Today is the fourth anniversary of a most heroic death draped by colours of far-influencing national import. General Ershads autocratic rule had hit lurid levels of corruption corroding the citizen's many freedoms into worse than a skeleton and pushing the future of the nation on to an irrecoverable course. Society had already had too much of that all-pervading rot made the more stinking by the shameless gloss with which the electronic as also the print media projected the trinity of the emperor, empress and prince. It was waiting for something that could precipitate his plunge into doom. Qamrul' Hassan's death worked that spark.

It was the closing night's session of the Jatiya Kavita Utsav, introduced by the nation's poets headed by Shamsur Rahman specifically to fight autocracy and take on Ershad frontally. Qamrul Hassan was presiding. At the end of the proceedings. the nation's most eminent painter, had a massive heart attack and died on the shoulders of Sheikh Hasina helping him to a transport on way to hospital. The painter had. before the attack, hardly finished a biting caricature of the autocrat captioned uniquely by him — Desh AaJ Biswhabehayar Khapporey. By the end of that night more than a hundred thousand posters were printed out of that to be distributed throughout the nation. By. the end of the week every family, committed to the overthrow of autocracy, had one Bishwabehaya poster hanging from the wall.

By now Qamrul Hassan has very deservedly been recognised as the nation’s second most important personality in the visual arts after the legendary Zainul. But his equally, if not more, important contribution to the undoing and defeat of Pakistan as also to the fall of Ershad, in particular terms, and generally to the struggle against communalism and bigotry of every kind, has not been appreciated .in a manner reflecting the nation's true debts to him.

Qamrul Hassan's caricature of the Pakistani demon during the Liberation War remains a supreme creation of patriotism. But his contribution to textile design as the founder chief of the Design Centre is not known to many. A disciple of the incomparable Gurusaday Dutta, he was the best Bratochari dancer in the two Bengals and an immaculate performer on the Santnal drum. madol. His last act of going to the masses involved a gigantic attempt to revive the Bratochari as a popular nation-building movement. Before that he had already declared himself a patua, the traditional village picture-maker, rather than a painter.

His graduation into a very special ’ kind of colourist, using the primaries so loved by our village painters, as also his breaking into forms neither tending towards modern western distortions nor beholden to influences of Zainul. places him on an enviably high niche in the history of our arts. He was besides a champion boxer and bodybuilder on the all-Bengal level. There wouldn't be another like hi»».