‘People don’t care about art, and the government doesn’t either’

Arbab Mohammad Sardar’s leafy house in Landi Arbab, a Peshawar suburb, is a testament to his devotion to art.

The rooms are filled with paintings, from sketches to large canvases, hung on red walls and stacked on the floor.

“At least 500,” he says, as he walks through his house, pointing out sketches and still-life paintings.

“This is not how they should be displayed though. There should be a space between the paintings but there is no more room left”.

Arbab Mohammad Sardar, who is a recipient of the Pride of Performance award, started painting in 1955, and held his first solo exhibition at Peshawar’s Islamia College in 1962.

“Even though my father was against it, I still had some encouragement from home.”

While he had a teacher in Peshawar, he managed to get a fellowship in Italy and specialised in sculpture and decorative art and architecture. He has received an impressive number of artists to his house as visitors, including Gulgee, Sadequain and Ali Imam.

However, his career as an artist over the past 55 years has not borne the fruit he thought it would. Even though Sardar has received numerous commissions from the provincial and federal government, he believes there has been no support from the state to artists.

“There are very few art buyers in Peshawar. We get some work on commission. During the last Pakistan People’s Party government we got a lot of work but it is not that much now,” he told The Express Tribune.

While Sardar believes the city has some good artists, he thinks the arts scene is far less developed than in Karachi or Lahore. “The work there is far more advanced, and there are more platforms and art galleries. Here, the art is more conventional.”

But it is not possible, he says, to make art a full-time career in Peshawar.

“Having another job is very important,” he says. “The material itself is so expensive now. And there is no encouragement at the government level. In the budget, there is something for every sector, but not for artists. The army protects the country’s borders, but artists protect the country’s heritage and culture and they should be given importance too. They also have to run a household. So many artists do not even have money to pay for their medical treatment when they grow old.”

Sardar, who has established a private art gallery of sorts in his house, wanted to give his work to the government - for free - so they would take care of it and display it properly. But his requests have fallen on deaf areas, and he now plans to sell them off to private collectors.

“I have been working for 55 years and I need to get something out of it,” he says.

“There is no pension for artists. People don’t care about art, and the government is not interested either. What can one do?”

Published in The Express Tribune, July 1^st, 2010.