Standing on the third floor and looking down into the well of the atrium where the retrospective ‘Traversing Terrains’ is displayed gives you a jolt — it is akin to a dramatic and sudden entry into a three-dimensional Raza painting. The circular edifice encloses within it interlinked quadrilaterals from within which the paintings gleam in splashes of colour. It’s a bird’s eye view of a maze that cuts in and out, like a grid of city streets, the paintings like lit windows, and the whole vividly roofed by giant letters that spell out the artist’s name. The idea of space is the first thing that pops into your head. And it’s an idea that occupied Raza through his career — place and the idea of belonging; place deconstructed into space; space voided of matter, a perfect shunya. The show builds upon this central idea — terrain, site, space.
Nuggets of history
With paintings mostly from the Piramal collection, many on view for the first time, the retrospective is a significant milestone in remembering Raza. Talking to co-curator Vaishnavi Ramanathan, I discover that Raza apparently ran into Henri Cartier-Bresson while on a visit to Kashmir in 1948, and the latter in his inimitable style advised Raza to get some ‘structure’ into his painting. How seriously Raza took this tip is obvious from the rather heavy-handed cubist ‘Still Life’ (1949) on display here, but it clearly stayed in his subconscious to slowly evolve into the classic matrices that would define his later work.
44 Bomanji Lane
The chronologically themed retrospective traces this evolution but avoids falling into the trap of a simplistic linearity by interlinking the corridors between the decades and creating little islands of overlap. This layout also helps you break protocol and wander between decades, double back or leapfrog, which makes the experience richer with the sensations all running into each other like an over-enthusiastic watercolour.
And in the interstices are nuggets of history — letters, photographs, invites, catalogues — that illustrate the man and the age. On a yellowing invitation, artist-collector Bal Chhabda invites friends to the preview of a Raza-Khanna-Padamsee-Husain show, probably his influential Gallery 59’s inaugural show in April 1959. About a decade earlier, Raza had co-founded the seminal Bombay Progressives Group, which included Souza, Ara, Husain, Padamsee and Khanna. It was an enormously creative era, rich with possibility and talent, and the archival material displayed here — sourced inter alia from The Raza Foundation in Delhi and Galerie Lara Vincy in Paris — adds historicity but also piquancy to the show, making it feel intimate. Raza had come to Bombay from Mandya in Madhya Pradesh in the 40s, and the skyline could not have been more different to a man drinking in the world visually. Then he visited Benaras; these new geographies occupied him; he adopted landscapes, and they are blurry with wonderment.
His ‘Benaras’ and ‘Bombay’ series are suffused with tenderness; my favourite, however, is the rather desolate ‘44 Bomanji Lane’, where Raza was living when Partition came and his family and first wife moved to Pakistan. Raza chose to stay.
In 1950, Raza too left, for France, but his heart and his art stayed in India. Over two decades, his work, while staying with landscapes and cityscapes, got more expressionist. In 1969 he painted ‘Punjab’, prescient of later works, not located except by title in any specific place, but evoking everything about a place by filtering it through his own by now already vivid palette. As Ramanathan says, “From physical reality, Raza is moving to the essence of the land itself.”
As Raza’s yearning for home grew, his trips increased, he dived into Indian philosophy, titled paintings in Hindi. He had returned from a teaching sojourn in the U.S. imbued with the frames and grids of Mark Rothko and Frank Stella, to which you can trace the architectonic harmony of his works, but also preoccupied with the need to fix his own locus.
‘Rajasthan’
As his canvases became more universal in execution, they struck deep roots into the earth of his birthplace. This becomes evident not just in his thematic choices but even his adoption of acrylics, which meant he could return to flat application and primary hues. The palette was from Indian folk art, but Raza used colours the way a composer uses notes, piling them on carefully, inexorably until the work reached a flamboyant crescendo. Most importantly, the artist began to look at land and location differently, to “go beyond”. He embraced the idea of prakriti, nature. It offered, as he says, “a marvellous possibility to go beyond the ocular vision of nature.” Raza was slowly beginning to “see” nature more and more with a Wordsworthian mysticism, not structurally as rocks, water and trees but in their elemental forms of fire, earth or ether.
As you wander down the sections, this progression becomes starkly palpable — landscapes move from local to universal to cosmic. Representation moves from the physical to the metaphysical; and that he should finally arrive at the Bindu begins to seem blindingly inevitable. All energy funnelled into that one ginormous, pulsating dot. And everything else, water and earth and grass and building atomised into segments of dazzling colour.
Within them black gets centrality. It was for him the colour of shunya , nothingness, endless space, but also the point from which everything begins. Raza has described the period before he discovered the Bindu as one of immense blackness, from where he had to find a way out — and his emerging from that nothingness was a rebirth. His later paintings revert to this idea over and over again — a black dot from which waves of creation pulsate outwards. Or the black Bindu located inside a fecund garden.
No-man’s land
The exhibition fittingly uses ‘Bindu Naad’, 1995, as the last painting. Immense, painted over three canvases, it draws everything that precedes into it — a gigantic Bindu thrown like a stone into space from which giant ripples radiate outward, gyrating, throbbing, containing and transmitting sound, energy, life itself.
‘Bindu Naad’
Raza died this month two years ago. A year earlier, in 2015, waves of refugees had crossed the Mediterranean seeking asylum in Europe, even as the Rohingyas fled Myanmar. The displacement of people from their lands, their denial of adoptive lands, their deaths in the seas in between, in no-man’s land — these are images we live with today. Raza too grappled with the idea of belonging — choosing India after Partition, leaving for France, returning to India to die.
Only, unlike the Rohingyas or his contemporary Husain, he wasn’t denied six feet of earth. And when Raza painted poet Ashok Vajpeyi’s verse: ‘Ma, laut ke jab aaunga, kya launga?’ (Mother, what will I bring you when I return), the painting seems to say that he brought back nothing beyond what he took, echoing the line from the Upanishads : ‘Purnasya purnamadaya purnameva avashishyate’ — when you remove wholeness from the whole wholeness alone remains.
