A note on the Gulgee Museum, and the handbook that refuses to settle Gulgee
By Narendra Pachkhédé
Art history is where a nation’s cultural life becomes a border regime. It grants entry, issues credentials, seals certain practices with the stamp of “modern,” and files others into quiet nonappearance—present in rooms, absent on the page. The work is done through ordinary instruments: a bibliography that never opens its gates, a survey that passes over a name as though it were smudged, a genealogy tightened into something that reads like rule. The record acquires its authority by deciding what can be seen without effort and what must struggle to stay legible.
Shaila Bhatti helps name the larger machinery that makes this feel normal. In Translating Museums: A Counterhistory of South Asian Museology, the museum appears as a language-making apparatus: it converts plural lifeworlds into orderly knowledge, and it does so through the familiar grammar of classification, periodisation, and display. Monica Juneja presses the problem from the disciplinary side. Her writing on global art history—most recently gathered in Can Art History be Made Global?: Meditations from the Periphery—stays close to the way categories travel with inherited hierarchies intact. “Islamic art,” “South Asian modernism,” “contemporary,” “global” arrive as ready-made frames, and the frame begins to speak before the work does. A museum wall and an art-historical label can share the same authority: they do not merely present; they decide what counts.
Since the mid-2010s, Pakistan’s art world has grown louder and more visible. Biennales, fairs, residencies, and literary festivals have multiplied stages for encounter and consecration. Expansion has not dissolved the border regime. It has increased the number of desks at which permission is granted, the number of moments when a career becomes “readable,” the number of ways a practice can be acknowledged and still remain unheld by history.
Faisal Devji’s “Little Dictators” sits inside this landscape as a brief piece of field intelligence. It describes a form of authority that does not need a ministry: a small circle of cultural officials, informal and effective, able to turn taste into jurisdiction. His dispute with Iftikhar Dadi makes the mechanism plain. A modernism that proceeds without naming Shahzia Sikander shows how erasure works when it wears the dress of scholarship: no scandal, no argument, only the clean silence of the page.
This is the atmosphere in which the Gulgee Museum and its Handbook come into view. The house-museum shifts the question from classification to custody. It keeps the work close to the scale of its making, close to the social studio, close to the textures that institutional display usually smooths away. The Handbook extends that posture in print. It does not rush toward a single authorised arc. It holds the labour of interpretation open, and it allows Gulgee to remain more various than the categories waiting to claim him.
From that provocation, Gulgee Museum—The Handbook is best approached as more than accompanying matter. It reads as a thinking instrument: a book that keeps legacy in motion, refusing to turn a life’s work into a solved problem. It does not tidy; it holds. It sustains the pressure between what can be gathered and what cannot be concluded.
The museum that the handbook shadows begins with an unusually plain fact. It is not a state project, not an emissary of cultural diplomacy, not a showroom designed to translate “Pakistan” into a portable image. There is no commissioning mandate, no program written for donors, no itinerary implied for visiting delegations. The origin is custodial and intimate: a decision made inwardly that still carries public consequence. In that sense the Gulgee proposes the museum as threshold rather than monument—an encounter with a practice that persisted for decades without state support and without the international art world’s certifying embrace.
Installed in Ismail Gulgee’s former home and studio, and shaped through the editorial intelligence of John McCarry alongside Amin Gulgee’s curatorial hand, the museum’s intimacy becomes the central tension of any serious reading. Proximity is not masked; it is faced. Inheritance enters the room as a condition, not a credential: what it means to assemble a life’s work into public form when the curator is also the son, and when the site still carries the weight of rupture. My own earlier engagement with Amin Gulgee’s practice—most recently through a review of his monograph No Man’s Land—returns here with sharpened relevance: his insistence on separation, adjacency, and refusal complicates any easy story of filial continuity. The museum does not behave like tribute. It behaves like an ethical boundary carefully maintained—a passage between practices that can sit near one another without collapsing into a single lineage, held in place by a restraint that resists the comfort of closure.
The Gulgee Museum and its Handbook
Amin Gulgee’s most consequential decision is not a hanging choice. It is a decision about stance: where to speak from, and how to keep his voice from filling the rooms. Filial proximity is usually treated as a problem to be disinfected in advance, a nearness assumed to compromise judgement. Amin refuses that theatre. He names the discomfort, admits he looked for an external curator, and then took on the task when that route failed. Proximity does not become innocence. It becomes a discipline. Inheritance is handled as a responsibility that must be negotiated day by day, an authority that can only be exercised by acknowledging what it cannot offer.
From that follows a second decision, equally structural: the museum declines the consolations of the career-arc. It does not give you the familiar plot of early struggle, mature mastery, late synthesis; it does not stage the retrospective as redemption. The organisation is thematic, and theme here does real work. It breaks the straight line, interrupts the forward march of biography, and lets the oeuvre appear as range and recurrence, as return and pressure, as contradiction held in view. The rooms feel less like a verdict delivered on a life than like a sequence of encounters that keeps the work from being prematurely settled by its own legend.
The handbook mirrors this logic with unusual clarity. A salient feature of Gulgee Museum: The Handbook is that it is organised less like a linear monograph and more like walkable intelligence—a book that thinks in rooms, series, and voices, while refusing the comfort of a single, teleological “career arc.” Its structure performs its thesis. Gulgee’s work cannot be finished by one narrative, so the handbook is built as a tentacular, roomed, many-voiced system: a museum in book form, where categories exist, but seep—where one register touches another without being forced into agreement, where meaning is carried forward through adjacency rather than conclusion.
The restraint is interpretive as well as spatial. Amin’s most telling reference is not a scholarly apparatus but the remembered posture of the artist himself. Pressed for the “meaning” of an abstraction, Gulgee would answer, with a kind of impatience for the demand, “Do you know what a bird song means?” Read casually, it can sound like evasion. Here it becomes an ethic of encounter. The museum offers enough narrative to orient without turning every work into a paraphrase. It holds back the explanatory machine that museums so easily become. Meaning is not denied; it is kept active, allowed to remain multiple, unfinished, resistant to any single voice, especially a familial one.
This is why Amin speaks of the museum as a first chapter rather than a definitive edition. The phrase has the tone of understatement, but it carries an institutional decision. The museum is built, yet it is not sealed. It anticipates argument. It makes room for later curators, later readings, later disagreements. Legacy is treated as something that requires ongoing labour, not a ceremony that concludes the matter.
John McCarry’s editorial intelligence extends that posture in print by refusing a single register of authority. The voices do not merge; they sit beside one another with their edges intact. Writers are not pressed into a common line. The result is not consensus but a productive instability, the kind an oeuvre like Gulgee’s needs if it is to remain available to serious rereading rather than become polished inheritance.
The Critical Take
Gulgee comes into focus less as an artist who “evolved” from portraiture to calligraphy to abstraction than as someone who learned to work inside three kinds of authority. There is the authority of power, met at close range in portraits that refuse the sitter’s preferred legend and keep the human residue—fatigue, vanity, calculation—on the surface. There is the authority of devotion, where script and illumination carry the weight of a word that cannot be treated as decoration. There is the authority of format: an instinct for scale, for rooms and institutions, for how an image takes its place in a public interior and begins to govern mood. What holds these together is not stylistic unity. It is a capacity to let incompatible worlds remain present to one another without being smoothed into a single story.
Quddus Mirza’s opening essay is useful because it refuses the reductions that cling to Gulgee: the myth of the “self-taught genius,” the lazy dismissal of the “derivative modern.” Mirza treats the engineering formation and late entry as methodological clue. Gulgee learns by looking; museums become his curriculum; medium becomes a field of movement rather than a fixed identity. The shifts from portrait to lapis, seal-impression, calligraphy, and gestural painting read as variations on one sustained problem: how to inhabit modernity without turning tradition into costume or category. Calligraphy is the hinge in Mirza’s account because it permits a tightening and loosening at once: language remains present, yet meaning can be held back long enough for letters to become force—rhythm, propulsion, pressure—without losing the gravity that comes with the Word.
Atteqa Ali takes the aura that viewers often call “magic” and returns it to its conditions. Her essay insists that the charge of Gulgee’s abstract calligraphic paintings is made in overlapping contexts that must be kept in play. Script in Islamic visual culture carries sovereignty as transmission; modernist gesture records tempo, body, insistence; abstraction circulates globally with the prestige of “progress,” especially in the Cold War’s cultural theatre. Ali’s strength lies in reading these paintings as products of inheritance and history, not escapes from them. The work does not float above politics. It draws on it, resists it, bends it.
Bina Shah’s “The Portraitist” quietly overturns the idea of commissioned portraiture as obedience. Her key claim is simple and persuasive: Gulgee looks at power without beautifying it. The examples are felt before they are analysed—King Faisal’s sagging, lined face; Nixon and the Shah pitched forward in their own assurance; Benazir held in uplift and crowd-energy; Aga Khan III caught in a turn, unposed. This is portraiture that exposes rather than polishes. Shah catches the crucial procedural detail too: Gulgee prefers live sittings, resisting the photograph except in cases like Jinnah and Iqbal. The choice is ethical as much as aesthetic. A camera turns authority into icon. Gulgee makes authority sit through time. Micro-expressions arrive; impatience shows; fatigue and vanity leak into the drawing. The portraitist begins to look less like a court painter than a witness with access.
Nilofur Farrukh’s “Crafting a New Unity” provides the handbook’s most effective remedy to the stale opposition between “Islamic tradition” and “Western modernism.” She reads Gulgee’s modernism as a bridging practice that is never merely diplomatic: he navigates patrons and international art worlds, yet his calligraphies speak to public audiences at home; he pushes script toward exuberance, spatial drama, illumination, and scale until it becomes something singular in its own right. Her argument aligns with Mirza and Ali from another doorway. Gulgee does not combine two worlds into a compromise. He produces a third zone where each vocabulary is altered by contact, where devotion can be public without becoming sermon, where modernist action can be disciplined without becoming mere style.
Read together, these essays keep the oeuvre out of tidy “periods.” Each contributor presses on a different problem and refuses to turn that pressure into one explanatory key. Mirza gives the precondition: formation outside art school as method, an engineer’s confidence with systems, materials, repetition, scale. Ali gives the interpretive rigour: enchantment as made effect, generated where calligraphic authority, painterly action, and geopolitical circulation meet. Shah returns the argument to the human theatre of power, where looking is never innocent and never merely decorative. Farrukh opens the work into architecture and audience, into gold and light, into the question of how images organise interiors and publics. Across them, Gulgee appears as an artist of three authorities—power, devotion, format—each medium becoming a test of how form carries obligation, how meaning stays compelling, how art addresses court and congregation and the wider public beyond the gallery.
The handbook’s “Gulgee’s Room / Zaro’s Room” pages do something quietly decisive. They return the work to its conditions, to the unglamorous infrastructure without which no aura holds. Gulgee’s room is not the romance of an atelier. It is a workshop with standards: oils mixed with care, viscosity watched, brushes made to order, the palette kept clean, tools washed, surfaces prepared. People sit for hours and watch him work, as one watches a craft that does not permit haste. The studio reads as a social node as much as a place of production: a traffic of minds and affinities, visitors drawn into the orbit of his looking—Annemarie Schimmel passing through, conversations circling Iqbal and Sufism, journalists and economists, politicians and university founders, Abdus Salam among them. You begin to feel how Gulgee’s art is made in company, in talk, in the long duration of attention.
Zaro’s room deepens the picture and changes its moral temperature. It breaks the myth of the solitary master by showing the partnership that carried the oeuvre on its back. Zaro appears as chemist and entrepreneur, the manager of Marble Crafts, the organiser of stability, the keeper of lists, the one who insisted on payment, the one who understood that access must not become surrender. She handles guests and publicity, negotiates the social obligations that gather around a public artist, advises on the practicalities of monumental work, including the difficult business of gold. The freedom often attributed to Gulgee is shown as something made and maintained—kept intact by labour, by judgment, by a domestic economy of care that rarely enters art history as a category.
Zarmeene Shah’s essay on calligraphic abstraction gives these rooms their full interpretive consequence. She offers a bridge from biography to history without turning either into illustration. Gulgee’s later renown as a gestural calligraphic abstractionist is placed within a transregional current that ran through the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia from the mid-1950s into the 1970s, a modernist experiment in which script is not adorned but reworked—letters pressed into form, pressure, movement, spatial problem, meaning present yet no longer literal. In that field, the line carries both inheritance and velocity. Gulgee’s trajectory—engineering training, early exposure to action painting, the return that yields a practice anchored in local authority—begins to read as a specifically Pakistani route into a wider calligraphic modernism, alongside figures such as Anwar Jalal Shemza and Sadequain, while remaining unmistakably his in scale, material exuberance, and public address.
Shared Proposition
Placed together, the room chapters and Shah’s essay sharpen the book’s best claim without announcing it as a claim. The oeuvre is not only a sequence of works. It is a production of modernity with a social and material base: made in rooms, secured by partnership, articulated within a geography of scripts learning to speak in the tense grammar of the twentieth century. Gulgee’s modernism stops looking like import or private idiosyncrasy. It becomes situated practice—built through companionship and craft, sustained by standards, carried by a life lived among institutions, interiors, and the difficult labour of keeping a practice possible.
Taken together, museum and book enact a shared proposition. They do not ask to be trusted because they are “objective.” They ask to be taken seriously because they build their authority in full view: by admitting the risk of proximity, by resisting the seductions of a redemptive arc, by treating interpretive restraint as a form of care, and by designing the institution—both spatial and textual—as something that invites successors. If legacy is often the moment when an artist is most easily embalmed, the Gulgee Museum proposes a different afterlife: not canon as closure, but canon as a site of continuing work.
Narendra Pachkhédé is a critic and writer who splits his time between Toronto, London and Geneva. His lates book is Form as History – When History No Longer Requires Us.
