Doted on dot

Nonika Singh

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, July 23

"I believe in Christ and Krishna. I believe the gods are for everyone."

Ranjha ranjha aakhdi mein aape ranjhan hoi. To become one with the muse is the ultimate ode to an expression of art. One of India’s most eminent painters, the modernist SH Raza, who passed away today aged 94, achieved exactly that point. Or shall we say bindu — the fulcrum of his artistic odyssey.

Who knew what began as a simple concentration exercise in school when a teacher asked him to keep looking at a dot to control his wavering mind would one day become his single-minded preoccupation. And it were not only his friends like Krishen Khanna who felt that Raza and bindu were one, he himself professed bindu as the most important thing. And it was bindu that remained the constant artistic companion of the man who ‘lived to paint and painted to live’.

Be it Aarambh or the exhibition Nirantar that he put up this very year, geometric motifs recurred ceaselessly in his inimitable style. He began as an expressionist landscape painter and a colourist, but even when he moved to metaphysical subjects, the essence of life zeroing in on primal energy, panchtatva, prakriti and more, the theory of colours never escaped his attention.

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He would often compare the putting of two colours to the coming together of two human beings and thus fraught with harmony or conflict. If painting was akin to an act of meditation for him, so was thinking aloud with fellow progressives, forming the Progressive Artists Group in 1947.

Unlike his contemporary, the equally legendary MF Husain who exiled himself, Raza returned to India in 2011 after six decades in France,  that honoured him with its highest civilian honour, the Legion of Honour. 

Back in time in 1956, if he created ripples when he was awarded the Prix de la Critique in France, more recently his paintings Saurashtra (which sold for Rs 15.9 crore), and La Terre (Rs 18.8 crore) set new auction benchmarks.

He paid crores in taxes but believed money wasn’t everything and instead spoke of “the need to go back to our roots”. As he famously said, “India is always in my heart and I put that in my paintings.”

Nor did he forget his days of struggle when after passing out from JJ School of Art, he wouldn’t find buyers. No wonder he patronised budding artists and would often be the first to buy their works. 

His Raza Foundation besides conducting art lectures and publishing journals, gives out fellowships.

“The most seductive thing about art is the personality of the artist himself,” said Paul Cezanne. Syed Haider Raza was every bit a gentleman who enraptured the world as much with his art as his generosity.

The man who believed in Krishna and Christ and who never got tired of bindu enriched the art world with his exploration of ‘Roopadhyatmik’ (abstract beauty). Like he said, “I want to find colours that are happy together.”