Sadequain

Biography

Sadequain worked on the ceiling of a hall in Frere Hall in Karachi until his death. The mural “Arz-o-Samawat” (“Earth and the Heavens”) remained unfinished and is regarded as his last work.

He was born in Amroha, in Uttar Pradesh, into an educated Shia family that considered calligraphy a valuable skill. By his own account he owned seven Qurans copied by his ancestors and relatives. Sources give different years of birth, 1923 and 1930; the day, 30 June, is the same. He studied at the University of Agra and graduated in 1948. As a teenager he painted anti-British slogans on the walls of Delhi, and he earned a living with maps and textbook illustrations. After the partition of India in 1947 his family moved to Pakistan and settled in the Nazimabad district of Karachi; he himself, by some accounts, followed in the early 1950s. In the late 1940s he joined the Progressive Writers’ and Artists’ Movement.

His first murals, at Jinnah Hospital and at the headquarters of the airline PIA, date from the 1950s; their fate is unknown. In 1960 he received the Tamgha-i-Imtiaz, a Pakistani state decoration, and first prize at the All Pakistan National Exhibition, and in 1962 the Pride of Performance award. The International Association of Plastic Arts invited him to Paris in December 1960, and in 1961 he received an award at the Paris Biennale. In 1962 he had exhibitions in Le Havre and Paris, and in 1963 he showed his work in the United States.

In 1961 came the mural “Treasures of Time” in the head office of the State Bank of Pakistan: a procession of thinkers from Socrates to Iqbal and Einstein, scholars of the Middle East, humanists of the Renaissance. Later murals followed at Mangla Dam (1967), in the Punjab University library (1968) and in the Lahore Museum (1973: the ceiling of the entrance hall, showing the evolution of mankind, and nine calligraphic panels for the Islamic gallery). In 1979 he worked in Abu Dhabi, and in 1981 he travelled through India: Aligarh, Banaras, Hyderabad, Delhi. In all he made more than thirty-five large murals for public buildings. He preferred to paint on public buildings rather than in private houses, and often worked without payment, calling the work a gift to the citizens.

In the 1960s he lived in the desert areas of Sindh and on the coast at Gadani. Wild cacti growing in the heat on sand became for him a sign of labour and perseverance. The series “Cobweb”, “Crow”, “Christ”, “Hope” and “Sun” date from the same time, and in them he commented on public life. The cobweb, as he conceived it, entangled people and deprived them of speech and movement. In the mid-1960s he made lithographs for Albert Camus’s “The Stranger”, and later he illustrated poems by Ghalib, Iqbal and Faiz.

In the last months of 1969 and the first months of 1970 he composed, inscribed and illustrated hundreds of rubaiyat. In the preface he wrote that an ideal book would combine the quatrains of Omar Khayyam, the hand of the calligrapher Yaqut and the drawings of Mani, but it would still be a group show, and so he decided to do it all himself. The Literary Society of Pakistan awarded the collection first prize. He published four books at his own expense: “Rubaiyyat-e-Sadequain Naqqash” (with more than two hundred drawings), “Rubaiyyat-e-Sadequain Khattat”, “Rubaiyyat-e-Sadequaini” and “Juzw-e-Bosida”, with poems from his teenage years.

In an interview in 1971 he said that he was an artist of the gutter and that his art was for the people. Asked whether he was a communist, he answered that if communism meant that people had the right to clothe themselves, eat and have shelter, then yes. He wrote calligraphy in his own way, without relying on established tradition, and to my mind this is what chiefly sets him apart from his predecessors. Until the late 1960s calligraphy was hardly taken seriously as painting in Pakistan, and after him it became a prominent direction, with many well-known Pakistani artists following him. He belongs to the Hurufiyya movement, in which traditional script was brought into contemporary art.

In 1975 he received a cultural award (in Australia according to some sources, in Austria according to others), in 1980 the Sitara-i-Imtiaz, and in 1982 the Gold Mercury International Award. He rarely accepted awards and usually did not take the prize money.

Sadequain died on 10 February 1987 at a clinic in Karachi and was buried in the Sakhi Hassan cemetery. In 2021 he was posthumously awarded Nishan-i-Imtiaz, the highest Pakistani civilian honour. After his death the gallery named after him in Islamabad was dismantled, about two hundred paintings are unaccounted for, and forty calligraphic panels on marble slabs have disappeared. In 2003 the exhibition “The Holy Sinner” was held at Mohatta Palace in Karachi and drew more than ninety thousand visitors; a volume of about 700 pages was published to accompany it.