Sultan and Suleman
Quddus MirzaEncoreOctober 6, 2024
An exercise in magic reality may have a longer lasting impact and existence than mere magic or pure reality.
n his short story, The God’s Script, Jorge Luis Borges mentions an Aztec priest, a captive of conquistadors, who has spent his earlier life searching for the “magical sentence” that God wrote on the first day of creation and contains the entire universe. In his solitary cell in the prison, he looks at the tiger in the next cell and finds the talismanic text in “black forms running through the yellow fur.” He is “able to understand the script of the tiger” but realises that this knowledge will die the next morning with his execution by the enemy soldiers not knowing (or perhaps knowing) that the writing on the tiger’s coat is eternal and can be deciphered differently by humans of various periods and regions.
During the ‘Indian’ colonisation, the tiger was a metaphor for resistance and resilience. It is a symbol of similar meaning for the present day South Asia. Due to its power, tiger or lion, is often regarded as the king of the animal world. In the last years of the Eighteenth Century, it emerged in the subcontinent as an emblem of freedom and the struggle against foreign invasion.
Tipu Sultan, the legendary ruler of Mysore fought the English armies, to defend his independence, did not compromise and died on the battle ground. So, like his favourite keep (and companion), a striped tiger, his name has been synonymous with valour. There is a curious object at the V&A Museum, a large-scale wooden semi-automation, “commissioned in the 1790s by Tipu Sultan of Mysore,” of an Indian tiger attacking a Company soldier. “Inside the tiger and the man underneath him” the mechanism “simulates the growls of the tiger and cries of its victim.”
This fascinating piece is a remnant of a heroic phase of the past multitudes of South Asians can identify with, like Adeela Suleman’s recent body of work, which addresses the history of glory and grief in pictorial form, on display (October 2-25, Grosvenor Gallery, London) in her solo exhibition, Exit the Tiger: Symbols of Valour in Tipu’s India.
The tale of Tipu’s unmatched courage, defiance and sacrifice has been rendered by many artists in varying epochs. What distinguishes Suleman from her fellow artists is that she has chosen the format of popular pictorial culture that connects with the forms understood by the common man (folk songs, local tales, decorative artifacts, transport painting). Her selection of materials, skills and surfaces to delineate her content also coincides with the themes and circulation of similar items in the society.
The story (or history), its physical metamorphosis and its resources compliment and create an idiom that is not alien to the lay audience, people not used to and not comfortable with products the sole purpose of whose existence is being a visual object having no utilitarian aspect. This is not dissimilar to initial understanding of work before the age of modernism that are now regarded as examples of art, but had specific functions/ uses for their makers and the community (i.e., spiritual, decorative, domestic, monetary or protective).
The conflict between the kingdom of Mysore and the East India Company is illustrated in the episode of Sultan’s two sons being hostages to Company officials. In one plate, they bid farewell to their father in the court; in another, they are in the presence of family women before leaving.
Adeela Suleman’s work, too, contains some points of contact even for an individual who is clinically blind, or blind to the history and complexity of art. Familiar items, such as ceramic dishes in ornate oval frames and shapes of graspable stuff carved in wood or cast in resin are easily recognisable and relatable. For her imagery, Suleman refers to pictures from historic sources painted during the reign of Tipu Sultan. This visual material, depicting both the glorious and gloomy scenes of Tipu’ court and female quarters, hunting and his death, is recreated in enamel paint on vintage ceramic plates. For instance On the Plains of Pollilur 1784, the battle subject commissioned by Tipu Sultan for his palace in Seringapatam; or Haider Ali and Tipu Witness the Qamargah Hunt, a circular scenario of father and son accompanied by their courtiers, recall the pattern of a sovereign’s activities in the Eighteenth Century India. But a set of other, found vintage ceramic plates, narrates turbulent stages in the ruler’s life. The conflict between the kingdom of Mysore and the East India Company is illustrated in the episode of Sultan’s two sons being hostages to Company officials. In one plate, they bid farewell to their father in the court; in another, they are in the presence of family women before leaving. Both these and the hunting activity are a blend of reality and fiction. The conventional campaign, originally a Mughal miniature, is interjected with Hider Ali and Tipu Sultan (the only two figures not in motion) watching the drama of killing innocent animals, as well as the line of spectators added near the lower rim. Likewise, if the scenes of farewell seem real (though these must be the outcome of individual accounts and historical descriptions of that time), the inclusion of a lion in the former, and a lion with two cubs in the latter appears symbolic, representing the figure of fearlessness in the form of Tipu’s pet.
Another painted plate shows Gen Sir David Baird discovering the body of Tipu Sultan after capturing Seringapatam on May 4, 1799. The layout of the picture echoes the Christian iconography of Jesus after the crucifixion lying amid lamenting mourners. The original painting, which must have been produced by an English artist for a colonial client, reveals the triumphant general in a Napoleonic gesture - one arm raised, a sword in the other - looking down at the fallen figure of Mysore’s sultan next to his lifeless tiger.
The emergence of tiger in these finely rendered vintage plates becomes an exercise in mega-reality, or magic reality, in which refraining from comment, segments emanating from diverse locations are presented in a combination that has a longer lasting impact and existence than mere magic or pure reality. The phenomenon has also been spotted in literature as Isaac Bashevis Singer observes, “Good literature, like good journalism, strives to provide facts without superfluous interpretation.” One sees this in Adeela Suleman’s sculptures too, especially the two allegorical tributes to Tipu Sultan’s battle standards, as well as her Honoring Tipu: Mahi Maratib Battle Standard.
Both these standards are composed of elements from a Mughal painting of Jahangir’s period along with the motif of a tiger with two cubs, a wooden contraption of tiger attacking a Company sepoy from the V&A Museum; the colonial trade ship; and a fish (the last one inspired from the Mughal insignia of fish granted to their allied rajas). The arrangement of these components – executed with wood carving, emulsion, oil paint stains, wood polish, gold leaf and lacquer – offers a contemporary version of cruel reality, contrary to how it was viewed and recorded by the conquerers.
A majority of Adeela Suleman’s visuals are bound by the presence of tigers; real, imagined, desired, these becomes a substitute for the king who fought against the colonial forces. Here’s an animal that will continue to exist till the end of time, compared to a unique human being on the earth. In the subcontinent, God’s script on the tiger’s skin is now translated as a text of courage, independence and sacrifice.
The writer is an art critic, a curator and a professor at the School of Visual Arts and Design, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore
