S.H. Raza: Ekagrata at Akar Prakar brought together a body of works largely from the last decade of the artist’s life (c. 2011-2016) — a period often read as one of distilled clarity, but here revealed as something more tentative, searching, and unresolved.
Anchored in the idea of ekagrata — absolute concentration — the exhibition drew on the well-known childhood anecdote of Raza fixating on the bindu. Yet what unfolded across the works was not the serenity of achieved focus, but the labour of arriving at it.
In paintings such as Panch Tatva 3 (2016), the central black circle appears less as an autonomous origin than as a point held in tension by surrounding chromatic forces — white, yellow, red, blue — suggesting that the bindu emerges relationally. Similarly, in Roopakar (2015) and Nirantar (2015, picture left), geometric scaffolds — triangles, bands, horizons — direct the eye toward the centre, yet never quite allow it to settle. Even in the concentric canvases like Nagas (2011) or Shanti Bindu (2014), the centre disperses outward, becoming rhythm rather than anchor.
This instability became explicit in the drawings. The pen-and-ink works from 2011, with their fractured grids and restless lines, expose a process of continual correction: forms are sketched, abandoned, redrawn. Here, the bindu flickers — sometimes emphatic, sometimes nearly lost — revealing that the meditative image is constructed through hesitation as much as conviction.
The textual works deepen this tension. A framed passage attributed to Mahatma Gandhi invokes truth, discipline, and inward search, aligning with the curatorial framing of painting as meditation. Yet the more lyrical, gestural sheet — its lines crossing and dissolving — introduces an opposing register of turbulence and affect. In Taa-te, where text and geometry converge, language itself becomes part of the compositional field.
Taa-te by S.H. Raza Sourced by correspondent
If the exhibition proposed a space of “quiet rumination”, it also quietly unsettled that premise. What emerged was not stillness, but a practice of return: a repeated effort to gather attention against dispersal. In this late phase, Raza’s bindu was no longer simply a symbol of unity — it became the residue of an ongoing struggle to arrive there.