Had Sayed Haider Raza been alive today, he would have been a 100 years old. And who knows, he might have looked out of his engrossed tranquil gaze and smiled at his birth date being a palindrome this year. As one of the most celebrated modern watercolourists, Raza’s transatlantic impressions on art can be traced back to two big metropolitan cities  — Mumbai, where he emerged; and Paris, where he evolved. His fascination with the dot or bindu, that  — as mentioned in his biography — began as a delayed consequence of his school headmaster making him focus on a dot on the wall to help him overcome his fidgetiness, was not just the influence of abstract expressionism. A quick glance through his great body of work and we see the figurative reach after the abstract, as if for a need to look inward. His lesser-known trials with figurative art capture his sensibilities, informed by Mumbai’s political climate in the 1940s. Piramal Museum of Art’s Byculla gallery is hosting such artworks that welcome us into Raza’s vision of modern art and Indian cities at the time.

Surya-Namaskar, 1993