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a handful of key works from the early Paris period. Rendered
in thick impasto, a cross between Van Gogh and souza, Eglise et
Calvaire Breton finds Raza drawn towards Parisian landscapes
much the same way as Bombay’s. “He had done eight-ten
paintings of a particular church on the outskirts of Paris. it’s a
highly Gothic church and looks somewhat like [Chhatrapati
shivaji Terminus],” Rajagopalan surmises.
There is no disputing that it was nostalgia that triggered
Raza’s most famous creation. The Bindu emerged from the
memory of his schoolteacher in Madhya Pradesh drawing a
point on the wall for the wandering young mind to concentrate.
a nod to Hindu philosophy, the deep well from which Raza has
drawn generously, the Bindu was a turning point for him as
an artist. Metaphorically, the Bindu awakened his ‘third eye’.
incidentally, the interpretation of the Bindu differs depending
on whom you ask. While Rajagopalan describes it as a “void”,
the signature dot could just as well symbolise the cosmos, a
centre of all creation, or the sun itself. The Bindu motif can also
signify the emptiness of life, and at the same time, the eternal
cycle of continuity.
Whatever the interpretation, Raza always imagined the
Bindu as black, refashioning the five Vedic elements (earth, sky,
water, air and fire) as primary colours. “For him,” says Raja-
gopalan, “the land is always brown, water blue and the sun is
bright red or yellow.” Few modern artists have explored colour
as tirelessly as Raza did. “His entire business was colour. The
Bindu gave him the excuse for space, colour and geometry, and
the whole thing was a manipulation of space,” Khanna argues.
“He knew the colour properties so well—the range and tonali-
ties of each colour and how they would f low into one another.
it’s a spiritual and experiential thing and you spend an entire
lifetime trying to find that out. i can’t think of any other indian
painter who had such a wide colour philosophy.”
The other interesting work at the exhibition is a 1984 paint-
ing that the curators claim as the first Bindu to be titled as such
by the artist. Rajagopalan invites visitors to pay close attention
to Raza’s titles, which are often self-revelatory. “Everything
he has done so far, we now know is associated with land and
landscape. He literally titles everything that way. We have
works called Punjab, Rajasthan, L a Te r r e (earth), Banaras and
Saawan (seasons).” after discovering the Bindu, as poet and
close friend ashok Vajpeyi once said, “From landscape, Raza
turned to nature itself.”
The impact of Rajput miniatures on Raza’s art is apparent
in his paintings of the 1960s onwards. The borders around the
canvas, careful division of space and the multiple perspectives
of storytelling reveal a clear affinity for miniature paintings and
indian scriptures. “settled in France, he was reading up a lot on
ancient indian culture. away from india, he was probably more
connected to india than he ever was,” Rajagopalan contends.
as he comes under the spell of american abstractionists
like Frank stella and Mark Rothko around the 1970s, his
canvases evolved into flat planes of colour. Out goes the thick
impasto and oil as acrylic becomes his sole preoccupation.
“acrylic offered him transparency and fluidity. it was also
quicker to work with. Oil is more romantic, in the sense that
when he left that impasto style, he also let go of the medium
itself,” explains Rajagopalan.
The late-period acrylic Surya Namaskar (1993) merges all
of the artist’s Hindu elements to create a memorable Raza
moment. summing up, Rajagopalan says that Raza’s work is at
the intersection of poetry and spirituality. in ashok Vajpeyi’s
telling, “Raza’s pictures are colour-creations and colour-memo-
ries. They overwhelm without any self-assertion and have the
sacredness of prayer and intensity of a scream.” Unlike his con-
temporaries, Raza never once wavered in his belief of painting
as a spiritual experience. From landscape to nature, the modern
master turned to the eternal itself, firmly committed to finding
spiritual sustenance both in work and life.sH Raza: Traversing Terrains runs at Piramal Museum of Art,
Mumbai, till October 28th“what was
construction
in a painting?
i never knew”
SH Raza in response to
Henri Cartier-Bresson’s
observation about his
paintings being good but
lacking ‘construction’
Courtesy: PiRamal muSeum of aRt