A Poet’s Lyrical Ode to Raza

Syed Haider Raza was only eight-years-old when he first encountered Mahatma Gandhi. In Mandla, a small town by the River Narmada, a crowd had gathered to listen to the bespectacled, khadi-draped leader. As a child of devout Muslims, who lived in a cluster of ten huts inside a forest, Raza happened to attend Gandhi’s address. It was a meeting that could have faded into a foggy childhood memory. Except that it didn’t. It left such a deep impression on the painter, that in August 1947, when millions opted to heave themselves to Pakistan, Raza stayed put. Despite the fact that his brothers, his sister and his first wife opted to pack up and move. He felt then, as he would feel later, that leaving India would be a betrayal to Gandhi. After all the Mahatma had promised that India would stay syncretic and tolerant, accepting of all faiths.

Such a multi-faith outlook was to shape Raza’s art and his life. Before turning to his painterly journey, Celebration and Prayer by Ashok Vajpeyi, an equally celebrated Hindi poet and Raza’s friend, plumbs his origins. Growing up as the son of a forest official, little Raza was attuned to the allure and perils of nature. But bloodsucking insects and creepy creepers were also braided into his being. Through his life, he chose to stay in bucolic landscapes, like later when he set up a studio in Gorbio, a village in France perched among billowy greens.

In his village school in Kakaiya, young Raza struggled to focus. A teacher drew a red bindi on the wall and asked him to attend to the dot. That bindi was to recur across many of his works – reminiscent of a childhood struggle and also perhaps of an ongoing quest. Attending high school at Damoh, he gleaned both Islamic and Hindu traditions, soaking up Mir and Ghalib while listening to the Ramcharitmanas chanted at a local temple. Symptomatic of the intermingling of faiths in that time, one of his brothers became a Sanskrit scholar and an editor of Vishwamitra, a Hindi magazine.

At his school, an art teacher spotted Raza’s talent for drawing and sent him to an art school in Nagpur, where he was accorded generosity and respect by his Hindu teacher. Later, he passed an art exam in Bombay and while working at a host of sundry jobs – as a block printer, a calendar painter – he garnered a diploma from the JJ School of Arts. Unsurprisingly, Bombay changed him, broadened his perspective. Brushing against a cosmopolitan set, he encountered modernist art trends.

And became a founding member of the Progressive Artists Group (PAG), a band of artists who were to spark off the modern art movement in India. His friends included Francis Newton Souza, MF Husain and K.H. Ara among others. The PAG, formed by six artists, included two Muslims, one Dalit, one Christians and two caste Hindus – reflective of its pluralistic, catholic worldview. While these artists were to rub off on each other, they also carved out distinct artistic paths.

It was in Bombay too that Raza learned what an artist’s struggle entails – in material terms as well as in creating his own oeuvre. Later, when he exhibited his works in Kashmir, they were seen by Henri Cartier-Bresson, who suggested his paintings lacked “construction” and advised him to study Paul Cezanne. Raza heeded this at once, studying French and heading to the Ecole des Beaux-Art to further his art education. Paris would be his abode for the next six decades. He also met his French wife, Janine Mongillat at Ecole.

At the French school he encountered poets like Rilke. And grasped the richness of the modernist tradition in painting. He also discovered oils. He wrote ardent love letters to Janine, whom he courted for a decade, before they married. His letters display his familiarity with French poets, essayists and writers such as Andre Gide, Charles Baudelaire, and Paul Valery. In those missives, he also penned his own profound thoughts such as “nothing is more beautiful than what doesn’t exist” and “I don’t believe in mysticism, I prefer mathematics.”

As the first non-European to be awarded the Prix de la Critique, his genius was recognized in France, where he was also invited to participate in the Venice and Sao Paulo biennales. He and Janine bought an apartment in Paris and later set up a studio in Gorbio, in the South of France.

At that time, Paris was all about “non-figurative abstract art” though Raza’s work was more figurative. While he seemed to exult in his Parisian learnings, he also missed India sorely and wanted to immerse himself in its dance, music, literature and arts. He started visiting the country often and felt that colour was really his vehicle, his means of expression. He wished “to create a musical harmony in colour, colours as density, as expression, as a state of emotion, as sentiments and time.” He would later say that he learned how to paint in France, and what to paint from India. He wasn’t just taken in by surfaces. He was equally keen on plumbing Indian metaphysical ideas that undergirded its aesthetics.

His art was also spiritual in that sense, a form of prayer. Before starting each painting, he would recite a poem by Rilke from The First Elegy, to heed his “innermost voice.”

“But listen
to the whisperings of the wind,
and the ceaseless message
That forms itself out of silence.”

Raza was recognized thrice by the French government and received all three Padma awards from the Indian government. He also encouraged many young artists, by critiquing or even buying their works. In 2001, he created The Raza Foundation, to sponsor young artists, filmmakers, musicians et al. His wife died in 2004 and he struggled later to cope physically in France. Ashok Vajpeyi, poet and close friend and author of this book, was among those who persuaded him to return to India – where he painted till his death at 94.

If MF Husain was known for horses, Raza was known for his Bindu. He continued repeating the Bindu and did not apologize for it. He said his repetition was like chanting with a japamala, an act that fostered a “state of elevated consciousness.” He even created a series inspired by Gandhi. Raza’s message, expressed in vivid, universalizing colours, ought to be absorbed at a time when nations are being cleaved into strident shades.

References

Ashok Vajpeyi, Celebration and Prayer: Life and Light in Raza’s Art, Speaking Tiger, 2025