He led a saintly life in his last days at home in the suburbs of Narail, which is an abandoned musical hall of the local zamindar. The maverick man painted and threw away his paintings as his pleasure was in making works of art, not in possessing them.
Nobody can say the exact number of paintings he created in his vagabond life in Kolkata, Kashmir, Karachi, Dhaka, Jessore and Narail. In fact, his whole life was spent like the rhymes of an epic depicting the pastoral scenes on huge canvases as his expressions of divine love.
Though Sultan was an ascetic by nature, the characters of his paintings are simple family bound people such as peasants and rural women.
This contradiction in his artworks has made him unique and correctly Cambridge University declared Sheikh Mohammad Sultan as the Man of Asia in 1982.
In fact, Sultan as an artist has no follower and he never followed any school of art, though sometimes people misinterpret him by comparing his works with European classical paintings done by Rafael, Vinci and Michelangelo as the theme of Sultan’s works and that of the European masters are similar: expressions of divinity through humane images.
But, the subject of the European classics and Sultan’s canvases are never similar. When the European masters articulated their conventional religious beliefs in classics such as David and The Last Supper; Sultan, being the follower non-conventional belief, expressed his divine love through the robust human images of farmers, fishermen, people doing household chores and toiling men and women.
For instance, his masterpiece titled First Plantation, Sultan glorifies human beings by depicting a gigantic image of Adam who plants a tree into the soil looking downwards in confident manner. Eve and an angel help him doing that in the art piece, which, is of course, contests the conventional belief where Adam regrets eating the forbidden fruit in the heaven.
And in terms of grammars of art, Sultan was never being a perfectionist like the western classical painters were since Sultan never got involved in productive enterprises and public welfare initiatives rather art was his devotion.
Still many art critics across the world consider him as the ‘Voice of Asia’ for his outstanding ability in depicting the struggles of masses for survival against the odds.
In fact, the minstrel Sultan has glorified the beauty of soul in art as his offerings to his deity just as mystic musicians worship through their music.
From the biographies narrated by Sultan’s friends and companions, it is obvious that the artist developed such thought after the partition of the subcontinent in 1947 while his encounters with the mystic musicians in Pakistan like Hafizuddin Binkaar for whom music was devotion and not art.
After his US and Europe tour, the Pakistani critiques recognised Sultan as the most promising painter of the then Pakistan. But, he had no intention to be established in Karachi, the then hub of the artists, nor had he accepted the offers he got after returning to Dhaka in the 1950s.
Rather, he chose the abandoned palace of the local zemindar near his ancestral house in Narail, an agriculturally developed area where many bauls also live.
There in the isolated place the ascetic artist nurtured his own belief and narrated it on his lyrical epic canvases such as Journey, After Storm, Grabbing of Rising Land and Fishing.
He imagined himself as Radha, who is sometimes personified as a human being urging reunion with the incarnation of God expressed as Krishna in Viasnavism. And sometimes in sari, Sulatn used to play flute looking for Radha in the dark midnight.
The locals used to treat him as a narcotics addict insane, but Sultan in his huge canvases glorified the inner energy of his neighbours to win the nature in the backdrop of either the arable lands or a village.
He also initiated a school for the welfare of the people of the locality.
In many classical paintings such as Harvesting Paddy, Peasants at Work, Crushing Paddy and others Sultan saw the farmers as a devotee of the land, putting in his very blood, sweat and tears to extract every last drop of life and wealth from the soil.
In the paintings like Billowing Paddy, Crushing Paddy 2, Fetching Water and others, Sultan glorifies the contribution of the rural women.
In fact, Sultan could successfully relate the masses with his own belief by glorifying humanism as his expressions of divine love, for which the artist is always contemporary.
New Age pays tribute to the master artist on his 19th death anniversary today.
-With New Age input
