10 hours Ago By Ashok Vajpeyi
It seldom happens that a particular image, or an idea, or a figure, gets identified with a particular artist. But it happened with two of our modern masters — Maqbool Fida Husain and Sayed Haider Raza. Husain with horses, and Raza with the bindu .
Both these motifs appeared fairly early in their artistic careers and remained the motif they revisited again and again throughout their career. Raza did not come to the bindu suddenly. It was a childhood memory of his schoolteacher trying to calm his wayward mind by drawing a bindu on the wall of the verandah of the rural school he was studying in.
Haider, the boy, was told to concentrate his attention on it. That bindu , blown up as the dark sun, remained with Raza throughout his artistic career, especially in France. Raza said, ‘For me at that initial stage, bindu not only represented the primordial symbol or the seed.
It also represented for me a point, which could be enlarged to a circle — one of the most significant geometrical forms! ...
In terms of painting, immense possibilities seemed to open up — the circle, vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines, the triangle and the square. Immense energy and potential were released by a simple yet essential form. It opened up a whole new vocabulary which corresponded, in a sense, to my training in Paris in formalism.
.. My earlier bindus were not vibrating: they were dense and solid as pure form.
Later, the bindu appeared as a concentric circle of energy, expanding. Still later, they began moving through space, as the sun moves across the sky.’ It may appear that his bindu paintings are repetitive but if you look carefully, they are not: each time the bindu emerges in a different context, located in a new geometric configuration.
In any case, it is many things: a still centre, a centre of energy, an all-engulfing figure, something that stands solid vis a vis the ephemeral nature of reality. It embodies essence, it harps back to the origins. There are works in which the bindu is in turmoil and fury; there are yet others in which the bindu manifests tranquility and consonance.
— Excerpted from ‘Celebration And Prayer: Life and Light in Raza’s Art’ by Ashok Vajpeyi; published by Speaking Tiger.
