A Title Earned, Not Given
Zainul Abedin did not become Shilpacharya, meaning Great Teacher of the Arts, through institutional favour. He earned it by doing something most artists of his era would not dare: he walked into the middle of a famine and drew what he saw. The resulting sketches, made on cheap packing paper with ink he mixed himself from burnt charcoal, became some of the most powerful images ever produced on the subcontinent. Bangladesh has not forgotten. Neither has the international art market.
Born on 29 December 1914 in Kendua, in what is now Netrokona district of Mymensingh, Abedin grew up beside the Brahmaputra river. That river would follow him throughout his career, appearing again and again in his watercolors. A series of works he dedicated to the Brahmaputra won him the Governor’s Gold Medal at an all-India exhibition in 1938, the first major recognition of a talent that would go on to reshape the entire trajectory of Bangladeshi visual art.
Calcutta, London, and the Search for a Style
In 1933, Abedin enrolled at the Government School of Art in Calcutta, now the Government College of Art and Craft in Kolkata. He was the first Muslim student to graduate with first-class distinction from the institution. The training was rigorous and European in orientation, grounded in British academic traditions that prized technical precision over emotional directness. Abedin absorbed it, then grew dissatisfied with it. He found the oriental style equally limiting. Neither framework gave him the tools to say what he needed to say about the world he actually lived in.
After completing two years of training at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, he developed what he called the Bengali style: folk forms with geometric shapes, semi-abstract representation, and a bold use of primary colours. But he recognised the limitations of folk art too, and eventually returned to nature, rural life, and the daily struggles of ordinary people as his primary subject matter. The result was a realism that was modern in appearance without abandoning its roots in the Bengali landscape and its people.
The Famine Sketches of 1943
Nothing Abedin produced before or after carries quite the weight of the famine series. The Bengal famine of 1943 killed an estimated two to three million people, a catastrophe that unfolded under British colonial administration while grain continued to be exported. Abedin did not paint from a safe distance. He documented the dying directly, sketching skeletal figures collapsed on roadsides, mothers clutching children, bodies reduced to outlines of bone.
He had no proper materials. He burned charcoal to make ink and worked on whatever paper he could find. The rawness of the medium suited the rawness of the subject. When the series was exhibited in 1944, it brought him immediate critical recognition. These were not decorative works or exercises in technique. They were testimony. They remain, decades later, among the most cited visual records of the famine, images that forced viewers then and force viewers now to confront what colonial policy actually looked like at ground level.
His engagement with social struggle did not stop at the famine. He was an active member of the Calcutta Group of progressive artists and maintained friendships with figures from the Progressive Writers’ Movement, including Shahid Suhrawardy and Ahmed Ali. His painting The Rebel Cow exemplifies the social realism he developed through this period, combining protest with genuine aesthetic ambition. He also made a significant body of work depicting Santhal people, including the well-known Two Santhal Women, treating an often-marginalised community with dignity and artistic seriousness.
Building an Institution from Nothing
In 1948, with a handful of colleagues and no existing infrastructure to build on, Abedin founded an art institute in Dhaka. There were no art schools in the city at the time. That institute grew into what is now the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Dhaka, and within its early years it was considered the finest art institution in Pakistan. Among the students Abedin taught were Monirul Islam and Mohammad Kibria, both of whom went on to become major figures in Bangladeshi art. Pakistani artist Mansur Rahi also studied under him. The institution he built did not just train painters; it created the conditions for a national visual culture to exist.
Art as Political Act
Abedin was not a bystander to the political upheavals of his time. He was involved in the Bengali language movement in East Pakistan, the grassroots cultural resistance that eventually fed into the independence struggle. In 1969, at the height of the non-cooperation movement against Pakistani rule, he painted a large scroll called Nabanna using Chinese ink, watercolour, and wax. The work was a direct response to the political moment, a statement that Bengali cultural identity could not be suppressed by administrative decree.
In 1970, he travelled to Palestinian refugee camps in Syria and Jordan and produced 60 to 70 paintings of the people he met there. That same year, he painted the Bhola cyclone, which devastated East Pakistan and killed hundreds of thousands. His instinct, consistently, was to go toward suffering rather than away from it.
Legacy: Museums, Craters, and Auction Records
After Bangladesh’s independence, Abedin turned toward preservation. In 1975, he founded the Folk Art Museum at Sonargaon in Narayanganj, one of the country’s most important repositories of traditional craft, and established the Zainul Abedin Sangrahashala in Mymensingh as a permanent gallery of his own work. He received an Honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of Delhi in 1974. He died on 28 May 1976 in Dhaka, and was buried beside the Dhaka University Central Mosque.
His legacy has only grown since. In 2009, a crater on Mercury was named Abedin in his honour. Google marked his 105th birthday with a Doodle in December 2019. And in September 2024, his painting Untitled (1970) sold at Sotheby’s in London for US$692,048, the highest price ever paid for a Bangladeshi artwork at auction. Earlier that year, his oil-on-canvas Santal Couples (1963) had sold at Sotheby’s New York for US$381,000. The market, like history, has confirmed what Bangladesh long understood: Zainul Abedin was not merely a great painter. He was the founding father of modern Bangladeshi art, and his work continues to speak with a clarity that time has not dimmed.
Image: Wikimedia Commons / Mainul Abedin (Public domain)