Noted painter Raza laid to rest beside his father in his hometown Mandla

Nagpur/Mandla: Life came a full circle for renowned painter Syed Haider Raza when his body was brought to Nagpur on an Air India flight from Delhi and then taken in an ambulance by road to Mandla, a small town in Madhya Pradesh, where the artist grew up and did his schooling from. The 250km journey by road back to his hometown was a reverse of the route he had taken six decades back when he had come to Nagpur from Mandla to study art and then had moved to Paris to pursue a career as a painter.
Raza breathed his last at a private nursing home in Delhi on Saturday. It was his wish to be buried in the cemetery in Mandla next to his father’s grave. The body was brought from Delhi by the trustees and officials of Raza Foundation. Manish Pushkale who accompanied the body from Delhi till Mandla along with trustee Ashok Vajpeyi, Sanjeev Chube and Sahitya, told TOI that the burial was in accordance with the last wishes of the painter.
“There was absolutely no confusion about the last rites as he had clearly stated in his will years ago that he would like his native village to be his final resting place,” he said.
Raza’s father was an employee of forest department in MP and had lived for a good period of time in Mandla.
The body reached Mandla around 2pm and was handed over to Raza’s relatives and Muslim clerics at the Shia Jama Masjid where it was prepared for its last journey to the only cemetery in the town. A guard of honour by the state government was given to the departed artist at Uday Chowk and the last post was sounded at the cemetery when the body was lowered into the grave.
There were emotional moments for the family comprising his three nephews and a niece, when a pandit from Babaria, in Narsinghpur, the village where Raza was born, brought a handful of soil and put it over the body.
“Mamu had very fond memories of this place and would always visit Mandla whenever he was in India,” said Syed Shabbir Hasan Jaffari, one of the nephews.
“He would visit his old school, take pictures and chat with us in Bundelkhandi for ours together. He had deep knowledge of scriptures and loved poetry which he would recite on these visits. He remembered so many Sanskrit shlokas and would always ask my mother to prepare kadhi which he loved to eat,” Shabbir recalled.
Shabbir, who resides in Tamia in Chhindwara district, further said, “He loved his country more than anything else. He loved Mandla and also the Narmada river. He would sit on the banks for hours, staring at the horizon. Though he lived in France, he never quit his Indian citizenship.”
Describing the last rites as a mix of Ganga Jamuna culture so ingrained in Raza, Pushkale said, “He rose from the dust of this hamlet to the sky and has returned to this very dust.”
In a touching gesture, a grocery shop owner, Chhote Raja, 50, travelled from Babaria village in Narsinghpur to Mandla with soil for his grave. “I read about his death in newspapers. He never forgot us despite his celebrity status. He wrote to my father from France in 1984,” Chhote Raja said. “When he would come home, he would smear his forehead with soil of his village,” he said. Displaying an old and torn letter from Raza, he said, “This is a proud possession of our family.”
Unlike Chhote Raja, not many in Mandla know about their celebrity son. “We don’t know him. We just saw a crowd and out of curiosity joined them,” said a villager. Another resident, Ehfaz Ahmad, said, “I never heard about him. But after learning he was a native, I feel proud of my Mandla.”