| It doesn't qualify as artistic rage, but S H Raza, freshly back from paying homage at Raj Ghat, is in turn irritable and mellow, churlish and nostalgic. | |
| On Thursday, when he turned 85, a retrospective of selected works opened at the National Gallery of Modern Art. It must have been a bittersweet moment "" in the eighties, particularly, the Indian press had sneered at the Paris-based painter and his emerging obsession with the bindu, the kundalini and the panchatatva as examples of an artist abroad going native. | |
| Raza daily spends seven to eight hours in his studio "" there was a time when it would have more likely been 10-18 hours "" acutely aware of the passing of time. | |
| The spirit that guides the adrenaline rush isn't prices "" though those are stratospheric, he acknowledges them as his due "" but what he wants to pursue is an engagement with his work. "Prices are fine," he admonishes, "but what about Raza the painter?" | |
| As he does every time he comes to Delhi, he has visited Raj Ghat and is tired from his excursion, but even more, he's upset. That in itself too is not unusual "" he can be crabby because his arthritis or gout is acting up, and has been known to cut journalists up in ribbons because they know nothing about his art "" and today he's being a hard taskmaster. | |
| "If you go to Gandhiji's samadhi, remember him, focus on his life for two minutes and not on shopping, or gossip," he fumbles angrily. | |
| Distanced from India but not detached from it, Raza believes himself a microcosm of its assimilative philosophy "" he is Muslim but his father insisted on his learning Hindi and did not mind his visiting a Ganesh temple. A warden in the forests of Kisli and Kanha in Madhya Pradesh, he encouraged Raza to chase his dreams. | |
| For Raza the person, this lay in his studies of Sanskrit and Hindi literature, and of the Bhagvad Gita, enough, he grimaces, for his family to wonder if his father was turning him "kafir", and could they summon the maulvi, please, for the young Raza's studies? | |
| "My intention," and he's speaking now as an artist finally at peace with his work, no longer restless, "is to let our people know that our civilisation is colossal. I have an incredible admiration for it." | |
| Grounded in his Hindi (and to a large extent Hindu) teachings, he is as dismissive of violent Islamic tendencies as orthodox Hindu and austere Christian ones, "rejecting the illogical from religious texts", preferring "" though he won't openly admit to it "" Mahavir Jain's views on non-violence and vegetarianism. But still managing a twinkle in the eye to confess, "I have a weakness for women," when one hugs him in a tight embrace. | |
| "I loved the forests, I loved the Narmada, and I am grateful for my Brahmin (and some Jain teachers) for my early learning," he sighs now. | |
| For the last three decades, Raza has been going back to Mandala in the deep heart of MP where he studied and lived, and it was this place he had in mind when with his French wife Janine, he looked beyond Paris for a stakeout studio, finding it finally in Gorbio, where he would spend months doing significant work. | |
| If the Narmada and its surrounding forests formed the first phase of his life, a period in which he includes admission at the Nagpur College of Art, a pursuit his father did nothing to discourage, Bombay formed his second and more radical phase. | |
| It was here, working during the day to support his art education by the evening ("We were neither rich, nor poor," he said of his earlier upbringing), that he came in contact with the artists who would be an early inspiration "" K H Ara and M F Husain, H A Gade, F N Souza, V S Gaitonde and Tyeb Mehta. | |
| "I was shy and unsure of myself, they had been to university," he reminisces, "Souza was so well read..." If you look closely at Raza's cityscapes from the fifties, they have a startling similarity to those of Souza's. | |
| But that was in itself hardly unusual. His first point of reference was European art taught through a British academic course. By the time he came to Bombay, he was ripe for looking at the canvas through his artist friends' eyes. | |
| "I personally thought that we should take the bull by the horn and go to the centre of art to find out what it is all about." The Progressives dissimilated, and at least some of them found themselves in Paris, some to stay on, others to flee it for London or India. Raza made it his home. | |
| His third period, he says, stretched over three decades, from 1950 to 1980. "I needed 30 years to master the art of painting," he explains. "You may consider it extravagant, but I did become quite well known all over Europe." | |
| It was also during this period that collector Emanuel Schlesinger, and promoters Walter Langhammer and Rudy von Leyden took a shine to Raza. | |
| Still, writes Ashok Vajpeyi in A Life of Art, Raza (Art Alive Masters Series), released on his birthday, "it was difficult to earn a livelihood by painting". Raza gave Hindi lessons, drew book covers, but continued with, first, his studies, and later his painting. | |
| Says Vajpeyi, "Many elements of the dominant modernism of the Parisian school were absorbed by Raza and transformed by his brush into components of an overall intensity, a colour-fury ultimately attaining harmony. The colour-harmony achieved on the canvas was emblematic of an inner search for harmony. The emotive element of Raza's art was an Indian legacy which he never moved away from and which, once again, qualified his kind of modernism." | |
| Raza says it was the foundation to his most critical work, which began from 1980 when he entered, he explains, the fourth phase of his life. | |
| "I was now able to integrate an Indian context and an Indian vision into my work. I wanted to bring a personal touch of my country where nature is seen by intuition, by the third eye." | |
| Writes Ashok Vajpeyi in A Life in Art, "Anyone who is familiar with the autobiographical accounts of Raza would know that everyday before he starts to paint, Raza, whether in Paris, Gorbio or occasionally in Mumbai, does a prayer. To quote his own words, 'My studio work starts with a prayer. It is not asking for anything... It begets blessing or grace... I have a conviction that you cannot create art without the support of divine powers'." | |
| If in the earlier decades Western critics saw him as a "Hindu artist", certainly an Indian one, by the eighties they were concentrating on his paintings rather than his country of origin. | |
| Pierre Gaudibert, who was director of the Museum of Art in Grenoble, wrote that the bindu "is transformed in Raza's work into a cosmic egg gestating in the heart of the earth, ready for germination even as it remains the starting point of the process of artistic creation". | |
| He would later compare it with the "point" in Klee's works, and certainly suffused it with Raza's early life such that each bindu contained "a metamorphosis of living, swarming, luxurious forms in infinite profusion such as are conjured up by the tropical forests Raza knew in his childhood". | |
| At 85, still able to recite from Sanskrit texts, still able to spout Hindi couplets, equally fluent too in English and French, Raza says he cannot believe the breadth and vision of his own work. "This is god's will to have done so much in so little time. I'm having such colossal success all over that there isn't a single painting left with me." | |
| It is interesting too, these frequent visits to India, because he says he is able to see India not just with sentiment but also with intellect. "I have never left India," he insists, "I'm only physically in France; India has been in my heart and mind." | |
| And then, excited, he says: "I'm longing to return to my studio, to make a large painting of the Narmada's "" how do you call it? "" going round and round", meaning perhaps its whirlpools. | |
| "And then an even larger one, three metres long, colourful..." In his intuitive mind's eye, the painting has already taken shape; on canvas it will be just a little bit longer. | |
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