Sadequain’s cacti

When you walk into the enormous central hall of the Lahore Museum, your eye is quickly drawn to the two rows of miniature paintings displayed along the walls on either side. Women on horseback playing polo; Radha and Krishna consorting under a mango tree. You approach the glass cases to observe the minute details of individual strands of hair, of eyelashes, of fingernails. Perchance, you look up.

And you are transposed. Telescoped from the micro to the macro! There, 11 metres in the air, are the sparkling stars, the whirling planets, the spiralling galaxies, all beaming directly at you. A viewer may not be able to immediately recognise the intricate Kufic calligraphy, the use of the letter noon as a design element, but the dynamism of the geometric shapes, the bold and energetic lines, the feverish cross-hatching, will intrigue and engage any imagination. This is a mammoth, 29×7.8-metre oil painting by the famed Pakistani artist Sadequain, rendered in a genre called 'calligraphic cubism', spanning the entire ceiling of the entrance hall. If your vision is sharp and you know Urdu, you will read the line of a poem by Mohammad Iqbal painted on one panel: Sitaaro'n ke aage jaha'n aur bhi hai – Beyond the stars there are still other worlds.

Standing there, humbled by the celestial orbs, another poet's lines echo through this writer's mind: Aur bhi dukh hai'n zamaane me'n mohabbat ke sivaa/ raahate'n aur bhi hai'n vasl ki raahat ke sivaa. These are Faiz Ahmad Faiz's immortal words: There are sorrows in this world other than those of love/ joys, other than those of union with one's beloved.

In resonance with the memory of the famous communist litterateur, I discover, at the far ends of the painting, the human collective. Metamorphosed into cactus forms, their fingers grope for light, for knowledge, for tools – the sickle and the hammer, held against the rising sun. The whole motif is a visual pun on the Urdu lettering aaj, Today. And in the middle of the huge rectangle, in the centre of the starry heavens, is the traditional image of procreation, a man and a woman. The powerful draftsmanship of the figures recalls Michelangelo and his "Creation", on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

As my eyes rove over the brilliant bursts of orange, blue and grey, I spot other symbols of human design: a quill, an hourglass, a compass, a clock, a globe held in cactus-like hands. Strangely, the globe represents the undivided continent – the American plate snuggling against the African plate, with the Eurasian plate hugging them from above. Here is a united world, Pangaea. Here is also a masterly vision of man's place, both on earth and in the mysterious universe – a challenge to the common myopic outlook.

Falling stars
I was not expecting this expansive vision of the skies at the Lahore Museum. People had recommended that I see the "Fasting Buddha", part of the splendid Gandhara collection, the Chughtai watercolours. But none of my friends had mentioned Sadequain's massive mural. Strictly speaking, it is not a mural, as the painting is not an integral part of the ceiling. It is a composite collage of 44 separate canvases, executed in oil and mounted on a hanging frame. It is indisputably a masterpiece. There is no other painting of such scale and subject matter on any ceiling of any other building in Pakistan.

In his article "On My Work as a Painter in Pakistan", Sadequain wrote that the title of this overwhelming painting was "Man and the Mysterious Space". He completed it in August 1973, while living inside the museum's premises, and dedicated it to the poets, the mazdoors and the wheat-complexioned common women of Lahore. Sadequain, who died in 1987, claimed: "My primary concern is humanity, its tragedies and its struggles to rise above the privations of physical existence." His cactus-like human forms are integral to the expression of this idea. "Cactus grows in the most hostile of climates – sand, heat, salt, no rain," he wrote. "Yet it grows majestically, as if its thorny branches are trying to catch the clouds. To me, it symbolises the triumph of life over the environment … symbols of simplicity, of dignity and of majesty, innocence and struggle – the values towards which all life strives to reach." To the artist, the cacti were symbolic of the fact that, though life can be complex and arduous, it can also be resilient and creative. As cacti shoots break through the parched earth's crust to emerge into light, so too can human beings rise above the bleakest of circumstances, to make their place among the glittering stars.

But the inheritors of the artist's majestic work have not been protective of Sadequain's exceptional legacy. Rainwater seepage, heat and humidity are rapidly destroying the mural. Termite colonies have infested the wooden frames and canvases. A close inspection reveals that the edges of the paintings, which are folded over the wooden frames, have been most directly affected. Termites have eaten away at the canvases, leaving the paint layer hanging almost without support, and liable to break away at any moment. Large tears are also noticeable in many places.

Fortunately, help appears to have arrived in the nick of time, in the form of Naheed Rizvi, appointed director of the museum in 2005. A true lover of the arts, Rizvi quickly recognised the urgency required to restore the Sadequain mural. The hitch is, there are no professional oil-painting restorers in Pakistan. So, last year, Rizvi contacted two renowned conservationists from India, Maninder Singh Gill and Sreekumar Menon. The duo flew from Delhi to Lahore in late 2006, inspected the ceiling painting, and gave the museum a two-year project proposal to conserve the 44 canvases. Undertsandably, however, things get complicated when dealing with matters of 'national interest', and the government in Islamabad has yet to give the go-ahead to the restorers from across the border. Meanwhile, on the ceiling of the Lahore Museum's central hall, "Man and the Mysterious Space" continues to be sacrificed to moisture and termites.

Speaking of time, astronomy and perspective, a young colleague from Pakistan recently sent me a photograph and an excerpt from Carl Sagan's book Pale Blue Dot, which offers a bit of understanding from the point of view of the stars – looking down, if you will. In the passage, Sagan talks about the enormity of the experience of first seeing a photograph of Earth taken from deep space. "We succeeded in taking that picture, and, if you look at it, you see a dot," he writes.

That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives … Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot … To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human cTonceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Complementing Sagan's photograph of Earth in deep space, Sadequain's ceiling mural is a heroic visualisation of our shared human condition on a Pangaeaic planet, a minor orb among the myriad celestial objects in the mysterious void. Given the tumultuous 60-year history of Indo-Pakistani relations, should Maninder Singh Gill and Sreekumar Menon get the opportunity to help Naheed Rizvi and her museum team conserve the Sadequain mural, much more than just art could be restored. As this article went to print, we learned that the Pakistan government has allotted funding for the preservation of the Sadequain mural. Maninder Singh Gill and Sreekumar Menon, the Indian oil-painting restorers, are expected in Lahore in November, to commence work on a two-year-long restoration project.

~ Rinku Dutta is pursuing her postdoctoral research on Genomics in Pennsylvania.