Artist and designer Adil Salahuddin is fortunate. He is alive. He can read in his lifetime this tribute to his work as an artist and designer par excellence of postage stamps. Titled Message Sent: The Life and Works of Adil Salahuddin — A Legendary Postage Stamp Designer, this sumptuous volume has been compiled by British-Pakistani author Arshi Ahmad-Aziz, who writes corporate histories, and is sponsored by a bank. The book contains a summation of Salahuddin’s educational background, the making of him as an artist, his graduation from an artist to a stamp designer and a collage of the numerous stamps he designed over his 37-year long career with the Pakistan Security Printing Corporation (PSPC). There is also a chapter on conversations with him, tributes from his friends and colleagues and, finally, a survey of Pakistan’s genesis and growth as a nation as seen in its stamps.  

I have known Salahuddin since 1966 when he was a student at the National College of Arts (NCA) and I worked in an honorary capacity at the Lahore Museum, cataloguing its superb collection of miniature paintings. The NCA was at that time under the principalship of Professor Shakir Ali, one of Pakistan’s earliest modernist painters. Khalid Iqbal — the artist who gave Punjab’s landscape a new identity — headed the NCA’s department of fine arts. Both men played a seminal influence in transforming Salahuddin into one of the most significant designers of his generation.

In the autumn of 1966, Salahuddin and his batch-mate Muhammad Asif — both lean and wiry — had grown tired of painting the old models hired on its shoestring budget by the NCA. Iqbal approached me and suggested that as I provided a younger face, I might like to sit for these two budding painters. The first portraits they made of me made me look like a wooden mannequin. By the time I quit the museum the following summer, their skills had improved immeasurably. The second portraits they did showed me standing, full-length, with my arms folded across my chest. They submitted these works in their thesis portfolio. I never found out what happened to these paintings. Perhaps they are still buried somewhere in the vaults of the NCA, waiting like some buried Pharaoh to be unearthed.  

A sumptuous volume is not only a tribute to a legendary stamp designer, but also a visual chronicle of Pakistan’s history and diversity

Salahuddin graduated. He moved to Karachi and took up employment with the PSPC, a body established by the Government of Pakistan in 1949 to make us independent in our needs for currency and stamps as most countries at the time — certainly those in the British empire — depended for their bank notes and currency on the firm of De La Rue in distant England.

The first adhesive British stamp was issued in 1840. Known as the Penny Black, it featured an image of Queen Victoria against a severe black background (and this was years before she went into mourning after the death of her husband, her beloved Prince Albert). Just over a hundred years later, Pakistan used — as its first stamps after independence — the image of her great-grandson King George VI, over-printed with the proud announcement “Pakistan.”

The first Pakistani stamps (still printed by De La Rue) came out on July 9, 1948. The highest denomination of Rs 1 bore a floral design by the immortal artist Abdur Rahman Chughtai. The lower denominations of three and a half annas depicted the Lahore Fort’s entrance, the one of two and a half annas showed the Stargate at Karachi airport, and the one and a half anna stamp featured the Constituent Building (now the Sindh Assembly Building) in Karachi. (Interestingly, there were none of East Pakistan). The latter three stamps were designed by Rashiduddin and Muhammad Latif.

In 1967, Salahuddin joined the team of 16 designers and engravers at the PSPC, drawn from East and West Pakistan. He recalled that the East Pakistanis were more skilled in watercolours, the West Pakistanis in oils. A year after joining, on April 7, 1968, Salahuddin saw his first design issued. The stamp commemorated the 20th anniversary of the World Health Organisation.

For the next 37 years, Salahuddin worked at the PSPC — rising from being one of its many designers to becoming general manager of the corporation. His longevity spelled more than survival; it spoke of a rare talent that enabled him to prepare designs for more than 600 stamps during his long, fecund career. He introduced innovations such as stamps shaped as parallelograms, in one continuous panorama spread over five stamps (the UNESCO campaign to save Mohenjodaro, 1976), and over six (depicting the Lahore Fort).

In retrospect, as is evident from Ahmad-Aziz’s painstakingly assembled book, the range of Salahuddin’s creativity is formidable. Working as he had to at the beginning using the miniature technique he learned at the NCA under Ustad Haji Sharif, Salahuddin acquired the ability to compress his ideas and images by hand into the confines of a minute rectangle. The boon of computer-assisted designs came much later. For inspiration, Salahuddin drew upon every facet of Pakistan — its archaeology, its history, its geography, topography, wildlife, natural resources, its heroes, its politicians, its poets, its painters and its sportsmen. However, this book is not a comprehensive catalogue of all the designs Salahuddin prepared throughout his PSPC career; it is more an album recording his journey over the artistic Himalayas of his life. It serves also as a vivid, visual chronicle of our nation’s history and diversity.

Stamps are normally issued in four main categories: definitive stamps (standard designs released from time to time); commemorative stamps to mark special, national or international events; special stamps on themes or subjects of particular interest; and service stamps for official use. Each category has not only provided the public with colourful stamps with which to adorn their correspondence (back in the day when letter-writing was still fashionable) but fed a vibrant, voracious market of philatelists. For them, the novelty is the stamp; the exciting coup is to find a stamp with a misprint or imperfect perforation or un-recallable mistake. A fascinating example of the latter is one prepared by the PSPC for the opening of the Faisal Mosque in Islamabad by its patron King Faisal of Saudi Arabia. Overconfident that the event would take place on the appointed date (Oct 11, 1976), the Post Office issued the stamp and then discovered that the event had been cancelled. It was too late to recall all the stamps and those already in the market became valuable collectors’ items.

Towards the end of this beautifully printed volume — as much a collector’s item as Salahuddin’s colourful stamps — the author invites the artist to choose 10 of his favourite stamps. It is a cruel request, in a way an insidious responsibility, such as asking a horse breeder to select the 10 best from amongst his thoroughbreds. Not surprisingly, Salahuddin’s three heroes — Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Quaid-i-Awam Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Quaid-i-Mussawari Professor Shakir Ali — figure amongst them.

In 2015, Salahuddin gave his more tangible assets — an enviable collection of world stamps — to the State Bank of Pakistan. His life and talent he had already devoted to the PSPC. His creativity remains an enduring legacy to our country as do his inimitable designs. They compress in miniature the gamut of every aspect of our national identity.

The reviewer is an art historian

Message Sent: The Life and Works of Adil Salahuddin — a
Legendary Postage Stamp Designer
By Arshi Ahmad Aziz
Printed by Topical, Lahore
220pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, April 22nd, 2018