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Bharatiya Samaroh is one of Raza's earliest and largest fractured geometric paintings. In this work Raza brings together a great number of his famous motifs in the form of a striking modern day mandala imbued with spiritual resonances.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s Raza began to feel he had exhausted everything he had learnt from the French School. For Raza, something was missing, a value deriving from his origins. So he returned... Bharatiya Samaroh is one of Raza's earliest and largest fractured geometric paintings. In this work Raza brings together a great number of his famous motifs in the form of a striking modern day mandala imbued with spiritual resonances.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s Raza began to feel he had exhausted everything he had learnt from the French School. For Raza, something was missing, a value deriving from his origins. So he returned to India and relocated himself amongst its poetry, aesthetics, philosophy, and its spiritual teachings. He was drawn to such ideas as yantra, the mandala, vastu shastra, and the words of Bhagavad Gita.

"Son of Kunti, I am taste in the waters, light in the moon and sun, the sacred syllable in all the Vedas, sound in the air, manhood in men. Also I am the pleasant fragrance in the earth, the radiance in fire, the life in all beings, and in ascetics I am austerity. Know, Partha, that I am the eternal seed of all creatures, I am the intelligence of the intelligent; I am the brilliance of the brilliant" (Chapter 7, The Bhagavad Gita, A new translation by W.J. Johnson, Oxford World's Classics, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1994.)

Such new inspiration brought a change in direction for Raza, a second birth, from academic naturalism to paintings that were analytical statements. From landscape painting, Raza turned to 'inscape' painting. From the European way of seeing with the retina, Raza's paintings looked with the third eye, a perception of the world beyond ordinary sight. As Rudolf von Leyden observes "Nature became to Raza something not to be observed or to be imagined but something to be experienced in the very act of putting paint on canvas." (Rudolf von Leyden, Raza, Vakil and Sons Ltd, Bombay, 1979).

Bharatiya Samaroh reflects Raza's new found interest in Indian metaphysics and geometric designs. At the centre, its point of origin, is the Bindu. The Bindu had previously figured many times in Raza's works often as the black sun, but in this work of 1988 it was to take centre stage. For Raza, the Bindu is a source of energy, germination and light. Many artists have used the circle as shorthand for the divine. For Kandsinky, who was a great inspiration for Raza, the circle was part of a cosmic language and a link to a more spiritual plane.
"(The circle) is the synthesis of the greatest oppositions. It combines the concentric and the eccentric in a single form and in equilibrium. Of the three primary forms, it points most clearly to the fourth dimension"- Wassily Kandinsky

Encircling the bindu are reverberating rings representative of the Kundalini, the coiled serpent that lies dormant within us, a force which if inert can poison us or if mastered can give us energy and power and ultimately the state of Yoga. Raza encloses his circle within a square thus cutting the shape into four defined corners, often likened to the states of sunrise, sunset, north and south. From this centre, the canvas radiates into a rich bifurcation of colours and multipolar spaces like veins across the canvas permeating it with energy and life.

Raza paints with a language of symbols for the five elements -earth, water, air, fire and space, and signifiers of fertility and fruitfulness, key components of the universe. Each of the thirty-two squares in Bharatiya Samaroh contains a different visual narrative. We see the 'Arbre' or 'Tree' as a set of downward triangles sat one upon another. So too we have the 'river', cutting across the square from one diagonal corner to the other, to Raza a representation of the flow of thought and the flux of life. There's the ovoid and the upwards pointing triangle (the lingam, or masculine principle) and the downwards-pointing triangle (the yoni or feminine principle). In the top left-hand corner is a calligraphic inscription rather like an illuminated manuscript, a nod to his own literary associations with poets and writers in India. Like a mantra that is repeated until it is fixed in the mind, Raza repeats many of these symbols within the painting in order that they are fully explored in their many facets. Finally, Raza frames his painting in a hard edged border to contain the forces within.

Although Raza's studies of ancient concepts are clearly evident in his works of this period, he sought to be influenced rather than led by them. Rather than copying their principles, Raza assimilated the spirit of Indian tradition to give a personal interpretation of it. As he describes in the book 'Mandalas':

"....I have done my utmost to invent my own perception of shapes and colours, as well as the geometry governing them. I have been through a long period of research and assimilation before finding my own vision. (...) We must slow down our intellectual functions in order to allow the inner light to open out. One then reaches a kind of semi-conscious state where reasoning becomes useless, shapes becoming as if they were dictated by heaven. I am convinced that the best paintings are produced while in that kind of state. Painting does not come from the intellect, it comes from the deepest layers of life and from an elevation in intuitive perception". (S.H Raza and Olivier Germain-Thomas, Mandalas: Sayed Haider Raza, Albin Michel, Paris, 2004, p. 20)

The constant in Raza's paintings, what lies at the very heart of his work is 'nature'. The artist Paul Klee, who Raza had great admiration for said: 'for the artist communication with nature remains the most essential condition. The artist is human; himself nature; part of nature within natural space'.

This purity of inspiration gives Raza's works an eternal resonance, untainted by the pressures of time and place. The title Bhartiya Samaroh loosley translates as Indian festival or gathering, and for the viewer it is indeed a celebration, a celebration of life and being "a colourful tribute to human existence itself. The questions and doubts, tensions and dissatisfactions have all been superceded by an art which combines intensity with tranquility" (Ashok Vajpeyi, S.H Raza: Punaragaman, Vadehra Art Gallery and Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 2011, p.5)

Works from the Geometric, or Bindu series are in numerous important private collections and in the following Public Collections including, Pompidou, Paris, British Museum, London, KNMA, New Delhi, NGMA, New Delhi, Jehangir Nicholson Collection, Mumbai.

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