Sadequain was not an artist. He was art unto himself. He was art. If you think this argument is far-fetched and made out of strong personal fondness for the great man, watch a 1976 documentary made by PTV in which Sadequain is seen passionately working on a mural based on Allama Iqbal’s couplets. There are moments in the film when the viewers completely lose track of the art in making. Instead, what dominates the foreground, hence the shift in viewers’ attention, is the artist himself.

The inordinate but believable keenness with which he is using charcoal and then going berserk with the paintbrush and then creating a firmament to interpret Iqbal’s lines with a swirl here, a stroke there, a line here, a figure there… all are done with a consuming passion that is simply mesmeric. He does not seem to give a darn about the TV camera or about the man handling that camera. Nor does he get distracted by his surroundings. All he wants is to create. And at that moment, the entire world disappears and only Sadequain exists.

The film tells you more about Sadequain than his art. And once you look at what he’s come up with, it is difficult to separate the artist from his creation. Yes, his creations surpass him, because he is more in love with them and less with himself. Sadequain was that beautiful a crackpot.

What now? Leaving aside the masters who were born before the partition of the subcontinent or just around that time, where is Pakistan going to get its next big name in art? Perhaps the question is foolish and invalid. Some might argue there are painters, calligraphers and sculptors in the country who are of no less stature, therefore the cynicism is unfounded.

Wrong. The cynicism has its reasons. The artists that today hog the limelight lack individuality. Their art is either derivative or doesn’t have, what I call, creative spontaneity.

The quality that made Sadequain stand out among his peers was his junoon, a trait that all great artists share. Vincent van Gogh was half-mad. Picasso was unafraid of airing his views. M. F. Husain pushed the envelope. Francis Bacon was a sucker for the process of self-discovery. All artists are eccentric people, but their eccentricities are driven by the passion to create, to interpret the vicissitudes of time, to draw meaning out of life’s Sisyphean struggle. Where are such artists today?

Not that artists in this day and age (with reference to Pakistan) are not achieving memorable feats, they are. Some of them are very well known abroad, in the circles that matter. Some of them sell a lot. Some of them try and look ‘different’. The problem is that there’s an element of ‘pre-determinedness’ to their efforts. They work with a preset mind (hence the heart takes a backseat) and stipulated goals. They will paint a civil war only when they feel safe to paint it, as more of an afterthought, when the horse has bolted. They only impress, to a certain degree, when they try and depict personal agonies. But even there their art seldom assumes impersonal significance and remains one-dimensional.

Sadequain in his extraordinary work, ‘Torso holding head’, has poignantly depicted the great martyr Sarmad carrying his head to Jamia Masjid, Delhi, after being beheaded by Emperor Aurangzeb’s men. But by doing that he is also portraying the picture of the times he lived in, and of his own life.

Sadequain lived with the burden of being an artist in a society that didn’t hold art in great esteem. There were Aurangzebs all around. Sometimes he identified them, sometimes he didn’t, perhaps deliberately. And modern-day Pakistan is fraught with Aurangzebs.