Emerging from the emancipatory individualism of the post-Independence era, Sayed Haider Raza’s remarkably long career came to be defined by the quest for an Indian expression of modernism.
A founding member of the celebrated Progressive Artists’ Group, Raza left India on a government scholarship to Paris in 1950. Living in France until 2010, Raza was one of the few artists of his generation to find success abroad while maintaining a place of significance among the art community back home.
Raza’s work must be regarded within the framework of the dilemmas faced by Indian artists showing internationally in the 1960s and ’70s – their work had to grapple with the accusation of derivativeness and the demand for intelligible signs of identity.
Raza is best remembered for the series of bindu paintings he began in the late ’70s, which he continued to make for the rest of his life. These canvases featured a dot or a circle as a centre of energy, the seed of life and creation.
Encouraged by the artist’s contextualisation of his own work, writers on Raza have turned to biography to explain this shift in his practice.
The bindu series is linked to Raza’s trips to the caves of Ajanta and Ellora along with a broad immersion into other aspects of Indian culture such as miniature painting, philosophy, and poetry following a long period of engagement with the formal strategies of the School of Paris.
The origin story of Raza’s bindu series, however, goes further back to the time when the artist was a little boy in the village of Kakaiya in Madhya Pradesh. His school teacher, Nand Lal Jharia, taught him to focus by looking at a dot. Describing this incident, Raza once said, “It’s there that I started seeing.”
One of the earliest work from this period features a black circle hovering in dark fields of colour, not yet bound within lines. Raza has spoken of this period marking his true birth as a painter: “In terms of painting, immense possibilities seemed to open based on elementary geometric forms.”
Born in 1922 in Mandla district in Madhya Pradesh to a father who worked as a forest ranger, Raza’s childhood experiences brought an interest in nature to his practice.
Raza’s early landscapes are expressionistic, using colour and brush strokes to imbue emotion. While studying at the Sir JJ School of Art from 1943 to ’47, Raza painted Bombay in fluid watercolours in different moods and seasons.
As he developed the formal aspects of his landscape painting in Paris, he moved from creating schematic forms to addressing the tension between figuration and abstraction.
By the 1980s, Raza had eliminated representation from his paintings despite often linking them to actual places through their titles.
Saurashtra from 1983, which broke the record for the most expensive artwork sold at an auction until 2010, featured geometric shapes and loose brushstrokes in vivid colours in its four quadrants without the suggestion of actual objects.
Although Raza briefly limited his palette to the colour white in the late 1990s, his flat picture planes are recognisable for their bold colours and geometric shapes denoting male and female energy.
Raza paired triangles, squares and rectangles in red, blue, orange, yellow and green with deep black circles. Extensions of his bindu series, triangles, elliptical forms and serpentine shapes within these paintings recall the patterns of Tantric yantras even if they cannot neatly be situated within the popular movement of neo-Tantrism that appeared nearly a decade before his bindu series.
Yet, their goals were strikingly similar – to find universal expressions of life and creativity through particular means. The link to spirituality remains, too, recalling discussions about the "numinous" image in Indian art around that time.
Moreover, Raza’s work signalled the painter’s identity through associations with transcendence and tradition, offering an Indian interpretation of abstraction, a national modernism. The task of questioning such an approach towards synthesis would fall on the subsequent generation of artists. Raza’s work remained distant from their concern of challenging the exoticising expectations of an international art market.
Up until his last solo show, Nirantar, in Delhi early this year, Raza continued to develop his symbolic vocabulary. Towards the end of his life, Raza invested the proceeds from his paintings to build a foundation supporting the work of artists, poets, musicians and dancers, an amalgamation of the various streams of thought that have fed his practice.
Among friends, Raza is remembered for being generous with his time and resources, deeply committed to helping young practitioners – a painter who came full circle from his beginnings as a young, bold upstart.
Raza passed away at the age of 94 in Delhi after a prolonged illness.