“More than one world”: An interview with Gulammohammed Sheikh

Abstract

Gulammohammed Sheikh is one of the most important contemporary Indian painters. He is also an acclaimed writer, an art historian and critic, and a poet in Gujarati (Athwa). In this conversation, which took place on August 13 and November 3, 2015, he discusses the centrality of Bombay for writers and artists of his generation, and his own connection with the city. He also reflects on the influence of poetry and translation, and on the transactions between poetry and painting which are both emblematic of his own work and of little magazines like Vrishchik, which he started in 1969. Retracing the history of Vrishchik and of “Group 1890”, he recalls his formative years at the Baroda Faculty of Fine Arts, and his lifelong engagement with the bhakti tradition, especially with the figure of Kabir. He also discusses the way modernity was reinvented in India, and the extraordinary cosmopolitanism of his generation of modernist artists, and of the Bombay they inhabited.