“I want to see with my eyes closed,” Syed Haider Raza said, echoing the Persian poet Rumi.
The black spot, the empty source through which light enters and etches itself on the retina in a multitude of images, has finally merged with the eye of Raza the artist. He has become the ‘Bindu’, the title of the most celebrated series of his creations on which he worked during the wonder years of the 1980s. Those were the years when the black suns, often turning into searing whites, edged with repetitive bands of yellows and greys, blues and greens, and geometric notations in triangles, tense scribbles on tablets of painterly motifs, elevated him to the greatest heights. In his later years, wondrous reds circled in tight concentric bands, white shone against saffron-orange and black, recalling the frenzied drumming of the monsoon rains in the forests of his childhood village of Damoh in central India.
Like the mystic Sufi singers and dancers, the twirling, swirling bands of colour around the Bindu became the trademark of an artist who left his rural moorings in Madhya Pradesh to travel to Paris, the artistic Mecca of the mid-20th century, where he achieved much-deserved acclaim and rewards. Like many other artists of his generation, Raza arrived in Paris in 1959 to study at the prestigious École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts. He had already gained a fairly well-grounded education at the Nagpur School of Art, followed by the Sir J.J. School of Art in Mumbai.
Then, of course, he became part of the young Turks of that era, a founder-member of the Progressive Artists’ Group that started, it would now appear, only to challenge the erstwhile dominance of the Bengal School and the timid forays into modernity that some of the others were attempting. Raza’s canvasses of this era are notable mostly for their fidelity to the prevailing fashion of water colours of temple towns and street scenes. There is, however, a hint at the turbulence, the fire that lurks within, which appears in works that erupt with uncontrollable stabs of red, or with vernacular script like the scrawled markings on the walls of caves in the forests of Madhya Pradesh, as if his thoughts were fighting to be seen. It’s only much later, as recorded in the pages of Ashok Vajpeyi’s monumental account of the artist’s work, A Life in Art: Raza , that we learn of the conflicts the young Raza must have faced. An early arranged marriage to a young woman who chose to migrate to Pakistan, for instance, is only hinted at, when he says in 2001: “Partition was a difficult period for us; we were extremely unhappy about Pakistan. But I decided to stay. I did and am extremely happy that I have neither changed my name, nor my religion, nor my passport, in spite of the 51 years in France. I am still an Indian citizen.”
Vajpeyi has been a poetic observer of the artist’s journey over the years, when he achieved his greatest inspiration working alongside his companion and artistic touchstone, his artist-wife Janine Mongillat, in the sun-lit medieval town of Gorbio in the south of France. And even after her death, when Raza chose to return to India, Vajpeyi continued to be a significant presence.
As Vajpeyi observes in his book: “It is always difficult to trace the sources of a painter. In the case of Raza, this becomes all the more difficult since he has drawn inspiration and creation provocation from a very rich variety of sources. Apart from visual arts, these sources include poetry, music, Indian thought, ancient Indian art and sculpture, Jain manuscripts, medieval Indian miniature paintings, forests — the river Narmada and the tribals of Madhya Pradesh, the colours of Rajasthan etc. have all gone into the psyche of Raza as memory, recollection, inspiration to be transformed into art.”
Looking at some of the images of Raza and Janine’s life in Gorbio, one is reminded of the dark-bright villages and undulating mountains and forests that appear in the iconography of the late Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. Both are exiles from home, artists who have recreated the colours of memory in a highly textured and enigmatic form. One might use the word mystical, if it were not so debased.
In both, it is a return to a secret revealed to them in childhood. Or, as Raza murmurs, “I always come back to the main theme that has obsessed me: nature.” Rest in peace, Syed Haider Raza. You are home.
Geeta Doctor is a Chennai-based writer and critic.
