Govt school that inspired Raza loses his signed work worth lakhs

BHOPAL: An autographed print of a work by renowned painter Sayed Haider Raza, worth lakhs of rupees, has gone missing from the Kakaiya government primary school

BHOPAL: An autographed print of a work by renowned painter Sayed Haider Raza, worth lakhs of rupees, has gone missing from the Kakaiya government primary school in Mandla district.

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Raza, born in Narsinghpur district’s Babria, did his elementary schooling from the school, and this was where the Padma Vibhushan awardee drew his inspiration for the concept of ‘bindu’, an idea he would later use in his geometric abstract works during the 1980s.

In the winter of 2006, Raza visited the village and gifted the school with the print, an album and a book.

“Raza was emotionally attached to his teachers. Even at his studio in Paris, he put photographs of his teachers. In 2006, Raza had gifted a print of one of his bindu paintings, which must cost lakhs,” Raza’s friend Ashok Bajpai, who was with the painter when they visited the school, said.

After Raza’s death on July 23, the villagers realised that the print was missing from the school, only the book and the album were intact.

For close to two months, the villagers probed the matter among themselves, but when their search left them no wiser, they decided to inform the police.

He said the police are now trying to trace this relative. “In our investigation, if Dubey’s story is found to be fake, an FIR will be registered by the police,” he said.