A retrospective of Sayed Hyder Raza's work was exhibited at the Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai, to mark the gallery's centenary celebrations and coincide with Raza's eightieth birthday. It was a fine tribute to a painter with a significant contribution to the spiritual in modern Indian art. He is one of the visionaries who have reconciled the polarities of internationalism with Indian tradition and spiritual thought to create a vibrant, timeless imagery - an exploration into the mystical and the sensual, a balance between the earthbound and the ethereal. The exhibition saw throngs of people asking for autographs, young artists touching his feet and children turning around in circles, prodded by his powerful images.

Raza's art has been called Tantrik or Neo-Tantrik but he keeps away from this classification and has always been absorbed in the simple, elementary forms of triangles, circles and squares, which speak a universal language. He says that his life long experience has revealed that it is important for a painter to understand the fundamental elements intellectually as well as intuitively- through direct perception. A painter must be in a superior state, where with total concentration, he realizes the work. To come to this stage, the participation of the higher forces is indispensable.
"There is a mysticism and an element of illogic, where even the artist does not know how it happened. It has happened because he has come to a stage of elevation beyond reason", he explains. "Analysis, practical work, thinking and working regularly along with the grace of God is when the vision becomes clear. It is achieved with patience and many years of Sadhana". His work is music and poetry for the eyes.

Nature was the main source of Raza's inspiration as he grew up in Madhya Pradesh, spending his childhood in the dense forests, where his father was a forest warden. His early work consisted largely of landscapes or abstractions and his themes and colours have consistently been earthy- those of the Indian countryside. Since he has been living in France since 1950, he was influenced by French painting, and Paul Cézanne in particular. From the French, he learnt construction, structure and geometrical perception of space. He also realized the importance of rich and intense colour harmonies. From the French landscapes of the 50's and 60's, he evolved towards a gestural, lyrical, almost abstract style of painting. The mood, the theme and the climate of the paintings were important. So was, what he calls the affectionate encounter of colours.
Colour relationships became important for him. By this time his works had begun to receive attention in Europe and America, but he was not satisfied as something fundamental was missing, which was his individual identity and Indian thought and philosophy. Fifteen years of being away from the country of his birth had given him a great devotion and appreciation of all that he had left behind. From 1975 onwards, he visited India again and again and deeply studied Indian sculpture, painting and philosophy, as well as Indian music, dance and poetry. The revelation of 'Bindu' was a major event in his thought process from 1975 to 1980. He remembers that even as a young boy, he was asked to meditate on a circle that his guru drew on the wall.

He realized that Bindu ( Beeja) is the seed symbol of visual art, just as 'Om' is to music- the primordial vibration. In early Indian philosophy, Nad, the primordial, inaudible sound, which is visually represented as a dot, symbolized cosmic energy. Bindu has a variety of meanings for him- from the 'Shoonya', (zero) which is the unmanifest to Bindu, which is the whole (infinity). The circle is the source of energy that generates all forms. Bindu the seed contains the vital elements of life condensed. It becomes a sacred icon, be it seed or semen, sun or the symbol of the Indian time cycle. It is also a circle with all the potentials of geometry, fundamental forms and their variations.