Amroha, Uttar Pradesh: Mustajab Ahmed Siddiqui is possibly the most widely exhibited artist in India. His busty women, half-crazed men and shiny guns populate scores and scores of bookstalls, on railway platforms and sidewalks, in teashops and dhabas across North India.
His vivid art graces the covers of Hindi pulp novels from almost every leading publishing house that traffics in these tales of lust, horror, revenge and exotic death. Better known as “Shelle”, Siddiqui is, as one enthusiastic publisher put it, “the king of the field”.
But, as publishing houses increasingly hire in-house graphic designers with Photoshop and CorelDraw skills, and some even abandon their lines of novels altogether, it is questionable whether Shelle is king of the field, or more simply the last man standing in the field.
“There used to be more, but they’ve all stopped working now. Shelle is the only one left,” says Shagun Sharma, managing director of the Meerut-based Tulsi Paper Books, which employs five full-time designers and publishes 10 novels every month. “We wanted more control over the designs, to change the shapes and colours as we wanted,” Sharma says. Only occasionally now does Tulsi Paper Books commission art from Shelle.
Branching out: Artist Mustajab Ahmed Siddiqui ‘Shelle’ with his oil paintings at his studio in Amroha, UP. Having painted Hindi pocket book covers for more than 30 years, Shelle hopes to exhibit his work in galliers. (Harikrishna Katragadda / Mint)
Shelle lives in his family’s ancestral house in Amroha, 130km of backbreaking roads from New Delhi. He is greyed and 60, but in his compact sturdiness, he could pass effortlessly for 40. He has lived away from Amroha only once —when, after getting his bachelor’s degree in drawing and English from Agra University, he taught art at an institute in Chandpur, near Amroha.
“But then I reasoned,” Shelle says in his courteous, old-world Hindi, “my entire family is in Amroha. Why should I stay away? So when I began doing covers professionally, I moved back home.”
Out of his first-floor studio —a long room, warm with colour and light—Shelle works on cover designs for half-a-dozen publishers.
He sits snugly behind a large expanse of desk, his paints to his right, an old radio and a tape player to his left, and shoeboxes full of Lata Mangeshkar and Mohammad Rafi tapes behind him.
Movie inspiration
Shelle’s designs draw heavily from the world of cinema. On the jacket of Surendra Mohan Pathak’s Aath Din (“He was a cheat by profession. Can he cheat the angel of death for eight days?”), a man resembling Bruce Willis in Die Hard 4 crouches in one corner. Dead centre is a Katrina Kaif look-alike, looking prettily and fearfully away from a maniac with the face of Sylvester Stallone.
Once Shelle sends out his draft watercolours, three times larger than the scale of the book jacket, he effectively hands over copyright for all the designs to the publisher.