Published with the Speaking Tiger Books in 2025, Celebration & Prayer illuminates us on the life of the Iconic Indian Artist
What would be the opposite of communal?
‘Harmonal’.
Not of bodies and biology, though it does not lack emotion either, but the one that is the practice of peace and sustainability.
Sayed Haider Raza was not communal, as he did not explicitly participate in politics. In-fact, according to Ashok Vajpeyi, he actively tried to un-do the communal through his paintings and turning, always, towards harmony. Ashok Vajpeyi writes it as Raza’s meditative practice in his new book, Celebration & Prayer, Life and Light in Raza’s Art.
Biography of a friend: Ashok Vajpeyi and S.H. Raza
Image Courtesy- Scroll.in
The Biography, or Profile of the artist through the eyes of Poet Ashok Vajpeyi, enlivens the modern master of Indian art. His practice, presented as an alternate ritual of faith, is written as a prayer by the author. Ashok Vajpeyi, who was also a close friend of Raza’s, with him on his death-bed, memorialises Raza’s oeuvre, with a poetic vision, in the interpretation of his works.
Overall, to give an alternate practice, a full of harmony approach to living -because true art, according to Vajpeyi, is a resident of life- he evokes the Artists’ becoming. S.H. Raza, a pioneer in Indian Modernism, lived during the partition and was subjected to the changing demography of religion in his young years. Vajpeyi writes of Raza’s later years when the Master, adamant to give back in gratitude, stood by his practice like a ritual.
Ashok Vajpeyi on the Influence of Gandhi on the A-Political Painter
Ashok Vajpeyi, along with the biography, also mentions few of Raza’s paintings, like Maa, the Gandhian Series, the infamous Bindu, and the many motifs associated with the artist.
Image Courtesy- Mapin Publishing
In an interesting excerpt from the book, Vajpeyi reiterates the “Harmonal” vision of S.H. Raza in the process of one of his paintings inspired by Gandhian ideas. He writes,
“One late afternoon in 2013, I found him doing a canvas in very subdued hues. I was intrigued since his usual geometrical shapes were absent. When we met in the evening he told me that he had decided to do a set of Gandhi paintings. The painting in question had Gandhi’s last words as he fell dead from bullets of his assassin: ‘Hey Ram’. It is appropriately sombre and subtly refuses to be an end-of-it-all work. It has significant use of white, indicating both purity and hope but also engulfs the canvas with a mist or cloud of sadness. The solid column seems to suggest a certain defiance and stubbornness of the body that is killed but the spirit surviving intact.”
The way Raza repurposes the name of Ram into his motifs of purity and harmony, alludes to a flipped side of the communal ideology prevalent in the later years of Raza’s India.
As Raza’s paintings are a meditation on language, the last lines of Gandhi, perpetuate that inquisitiveness of the artist. Showing that he approached life with consciousness and composed it back on the canvas. Raza stands opposite to the scale, ‘Jay Shri Ram’ and ‘Hey Ram’ tipping the instrument on each side. Yet, Raza’s Ram is full of hope.
Image Courtesy- Mapin Publishing
Other Themes in the Book
The book talks about the themes of faith and multi-culture in S.H Raza’s becoming, influence of Formalism and revisiting his symbols, combination of the Plastic and Spiritual in the Artists’ process; in return making the Artist himself as an event. Ashok Vajpeyi revists, Raza’s life in Celebration & Prayer, like a true lover and admirer of the artist.
Image courtesy- Raza Foundation
Feature Image Courtesy- Abir Pothi
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