Sadequain – father of Islamic calligraphy in Pakistan

Syed Sadequain was a master muralist and his murals adorn the halls of the State Bank of Pakistan, the Power House at the Mangla Dam, the Lahore Museum, the Aligarh Muslim University, the Banaras Hindu University, and the Geological Institute of India among others.
Sadequain was a social commentator whose murals generally depict man’s endless quest to discover and develop the endless potentialities that lie within him and without. The whole pageant of man’s triumphal progress – past, present and future – is captured in line and colour in one magnificent form. His murals are densely filled and tightly packed with images to render adequately the lofty subject.
The images are not only rich in symbolic meaning, but visually so much variegated that the eye travels fascinated from point to point. Sadequain was responsible for the renaissance of Islamic calligraphy in Pakistan. He was one of the greatest calligraphers of his time who transformed the art of calligraphy into eye-catching expressionist paintings.
His calligraphy was endowed with divine inspiration giving it a dimension of space and movement. He carried the script with a flourish in all directions, giving it the power of space, vigour and volume.
In Pakistan, the art of calligraphy was relegated to a second-class status until Sadequain adopted this medium in the late 1960s. Before that time, a few painters experimented with the medium, but it remained just that – an experiment.
After Sadequain transformed the art of calligraphy into a mainstream art form, most of the known Pakistani artists have followed Sadequain and calligraphic art now dominates the art scene.
Sadequain also painted in bold form the poetic verses of Ghalib, Iqbal and Faiz, which illustrate his love for classical literature.
He belonged to the school of thought that enriched realism with lyricism. He also wrote and published thousands of quartets. Sadequain is the only painter who has been copied openly and widely by many painters and even the copies fetch large sums to the copiers – an irony since the artist himself hardly ever sold his works, despite offers coming from the royals and the common public.