Muzaffar Ali: The Muse Whisperer

HIS GREAT-GRANDFATHER wrote a book on horses and their ailments, and trained them to perform great feats, which the folk of his village, Kotwara, loved. His father would narrate stories of great horses to him in his childhood, especially of one, Barq, who with his black-and-white markings, looked like lightning in motion.

No surprise then that Muzaffar Ali, the could-have-been Raja of Kotwara, loves horses. So much so, that with his stately white mane, he looks like a thoroughbred himself. The horse has been memorialised and picturised throughout history, in war and peace. Zuljanah was the sacred horse of the grandson of the Prophet, Imam Husain, who took an arrow for his master in the Battle of Karbala. In India, Chetak is the symbol of sacrifice, for though he carried Maharana Pratap to safety in the Battle of Haldighati, he died of war wounds. And Bucephalus was a wild black stallion tamed by Alexander.

But Ali is not interested in taming, riding, dominating or overpowering the horse. He wants to admire the horse, its majesty and its beauty. As he speaks in his living

room dominated by a life size painting of three horses done in 2022, he talks of the philosophical relationship he shares with animals. As proof, one of his 12 Salukis, a Bedouin dog that looks like a baby horse, comes and lies at his feet. “When you tune in to animals, a new world opens up to you,” he says.

The horse was an indelible part of his childhood, especially on the family’s annual visits to Nainital from their Qaiserbagh home in Lucknow. As he writes in his autobiography, Zikr (2022), “Hashmat the horseman and his blackish-brown horse, Badal; the Punjabi horse Tiku, owned by the grand-looking Gulzar Khan, who always donned a safa, a waistcoat and a baggy shalwar. These horses racing through mountain paths and tracks around the lakeside got my adrenaline going. I admired these horsemen and how they served their riders clinging on to their horses’ tails, going up steep climbs.”

Much later, in Delhi, he started riding at the Riding Club in the ridge opposite the President’s House. He would go to horse fairs and enjoy looking at Indian breeds which varied slightly from region to region. In Zikr, he writes: “You could see Arab blood, as horses in tens of thousands must have come to India with the Turks at the turn of the first millennium. They came with their steeds and dogs to hunt and explore, thus introducing new strains in the culture of the animal world and its imagery in painting and poetry, in myth and legend.”

Ali has been painting horses for a while, especially in the last year. The fruits of it comprise an exhibition called Faras Nama: The Legend of the Horse, which opens to the public on October 19 at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Bikaner House, Delhi. It will celebrate his love for creating works that range from sketches over four decades to a new set of canvas­es and bronzes on and of the horse. Ali’s art is a rare blend of cinema and painting. The former scales the cinematic terrain of films and the latter explores the tactile zone—painting. The exhibition also features his horse bronzes for the first time. The calligraphy section features intonations which have a certain suffusion of softness and the lyrical cadences of a prayer. Designed by his wife Meera Ali, architect and designer, the show has been curated by Uma Nair.

“The horse has become a metaphor for my art. It’s an organ­ic thing. The horse is a part of all my work, from larger than life to the minuscule,” Ali says, as he points to his belt buckle which he sketched and cast in a bronze mould. “Each horse has its own personality, its own aura. It allows a new way of explor­ing a landscape, of colour, of texture and of form,” he adds. “It is elementary, there is no complicated philosophy.”

Everybody has his own horse, says Ali. In India, most famous­ly, MF Husain had his horse, dynamic, kinetic and powerful. When Ali last met him a few months before he died in London, while dropping him off in his Rolls-Royce, the artist told him that he was wasting his time making films and that he should paint. “When I told him that it took me a long time to make a painting, he said, ‘Meri tarah jaldi wali painting kiya keejiye (Like me, do quick paintings).’ And then he recited a couplet, probably his own: ‘Na aane ki khushi na jaane ka gham/ Kamaye duniya khayeiñ hum.’ (Neither happy about the incoming / Nor sad about the outgoing / Let the world do the earning / let me do the enjoying.)”

But you have to do your own art, says Ali. “You can’t be a poor copy of anyone. The horse has beauty, angst, and pow­er. The world has been conquered by a horse,” he says. Just imagine its collective memory, infused with the bloodshed and bones of so many warriors. Horses through history have witnessed death, destruction and devastation, of their masters and those they vanquished or were vanquished by. Perhaps that is what makes them so loyal, their gaze so meaningful and their companionship so humane. That is what makes them unique. While they have been used as weapons of war, they remain peaceful and poised.

Ali cannot get enough of horses. They are embedded in a favourite ring, they adorn brooches he is designing, and belt buckles he draws in his sketchbook that has his paintings in various versions. His earliest memory of a horse is a yellow Kotwara with a white tail that would follow him around when he was a four-year-old. He got one exactly like that for his daughter Sama. There was a time their home had seven to eight horses, but now there is just one, Barak (named after Barack Obama because it was acquired in 2009, the year he was first elected presi­dent, and also because it means blessed in Arabic.) Barak reminds him of magnificence, “I feel like a king stroking his unridden back. He often enters my work as a sign of beauty. It takes years of concentration to achieve this,” he adds.

Each horse has a story. He had bought Barak, for instance, from Dewa Sharif as a skinny five-month-old. Acquiring each horse has been a long-drawn story. Seeing the animal, falling in love with it and finally getting it. For instance, once Meera and he were driving from Delhi to Nainital, and they saw the most beautiful creature move swiftly on the highway near a village called Joya. He writes in Zikr: “I had not seen a sight like that. I stopped, mesmerized by the nodding head and the flying mane of the beautifully proportioned creature heading towards us. I asked the rider, a young boy in his teens, if he would part with it. He said no and sped on.”

There are enough horse references at his home though, from a Lladró porcelain version to the mould on a fireplace, from a horse statue lying carelessly on a sofa to a belt etched with horses Ali is showing. As the exhibition note says, “Ali is a Sufi in his art as well as his belief in the universal ethos of nature and man. The exhibition is split into thematic considerations establishing the symbiotic connection of the left and right hemisphere of his mind. It begins with sketches of horses as well as a series of sketches on Rumi, his favourite muse, as a preparation of a feature film, transcending into portraits of Zooni, a legend from Kashmir, which lingers like an unfinished poem in the artist’s mind.”

FOR THE DIRECTOR of the courtesan classic Umrao Jaan (1981), the unreleased ‘Zooni’ is the film that got away. Starring Dimple Kapadia and Vinod Khanna, it was a biopic on Habba Khatoon (a 16th-century Kashmiri Muslim poet and ascetic). Seventy per cent of it was shot before militancy intervened and ended Ali’s passion project. Now Ali’s son, Shaad, is recreating a film from the remaining footage with help from Shivendra Singh Dungarpur of the Film Heritage Foundation. “It will feature a conversation between Dimple and I,” says Ali. It will be an unscripted dialogue, which will depend entirely on their chemistry.

Kashmir has been another obsession in Ali’s life, right from the time he designed the Sher-i-Kashmir Convention Centre in Srinagar. “Kashmir has always been a powerhouse for the country. There is a lot of talent there seeking ownership in music and art. It has been the hub of knowledge in the history of every single subject,” he says.

One of the four sections of Faras Nama is dedicated to Kashmir and ‘Zooni’. There are detailed sketches of the character, architecture and lifestyle from the prologue to the four feminine portraits on canvas inspired by the poetry of the film through the moods of ‘Zooni’ and the four seasons of the valley.

For now, it is the horse that consumes him. As he says, “When a horse transitions from a brushstroke into colour and form, it becomes an eternal truth, transforming painting into a healing, meditative art. To me, a horse is a dervish in equine form, captur­ing timelessness and poetry in every stroke.” India’s indigenous horses, a blend of strains from all over the world, are a unique testimony to the steed. From Central Asia, Arab, the Kathiawar and Marwar regions to Deccani and Sindhi, Ali’s horse emerges as a being which knows no barriers. “All the horses I have sketched and painted belong to the Indian sub-continent adding soul to landscapes,” says Ali. “I have always loved their free spirit and their inherent traits of love and loyalty.”

Painted against pale backgrounds, the stallions and mares stand against abstract forms of landscape, evocative of the unknown yet spirited. Ali approximates the simplicity of the horse, painting them in varying moods symbolising the beauty of living, of the courageous and the eventual triumph of light over darkness and knowledge over ignorance. Each painting is a fragment of a horse story that he weaves out of his own imagination.

(Faras Nama: Legend of the Horse by Muzaffar Ali runs at Bikaner House, Delhi, till October 28)

animalsart ExhibitionartistsBikaner HouseDelhihorsesMuzaffar AlipaintingsZooni