From Black Sun to Bindu

Essays

From Black Sun to Bindu

Yashodhara Dalmia

Rajasthan, 1973 Courtesy: Vadehra Art Gallery (See also, p. 228) In wending his way through the trajectory of modernism, the artist Sayed Haider Raza moved from elementary geometrical forms to abstract shapes in light and dark and large swatches of colour enveloping the surface. At each stage, he imbued the works with his personal vision and the requisites of modernist expressions. It could be said that his quest was informed with colour and composition, which pivoted around the black circle and morphed into consistently new modalities.

Raza had spent his childhood in the forests of Madhya Pradesh, in central India, and found solace among the chlorophyllous greens of foliage and the juicy sap of plants. Seeing his innate talent to catch the quick of life, he was sent to train at the Nagpur School of Art, from where he made his way to Bombay (now Mumbai), the centre of art activity in India at that time. These were sombre times for the newly independent country, which was to experience the ravages of Partition. In the midst of the ensuing communal frenzy, Raza’s entire family left for Pakistan. Yet the artist chose to remain in Bombay, where he was a founding member of the forceful modernist group known as the Progressive Artists’ Group (PAG), formed in the very year that the country gained independence. The PAG formulated its own notions, discarding any revivalist tendency or academic naturalism in art, and in the midst of a welter of existing traditions, it carved its own path to modernism, linking it to international trends. Raza was to engage in debates and discussions with other members of the Group, such as M. F. Husain and F. N. Souza, which would continue late into the night. Their poverty of means was matched by their sincerity and talent, which would later propel them into the mainstream of art in the country.

To acquire greater training and to acquaint himself with the works of masters such as Cézanne, Picasso and Matisse, Raza made his way to Paris in 1950 on a scholarship. In many ways this was to be a culmination as well as a beginning. Postwar Paris suffered from a sense of exhaustion and wore a haunted look. The regular meeting places of artists and writers, like Café de Flore, had a deserted air and the masters were present only by their absence. The École de Paris (School of Paris) had run its course, leaving behind the last remnants of abstract art, with painters such as Pierre Soulages, Nicolas de Staël and Serge Poliakoff. While the scene had shifted to New York, Paris, the city par excellence for art, harboured a melancholy nostalgia for the masters of art. Yet, a whole generation of artists from other parts of the world was to make their way here to imbibe the paradigms of modernism that the city had been celebrated for. Raza, for instance, engaged with the Lebanese artist Chafiq Abboud, whose journey was comparable to his, in that both artists spent most of their lives in Paris but became influential painters in their own country. Abboud also remained attached to his Middle Eastern roots, recalling his grandmother’s oral storytelling as well as the Byzantine icons in churches, which would eventually radiate in his works. His encounter with École de Paris led him to move from a Lebanese tradition of figurative and landscape painting to a colourful personal abstraction.

In the Hundredth Year

Ashok Vajpeyi

Aarambh, 2014 Acrylic on canvas, 120 × 100 cm Courtesy: The Raza Foundation, New Delhi When he wrote “I Will Bring My Time,” it was not an aesthetic boast but a gentle assertion that Sayed Haider Raza made in a love letter to Janine Mongillat, a French artist who became his lifecompanion in 1959. He had been in Paris for about a decade, a young struggling Indian artist who eventually remained there for six decades, the longest time any Indian artist has lived and painted in France before or after him. Raza did not change his nationality and retained his Indian passport till the end. He returned to India for good towards the end of 2010 and died on 23 July 2016 at a New Delhi hospital. He was buried, as he wanted, the next day in Mandla, next to his father’s grave, close to the river Narmada, which he always remembered with deep regard.

Having experienced beauty and fear in the thick jungles of Mandla in his childhood, the two became his life-long concerns, fear both superseded and side-lined as he pursued beauty through his art. He attained a rare but vitally creative fusion in his art, of French la sens plastique and Indian metaphysical concepts. Raza would say that he learnt how to paint from France and what to paint from India! He searched for a visual language in painting, which could enact his sense of celebration and affirmation of life as also reveal sensuously, in vibrant colours and dynamic form, his spiritual reality as it were. Living in the West for nearly six decades, Raza explored in his work an alternative modernity of consonance, celebrative and cerebral, of affirmation and silence, of germination and rejuvenation. Nature remained a central theme for him throughout his life. It was perhaps an inherited pagan sensibility not giving in to the dichotomies that dominated modern Western art. His early French period works were largely cityscapes, and he later painted “inscapes.” He termed his art as roop adhyatam, or “spiritual form,” underlining that for art, beauty is at once both physical and metaphysical. In Raza’s paintings, there are no visible traces of the post-World War II history, although he was in France at the time. Once, when I told him that he was more concerned with eternity than history, he joyously agreed!

For a couple of decades in France, life was not easy and smooth for Raza. He was accepted as a painter of the Parisian School, which gave him some recognition and clientele, but equally, it made him unhappy about his artistic identity. It is then that he, through a lot of agonizing self-questioning, recalled bindu—an image that a primary school teacher in a village school near Mandla had told him, a boy of wayward mind, to concentrate upon. Bindu as a source of energy, a point of entry and exit and a still centre, became the central motif for Raza. In popular imagination, both among casual viewers and serious observers of art, bindu came to be identified with Raza:

“I have no apology for my repetition of the form of the bindu. With repetition, you can gain energy and intensity as is gained through Japmala, or the repetition of a word or a syllable until you achieve a state of elevated consciousness.”

Kriti Prakriti, 2012 Courtesy: The Raza foundation, New Delhi (See p. 101)

Understanding

Raza

A poem by the modernist American poet Wallace Stevens is titled “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” If it be so, then there must be many more ways of looking at art. Raza wrote extensive notes about his art and vision; several critics, from France, Europe and India, wrote about his art, and throughout his life, Raza kept in touch with his artist–friends by way of letters. All this rich and varied material offers interesting insights to better understand the life, the struggles, the self-reflections, the richness of Raza.

A small selection is being presented here. Some of his own notes, a few love letters to his artist–wife Janine Mongillat, and some extracts from his notebooks are included. He kept notebooks— all called “Dhai Akshar” (Two and a Half Letters)—in which he noted poems, thoughts, philosophical and aesthetic ideas, utterances from a wide range of sources, writers and thinkers, poets and sages in many languages, namely Hindi, Sanskrit, French, English and Urdu.

The essays or extracts from the critics have been selected keeping in mind both their historical and continuing relevance, providing a critical map of the artistic journey of more than 70 years.

A. V.

Encounter, 1999 Courtesy: The Raza foundation, New Delhi (See, p. 99)

Raza on Himself