The artist/designer Adil Salahuddin is fortunate. He is alive. He can read in his lifetime this tribute to his work as an artist and designer par excellence of postage stamps. Titled Message Sent: The Life and Works of Adil Salahuddin: A Legendary Postage Stamp Designer, this sumptuous volume has been compiled by the British-Pakistani author Ms Arshi Ahmad-Aziz who writes corporate histories, and is sponsored by a bank. The book contains a summation of Adil’s educational background, the making of him as an artist, his graduation from an artist to a stamp designer, a collage of the numerous stamps he designed over his 37 year long career with the Pakistan Security Printing Corporation (PSPC). There is also a chapter on conversations with him, tributes from his friends and colleagues, and finally a survey of Pakistan’s genesis and growth as a nation as seen in its stamps.  

I have known Adil Salahuddin since 1966 when he was a student at the National College of Arts (NCA) and I worked in an honorary capacity at the Lahore Museum cataloguing its superb collection of miniature paintings. The NCA was at that time under the principalship of Professor Shakir Ali, one of Pakistan’s earliest modernist painters. Khalid Iqbal - the artist who gave Punjab’s landscape a new identity – headed the NCA’s Department of Fine Arts. Both played a seminal influence in transforming Adil into one of the most significant designers of his generation.

In the autumn of 1966, Adil and his batch-mate Muhammad Asif - both lean and wiry – had grown tired of painting the old models hired on its shoestring budget by the NCA. Khalid approached me and suggested that as I provided a younger face, I might like to sit for these two budding painters. The first portraits they made of me made me looked like a wooden mannequin. By the time I quit the museum the following summer, their skills had improved immeasurably. The second portraits they did showed me standing, full-length, with my arms folded across my chest. They submitted these works in their thesis portfolio. I never found out what happened to these paintings. Perhaps they are still buried somewhere in the vaults of the NCA, waiting like some buried Pharaoh to be unearthed.  

Adil Salahuddin graduated. He moved to Karachi, and took up employment with the PSPC, a body established by the Government of Pakistan in 1949 to make us independent in our needs for currency and stamps as most countries – certainly those in the British empire – depended for their bank notes and currency on the firm of De La Rue in distant England.

The first adhesive British stamp was issued in 1840. Known as the Penny Black, it featured an image of Queen Victoria against a severe black background (and this was years before she went into mourning after the death of her husband, her beloved Prince Albert). Just over a hundred years later, Pakistan used as its first stamps after independence the image of her great-grandson King George VI, over-printed with the proud announcement: Pakistan.

The first Pakistani stamps (still printed by De La Rue) came out on 9 July 1948. The highest denomination of Rs 1 bore a floral design by the immortal artist Abdur Rahman Chughtai. The lower denominations of 3½ annas depicted the Lahore Fort’s entrance, the 2½ annas the Star gate at Karachi airport, and the 1½ annas the Constituent Building (now the Sindh Assembly Building) in Karachi. (Interestingly, there was none of East Pakistan).  The latter three stamps were designed by Rashid-ud-din and Muhammad Latif.

In 1967, Salahuddin joined the team of sixteen designers and engravers in the PSPC drawn from East and West Pakistan. He recalled that the East Pakistanis were more skilled in watercolours, the West Pakistanis in oils. A year after joining, on 7 April 1968, Adil saw his first design issued. The stamp commemorated the 20^th anniversary of the World Health Organisation.

For the next 37 years Salahuddin worked in the PSPC, rising from being one of its many designers to becoming the General Manager of the Corporation. His longevity spelt more than survival. It spoke of a rare talent that enabled him to prepare designs for more than 600 stamps during his long, fecund career. He introduced innovations such as stamps shaped as parallelograms and in one continuous panorama spread over five stamps (UNESCO campaign to save Mohenjo-daro, 1976), and over six depicting the Lahore Fort for the National Stamp exhibition Pak Pilex, 1983.

In retrospect, as is evident from Ms Ahmad-Aziz’s painstakingly assembled book, the range of Adil’s creativity is formidable. Working as he had to at the beginning using the miniature technique he learned at the NCA under Ustad Haji Sharif, Salahuddin acquired the ability to compress his ideas and images by hand into the confines of a minute rectangle. The boon of computer-assisted designs came much later. For inspiration, Adil Salahuddin drew upon every facet of Pakistan – its archaeology, its history, its geography, topography, wild-life, natural resources, its heroes, its politicians, its poets, its painters, its sportsmen. However, this book is not a comprehensive catalogue of all the designs Adil Salahuddin prepared throughout his PSPC career. It is more an album recording his journey over the artistic Himalayas of his life. It serves also as a vivid, visual chronicle of our nation’s history and diversity.

Stamps are normally issued in four main categories: Definitive stamps (i.e. standard designs released from time to time); Commemorative stamps to mark special, national or international event; Special stamps on themes or subjects of particular interest; and Service stamps for official use. Each category has not only provided the public with colourful stamps with which to adorn their correspondence (in the day letter-writing was still fashionable) but fed a vibrant, voracious market of philatelists. For them, the novelty is the stamp; the exciting coup is to find a stamp with a misprint or imperfect perforation or un-recallable mistake. A fascinating specimen of the latter is one prepared by the PSPC for the opening of the Faisal Mosque in Islamabad by its patron King Faisal of Saudi Arabia. Over-confident that the event would take place on the appointed date (11 October 1976), the Post Office issued the stamp and then discovered that the event had been cancelled. It was too late to recall all the stamps. Those already in the market became valuable collector’s items.

Towards the end of this beautifully printed volume – as much a collector’s item as Adil Salahuddin’s colourful stamps – the author Ms Arshi Ahmad-Aziz invites the artist to choose ten of his favourite stamps. It is a cruel request, in a way an insidious responsibility. It is like asking a horse-breeder to select the ten best from amongst his thoroughbreds. Not surprisingly, Salahuddin’s  three heroes - the Quaid-e-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the Quaid-e-Awam Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and the Quaid-e-Mussawari Prof. Shakir Ali - figure amongst them.

In 2015, Adil gave his more tangible assets – an enviable collection world stamps - to the State Bank of Pakistan. His life and talent he had already devoted to the PSPC. His creativity remains an enduring legacy to our country as do his inimitable designs. They compress in miniature the gamut of every aspect of our national identity. 

F.S. AIJAZUDDIN