When Singh emigrated to England in 1952, Sohan left Jullandhar for Bombay, settling in Parel and working as a still photographer in an early Bollywood studio in Andheri, Bombay. He resigned after completing two films. In 1955, he enrolled in the Simla College of Art. While a student, Qadri visited the art galleries of Delhi, met the artists Sailoz Mookherjea and J. Swaminathan, who were in the process of starting the group Unknown, and joined the artistic circle around the Indian modernists M.F. Husain, Syed Haider Raza, J. Swaminathan, and Ram Kumar, who were building on earlier Indian modernist movements such as the Calcutta Group (1942) and the Progressive Artists Group of Bombay (1947), while rejecting the reliance on figuration which the earlier artists had believed defined them as authentically Indian.
