Darya Ba Hubab Andar

Text: Dr. Akbar Naqvi
Photography: Taimoor Khan Mumtaz

 

The concept of an ocean in a bubble, or a particle containing the cosmic order, is of very old lineage in the religions and philosophies of the East. After all, ancient Bharat rishis invented the concept of bindu or zero and Arabs took it over to invent mathematics. To this day English numbers are called Arabic numbers. It is also reported from Hazrat Ali that he said that the, ‘The essence of the Quran is in Surai Hamd or Fateha, the essence of the Sura is in Bismillah. The essence of Bismillah is in the letter ba with which Bismillah begins, and the essence of ba is in the nuqtah hanging under it. Nasir-ud-din Mahmud Chiragh Dehlvi (1274-1356) knew all of the above when he wrote in one of his couplet in Persian in which the phrase above occurred. It was the title of a recent exhibition of classical calligraphy at the Koel Gallery recently.

 

The Koel exhibition was a beautiful experience of khattati even if we may not have known one style from another. Those who exhibited were masters from Lahore. Koel succeeded in giving viewers a different kind of experience of Kinetic art from its modern incarnation in the twentieth century.