SH Raza, who took bindu to the world, passes away

Legendary painter S.H. Raza, who popularised Indian concepts and iconography globally and built a towering legacy of modern art, passed away here on Saturday after a prolonged illness. He was 94.

“He was in the ICU at a hospital here for the past two months and passed away today. It is indeed a very sad day,” poet and former Lalit Kala Akademi chairman Ashok Vajpeyi said.

Through his long and prolific career, Raza’s art evolved continuously and he depicted concepts like purush-prakriti and nari in his instantly recognisable geometric abstract works.

But the motif that made him a legend was the bindu. Influenced by nature from his early childhood, Raza’s work represents the origins of life and draws on symbols that tribal painters and highly sophisticated Indian philosophers have traced, pondered and mulled for millennia.

As a co-founder of the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group, together with F.N. Souza, K.H. Ara, M.F. Husain, H.A. Gade, S.K. Bakre and others, Raza passed quickly into an engagement with a stylised reinterpretation of retinal reality in the 1950s. “We shared the unhappiness, the dissatisfaction, the anxieties. Each one us in the PAG had a different style, a different aesthetic vision... Our staying places were small and narrow and could hardly accommodate more than one person, but we often met in Irani cafes over tea and furiously discussed the various issues, from politics of freedom to our works, the direction art was taking and the possibilities of the Modern in India,” Raza once said in an interview.

His paintings Saurashtra (Rs 15.9 crore) and La Terre (Rs 18.8 crore) are among the most expensive paintings sold at auction. But the artist remained unfazed by the attention. “What matters is value, not price,” he once said.

Raza’s interest in the bindu came from childhood. “One of my teachers in Mandla had once drawn a sign, a dot on the wall, knowing that my mind was wandering. He told me to look at the point while he went for a wash. I did not understand the significance of the bindu then, but it existed in my mind... Bindu is a source of energy, a still centre, a point of radiation. It has immense visual possibilities,” he had said.

Born in 1922 at Babaria in Madala district of Madhya Pradesh to a forest ranger father, Raza took to drawing at the age of 12. He went to Paris on a French government scholarship in 1950, where he subsequently set up studios and married a French citizen, Janine. But he never gave up his Indian citizenship and was in constant touch with his contemporaries back home. He returned to India in 2011.

Fellow progressive artist Krishen Khanna mourned the loss of his close friend. “I feel very lonely now. One by one they have all gone — Ara Raza, Gaitonde, Tyeb. Akbar Padamsee and Ram Kumar are the only two of our group who are now alive. Death has to happen in the course of time but it does not take away personal sorrow,”

Another contemporary, Ram Kumar, said, “He was very honest and never liked shortcuts. He did whatever he liked and was decisive. I don’t have words to describe his art work.”

Raza wanted his last rites to be conducted in his home town. “He wanted to be buried along with his father on the banks of the Narmada,” Mr Vajpeyi said.