On 26 September this year, a black and white painting by Bangladeshi artist Zainul Abedin sold at Sotheby’s in London for over half a million pounds. Listed in the catalogue as “Untitled”, it is in fact part of Zainul’s “Monpura” series.
On 12 November 1970, present-day Bangladesh was struck by the most deadly tropical cyclone that has ever been recorded; this came to be known as the Bhola Cyclone, claiming the lives of between 300,000 and 500,000 people.
The cyclone acquired an additional importance in the history of Bangladesh’s Liberation, since the response of the Pakistani government was considered inadequate at best, and discriminatory at worst, leading to an intensification of nationalist feeling in East Pakistan, as it was then called.
During the cyclone, Zainul Abedin, then one of Pakistan’s most highly regarded artists, travelled to the site of the disaster to paint the suffering that arose. He produced a highly significant body of work: the large-scale scroll painting “Monpura 70” and a number of smaller pictures, including the painting which sold last week at Sotheby’s.
This work, which sold for a world-record price for a Bangladeshi artwork at £516,000, was done in black-and-white water colour and melted wax. It is a powerful, mature work by Zainul, who is perhaps Bangladesh’s finest 20th century artist. He is best-known for his “Famine” series, depicting the starving victims of the 1943 Bengal Famine.
At the time, Zainul was a young teacher at the Government Art College in Calcutta. When the famine hit, he would see destitute and starving people every day on his way to work. He began to sketch them, quickly and simply, in black ink on plain paper. The resulting artworks are horrifying masterpieces of nightmarish realism and they are remarkable for the economy of Zainul’s brushstrokes; with just one bold black line, he conjures up the crooked body of a starving man.
Simple details, such as a crow hovering over a dead body or a rib sticking out of a child’s torso, hint at a larger and darker story. Some of these works were published as illustrations in “People’s War”, the official organ of the Communist Party of India, alongside others by Chittaprosad Bhattacharya.
After the Partition in 1947, Zainul migrated to Dhaka, close to his home district of Mymensingh. Here, alongside Bangladeshi artists Quamrul Hasan and Shafiuddin Ahmed, he set up the Faculty of Fine Arts at Dhaka University, which trained some of South Asia’s finest painters, draughtsman and printmakers.
His paintings are on display publicly in Dhaka in the Zainul Abedin Museum in Mymensingh and in a dedicated room of the National Museum in Dhaka, as well as in private collections in Bangladesh. One can also see his paintings abroad, in the Lahore Museum, the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi, and private collections in India, Pakistan, and the West.
The experiences and images of the 1943 famine stayed with Zainul throughout his career; he made suffering and resilience important themes of his work, painting, with haunting simplicity, the faces, figures, and lives of people in Bangladesh and Pakistan.
Consequently, when the Bhola cyclone struck in November 1970, he made sure to be present to capture the suffering in his art. According to the documentary “Monpura 70”, produced by Pradip Ghosh in collaboration with the late artist’s son, Mainul Abedin, Zainul would travel to the site of the cyclone at Monpura by light aircraft to paint its victims.
He made several small-scale sketches, capturing the moment, and, in 1973, worked these up into the 9.6-meter-long scroll painting “Monpura 70”. Although this is owned by the National Museum in Dhaka, it is not currently on display. However, a smaller painting, which Zainul Abedin presented to Indian PM Indira Gandhi after the Liberation of Bangladesh, is on view in in New Delhi.
Entitled “Gorki”, after the name of the cyclone, it is almost identical to the painting “Untitled” just sold at Sotheby’s, which Zainul gave as a gift to his friend Cedomil Plazek, a Croatian hydrologist who worked in Dhaka for many years and whose family owned the painting until now.
Zainul Abedin was not the only artist to take inspiration from the Bhola cyclone; his colleague and friend Quamrul Hasan also visited the site of the disaster and painted its victims in contemporaneous, black and white ink drawings. These artworks provide a powerful Bangladeshi contribution to the tradition of artistic depictions of adversity, continuing the lineage of Picasso and Goya.
The “Monpura” paintings, inspired by Bhola, build on the achievement of his earlier “Famine” works. In both cases, he has turned the immediate horror of human suffering into a profound work of art. When we look at these images, our aesthetic sense augments our intellectual understanding of that horror; they are realistic and stylised at the same time, provoking the viewer to contemplate truths beneath their surface-level simplicity.
Composed in 1970 at a fateful moment in the creation of Bangladesh, the “Monpura” series must have held deep political significance for Zainul. These paintings represent the essence of Bangladeshi art: its economical genius and its aesthetic power.
*Cyrus Naji was educated at Oxford and St Andrew’s Universities. From 2022-23, he was a Teaching Fellow at the Asian University for Women in Chittagong, Bangladesh.