A Facebook post shared on Saturday by UK-based Bangladeshi investigative journalist Zulkarnain Saer has highlighted a curious visual resemblance between Bangladesh’s national flag and a nearly century-old artwork by Slovak-Hungarian writer and painter Lajos Kassák.
Saer said the similarity first caught his attention while viewing one of Kassák’s works from the Architectural Structures series. The composition, which features a red circular form against a green field-like background, immediately reminded him of Bangladesh’s national flag.
He noted that the resemblance appeared even more striking when he learned that the artwork had been created in 1925, decades before the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent nation. The original piece, made using gouache and ink on paper, is currently preserved at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
According to Saer, the original painting cannot be privately owned because it is part of the museum’s collection. However, he had been searching for a lithograph of the work bearing the artist’s original signature and recently managed to acquire one through an online auction in Sweden.
Kassák, who was born in 1887 and died in 1967, created the artwork long before Bangladesh came into existence. Saer therefore raised the question of whether the resemblance is purely coincidental or if it could reflect a later visual influence.
Bangladesh’s first national flag was designed in 1970 by student leader Shib Narayan Das while he was associated with the then East Pakistan-based student organisation Swadhin Bangla Nucleus. The design featured a green background symbolising the country’s lush landscape and a red circle representing the rising sun of independence. Inside the red disc was a golden map of Bangladesh.
The flag was first publicly hoisted on March 2, 1971 at the Dhaka University campus, becoming a powerful symbol of the independence movement in the lead-up to the Bangladesh Liberation War.
After independence, the design was slightly modified in 1972 by renowned artist Kamrul Hasan. The golden map was removed from the red disc to simplify the design and make it easier to reproduce accurately on both sides of the flag.
The revised version retained the green field and the red circle, which symbolise both the blood of those who sacrificed their lives during the Liberation War and the rising sun of a new nation.
Saer pointed out that the resemblance between Kassák’s composition and the Bangladeshi flag is particularly noticeable in the colour palette and the central circular motif. In Kassák’s work, the form appears within a rhomboid structure, whereas Bangladesh’s flag adopts a horizontal rectangular format.
While the similarity may ultimately be coincidental, Saer’s observation has sparked curiosity about possible visual parallels between early twentieth-century modernist art and later national symbols.
Zulkarnain Saer’s post suggests that the resemblance may merit further examination by historians, art scholars and researchers interested in the evolution of Bangladesh’s national flag.
