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The return of Raza

India’s art scene regained one of its brightest stars this New Year when distinguished painter Syed Haider Raza, moved back to the country of his birth after being away from it for 60 years.

Raza whose contemporaries include the luminaries such as K. H. Ara and F.N. Souza, moved to France in 1950 to study at the Icole Nationale Supirieure on a government of France scholarship and decided to stay back after he married artist Janine Monillat in 1959. An only child to her parents, Janine’s mother found it hard to let her daughter go away from the country and a young, very much in love Raza decided to adopt his wife’s country as his own.

Now back in India, Raza, who has attained inconic status as a painter in the last few decades, said he is glad to be back in his own country after the death of his wife a few years back.

“I love my country and want to spend my last years here. I’m very happy to return to India. India is mine and I am all Indian. Despite living in France for 60 years, I remained an Indian citizen, maintained relations with my country and read Gita Pravachan and Ramayan. I continue to read and write in Hindi.”

The much-admired painter is yearning to go back to the little town in Madhya Pradesh where he spent his early years. “I want to kiss the ground of Mandla, my birthplace where I spent my early days with my brother, sister, mother and father. It is like touching my mother’s feet.”

Raza, along with a clutch of other Indian painters including Amrita Shergill and Jamini Roy, have held art lovers around the world spell bound with their genius. The artist displayed a streak of brilliance even in his youth when he strained against the established norms of that period, co-founding a revolutionary new body, the Bombay Progressive Artist’s Group with peers Ara and Souza. The BPAG broke free from the influences of European realism in Indian art and introduced an Indian inner vision (Antar gyan) into the art, holding its first show in 1948, in Mumbai. That year, his father died in Mandla and most of his family of four brothers and a sister migrated to Pakistan, after the partition of India. Raza however cherishes his connections with India.

Raza’s works are mainly abstracts in oil or acrylic, with a very rich use of color, replete with icons from Indian cosmology as well as its philosophy in June last year his seminal work, Saurashtra, sold for a jaw-dropping Rs 164.2 million ($3,486,965) at a Christie’s auction.

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