What a pleasant experience it was going through a well-produced, hefty volume on Sadequain in which his three different forms of expression — poetry, painting and calligraphy — are so deeply interconnected with each other that they appear as one. The volume has been presented under the title Rubaiyat-i-Sadequain Kulliyat. Sadequain had additionally taken care to record them in both calligraphic mode and figurative mode. So we see here his three creative styles forming one coherent whole.

The collection has been compiled by Sadequain’s nephew Syed Sultan Ahmad Naqvi, who has explained for our benefit the way he has compiled it. Sadequain, as Naqvi tells us, had from his early years developed a passion for writing poetry. But in later years he felt attracted to painting and calligraphy. For a number of years he concentrated on these two forms. However, in 1969 his forgotten passion for poetry revived. So while engaged in paintings and calligraphy, he started writing rubaiyat. It was as if he was under an unending spell of poetry. For months he was preoccupied in transforming his paintings into the form of rubaiyat. As he himself has said:

So this spell resulted in about a thousand rubaiyat, to which are added the rubaiyat written in later years.

After Sadequain’s death, Naqvi took it upon himself to collect all his scattered papers and publish collections of his rubaiyat in a befitting manner.

With all the rubaiyat of Sadequain before us and with us standing at a distance from him, we are in a better position to judge him as a poet. In fact, during his lifetime Sadequain’s glamour as a painter did not allow his admirers to pay full attention to his poetry. The poet in him was overshadowed by the outstanding personality of the artist. Now we can recognise the poet standing distinct from the artist. He can be better seen and judged in the background of the poetic tradition of Urdu, or to be more particular, in the background of the tradition of rubai as it developed in Urdu. Seen from this standpoint, we can recognise him as a distinguished rubai writer possessed with a vision of his own and a style peculiarly Sadequainian.

One thing is very obvious. Sadequain’s rubaiyat do not stand in isolation. They are seen appearing in the form of a series, one rapidly following the other under the spell of one particular idea or situation.

In this short form of poetry the poet likes to speak in a wise way about eternal truths related to human life and death, the vagaries of time, the transient world as well as the inevitability of death. The expression is in general Persianised.

Firaq Gorakhpuri, while expressing in this form, made a departure from this tradition. He made the experiment of writing love poetry in this form and that in a mode of expression which is poetic and steeped in Hindu culture, called Singhar Ras.

Sadequain too likes to write love poetry in this form, but he likes to speak in a realistic way instead of being poetic. Such is his style:

With this way of talking, Sadequain stands distinguished by his style in the midst of Urdu poets.