WAS SULTAN QUEER ?

Sheikh Mohammed Sultan, popularly known as S M Sultan, was a Bengali decolonial artist who worked in painting and drawing.

Welcome to your blog post. Sheikh Mohammed Sultan (Bengali: শেখ মহম্মদ সুলতান; 10 August 1923 – 10 October 1994) S.M. Sultan was born in Machimdia village, in what was then Jessore District, British India (now Narail District, Bangladesh) on 10 August 1923.

He represented Pakistan at the international conference of artists in the USA in 1950. His works were displayed in Simla, Lahore, Boston, New York, Chicago, Washington and London.

Sultan received the Ekushey Padak, Bangladesh's highest civilian award for contribution in the field of arts, in 1982; the Bangladesh Charu Shilpi Sangsad Award in 1986; and the Independence Day Award, the highest state award given by the government of Bangladesh, in 1993 for his contribution to fine arts. Sultan established the Kurigram Fine Arts Institute at Narail in 1969 and another art school, now named Charupeeth, in Jessore in 1973. Bangladesh government declared him as a ‘resident artist’ in 1984.

SM Sultan passed away on October 10, 1994.

In 1989, Tareque Masud directed a 54-minute documentary film on Sultan's life, called Adam Surat (The Inner Strength). Masud started filming it in 1982 with the help of the painter, and traveled with him all around Bangladesh. According to Masud, Sultan agreed to cooperate only on the condition that "... rather than being the film's subject, he would act as a catalyst to reveal the film's true protagonist, the Bengali peasant."

In 2005, photographer Nasir Ali Mamun published a book Guru with 68 photographs of Sultan. These were selected from thousands of photographs taken by Mamun in the period from 1978, when he first met with Sultan, until his death.

Some important quotation in bellow from the novel ‘SULTAN’ written by Hasnat Abdul Hye

“Sultan used to play the flute, danced with ghunroos (dancing bells) on his ankles, sometimes he used to paintings"

“As if he could hear a siren call from within himself " Get ready" He knew that the call would come. He was never too late to respond. "

"When he came out wearing shari, the boys of the neighborhood used to chase him. They used to bully him saying, hijra hijra ”

“Sultan was very serious about wearing shari. The boys in the neighborhood have a lot of gossips, even beatings. Yet his habits have not changed.”

"We noticed, he had a very complicated reaction in his mind about the women.”

“Aminul Islam was lying next to him. He laughed and said, "It was the Sultan's RADHA PERIOD, from 1953 to 1975."

Sultan by Hasnat Abdul Hye

SM Sultan, the legendary painter of Bangladesh was a recluse and nature-loving individual without a family-

almost all art-historians, from past and present, claim that. They also maintain that SM Sultan had spent all his life as single and embraced celibacy. However, to ascertain whether a person is asexual or celibate simply because he chose to live his life as a recluse is not only presumptuous but also intrusive. A binary understanding of art history is to keep Sultan's gender identity even now in binary perspective. Our Zine project will bring forward the issues that have been kept secret for many decades.

- Dipa Mahbuba Yasmin