Person Sitting in the Back of a Truck Art

Raindrops fall from the sky on bare winter trees, their branches spread in the manner of a person wailing with arms spread out. The golden beams of a sun, filtering through clouds, turn these droplets into prisms that throw upwardly curious combinations of emerald, green and turquoise. Another array of raindrops gleams like modest mirrors, suspended to bare boughs running from one end to the other.

This is non a scene from a mountain valley coming dorsum to life after heavy snows. It is not even the cosmos of a writer's fertile imagination. It is part of the fantastical imagery oftentimes establish painted on trucks plying across Pakistan. Exist fascinated past it and phone call information technology truck art. Exist detached and y'all will encounter information technology equally mere decoration. For a truck driver, it is the make-up of his "bride".

In the metamorphosis of a truck into a bride, the body parts of the vehicle assume human aspects. The silver, metallic ornament on top of the driving cabin is a taj, a crown; the windscreen is matha, the forehead; and the bonnet ishont or lips. The lowest role of a truck'southward front – where the bonnet meets the chassis and tyres – is adorned with golden metal bells, ghunghroos, hanging by a series of vertical steel bondage.

The 50 or and then bells chinkle and trip the light fantastic toe as an elusive film melody plays in the distance on an early February day at a Rawalpindi trucking station, known as adda in transport wording. "I accept strung these bells together myself," says Ghulam Munawwar, a 40-something truck driver, as he points towards the vehicle he calls his bride. "Her splendour lies in these details," he says with optics beaming in adoration. "Isn't she beautiful?"

The part of Pir Wadhai Road, where the adda is located, is witnessing an interesting tableau in the skies. A meek sun trying to peer through a canvass of rain-laden clouds is turning them purple at the edges, giving them wondrous shapes and hues – similar to the ones you see in landscapes painted on trucks.

Metal balls, ghungroos, being placed on vertical steel plates in Rawalpindi

Here is a sample: a strange two-headed fish made with glowing sticker record in bright hues of cherry, dark-green and yellow swims in an ocean of windshield glass. The outer surfaces of the carriage behind the engine are crammed with thick leaf surrounding a crisp blue lake glistening under the dominicus; a fish soars to the skies; a peacock walks dreamily around a tree in the company of exotic birds peering from a window; a benign-looking serpent rests under the watchful middle of a tiger. This Garden of Eden could not take been complete without the woman painted on the back of the truck. Looking into the distance with her head covered, she looks similar a heavenly beauty uncorrupted by satanic designs.

Who is she: a pol, a flick extra, a freedom fighter or the quintessential representation of unblemished female charm? Munawwar does not have a clue.

The driver swiftly climbs into the truck to avoid the drizzle that has merely started. The interior of his driver'southward cabin is trying its best to compete with the overly decorated exterior: beads, artificial flowers, fake necklaces and a rosary jostle for attending along with colourful drapery, lights, mirrors and the portrait of a heavily bearded saint dressed in xanthous and green.

Munawwar puts the central in the ignition. His assistant, the kleender (possibly a distorted form of the English give-and-take 'cleaner'), hops into the truck from the other side every bit the vehicle begins to amble on to the Grand Trunk (GT) Road.

The route sometimes seems to be passing through a veritable truck country, especially in the mountainous regions of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and northern parts of Punjab: houses and natural environs closely resemble the idyllic scenes depicted on trucks. Almost every driver in the country passes through these mountains and valleys multiple times during his career. Many even have their homes and villages there. Their personal and emotional zipper to these parts is not surprising. Do the motifs painted on their vehicles stand for this personal link?

A middle-anile truck driver well-nigh Lahore quickly dismisses suggestions that anything in the scenery painted on trucks is a nostalgic – and thus romanticised – version of a driver's home, birthplace or some other venue stuck in his memory. "It is not the reality of our houses or our lives," he says, "It is our hopes that we paint on trucks."

This resonates with Durriya Kazi, head of the visual arts section at the Karachi University. The layered complexity of the visual language on trucks is symptomatic of the diverse thoughts, ideas, dreams and ideals truck drivers and owners accept, she says. The images painted on trucks, according to her, are a "hyper reality" that we all live in our imagination.

Information technology is yet midday in Dera Ghazi Khan. Yousuf Zahoor's phone rings. He pulls it out of his pocket – a bones handset held together with a rubber band – and cancels the call. "Time, it cannot be wasted," he says equally if to himself.

Famed for making portraits that sit on the back of thousands of trucks across Pakistan, Zahoor charges Rs 600 for each portrait he paints. Every minute equates money for him – money made or money lost.

His job is fabricated easy and quick by the nature of his work. Each portrait seems to have the same bones structure to which a face up is then attached – identification depends not on the exact portrayal of the features but on the dress and other paraphernalia.

At first glance, Rehman Dakait, a Lyari gangster he paints, may well-nigh look like Jalal Chandio, a Sindhi folk singer – but for his sunday glasses and black shalwar kameez. Chandio is always made singled-out past showing him in a white dress and Sindhi cap.

A tribal elder, a pol or a expressionless Baloch nationalist looks dissimilar from the chief of the army staff or cricketer Shahid Afridi but due to their varying headgears, article of clothing or other signs specific to their fields of life. A Kurdish insubordinate, a Palestinian freedom fighter, an Afghan state of war hero, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, Full general Ayub Khan – everyone has the same plump circular confront and big bright eyes. Benazir Bhutto, Princess Diana and film histrion Nargis mix and merge in confusing succession equally they appear on the backs of trucks moving on Pakistani highways.

Once the portrait is completed, Zahoor hops off the truck without signing his proper name on it. "He stopped signing his work a long time ago," says Abdul Wahab, the commuter of the truck existence painted. He and so playfully says it could be because the last fourth dimension the painter put his signature to a portrait, he was taken away by the late Nawab Akbar Bugti'south men.

An audience gathers as the story begins. The year was 1994; ii jeeps stopped outside the adda where Zahoor was working. A group of men with guns slung beyond their shoulders walked around, asking for him. They had orders from their tribe's leader to take the artist to Dera Bugti, their native town in Balochistan. Zahoor is said to have told them that he would leave with them only after completing the portrait he was working on. The men waited. They would not disclose why they had come all the way to take him abroad. Zahoor and so travelled 325 km with them and was presented to Bugti.

The tribal primary warmly embraced Zahoor, appreciating a portrait of himself that he had seen recently behind a truck painted by the artist. He got Zahoor to paint his portrait – showing him standing next to his son, Salal Bugti, who was murdered a couple of years earlier. The artist stayed in Dera Bugti for many days and was safely returned to Dera Ghazi Khan in one case his work was finished.

Zahoor smiles, his white teeth glistening against the stark black dye of his moustache, when asked if that was the reason for not signing his work. "Artists sign their work. This is not fine art. This is a potboiler."

He also does non desire his children to follow in his footsteps. "No, I want my children to study. Truck painting is an uneducated man'southward job." People take up this profession non out of choice merely out of necessity, he says.

Every bit a 12-yr-quondam, R.M. Naeem, too, started painting trucks out of necessity. Now working as an assistant professor at the National Higher of Arts (NCA), Lahore, he had to pigment signboards for films and shops, and work with truck painters in his native Mirpur Khas boondocks in Sindh to fund his schooling.

The decorated body gets placed on the truck, Rawalpindi

"Truck decoration is not stagnating; it is dead," he tells the Herald in an interview. This is because truck painters treat their work as a source of livelihood. They do not have the time or the luxury to innovate; they echo the same old patterns, images and icons over and over again, he explains.

Naeem attributes this state of affairs to the lack of appreciation by the state as well equally society, and the absenteeism of incentives for artistic innovation. The art circles and the cultural elite, co-ordinate to him, do non treat truck painters every bit artists, simply rather as artisans. Without suitable incentives, these painters will not feel the need to create something new or to transfer their learning to younger members of their families, Naeem laments.

Surrounded by mango orchards, his birthplace, Mirpur Khas, is located on the north-western tip of the Thar desert, on the confluence of Sindh and Rajasthan. The town has been a melting pot of regional and religious influences since at least Partition when it received a big influx of migrants from the other side of the edge. Thari, Sindhi and Rajasthani artistic and cultural traditions mix hither curiously with Muslim and Hindu ones.

About three decades agone, Mirpur Khas was a humming heart of truck painting and decoration. Some vestiges of that still exist.

The odour of turpentine inundates the air as spray painters in the town's bus stand utilise a pressure level gun to colour the base of a van. Just behind them, calligraphy is existence done on a tractor. The calligrapher'due south name is Syed Wajid Ali Shah. Quite similar his namesake, the last ruler of Awadh, he seems to be presiding over a decomposable art enterprise. "Mirpur Khas used to have all these big truck painters but nigh of them have left town," says Shah.

Among those who have migrated was one Syed Jameel who taught Naeem how to paint text, a technique that still forms a major function of the latter's work. Those who stayed back have been forced to use tractors, vans and buses equally their canvases. Even that work has shifted, mostly, to the nearby town of Tando Allahyar.

Since Shah is working with words, 1 assumes he tin besides read. He, in fact, is illiterate and paints words as shapes and images, creating replicas of messages as he sees them. It does not matter to him if the text is in Urdu, English, Arabic or another language.

A shop sells truck ornamentation items at the Hazar Ganji adda, Quetta

In a nutshell, this explains why truck painters stop short of becoming fine artists and why their work does not graduate to go art. While they faithfully reproduce the aesthetic attribute of an object – a face, a woods or a flower – they practice it in a mechanical way. Their work lacks imagination.

Naeem believes their artistic illiteracy is the outcome of a certain mindset among the elite that wants to deliberately keep these painters every bit artisans – equally executors of someone else'due south ideas – rather than letting them get artists. "The British turned us all into craftsmen," he says, referring unwittingly to the NCA which was established by the British colonisers in the second role of the 19th century as a school to train craftsmen and artisans in indigenous arts and architecture. Naeem believes the elite perpetuates the same mental attitude today. "They practice not desire people to get thinking artists because once y'all call back, you question."

Herein lies an explanation for Naeem's own evolution as an artist. He managed to rise higher up the ranks of signboard and truck painters only after he was admitted to the NCA, that is, past joining the cultural elite and by proving that he can think as well every bit he tin can paint.

Haider Ali, a Karachi-based artist in his late thirties, has taken a different road to graduate out of being a truck painter. He learnt truck painting from his male parent, Mohammad Sardar, starting at the age of seven; he has worked in Karachi'south Garden expanse, known as the hub of truck painting, for more than two decades. Even every bit a truck painter, he says, information technology was his power to introduce that made his colleagues refer to him equally an ustad at a immature age.

Ali is one of the first truck painters to use his skills on surfaces other than vehicles – he has been painting peacock and blossom patterns on lamps, water pots, photo frames and tea coasters since the early 2000s. One of his early works is a wheelbarrow that adorns the ground floor hall at The Second Floor (T2F), a pop eating house and community space in Karachi, founded by the belatedly Sabeen Mahmud. For his latest project, Ali paints bridges, flyovers and other public spaces equally part of a civil guild initiative chosen I Am Karachi.

Ali, whose works have helped truck paintings enter the home space, agrees with Naeem that art is a luxury that needs to be "befriended and seen beyond breadstuff and butter". He signs his work as Truck Artist Haider Ali —thanks to some lucrative assignments, he seems to have acquired that luxury.

Anjum Rana, a Karachi-based art entrepreneur, has set up an organisation, Tribal Truck Art, with the self-alleged mission to help other truck painters get complimentary of financial worries. Co-ordinate to her organization's website, she "has made it her goal to bring [truck] art into the mainstream, into our homes, and give information technology the recognition it so richly deserves."

Rana employs truck painters for decorating lamps, lanterns, mugs, kettles, trays, boxes, watering cans and buckets. Those painters, thus, get a new source of income as well every bit "a new legitimacy" for their work.

Naeem, however, does not endorse this model for promoting truck painting and improving the living conditions of its practitioners. "What is happening is that the privileged classes are hijacking these traditional crafts every bit their intellectual holding," he says, by creating a hierarchy in which blueprint managers and marketeers stay to a higher place those creating those crafts.

He is opposed to the very idea of outsiders telling truck painters what to do to survive. This very rescue mentality is wrong, he says. That the members of a privileged course ascertain what should be painted and where it should be sold, he says, is ridiculous.

Jamal Elias, chairperson of the department of religious studies at the Academy of Pennsylvania and the writer of On Wings of Diesel: Trucks, Identity and Culture in Pakistan, says in that location is a reason why the privileged class would want to patronise the under-privileged. The absence of interaction between the 2 classes leads to a lack of understanding amongst the former about the working of trucking economy, he says. The only bit of culture attached to this economy they observe and react to is a truck's most hit aspect – its visual imagery.

The lord's day beats down upon Zahoor'south forehead as he cranes sideways to have a expect at a big canvas. A whitewashed background with an elaborate edge of floral collage fabricated of intricately cut fluorescent stickers is what he sees. Dipping his large, flat brush in green pigment, he starts making broad strokes as spectators lookout. A red, a chocolate-brown, a peach, a green – colours showtime spreading beyond the canvas in this very order.

The adda starts buzzing with adoration every bit his work progresses. "Zahoor is a figurer," says Wahab, the driver. "The pictures he paints are embedded in his mind."

He is painting a figure – seemingly an androgynous 1, at least initially – but as Zahoor adds ane layer of colour over the other, the contours of a male face offset actualization. One broad, bold stroke, then another and some other – he goes through the motions he has perfected through endless repetitions. He squats swiftly equally he mixes petrol with paint. (Petrol helps the work dry faster. The other choice is kerosene oil which takes longer to dry and as well has a smell that stays longer in the air compared to that of petrol.) His apprentice, a young boy with the hint of a moustache, puts glitter on the painted figure. Soon plenty the portrait is complete.

All it takes is 60 minutes.

A truck is made in three phases and involves at to the lowest degree 13 crafts. The main frame is made by the welder (lohar), metalworker (evidence wala) and the denter (local discussion for a person who irons out dents); engine work is done by the mechanic (mistri) and the electrician (bijli wala); the base colour is given by the spray painter (rang saaz), and the calligrapher (likhai wala) writes poetry and other texts. Specialists of glasswork, metalwork and woodwork further adorn the vehicle, each with their own arts and crafts; chammak patti wala and the plastic wala, respectively, work with cogitating tape work and decorations made of plastic. Seats are made past the upholster (poshish maker) who as well decorates the truck'south interior with beadwork and other hangings. The trucking world appears inhabited by a diverse group of specialists, brought together by a common cultural and commercial endeavor.

Truck ornamentation — Haji Habib by HeraldPakistan

The town of Dera Ghazi Khan, around 500 km southwest of Lahore, is renowned for producing some of these specialists. Next to a busy crossing, known as Samina Chowk, on the entrance to the boondocks from Multan, are multiple addas where some of these artisans work. Manzoor Hussain is one of them.

Everyone hither calls him Ustad Manzoor Chamak Patti Wala after the piece of work he does: producing decorations made from colourful fluorescent tape. His workshop looks like a small rudimentary hangar, open from the front but enclosed from three sides. Within the dusty grey brick building, Ustad Manzoor sits on a straw mat laid out on the uneven ground, mechanically producingchamak patti at a brisk pace.

He says every blueprint he is making is done exactly how it was taught to him past his teacher. "It is all memorised and is in my mind," he says, echoing what onlookers state virtually Zahoor's production process. No imaginative rethinking of designs takes place hither; at that place is no room for whatsoever artistic innovation.

Computerised printing has reduced the importance of fifty-fifty retention and the long and difficult mentoring that Ustad Manzoor underwent. Printers in Karachi produce more chamak patti by pressing a computer fundamental than Hussain and his 3 apprentices do in a whole day, and all with the pre-set up designs.

A narrow road in the city's Garden E expanse, with cars parked bumper to bumper on one side of it, is where many of these printers, including Asif Awan, practice their concern. He copies chamak patti patterns from the internet and prints them on fluorescent sticker sheet without even looking at them carefully. The most popular designs are pasted on the door of his shop – Che Guvera wearing a lid with the symbol of a Baloch nationalist group on it catches 1'south eye immediately.

Asif Awan'south chamak patti press shop in Garden E area, Karachi

Awan makes pocket-size alterations of this type on request from his customers. Otherwise, his product process is uncomplicated – copy, paste and print. Why does he non create original images? "Nosotros make what the truckers want. Why put in extra effort?" he responds.

Information technology is true. Trucks are painted by and large the way their drivers like.

Religious emblems and portraits of saints make an essential part of the images and icons painted on trucks. Syed Abdul Qadir Jilani, a revered twelfth century Sufi, is perhaps the most ubiquitous religious effigy on the trucks.

A direct descendant of the Prophet of Islam, he spent about of his adult life in Baghdad, now in Republic of iraq. He is remembered by several different names among his devotees in the subcontinent- Ghaus Pak, Ghaus-al-Azam, Gyarhveen Wali Sarkar and Yarhveen Wala (the latter two associating him with the 11th day of every Islamic month which is regarded his twenty-four hours past his followers). He is believed to exist the source of several miraculous legends. One of them goes like this:

Once a wedding procession was crossing the Tigris River virtually Baghdad on a boat. Of a sudden a loftier moving ridge turned the boat upside downwardly. When the bride waiting on the other side of the river heard most the blow, she was heartbroken. In her moment of helplessness, she is said to have approached Jilani for assistance, urging him to save the wedding procession. The saint accepted her request and raised his correct manus in the air as if he was lifting something on his palm. Presently the boat was sailing again on the Tigris as if someone had lifted information technology upwards from the depths of the river.

For truck commuter Allah Tawakkul, and about everyone in his profession, Jilani is Yaari Baba, the saint of companionship, who helps wayfarers as he had helped the drowned wedding procession. "Yaari Baba volition take care of us as we proceed our long journeys," Tawakkul says while standing under a fluorescent tape portrait of the saint at a roadside nutrient stall on GT Route near Jhelum.

Yaari Baba is seen on many trucks on the GT road as truck drivers agree on to a belief in his protective powers

A few days later in Multan, the Sufi legend takes a different turn. Driving through the narrow lanes of a humming part of the city, a rickshaw driver stops at what looks like a shrine. A hoarding carrying the paradigm of a woman praying adjacent to a gunkhole on the river and an elderly disguised man in a turban graces the entrance. This is the tomb of Musa Pak Shaheed, a 16th century Sufi, whose successors include former prime minister Yousuf Raza Gilani.

Shaheed is a descendent of Jilani (Gilani being a variation of it). A caretaker at the tomb insists that the Sufi cached there had also saved a boat in the aforementioned mode his famous antecedent from Baghdad had done.

Meeran Mauj Darya Bokhari, some other saint buried in another part of Multan, is also credited to have performed the same phenomenon, every bit have a number of other saints and Sufis whose tombs and shrines tin can exist establish in every office of the country. Nobody quite knows how and why a single legend could be owing to several people at the same fourth dimension. What is certain is that travelling has always been a hazardous undertaking – it remains so fifty-fifty now in spite of all the technological developments – and travellers have always required some kind of special protection. Sufis and saints have been very helpful in this regard.

There is also another explanation: travel is a metaphor for overcoming the limitations of time and space. Equally travellers suspension these boundaries so do their patron saints. Taking dissimilar names and assuming different identities, these Sufis transcend both centuries and cities, and become available for aid to their followers wherever and whenever they are required.

The loose structure of these saintly narratives as well makes them prevalent, if not entirely adequate, in all parts of the country and amid different sections of the society. Trucking, as will be argued later on, thrives on this kind of universal recognition.

The portrait that Zahoor has painted on Wahab's truck is of Jalal Chandio, though the driver is not fifty-fifty familiar with his music. Why, and so, is he getting him painted on his truck? Wahab laughs heartily every bit he explains that Chandio's portrait is his licence to move easily through police force checkpoints while passing through Sindh, a route he frequently takes. "The police don't terminate y'all; they don't effect you a challan (ticket) considering they think you are a Sindhi."

While deciding how to become their trucks painted, drivers are motivated as much by their likes and dislikes equally they are past the prospects of having smooth trips in various and diverse parts of the land. That explains the eclectic imagery and icons that one finds on the body of a truck. The truck that Wahab drives to Quetta, for instance, has Balochistan's Chief Minister Sanaullah Zehri painted on the back of information technology for the aforementioned reason.

Ahmed Shinwari and his son hold a challan (ticket) that one of the drivers has received, Lahore

Wahab, indeed, is the paradigm of multiculturalism reflected in the world of Pakistani trucking. He was born in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to Pakhtun parents but at present lives and works in Karachi, and he speaks Sindhi fluently. Geographical divisions are porous in his universe if and when they be – and matter – at all.

Wahab says even insiders of the trucking business cannot tell where a truck belongs from the images and portraits it carries. The number plate may requite a clue but sometimes fifty-fifty that does not since a Panjabi truck owner might have had his truck registered in Lasbella, Balochistan. "Trucks practice not vest to i city. They never can."

A man stands adjacent to his sugarcane juice cart in the midst of a line of trucks. This is one of the largest trucking stations aslope Peshawar's Ring Road, a highway that skirts the city on three sides like a ring. The cart is covered with images of valleys, eagles, a panthera leo and a pair of female optics – a miniature version of an elaborately painted truck.

Across the road from the juice vendor, truck driver Waheedullah sits on a charpoy. He speaks with easy affability. "Lowari Pass is the road to hell. It is by far the virtually challenging route," he says.

Located at a height of 3,118 metres, the pass is the but route connecting Chiltral valley in the due north-western part of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa with the rest of the province. A truck, made heavier by all its embellishing crowns, hangings and painted panels, will e'er struggle to manoeuvre through its steep and narrow paths.

Other than hampering the movement of a truck, these decorations may even create risks. According to Elias, these are non permitted past law regulations because of being safety hazards, especially during unsafe drives through places such as the Lowari Pass. This, he says, means that "the decorated truck is, by definition, exterior the constabulary."

Images pasted inside the door of a truck

Why practise truckers invest in illegal ornamentations that easily ready their finances dorsum by Rs 300,000 rupees, nigh one third of the total cost of a vehicle? "Because the amend the truck'southward advent, the improve the services provided by it and the more reliable it is," Elias explains. A well-busy truck gives the customers the impression that information technology is well taken care of and will, therefore, be a dependable mode to transport goods.

As hinted before, how big a function decorations have in ensuring the safe passage of the goods is severely tested during the 300-km journey between Peshawar and Chitral. When asked what preparations Waheedullah makes before travelling between the ii places, he says something in Pashto. "Niswar and charas," interjects an interlocutor only one-half in jest, mentioning an intoxicant made from minced tobacco and another one processed from cannabis. It is certainly not the reply that the driver has given but, judging past his smile, there seems to exist some element of truth in it.

Waheeedullah climbs onto the truck every bit he gets prepare to go out Peshawar. When he opens the door to the driver's cabin, images of female person motion-picture show actors can exist seen stuck inside. Being in such pleasant company could exist another lark he requires to undertake the perilous journeys such every bit the one to Chitral.

Kausar Baba Nickelwala, an onetime man wearing a Chitrali woolen cap to proceed himself warm on a tardily winter day in 2016, became a truck decorator nearly 40 years ago. By about accounts in Rawalpindi, including that of his own, he pioneered souvenir trucks.

20 years ago, an American tourist approached him at his workshop nearly the Railway Carriage Factory in Rawalpindi and asked him to build a truck that the visitor could accept back home to the U.s.a.. Nickelwala laughed at the idea beginning. "The truck will have to be a miniature one if y'all want to take it all the fashion to America," is what he told the tourist. "So build me a miniature truck so," responded the American.

He gave Nickelwala two months to exercise the job and asked for the price. The decorator idea he could turn the request down by asking an incommunicable cost and quoted Rs 35,000. The American returned the next twenty-four hour period with the money in his manus.

Nickelwala spent the adjacent eight weeks building the miniature truck, with a metal trunk, tiny tyres, tiny bonnet and a tinier series of bells hanging with steel chains. Painting the truck was the most difficult part. He had to reduce the scale multiple times to arrive at the minuscule level that fit the modest truck.

The American, notwithstanding, did not render. 6 months subsequently, some other visiting foreigner spotted the small truck in Nickelwala's workshop and insisted on buying information technology. He was willing to pay Rs 10,000 for information technology. Nickelwala did not want to sell something that someone had already paid for merely so gave in to the asking.

His conscience, however, started giving him worries. What if the first greenhorn came dorsum to receive his society? Another truck should exist built for him, Nickelwala idea. Now that he was familiar with the technique, he managed to complete two pocket-sized trucks in just xv days. He claims to be safely keeping them both for his original customer even today, refusing to sell them at any price.

Seat covers for trucks existence prepared in Hala, Sindh

Soon the news of his new production began to spread and he started receiving a barrage of orders. While his first miniature trucks were made for the foreigners, in contempo years a local market has besides emerged and then take many artisans, decorators and painters producing miniature trucks and similar decoration pieces in truck painting style. They sell their wares to not-government organisations working in the fields of arts and culture and for-profit companies that trade in local arts and crafts.

The subcontinent possesses a rich tradition of send decorations going dorsum many centuries: river boats accept e'er had carvings; artefacts adorned seafaring ships; horses had hennaed foreheads, sometimes fifty-fifty braided and styled manes; horse-drawn carriages were full of wooden designs and printed shades and seats. Even camels had their body pilus cut in stylish patterns. It is an obvious and easy extrapolation that this tradition has connected with the introduction of mod engine-based vehicles.

The first Bedford trucks were imported in the subcontinent in the 1930s. "These trucks were only painted with a protective coat of one colour," recalls Haji Habibur Rehman, one of the oldest truck painters in Rawalpindi. He is a disciple of Ustad Mohammad Azam and Ustad Mohammad Yaseen, both known every bit the pioneers of truck painting in this office of the world. The only things painted on the early on trucks were the names of the companies they belonged to and their contact details, he says. At the most, a ribbon running beyond the windshield carried a prayer for a safe journey and a couplet adorned the back of the truck, Rehman says.

Kazi, the Karachi University professor, offers a unlike version of the history of truck painting. This could be because she mostly focuses on Karachi and its nearby areas such as Mirpur Khas.

Sitting on a sofa in her living room, she explains how the partition of the subcontinent in 1947 altered social hierarchies and restructured power at the political, economic and social levels. With flowers and partridges depicted in the traditional truck painting style hanging on the walls of the room among other art works, she explains how the Sectionalization-related upheavals have had a major impact on the cultural evolution of the areas we now call Pakistan.

A young mechanic sits on the roadside in Hyderabad's truck adda

For ane, Kazi says, many Muslim artisans and artists who used to work at the palaces of Indian princes and rajas migrated to the newly-created land of Pakistan. Most, if not all, of them did non detect any moneyed patrons in their adopted country and became available for piece of work that catered to the uneducated masses, truck decorations beingness one of them.

A pioneer of truck painting in Karachi, co-ordinate to Kazi, was one Haji Hussain. He hailed from Bhuj surface area in Kutch district of what is now the Indian state of Gujarat and belonged to a family unit of painters who decorated the interiors of courts and princely residences. Afterward the Division, Hussain moved to Karachi with his skill gear up of painting ceilings and murals and was encouraged to turn to decorating trucks past a local artist, Ghaffar Sindhi, who so worked on embellishing horse carriages. Suddenly, crafts that were previously the exclusive privilege of the ruling grade to relish became accessible to the working classes, Kazi says.

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Source: https://thewire.in/culture/seeking-paradise-the-image-and-reality-of-truck-art