Syed Jahangir is at the threshold of seventy summers. And he has remained an active painter all his adult life. Starting from his student days, for more than half a century now, he has been selling art-works and living almost entirely on the proceeds from sale of his paintings, some savings from which he also charitably spared for social investment in his native village in Satkhira. A family man by temperament, he lovingly supports an extended family of several growing children. Also a sporting and gregarious person by nature, Syed Jahangir befriends many. He had and still has, many admirers amongst the learned section. Blessed with clear articulation and an elegant bearing, Jahangir has also been often sought after for presentation of news on TV and for events on stage. While a budding artist immersed in the search for self-identity, Jahangir developed lively communion and lasting bondage with other creative individuals in literary and cultural circles including the undersigned. While in Islamabad, he set up a cooperative Art Gallery that marketed art-works from Bangladesh. Back home, he became Director of Fine Arts at Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy and devoted fifteen years to the promotion of Bangladeshi painting and sculptures, particularly through organizing Asian Art Biennials, Bangladesh. Syed Jahangir continues to be a brilliant water colorist. His highly transparent water color landscapes of rural Bangladesh are worked in the vein of maestro Zainul Abedin, his teacher and guide in nature studies. Later he developed a style of line brushing or penning in ink the background sketches of landscapes, particularly hilly terrain like Chittagong Hill Tracts or Murree Hills, along with color washes to highlight the character of the objects in view. This probably led to the development, during the last decade, of structured water color compositions of thematic landscaping using selective memory or imagination. Disturbing mental images of flood disasters have lent his water colors subdued expression, brevity of rhetoric and sublime transparency. These are considered the most characteristic creations of Syed Jahangir. In oil paintings, Jahangir has painstakingly gone through various phases of experimentation both in abstract representation of visual reality and in formalized expression of aesthetic experience. He had early exposure to action painting in the US before his better acquaintance with formal, analytical or synthetic conceptions of multidimensional appeal in modern European paintings. Perhaps that exposure inspired him in some phases of his experimental work to resort to relative informality in subjective or objective expressionism, with spurts of spontaneity in emotive brushstrokes, figurative rhythm or simple color connotations. Of late he has reverted to story telling in his compositions in semi-abstract or symbolic configurations. Apart from that summary appraisal of Jahangir’s works as I have witnessed them in various phases, I am tempted to draw a pen-picture of Jahangir through the words of connoisseurs who pronounced a different kind of empathy with his creativity. Asafuddowlah, a former civil servant and noted singer, found Jahangir less of a “thematic painter” than a “faithful chronicler” of the painter’s mindscape through the journey of life. He wrote: “Syed Jahangir’s stages of development have been faithfully supervised by Time. In his instance, the Artist and the Time have not betrayed one another. The stages are inseparably related to both life and time frames. The spell of the traditional school and the struggle for liberty and self-identity that followed, the significance of the Language Movement in his consciousness, the period of pure romanticism, the conflict for finding himself are all perceptible in his works.”Masud Ahmed, career diplomat later turned environmentalist, looked through the prism of Jahangir’s experimentation with techniques marking the beginning of a timeless voyage of joyous exploration. This came about as Syed Jahangir boldly persevered in, what would seem to many, a perilous exploration of the creative possibilities to its precipitous and awesome limits. The risk was great: the stark possibility of a total breakdown induced by the sheer dizzying magnitude of the task. The outcome is uninhibited celebration of life’s infinitely varied manifestations, shape, space, density, light and color, vibrantly glowing on the scores of work done….
Time, Compromise, Defeat,
Passion, Life, Texture, Shape.
Sunset, Clouds, Fragrance,
Color, Violence
Soul, Love-feelings..”

Painter Hamidur Rahman, a pioneer of modern art in Bangladesh and also the architect of Shahid Minar, found in the oil paintings of Jahangir “….a vague indefinable search for new vistas, without the eagerness or the urgency to reach anywhere. Here the riot of forms is over, thoughts have no particular motifs to serve, colors have no longer any set place to stick to, even lines have no set purpose to achieve. What a world that would be, the artist wonders taking shelter behind the world of almost nothingness. The whole process is a process of expedition and exploration, leaving behind some imprints of the artist while he was covering the track, and there it is!” Hamidur Rahman had further comments about a characteristic luminosity in Jahangirs compositions: “Syed Jahangir’s brushing has a feathery quality from which emanates a strong luminous vibration. The handling of pigments and forms are atmospheric in character. Divisions of planes are geometric with some use of free shapes and there is an air of dreaminess which does so characteristically remind one of Jahangir’s own romantic demeanor.”

Hasnat Abdul Hye, acclaimed novelist, penned the following as introduction to the latest works of Syed Jahangir, “Sustained pace of creativity over a long period has made his painting very much a part of his daily routine where art imitates life spontaneously. To hear his views, the line separating art and the world he lives in is a thin one, most of the paintings being reflections of the ideas or themes thrown up by the contemporary socio-cultural milieu or surrounding nature. It is this underpinning of ideas or ideology of creativity, if one might call it so, that distinguishes Jahangir’s works, giving them an unmistakable imprimatur of his persona and is without doubt the well-spring of his astonishingly continuous activity. At first sight, many of his paintings in the abstract and semi abstract genres will belie this ideological proclivity. But a careful scrutiny of otherwise aesthetically pleasing forms and compositions developed by bright colors in free wheeling motions eschewing rigidity of structure reveals their inner meanings suffused with the restlessness of a searching soul. It then becomes evident that Syed Jahangir’s quest is not for beauty alone but also designed to engender hope for the harried heart and redemption for the anguished soul. As an artist he perceives his role not only as a purveyor of beauty in plastic art but also as a messenger of life in its mundane and mystical manifestations. This commitment to ideas makes his paintings both contemporaneous and timeless.”

There is hardly anything more that needs to be added to complete the graph of Syed Jahangir’s creative impact on his contemporaries.

Sadeq Khan
April 2002

Date: 18/04/2002 – 09/05/2002
Exhibition regular hours: Everyday 12 – 8 PM
Venue: Bengal Gallery of Fine Arts
Entry condition: open to all