Happy birthday to ‘Voice of Asia’ SM Sultan

SM Sultan is an unparalleled name in our world of art and literature. He was literally a son of soil. A bohemian by nature he used to vanish sometimes without telling anyone. He lived in his home in Narail with wild animals and rare species of venomous snakes. It was a dark, abandoned house which once belonged to a zamindar of Narail. Bushes and moss surrounded the house on the banks of the Chitra River.

Poisonous snakes had already been living there. Sultan cleared the jungle surrounding the house and eventually began to live there. But he did not kill any animal, including snakes. They were members of the family. He would wrap a snake around his neck and kiss it. Crows would come and sit on his hand, eat food, and fly back to the tree branches, only to return again. This art-loving, world-renouncing man lived in an old building by the jungle. His companions were monkeys, cats, mongrel dogs, and a flock of chickens. It was as though he mingled not with so-called humans but with nature itself. He built himself into an artist living so close to nature and so intertwined with the roots.

The eminent artist SM Sultan portrayed the rise of inner strength of mankind in his colourful canvases. He immortalised the immense power of the peasants in the archives of eternity and showed that the poor farmers are not weak. Today marks the 101st birth anniversary of Sultan, the great painter of an art language fused with equality and beauty in opposition to discrimination. He was born on this day, August 10, 1924, at Machimdia village in Narail.

Legendary photographer Nasir Ali Mamun—who had seen Sultan up close, mingled with him, and framed him through the lens—said in an interview, “Western artists, especially in Europe and Italy during the Renaissance, painted God, goddesses, and churches, but Sultan painted those who has a deep connection to the earth, those who had practised cooperative agrarian civilisation in this region for thousands of years—the country’s peasants. The people of the basins of the Jhelum and the Indus rivers began to appear on Sultan’s canvases.”

The artist’s full name was Sheikh Mohammad Sultan. However, in childhood, his father had named him Lal Mia. His father, Sheikh Mohammad Messer Ali, was a mason; but to Sultan, his father was an artist. Many designs of the then landlords’ houses were drawn by Sultan’s father. Sultan had closely observed those works, which later inspired him to become an artist.

Although he was admitted to school, he did not like studying under the strict rules of school. He spent time feeling nature. Sometimes sitting in class, sometimes sketching on the bank of the Chitra River. Schoolteacher Rangalal noticed this. Seeing Sultan’s notebooks, he realised that an artist lived within him. He wanted to nurture that inner being of Sultan. He took Sultan to his own home. There, Rangalal poured all his knowledge into Sultan. That was the beginning.

In 1950, during a tour of Europe, his paintings were exhibited in a joint exhibition alongside the works of world-famous contemporary painters Pablo Picasso, Raoul Dufy, Salvador Dalí, Paul Klee, Claude Manet, and Henri Matisse. Sultan was the only Asian artist whose paintings were exhibited alongside theirs.

In his lifetime, novels were written about him, short films were made, books were published—he became a legend. The powerful appeal of Sultan’s creations easily transcended the boundaries of place and time to take on a universal form. Evidence of this can be found in filmmaker Tareque Masud’s documentary Adam Surat. Poet Shamsur Rahman, in his essay “Sultan did not abandon his sultanate”, introduced his house: “Sultan’s house, filled with creepers and plants, bearing the scars of time, remains vivid in the memories of many. Even those of us who never went there, his surroundings and dark chambers remain alive in our imagination.”

Scholar Abdur Razzaq said of Sultan, “The ability to portray ordinary people as extraordinary is one of the key features of Sultan’s paintings. The paintings Sultan made on the subjects of Bengal and the Bengali people have transcended the boundaries of time and place to become the radiant heritage of all humanity.”

National Professor Kabir Chowdhury, in an article, mentioned the incredible variety in Sultan’s paintings and quoted the words of Peter Zewitz, then director of the Goethe-Institut in Dhaka, on Sultan: “Among the few exceptional artists of this subcontinent, Sultan is the most splendid. He is the voice of Asia.” Indeed, in his creations we see the determined and struggling people of post-colonial Asia—no, of the entire world. We also see an explosion of feelings for diverse landscapes.

Professor Borhanuddin Khan Jahangir, in his book “Indigenous Modernity, Sultan’s Work”, wrote: “Then what is Sultan? A hidden Picasso? A secret Vincent van Gogh? Sultan is both. Possibly, more.” To me, this “more” is Sultan’s deep and intense compassion and oneness with the subjects of his paintings, which has made his creations unique. Moreover, his paintings often contain a message, for which Peter Zewitz called him the “voice of Asia”. In his paintings, the anguish of struggling, deprived, and neglected people has taken on a powerful, determined, and hopeful form.

Public intellectual and writer Ahmed Sofa, who went deep into Sultan’s being and expressed his perceptions with unparalleled clarity, said, “Sultan’s peasants are immersed in the pursuit of life. They do not till the soil merely to grow crops. With the strength of their muscles, they struggle with nature and compel it to become a beautiful, fruitful mother.”

Ahmed Sofa said, “Here lies Sultan’s uniqueness. Here lies the incomparability of any artist of Bengal, or of India, with Sultan. Avanindranath, Jamini Roy, Nandalal Basu, Zainul Abedin, Abdur Rahman Chughtai, Ahmed Saeed Nagi—no matter how many differences there are among these towering artists, there remains an inherent connection among them all. None has been able to go beyond the broad definition of Indian art given by Ernest Binfield Havell—except one Sultan.”

Eminent artist Shahabuddin Ahmed, who saw Sultan very closely, described in his article “Sultan in My Memory” how recitation of poetry and discussions on philosophy left deep imprints on Sultan’s creative thinking. He wrote, “One day, after hearing my recitation of Rabindranath’s poem Prithibi (The Earth), he (Sultan) quickly painted a picture. The lines were these: In Baisakh I saw the beak of lightning pierce the horizon to snatch it away, like your storm as a black hawk…”

On his birthday, we pay our humble respects to the voice of Asia, the legendary SM Sultan.

Shahadat Hossen Towhid: Journalist