His fame rests on his striking depictions of exaggeratedly muscular Bengali peasants engaged in the activities of their everyday lives.

Mustafa Zaman in his article entitled "Revisiting Lal Mia's vision" wrote: "His fluid movements through myriad social geographies and his proximity with some unique personalities, his engagement with Allama Mashriqi's Khaksar movement that sought to organise the 'self' and 'Muslim sociality' to lay the ground for decolonisation; and his sojourns in America and Europe prepared him for his canvases which soon became populated with muscular men and women.

[6] There poet and art critic Hasan Shahid Suhrawardy restyled him S. M. Sultan and offered him accommodation in his home and the use of his library.

[5][7] Under Principal Mukul Chandra Dey the school deemphasized the copying of Old Masters and moved beyond Indian mythological, allegorical, and historical subjects.

Later he traveled to England, where he participated in the annual open-air group exhibition at Victoria Embankment Gardens, Hampstead, London.

[4][5] The following year, while teaching art at a school in Karachi, he came into contact with leading Pakistani artists Abdur Rahman Chughtai and Shakir Ali, with whom he developed a lasting friendship.

[5][14] He lived close to the land and far from the outside art world for the next twenty-three years, developing a reputation as a whimsical recluse and a Bohemian.

[8][16] Agricultural laborers engaged in everyday activities such as ploughing, planting, threshing, and fishing took center stage on his canvases.

In this way he made obvious the inner strength of the sturdy, hard working peasants, the backbone of Bangladesh, something that would have remained hidden in a more realistic depiction.

[12] The catalog of his solo exhibition at the German Cultural Center, Dhaka, in 1987, described how he saw his subjects: These people who lived close to the soil, who bore on their shoulders the burden of civilization did not appear to Sultan to be weak, debilitated, starving creatures who deserved pity and sympathy.

Quite the contrary, he saw their bulging muscles, their vigorous torso, their overpowering vitality, their well-rounded buttocks and swelling breasts ready to come to grip with life.

[1][16] Professor Lala Rukh Selim, Chairman of the Department of Sculpture, University of Dhaka, described Sultan as one of the four pioneers of Bangladeshi modernism, along with Zainul Abedin, Safiuddin Ahmed, and Quamrul Hassan.

[4][7] In 1989, Tareque Masud directed a 54-minute documentary film on Sultan's life, called Adam Surat (The Inner Strength).

[20] As of January 2020, the award recipients include Farida Zaman, Mustafa Monwar, Qayyum Chowdhury, Rafiqun Nabi, Ferdousi Priyabhashini, Hashem Khan, Abdul Mannan, Kalidas Karmakar, Hamiduzzaman Khan, Samarjit Roy Chowdhury and Murtaja Baseer.