Nusrat Ahmad: Pioneer of Pakistan

Nusrat Ahmad: Pioneer of Pakistan

As I walked up to the future interior designer of the Ahmad family, I wondered the extent to which Nusrat Ahmad had taken her designing career. I saw Nusrat sitting on the lush green sofa in the corner of her family room, thinking that one day she would be strategically placing sofas in other people’s houses. Belonging to a Pakistani family, I wanted to question the extent of approval she received from her family and relatives and inquire about other South Asians artists in today’s community.

Just like any other Pakistani family, Nusrat’s parents always wanted their daughter to be a doctor. As she struggled through high school with her science classes in order to please her parents, she started drawing as a hobby. Sitting bored in her Biology class, she developed a habit of drawing pictures of different organs of the human body in her notebook. She had no interest in the field and she bluntly told me that “I enjoyed drawing more than physics or biology.” (Nusrat) Her parents were unaware of her art, which started to show up at her school’s art exhibitions. Even until the end of her high school career, she did not tell her parents that she was serious about her art and wanted to pursue it, and only when she started college did she tell them that she had an avid interest in that field. They disregarded the idea, thinking of it as a childish interest and still forced her into pursuing a medical career. After the end of her first year in college, she started taking an afternoon art class with a famous abstract artist in Pakistan, Mansoor Elahi, who was well known for his murals in The Parliament, the President’s house. Even though her parents did not want her studying art, they allowed her to take that class due to her incessant nagging. Nusrat studied abstract art with him for about a year and a half, “encouraged by Mr. Elahi” (Nusrat) and most of her paintings were a reflection of his ideas. These paintings were exhibited at local art exhibitions on and off. Eventually, he told her that her paintings could be sold for about three thousand dollars a piece. At the end of her particular 2 year college career, her peers granted her the title of “Nusrat daVinci,” a tradition where the juniors award a title of how an individual has been through his/her college career upon their graduation. It is indeed such an honor to be given the name of the famous Leonardo daVinci! The two artists belong to completely different backgrounds, yet the association provided to them was great.

When I asked Nusrat if having a different cultural background and upbringing in a different country had an impact on her art now that she’s living in the United States, she calmly replied that she had a “bigger advantage over other people.” (Nusrat) Not understanding what the “bigger advantage” was, I inquired about it and she answered by calling herself “the unique one having a relation to two different cultures and presenting the cultural values in art.”(Nusrat) Nusrat’s current art contains many cultural representations like Taj Mahal, old streets in rural areas of Pakistan, and a representation of everyday life in Pakistan. Since 70% of the population in Pakistan lives under poverty, Nusrat’s art mostly depicts the lives of these poor people and paintings of their villages.

Along with interior designing, Nusrat enjoys architectural drawings as well. She switched from abstract paintings to architectural drawings because it seemed more creative to her and “the strict code of drawing was more competitive and precise as compared