Faiz Ahmed Faiz on Sadequain

aaj tak surkh-o-siyah sadiyoñ ké saaye talay // aadam-o-havaa ki aulaad pé kiya guzri hai

“Retrospectively, he began quietly enough painting living things as appearances, but even then, in selection and treatment, he was more of a commentator than a mere naturalist? From things phenomena, he chose only those, which were alive and trying to ‘kick’ however, ineffectually. And in his social community the only living ones are those who toil like, the camel, the ox who is the hewer of wood and the drawer of water, the famished cactus, or the root under the stone. And to paint the figure together with its suffering obviously dictated a distortion of visual appearance, a juxtaposition of the conceptual and the material.

In the process, he also evolved a new social and emotional credo of the essential unity of material things, all caught in the agonizing toils of an evolutionary process of struggle goading them upwards. And now, since his return from Paris, Sadequain has once more reverted to direct social comment to depict a loveless and macabre world a world of the scare-crow acting as the Lord of blood-thirsty crows, of the harridan decked out as a beauty queen, a world of trapped tongues and cob-webbed hearts, of debased flesh and servile manners. Filtering across this world we see a Christ-like Figure perhaps meant to be autobiographical, his body covered with thorns, his head encircled by the crown of atrophied oblivion. This bitter vision of reality may not be the whole truth but it is certainly a part of it and if some of those immediately confronted with the hypocrisy and the heartlessness of a particular environment fail to own the hope beyond the despair, the failure is not entirely theirs.”

- Faiz Ahmad Faiz

Full text of the letter and the rest of Sadequain’s paintings on Faiz’s shayrs can be found here