JOINING HIS DOTS

A new Sayed Haider Raza biography makes sense of the abstract in him and his art

- Giles Tillotson

India’s first modern artists, born before Independence, faced a near-impossible challenge. They sought to attain modernity at an international not a parochial level, but at the same time were required (and some sincerely wished) not to forfeit their Indian identity. They ran the gauntlet between those critics who accused them of selling out and those who dismissed them as provincial. For Sayed Haider Raza, the dilemma had a geographical twist. Given a chance to visit Paris as a young man, he stayed on and made France his home for the next 60 years. He visited India frequently, but finally returned only in 2010, six years before his death. Despite his émigré status, India clearly mattered profoundly to him, as a source of both identity and inspiration.

But how to express it? Those who found their subjects in India’s enduring myths were not always thanked for it, especially if they were seen as “outsiders”. M.F. Husain is a case in point. Such an approach would not suit Raza, who from an early age was pulled towards abstraction. One major point of connection for him was Rajasthan: not its legends but the intense colours of its costumes and its art. But this brought its own tensions with modernism. The glo bal modernist sensibility often focuses on the anguish and turmoil of the 20th century. One of the things that makes Raza’s art so appealing is that his default mood is celebratory.