Doing one thing, and doing it well

As a little girl, the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research was my playground. I ran through the corridors, sliding along the polished floor, played hide and seek among the sculptures in the colonnade and collected spiny berries from the deep, dark forest and salt crystals from the seashore. Inside the icily air-conditioned building I would walk tip-toe through main lobby, staring in awe at the paintings on the walls, reverently almost-touching a tentative fingertip against the enormous MF Husain mural. I spelled out names I could not pronounce, and learned the sounds of Ara, Gaitonde, Sabavala, Hebbar and Raza. Later, as exposure and experience made the viewing more intelligent, styles were identified and preferences defined. To me – as to many – the geometric colour blocks that came to describe the work of Sayed Haider Raza seemed childlike, silly in a way, an ‘I can do that!’ response almost blasphemously evoked. But then a glance at the artist’s watercolour of the erstwhile CJ Hall in Mumbai, now the National Gallery of Modern Art, educes a rethink — the misty colours, the gorgeous light, the dynamism of the people at an event…it was far more than a painting, it was a live-cam on canvas! Was this the same man who painted dots and triangles and multi-coloured stripes?

Time and maturity bring enlightenment. Those same geometric blocks started making sense, with every new experience of a Raza work evoking a new emotion. But the characteristic paintings that told a metaphysical, spiritual, powerful story were not the beginning. Born in 1922 in Mandla district in Madhya Pradesh, Raza started drawing when he was just twelve years old. After high school he studied at the Nagpur School of Art and then at the JJ School of Art in Mumbai. Progress was rapid – his solo debut was in 1946 at the Bombay Art Society Salon, where he got the silver medal. Raza, Husain and FN Souza energised the formation of the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group – “We cherished and celebrated our plurality…we shared the unhappiness, the dissatisfaction, the anxieties.” Big honours came some years later: the Padma Shri and Fellowship of the Lalit Kala Akademi in 1981, the Padma Bhushan in 2007 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2013. 

In 1948 Raza met Henri Cartier-Bresson in Kashmir. That was a significant turning point. The photographer told the young artist that his work lacked ‘construction’. Raza told India Today in 2006 that if he had not met the Frenchman, “I would have continued painting white crosses to symbolise resurrection and black crosses for crucifixion.” From more realistic art, he plunged into a world where geometry ruled. The bindu was already a familiar concept – the story goes that when he was a restless nine year old, his teacher drew a bindu on a white wall, asking him to stare at it, hoping to calm the child. It “awakened a latent energy inside me” the artist said. He advised young men to “concentrate on one woman”, in the same way as “One idea is sufficient for an artist. For me, the bindu has been a vast subject with its variations throughout my life.” Themes of nature (prakriti), primal energy (kundalini) and the triangle (tribhuj) blended with the bindu and created something rarely seen before and understood even less. 

A French government scholarship took Raza to Paris in 1950. He travelled across Europe, as it was then, and osmosed in the art of painters like Cezanne, Monet and Gaugin. Paris became home for the next sixty-plus years – study at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts and marriage to Janine Mongillat, whom he met at the college, kept him in the city. It was after Mongillat passed away in 2002 that he decided to return to India some years later in 2010. France honoured Raza with various awards, culminating in the Commandeur de la Legion d’Honneur in 2015 for his artistic contributions. In Delhi, he worked a few hours every day in a studio that was stark, a perfect frame for his vivid expression. But he had slowed down, obviously, at almost ninety, telling an interviewer that “I don’t paint a lot, though I’m very keen to work. At times, I work for an hour in the morning and sometimes for three in the afternoon. I have assistants who help me move the canvases around.” But there was much more that he wanted to do. Even when in a wheelchair, he was looking at new goals. “I want to explore ‘Roopadhyatmik (abstract beauty)’ in my art. It is another spiritual form of abstraction which is beyond the conventional icons of triangles and the ‘bindu’. The concept emerges from the dot... And I have to find my own way to reach it.” 

The artist, who often talked about his belief in the power of Shiva Parvati, collected both contemporary paintings and ancient art from more remote areas of the country. His aim: to build an archive and a foundation to support Indian contemporary art. “I look for originality, sensibility, new perspective and authenticity.” Raza felt that artists of the day are too scattered in their interests and involvements. As he said, “You should concentrate in one direction and work without change. The Bhagwad Gita calls it ‘one religion’. The fact that artists have too much to do is partly because of the technical prowess and the lot of ‘bla-bla’ going on in this modern world.”  His close friend Ashok Vajpeyi, who has written extensively on Raza and his work, wrote, “In Raza, the sensuous and the spiritual, the erotic and the metaphysical coalesce organically. Rhythms of pleasure and the choreography of ideas are in constant dialogue, as it were.” The writer noted that “For him, the roots, the soil, the colours and hues, the fragrances, the shapes all constituted a spectrum which should create the artistic geography of contemporary art practice.”

SH Raza died on July 23, 2016 after a long illness. He was buried the next day in Mandla district, where he had been born, in a grave next to his father’s. His art may not make complete sense to me even today, but I know now that those triangles, those colourful stripes, those dots…I will never again think that “I can do that!” 

(The author is a Mumbai-based art critic)