Raza’s runes: visions of the self

Sayed Haider Raza’s paintings with herringbone triangles, blue moons, licks of flame and inner vistas trigger transcendental experiences. India’s beloved Raza was born in central India and grew up among forests. Madhya Pradesh is far from the sea, it has hills, but not great mountains, and most of all it has had tribal princes and long waves of peace. As a child, Raza must have seen nocturnal wild creatures padding softly and dark birds flitting through damp jungles and dry forests and his early work was mainly landscapes. It was later, much later, that his handprint, or dare I say, pugmark became the ‘bindu’. Bindu is the sparkling, infinitesimal dot, the spark, the blue pearl from which worlds, (and Raza’s universe), unfurl and into which they curl back. And from bindu, says Hindu religious thought, came energy and time and space, perhaps the first light followed by the first sound.

19 July 2007