Circle of Life

Today I have lost one of my closest friends. I have been losing them often now — Tyeb Mehta, VS Gaitonde, MF Husain — but now I feel a bit left out and lonely. We have shared a long association and a friendship that began years ago, when I first saw Raza sitting in a corner at Warden Road in Mumbai, drawing or painting the buildings, the city. I did not know him back then, but in the coming years we were to exhibit together, and grow old together. He was responsible for getting me into the Progressive Artists’ Group. We all dispersed over the years but remained very close knit, exchanging letters, meeting each other whenever we could.

When I went to London for my first exhibition there in 1959, he was already an artist of repute, and exchanged with me a list of people I should interact with. He did the same when I showed there in 1960 and 1962. In fact, I remember his very first exhibition in Paris in the early ’50s, where he showed with Akbar Padamsee and FN Souza, which was extremely well-received. Several well-known collectors were present and bought their works. At this stage, what he was painting was a shoot off from the traditional Indian way of thinking; even his depiction of the Parisian houses. With his death we’ve lost one of India’s best colourists, whose sense of placement was absolutely perfect, whether he was painting Kashmir or Paris. He was a magnificent artist and there is a lot to learn from him. When he won the Prix de la Critique award in 1956, it was a proud moment for Indian art. The critics here celebrated the achievement, writing how “our painter got the most coveted award in Paris.”

For me, his death is also a personal loss. He was one of my oldest friends and we remained staunch friends till the very end. When I quit my job at the Grindlays Bank in 1961 to pursue art full-time, he had thrown a dinner party in Paris to celebrate, while we were celebrating in Mumbai. It was heartening to know that there was a fraternity like that, and friends who cared. I stayed with him whenever I visited Paris, even when he had a modest apartment, with one room for him and his wife, whom he was madly in love with, and a small living room, with a probably 12th century bunk that he was very proud of. We discussed art all the time, shared laughs and our concerns. He was a great admirer of my ability to recite poetry at will, and I loved doing that. He wasn’t a closed book, or just a painter, but an admirer of literature and music. I remember when he initially went to study in France, he taught Hindi to make ends meet, even designed book covers, striving for perfection in everything he did.

He has left a great legacy behind and we should be thankful for what he has given us.

‘His style of painting was heady and haunting’

-Uma Nair ON SH Raza

“I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.”

Rainer Maria Rilke in Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

My first experience of looking at a work by Syed Haider Raza was at Vadehra Art Gallery in the ’90s. His style of painting with the elemental form of the circle as a compositional starting point was heady and haunting. I recall going back the next day to study his works before meeting him at the Indian International Centre, Delhi, for an interview. When I met him that winter afternoon, he spoke of how the circle manifests itself in multiple forms because it is the beginning and the end — the source and the spirit; and mentioned the similarities between the word Om and the seed.

While other critics were speaking of foreign artists, I felt that Raza’s works addressed a deeply Indian, spiritual connotation. The idea of the concentric circles represented a concentrated energy. Raza imbued an inherent rhythm and elegance in his works which made him one of the finest and most striking examples of artists in the domain of Indian contemporary art. Shapes and colours were his world. And he tried all kinds of permutations to create his Indian-looking mandalas that were born out of an orchestration of chromatics. He was so content creating works and watching art lovers crowd around his primordial bindus and his rippled geometrics.

In those days he was also into Buddhist chanting and spoke of the vitality of the Panchatatva — the five primary colours and their elements. “My colours are born of the earth,” he would say, “they are the reflection of gestation, of the seed that must be born out of the spirit of all that is omniscient.”

It was last year, when I curated Five Quartets, that the Raza Foundation gave me permission to spend time with him. 93-year-old Raza was frail but a gentleman with finesse. His long slender fingers always fascinated me. I shamelessly held onto them while he spoke. It was the heart of a solitary, deeply reflective Raza reminiscing over his wife Janine, the Sunday Mass at the church in Gorbio in France and the hymns that he loved. He spoke about his love for Christ, of how his teachings spoke about the power of humanism. He spoke of how the bindu that used to be a symbol of peace was now a symbol of a tormented world of the violence that man subjects it to. Suddenly Raza’s whole universe had morphed into his bindu and it was as if time and space stood still to create a corollary of conversations.

Raza’s universe was the vocabulary of great thinkers and writers. Everything he did was born out of allegories and allusions. The principles of pure geometry and form that he used in his canvases were his own principles. His favourite authors Arthur Rimbaud and Rainer Maria Rilke seemed to bring him joy. When I recited a few lines of Rilke’s poetry he became ecstatic and recited the lines in French.

Everyday of those seven days I sat with a pen and paper and put down my notes. Those notes from the summer of 2015 became Reverie with Raza, the book I wrote on him. Hearing the news of his passing, I now think that it was so precious to have been able to spend time with the last of India’s modern masters. He leaves behind works that speak of seasons in the sun and twinkling nights merging Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and the South of France.