S.H. Raza

I Germination
In 1947 when India became independent Raza was twenty-five years old. It was a coming of age for the country, of turmoil and tragedy with a feverish search for a new identity. In the next year, the Progressive Artists including Souza, Husain and Raza held their first exhibition in Bombay. Raza recalls the mood: “We could move mountains! We were in the process of becoming ourselves!”

These artists were evolving a bold language by using the human condition to make their statements. Unlike his contemporaries, from his early watercolours of the 1940s Raza painted only landscapes. He was not concerned with the anecdotal, the temporality of human life. His concerns lay elsewhere, in the magnitude of nature with its universal implications.

Since 1950 he has been living and working in France. Almost every year now he visits and travels into the interiors of India, with a deepening consciousness of his Indian sensibility. It is here in the country of his birth that he rediscovers the interrelation of all living things. For him, nature has remained a primary source of inspiration, indeed the only source. Some fifteen years ago when we spoke of this he had remarked, "It’s strange that I needed forty years to understand my passion and love for nature and to transpose this on canvas. I’m glad that I took all this time because it was not a gift to me by someone – a teacher, a book, or something else; it was the conclusion of a lifelong experience!." Painting is something as alive as human beings in their different manifestations. It is a vital process of becoming..."

Likewise, we might follow his paintings over the years as a process in becoming – from the germination of an idea like a bija, a seed growing into a tree as his work reached the fullness of maturity. His commitment is to bring his life’s experience to his work. His passion for Hindusthani music and modern poetry, geometric patterns in textiles from Gujarat, the vitality of colours in miniature painting, Jain and Rajput, are all to be found in his paintings. It is the ‘total environment’ which inspires him and contributes to his images.

This vocabulary is pared down now to a vision of clarity and insight. It is a language abstracting from nature the essence of life’s forces by using the circle, square and triangle, horizontal lines and diagonals that intersect to set up vibrations of energies pervading the universe. If these symbols have been repeated in his paintings over twenty-five years, they serve to endorse the sanctity of these forms. Raza asserts that this repetition is akin to the recitation of a mantra or counting a japmala, of repeating a word until you ‘reach a state of elevated consciousness’.

In the patio of his summer residence in Gorbio in south France or at his studio in Paris, Raza may sit for hours looking at a pure white stretch of canvas. The process of painting becomes an exercise in meditation; in contemplating the canvas until the forms emerge from deep silence; from the absolute vacuum created within himself. Beginning with shunya, the state of emptiness, his vision arrives at oneness with the universe. He declares, "By very simple means I am convinced One can attain infinity!"

II Encounter between East and West
Raza does not look upon his work as a religious experience. He refers to his paintings instead as ‘significant form’. This term is indispensable to understand his paintings and their purpose. His training in Paris (1950-53) at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts focused on formal order, that which he describes as “the pictorial logic of form”. How could he live in France and remain unaffected by the statement to him on the structure by Cartier-Bresson, the discoveries of Cezanne and the pursuit of modern European sensibility? Yet his preoccupation with pure geometry returned him at the same time to an Indian tradition of visual abstraction, practised in diagrams of the yantra and the mandala. There was his commitment to the perennial forms in nature. Eventually, these preoccupations resolved into a coherent visual language.

At a conference of the East-West Encounter held in Bombay in 1985 Raza gave a plausible argument to explain his images emerging in the 1980s. "My present work is the result of two parallel enquiries. Firstly, it aimed at pure plastic order, form order. Secondly, it concerns the theme of Nature. Both have converged into a single point to become inseparable; the point, the Bindu, symbolizes the seed, bearing the potential of all life in a sense. It is also a visible form containing all the essential requisites of line, tone, colour, texture and space. The black space is charged with latent forces aspiring for fulfilment."

But we may ask, how can the circle, the square and the triangle represent a reality we can recognize? How can geometric forms on canvas mean anything? The dilemma for abstract artists in the West has always been the suspicion that they are creating art without ‘meaning’. This is why great pioneers in abstraction such as Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Mondrian wrote manifestos to defend their work, from Kandinsky’s The Spiritual in Art (1914) to Klee’s notebooks in The Thinking Eye (ed.,1961). In their writings we find shared affinities with Raza’s vision.

In the East, the use of symbols is legitimized by ancient legacy and practice. Geometry, number and harmony are part of an objective language used in the sacred arts of Buddhists, Hindus, Jains. Muslims, Christians and Jews. In Islam, the cosmos is conceived as order and harmony, which is best conveyed through the symmetry of geometry in architecture. By the Tibetans, the mandala is used in their imaging of the sacred. Among the Jains the notion of Jambudvipa envisages the sacred geography of the universe. Yantras, power diagrams of the cosmos, are used in meditation by yogis to configure the primal substance of the universe as revealed to them. Invariably these compose circles overlapping or superimposed, of the universe in orbit.

These visual concepts are ingrained into Indian sensibility. When Raza describes the country of his birth he returns again and again to a memory of the black Bindu inscribed for him by his teacher on the wall of the primary school in the village of Kakaiya. In his early years in France, the Black Sun (1953) erupts suddenly from this memory, blazing over scorched houses in a world divided into white and black, day and night. In surreal landscapes such as Haut de Cagnes (1951), the savage intensity of townscapes transports us into another world, another climate of his youth in Madhya Pradesh. No breath of wind stirs, no sound breaks through the eerie silence of this eternity.

His paintings contain fragments of his past, intensified on canvas with colors that are essentially Indian. Paysage painted decades later in 1982, recalls through fl uid forms the impression of Rajput miniature painting with its horizontal registers and defined borders, introducing pungent reds, yellow ochre and black. With the orchestration of colours, he revives his latent sensibilities. Titles to his paintings of this time such as Rajasthan (1975 and 1983) and Saurashtra (1983) reveal these sources of inspiration. For those who live away from home, memory plays a fascinating role, in that it feeds on images of the past and intensifies the experience. In early interviews, Raza described the tenacious hold of childhood memories: his fear and fascination with the forest and with the elements of nature, reverence for the sacred river Narmada which circuited the town of Mandla. Woven into this account as he himself asserts is the town of Mandla as ‘mandala’ – the concept of land circumscribed and held to be sacred. He invents a metaphor for his homeland that is old and new, of the circle within the square – like a mandala, the universal symbol of sacred geography.

III Painting as Metaphor
In 1981 Raza was invited to participate in the Triennale in Delhi. He sent two paintings, including his celebrated large canvas titled Ma. The idea emerged from a poem by Ashok Vajpeyi, inspiring him to address “a letter to my mother country, India, revealing my experiences, discoveries and acquisitions. I hoped that the painting could be evidence that I was never cut off from my sources.”

Dominating the canvas is a large black circle, framed within a red and black border – a magnetic force compelling attention. Alongside this pivotal form are arranged subsidiary panels such as the narrative scenes you might find around the deity of Sri Nathji in paintings from Nathdwara in Rajasthan. Could there be any better way to express his Indian identity than to circumscribe his sense of belonging with the circle? Memory, the power of recall, selects this essential form of the Bindu and enshrines it like an icon.

His second painting at the Triennale was titled Bindu, 1980, focusing on the circle in dense black within a square. This was the genesis of a vision which opened up a range of possibilities and experiments. He suggests: "Immense energy and potential was released by a simple yet essential form. It opened up a whole new vocabulary which corresponded in a sense to my training in Paris in formalism."

Black for him is the ‘mother colour’ for the Bindu, which appears at first as a pure symbol, intense and solid against a white ground, to be repeated time and again from 1980 through the years – even as late as the Bindu of 2002. Colours begin to appear and sing in his canvases, resonating through forms in nature. Through the geometry of circles, triangles and lines horizontal, vertical and diagonal, he introduces us to the representation of the Five Elements of earth, water, fire, wind and sky. He suggests, “with the Bindu I discovered that a whole series of different climates of thought can be created”.

The Bindu appears then as the Earth (1989), a black circle emerging from triangles of ochres and black, to share remarkable affinities with the traditional diagrams of contemplating the goddess in Sri Yantra. The Bindu is no longer still but in ceaseless movement, a force of energy levitating against thin horizontal lines and triangles of blue as in Jala Bindu (1990). This image is repeated in several variations, to manifest itself again as the Earth (2002) surrounded by seas and the oceans, moving through space and sky.

The Bindu represents also the primordial seed of fertility, and so it is some times titled as the Beej (1964 and 1996). Here it is manifested as the central force, a tiny black circle emerging through shimmering white lines and diagonals to radiate multiple energies. Raza experiment again with the bindu within a rectangle, as the seed/sun which fertilizes to give birth to trees and plant life in Genese (1992).

The titles to these pictures may change from Germination 1987 to Genesis (1989) to Tree of Life (1989) to Ankuran (1984) to return again to Germination (1994), but the concept remains essentially the same. As the seed of germination, the Bindu is enshrined in the centre of the canvas, to multiply a thousandfold into different forms which celebrate the fertilizing powers of the sun and the earth which converge to give birth to new life. The repetition of familiar forms of plants are an epiphany to life in their vibrant colours, in harmony with the plenitude of this earth’s resources. These images formulate a new perception of reality. They emerge as different disciplines of the sciences, philosophy and the social sciences have come to realize the universe to be a dynamic web of interrelated events. The complex phenomena of the biosphere “can be understood only if the planet as a whole is regarded as a living organism”. The dilemma of the twentieth century was that the earth needed to be sanctified and made whole again. Raza’s paintings contribute to this acute awareness of ecological harmony.

IV: Form, Colour and Sound
Raza relies upon an intuitive grasping of these realities, following what he describes as the ‘dictates of an inner logic’ – and he concedes his insights emerge from a cultural substratum. Yet his use of circle and line finds remarkable affinities with texts used by traditional artisans in sculpture, painting and architecture. In a treatise of the Vastusutra Upanishad, it is said: “Who has the knowledge of circle and line is a sthapaka.” Remarkable affinities are to be found between the meaning given to the circle and line which are in consonance with Raza’s images.

As meaning is to be found in these elemental forms, so also there is symbolism in colours. Raza mentions the five Elements of earth, water, fire,
wind and sky, the Pancha tattvas can be apprehended through the use of primary colours red, blue and yellow along with white and black. Bindu, Naga and Kundalini vibrate with the potency of these principles which govern the universe. He is convinced of their implications.

I did make the five colours the essential elements of my work, giving importance to colour itself – visible colour as perceived by the retina – with all the consequences it may have on our senses. Perhaps in colour, you can even hear sound!

His views find parallels with Kandinsky’s theories of association between colour and sound. Both artists are concerned with developing a visual language of form and colour which could affect the other senses of seeing, singing and hearing all at the same time. The repetition of form and colour, word and sound is an exploration of this idea – so that the image acquires resonance to move into the dimensions of sound.

From the excitement of this discovery, Raza develops his large canvas in 1989 titled Naad Bindu. Concentric circles spin-out from the Bindu as the primordial sound reverberating and echoing through the universe. In 1997 he returns to Naad Bindu by paring the colour spectrum down to monochromes of black, white and grey. Attention is focused on rhythms of concentric circles, that embrace time and space, stretching into infinity. In one corner he inscribes the title of the painting.

Language dictates a world view, a certain sensibility. Music, poetry, dance have inspired his work so that his paintings are to be felt through all the senses. By inscribing modern verse, a song or a poem by Kabir, his paintings acquire the rhythms and flavour of his country of origin. The flavour of a painting is rasa, that concept unique to India which in culinary terms means ‘juice’ and implies ‘taste’. As he paints Raza is both listener and singer, viewer and artist, the rasika who hears the melody and is himself transformed.

Portfolio Name: S.H. Raza
Source: Lalit Kala Akademi