In 1944 a spiky haired boy tried teaching himself swimming, using a clay pot for assistance in the West Bengal River. Abul Mansoor Ahmed—as he was then known—was curious and regularly in trouble. As an adult he would do weighty things: migrate, achieve fame, adopt a grandiose name, lay the seeds for an art movement and help found Karachi’s oldest running art school. But when he would pass away in Islamabad at 85, it would all be very quiet.

When I hear of Mansoor Rahi’s passing, I am struck by the lack of tributes, the noiseless Whatsapp groups and posts. Didn’t millions see his art classes on PTV? Isn’t the Watercolour movement indebted to him? Wasn’t he one of our ‘senior artists’? I find myself returning to the mid-nineties, in a corridor of his house, dwarfed by his murals while I lug a painting board to the noisy backyard where he, “Sir”, held classes. In the darkness of the house his paintings look monstrous, while his wife Hajra’s are luminous (Rahi would laugh about how all, from the carpenter to the postman asked, “why can’t you make pretty faces like your wife? Must you always scare us?”).

“Transform karo” he would instruct us. He drew a bottle in my first lesson, then made versions of it mutating, as though it had cousins who got stranger and stranger. A bottle’s lip inflated, its neck was melting like a candle, another was boxy like a cupboard. He explained Sadequain chose to enhance forms through curves and undulations, and how, conversely, he Rahi, a cubist, chose an angular path with more subtractions. He regularly named fellow artists, giving credit and respect for techniques and skill— “void areas, the silent spaces, like Shakir Ali used to play with”. In my sketchbook, he jotted percentages under each bottle, until they reached 100, and the bottle was unrecognisable. He told me to find my voice.

“Transformation” he’d say when drawings were predictable. “Transform the sitar” the parrot’s beak or the chess board. “Transform karo” –it was a command and a remedy. Ironically it was what his detractors felt he resisted. When I try to tell Rahi’s story, I wonder how much geography plays a role.

“I always thought of Rahi as a man caught between two worlds” says Yusuf Agha, husband of the late Lubna Agha, one of Rahi’s star pupils. ‘His strong longing for his native land showed when” the deadliest tropical storm in history “hit his native East Pakistan.” In November 1970 the Bhola cyclone churned through the Bay of Bengal. ¹ Humans and cobras jumped onto palms, sharing the only safe place above the surface, ² almost 50,000 perished³. Rahi was 31 at the time, and flew to East Pakistan to visit his family, extending his trip to wander “far and deep into the rubble of villages.”  His action pen and ink drawings are testimonies from frightened villagers.

He saw a woman’s hand reaching from the sand, the earth had swallowed her body, a “cluster of coloured bangles” was on her wrist. “Someone must have placed them there with loving care—perhaps a lover, perhaps a husband. And now…” His striking sketches had the pathos of Zainul Abedin’s famous 1939 Bengal famine drawings.

“It was only after I had interpreted the turmoil within my mind into these drawings that I felt at peace with myself,” Rahi told Agha in an article for Henna Magazine.

Agonized desperate figures appeared in his works: vultures perched by gaunt limbs, mouths frozen in silent wails, humans crawling like crabs. Later he painted epic heroes brandishing grains of wheat like swords. He lamented that governments wanted wars, when they should just grow food (the 70s also had a world food crisis⁴).

A year after his trip home, he captured that terrible hour in Faces in Cyclone. In a horizontal strip of despair, his protagonists are ‘trapped between earth and sky with no one to turn to⁵.’ The faces’ hair and eyebrows jut out like spider legs; they watch the dreadful scene agape. Surrounded by an expanse of flatness, a levelling of the earth, their aggressor is nature. Rahi uses smitches of texture on the canvas, a regular in his practice, as well as red scattered like shards.

By 1971 West Pakistan proved itself an “egotistical guest, devouring the best dishes and leaving nothing but scraps and leftovers for East Pakistan. ⁶” Cyclone survivors and civilians faced callous apathy and later brutality at the hands of the central government. Rahi responded with the furious Red Sky and Revolution, encapsulating all the rage and heightened political activism⁷ of the time. Enough, the painting screams with its blazing sky; enough with the indignity and injustice, as a throng raise their fists. The heavens join the figures in their protest. The agitated crowd composed of planes and facets are unmistakably united. Rahi peels back ‘the social, political and geographical complexities of tragedy to reveal its raw human cost.’ ⁸ Years later, Rahi explained that he tries to “capture the fragrance instead of the flower,’ ‘and instead of painting a beggar, I look for ways to present poverty in its greater essence. ⁹”It’s no wonder the work evokes Palestine today.

Rahi studied under Mohammed Kibria and Abdur Razaq at Dhaka’s Government College of Arts and Crafts. But it was the principal of the institution, the acclaimed Zainul Abedin, who became a lifelong source of inspiration, ¹⁰ instilling in the young Rahi a watercolour training and aesthetic that would persevere. Hajra recalls Rahi bringing his famous teacher to the Zuberi sisters’ home. Zainul Abidin was impressed by their plans for the Mina Art School in Nazimabad and encouraged Rahi to give it the nurturing it needed.  It would become Karachi’s oldest running art school, The Karachi School of Art (KSA), and Rahi would prove to be a gifted teacher, competent administrator¹¹ and KSA’s first principal.

According to Agha, KSA was a fun place to be in the ’60’s and 70’s. Rahi “organized fancy dress competitions, built camaraderie, and encouraged students to enter art competitions. When students got tired of painting imaginary natural scenes, Rahi took them wherever he thought nature could inspire them: Northern Pakistan, Swat, Chawkandi Tombs, Hawkes Bay, and the densest colonies of Lyari – among other places.

…Far from the madding fluorescent lights of the classroom, they rolled up their holdalls and paint paraphernalia into economy class trains, and picked their mountains, their valleys, their rivers and oceans. They saw their people up close and natural… This was an education, both in art and humanity, for his eager young pupils.”

Rahi and Hajra were married on 10^th June in 1970, at Rahi’s house in North Nazimabad. To help him raise money for the wedding, Shaukat Fancy held an open-air exhibition in his lawn, filling the garden with paintings, and 3 murals. Hajra recalls the simplicity of Rahi as a businessperson, there were no receipts for the show.

In the 1980s Rahi founded KSA’s robust watercolour program, planting the seeds of the Zainul Abedin Watercolor School. ¹² Students like Abdul Hayee, Athar Jamal, Ghalib Baqar, and Pirzada Najmul Hasan established themselves as esteemed watercolourists upon graduating KSA, birthing the local Watercolour Movement. When Rahi painted in oils, he maintained elements of translucency: gliding a flat brush to make lower pigments shine. “It’s a game of hide and seek,” he’d say. Viewers need to see rough and smooth, soft and harsh, so that they stay “to play”.

Forty years ago, Rahi moved to Islamabad and began conducting classes from his home. No student forgot his promise: you will be gifted a Rahi when you get married. Brides waddled to his house in ghararas to collect their gift, en route to the wedding hall. During rukhsathis, they would turn to him teary eyed “I will see you tomorrow for my painting Sir”.

On the terrace of his home in the late 90’s, his classes were filled with NCA hopefuls, and O and A level contenders. But there was always a student there because they never smiled or left the house, and Rahi knew his class, with its infectious passion, would help. ‘I painted like my life depended on it’ one student recalled. Rahi made everyone believe they could be an artist, and nothing was greater than that. With all his awards and international exhibitions, he made it seem possible for all of us to reach and dream that far. It was a thrill when mid lesson he would run to grab a canvas he was working on. For a teenage student of art, seeing his work in progress was like being in on a secret. Till today, when I meet secretive artists, resembling cooks who don’t reveal recipes, it feels like a slammed door. Why aren’t more creatives willing to share, nurture and collaborate? But Rahi’s largesse would exasperate his inner circle, “sab kuch bata detey hain” (he reveals everything). He couldn’t resist, because his “third love”, (after Hajra and art) was “his love for teaching” in Yusuf Agha’s opinion.

Rahi signed his name without any lines or swooshes underneath, R-a-h-i, the letters alone with upturned flicks. He equated underlines with insecurity—It became an amusement of mine to see which celebrity or artist signed with a swoosh, and I found it ironic that pioneer cubists Braque and Picasso did. Let your name stand on its own, Rahi would say; like his signature he was self-sufficient. As critic Amra Ali said, he was true to his genre, working quietly in his space.

For most of his life Rahi never seemed to age. After lunch he practiced the Savasana (yoga corpse pose), citing its superiority over afternoon naps. His diet was spartan, meals were taken without oil and spices. Imran Zuberi (KSA’s Executive Director, and Hajra’s nephew) said Rahi would paint “the way we go to office.” He was known for his discipline and health tips (he offered me a clove to chew for a grisly cough), relentless cheerfulness (few can recall him angry) and extraordinary agility, rotating giant canvases, using his whole arm to draw like a discus thrower.

I was enamored by his King and Queen painting (a recurring motif, and a favorite of copycats), exhibited in Lahore in 2007. On the milky surface Rahi’s expert handling of unforgiving black pigment delights: undulating between dark caverns, or fading like vapor, the forms simultaneously vanish and emerge. The conjoined faces are both frontal and profile, the queen’s eyes and jewels form gentle scallops, her partner is craggy and sharp. It evokes his Resurrect Rock series and his love for the mountains.

A continuous thread in Rahi’s story is “he didn’t get the credit he deserved.” Zohra Hussain, founder of Chawkandi Art Gallery echoes this, as well as Rahi’s exceptional drawing skills. One wonders again, was it also because of geography? The boy who travelled through the subcontinent, from Rajshahi, to Dhaka, eventually ending in Pakistan’s mountains—had he stayed in Karachi, instead of the capital where he was the only artist of his stature¹³, would things have been different? Would the presence of other creative personalities fuel and enrich his practice? Would he have been part of the exchange of ideas and disruptions in the 90’s, at places like Chawkandi Art Gallery?  Was little seriously written about him because he wasn’t fully owned, and considered ‘an artist from Bangladesh’? Why were his last few decades, what one writer described, a ‘gradual disappearance from the active art scene¹⁴’? I remember arguing with a senior art critic on this. How many living art personalities were there who held the legacy of Pakistan’s past, with the skills to match? Those close to Rahi feel his choice of galleries impacted his position, “Jis nay maangi painting unho nay dein di”. Over his five-decade practice, Rahi witnessed Karachi evolve from a handful of exhibition spaces after partition, to becoming the third largest art market in the region¹⁵. Some of Rahi’s supporters grumble about gallery lobbies. Does the role of framer turned galleries (allegedly less serious spaces) come into this?

When I visit Northern Pakistan in the summer, I can see Rahi’s hand in the rainy mountains. I see the turn of his pencil, the graphite smudge creating rock and cloud. I remember when he would check student sketches, he’d silently hold a paintbrush up like shining an imaginary torch.  He would proceed to darken or remove lines, turning an ordinary scrawl into a jewel. I always wondered what he was thinking, how he knew what to subtract to make the paper dance for the eye, and, most of all, how that invisible torch helped. I will never know.

Goodbye dear Sir.

Title image: Revolution and Red Sky.1971. Oil on canvas. 30¹⁄₂ x 36¹⁄₄ in. (77.5 x 92.1 cm.). Image Credit: Christies

Disclaimer: Some images included in this article may appear blurry or of lower quality due to their age and the conditions under which they were originally captured. We have made every effort to source and present these visuals accurately in their historical context.