This article examines the career of the immensely productive Sadequain Naqqash (1930-87), Pakistan’s most celebrated artist. A self-trained, larger-than-life figure, Sadequain charted a singular trajectory in enacting a paradoxical subjectivity. He remained close to national aesthetic ideologies that promoted calligraphy under the increasing Islamization of the 1970s and 1980s, yet maintained a persona that simultaneously relayed aspects of transgressive Indo-Persian Sufism into a dialogue with transnational modernism during the 1950s and 1960s in order to…
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