A screenshot from Musadiq Sanwal's interview in Chess with Maskawaith | Courtesy E-South Asia production If I were asked to describe Musadiq, I would say, “He was a shooting star that rose, shone and disappeared. Shone from the earth to the galaxies.” I never thought I would be thinking about him in the past tense. He was the kind of person who would live in the present and love every moment of it. For who knows what tomorrow may bring. In our tomorrow, Musadiq is not there, but his memory is.
It was the winter of 1986. Students of the Fine Arts Department of the National College of Arts (NCA) in Lahore were returning from their tour of India. At Attari station, they had to wait the entire day for the next train to Lahore under the December sun, without any shade. To kill time, Musadiq started playing his harmonium; another teacher from the NCA joined in with his tablas that he had bought from India. Musadiq started singing a Tufail Niazi song: “Sada Chiryan da Chumba way Babala” (Father, we daughters are like a flock of sparrows).
Like his friends, his interests were vast and varied: he was a keen spectator of Muharram processions and concerts of Royal Albert Hall, alike. He was concerned about the environment; from the coast of Karachi to the fish beneath the Indus Delta.
His voice floated over the whole landscape, rising over the borders. The villagers from either side of the Wagah Border started to throng the iron grille gate. From the Indian side, the villagers brought meals with sarsoon ka saag, lassi, roti and gifts as this impromptu soirée continued. This was Musadiq, my friend, and such was the effect Musadiq’s music produced.
At the time, the country was under the boot of Ziaul Haq’s martial law. Under Zia, Pakistani arts faced severe censorship. “My hands always remained in fists,” was a line in one of Musadiq’s Urdu poems. In a protest by NCA students during the dictatorship, Musadiq lost an eye in an attack by militants of the Jamaat-e-Islami, a pro-Zia religious political party. Generations later, not many NCA graduates may know that it was Musadiq and his comrades who struggled to elevate the NCA’s fine arts diploma to a four-year degree programme (the cartoonist Sabir Nazar, Mudassar Punoo, Tahir Mehdi, New York’s sculptor couple Ruby and Khalil Chishti, and Munawar, who hailed from Bangladesh, were all his contemporaries supporting this cause).