RAWALPINDI: Sadequain, who has painted at Mangla’s power house one of the world’s largest murals, is not sure whether the mural is finished yet — in terms of length and theme [Nov 20].

The mural is 170 feet long, with a width of 23 feet, and its theme is man’s unending effort to tame and train nature to make it possible for humanity to have a more plentiful and purposeful existence. Sadequain begins his mural by depicting Farhad’s effort to cut, at Shirin’s behest, a canal through the mountains, and tapers off with a visual representation of Allama Iqbal’s “Sitaron se agay jehan aur bhi hain.”

Sadequain’s mural in 26 canvas panels starts from near the entrance to the power house and ends near about the fourth turbine. In a power house which will ultimately have 10 turbines, the mural may have to be balanced at the spillway end by something meaningful and colourful.

A feature of Sadequain’s mural is that several of its sections are complete and properly balanced pictures in themselves.

The first section shows Farhad, and other workers of his time, using simple implements like the spade and the axe, a special feature being that each of these implements is surrounded by a halo — the message that Sadequain is recording here in oil being that these implements have given mankind the same degree of physical comfort as has come from sains through spiritual channels.

After showing man’s struggle against and supremacy over inorganic and organic symbols of nature and recording through visual representation man’s invention of the wheel and other tools, Sadequain introduces the huge draglines, cranes and pylons that help mankind today in dominating the landscape of nature.

Published in Dawn, November 21st, 2017