Sayed Haider Raza

Abstract

Sayed Haider Raza was one of India’s most important modernist painters and the last surviving founding member of the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group. He was born in Central India on 22 February 1922. He trained in Nagpur and Bombay (now Mumbai) in Maharashtra, India, before moving to France, where he lived for several decades with his wife, Janine Mongillat (1929–2002). Raza moved back to India after her death and spent the last years of his life in New Delhi. Raza’s artistic accomplishment was noticed and celebrated throughout his career, and he began exhibiting in India in 1943 and internationally, including at the Venice Biennale in the early 1950s. He painted landscapes and cityscapes with gouache and aquarelle. Raza later moved towards abstraction, informed by his interests in modern and contemporary art movements, architecture, literature, music, philosophy, and religious iconography. Raza is best known for his exceptional use of imagery drawn from the traditions of Tantric ritual practices, such as the bindu (dot), mandalas, and yantras (diagrams of the cosmos and meditative aids), colour, and geometry in his art. His artworks are in several significant collections, and he was decorated with honours in France and India, including being the first non-French artist to win the Prix de la Critique, Paris in 1956; three of the four highest civilian honours in India: the Padma Shri (1981), the Padma Bhushan (2007), and the Padma Vibhushan (2013); and the French government’s Commandeur de la Légion d’Honneur in 2015, a year before his death.

Biography

Sayed Haider Raza was one of India’s most famous and influential painters. He was born in 1922 in Babaria, a small village in central India. His father was a forest ranger, and the family lived near forest reserves in the Central Provinces (present-day Madhya Pradesh). After his parents separated, Raza and his siblings moved with their mother to Damoh. As a child, he witnessed tribal ritual dances and performances, listened to recitations of Hindu epics alongside Hindi and Urdu poetry, attended local schools where he received encouragement in art, and was introduced to spiritual practices and philosophical concepts associated with the Upanishadic and Yogic traditions —perhaps the most significant was at the age of eight when his teacher asked him to focus on a single dot on a wall, sowing the seed of his exploration of the bindu later in his career. Raza’s formative experiences of forests, Gond forts, and life along the banks of the Narmada River can be traced throughout his career. At 17, Raza joined the Nagpur School of Art and was offered a scholarship to study at India’s foremost art school, the Sir J.J. School of Art in Bombay (now Mumbai).

It is unsurprising that Raza was drawn to Bombay. The city’s cultural and academic institutions had nurtured artistic practice for a while. These included flourishing art schools like the J.J. School of Art (established in 1857), public libraries; museums like the Victoria and Albert Museum (now the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum) established in 1855, and the Prince of Wales Museum (now the CSMVS) which opened in 1922, and associations like the Bombay Art Society (founded 1888). In 1946, the art critic, institution-builder, and novelist Mulk Raj Anand started Marg Magazine dedicated to art, architecture, and culture. Several art studios, most famously Raja Ravi Varma’s printing press, were founded in 1894. The headgear maker ‘Topivale,’ Anant Shivaji Desai, was also the distributor or agent for the Ravi Varma Press and later became the sole publisher of Ravi Varma images after the artist died in 1906. Desai, a successful businessman and philanthropist, supported Bombay's nascent film industry. More presses and studios followed, producing commercial work for films and theatre. Music— Indian and Western— and performing arts also thrived alongside commercial enterprises. In 1963, Pundole’s and Chemould, the first private galleries, opened. Artists worked in various media and enterprises, often collaborating across disciplines.

Raza exhibited at the Bombay Art Society Salon, won prizes, and caught the eye of Rudolf von Leyden, a leading art critic, and of the collector Walter Langhammer, who was art director of The Times of India, an influential newsgroup. Most importantly, Raza and five other visionary artists (FN Souza, MF Husain, KH Ara, HA Gade, and SK Bakre) founded the Progressive Artists’ Group in 1947 and had their first show in 1949. Phenomenally successful as a group and in their practices, the “Bombay Progressives” significantly shaped modernism in Indian art.

Raza worked at the Express Block Studio during the day and studied painting at the Mohan Art Club in the evening. Bazaargate and Bombay (1943) conveyed the city’s architecture and sense of fast-paced movement in impressionistic aquarelles and gouache. He embodied the spirit of a flâneur, was observant and sensitive to the nuances of place, and experimented with colours and style when he travelled around India. In the 1940s, it would appear that Raza’s art— style, subject, and medium— depended on his geographical location and immediate artistic context. For example, when he worked in India and painted Indian landscapes, Raza used gouache and burnished his paintings with shells, like traditional materials of Rajasthani miniature paintings. In Europe, he turned to oils and depicted French scenes. However, even as his subject matter and media changed, Raza’s choice of colours and a preference for the rich tones of green, red, and yellow, often used in startling contrast, were absorbed from miniature paintings from the Rajput courts of Bundi, Mewar, Malwa in Central India, and the Pahari schools in the north of the subcontinent. His 1947 painting, Indian Summer, depicts a familiar trope in Indian painting: a heroine lying on her bed, surrounded by sakhi (female friends) and attendants. The figures, drawn without intricate detail, are an assemblage of various styles of depicting women in Indian art history as seen in western Indian Buddhist cave frescos of Ajanta (3rd to 6th century AD); Jain manuscript paintings (12th to the 16th century); Rajput paintings (17th to the 19th century), and in the idiom of the 20th century.

Raza faced financial difficulties during his time in Bombay and had to cope with the death of his parents (mother in 1947 and father in 1948) and separation from his siblings, who migrated to Pakistan before the Partition of the Indian subcontinent. Raza did not move with the rest of his family. In 1948, he travelled to Kashmir, a region known for its breathtaking Himalayan landscape. He serendipitously met the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who encouraged Raza to pay attention to composition and structure within a painting by studying artists like Paul Cézanne. In 1950, with a grant from the French government, Raza set off to study at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. On his journey, Raza was accompanied by a young artist, Akbar Padamsee. Raza knew several artists and writers in Paris, like Ram Kumar and Krishen Khanna. He also met the artist Janine Mongillat, whom he married in 1959. Their friends included writers, filmmakers, collectors, and musicians, notably the sitar maestro Pandit Ravi Shankar.

In Paris, Raza visited museums and galleries where he saw paintings of artists like Cézanne and Van Gogh, absorbed new idioms of colour, form, and composition, and took French lessons. In his atelier, he also joined Edmond Heuzé, artist and professor at the École des Beaux-Arts. He attended classes in art history (Western and Oriental) at the Louvre and explored the archives and collections of Museé Guimet, which specialised in Asian Arts. Raza also read Western writers and poets, especially admiring the poems and diaries of Rainer Maria Rilke. As his scholarship ran out, he sold paintings and designed books for the Club des Beaux-Livre de France. He signed a contract with Galerie Lara Vincy in Paris to show exclusively with them from 1955 to 1971. When Lara Vincy’s daughter, Liliane, took charge of the gallery in the early 1970s, the focus shifted to emerging conceptual and performance art, diverging from the early idioms of the School of Paris and Raza’s own evolving practice, thus ending their 16-year association.

He focused on le sens plastique in Europe, often using oils on canvas. Stylistically, in the 1950s and 1960s, Raza’s work was informed by post-impressionist artists like Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh, and his travels can be mapped through the choice of subjects in paintings like Haut de Cagnes (1951), Black Sun (1953), and Village en Provence (1957). Raza’s landscapes had a new sense of composition; the houses he depicted had a cubist quality, and the atmosphere within the painting had sharply changed from his earlier work in India. Confident lines replaced tranquil watercolours, and he moved towards depicting his emotional response to the place. Les Vergers (The Orchard, 1966) is a brilliant abstraction of the colours of nature. Raza’s paintings displayed a keen understanding of light, the colour black, and powerful lines. His treatment of landscape came from the way he, as a child, experienced the light and colours of Central Indian forests, the brightness of the tropical sun, and the deep contrasts of shadows cast on the ground. He was drawn towards light and seasons in paintings like Lumière d’été (Summer Light, 1958), where the outlines of houses are discernible, and shades of blue of the night meet the bright yellow of a long European summer day. In paintings such as Village en Fête (Festival in the Village, 1964), Raza has moved closer to abstraction and captured the crowd's euphoria simply through energetic colour, indistinct shapes, and brilliant contrast. Raza’s paintings, including those with European subjects, were distinctive and fresh because of his position as an outsider, training in European and Indian techniques, and exposure to art beyond the Western canon.

Only a few years after he arrived in Paris, Raza’s work was extensively appreciated and exhibited. Raza’s work, along with that of other notable Indian artists like Jamini Roy and Amrita Sher-Gil, was shown at the Venice Biennale of 1954, in an exhibition of work from India arranged through the Embassy of India in Rome at the Padiglione Centrale, Giardini. His acclaimed work, Ville Provençal (1956) was exhibited at the Venice Biennale of 1956, and Raza was the first non-French artist to win the Prix de la Critique in Paris that year. In 1958, Raza, the Bombay Progressives, and other artists had a successful show in London. Raza’s work travelled to Brussels, New York, São Paolo, Tokyo, Toronto, and other cities.

In 1962, Raza went to the University of California at Berkeley to teach. After that, he spent some time in New York, where he became interested in abstract expressionism and the work of artists like Mark Rothko and Hans Hoffman. The art he saw encouraged him to revisit his practice, and he painted La Mer (1968), working with shades of deep blue in acrylic, a new medium that allowed more fluidity than oil paint.

In the 1970s, ideas of sacred geometry and geography began to find articulation in his art. In addition to colours, he revisited compositional techniques in Indian miniature and manuscript painting, as seen in several works, including Punjab (1969) and Rajasthan (1973). The pictorial space is divided into smaller panels, and like miniaturists using single colours to depict the horizon and skies, Raza, too, created registers in his paintings. However, even in his early work, Indian Summer (1947), his figures were abstract. When he painted Saurashtra in 1983, the registers were integrated with geometric shapes, and even the hint of figuration disappeared.

Raza painted Zameen (Land, 1971) and Tapovan (1977) and began incorporating words and lines in the Devanagari script (used to write Sanskrit and Hindi) on the canvas. He quoted various poets like Agyeya, Ghalib, Faiz, Kabir, and Nirala. It was also in the 1970s that the bindu (dot), a critical leitmotif, would appear in Raza’s art, linking an engagement with religious iconography and cosmic diagrams to abstraction, marking a shift in his style and visual language. The bindu is more than just a dot or circle; it is a Tantric motif laden with meaning: as a seed, it symbolises the beginning of the universe; it becomes the sun, the source of energy, and the black void into which everything disappears. The bindu is the centre of the cosmos and can represent the universe; or, in yogic traditions, it is a chakra (one of seven charged portals placed in various parts of the body, from the top of the head to the base of the spine). The bindu is placed on the crown at the pineal gland, regulating balance, mental peace, and harmony.

Although Raza painted the mandala and yantra (ritually charged diagrams), he did not identify as a Tantric artist. He declined an invitation to participate in a Neo-Tantric exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, in 1983. He knew the layered and charged meanings of Tantric imagery and symbolism, but his engagement was not ritualistic. It was visual and intellectual. Beyond the bindu, he also incorporated the form of the mandala in his pictures. Borrowed from Jain and Tantric contexts, these diagrams are tools to guide meditation, achieve transcendence, and evoke deities. His engagement with the mandala was to reach depths of abstraction and to distil the meaning and symbolism of these diagrams. Religion featured regularly in his daily life and artistic practice: he read Hindu religious texts like the Bhagavad Gita, persistently painted Tantric and Jain mandala, and explored sacred geometry. His iterations of motifs were akin to the use of the rosary in prayers, where repetition of the names of God (in Raza’s case, motifs like the bindu and mandala) are an articulation and ritual of devotion. According to several accounts, he had a spiritual approach to his practice and would treat his studio as a sacred — but not religious — space. Raza extended his exploration to ideas of Surya Namaskar (sun salutations), a widespread yogic practice and an ode to the sun, in the mid-1980s; he painted the Naga, a snake deity seen in Buddhist, Jain, Hindu, and Tantric imagery. The serpent is another repeated motif explored for its coiled form around the bindu, and as a symbol of masculinity. In Surya and Naga (serigraph on paper 2007), the snake is juxtaposed with the sun, evoking the persistence of life. Using consistent visual language, Raza explored ideas like the five elements that make up the universe, the representation of the divine feminine and masculine through sacred shapes of the triangle and circle, and concepts of peace. Since the 1990s, several exhibitions have shown Raza’s abstract and geometric work. Despite the distance he wanted from Tantric art, Raza became synonymous with the bindu and his geometric paintings.

Raza’s use of traditional and religious imagery was not universally appreciated. Satish Gujral objected to a non-Hindu artist using Hindu religious motifs in his work. Raza was born a Muslim, but as an artist, he staunchly resisted the interference of religion in art and public life Raza was a modernist artist, and he did not see his non-Hindu subject matter as cultural appropriation as he considered Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, Islamic, Bhakti (devotional), and Tantric ideas to be part of his own tradition and spiritual heritage. His close friend and gallerist, Khorshed Gandhy of Chemould Gallery in Bombay, wrote a letter to Gujral defending Raza, where she also raised the alarm against the rise of the Hindu right-wing’s attack on MF Husain. Raza remained firm in his conviction of using themes from India’s multicultural heritage and practices — not dictated by religion, politics or conservative and partisan world views— as subject matter. KG Subramanyan was critical of how Indian artists in the diaspora exoticised their “Indianness” by peppering their artwork with quotations from Indian texts, adding calligraphy, and invoking nostalgia. Even in the late seventies, Raza was processing the notions and limitations of belonging. His 1977 work, La Terre (The Ground), is charged with energy and an explosion of colour, contrasts and lines. Here, he does not use “Indic” motifs, and the visual language is European or, at least, legible to a Western audience familiar with abstraction. Raza’s preoccupation with identity is addressed in Maa (1981), a large acrylic on canvas work that has on the bottom left, Ashok Vajpeyi’s line “Maa, lautkar jab aaunga, kya launga?” (Mother, when I return, what will I bring with me?). The painting is dominated by the bindu on one side and abstract niches, as if rooms within a home. Raza’s work was self-assured and demonstrated his cosmopolitan nature.

Raza was entirely engaged with India’s politics and society. He responded to Mahatma Gandhi and his teachings—from the shape and rhythm of his spinning wheel to his philosophical reflections on a new India—in artworks like Immanence (1990). Raza revisited Gandhi's assassination with Hey Ram (2013), the words uttered by the Mahatma when he was shot. He also painted Satyameva jayate (the triumph of truth, India’s national motto) in 2012.

By the 1980s, the Indian central and state governments and national art institutions had recognised and decorated him with awards. In 2001, Raza set up a foundation in his name, with a mandate to publish books on various subjects, award fellowships, and organise exhibitions and concerts. The Foundation in Gorbio, based in Raza and Mongillat’s home, holds their archive and runs an artist-in-residence programme.

Health concerns marred his late years. In 1993, Raza had eye surgery that resolved nagging issues with his eyesight. He marked this by inscribing the word Drishti (sight) in a painting. Mongillat was diagnosed with cancer, and Raza moved back to India after she died in 2002. Raza continued to paint, exhibit his work, and foster conversations on art until he passed away in 2016 in New Delhi.

S.H. Raza (1922–2016), a monographic exhibition at Centre George Pompidou in Paris in 2023, curated by Catherine David and Diane Toubert. This landmark exhibition, with rarely seen work, was a detailed survey of Raza’s career. At the same time, Musée Guimet mounted a small show focussing on the Bindu and Mandala in Raza’s work. In addition to several exhibitions in India marking Raza’s birth centenary, France, the country where Raza spent much of his career and had made his home, has celebrated his art and mapped his illustrious journey across geography, and his engagement with colour, form, lines, and themes.

Bibliography

Bonfand, Alain, Raza, Paris: Les Éditions de la Différence, 2008.

Bose, Nandalal, Gopalkrishna Gandhi, Ashok Vajpeyi, Gandhi in Raza, Ahmedabad: Mapin in association with Akar Prakar and The Raza Foundation, 2017.

Dalmia, Yashodhara, Sayed Haider Raza: The Journey of an Iconic Artist, New Delhi: HarperCollins, New Delhi, 2021.

“S.H. Raza's Journey”, Indian Express, July 26, 2016. S H Raza’s journey | The Indian Express

Germain-Thomas, Olivier, S.H. Raza: Mandalas, New Delhi: Art Alive Gallery, 2009.

Ghose, Anindita,‘The Last Great Moderns’, Livemint, 13 January, 2012.

Hoskoté, Ranjit, S H Raza: Nirantar, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi 2016.

Hoskoté, Ranjit, et al., S.H Raza: Vistaar, Mumbai: Afterimage Publishing, 2012.

Imbert, Michel, Raza, An Introduction to his Painting, Noida, New Delhi: Rainbow Publishers, 2003.

Jumabhoy, Zehra, and Boon Hui Tan. The Progressive Revolution: Modern Art for a New India. New York: Asia Society Museum, 2018.

Lassaigne, Jacques, Sayed Raza, Mumbai: Chemould Publications and Arts, 1985.

Leyden, Rudolf von, Raza, Sadanga Series, Mumbai: Mulk Raj Anand Publishers, 1959.

Raza : Metamorphosis, Mumbai: Vakil & Sons Ltd, 1979.

Macklin, Anne, ed, S H Raza Catalogue Raisonne 1958 – 1971 (Volume I and II), New Delhi: The Raza Foundation and Vadehra Art Gallery, 2016, and 2022.

Nair, Uma, Reverie with Raza: On the Occasion of Nirantar: The Aesthetic Continuum, Ahmedabad: Mapin in association with Akar Prakar and The Raza Foundation, 2016.

Pandey, Alka, Akhil Esh, Raza: The Sacred Search, exhibition catalogue, Chennai: Apparao Galleries, 2002.

Raza, S.H., ‘My Art’, Illustrated Weekly of India, 19 March, 1989.

Sen, Geeti, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza’s Vision, New Delhi: Media Transasia India Limited, 1997.

Raza Anthology, Mumbai: Gallery Chemould, 1991.

Sinha, Gayatri, S.H. Raza: Sketching Silence, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery and The Raza Foundation, 2021.

Vajpeyi, Ashok, Raza: A Life in Art, New Delhi: Art Alive Master Series Books, 2007.

Geysers: Letters between Sayed Haider Raza and his Artist Friends, New Delhi:Vadehra Art Gallery, 2013.

Maitri: Letters between Sayed Haider Raza and Ashok Vajpeyi, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2016.

My Dear: Letters between Sayed Haider Raza and Krishen Khanna, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2013.

Passion: Life and Art of Raza, New Delhi: Rajkamal Books, New Delhi, 2005.

’The Moment of Raza’, A Name for Every Leaf: Selected Poems, 1959-2015, trans. Rahul Soni, New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2019.

Vajpeyi, Ashok, et al, SH Raza, in association with The Raza Foundation, New Delhi and Centre Pompidou, Paris, Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing, 2023.

Vajpeyi, Ashok, ed, Understanding Raza: Many Ways of Looking at a Master, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2013.

Vajpeyi, Ashok and Shruthi Issac. S.H. Raza: An Itinerary. New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2015.

Further reading

Appasamy, Jaya, S.A. Krishnan, ed, 25 years of Indian art: painting, sculpture & graphics in the post-independence era, New Delhi: Lalit Kala Academi, 1972.

Bartholomew, Richard, Nature and Abstraction, New Delhi: Lalit Kala Contemporary, No 23, April 1977.

Bean, Susan S., Midnight to Boom: Painting in India after Independence, London: Thames & Hudson, 2013.

Brown, Rebecca, Art for a Modern India, 1947 – 1980, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2009.

Chatterjee, Mortimer and Tara Lal, The TIFR Art Collection, Mumbai: Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, 2010.

Dalmia, Yashodhara, Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Contemporary Indian Art: Other Realities, Mumbai: The Marg Foundation, 2003.

Journeys: Four Generations of India Artists in Their Own Words, Volume I, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Dalmia, Yashodhara, Hashmi, Salima, Memory, Metaphor, Mutations: Contemporary Art of India and Pakistan, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2006.

Dave-Mukherji, Parul, ed, Alkazi, Ebrahim: Directing Art: The Making of a Modern Indian Art World, New Delhi: Mapin Publishing & Art Heritage, 2016.

Interview with Saffron Art in Gorbio, France, 2012. https://www.saffronart.com/artists/s-h-raza

Kapur, Geeta, Contemporary Indian Art, London, Royal Academy, 1982.

Mitter, Partha, Indian Art, Oxford History of Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Sen, Geeti, Your History Gets in the Way of My Memory, Essays on Indian Artists, New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2012.

Sinha, Gayatri, Indian Art: An Overview, Kolkata: Rupa & Co, 2003.

Art and Visual Culture in India: 1857 – 2007, Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2009.

Subramanyan, K.G., The Living Tradition: Perspectives on Modern Indian Art, Kolkata: Seagull Books, 1987.

The Heritage Lab: project for children: Look! 6 Paintings by S.H Raza : Ideas & Activities , July 2017.https://www.theheritagelab.in/sh-raza-art/