GEETI SEN on a living heritage

The art of Sayed Haider Raza introduced a new language into contemporary painting, as a synthesis of Indian traditions and also, the language of form that he learnt while living in France. His resources were the use of the circle and square, the triangle and the diagonal — to circumscribe the universe and the five elements from nature which were his inspiration, of earth, water, fire, air and ether (akaash).

  This rediscovery had happened 30 years ago, in the mid 1980s when we had first met, and as the Editor of the journal of the India International Centre I had published an interview with him. In the years that followed I visited him in Gorbio, the south of France, where he lived in the summers. Some ten years later, my explorations were published in 1997 on Raza’s 75th birthday, as the first major book on him, titled Bindu, Space and Time in Raza’s vision.

It was indeed a new vision, of insights into life and the living.  Watching Raza Sahib work in his garden brought alive his excitement in discovering the the bija, the seed which he planted, as  the birth of life itself!  Several of his paintings of this time in fact refer to his discovery as they are titled Bija or Ankuram or Germination.

The seed was also enlarged to encompass a circle. It could be the bindu, a womb and the earth itself made whole again.  We cannot under-estimate the meaning of the circle in traditional Indian art as it had existed for centuries: as a form of meditation, and in tantric art. In European art, however, it was a new experiment; and artists like Kandinsky and Paul Klee went to great lengths to explain in words and in lectures that their abstract images had meaning and purpose. 

For Raza, his explorations expanded quickly into an awareness of the new meaning that he could bring to the circle.  When he was invited in 1980 to show his work at the Indian Triennale, he sent two paintings.  They were titled simply as Bindu  and the larger work was titled Maa, as a metaphor for his country that he had left behind.  Raza may have lived and worked in France for over  50 years, but he had continued to visit his homeland from 1959 almost every year, to visit the interiors of Madhya Pradesh. His studio in France was strewn with mementos that he brought back. 

His passion for Indian miniature painting is invoked in the colours he used in his paintings, of vermillion red, ochres, intensity of blacks and blue.  At times he would inscribe a line of verse from the poets of Madhya Pradesh, in the manner used in miniature paintings of ragamalas and in poems of the Satsai and other poems of love.

In a sense, he will never leave us, with his rediscovery of a language that was  essentially Indian in feeling and resonance. He has bequeathed a legacy that continues to be explored.

(Geeti Sen is a cultural historian and writer)