In the centennial year of the renowned artist Sayed Haider Raza, it is worth noting that he made a long journey from a small village, with barely a few hamlets, in central India, to the international art world, which became his domain in the later years. He stayed for over half a century in Paris but his thoughts were never far from home, as is evident in his masterly painting Maa… (1981). In it, flaming splash of colours on the one side are juxtaposed with the black, still centre on the other, both equipoised as movement to stillness, action to reflection. The flickering square resonates with the opening gateways of realisation and the unmoving, dark circle at its centre. Below the painting, in a manner reminiscent of the miniature tradition is the inscription, “Maa, lautkar jab aaunga, kya launga (Mother, when I return home, what shall I bring)?” The yearning for home overflows and gets reconstructed evocatively.
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The dark circles emanating colours began to appear increasingly in his works from this period onwards. If Raza’s early bindus are dense and immobile, they metamorphose into concentric circles of energy and, still later, begin to wade through space, suspended yet animated. Finally, their potential as germination of life is brought into play, providing them with a universal connotation. The concept that the “point” carries within it the potency for all of creation, just as the seed carries the tree within it, leads to innumerable, radiating permutations and combinations with circles, triangles and squares. In Raza’s works of the ’80s, such as Germination, the seed is like the womb of the Earth which contains within it an infinite potential for life. And from Germination there is Tree, Water and, then, Emergence as the artist turns towards the darker hues of the Earth, as if he is delving into its very centre, to find an even more universal space.
His delicate works from the ’90s, such as Param Bindu (1989), have concentric circles painted in ethereal colours of yellow, ochre, green revolving around a dark centre. In Naad Bindu (1989), the diaphanous sheaths of grey which turn white at the edges and rotate around a black disc convey a sense of ascending to a higher world of light and sound. The monochromatic canvas, which expands into a translucent space, transfers an exquisite delicacy while retaining its rootedness to the Earth.
When the bindu first emerged in Raza’s work, in 1980, it was as a result of his memories of home. He stumbled on the vast universe of inchoate experiences of childhood after an encounter with the Abstract Expressionist artists during a residency in the US in the Sixties.
The floodgates of the past opened up and, in my book The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives (2001), he recalled, “I have never really left the deeply rooted, wonderful world of forest and rambling river, hill and sparkling stream. The time spent as nature’s child. You see, we lived in the country’s core, in Barbaria, Madhya Pradesh, where my father was a forest ranger, and in Mandla afterwards. The lush Kanha thickets were my regular haunts. Highly impressionable at that tender age, I soaked in every single feature of that beautiful landscape. So I let my mind wander. But that was precisely the problem. It wandered excessively, making me, I’m afraid, the worst, most distracted pupil in my class. So that was when it happened — my introduction to a certain idea which was later to become my leitmotif, an integral part of my art, the very backbone supporting my body of work. This was the concept of the bindu. How can I ever thank my beloved school teacher Nandlal Jharia? He left an absolutely indelible mark on me. Noticing my restlessness, it was he who made me wait behind suddenly one evening, facing one of the whitewashed walls of the classroom. On this he drew carefully, with firm, strong hands, a large, dark circle. Just that, stark against its clear background. ‘Iss bindu par dhyaan do (Concentrate on this round spot),’ he instructed. I tried that. It was difficult not to be distracted at first, but then I got his point. Gradually, blotting out much else, my mind settled down to focus solely at that centre. It was uncanny. Savouring every one of its essential requisited colour, line, tone, texture and space. I found myself riveted.”
In the painting Maa…, the famous lines are originally from a poem written by his close friend and poet Ashok Vajpeyi. Moved by the resonance these created, Raza encased them in his painting, evoking a spell of remembrance for him. He had gone to Paris for two years on a scholarship in 1950 and stayed on for over half a century. But his yearning for home never left him and he would visit the country every year to meet poets, writers and artists. In the last years of his life, he came to live and work in Delhi where he passed away at the age of 94 on July 23, 2016. He was buried according to his wishes next to his father’s grave in Mandla in Madhya Pradesh. The artist’s homeward journey had, at last, found a resting place.
The writer is an art historian and an independent curator based in New Delhi
Late artist Sayed Haider Raza with his work. (Photo: Express Archive) 
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