Open Magazine – August 07, 2018

58

art

Time-travelling with Raza

back to

the bindu

By Shaikh Ayaz

S

H Raza is most commonly associated with

the Bindu, a solitary black cosmic circle once

described by the man himself as “the seed of all

energy and source of all life”. SH Raza: Traversing

Te r r a i n s, a major new exhibition on the legendary

artist that will run through October in Mumbai, does its best to

convey otherwise. “Without shattering the importance of the

Bindu, we want to correct people’s understanding of how Raza

arrived at the Bindu, what the Bindu is in the course of his own

art history, and where it came from,” says ashvin E Rajagopa-

lan, a co-curator of the show. Neither a full-dress retrospective

nor too marginal to be ignored, Traversing Terrains packs in

just enough of Raza’s works from his early to later years to give

visitors a broad sweep of the late artist’s place in the pantheon

of indian art. Hauntingly, the show serves as a timely tribute to

the artist who died this very month two years ago. a founding

member of the Bombay Progressive artists’ Group (PaG) that

included FN souza, MF Husain, Vs Gaitonde, Krishen Khanna,

Tyeb Mehta and akbar Padamsee, Raza left india for Paris in

the 1950s and returned to his homeland only 60 years later.

Though he was deeply attached to the medieval French town of

Gorbio, where he had lived for much of his life until the death of

his wife and fellow artist Janine Mongillat, his last wish was to

be buried in his birthplace Mandla, Madhya Pradesh.

But as co-curator Vaishnavi Ramanathan, who along with

Rajagopalan spent two years putting together Traversing

Te r r a i n s, says, “Bombay was a catalyst for his entire French

journey.” among his earliest-known paintings, the small-

sized Bombay watercolours included in this exhibition are

a testament to Raza’s keen appreciation of colour from the

very beginning of his career. Painted in 1945, an untitled city

street scene depicts Bombay as a bustling melting pot even

back then. as a student at sir JJ school of art, Raza was said to

be fond of walking around south Bombay neighbourhoods

in search of subject matter. Krishen Khanna, then a banker

at Grindlays Bank and his future friend and peer at the PaG,

recalls first spotting Raza “sitting in a corner of a street, trying

Photographs by rohit chawla