Bengali Bride for 86 yr Old Raza?

Uma Nair

A Strange way to turn 86 years old. After praising and verbally eulogizing a set of abstractionist `chelas' Syed Haider Raza is now indulging in openly chastising the very same artists he helped set up. Perhaps it's a case of flaunting your moment of truth rather than short lived love. Raza who has high visibility assets ever since his works climbed to abnormal highs has had around him a string of obnoxiously visible artists who have used the old man's feeble shoulders to climb to celebrity highs.

Among them are self proclaimed curators who have no credibility, who can neither speak a word of structured English straight nor write. So the high visibility of the parties and the awards and the `you scratch my back-I scratch yours' have all come to an end?
Take Raza's birthday preview of an interview in which he said:
'Indian art is considered very seriously the world over and it is progressing in a very important way; in fact, doing quite well. But the new generation of artists needs to put in more fundamental research on how to use colours. There is a tendency in them to rush through colours - especially in abstract drawings. They need to take art and life more seriously,' the master of abstraction and modern landscape S.H. Raza told a news agency in an exclusive chat in the capital. 

Who is the new generation of artists that Raza is referring to? The very same group that he has conferred accolades and awards, or a new breed of younglings? The group that hangs onto his clothes and veritably verbalises in hollow tones every word he utters, or others waiting in the wings?

An artist who wishes to remain anonymous says: After spending so many years in France he appeared on the Indian threshold when Indian art started looking up. It was the Indian galleries and collectors who feted him. Where did the guru and the many shagirds appear from? How does the so called Raza group talks of affiliations when he was no guru? How can Raza take on the mantle of a guru when he hasn't been a guru at all? Just because a few artists have gone to Paris and lived with him and used him for their own career graphs, one cannot give him the status of a guru. Indian art is seeing strange twists and trends thanks to the mad art boom and the whole issue of an image making market.'

Raza's words in the aftermath of the abstract image making boom these past five years and his flying to India and being here to muse around for his birthday amply proves that he wants to be where the action is. But his latest pre-birthday interview and his flush of anger proves that he is on a  mode of realisation-.`I am no one's guru and no one is my sishya ,'said Raza to Muzaffar Ali in an interview in Taj Mansingh Hotel a few nights ago.'

To begin with the interview was more about random mutterings and uttering than substance. Don’t get me wrong folks, Muzaffar is about the finest you could get, but then 86 year old Raza was more the little boy who wanted to lick the cream off his cake and lick it again.

It was the last part of the interview that became the only worthwhile raconteur when he spoke of his wife `French and Christian, but very good’. He said, ‘Art isn't about investment, it’s about an inner urge,' while the go-getters at the back chattered non stop-until-someone switched off the lights so that there was a Pavlovian silence.

`The new crop of artists must 'ponder' over their work, study world art before experimenting', Raza said. The newly incarnated critic in Raza is no more anchored in worthless praise but filled with a meaningful and meandering mélange of finally seeing through the many charades that his `chelas' and others have played on him. `He honestly doesn't know what's happening,' says a long time friend who wishes to remain anonymous. `At an interview in Mumbai he is supposedly to have stated that he was in search of a young Bengali bride. 'The Mumbai newspaper was covertly told to delete the lines because it would reflect a rather fleshy state of mind for the octogenarian’.

Muzaffar's last question had a poetic gravitas about it. France ke galiyaon mein aapne bharat ko kaise dhoonda? Raza spoke of nights in Madhya Pradesh and his visits to India, how he has to be looked after. In many ways Raza sounded the melancholic Jacques who recited those immortal lines:
 `Last scene of all,
that ends this strange eventful history,
is second childishness and mere oblivion,
sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.'
The art boom presents a weird world in which liberal epiphanies can twist and turn. Guess Shakespeare was right when he spoke of man's last age in Seven Ages in which he comes to the state of a strange and eventful history when he is sans eyes, sans taste, sans smell and sans everything.

`Life is about women, work and God, 'in that order', stated Raza with emphatic vigour. After speaking about his loneliness after the loss of his wife he ended on a robust Romeo note and said: Sometimes I tell my artist friends, I need to find a young Bengali girl. The interview ended on a note of aesthetic irony, `Uske baad kuch kehe nahin sakte,' said a perfectly poised Muzaffar. The success of the evening at Taj Mahal Hotel lay in Muzaffar's ability to bring out the monologue in Raza (albeit an adolescent’s confession).

Suppressed desires of 86 years Raza sahib? Or am I just too Victorian??