The canvas of a rebel: A review of Hasnat Abdul Hye’s Sultan

The history of art in the Indian subcontinent contains few figures as towering, yet resolutely solitary, as Sheikh Mohammad (SM) Sultan. He remains an artistic anomaly, a giant whose distinctive style possesses neither an antecedent nor a precedent. He occupies a space entirely his own. It was this singular genius that prompted the critic Ahmed Sofa to mount a vociferous, deeply emotional defence of the artist in his seminal essay, Banglar Chitro Otijjo: Sultaner Sadhona (The Tradition of Painting in Bengal: Sultan’s Endeavour), a testament to the sheer weight of Sultan’s presence in the cultural landscape.

Yet, as Hasnat Abdul Hye demonstrates in his remarkable biographical novel, Sultan, it was not merely the artist’s canvas that forged his legendary status; it was his fiercely unconventional lifestyle. Published by The University Press Limited in 1991 while Sultan was still alive, the novel confronts a gargantuan task. Much of Sultan’s early life, much like his pre-1976 solo exhibition paintings, had been shrouded in oblivion. Hasnat Abdul Hye steps into this vacuum, not merely as a biographer, but as a novelist navigating the delicate boundary between fact and fiction.

Writing this novel during the protagonist’s lifetime offered a distinct advantage: the author could consult the maestro directly to clarify historical details or his philosophical stances. Indeed, Hasnat writes himself into the narrative as a character, explicitly stating that he was not attempting a conventional biographical novel, but rather “a novel on the process of writing one.”

This meta-fictional approach highlights the inherent difficulty of the project. Maintaining the emotional neutrality and aesthetic distance required for an unbiased study of a living, hyper-sensitive genius is a tightrope walk.

The novel opens exquisitely with a striking scene: the aging painter is engrossed in an intense dialogue with the muscular peasants—the men and women—he has brought to life on a monumental 21x11-foot canvas. Hasnat crafts these opening paragraphs with a heightened, immersive intensity that immediately draws the reader into the artist’s internal world.

Structurally, the novel avoids formal divisions but bifurcates organically in terms of narrative technique. For the first 134 pages, the narrative employs a disjointed, non-linear technique. This style mirrors the erratic nature of human memory, capturing the elderly Sultan as he unspools his reminiscences to the author.

From then on the novel shifts toward a seemingly linear, chronological account of Sultan’s childhood in Narail, tracking his transformation into an artist, before resorting to fragmented narrative once again at the last few pages of the novel. Yet Hye’s narrative alchemy ensures that this linear progression retains the fluid, impressionistic quality of the book’s first half. The narrative voice shifts seamlessly from an omniscient third-person perspective to Sultan’s own first-person interiority. This transition is executed so deftly that unless one reads with acute vigilance, the boundary lines blur completely.

The chronological sections illuminate critical milestones in Sultan’s life, notably the paternal intervention of the scholar and art critic Shahed Suhrawardy. It was Suhrawardy who named the 14-year-old Lal Mia into Sheikh Mohammad Sultan, providing him with art literature and facilitating his admission into the Calcutta Art College in 1938. Lacking an entrance certificate, Sultan was admitted as a “special case” after topping the admission test—an early indication of his undeniable raw talent.

Hasnat Abdul Hye captures the bohemian nature of Sultan. We see a teenage Sultan in Simla in 1941, where a British lady organised his first solo exhibition when he was a mere 17 years old. The novel follows him across continents, from his time in Kashmir to his inclusion in an international exchange programme by the Institute of International Education in 1950, which ultimately led him to exhibit alongside masters like Picasso and Dali.

Yet, at the very cusp of international fame, Sultan made the sudden, inexplicable decision to return to the soil of East Bengal. Hasnat’s prose at this juncture quickens, adopting a journalistic brevity that reflects the hurried tempo of Sultan’s own life during his American sojourn.

One of the most magical moments in the novel is when acclaimed writer Ahmed Sofa sees SM Sultan for the very first time. We don’t know whether this was true since neither Ahmed Sofa nor Sultan himself has written about this meeting anywhere, writes Nasir Ali Mamun in his book “Purbodesher Monishi” that has been published in 2021. It could be that Ahmed Sofa spoke about the meeting to the novelist, Hasnat Abdul Hye, only. However, the setting of the encounter is an enchanting one: Sofa watches SM Sultan painting for the 1976-exhibition at the Shilpakala Academy. It was a moonlit night when one maestro met another grand master.

The wider community of readers or people had an idea of who Sofa was but not many were aware of Sultan. In the following paragraphs, the readers discover the height of SM Sultan through the conversation between Ahmed Sofa and sculptor Shameem Shikder.

Sultan was deeply engaged with the socio-political realities of the subcontinent, though often through maintaining a profound isolation. A particularly striking episode is where the novelist illustrates how the state machinery attempts to co-opt and control the artist under the guise of “national security”.

Interestingly, the cataclysmic event of the 1947 Partition of British India leaves almost no impression on Sultan’s recorded discourse, save for a brief moment when, stranded in Srinagar of Kashmir, his sole anxiety is whether he could still travel from Narail to Calcutta. Scholars like Said Ferdous have noted that East-Bengali Muslims often remained silent on the trauma of Partition due to the immediate political advantages it yielded them. One is left to wonder: who is truly silent here? Is it Sultan the man, or Hasnat Abdul Hye the novelist?

The novel documents Sultan’s encounters with contemporary intellectual and art giants like writer Saadat Hasan Manto, poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, singer Bade Ghulam Ali Khan and many others. When Manto faces obscenity charges over his short story Thanda Gosht (Cold Meat), Sultan offers a defence of artistic liberty: “No artwork can be obscene; obscenity lies strictly within the eyes of the beholder.”

Sultan’s artistic philosophy was inseparable from his vision of human society. Inspired by the artistic communes he witnessed in the US, Sultan attempted twice to establish similar artist communes—first in Jashore and later in Sonargaon.

Hasnat traces Sultan’s spiritual and artistic evolution through distinct phases, such as the Radha Period (1953–1965), following his return to Masimdia village after his father’s death. It was during this period that his reliance on indigenous materials deepened.

This rejection of imported material mirrored his philosophical alignment with the peasantry. As explored on several occasions in the novel, Sultan maintained a fierce conviction that his paintings belonged fundamentally to the subaltern masses who populated his canvases. The adulation of the educated elite was merely an “additional acquisition.”

While the novel is a triumph, it is not without its historical and narrative incongruities. A minor dissonance occurs in the depiction of the revered intellectual Professor Abdur Razzaq. Contemporary accounts by Ahmed Sofa and Sardar Fazlul Karim establish that Razzaq invariably addressed everyone with the formal “apni”; in Hye’s novel, however, he addresses characters with the familiar “tumi.”

Another question remains to be studied: whether his lifelong dream of the Nandankanan School of Fine Arts on the banks of the Chitra River was merely an educational institution, or an attempt to establish an entirely alternative school of thought?

Furthermore, certain transitions remain unexamined. The novel abruptly mentions Sultan’s transition from the Khaksar Movement to agrarian radicalism without adequate contextualisation.

The novel also touches upon Sultan’s decision to wear a sari during the “Radha episode”, which the artist explains as a conscious desire to be “de-classed”—a visual shedding of patriarchal and societal hierarchy. Yet, earlier discussion on women during the explanation on the subject is filtered entirely through the gaze of another character Aminul, leaving Sultan’s own perspective ambiguous.

Another critical shortcoming of this novel is, we don’t see any truly intense inner fight or query that an artist always faces regarding various age-old ideas and existential questions.

In the introduction to the collected poems of Sudhindranath Dutta, Buddhadeb Bose famously remarked that Dutta could have pursued many other professions and all of those would have been natural for him, yet he chose to be a poet. The same can be said of SM Sultan. He used to say he has drawn his life’s circle a bit widely and was eager to learn so many things. He could have been an accomplished dancer, a fine actor, a tabla maestro, maybe even a skilled singer, had he pursued those and immortality would have knocked at his door. But he chose painting and even after 100 years of his birth, he remains contemporary and relevant. A man with an enigmatic magnetism, SM Sultan possessed an effortless access to the world of creativity.

Despite the shortcomings, some of which have been mentioned here, Sultan is a text of profound contemporary relevance. Studying this novel and the life and art works of SM Sultan has become essential for the people, especially at this moment of intense chaos in human mind, and growing intolerance and because communalism, of different types, is showing its fangs and its adherents have, to some extent, become successful in instilling ideas that are evolutionary throwbacks among some people.