The Maharaja
of Madrid

MONIRUL Islam, son of a sanitary inspector who hails from Chandpur but was raised in Kishoreganj, failed to pass his matriculation exams three times. The first time he failed and the second time he was disqualified. Angry at being disallowed he went up to his headmaster and asked him, ‘Why have I been un-allowed?’
   ‘This is exactly why,’ the headmaster said.
   Preparing for the third time he had by now become an expert in ‘nakal’ (copying) and for the Bengali exam he took to the exam hall 32 essays in small notes hidden inside his clothes in the hope that one of them would strike common. Unfortunately, the question paper required Monir to write an essay on Bangladesh’s natural scenic beauty, a subject not in his collection.
   Left with no hope, Monir dug deep and composed an essay through whatever images he could conjure up. ‘I wrote about the burning of hay, of mustard fields, of children playing on the fields and of the sun setting behind them,’ recalls Monir. ‘I wrote about all that struck me as beautiful and by the end of the exam I was still stuck with the essay, unable to complete it despite using up the entire answer sheet and not having answered anything else in the question paper.’
   To Monir’s trepidation when the teacher read it he asked the first boy in the class to read it out loud. Later, he called Monir in private and told him, ‘You are not a bad student. Try hard – you will go a long way.’
   That year, Monir and his family moved to their ancestral home in Chandpur after his father’s retirement. There he finally passed the matriculation exams failing to secure first division by only a few marks. His long and poor record in education, however, worked as a catalyst for his parents to later allow him to join Art College in Dhaka.
   ‘Back then artists painted rickshaws, made cinema posters and banners. Uttam Kumar’s movie "Shilpi" had been released recently and it portrayed the artist as poor, womaniser, alcoholic and one who dies of tuberculosis,’ says Monir. ‘There was no way any parent would allow their child to become an artist.’
   Unfortunately, the only thing Monir was good at till then was art. At Kishoreganj, he spent his days fascinated with a rickshaw painter who let him paint not only at the back but on the entire body of a rickshaw. On the tin walls of their home he would stick up old newspapers and draw images on them. ‘I used to stand fascinated in front of cinema posters and wondered how it was done. To one day draw cinema posters was my ambition,’ he says.
   Resigned to his apparent incompetence, Monir’s parents allowed him to join Art College. The entrance to his favoured subject, however, transformed him overnight. From his first to final year, he never stood second in his class.
   ‘I was staying in Kalabagan and every day I would cycle to Rayerbazar and other places to paint. I started at seven in the morning and finished at nine in the evening. I finished copious amounts of work during my first year with nearly 80 of my work displayed in the yearend exhibition,’ recalls Monir, whose teacher Abul Baset served as a major encouragement to develop his work ethic.
   ‘During the second year I came under the tutelage of Mustafa Monowar. Leagues ahead of his time, he encouraged his students to be free, to experiment, and to be bold, against the wishes of the other teachers of the institute. It was through his encouragement that I acquired the speed and thrift in my thought and also understood the poetry of watercolour composition.’
   Monir graduated in 1963 and immediately joined the Art College as a teacher.
   ‘Most of the work I was doing at the time was very timid. We were very discouraged to go beyond our academic training and with much fear I ventured in to semi-impressionistic works encouraged by the works of my teachers such as Aminul Islam, Md Kibria and Murtaja Baseer – who had gone abroad and acquired new ideas about art,’ he recalls.
   In 1969, Monir earned his own opportunity to go abroad, to Spain, on a nine-month scholarship. Two days before he left he met Shilpacharya Zainul Abedin, his teacher and mentor, at his house. ‘"If you are going to run after people over there run after a champion. Don’t be a follower of a limping artist," he told me and I took that advise to heart.
   ‘For the entire duration of the nine months I worked on murals and frescos and by the end of it I won an award from the national government which allowed me to extend my stay there for another year through an honorary admission.’
   By the time he was done in Spain, the war had already started in Bangladesh. ‘My family wrote not to come back,’ he says. ‘During the time I also studied Goya’s painting of the Black period and understood the significance of it through what was going on in my country. Later, I also held an exhibition on the subject as my study of Goya.’
   Monir stayed back and with the help of a Philippine roommate and friend he got a job at a printmaking workshop in Madrid where he worked as well. It was also through this friend that Monir was first introduced to etching and was completely taken up by it.
   ‘For four years, I worked at the workshop earning my living as a technician printing the works of most of the great artists of Madrid at the time. I saw them close, studied their work and how they thought, became their friends and was also indispensable to them.’
   By then, Monir had moved to a house of his own and though he did not have water and electricity in it, it nonetheless served as a dugout for him to practise at night all the elements he had learned during the day from the masters, on his prints.
   In 1975 Monir discreetly sent a work of his to a contest in Yugoslavia and surprisingly won the first prize. ‘All the big Spanish painters who had already known me through the workshop were surprised by it and asked me to show them my work. From then on, they edited my work, promoted me through sending my work in other contests, and also giving me important inputs.’
   Monir left the workshop job that year explaining to his friends that he no longer wanted to cook other people’s food and wanted to make his own recipe.
   In a short time Monir’s print became a hit in the Madrid art arena and the numerous art festivals held across Europe. Critics hailed him for his ability to mix skilfully oriental and western elements in his prints. ‘They usually refer to oriental art as curry painting,’ he laughs. ‘Today, however, I don’t think I retain any of the elements of oriental art than what is deeply embedded. When I start I only think of the image I want to create, not the east, west or any influences and that I believe is my biggest achievement.’
   In 1980, he had earned enough money to buy a house with five million pesetas (50,000 dollars) at the centre of Madrid’s commercial hub which has since hosted many Bangladeshi visitors and at times served as a de facto Bangladesh embassy. In fact, Monir has been one of the brightest ambassadors for Bangladesh.
   The same year he returned to Dhaka after 11 years and held the first ever workshop of etching in Bangladesh. In 1983 he held his first solo show in Bangladesh at the Shilpakala Institute Gallery. Since then, Monir has had shows in Turkey, Morocco, Iraq, Ethiopia, Cairo, Norway, Japan, Korea, San Francisco, New York, Boston and Montreal. He has won awards across Europe, in the United States, in Iraq, in Egypt and in Bangladesh. In 1997 he became the first non-Hispanic to win the Spanish National Award in printmaking.
   At the age of 48 Monir married Mela Ferrar. They have since gone separate ways though they have a sixteen-year-old son, Arman Islam Ferrer, and every Sunday the three get together. ‘The three days in a week that my son spends with me from Friday to Sunday is totally dedicated to him,’ he says.
   Sitting in his Dhanmondi residence, a 2,500- square-foot apartment which has a few pieces of furniture besides piles and piles of completed and half-done work, Monir shrugs of any claim to international fame. ‘This international celebrity is a creation of the Bangladeshi media,’ he says. ‘That I have totally dedicated my life to the creation of art, that I have tried to do something new with each new day and that I have earned a living from it is my greatest achievement.’
   Mubin S Khan