In this book, poet Ashok Vajpeyi writes about his close friend Sayed Haider Raza's evolution as a painter
Raza painted in many studios in Paris where he lived for six decades. But he painted in two studios for more than two decades—in his home on Rue de Charonne and in his home studio in Gorbio, France. Back in India in 2011, he lived and painted in his new home. At over ninety years of age, his zest for life and energy for painting were unusual and amazing.
His return to his homeland for good was his arriving, in a sense, and painting, in a third studio. While he lived and worked in Paris, Raza turned to a unique painterly exploration of some Indian concepts which fascinated him, relocating himself in his country of origin both aesthetically and spiritually. Once back in his homeland, he finally began painting India in India. A large number of the works were painted in his home studio in Delhi. The exhibition in which they were displayed was called Vistaar, and as the title resonates aptly, they were an extension of his vision and aesthetics, both meticulously cultivated and powerfully articulated in his work.
Raza was born in 1922 in a Muslim family in Central India. His parents were devout Muslims but were open to other religions, including Hinduism. Theirs was a Muslim family in a multi-religious society. It is not coincidental that one of his brothers later became a Sanskrit scholar and editor of Vishwamitra, a Hindi daily in Calcutta (now Kolkata). Another brother landed up becoming the Secretary of the Bolshevik Party of India. In his early years, Raza studied in Hindi-medium schools and that was his mother tongue. At home, his father recited Urdu verses and in Bombay he learnt English, and then French, in order to qualify for a French Government scholarship. The three languages, whose poets and poetry he read and admired, also brought with them their cultural resonances, their distinctive ways of looking at the world, at being and becoming.
In Bombay he formed the legendary Progressive Artists Group. During this period, Raza also found his early benefactors and promoters in three Jews in Bombay, namely Rudolf Von Leyden, Walter Langhammer and Emmanuel Schlesinger.
The ethos in which Raza grew as a person and a painter was multi-faith and the accent was more on the spiritual than on the religious. After the independence of India, Raza did not leave for Pakistan. He wanted to remain in his multi-religious India rather than go to Pakistan which was formed on the idea of a single religion.
After 2011, once he was settled in Delhi in his new home and studio, Raza visited a temple, a mosque and a church every week. He was a person of deep and abiding faith. He did not observe any rituals or ceremonies but never missed the weekly visits to the three places of worship. Subconsciously, perhaps he was connecting with Mahatma Gandhi라이브 바카라 Prarthana Sabha. These prayer meetings took place twice daily in Sewagram.
Renditions from all major religions were made and Gandhiji used to speak briefly at the end on moral, social and cultural issues. Raza once told me that the reason he did not leave India for Pakistan after Partition, was because somewhere in his mind there was a persisting image of the Mahatma and he felt that leaving would have been a betrayal.
Thus, Raza라이브 바카라 artistic sensibility was shaped by many influences—cultural, linguistic and spiritual. It was open and liberal but also rooted. It became increasingly suspicious of the cliché and the fashionable and started searching for the essence—of artistic expression and life. In the late seventies, the search took Raza to a discovery of India. ‘Where was Raza in his art?’ and ‘Where was India, his homeland, in his art?’ were some of the agonizing questions that beset him. The search for self and the reaching out to the roots became his major concerns. And out of these twin concerns emerged a unique Raza poetics positing itself in some of the key concepts of Indian metaphysics.
Raza gave titles of his works in Hindi. He, in fact, eventually had two mother tongues: painting and Hindi. His works had titles such as ‘Neel Shyam’, ‘Rakraabh’, ‘Neelabh’, ‘Aabhas’, ‘Ulpatti’, ‘Sarvatra’, ‘Praki’, ‘Urja’, ‘Atmaras’, ‘Kriti Prakriti’, ‘Madhya Desh’, ‘Rajasthan’, ‘Satyamev Jayate’, ‘Bharat 2012’, ‘Bindunaad’, ‘Bindu’, ‘Germination’ (carrying on the ‘Bindu’ series), and ‘Tiryak’, ‘Vistaar’. Every now and then he inscribed, like the medieval miniaturists in India whose sense of and command over colour he inherited so eminently, lines of poetry or some key words on his paintings. They were always in Hindi or sometimes in Sanskrit. This tendency of inscribing words or lines of poems also indicated his rooting: a visual imagination deeply rooted and still drawing sustenance from the mother tongue.
His artistic memory recaptured his early boyhood impressions of forests, rivers, mountains and trees from Central India. Interestingly, very few images of Bombay라이브 바카라 cityscape or the landscapes of France and Paris survived in his later work. The landscapes of yesteryears were replaced irretrievably by inscapes which perhaps have no recognizable location.
In his now iconic ‘Bindu’, Raza discovered a self all his own and an aesthetics which consisted of exploration, celebration and meditation. In fact, this development made him a counterpoint to the dominant modernity which thrived on emphasizing dissonance, disruption and tension. He pursued a celebrative vision of life and being, putting almost equal emphasis on vision and passion.
Excerpted from Celebration and Prayer: Life and Light in Raza라이브 바카라 Art by Ashok Vajpeyi with permission from Speaking Tiger Books.