Beginning At The Bindu

For Over 40 Years, Legendary Modernist S.H. Raza Spent Summers In A Hilltop Hamlet In The French Riviera. An Ardent Admirer Drives Up To Sleepy Gorbio In Search Of His Story.

- Shaikh Ayaz

As our Tintin-themed aircraft hovers over Nice, a curious eye out from the window proves what I had always imagined. Côte d’Azur is the France of everyone’s dreams, particularly more and more now of the rich, famous and the creative elite. This southeastern wonderland, with the Mediterranean coastline entwined with cliffs that struggle to provide shade to sun-baked beaches, once inspired Picasso, Cézanne, Renoir, Matisse and Jean Cocteau. I see perfectly perched hilltop villages dotted on fragrant fields—a fabled landscape that could have just as easily been conjured up by a post-impressionist painter.

I arrive in Nice at high summer (on a sunny day that Picasso, one imagines, might have spent creating and copulating). In a region hotter than the rest of France, summer days are an unending swathe of sun-dappled reverie. As we drive past the beaches and begin our ascent over the foothills, I think of Henri Matisse who made Nice his home, Picasso’s Antibes and Renoir’s final days in Cagnes-sur-mer. My destination is a 45-minute drive up, to a medieval village called Gorbio, perched atop the town of Menton. Laid-back and sleepy, it’s easy to miss Gorbio on the map. Far harder is to miss this tiny French hamlet’s Indian connection. Best known for the Bindu and other philosophically-minded conceptual and geometric landscapes drawn from his Indian heritage, S.H. Raza made a habit of spending summers in Gorbio after discovering it in the 1950s. His wife Janine Mongillat, whose family belonged to this part of France, is buried in the village cemetery. Raza, on the other hand, returned to India in 2011. A major figure of Indian modern art, he died in 2016 in Delhi, aged 94 and is buried in his native town of Mandla, Madhya Pradesh.