The Forgotten Artist

A contemporary of masters like MF Husain,KH Ara and FN Souza,Raiba was a leading experimenter of his time,matching his peers in technique and originality,but drawing back when it came to publicity. Without taking anything away from them,many of his contemporary greats were extremely good in handling the media and were aware of the commercial gains to be had from art. Raiba was very much on a par with them in technique and talent,but he was rather naïve about the business side of art, says Anant Nikam,head,department of graphic/printmaking at the Sir JJ School of Art in Mumbai,that is currently displaying prints of the artists drawings. Earlier this year,the school had hosted a retrospective of Raibas work,titled Miniature to Monumentalism.

After Independence,when Souza,SH Raza,Husain and other avant-garde artists came together to form the Progressive Artists Group as a reaction to the revivalist nationalism of the Bengal school of art,Raiba was invited by Husain to join them. But within a year,Raiba found the environment constrictive and left it to pursue art on his own. Even though the group dissolved by the early 1950s,its attempt to develop an original idiom for Indian modern art saw its brand value soaring in the market and gave its founders unprecedented fame in the country and abroad. Raiba,in the meanwhile,got lost in the labyrinth of art,never enjoying the same level of success or recognition. However,leaving the Progressives is a decision he does not regret. I did a group show at Chetana,near Kala Ghoda,with them. Later,my work,Artist Painting a Purdah-Nasheen Lady,was also shown at another of their exhibition. But they didnt know anything about art. I would see them making tedha-medha squiggles and call it art. I told them,bekaar hai,I will do my own thing, he says. Sitting next to him,his son Najeeb tones down his words. Although they had different ideologies,my father had a good personal equation with Husain and Ara,especially the latter,although they lost touch in their last years, he says.

Raibas life is full of such little ironies. Despite having a thorough academic knowledge of art history he made a premature exit from school to study art,first at a newly established art school called Nutan Kala Mandir,and then at Sir JJ School of Art in 1943,where he earned a double promotion Raibas art was anything but bookish. Perhaps,it helped that he was also a poet at heart,the lyrical mystique of Urdu poetry finding expression in the haunting quality of his paintings. In fact,Raibas initiation into the creative world came through Urdu. His paternal grandfather Mohiuddin had started one of the first Urdu newspapers in the country called Hadiqa. His own command over the language helped him secure a scholarship early in his life at the prestigious Anjuman-I-Islam school in Mumbai. Its here while he was trying his hand at Arabic calligraphy,that his talent for drawing was spotted and an offer to join art school came his way.

Art transformed his lower middle-class life. Son of a tailor,his family lived in a kothi first in Andheri and then on Temkar street near south Mumbais Kamathipura. His father was very proud of his sons talent and encouraged him to pursue art. He became financially independent after he graduated from JJ,his period at the art school defining his coming of age as an artist. The then dean at the institute,Charles Gerard,was a mentor,who appointed him as a fellow to assist other students in 1947. But it was an Austrian called Walter Langhammer,an art director at a leading newspaper,who proved to be the strongest guiding force. He thought the Progressives werent serious and advised me to pursue art on my own. I was planning to go to France,but he told me I should explore my country instead. So I went to the south first,moving from temple to temple,marvelling at the architectural splendour in Cochin and Tamil Nadu before I visited Kashmir. In between,I had won a gold medal from the Bombay Art Society in 1956 for a painting I had done based on my trip to Cochin, he says.

Kashmir would turn out to be a decisive chapter in his life. It was there that he found his voice,where his individuality found its strongest inspiration in nature. He found himself unable to leave the place,captivated by the beauty of its landscapes. Walter told me not to be bound to any group,to go out and seek the world in my own country. I observed how day changed into night,how the snow melted slowly on mountain tops. He discouraged me from replicating a scene,so I would try to internalise everything that I saw. Later,I would try to achieve it in my work. It was there that I discovered that the east and the west were no different. It was almost a spiritual realisation, he says. He stayed in a village hutment,surviving on milk and rotis,spending all his waking hours outdoors,careful to leave his sketchbook and paintbrush behind. It would be five years before he would return home to Bombay.

His Kashmir series,water colours on canvas using primarily four colours white,black,green and brown captured life in the Valley. Together with another series on old Bombay,a homage to the Portuguese-ruled Bombay in the pre-British era,it went on to become his most celebrated work. His musings on Bombay were exhibited in three galleries Taj,Pundole and Jehangir in 1978,marking the high point of his career. He was never enamoured by the West,but engaged with the world around him through domestic travel, says Colah. Raiba found home wherever he went his portraits of village life in Goa,with its Portuguese architecture and its churches,appealed to him because they had something Indian about them,and because like him,they too had a Konkani-Muslim heritage.

Although religious in his daily life he never forgets to offer namaaz Raiba is secular when it comes to his art. He has always looked at religion through the prism of culture and has been curious about its varied nuances. He recalls an incident during his travels across south India,when he had disguised himself as a Kashmiri Pandit to enter a temple in Tamil Nadu to observe the festivities marking the ceremonial wedding of Radha and Krishna. He was deeply moved by what he saw. It also made him sensitive towards diverse cultures,one of the reasons he is critical of Husains controversial portrayal of Saraswati. Kya zaroorat thi karne ko,there is no prestige in earning fame that way, he says. He speaks softly,the words often getting lost,but every sentence,even while talking about banal happenings in his life,is cadenced with chaste,poetic Urdu. And in between words like chilman,alfaaz or hayaat,others like dabba gul or apne ko slip in,a testimony to his Konkani-Muslim and Mumbai roots.

Ironically,the period in Kashmir that gave him his vocabulary as an artist,also took away the commercial opportunities his contemporaries were enjoying. Galleries like Pundole and Chemould were beginning to come up in the early 60s and Kala Ghoda was slowly becoming an important centre for art. But Raiba was away from all of these. He was distant from the environment his contemporaries were in. But it probably also made his work an alternate to what was happening in the mainstream. He built a body of work unique for its individuality and symbolism, says Ali Akbar Mehta,a contemporary artist and grandson of Tyeb Mehta,another artist of the Progressive Group who worked with Raiba on a commissioned mural for the Ashoka Hotel in Delhi. Mehta abandoned the project half-way,because he said he wasnt enjoying himself. I finished all of it by myself. I did it because I needed money, says Raiba. According to Ali Akbar,Raibas forte was a natural realism some of the recurring motifs in his work are elements from a simple village life: the rooster,whale or a fish,the moon or a powerful sea storm. His contemporaries had moved on to abstracts by then. The lack of commercial interest in his work and Raibas reluctance to network slowly ensured that his shows went undocumented. His works never commanded a price higher than Rs 5 lakh in that period.

His technique,too,had found its own idiom over time,challenging the established practices. At one point,his canvases were made of jute,that allowed a thick coat of primer made of crushed bricks and cements,giving it a mural-like solid base. He was also among the first artists to have experimented with overlap glass painting,a technique where paint is applied over multiple layers of glasses lending a three-dimensional quality to it. There are elements of miniature painting in some works and an influence of Cubism in others. It was radicalism of a different sort,and an experimentation that would find praise decades later. His works always had a gentle humour,sometimes,even anger. They werent safe and pretty,so perhaps,they escaped the attention of museums and galleries, says Colah.

For someone indifferent to money,Raiba was extremely particular about his shows,choreographing them to the tiniest of details. Using his calligraphic skills,he once wrote the invitation card of one his shows in English,fashioned to look like Arabic. As he grew old,his active participation in shows lessened,thus reducing the number of exhibitions. His last show before he met Colah and Sharma was at the Jehangir Art Gallery in 2000. He is a very strong modernist,with very bold lines. But he has been a very reticent artist. His portraits speak to the soul. There is a quality of caricature to them,not in a manner of laughing at them,but at the same time capturing the brilliance of the situation, says Kishore Singh,head,publication and exhibition,Delhi Art Gallery,which has a few of his works.

But his apathy toward finance also meant that the family went through hard times. In the year since Colah and Sharma discovered him and organised an exhibition of his works at the Nehru Centre in 2011,they have also been campaigning to ensure that artists receive some percentage of the proceeds from the secondary sale of their works. Colah and Sharma have also given Raiba a substantial amount from the sale of his artwork from that exhibition. Raiba,however,never talks of money. It brings to mind a story about him that the few people who know him in the art circle never fail to mention. In the early 70s,when he lost his studio in Nagpada to a fire,he wrote a letter to his friend Kekoo and Khorshed Gandhy who started the Chemould art gallery in his wife Aishas voice,lamenting about the huge emotional and financial loss it had wrought in their lives. It was almost as if he could not say it in his own voice. The letter is a work of art. Its a conceptual piece that uses humour and fiction in order to bring out something so real, says Colah.

Money doesnt enter the conversation still. Instead,Raiba tells us stories about his days in Kashmir. He describes the mountains,the waterfalls and the peaceful villages he came across,his eyes sparkling,a sense of longing in his voice. I am an emotional painter. I have always wanted to be true to my art, he says.