Syed Haider Raza
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A profile
Gayatri Jayaraman
February 27, 2015
At 93, S.H. Raza paints every day
A turquoise blue light filters through the stained glass above the altar of the Franciscan arches of the Sacred Heart Cathedral in Delhi, falling upon a diminutive fi gure in an ash-grey suit in a wheelchair in the fi rst pew. Artist S.H. Raza seems oblivious to the greys and blues that are synchronously the current palette of an ongoing Bindu on his easel, back in his studio. Now hard of hearing, losing vision, shrunken by his liquid-only diet, Raza tilts his head to listen to the benediction being read for his 93rd birthday. It is a Raza trans-posed into the core of one of his works, the several hillside churches of Europe that occur in his early landscapes, before the Bindu became his perenni-al obsession and expression. In life, as on canvas, there is no more a separa-tion between the artist and his art. As his closest friend and fellow Modern, the now 90-year-old Krishen Khanna, himself recovering from a 20-footlong art work that took eight months to complete and put a pacemaker in him, says: "There is no more a distinc-tion between Raza and his Bindu, he is living his art".
The master at workBack in his studio, as Raza takes to his canvas where his assistants not only lift him onto his seat but pour colours to his specifi cations, his col-league-turned-caretaker-and-inter-preter, Ashok Vajpeyi, trustee of the Raza Foundation along with Ashok Vadehra, remarks: "Now his fi ngers are his eyes." The art is his meditation and consumes him. "It is a religious perception of colour. Just as you would say Ram, Ram, Ram, or Allah, Allah, Allah, you say Bindu, Bindu, Bindu. It leads to an understanding of life, the mysteries of life, and in painting, the mysteries of colour. All colours emanate from it. Then, with the colours that appear, you paint," says Raza.
Aarambh, the exhibit of Raza's 44 unseen canvases done across 2013 and 2014 (nine-odd 2015 works line his studio still), went up for preview the previous evening at Delhi's Vadehra Art Gallery. The three-part exhibit to celebrate his birthday also is on at Art Musings, Mumbai, and Akar Prakar in Kolkata. The canvases bear the exertions of his labour-the heavier-handed drop, the smudged intersections, the wavering smear. It is as if with age, Raza's carefully constructed geometrical edges blur. Within their engagement lie his biggest truths. "Newspapers do not write about the intersection, the meeting point of two colours. Therein lies all conflict and all harmony," he says. He is well aware of his diminished ability, and paints with an awareness of the spaces in which he triumphs over it. "It is important that the painter deal with the subject; that is the importance of the mass of colour, be it a hand that shakes or a line, it is a form that is in contact with another form-that is the importance of a painter and the importance for his onlooker." The range of his palette too has shifted. From the warmth of his mid-70s strident reds and blacks, blues and yellows now dominate. He laughs at the play of the spectrum. He has brought it down to a science, he says, pointing to his painted gradations on the wall: in it the panchatatva (five elements) are each represented by a colour on Raza's brush-black, red, blue, yellow, white. Different colours have dominated at different phases of his career. As they emerge, he says, it has been his effort to control them. Yellow turns to orange, orange to brown, and brown to black. Or, as he teases, a twinkle in his eye: "Have they dominated me, or have I dominated them?" It is more a riddle than a question. The protagonist to his canvas remains the strident black Bindu. And while it is from what the other colours and elements and energies all emanate, it is yet the inversion of the spectrum that traditionally emerges from white. Raza, amused, chuckles. "Yes, but they are looking at the end of the spectrum-that into which it is all consummated. I look at the beginning, where it is all yet potent. White is integrated into the Bindu. It can be a part of black, but black can never be a part of white. The black is in which all is contained. White is the energy that is glowing right from the darkness of black, and from which red, yellow, blue and grey emerge. This is why the works are called Aarambh, the beginning," he says.
Within that range, all energies are in conflict and harmony with each other, he explains. "The colour you choose to place next to another is either in a state of seeking conflict or harmony with its neighbour, and that resonance, that which is between the line, is the energy of the painting," he says. In his smudges and his smears then, the disturbances of the outer concentric circles are an almost primal dance which come to calm in the centre. It is inherent in his move from deeper to lighter tones. As he feels his way through his palette, he etherises his own inherent geometric boundaries. "Oh that chap, he is a master manipulator of colour. He can make any colour say whatever it is he wants it to say," chuckles Khanna, himself partial towards the warmth of the red. Colours have been very particular to the Moderns, all of them master wielders of its strength; M.F. Husain playing with monochromes of yellow in his 'Peeli Dhoop', V.S. Gaitonde infusing them with the sonority of a temple bell, and Akbar Padamsee still engaged with his plays of light and abstraction. "It is only because the Indian artists understood the importance of colour that the world is realigning to the point of view of Indian art today," Raza says. He breaks it down to the dot, or the atom. "It is not that you painted a portrait. It is the elements you used to paint the portrait. And when you realise the importance of those, the painting becomes important. It is the use of the colour and the relationship in its use on a canvas that makes a painting a work of art."
This theory of colour, of conflict and harmony, from black to white, today consumes Raza's entire thinking: social, political and aesthetic. You have to put the colours together as two human beings, says Raza. "It is a man and a woman coming together. Either they fight or they make love. Whatever style one may have, this relationship of colours remains true, remains the geometry of life." All of society, and nature, and primal instinct are tinged with this essential conflict. Whatever your practice of art-creative, abstract, figurative, or performance even-the basic truth remains the same, he emphasises. "Whatever element a woman chooses to wear, it is like what a painter chooses to paint with. When a woman decides to wear a cloth, whether a kurta or a sari, she is making a choice of colour. There is an expression of an inner tatva," he says. In picking that colour, there is resonance, and conflict or harmony is established. Much like the spaces with his lines, increasingly indented with greater flecks of white, in his new canvases. "This is why," he says, finally allowing himself to lean back into his chair, "the Bindu is the most important thing of all."
Fellow Progressives Khanna and Ram Kumar still come across for tea when they can. "We do not talk of this and that. We talk of art, and concerns, and colour," Raza says. Founder of the Progressive Artists' Group, the Moderns' devotion to conversation and sharing of knowledge is crucial to their identity. It is a group in the remnants of which the artists still provide each other with critical and emotional support. "Thinking is meditation-a point at which it is not separate from doing, or painting," says Raza. Khanna, still critical of Raza's geometry, what he calls an imposed lifelessness of structure on his art, binding, and restrictive, explains that they were never a group formed to pat each other on the back. "We were not each others' 'yaysayers'. The function of the group was to propel each other into new ways of thinking and allow our art to grow. The ultimate purpose of everything we believed in was growth." Raza's devotion to structure began when French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson came across his student work in an exhibit in Srinagar, and told Raza that he had talent but no plinth to build on. Raza returned to Bombay and devoted himself to exploring the geometry of paintings as keenly as its abstractions.
Vajpeyi points to Raza's generosity with not only his knowledge but also his wealth. Returning to India in 2006, after the death of his wife and fellow artist Janine Mongillat in 2002, the heirless Raza's primary intent was to create a fund that would allow young artists to escape what he describes as the "dark days" after his studies at the JJ School of Art in Bombay. No one was buying his art. When he arrived in Bombay in 1943, he could not enrol right away in college as the government scholarship he won was delayed, so he began to paint at the Express Studio in Fort. When he went to Paris on a French government bursary to study at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in 1950, he did not have the money for a coat warm enough to withstand the Parisian winter. It was The Times of India critic Rudy von Leyden who gave him one. Years later, when artist Atul Dodiya was leaving for Paris, history repeated itself; Raza gave him money to buy himself a winter-worthy coat. And so the baton passes. Today, the Raza Foundation publishes three journals, puts out seven memorial lectures, and funds both performing and visual arts through awards, fellowships and grants, as well as to projects that revive and document the memory of now-forgotten Progressives such as K.H. Ara and S.K. Bakre. Raza even pays rent staying in his rooms at the Raza Foundation building in Delhi's Safdarjung Development Area. Himself a large-scale collector of art, Raza's ailing health impedes his ability to view new artists, but the encouragement of new art is an undertaking that has occupied him for most of his return to India.
In the early 2000s, Raza visited the debut showing of artist Smriti Dixit in Mumbai and made it a point to be the first to buy one of her works and leave. The next morning, the grateful gallerist called. Word had spread that Raza bought, and thereby endorsed, the artist, and her show was sold out within the hour. With such deliberate consideration of the artist's struggle, Raza has often called up gallerists and offered to buy on the condition that commissions were waived. Today, Raza pays income tax of around Rs 2 to 3 crore every year and is devoted to the idea of what will linger beyond him in the name of Indian art.
To understand the frontiers he breached on behalf of Indian art, it is important to go back to the day in 1956 that Raza was awarded the Prix de la Critique in France, says Khanna. He recalls being at the Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai, when Cowasji Jehangir hushed the room and stood up to make the announcement. The room, says Khanna, erupted in thunderous applause. "It was such pride, such pride. He was our boy you know, he'd gone there and he'd done it. It was not easy in those days. None of us had the means, and none of us knew what we were in for. We just knew what we believed in. Those were frontiers that he was breaching for us. Now it would be possible for us too." The nitty-gritty of Raza's expansive and generous life are well documented. His birth in 1922, and the influence of his early childhood in the forests of Madhya Pradesh, passages to Nagpur, Bombay, France and California, his founding of the Progressives as a group and their lifelong friendships that shaped the course of Indian art.
The ne plus ultra of Raza's existence and practice today is the sublimation of everything to the resonance of its colour. This cumulative of lifelong learning, decades of conversation and thought is the essence of a Hindu complexity of metaphysics, a Christian beatitude and the Muslim riyaz of rhythmic repetitiveness. Of all the Moderns, rationalists to the very end, Raza stands out for his being the eternal Believer: beliefs that he now merges with. "Everything emanates from it. If the Bindu disappears, I can't even imagine....." he trails off.
