istory starts in classrooms. A child going through text books, takes history as facts; because in most cases (particularly in government schools) history books do not have the author’s/ authors’ name; a small detail that separates these from works of literature, which are recognised by their writers. This early lesson ingrained in the formative minds, matures into the unchallenged conviction: what is taught as history is perceived to be the ultimate truth.

States have used this conditioning to impose their political agendas. During the military regime of Gen Zia ul Haq, democracy was a despicable term in Pakistani curricula, and so were some other entities. In those bleak years, once walking in my village, I picked a torn page of 7^th grade history course, describing the period of Hindu rule before the arrival of Muslims in the subcontinent as an era of darkness, without any refinement, advancement, or achievement in culture. A parallel can be witnessed in the present-day India, where chapters on the Mughal dynasty have been reduced or removed from the history text books in several states.

The Indian Urdu literary critic, Shamim Hanafi once noted that “books of history are pieces of fiction, whereas works of literature are the actual account of history”. Both genres are penned by individuals or a group of people. The former is written for an external cause, whereas the latter comes out of an internal calling. The two types of books gather information from all over but the first presents it as truth – often the only truth; and the second admits to being a fabrication. In reality, both books carry some assumptions. Both, even when they deal with the present or the future, resurrect the past.

Past in our context is a mosaic or a jigsaw puzzle composed of multiple and diverse segments. Like the history of the Indian subcontinent, which comprises races, religions, languages, dresses and varying origins. Indi’s past is also a logbook of migration, travel, invasion, settlement, adaptation, absorption, appropriation and inclusiveness. There are many strands of what we believe to be the indigenous culture and praise.

Take the example of Mughal Miniature painting. A historical genre, now considered the mark of identity in our surroundings; it evolved through influences from Chinese landscape painting, Persian book illustrations, Arab manuscripts, Turkish miniatures and European art. Not only in stylistic details, but in the choice of subjects (Christian, Greek mythology) it encompasses a wide world view.

Prior to the construct of nation-state, people lived in a global village. A man leaves his home in Azerbaijan for India seeking marriage with the daughter of Bahauddin Zakaria of Multan, and is eventually buried in Sehwan Sharif in Sindh and revered s Lal Shahbaz Qalander. Mughal conquerers from Central Asia have contributed to art, architecture and languages of India; like the Greek soldiers who stayed on after Alexander the Great’s campaign. A number of Europeans, including Company officials were localised to such an extent that they got native wives, adhered to vernacular customs, acquired colloquial dialects and made a mix of geography and history.

Manganhar, as defined by Ayaz Jokhio (his contemporary and another magnificent artist) is a magician of paint. He is endowed with the extraordinary gift of daubing everything into high art.

Ahmed Ali Manganhar – like the French historian Jules Michelet whom Roland Barthes calls the devourer of history – is a gatherer of history. He is not an archaeologist who unearths and preserves, but a fiction writer, who gleans what is out there, in order to create something that tells more about the maker than the objective reality. Looking at Manganhar’s current exhibition, Taxila Revisited (July 5-14 at Canvas Gallery, Karachi) one questions in the words of Thomas McEvilley: “Has the idea of ‘History’ imploded, or has it simply taken a new form, like a natural species mutating for survival?” Manganhar’s work relates to an important part of our past, but essentially it alludes to something wider, and more enjoyable than the archaeology sites referred to as Gandhara structures and sculptures.

Manganhar, as defined by Ayaz Jokhio (his contemporary and another magnificent artist) is a magician of paint. He is endowed with the extraordinary gift of daubing everything into high art. For some years, Manganhar worked as an illustrator for these pages, and from the base of everyday happenings and passable issues, created incredible images that could survive the story, its author, its relevance. For him everything was a form of inspiration to express his unbound creative impulse/ power/ vision.

In the present exhibition Ahmed Ali Manganhar focuses on the past, but transforms it into a personal narrative. In his canvases one traces the reminiscences of Greek invaders, English Imperialists, American visitors and indigenous characters – but mixed with his medium in such a way that their origins cannot be easily unearthed. Being an intelligent artist, he incorporates all these threads to make a blurred version of history.

In his loosely and lucidly constructed canvases, one encounters multiple dimensions of history: face and figure of Alexander the Great mingled with a crowd from another time and place; like the gathering of people from the colonial period (The Assembly, Alexandrian Dreams I & II), or glimpses of present-day Gandhara landscape (Treasure Hunt, Tak Shaala Histograph, and Eyeless in Taxila).

These paintings are the outcome of Ahmed Ali Manganhar’s visit to Taxila in 2019, and a meeting a Korean monk, but these are also a product of the artist’s lifelong interest in the history of this region (visible in his 2006 exhibition at NCA Gallery, those paintings on slates with defused imagery of Raj). For the painter, the politics of documentation is more important than the purity of accumulating data. In his new canvases, distant and recent past survive simultaneously, but due to the magic of making, these divergent points of history become one - a composite and coherent narrative. Thus it hardly surprises a viewer to find Jacques-Louis David’s 1784 painting Oath of the Horatti, blended with the picture of some English men standing on an uneven terrain (Greek Myths: Narcissus).

History is further expanded by combining the images of US President Richard Nixon’s visit to Pakistan in 1969 and the section of an amphitheatre in The Claimants. Whether this juxtaposition, or a train on its track in the painting named White Man’s Burden (based on Taxila railway station), or two faded figures on a dusty plane called From Dust to Dust (through which the artist recalls merchants or smugglers from that area), Manganhar’s paintings remind the viewers that history is not a romanticised story. It is a cruel chronicle written with the alphabets of war, blood, occupation, exploitation – from the great Greek invader to the New World Order.

In the early nineties, I came across an advertisement about recognising contradictions and respecting local perspectives. In this HSBC poster, there were three identical cockroaches, with these captions: ‘Pest in America’, ‘Pet in China’, ‘Appetiser in Thailand’. In a similar way, the past is a pest, a pet and an appetiser in the art of Ahmed Ali Manganhar.

The author is an art   critic based in Lahore