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In a memoir excerpt published by Scroll.in on January 29, 2025, political activist and writer Tariq Ali recalls meeting Pakistani artist Tassaduq Sohail at a small Bloomsbury gallery in 1987. Ali’s account follows a friendship shaped by art, Punjabi conversation, humor and disagreement—and by Sohail’s memories of Partition. It is a personal recollection, not an independently reported biography.
How Ali and Sohail met
Ali says a friend urged him to visit an exhibition at a small Bloomsbury gallery. When he arrived, he initially mistook Sohail for a security guard. The works on the ground floor were black-ink miniatures crowded with figures in scenes of brutality. Upstairs, the paintings were colorful, comic and satirical. That sharp contrast was Ali’s introduction to the range of Sohail’s work—and to the artist he would know for decades.
The meeting took place in 1987, according to Ali’s memoir. The excerpt recounting it appears in You Can’t Please All: Memoirs 1980–2024. The memoir is available in distinct publisher editions: Seagull Books lists a 2025 hardback, 824 pages, ISBN 9781803095387, for sale in the Indian subcontinent (Seagull Books); Verso Books lists a November 2024 hardback, 816 pages, ISBN 9781804290903 (Verso Books).
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Partition in Sohail’s story
Ali presents Sohail’s experience of Partition as central to understanding his outlook. In Ali’s recollection, Sohail and his parents left their village in Punjab for Lahore in June 1947. The family’s convoy discovered that the first bus had been attacked and its passengers killed; they reached Lahore. These details, including the family’s memory of the journey, come from Ali’s memoir rather than independent reporting on the event.
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Ali describes Partition as involving “several million refugees and well over a million dead bodies.” That is Ali’s wording in the excerpt, not an independently verified estimate here. The memoir links Sohail’s childhood experience of violence to the emotional weight Ali saw in his work, while also portraying him as largely apolitical.
From Britain to a life in painting
Ali says Sohail’s parents moved to Karachi in 1952 and that Sohail left for Britain in 1960, two years after Pakistan’s 1958 military coup. In Britain, the memoir recounts, Sohail held factory and newsagent jobs, drew in notebooks and attended weekly life-drawing sessions for six months. He also sold paintings on the pavement near Hyde Park.
Ali says Sohail returned to Pakistan in January 2000 after about forty years in Britain. In the passage, Sohail explains his decision this way: “Everyone has to. I thought it best to be close to my final destination.” Ali reports that Sohail died in Karachi in October 2017. These dates and details are presented as part of Ali’s retrospective account.
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Ali recalls a shift in Sohail’s paintings: early ink scenes marked by trauma and later work that became more colorful, with animals and mermaids among its subjects. He describes the earlier paintings as biting in their satire and remembers Sohail asking whether art could make anyone resist: “Do you think any of my paintings would encourage anybody to fight back? I mean anyone. Even a single person? You, for instance?”
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Ali’s account also describes Sohail’s antipathy to religion and his later caution in Karachi, where Sohail perceived a more pious cultural climate. Those observations about his motives and the cultural conditions around him are Ali’s interpretations or reports of their conversations, not a comprehensive account of Sohail’s views or the reception of his art.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.A friendship carried in Punjabi, poetry and argument
Ali says the two usually spoke Punjabi and tried to avoid English. Their friendship included jokes, Sufi poetry recited by Sohail, and conversations about the painter in Ali’s novel The Night of the Golden Butterfly, a character Ali says was loosely based on him.
They also disagreed about history. The memoir recalls a conversation over whether Partition could have been avoided; Ali says his answer remains yes. The dispute sits alongside the more intimate details of their bond: language shared, art debated and difficult questions left open between friends.
Reading the excerpt as a memoir
Ali’s piece is most revealing as one participant’s account of a long friendship. Its value lies in the scenes he remembers: the divided gallery, a childhood journey recounted years later, the painter’s question about whether art might prompt resistance, and the conversations that continued after Sohail returned to Karachi. Biographical details and judgments about Sohail should be read in that context—as Ali’s recollections, not as a standalone verified profile.
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