ABDUR RAHMAN CHUGHTAI (1894-1975)

"Chughtai is widely considered the first major modern Muslim artist in South Asia. His artistic oeuvre shows a remarkable consistency since the 1920s in referencing the Mughal painting tradition. Chughtai filters this influence through his stylistic markers, rendering his later work immediately recognizable, which unmistakably invokes Mughal painting and yet plays up its stylistic individuality. His work performs a double maneouver, referencing 'tradition' yet also enacting the artist as a modern subject. Chughtai's works ceaselessly seek a common ground, a continuity, with tradition. The very act of striving to secure this ground over the chasm of the centuries of decline of Mughal painting, while acknowledging the impossibility of its recovery by deploying a style that is consistently and unmistakably that of Chughtai, paradoxically marks him as the first significant South Asian Muslim artist in the modern era." (I. Dadi, Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia, Chapel Hill, 2010, pp. 7, 10)