The Queen refers to the tiles situated on the facade of the tomb of Miran Zain, the mother of Zain al Abedin, the 8th Sultan of the Shah Mir dynasty that ruled over Kashmir. This tile is unique in design and hard to pin down. In Western parlance, it is an egg-and-dart motif. To Soi, its four-petalled shape with an oval centre could refer to a lotus flower. It could also be an anthropomorphic form, although this is unlikely. However, all these possibilities have made this tile a site for rumination on the intertwining of form with history. In mediaeval times there was an accretion of Hindu, Buddhist, and Islamic motifs, leading to a rich visual language in the valley and the surrounding regions, such as Ladakh, all of which would have influenced the craftsmen that constructed it.
Praneet Soi | Mashrabiya: Experimenter – Hindustan Road, Kolkata
Forthcoming exhibition
These tiles form part of Soi's most recent immersion in Srinagar, where since 2014 he has been experimenting with his imagery rendered by the use of Kashmiri motifs painted as a part of an ongoing commission with the master craftsman Fayaz Jan. The tiles they are painted upon are an extension of the craft of papier-mâché that is ubiquitous in the craft industry of Kashmir.
Soi was fascinated to learn that the craft is an import, carried into the valley by Sufi preachers travelling from Central Asia. He developed the material as tiles, a process that took a year to finesse, thus creating canvases that he could work upon. The tiles consist of a papier-mâché core, over which clay from the river Jhelum—that runs through the city—is layered to smoothen the rough papier-mâché surface. It is then layered over with thin tissue paper and sealed with saresh. This process gives the tiles an absorptive surface, making painting upon them extremely pleasurable.
