‘It opened up a whole new vocabulary’: Painter Sayed Haider Raza on his iconic ‘Bindu’ series

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 motifs 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...

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