Sadequain (1930-1987) was an artist extraordinaire; he was not only a legendry painter, but also an accomplished calligrapher, a visionary thinker, and a sensitive and romantic poet. After 21 years of his passing away, a new wave of appreciation of his work is traversing the global village.

Sadequain used an array of forms and media — calligraphy, modern painting, classical sculpture and modern sketches — to convey his points, messages, commentaries, and satires on society. Paying tribute to Sadequain's skill and craft, Le Monde, Paris observed, “The multiplicity of Sadequain's gifts is reminiscent of Picasso.” (Le Monde et. lavie, Paris, April, 1964). According to Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Sadequain was a visionary whose phantasmagorical creations expressed the emotional and social unity of all material things caught up in an upward struggle.

Sadequain used cool colours to depict realism, impressionism, and abstraction in his work. He practised his art all over the globe and his quest to enhance and augment his skills and art took him from Amroha to Karachi, London to Paris, and Washington to Tokyo. In the 1960s, his work was very much admired on both sides of the Atlantic.
Sadequain synthesised his observations and ideas using various forms of lines, contours, and colours. His characteristic style of using wavy lines in his illustrations is very effective in portraying his subjects' struggle to adjust to new environments and changing times. Nature had given him special tools to practise his craft a very fertile and imaginative mind, and hands with long brush-like fingers.

His fertile mind synthesised the beauty of cosmos around him, and his fingers transformed his synthesis of ideas and observations into exquisite depictive forms. But it appears that Sadequain's quest to express the beauty that he found around him remained elusive. His struggle, to capture and express the beauty of his environment and cosmos, parallels that of the expression by poet Tulsi Das

Sita sobha kahe bakane
Mukh bin nain, nain bin bane.

How can one describe the beauty
of Sita
A mouth has no eyes,
And eyes cannot speak.

In an attempt to capture and express this elusive beauty, Sadequain used different forms of expressions and media drawing, sketches, paintings, sculpture, miniature calligraphies and murals.

In his sketches he has depicted human failure to be moral, and man's inability to adjust to the changing social environment. Commenting on this dilemma, Mazher Yousuf, in the publisher's note of Sadequain, a book that documents sketches and illustrations by Sadequain (published by Editions Mystique, Karachi, in 1966) observes “Sadequain feels that man is not the same as he was. Man survived the ages as he adapted himself to nature and mastered the primitive world. But now, due to his own modern discoveries and inventions, he is getting out of gear with the world of his own thought, experimentation and creation. His nervous system is being strained to limits. Sadequain sees this and shows this.”

He further observes “His men and women, wrung out of shape and contour, and scattered as chaff in the whirl-wind of their own creation, are the ugly testimony to the irony of fate they had hoped was their destiny. This mastery of depiction gives Sadequain a ranking amongst the unforgettable artists of the world of today and tomorrow.”

In the same title, Faiz Ahmed Faiz also observes “With the commencement of his phantasmagorical exploration of form and substance, there emerges a series of abstract visual statements, strong and subtle, stripping, anatomising and recreating the skeletal forms beneath the visual flesh — skeletons of streets and cities, weeds and plants, men and women. In the process, he also evolved a new essential unity of material credo of the essential unity of material things, all caught in the agonising toils of an evolutionary process of struggle goading them upwards.”

Sadequain's new hybrid technique of mixing Naksh and Nastaliq calligraphy with abstraction gave a new life to Islamic Calligraphy. He got critical acclaim for his renditions of the verses of the Quran. His artistic renditions of the verse “Which of your Lord's blessing will you deny?”(5516, The Quran), a refrain repeated 31 times in Surah Al-Rehman (The Merciful), is regarded as the masterpiece of his calligraphic work.

Sadequain also brought forth the meaning of poetic expressions of Ghalib, Iqbal, and Faiz through his artistic renditions. He also tried his hand at poetry by writing Rubai (a genre consisting of four lines generally used in Urdu and Persian poetry). Like his paintings, his Rubiyyat address different facets and domains of human nature.
Syed Sadequain Ahmed Naqvi was born on June 25, 1930 at Amroha, U.P., India. He hailed from the Naqvi family of Sadaat-i-Amroha. After matriculation in 1944, he graduated from Agra University in 1948. He then joined All-India Radio as a staff artist in September 1944, and served there until September 1948, after which he took the job of teaching art at I M High School, Amroha. He remained there until June 1948 when he migrated to Pakistan.
In February 1960, he set up his studio at Sandspit beach, Karachi, and in March he was awarded 'Tamgha-e-Imtiaz' by the president of Pakistan. In July 1960, he won the first prize in the All Pakistan National Exhibition of Paintings, and in September he held his one-man exhibition sponsored by the Arts council of Pakistan at Karachi.
In December 1960, Sadequain visited London, and in January 1961, he arrived in Paris on the invitation of the French Committee of the International Association of Plastic Arts. In September 1961 he executed a mural at the Headquarters of the State Bank of Pakistan, Karachi. In September 1961 he participated in the second Biennale of Paris, and in October, he was awarded 'Laureate Biennale de Paris'. In March 1962, he was awarded President's Medal for 'Pride of Performance'.

Shamim Ahmed, in book titled Sadequain, throws some light on how Sadequain found fame by discovering a new art form “Breaking though the cliché-barrier, Sadequain has discovered a new art form for him self which he calls 'mystic figuration'. The new art form got a flying start when the first attempt at mystic figuration 'The last supper' won Sadequain the Biennale (1961) award in Paris...

“The way of all discovery, mystic figuration was discovered by accident, or be more precise though as series of accidents, which landed Sadequain on the wild shores of primitive Gadani, 35 miles west of Karachi. Before the discovery, Sadequain was what environment made him.” (Sadequain, published by Pakistan Publications Karachi, 1963, p.7).

In 1983, Sadequain focused his energies on composing Rubiyyats, and in 1984 he started writing his autobiography. In 1985, he did rendition of the poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz. In 1986, he painted calligraphic mural at the Shah Faisal Mosque, Islamabad, and also started painting a mural on the ceiling of Frere Hall, Karachi. This was Sadequain's last major project. Before he could finish it he fell ill in January 1987, and passed away on February 10, 1987.

Sadequain was a simple, humble and down-to-earth person. Through his art he reached the zenith of fame, but he never forgot his roots and never tried to distance himself from ordinary people around him. He never sold any of his painting; most of them were given away as gifts or were stolen. He believed in sharing his gift with society; he gave away his gift of art in form of big murals at public buildings.

In a nutshell, his paintings depict the complex snap shots of human struggle on a continuum of time and space. As he has eloquently said in one of his of Rubai published in Bayaz-e-Sadequain (p.85)

Qar'tass pay jab Naqsh bana'yah maiN nay
Toh Umer ka Sar'maya laga'ya maiN nay
Aik Jaal Lakee'rooN ka bu'nah aur iss maiN
AurR'tay hu'way lam'hooN ko phansa'ya maiN nay

In depicting images on paper
I have invested capital of my lifetime,
I have spun a web of lines, and in it
Captured the passing moments of time

Dr Ahmed S Khan (askhan@devry.edu) is a senior Professor in the EET dept. at DeVry University, Addison, Illinois.