Important Notice

The bindu - which Raza first introduced into his paintings in the 1950s as a black sun looming in the background of a Provencal landscape - emerged from the artist's preoccupation with formal order and geometry, as well as an exploration of nature and spirituality. The inspiration for this motif originally came from his native Indian village, where one of his teachers, Nandlal Jharia, taught him how to focus on the significant and eliminate the... The bindu - which Raza first introduced into his paintings in the 1950s as a black sun looming in the background of a Provencal landscape - emerged from the artist's preoccupation with formal order and geometry, as well as an exploration of nature and spirituality. The inspiration for this motif originally came from his native Indian village, where one of his teachers, Nandlal Jharia, taught him how to focus on the significant and eliminate the peripheral by concentrating on a small black dot. However, it would be many years before this idea would begin to manifest in Raza's oeuvre, which evolved in distinct yet connected phases, influenced by his journey and life in France before circling back to his Indian roots.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Raza - who was based in Paris - frequently travelled to India, and began to question the "Indianness" of his work. This period of travel and self-reflexivity ushered in a deeper engagement with forms, colours and philosophies rooted in his home country. It became the focus of Raza's art during this period when his paintings transitioned from gestural works into geometric abstraction.

The central black circle or bindu is a metaphor for the origin of all life in Hindu philosophy, from which "a whole series of different climates of thought can be created," in addition to representing concepts like unity, completeness and infinity. It is also indicative of shunya or a void, similar to that from which the universe was created. As Raza explains, "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." (The artist quoted in Geeti Sen, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza???s Vision, New Delhi: Media Transasia Ltd, p. 12)

Using this new geometric vocabulary, Raza alluded to nature - which always remained an integral part of his work - as well as Indian philosophical, spiritual and cosmological concepts. He also returned to his native language, using Hindi and Sanskrit terms as titles for the works of this period. For Raza, the bindu - which appears in his work in various shapes, from a concentrated point to a large black orb - came to symbolise "...the seed, bearing the potential of all life, in a sense. It is also a visible form containing all the essential requisites of line, tone, colour, texture and space. The black space is charged with latent forces aspiring for fulfillment." (Sen, p. 134)

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