Lahore was more than a city to Sadequain; it was a stage for the convergence of art, poetry, and civic imagination. Arriving in the 1970s, he spent nearly a decade transforming public spaces, galleries, and institutions into arenas where murals, calligraphy, and verse intersected to reflect human struggle, perseverance, and moral inquiry. For him, the city offered both inspiration and audience, a space in which creativity could engage with ordinary people rather than elite drawing rooms. The motifs that recur throughout his work — cacti, crows, spider webs, and snakes — symbolise resilience, the consequences of desire, and the universal fight for survival, anchoring his aesthetic in lived human experience.
Sadequain’s formative years had already prepared him for such a synthesis of art and life. Born on 30 June 1930 in Amroha, Uttar Pradesh, into a family of calligraphers, he explored painting and poetry from childhood. Early practice on walls and school desks drew reprimands, yet he persisted. Following his matriculation in 1944, he moved to Delhi and worked at All India Radio, coming into contact with leading literary figures of the time. Around the age of sixteen, his first collection of poetry, Juzv-e-Boseeda, appeared, signalling his early literary engagement. Despite financial hardship, he completed a graduation certificate in the history of art from Agra University in 1948. After Partition, he moved to Pakistan, working first as a teacher and later at radio, and gained recognition as a painter in 1955 with his first exhibition, ironically titled An Exhibition by an Unknown Painter, at the home of Hussain Shaheed Suhrawardy.
A pivotal moment in his visual language came in 1957 near Karachi’s Gadani coast, where he became absorbed by the cactus, its stubborn growth in harsh conditions a metaphor for human perseverance. Alongside cacti, crows, snakes, and spider webs, he developed a visual vocabulary devoted to ordinary human struggle. He explained in interviews that he avoided painting pretty landscapes or flowers because his concern was with poverty, grief, and survival. This social commitment extended beyond motifs: Sadequain rejected the role of drawing-room artist, calling himself a dustbin artist, and refused to sell artworks in order to preserve the bond between artist and public.
It is in Lahore, however, that these impulses found their most enduring expression. He reflected:
جس کے لیے دنیا کا ہر اک شہر تھا وا
لاہور کا ہو کر رہ گیا ہے وہ شخص
His attachment to Lahore also becomes clearer when one considers the long imprint of Delhi on his formative years. A substantial portion of his youth unfolded there, and although Partition brought him to Pakistan, he never erased from memory the soil of Khusrau and Ghalib. He returned to India repeatedly and at times stayed for years, sustaining a private continuity with the city that shaped him. Lahore, with its cultural temperament and even with echoes in the architecture of its old quarters, offered a familiarity that resonated with those earlier experiences. In its atmosphere he recognised something of the Delhi of his youth, and in that recognition, he framed his own sense of arrival, writing:
مجھ حسن پرست نے جو دلی چھوڑی
لاہور کی پھر آب و ہوا راس آئی
Sadequain rejected the role of drawing-room artist, calling himself a 'dustbin artist,' and refused to sell artworks in order to preserve the bond between artist and public
Within Lahore, his engagement with calligraphy grew into a sustained and defining project. Many art historians regard his work as a decisive impulse behind the modern revival of calligraphic art, and it was here that he even devised a new script of his own. He was keenly aware of the significance of what he was doing and took open pride in the belief that his art added to the city’s splendour and reputation. That conviction surfaces again and again in his rubais, where personal achievement is inseparable from his celebration of Lahore:
نقاشی کی اندور کا پانی پی کر
کی شاعری بجنور کا پانی پی کر
جب مرکز خطاطی میں آیا، مَیں نے
خطاطی کی لاہور کا پانی پی کر
۔۔۔۔۔
جو خط کیا لاہور میں، مَیں نے ایجاد
اُس کی ملی کچھ مشرق وسطیٰ ہی میں داد
اس بات پر لاہور کو کرتے ہیں سلام
شیراز و دمشق و قاہرہ و بغداد
Even so, his engagement with Lahore was never confined to calligraphy alone, for poetry occupied an equally serious share of his creative energy. At one extraordinary moment he set aside all other commitments and, within a single day and night, composed 250 rubais, an astonishing feat given that the rubai is counted among the most demanding poetic forms. This episode shows that his authority over language matched his command of colour, the same restless inventiveness moving between brush and word. Reflecting on the rubais shaped in Lahore, he writes:
لاہور میں، مَیں نے شاعری کی یارو
کچھ ایسے ہے میری ہر رباعی یارو
ہائے مثنوی ’باد مخالف‘ جیسے
کلکتے میں غالب نے لکھی تھی یارو
Yet the same city that nourished his creativity also became the setting for a storm that unsettled literary and artistic circles. One exhibition provoked not only sharp criticism of Sadequain but also public taunts, abuse, and even stone-throwing directed at the Punjab government, and an explosion during the show destroyed many of the paintings. By this stage, his thinking had undergone a transformation, particularly after he was chosen to illustrate an edition of a book by the Nobel laureate Albert Camus. That opportunity exposed him closely to currents in modern Western painting. On returning, he embarked on a series of colourful drawings and sketches that were presented at the Lahore Art Gallery under the title Kiss. At the entrance he placed the following rubai:
لو کر چکا صادقین ترک اسلام
خطاطی نہیں۔ اب بناتا ہے اصنام
ماتھے پہ اب وہ کھینچ رہا ہے قشقہ
کل لوح پہ لکھتا تھا جو اللہ کے نام
The exhibition did not pass quietly into Lahore’s cultural calendar; instead, it ignited a storm that revealed how sharply opinion could divide around a changing artist. Many among the self-appointed guardians of taste reacted with visible alarm and, in an act that became symbolic of the moment, some of the paintings were eventually set ablaze. Newspapers, most prominently Nawa-e-Waqt, attacked the works as un-Islamic, framing the exhibition as a moral breach rather than an aesthetic experiment. Yet the backlash did not go unanswered. Leading literary figures, including Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi, and Ashfaq Ahmed, publicly defended him, and the agitation grew so intense that thirty-two writers felt compelled to issue a joint statement clarifying his intent. The debate even reached the Punjab Assembly, where Aitzaz Ahsan spoke in his support. Sadequain, for his part, answered not with manifestos but with verse:
چھوڑوں کیوں کر میں گلستان لاہور؟
کانٹے اور پھول ہیں نشان لاہور
مجھ پر برہم ہیں واعظان لاہور
لیکن خوش ہیں مَہ وشان لاہور
۔۔۔۔۔۔
حال آج تو ناساز کرے گا لاہور
گالی سے سرفراز کرے گا لاہور
لیکن میں یہاں آ کر رہا تھا کئی سال
اس بات پہ کل ناز کرے گا لاہور
۔۔۔۔۔۔
کہہ سکتا ہوں صاف صاف جیسے میں ہوں
اب منزل معرفت میں کیسے میں ہوں ؟
جیسے کبھی دلی میں تھا سرمد بالکل
لاہور میں اس دور میں ایسے میں ہوں
And yet, the relationship did not curdle into contempt. In the preface to his rubais he combined reverence with defiance, insisting on his respect for the pious and the learned while affirming Lahore as the greatest centre of calligraphy in the Indo-Pak subcontinent. Tradition, for him, was not a closed inheritance but a living continuum that required creation, innovation, and invention.
In the book’s concluding note, he returned to Lahore with even greater intimacy, writing that the hatred of a few opportunists was no more than “a small packet of salt in thousands of tons of sugar made of love”. In one rubai he framed the bond in a striking comparison with Michelangelo and Rome:
جو مائیکل اینجلو کو رومہ سے تھی ہائے
لاہور سے مجھ کو وہی نسبت ہے حضور
……………..
لیلائے ہنر ہے اگر بنت لاہور
پھر واقعی لاہور کا داماد ہوں میں
This attachment materialised in the city’s public spaces. During his long stay he created works for numerous institutions, most prominently the Lahore Museum, where he discovered a long-locked basement and turned it into his studio. For the vast mural on the museum ceiling he often worked lying flat for punishing stretches of time. Zahida Hina records an eyewitness scene that captures both the physical toll and the devotion behind it, describing how after thirty hours of work his fingers had to be soaked in hot water before they would release the brush. Beyond the museum he produced murals for the Punjab Public Library, Staff College Lahore, and the University of the Punjab, hanging them as what he called a dervish’s gift.
His love for Lahore emerges again in a travel anecdote that he reshapes into a personal credo. Recalling the Second World War, he notes that Paris was chosen as the first city to be liberated for its symbolic value, prompting the cry “See Paris and die,” later corrected to the older proverb, “See Naples and die.” Having seen both cities himself without feeling any such finality, Sadequain reworked the saying in light of his own attachment: Paris may be dear to the French and Naples to the Italians, yet Lahore is dear to him, and after all his travels, it was Lahore that his heart declared the place where one could die.
He then renders this sentiment in Punjabi verse:
نیپلز کا چُمن لئی در جاواں گا
ایہہ اکھاں گا پیرس میں جیکر جاواں گا
ایہہ سوچ کہ جو لاہور آیا میتھوں
دل آکھیا ہن اِتھے ای مر جاؤں گا
The same idea appears again in Urdu:
شہروں سے مئے عشق پئیے آیا ہوں
خود اپنے کفن کو سئیے آیا ہوں
یہ سوچ کہ اک اچھی جگہ مر جاؤں
لاہور میں مرنے کے لیے آیا ہوں
Sadequain’s gift to Lahore was not merely his murals, poetry, or calligraphy, but the ongoing encounter he created between art and the public. The challenge now is not only to preserve his work, but to sustain the intellectual and creative life it demands. While the gallery at the Lahore Museum acknowledges his presence, Sadequain, who declared himself neither disciple nor master but a figure of perpetual creation and invention, entrusted the city with something far greater than objects on display. To preserve his murals without renewing the habits of study, interpretation, and critical engagement they require would reduce a radical modernist vision to mere heritage décor.
A Lahore shaped by his hand must also be shaped by the serious teaching of his thought, enabling future generations to encounter him not as an ornamental name but as a central force in South Asian modernism, where calligraphy, painting, poetry, and the civic imagination converge. Only through such a continuum of memory and inquiry can the city truly reciprocate his gift. The real custodianship of Sadequain lies not merely in safeguarding what he made, but in extending the restless, inventive, and public-facing conversation he began — a conversation through which Lahore continues to remake itself.