Jimmy Engineer – The Artist who Relived 1947
By Sasha Scheherazade Not many artists have achieved success where documenting the traumatic experience of one of the most horrific and grandest migrations in history is concerned. The colonial British powers that brought Pakistan and India into being nearly seven decades back, was not without an engineered and very violent partition of the boundaries. "I have relived 1947," says Jimmy Engineer, "although I was born seven years after the inception of Pakistan, but to me it seems that the very time of partition, with people migrating from Indian border to Pakistan by whatever means they could, is still etched afresh a memory as if I had lived through this whole process of partition, died and my rebirth happened in the year 1954," says the artist par excellence, who has proclaimed himself as The Servant of Pakistan. Seeing Jimmy Engineer's work on his Independence Series one can observe the trauma encountered ...