythology

Indeed, biographical details abound in Sheikh’s works. Sheikh was born in 1937 in Surendranagar, Saurashtra – the red colour of the earth in his paintings harks back to this place. He went to MS University Baroda on a scholarship. Sheikh has said in the past that art school opened up new worlds to him. Even before he travelled to see art in other countries, books offered him a window onto them. The art faculty library introduced him to masters like Piero Della Francesca and Caravaggio. These figures and their influences as well as things he saw on the trips he took, in India and abroad, often filter through in his painting.

"In childhood I walked everywhere, and saw the world through my feet," Sheikh said on a walkthrough of the retrospective - comprising some 190 artworks - at the KNMA. "My journey has been manyfold, and many worlds opened in front of me. From the world that I was living in when I was 18 years old in a small town in Saurashtra, a new world opened to me when I joined the faculty of fine arts (at MS University Baroda, in 1955) with the world art I was exposed to. I went to England in 1963, and a third world opened to me. I saw great works of art which I had only seen in reproduction. I travelled to Italy and discovered my favourite masters..."

Gulammohammed Sheikh, 88, at the KNMA walkthrough.

These travels and global influences find a register in Sheikh's art. But friends and family also make an appearance in works such as ‘We Two’ (1970), where we see Sheikh with his wife – also a well-known artist – Nilima Sheikh, and ‘Returning Home After a Long Absence’, where we see Sheikh’s mother waiting for him at home as he returns from the UK.

Incidentally, ‘Returning Home’ (1969-73) is also featured on the cover of Sheikh’s memoir, ‘Ghar Jaate’ – which he says he wrote around the same time as he was painting ‘Returning Home’. Originally written in Gujarati and translated into Hindi by Bansidhar and Sahitya Akademi-awardee Amritlal Vegad, et al., the book offers many cues to people and events that led him to a career in art and teaching, as well as ideas and experiences that have shaped his thought and his works.

There are chapters on his family - his mother, grandfather, brother. Mention of teachers and fellow-students: NS Bendre who offered him a teaching job in his second year, Jyoti Bhatt who shared the good fortune of a free stay at KG Subramanyan’s ‘Udhyan’ bungalow with Sheikh, and another friend who shared meals and good times in addition to a roof back then. There are descriptions of his home in the memoir. In one chapter, titled Dada ji (paternal grandfather), he writes about dreaming of home – sometimes as a living thing sleeping under the “covers” of the village, sometimes as human, sometimes as an animal, sometimes like one entity in a long-slow-moving line. So much so that, he writes, “maine ghar ko asal mein nahi dekha jitna sapne mein dekhta hoon” (I haven't seen my home as much in reality as I do in my dreams; from the Hindi translation by Bansidhar, et al).

These people and these locations recur in his paintings. Like the village mosque his father frequented in Wadhwan, appearing in ‘Speaking Street' (1981). Or his wife Nilima, in ‘We Two’ (1970).

History is another source of inspiration for Sheikh. In the 1980s, when architect Charles Correa invited him to do a large mural – 31 ft high and 21 ft wide – on the wall of the then newly built Legislative Assembly of Madhya Pradesh, he tried a couple iterations and finally zeroed in on India’s freedom struggle as the theme. “The history of India… the moment of freedom. I brought Gandhi, but Gandhi was already pushed aside, as you can see (in the painting that would later be scaled to cover the large wall of the upper house).”

Sheikh thought about history but also the present moment. Legislators passing through the hall of the upper house of the Assembly would see the mural, and Sheikh wanted to create something that would be fitting for people who were going to be discussing important issues of the day, “discussing Union Carbide, Narmada Dam.” He added a chair with fairies swarming the top – an import from a folk tale – Singhasan Battisi – about a king who finds the throne of King Vikramaditya, but is dissuaded from ascending it by the 32 stone apsaras carved into the throne. “He has to earn the right to ascend,” Sheikh says.

Unlike MF Husain, Gulammohammed Sheikh's horses are emaciated, inspired by the horses that he saw pulling tongas.

Story goes on

In the KNMA retrospective, we see Sheikh's earliest horses - so different from those of MF Husain, who incidentally opened Sheikh's first major exhibition at Jehangir Art Gallery - inspired by the tongas he saw growing up. We see his obsession with cities, in photos and on the canvas. We see the tight group of friends he made in art school; photos depicting young students sitting in the stairs and on two-wheelers. We see his Kawad boxes, some so big, you can walk through them. We see his meticulous attention to detail in cartography-inspired works. People like Mahatma Gandhi and Sant Kabir as well as friends and family appear in his works from time to time. A large ark in the work titled 'Kaarawaan' (2019-23) carries some of Sheikh's biggest influences - Italian Baroque painter Caravaggio, Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlon, Bhupen Khakhar, Piero della Francesca, Vincent Van Gogh, FN Souza, 14th century Italian painter Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Edouard Monet, MF Husain, Albrecht Durer, but also Indian miniature artists, saints and ascetics. We see works made with the linseed oil-wax-cheap hardware-store paint that Sheikh and other artists used in the beginning of their careers as well as photos and books. Letters he wrote to people like Ram Kumar and Krishen Khanna are placed in a vitrine at the entrance to the show as well. A video interview with Sheikh runs on loop.

At the KNMA retrospective walkthrough, Sheikh explained that from the start, he had a tendency “to make something that appears to be something else”. Like putting a human figure in what appears to be an abstract painting. Seeing his work over 60-plus years in one place, there seem to be nuances waiting to be discovered at every corner, in every canvas, print, photo, and box.

A Kawad box by Gulammohammed Sheikh that's so big, you can walk through it.