Conversation: East Meets West in Raqib Shaw’s “Paradise Lost”

Hello. Good afternoon, everybody. So wonderful to see such a full house today.

Thank you very much for joining us. I'm Katie Reilly, the associate vice president of publishing here at the museum, and today, we join Professor David Lomas and curator, Madhuvanti Ghose, as they discuss the work of Raqib Shaw, whose epic multi-panel painting, "Paradise Lost" is currently on view nearby in Gunsaulus Hall. I hope you all had a chance to take a look at it before today's program.

They will explore Shaw's culturally diverse sources and unique visual vocabulary, connecting them to his lived experience of displacement and exile in his unending pursuit to recreate a paradise lost. As a member of the publishing department, I had the great pleasure of working with Madhu and David on this publication available in our museum stores, which attempts to capture the wonder and complexity of Raqib's magnum opus. I had the rare honor of visiting the artist's studio with Madhu back in 2024, while the work was only partially complete.

Getting a chance to explore Raqib's magical garden and see his extensive library and his studio gave me just a taste of the wide-ranging sources of inspiration for his art. David and Madhu are each uniquely qualified to illuminate the many layers of meaning in Raqib's work. From the deeply personal to the art historical to the mythical, the insightful texts they contributed to our publication help readers fully appreciate the depth of the artist's achievement.

David Lomas is emeritus professor of art history at the University of Manchester. He has published extensively on surrealism, psychology, and medicine, including the book, "The Haunted Self: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity." Madhu is the inaugural Alsdorf Associate Curator of Indian, Southeast Asian, and Himalayan Art at the Art Institute of Chicago. Since joining the museum in 2007, she opened the Alsdorf Galleries in 2008 and has curated numerous exhibitions and installations including Jitish Kallat's site-specific "Public Notice 3" in 2010 and 2024, still installed on the Grand Staircase, and most recently, "Paradise Lost." As we begin, I want to share our emphatic thank you to Art Institute trustee, Usha Mittal and her husband, Lakshmi, for their leadership at the museum and for their generous support to bring "Paradise Lost" to the Art Institute.

(audience applauding) And now, without further delay, I'll welcome Madhu and David to the stage. Thank you. (audience applauding)

   Good afternoon, everyone, and David, a very, very warm welcome to Chicago. (chuckles) Thank you for joining us today. Thank you, Katie. Without you, this book would not have been possible, so thank you for being with us at every stage in imagining it and realizing it.

So, I am going to start by briefly introducing "Paradise Lost," which, as you can see, is an epic meditation on a monumental scale, frankly, on the effects of absence and loss for an artist in exile. It's largely inspired by Raqib Shaw's own life and covers it up to approximately 2015. This herculean effort at currently over 100 feet took more than 20 years to imagine and create.

What you're seeing in front of you when you walk into the Alsdorf Galleries is essentially the work in four chapters, and this is the first time that all of these four chapters have been shown together. Raqib started to conceptualize the work as a second-year student at Saint Martins back in 1999 and really started working on it around 2009, exhibiting the first chapter in 2011. And this current iteration was finished approximately a year ago in May, 2025.

Raqib Shaw was born in my hometown of Calcutta in 1974, but he grew up in the beautiful verdant Kashmir Valley in an extended Muslim merchant family. He had a pretty eclectic upbringing. He went to a Catholic school, for example, but at the same time, he, like a lot of other wealthy merchant boys, was educated also at home by Hindu Pandits in Indian epics and texts.

So he is a product of what we call Kashmiriyat, a time when there was more secular, peaceful existence in the valley, but unfortunately, this idyll of childhood was not to last. At the age of 16, he fled the valley, moving with his family to Delhi first as a result of the troubles that erupted around 1989-90 in Srinagar, and eventually, about a few years later, at the age of 18, he left for England, first to go to school, and he continues to live and work there. (David and Madhu chuckling)

Thank you, so it's over to me, and I'd like to start by expressing The mic.

My gratitude to my co-presenter, Madhu, for inviting me, first of all, to contribute to her splendid catalog about "Paradise Lost," and I would exhort all of you to buy a copy. (audience laughing) I can assure you it's an easier read than John Milton's epic poem, "Paradise Lost," (audience laughing) and who knows, one day, it might be as widely admired, (Madhu chuckling) but Madhu, I think we've both got a mountain to climb in that regard. And also, of course, thank you to Madhu and to the Art Institute for inviting me back a year later to take part in a conversation about a work that both of us have had the opportunity to reflect upon at length.

For me, it's the fulfillment of a dream to visit Chicago, which this afternoon, shrouded in mist, you'd perhaps agree is rather like a dreamscape. (audience laughing) And of course, it goes without saying that as an omnivorous art lover, I feel like a child in a candy store here at the Art Institute. My sense of my glee in these surroundings may not be so different from what Raqib felt after his family had forcibly relocated from Kashmir, a threatened paradise, as Madhu was just explaining, and he was taken by his mother to visit the National Gallery in London.

The National Gallery situated on Trafalgar Square is a museum teeming with masterpieces of European art. The story has frequently been told, and perhaps Raqib told it when he was here in conversation, that he bowled over by what he saw, Holbein's "Ambassadors," the picture that I reproduced. And, you know, it was upon that encounter I took this photograph myself just to give a sense of the actual encounter with an artwork in situ rather than just as a, you know, disembodied image in a book.

And he resolved then to become a painter with a wildly hubristic ambition that his work might one day hang there in the National Gallery. This conventional story is upbeat and inspiring. Of course, though the boy's reaction might have been quite opposite, encountering an authoritative museum art collection from which the culture that he'd grown up amongst and was familiar with was absent and erased, a dispiriting and potentially paralyzing recognition of a cultural hierarchy ordering East and West.

Fortunately, that did not occur, but my conjecture is that a sense of injustice that he may not even have consciously appreciated at that moment has nevertheless shaped his artistic project, which seeks in ways that both of us will try to bring out to redress that erasure. To view "Paradise Lost" in which Shaw has invested so much of himself, his whole life in a sense, in such a prestigious venue as this is a marvelous vindication of that project and proof of its integrity. Could we go on to the next slide, please, Madhu? I've come up with a phrase, a creative insurgency, to describe this artistic project.

I admit that in the paranoid reality we inhabit, this is a risky choice of words. In point of fact, I wouldn't entirely wish to dispel the impression of an interloper, a disruptor, and a usurper who revels in transgressing the cultural polarities and hierarchies that have governed east and west. The kind of strategy I have in mind is one that the Roman mosaic on the left of the screen with its flamboyant, swirling border, rather like a cyclonic weather pattern, can help me to define.

The central panel depicts Dionysus, the Greek God of dance, ecstasy, and intoxication, returning in a triumphal procession from conquering India on a chariot pulled by tigers, accompanied by an exotic menagerie of beasts and a bevy of characters amongst them, unhinged, wildly-dancing maenads. A winged allegorical figure of victory crowns Dionysus with a laurel wreath. I imagine Shaw as Dionysus not returning from having conquered the East, but on a journey westwards to occupy and conquer the citadels of European high culture.

The image on the right, one of my favorite works by Shaw illustrates this creative insurgency in practice. Repeatedly, we see Shaw taking a picture whose place we thought was secure in the past in art history, occupy it, and populate it with the products of his outlandish, constantly overflowing imagination. The source image in this instance is a Flemish altarpiece in the National Gallery depicting the Adoration of the Magi.

Shaw has inserted himself into the picture wearing a Japanese kimono and cradling his beloved little terrier, he impertinently takes the place of the Madonna with the baby Jesus. (audience chuckling) His intention is to satirize the art markets' fetishizing of him as the exotic boy from Kashmir to which the scene is transposed, the Wise Men, a jackal and hyena-headed dealers and collectors. Could we go on to the next one, please, Madhu? Great.

By way of introducing "Paradise Lost," now, finally, I wish to say a few words about its form before handing over to Madhu who will speak on the basis of her immense erudition about the sources for Shaw's very distinctive technique in Indian and Mughal decorative arts. One is immediately struck by, and it's already been commented upon, the epic scale of "Paradise Lost," it has a long, horizontal format subdivided into discreet chapters that demand to be read sequentially. Indeed, when Madhu and I came to write about "Paradise Lost," Shaw was insistent that we start from the left edge and proceed across.

The notion of a life as a journey, such as we see here, is a familiar literary topos. The arc of the picture traverses two nights and two days. There are also intimations of the four seasons, which add to this sense of the passage of time.

Shaw himself, one only has to be with him for an afternoon to realize is an inveterate storyteller. In "Paradise Lost" most overtly, he compels us to reassess the status of narrative art, which was comprehensively devalued within abstract modernism. One can describe this in terms of the return of the repressed narrativity.

Shaw confirmed my intuition that Chinese scroll painting is an important reference point for the episodic narration of a journey that unfolds, or in the case of Chinese painting, unrolls in time. You know, it isn't just the formal kinship, but also, I'd add that themes of reclusion and renunciation about which Madhu is going to speak later, are prevalent in Chinese art at certain historical periods. Notably, when China came under a foreign Mongol rule.

Rather than serve in the new administration, officials might renounce public life and devote themselves to painting, calligraphy, and poetry. One consequence is that goodbyes and embarkation on a journey, a journey of interior exile, have a salience in Chinese art and poetry that they do not possess in the West. Next slide, please, Madhu.

I will hand back to Madhu very shortly, but my reason for showing this particular section of the painting was chiefly to undermine a cinematic and also operatic aspect to the epic scale, and perhaps you'll agree, shrill, often overblown rhetoric of "Paradise Lost." Shaw has indicated to me that this section of the painting is an allegory of the turbocharged London art world of the '80s and '90s, a time of feverish speculation. Shaw was the golden boy gallerists were searching for, a newcomer whose edgy, exotic, and erotic painting was a welcome change from the thin gruel of abstract minimalism. "Garden of Earthly Delights," which propelled him to stardom, is a pleasure garden, mirroring an art world drunk on hedonism.

"Paradise Lost," by contrast, is a hindsight view of that same world, a second take as Milton's capital of Hell. With help from Satan's offsider, the demon, Mammon, rebel angels construct pandemonium, a term that John Milton came up with, out of glittering gold. Pandemonium well describes the chaos that Shaw presents us within this chapter in which dog eats dog and gold coins are showered like confetti, and the air is abuzz with brutish, ape-headed cupids signifying naked greed, cupidity, you might say.

A mordantly satirical perspective on the commercial art world that I gestured to before is here writ large. In another instant, this corrupted world will be swept away by the force of a tsunami, and we shall encounter Shaw in various guises or avatars, Madhu's very apposite term that identify his journey in "Paradise Lost" as an essentially spiritual and anti-materialist quest.

   Should I move on?

Yep.

So I wanted to address briefly the very unique technique that you see Shaw having employed in "Paradise Lost," because it is not only elaborate, but it's very unique to him. I am going to take a section of the painting to try to make this point, and I just want to emphasize that whenever we are showing you sections of "Paradise Lost," there's a strip at the bottom, just like the strip during when David was describing pandemonium, so you can actually locate the section that we are talking about and go back and see it again if you were interested. So I'm taking this section around the cherry tree to try to delve a little bit deeper into his technique.

So as both David and I have spent quite a bit of time with Raqib in his studio, it's really quite an incredible place. To me, it reminds me of medieval Mughal ateliers, you know, what they might have been like, but you know, many people beavering away. But the very detailed, painstaking process that he has evolved includes, first of all, working with Hammerite, which is something that's used to paint automobiles with, an enamel.

And on top of that, he, like the Mughal artists who would've worked with squirrel-hair hairbrushes, over a period of time, Raqib has employed porcupine quills, quills made of the hair of porcupines, as a way to make his detailed work. So I mean, when you see "Paradise Lost" and, you know, look at it as over a hundred feet, imagine the kind of labor that's gone into that work. And the part of this is because Hammerite, it tends to run, and so you need to create a dam around it.

And so every bit of drawing is lined with the gold liner within which the enamel is placed using porcupine quills. So it's extremely elaborate, and I hope you will go back and appreciate the detail of the work when you go back to see "Paradise Lost" after this talk. If you look, for example, at the section under the cherry tree, the rocks, for example, they're very reminiscent stylistically of Kashmiri paper mache.

You know, in the 15th century, paper mache was introduced into Kashmir from Iran by the king of Kashmir of the time, Zayn al-Abidin, and it is employed today, for example, in making a little trivia for the tourist market, but in the past it was used on a lavish scale to adorn important monuments such as this one of Shah Hamadan's Mosque where both the interior and the exterior is elaborately worked with paper mache. Islam forbids the use of the human form, and Raqib has spoken to us about how these kind decorative motifs that he would experience as he would go to these mosques with his mother, that played a big role in the way that he visualized decoration. And the other source of inspiration for him was, of course, from nature, from Kashmir itself, from the seasons.

So this is this combination of this seasonality, the colors that come from nature as well as the kind of decoration that he would around him. These were the kind of primary sources of inspiration for Raqib as he was growing up. This was the influence that he had.

In Kashmir, instead of the the human form, you use ornamental motifs inspired by geometrical designs as well as florals, for example, to decorate every surface, whether that's this Koran stand or the shawls, the famous Kashmir shawls, or carpets, or any other form of decorative object that Kashmir is, even today, famous for, and it's this kind of detail that you see in "Paradise Lost" if you look closely enough. And on top of this, you know, very elaborate, painstaking technique, Raqib has also then embellished further with semi-precious stones, with, you know, glitter, and that, again, is something that is very, again, a common feature in Indian decorative art where we are accustomed to seeing this form of decoration in Kundan, whereby you encrust precious stones, semi-precious stones, into enameling in a technique that is very similar to the way in which "Paradise Lost" has been created. So if you look at Kashmiri decoration generally, you know, this kind of layering, layer upon layer, like you build up the surfaces like in Kashmiri woodwork, which we call Khatamband, that is the way that I view "Paradise Lost," this incredibly painstaking process of layering one form of decoration over another, over another until you see what you see now in front of you.

I'd like to take this moment to actually also talk briefly about Kashmir itself as a source of inspiration for Raqib, because Raqib has talked frequently about how Kashmir, for him, is like a paradisical idyll. Perhaps part of this is because in exile, everything from home feels more paradisical, but Kashmir has always been regarded by authors, by poets, by painters, by the Mughal emperors who conquered the valley in the 16th century as paradise on earth, and that plays on this theme of paradise, firdaus or jannat Even today, when most South Asians think of Kashmir, we think of it as jannat or paradise. So this beautiful landscape was further beautified when Kashmir was eventually conquered by the Mughal emperors in the 16th century, and the Mughal emperor, Jahangir, would spend entire summers there.

He loved it so much that the entire court, the Imperial Mughal court, moved to Kashmir, and he would have his artists paint the flora and fauna of Kashmir, which he loved. This is a time when even local Kashmiri artists joined the Imperial Atelier, and it's a time when the beautiful, in a sense, untouched landscape of Kashmir was landscaped. And the Mughals wanted to order nature in their own concepts of the Islamic idea of paradise by landscaping these beautiful gardens which would landscape on the hills going right down to the lakes of the Srinagar, like Dal Lake, for example.

So gardens like this, the Shalimar Gardens or the Nishat Gardens, were landscaped by the Mughal emperors and their family members to further beautify the valley where they would spend so much of their time, but the reality of Kashmir and the reality that we see in chapter one of "Paradise Lost" is very far from that paradise. It is rather the paradise that is lost. It's not just in '89/'90 or in recent times that Kashmir has seen, you know, difficulties.

Kashmir's entire history has been one that has had bouts of incredible violence, incredibly difficult times. So what Raqib is showing in chapter one is the promise of the beauty of the valley, but against the reality that he has himself experienced. And you know, his voice as a Kashmiri artist displaced from this valley in the diaspora is equally important when we think about "Paradise Lost," because there are very few Kashmiri artists who even have a voice.

There's just a handful of people who are able to talk about the pain of this kind of dislocation from Kashmir. So at this point, I'm going to ask David to say a few more words about the concept of paradise and the idea of paradise itself.

Yes, sure, Madhu, but before that, you know, I just wanted to endorse absolutely what you said about the importance of decorative art for Raqib. When Raqib was an art student, painting was totally peripheral, and you know, minority pursuit amongst artists who were, you know, using video, you know, performance happenings, and so forth, but part of Raqib's genius, I think, is the way that he completely renovates painting from the direction of decorative art, and you know, on the basis of his background. So I think his work is very interesting, you know, not just because of the themes that it deals with, but how it addresses the problem of painting, shall we say.

And you know, just to connect with the points that you were making last about violence within, you know, paradise, and Kashmir as this lost paradise, an aspect of Raqib's painting that many viewers pick up on, perhaps you have, is this kind of tug of war, if you like, between beauty and seduction on the one hand, and then as you get close up, you see, you know, a sort of gory or, you know, gruesome second reality come into focus. But anyway, you know, I was warned not to go off piste, (audience laughing) so back to paradise. And etymologically, you know, it's interesting, because the word itself, paradise, migrates from east to west, its original meaning of an enclosed garden referred to in Old Iranian, I want to mention that civilization again, to walled parks where royal hunts took place.

Xenophon of Athens adopted the old Iranian paradaesa into Greek as paradeisos, the word employed for the Garden of Eden in Greek editions of the Old Testament. From his first major series, "Garden of Earthly Delights," paradise has been the leitmotif of Shaw's work, invariably connected with the homeland he left behind when he departed Kashmir. Discussion of this topic, paradise, would be incomplete, I think, without mention of gardening, to which Shaw now devotes whatever spare time painting leaves him.

The Paradise Garden at his own residence in Peckham, and the garden has been working on for the past two years at Alderbrook, the country retreat of an important patron who actually supported the installation of "Paradise Lost," are creative expressions in their own right. Gardening parallels and complements his painting. While the one is a mournful elegy for a paradise lost, the other represents, in a sense, paradise regained.

The garden as subject is reflected in numerous picture titles of the last few years, and it appears as a setting in more besides. Inevitably one thinks of Monet's garden at Giverny, a universe in microcosm that from the 1890s becomes an inexhaustible source of motifs for his painting. The right-hand section of "Paradise Lost" segues from Himalayan forest into a cultivated English garden stocked with foxgloves, hollyhocks, daffodils, hydrangeas, tulips, and innumerable other plants, the perfect milieu for a paradisical luncheon on the grass.

[Madhu] Hmm.

[David] Could I have the-

Yes. Next slide please? Oh, and just before we leave that one, that's Raqib himself at work in his garden, wearing a beautiful sort of Liberty's floral print shirt. (audience chuckling) So if we... Okay, yes, parrots, emigre parrots.

Fraternity with animals is a constant of Shaw's paradisical vision. They appear in his painting, not singly, but in great profusion, shoals, swarms, flocks and herds of them. A curious case that mirrors Shaw's own emigre status are the flocks of raucous green parakeets that appear in the final chapter of "Paradise Lost" and several other pictures.

First spotted in Kew Gardens, they have since gained a foothold across London's parks and occasionally touch down in Shaw's garden. They originate from Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia where their habitat extends to the Himalayan foothills. One urban myth regarding them is that Jimi Hendrix, in 1968, released a pair of parrots named Adam and Eve that went forth (audience chuckling) and multiplied.

Were these resourceful birds trying to settle in this country, they would no doubt have a smart lawyer applying for a green card on their behalf. (audience laughing) So I think it's back to you.

Yeah. (Madhu sighing) Okay, so I'm gonna pick up that theme of animals and explore the many incarnations of Raqib Shaw that we see across "Paradise Lost." We see him in innumerable cases, sometimes self-portraits, sometimes as figures in Western myths, sometimes in various animal-headed avatars. The Hindu pantheon that Raqib loved and was exposed to as a child, of course, is rich with such imagery.

You know, whether it's the monkey-headed god, Hanuman, or the elephant-headed Ganesh, there are innumerable gods that Raqib was familiar with from childhood as well as during the winter holidays when he would spend time in Calcutta during the Durga Puja festival. He also, as a slightly lonely child, would bury himself in Amar Chitra Katha and Tinkle comic books, and he remembers vividly, well, a lot of people of a certain age remember vividly when the Indian epics, the "Ramayana" and the "Mahabharata" was shown on Indian television for the first time, and he, like the rest of India, was glued to TV, watching the epics unfold, so he has grown up in a world where such imagery, such iconography was very common. Also, growing up in a merchant family, he was accustomed to seeing carpets, shawls, with composite creatures on them.

This is a feature of Mughal and medieval Indian art. So the fact that Raqib employs many types of representations of himself often is something that I don't think we should be that surprised by. One of the types of, you know, that he employs, particularly, I would say, in the first section of "Paradise Lost" are what we call humanoids.

And "Paradise Lost" itself starts with this creature gazing up at the moon, and that, of course, is the young Raqib Shaw imagining what life was going to unfold. And it is through this creature with many different types of animal heads that we, you know, look at the first section of "Paradise Lost." There are also many animal avatars of the protagonist in "Paradise Lost," such as the fawn that is being strangled under the cherry tree or the curious monkey under what he calls the collapse of the kingdom of greed, and David here has been describing as pandemonium, or even in the senmurv (simurgh) that we see being trampled in this section, in all of these, you will see Raqib. You know, having grown up in a world where he would visualize, you know, putting different heads on even the people around him, including his family members, he got into the habit of visualizing people as animals or birds, or whatever the moment was at that particular time, and this is a feature that you see across "Paradise Lost." One of the ones that I'm most intrigued by is, of course, the what he calls the zebrataur.

I wonder whether he actually identifies with the delicate zebra. This is a zebra that was gifted to the Emperor Shah Jahan in 1621, and the emperor, sorry, the Emperor Jahangir in 1621, and Jahangir was so fascinated he thought somebody had painted the stripes on the body of the zebra. Raqib has often talked about the fact that when he first came to art school, he stuck out.

He felt that he stuck out like the noble savage. And in the sense, the zebra with its stripes strikes me as one of the many avatars, again, that Raqib is hiding behind throughout "Paradise Lost." David, do you want to add?

Yes, yes, I'll just try to be more brief, and you know, one point that I would make is that the word, avatar, and this notion of avatars of the artists, the word itself is a Sanskrit word. You may not have known that. I didn't a few weeks ago.

(audience chuckling) It, you know, refers to corporeal embodiments of the gods, which are often multiple, as are Raqib's mythic and other personae, and I just wanted to draw your attention to one in particular at the right edge of the panel, a figure that we can, despite being, you know, sort of peacock-headed and so forth, we can identify both as Raqib because it's wearing his trademark Kashmiri shawl. And I think he plays on the sort of Shaw-shawl kind of punning similitude, (audience chuckling) and the playing, and we can identify this avatar as the mythic God, Orpheus, playing his lyre, and then if I can see correctly, I think there's a green parrot sitting on the lyre. Yep.

And Orpheus in Greek myth are offered and so forth, enchanted animals, and not just animals, but also trees and rocks. And so it's a very powerful expression, I think, of this affinity with animals that runs through Raqib's work. Although we see him alone, he's never lonely, because he's always surrounded by animals, and a bit like Nietzsche's "Zarathustra," he prefers the company of animals.

And just to add to what Madhu was saying about Raqib's predilection for hybrids and so forth, I'd also draw your attention in this section of the painting to the presence of a unicorn. And another little takeaway fact that you may not have known, in ancient times, and certainly, you know, one finds this repeated in Renaissance bestiaries, unicorns were believed to exist in India, and one finds descriptions of this. And I think, well, the unicorn is a special kind of hybrid.

It's an example of a chimera, which is a sort of, you know, kind of monstrous mixture of parts from different sources, different animals. But I think these aspects sort of enrich the presence of the unicorn, which I think also perhaps in that final section of the painting which looks a bit like a fairy tale kind of underscores our sense of the fictiveness of the paradise, or it's kind of elusive, perhaps, you know, sort of unattainable aspect, yeah.

Well, we are going to finish by exploring this final theme of exile and renunciation, which is across the whole work.

There, you know, where we'd have a whole afternoon, I think it could be interesting to think about the status of landscape in Raqib's painting in relation to this experience of exile. The experience of exile entails a kind of split experience in which memories of somewhere else, a kind of homeland, intrude on one's present reality. And there, I'm speaking from my own experience as someone who grew up in Australia before moving to the UK, so I think the predicament that Raqib speaks to is actually quite prevalent in the present-day world.

And were there time, I would talk about the genre of the world landscape which developed in the 17, 1600s, sorry, as a consequence of sort of increasing travel and exploration, including the discovery of the New World, of course, which expanded the sense of the geography you know, as a consequence of travel and journeying. And just very briefly, one of the, I think, sort of distinctive aspects of this newest iteration of "Paradise Lost" is this sort of impassible cliff that surrounds, or sort of is a kind of barrier between us as viewers and the paradisical scene that we see within the picture. So there's this sense of, you know, a paradise which is perhaps, you know, a kind of unattainable quest, that paradise, as Madhu was saying, is, in a sense, always already lost.

And I saw an interesting resonance with the work by a young artist who was a nominee for this year's Turner Prize when I was at Tate Britain recently, and I reproduced it there. It's called "Refugee Camp," and it's by a young Iraqi artist who was, first of all, a refugee in Sweden before settling in London. And the same kind of, you know, cliff face, yeah, I just saw a resonance with that aspect of Raqib's "Paradise Lost."

And you know, there's a second cherry tree in the middle of "Paradise Lost," and a moment of tranquility, where, on an island, we see the protagonist, again, wearing his beautiful Kashmiri shawl, but when we actually look closer, that moment of tranquility is probably not that tranquil, because you see that all around him are his faces, which reveal the emotions, the turmoil that he's going through. So, in fact, he is buried in the memories of the past, and it's these memories that cloud him and create the turmoil that is chapter three of this work, which eventually leads to resolution only through letting go, letting go not just of those memories which you see in the thought bubbles, but also of the possessions of the things that meant something to him. And here, for example, in the flotsam that you see in this ocean, there are all these beautiful symbols of Raqib's possessions, memories attached to his homeland, like the Ashokan pillar, this beautiful shrine.

And again, we find him reclining on this cliff face, looking into another thought bubble, but when you look closely at that thought bubble, you will see that it's filled with skeletons. And it's these haunting memories that he realizes he needs to let go of, the memories of the past, and how does one do that? One does that by letting go, letting go, renunciating completely. And so the final section of chapter three shows him at peace, but now hidden in the high Himalayas, seeking that peace in what's essentially a hermit's little hut, completely absent of things.

All possessions lead to a sense of desire, and it is an understanding that very major philosophical underpinning of Hindu philosophy as embodied in the Bhagavad Gita that Raqib here is finding a modicum of peace. David, do you want to explore the idea of the hermit a little bit more?

I wondered if that's a good point to finish up on?

[Madhu] but I think, yeah, just let's use these slides (audience chuckling) to finish it off.

Well, you know, just, you know, once again, to take up this theme of the reference points in both, you know, sort of Eastern spirituality, but also West. I, you know, just wanted to mention Saint Jerome, a frequent reference point in Raqib's painting of the last few years. Saint Jerome, important within a Christian tradition, because he translated the Bible from the Hebrew and Greek original into Latin, and his version known as the Vulgate was the standard Bible for roughly 1,000 years.

And I think this issue of translation, you know, sort of resonates once again with Raqib, this sort of movement between cultures, which is-

Which we will also illustrate through this example of Narcissus gazing down not at his visage in this case, but down this cliff face, and how it relates to a very old fable from the Indo-Islamic world of "The Greedy Dog," who, looking at his image in a stream with a bigger bone, jumps into this icy pond to try to get that bigger bone and dies. "Paradise Lost" essentially is all about illusion and it is playing with the theme of illusion throughout. As Raqib himself says, "In Kashmir, one talks through metaphor.

Metaphor is intrinsic to the way people speak and think, and it is through metaphor rather than directness that meaning is conveyed." And I think that's how we would love to leave this conversation about "Paradise Lost." It's, on one hand, about Raqib and all the paradises that each of us may have lost in our own lives, but at the same time, it is about illusion. It is about being, you know, constantly playing with the idea of illusion and metaphor, and this constant going between the East and West, because he himself is a product of all of these cultures. You know, he came to the West at the age of 18, and so for him, while on one hand, looking back at Kashmir and its mythic beauty is a source of inspiration, but it is also a source of pain.

As he urges all of us to look for within this painting, to look at it not just as his story, but to try to find, you know, connections with it in all of our own lives as well. So I think at that point, we should really say (laughs) thank you. (audience applauding)