Imagine being born in the early 1920s in a small village in Madhya Pradesh amid the lush, inviting Kanha National Park, with quietude all around, only to reinvent the boundaries of contemporary modernist and abstract paintings.
When Yashodhara Dalmia—a renowned art historian and curator in her own right—met S.H. Raza in Paris just a few months before his passing, it was the most extraordinary day of her life for all the right reasons. Of course, she could never have envisioned writing the biography of the man; but the memories are fond and wistful. “His presence itself was so welcoming,” she recollects. “I came out spell-bound. He was strikingly informative and ever so humble.”
Dalmia was commissioned by HarperCollins to work on Raza’s biography shortly after his passing in July 2016. Naturally, her biggest source—the man himself—was inaccessible. The only way for her to attempt near-accurate documentation of Raza was through his correspondences with other artists, interviewing his loved ones, and tracing his continent-spanning journey of more than seven decades.
