Speechless City by Gulammohammed Sheikh

The painter, poet and critic Gulammohammed Sheikh (born 1937) is one of the leading lights of Indian modern art. In the early 1960s he was a part of the short-lived but influential ‘Group 1890’, twelve artists whose works went a long way towards developing a distinctly Indian language of modernism. Sheikh painted the oil-on-canvas work, Speechless City—currently on display at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Saket, as part of their retrospective ‘Of Worlds Within Worlds’—in 1975, shortly after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a state of Emergency across the country.

The eerie silence that permeates every inch of this square canvas speaks volumes about the fear and paranoia of that time. The houses are empty, no humans anywhere in sight. The staircases and rooftops seem to turn in upon themselves, like one of Dutch graphic artist M. C. Escher’s illusory creations. Flocks of birds settle down in sombre conclaves mounted upon TV antennas. Farm animals wander in and out of these phantom houses freely, bemused at the humans being tucked away out of sight.

Have the people of this city, battered with censorship and authoritarianism, become ‘sheeple’, so to speak? When governments overreach their executive power, it changes the fabric of a city—spatially, aurally, morally. And Speechless City is an unforgettable portrayal of this decay.