Raazia Chandoo: A Window to the Interior

Raazia’s visual relationship with the world crystallized when she reached the age of 23 years.

At the time, she was living in an apartment in Brooklyn with Hasan, her husband. The apartment had an old-fashioned bay window. The bay windows met at an angle, and a similarly angled bench ran below the window sills. If, on a clear day, you were to sit on the right bench and look out, you would be able to glimpse the Statue of Liberty.

A weaker artist would have been compelled to paint that most iconic symbol of freedom as seen from the bay window bench. But, in Raazia’s painting, there is not a hint, not a shadow, of the Statue of Liberty. It is an unrepresented presence. Raazia’s perspective is from deep within the apartment, and captures only the light streaming in from the bay windows. She could be depicting the light of freedom, or perhaps the refracted stream of just another sunny day, the light of morn to noon.

Raazia Chandoo, Brooklyn, Ink and Acrylic on Paper

The painting reflects a doubled interiority. It is a painting of the interior of Raazia’s apartment taken from an interior position within the apartment. The window admits the light even as it frames the world outside and the world inside. And another lattice, more proximate and complex, frames the vision of the artist, the vision she has gifted to us, as she looks upon the light streaming in from the outside. This interiorised latticework is luminous too: from where is this light emanating?

I am transported to the beautiful intricacy of the Quranic verse so beloved to Sufis:

“God is the light of the heavens and the earth. The semblance of His light is that of a niche in which is a lamp, the flame within a glass, the glass a glittering star as it were, lit with the oil of a blessed tree, the olive, neither of the East nor of the West, whose oil appears to light up even though fire touches it not, light upon light. God guides to His light whom He will. So does God advance precepts of wisdom for men, for God has knowledge of everything.”

Light upon light. The Zen masters talk of the blade of the sword that cannot cut itself, the finger tip that cannot touch itself … What is this luminous latticework that so framed everything Raazia painted from the age of 23 until her death in 2016 at the age of 52 but that she herself never fully described in words?

The depiction of expansive geometric patterns is, of course, a distinctive feature of Islamic art, and finds its fullest expression in tilework. In traditional tilework, the geometric pattern resides at the terminal point of the vision of the artist. One does not see through the geometry; one sees the geometry and imagines its infinite extension.

15th Century Mamluk Tilework

Raazia forces me to go deeper into geometric frameworks that are experienced; frameworks through which one sees the world.

I am taken to the ‘shuttlecock’ burqas, white in Pakistan, blue in Afghanistan, through which women looked at the world (Pakistan, prone to colonisation, has replaced its ancient white shuttlecocks with the black Arab niqab; Afghanistan, resistant to occupation, has retained its long blue frocks). Imagine always looking at the world from behind the exclusionary, protected latticework of the burqa. As did Raazia. By choice.

Latticework of an Afghan Burqa

I am taken to the zenana – the section of royal and noble Muslim households reserved for women. And to the latticework through which women could observe, unseen, the world of men – of debate and decision, commerce and command. Imagine always looking at the world from behind the exclusionary, protected latticework of the zenana. As did Raazia. By choice.

Latticework in the Lahore Fort

At least to my mind, Raazia’s art is deeply Islamic and deeply feminine. Her work reflects the beauty and constraint of a Muslim woman across the ages.

Raazia had studied art at the Rhode Island School of Design. She had no formal exposure to Islamic art. Most artists grow into a tradition. They master the intricacies of the tradition and, then, if they are sufficiently strong, they contribute to the tradition. As a graft onto an olive tree may produce a new branch. But Raazia – of both the East and the West – became a Muslim artist afresh. As an olive seed might grow into an altogether new tree in an indifferent environment. She became a Muslim artist not because she was trained into the tradition, but because she gave expression to her DNA, her bones, her accumulated experience of life lived as a Muslim girl growing up in Pakistan and a Pakistani student studying in America.

Over a considerable stretch of time, she explores the depths of her doubled interiority. The colours grow richer, the interior architecture more complex. 

Raazia Chandoo, Study for Mural, Ink and Acrylic on Paper

Raazia Chandoo, Unnamed, Ink and Acrylic on Paper

For only too brief an interlude, Raazia transports her vision into jewellery. In one brutal piece, you can see the moon through a window. The moon is in the upper segment of the window, as if one is looking at the window from a depth below, perhaps from a prison cloister. Indeed, the entire piece looks like a padlock – with a window in place of the keyhole. A pendant companion to the prison poems of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, whom we have consigned to forgetfulness in the company of Iqbal and Jinnah:

Shaam ke pech-o-kham sitaron se

Zina zina utar rahi hai raat

yuun sabā paas se guzartī hai

jaise kah dī kisī ne pyaar kī baat …

From the intricate knots of the evening stars

The night descends in staggered steps

A sweet breeze blows by me

As if someone whispers to me words of love …

Raazia Chandoo, Silver Jewelry

We are imprisoned, yet we reside in love and beauty.

And then, slowly, the latticework of the burqah and the zenana begins to detach itself from the vision of the artist and embed itself in the interior space itself. There is a measure of liberation, as if Raazia is telling us that our frames of reference are as much exterior to us as the char diwari in which we find ourselves. 

Raazia Chandoo, Untitled, Ink and Acrylic on Paper

And, then, perhaps through one of the many windows she has painted, a mythical bird takes flight. Its body now contains the latticework, entirely distanced from the artist. The bird circles an eclipsed sun. Raazia’s close friends, the sun and the moon, have embraced to constitute the nuqta, the diacritical mark in the form of a dot that serves in the Muslim imagination as the opening between this world and the other world. 

Raazia Chandoo, Eclipse, Acrylic on Paper

At least since the 12^th century Nishapuri poet Farid-ud-Din Attar penned The Conference of the Birds, Muslims have associated the representation of birds with the mystic quest to find divinity within the self: 

If Simorgh unveils its face to you,

you will find that all the birds,

be they thirty or forty or more,

are but the shadows cast by that unveiling.

What shadow is ever separated from its maker?

Do you see?

The shadow and its maker are one and the same,

so get over surfaces and delve into mysteries.

Raazia’s bird series, too, represents a transition. As the sun sets to a rising moon, the bird spreads her wings of wisdom over the world and her latticework embeds itself in the firmament. The very sun that beat through Raazia’s window in Brooklyn is now resplendent in latticework. The human spirit is on one side; the external world and the frameworks by which we comprehend the world are on the other. The artist has been liberated.

Raazia Chandoo, Expanse, Ink and Acrylic on Paper

The time has come for Raazia to move to the other world. Like a bird, she departs. Suddenly. With a single great beat, strong wings transport frail lungs. November 29, 2016.

Because I tend to think abstractly, I believe that Raazia’s greatest achievement lies not in her art, nor indeed in the deeply Islamic nature of her art, but in crafting a new path for young, modern Muslims. She addresses a tradition and contributes to that tradition, not by growing from inside, as a mullah might claim to Muslim authority, but by planting a seed from the outside. She paints as if to say there are many paths to the Islamic vision, and none is truer than the path created by what you are, by your DNA, by your bones, by your accumulated experience in this blessed and accursed world. As if to say there is no greater truth you can contribute to your Muslim self than being true to what you are.

I return to the beautiful Quranic verse on light upon light. Let us never forget the central tenet of that verse, indeed of the entire Quran: “God guides to His light whom He will.”

“God guides to His light whom He will.” “God guides to His light whom He will.”

Perhaps God guided Raazia to His light. Neither you nor I can be the judge of His guidance or His will. But we can try to find the light with which He has infused our inner being. And give expression to that light. As did Raazia.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 4^th, 2017.

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