At the start of his birth centenary year, Yashodhara Dalmia’s book on S H Raza could not have been timelier. An authority on the Progressive Artists’ Group, she has added to her own oeuvre in recent years with publications on Amrita Sher-Gil and Sri Lankan artist George Keyt. This book on Raza was waiting to happen, and the support of the Raza Foundation and Ashok Vajpeyi, who commissioned it, is considerable since it allows the author access to the artist’s personal correspondence and papers, some of them being made public for the first time.
Raza’s life in India before he left for Paris has been fairly well documented, yet Dalmia adds considerable detail to it. His journey from Barbaria — a clutch of huts beside the Narmada in Madhya Pradesh — to Paris, did not come easily, and Raza refers, in his letters, to constant practice and hard work to hone his skill as an artist. His early marriage to Fatima, her migration along with the rest of the Raza clan to Pakistan, his parents’ death soon after Partition, these sketchily known details are fleshed out unsentimentally by Dalmia, and we learn considerably more about his family than previously known.
Having studied art in Indore, Raza came to Bombay to join the Sir JJ School of Art, found support from his Progressive peers F N Souza, Krishen Khanna and M F Husain, and enjoyed the mentorship of the war emigres Rudolf von Leyden, Walter Langhammer and Emmanuel Schlesinger. On a trip to Kashmir, he met photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, setting him off on his eventful French odyssey where “I started studying Cezanne seriously”, he told Vajpeyi. “I went to the museum again and again and tried to understand construction according to Cezanne.”
Sayed Haider Raza: The Journey of an Iconic Artist
Author: Yashodhara Dalmia
Publisher: HarperCollins
Price: Rs 899; Pages: 251
While other Indian artists in Europe struggled for recognition and a toehold, Raza’s walking off with the critical Prix de la Critique award established his reputation and career. Dalmia explores the “opening panorama of possibilities” available to Raza through the correspondence archived in the Foundation — letters written to him — including by his brothers in Pakistan whom he helped financially — and by him. In Paris, he found love again, both fleeting and permanent, the latter with fellow painter Janine Mongillat, who became his wife after a prolonged and fraught divorce from Fatima.
It is Raza’s passionate, swooning letters to Janine, published for the first time, that help us understand better the sensitive, almost reticent artist. He wrote to Janine, sometimes several times a day: “I am obsessed, and I already know perfectly well that nothing can separate me from you now”; and “I’m coming to pick you up in my arms. I’m coming over to tell you that ‘I love you’ as it has never been told. I’m coming to soak my lips in yours. I’m coming to breathe. I already feel the earth shaking, the sky waiting”; and “I think of your trembling lips tonight, which were wet. At this moment, I would have licked them with mine…”
What was it that caused Raza, then, following her death in 2004 and his considerable grief, to become “intimately associated” with, first, Sabrina Guiglionda, and then his masseur, Devina Rughoobar, to whom he became “almost a slave”, “gifting” her, eventually, “a considerable amount of finance, his possessions and his apartments in Paris and Gorbio”? It is here the narrative falters and loses clarity, perhaps for fear of legal repercussions. Readers and Raza fans are left wanting to know more about the swirling rumours that surrounded his last years.
Raza returned to India in 2010, somewhat poorer after his tryst with his masseur-companion, to be cocooned and left free to paint, though the bustling New Delhi colony that he made his home was hardly as charming as his Paris and Gorbio studios. Here, he attempted to pick up the threads of his painterly life again. He was already ailing and continued to weaken but met the media warmly to speak of his admiration for Mahatma Gandhi, his loyalty to his earliest art teachers, his love of his motherland, his belief in India’s communal cohesiveness, the impact of American colour-field painters on his work following a stint in Berkeley, and of the change in his work following a homecoming visit to Bhopal in 1978.
Dalmia’s greatest achievement lies in bringing alive the early decades in which Raza worked, his inter-personal relationships with other artists, the atmosphere, zeal and enthusiasm of his fellow artists, the experiments being undertaken by them in Europe and America, and the heady life and times of the art community at a time of great introspection and churn — a reason I hope to keep returning to the book, which, though about Raza, goes well beyond it.