Sufis, Malangs and Crowds

By Mahtab Bashir, "Looking into the hole: A witness to how Pakistan survives in its villages" - Daily Times - Lahore, Pakistan
Sunday, February 22, 2009

Islamabad: An exquisite exhibition of paintings and sketches titled ‘Rural Pakistan and Reflections’ by Badar Moinuddin started at Nomad Gallery, Saidpur Village, on Saturday.

Badar Moinuddin is an artist, painter, calligraphist, and a former lecturer at Aitchison College Lahore. His romance with art dates back to 1960’s.

Moinuddin’s cache of 29 paintings and sketches has created a new style of art depicting the rural life, especially of a child and mother, and artisans like of barber, potter, carpenter and devotees participating in ‘Urs’, which he calls the deprived classes of Pakistan.

He has a burning desire, and a longing for a chance to show misery and pain of rural life.

“How they are victimised and suffer extreme deprivation and how they spend their lives,” he told Daily Times.

Moin wants to show how lives of ‘malangs (devotees)’, villagers and people of rural areas are deprived of even small happiness. In paintings, he has tried to capture all human feelings that are hurt and killed in survival for the fittest.

In one of his painting titled ‘hair care’, a mother is picking lice out of her daughter’s matted hair. A painting is titled ‘devotees 1 & 2’ showing malangs preparing hemp juice under a shady tree.

Moin enjoys playing with reflections in door mirrors and in car windscreens. He said, having been born to a feudal and religious family in Pakpattan, his early sights and sounds evolved around the shrine of the great Sufi Saint Baba Farid Ganjshakar.

“The presence of Sufis, mystics, dervishes, qawwaals, malangs and crowds of people were a common sight in my growing up years. The ‘lagarkhana’ where charity food was distributed daily was frequented by a lot of villagers,” he said.

Moin, an economist by education and an architect by profession, said rituals of ‘sama’ and ‘qawwali’ were regularly attended to and the sight of Sufis getting into a ‘trance’ was a frightening experience at first but became a routine as time went by.

“Today these images are part of my life experiences and painting all of them comes naturally to me,” he said.

Talking about ‘reflection series’, Moin said this series was basically realism in its abstract form - one may call it ‘abstract realism’.

“In any indoor or outdoor situation, light reflecting on glossy surfaces creates abstract images, which can be seen as one moves about,” Moin said.

[Picture: Potter; Oil on Canvas. Photo from the Artist website: http://www.badarmoin.com/].