Born in a forest village called Babariya in central India, in the family of a forest ranger, Raza grew up close to nature and this has had a tremendous effect on his art. He studied painting at the Nagpur School of Art and the Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai. He further studied painting at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts from 1950 to 1953 and was awarded the Prix de la Critique in Paris. S. H. Raza along with Francis Newton Souza, Maqbool Fida Husain, Krishna Howlaji Ara, Hari Ambadas Gade, and S Bakre formed the Progressive Art Group. This group of young artists felt an affinity with international modernism and dwelled on the formal values of a painting.

A strong colourist, Raza's painting resonate the passionate, hot colours of India with all their symbolic and emotive value reflective in his landscapes. The artist has also featured inscriptions in Hindi, Sanskrit and sometimes Urdu in some of his works. Eventually Raza moved towards abstraction which was a progressive process, where he pared down gestural abandon until he arrived at the purity of form with circles, squares and lines.

The contemplative bindu, circles that reduce to a point of intense meditation, is painted in resonant colours of red, ultramarine and black. The artist lives and works in New Delhi.