Gandhi in Raza
February 22, 2017 at India Habitat Centre, New Delhi
Raza used to visit Sewagram or Sabarmati or Rajghat whenever he came to India on his frequent sojourns to his native country from France, where he spent nearly six decades of his life.
For him visiting a Gandhi place was like visiting a temple or a mosque or any holy place. Even when he was well above 85 years of age, some of us have watched him kneel down and touch the earth with his forehead in salutation to the Mahatma. He, of course, had read the Mahatma's auto-biography My Experiments with Truth and would delve through the Mahatma's treatise on the great metaphysical poem 'Geeta'. His constant engagement with the spiritual and philosophical vision of Gandhiji also led him to discover and study the Mahatma's spiritual heir, Acharya Vinoba Bhave. He became particularly fond of the concept of swadharma propounded by Vinobaji. One of the few books he brought from Paris when he shifted to Delhi to spend his last five-and-a-half years was Vinobaji's book Geeta Pravachan in Hindi.
Ashok Vajpeyi
SH Raza | Thoughts of Gandhi ji | Acrylic on canvas | 59 x 47.25 in | 2013
SH Raza | Swadharam | Acrylic on canvas | 59 x 59 in | 2013
SH Raza | Shanti | Acrylic on canvas | 59 x 47.25 in | 2013
SH Raza | Satya | Acrylic on canvas | 59 x 47.25 in | 2013
SH Raza | Sanmati | Acrylic on canvas | 59 x 59 in | 2013
SH Raza | Peed Parai | Acrylic on canvas | 59 x 59 in | 2013
SH Raza | Hey Ram | Acrylic on canvas | 23.5 x 23.5 in | 2013
About S H Raza
Sayed Haider Raza (22nd February 1922- 23rd July 2016):
Sayed Haider Raza was born in 1922 in Madhya Pradesh and studied painting at the Nagpur School of Art and the Sir J.J.School of Art. After receiving a French government scholarship in 1950 he left for Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts, Paris. Raza was awarded the Prix de la Critique in Paris in 1956. In 1962 he served as a visiting lecturer at the University of California in Berkeley, USA. Raza was one of the founders of the Progressive Artists’ Group, along with K.H. Ara and F.N. Souza. He has participated in numerous exhibitions, including the Sao Paulo Biennale in 1958, the Biennale de Menton, in France in 1966, 1968 and in 1978, and Contemporary Indian Painting, at the Royal Academy in London, in 1982.
In December 1978 the Madhya Pradesh Government invited him to his native state for homage and an exhibition of his work in Bhopal. He was elected Fellow of the Lalit Kala Akademi in 1983. In 1997 Raza was awarded the Madhya Pradesh Government’s prestigious Kalidas Samman.
He was conferred the Padma Shree Award by the President of India in 1981, the Padma Bhushan in 2007 and Padma Vibhushan in 2013.