Raja Muzaffar Ali Kotwara: Known the world over for his iconic feature film ‘Umrao Jaan’ released in 1981, Muzaffar Ali is essentially a painter, filmmaker and designer with a discerning eye and a vision for aesthetics and humanity. He was deeply inspired by Sufism while making his feature film ‘Zooni’ in Kashmir on the 16th-century poetess queen, Habba Khatoon. He has several other socially relevant award-winning films like ‘Gaman’, ‘Aagaman’, ‘Anjuman’ and ‘Jaanisaar’ to his credit. Muzaffar Ali has also made scores of television serials, documentaries and short films, mainly centered on Awadh, craft, culture, exploitation of women and Sufism. In 1991, he turned back to his roots in Kotwara and Lucknow, establishing the ‘Dwar Pe Rozi’, Employment at Doorstep movement through craft under the aegis of Kotwara Welfare Trust. Together with his architect wife Meera Ali, they established House of Kotwara, their international couture brand. Paintings are an organic extension of Muzaffar Ali’s aesthetics which has guided his intellectual and spiritual quest. For him, paintings are a dialogue of sensibilities that know no boundaries. He held his first solo show of paintings at the Academy of Fine Art in Calcutta in 1968 and has continued his journey moving with ease between sketches, watercolours, crayons, oils, installations and collages. He was awarded the Yash Bharti Award in 1994, Padma Shri in 2005 and the Rajiv Gandhi Rashtriya Sadbhavana Award in 2014. In 2004, Muzaffar Ali instituted the Rumi Foundation, which holds several Sufi festivals including the Annual World Sufi Music Festival, Jahan-e-Khusrau and the Wajid Ali Shah Festival of Conserving Cultures. The Foundation publishes regular coffee table books on Sufism. “For me and many others like me, a car is a toy. Every time I see a car, a certain playfulness awakens within me. The automobile is the greatest cult the human race has discovered for itself, both in war and peace.” ~ Muzaffar Ali

AUTOMOBILES EN VOYAGE

Metaphors in Metal

Raja Muzafar Ali of Kotwara

in support of the Kotwara Welfare Trust

A car is a statement of time. It is the slice of history. It is an aura of nostalgia. It is a celebration of design. It is a testimony to the integration of craftsmanship and ingenuity of engineering. A car is an extension of human reflexes and sensibility. A car experiences phases of rejection and appreciation. When an artist applies his art to a car a miracle is in the wings. I have seen a car in almost all its avatars. And these paintings are inspired by the memory of my father, some seen firsthand and more out of a distilled imagination. It is this that has taken me into a world within a world. My art drew me into cars. The beauty of cars in landscape, experience of landscape through cars. Sublime surrealism inspired me into the abstraction of a car design. As a child, I used to enjoy seeing the very discreet enamelled badge that read Cesare Sala. I wondered who was this person that took you away from the larger than life branding of Isotta Fraschini. It was this man who created the cerebral experience of my father's Isotta that has lived with me and influenced my sense of design and aesthetics. As I grew up in Awadh I was brought up on the images and stories of these cars and in the sixties and seventies seen them as abandoned machines in old crumbling homes. As a child I would look for this discreet badge. The Mahmudabad Minerva which stood disintegrating in Qaiserbagh where I lived too. Each car I have painted belongs to a glorious past now finding a new future for itself. This gave me a new extension to my geometry design series. I felt like a child again.