Ode to A Ramachandran: A colour palette of pure aesthetics

Sreevalsan Thiyyadi

The sight of stick-wielding people beating a turbaned man to death stupefied A Ramachandran, standing by a window of his Delhi house. The city was bloodied during the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, and the artist had for long been painting images around violence. When a scene from his own pet theme really played out in front of him, Ramachandran gasped for breath. The loud messages from his brush have gone totally meaningless — or so he thought. The ‘realisation’ prompted a paradigm shift in him.

At 50, thus, Ramachandran happened to change his creative course. The activist with the palette metamorphosed into a proponent of pure aesthetics. The new-found spirit would gift Indian art with world-class works for the next four decades. The lotus ponds of Rajasthan bloomed on the canvas in a style that bore no evident relation with the vintage Kerala murals that had inspired the Malayali as a boy. Neither were the 12 huge panels of the bright-hued ‘Yayati’ masterpiece (with its 13 complementary bronze sculptures) a direct product of his younger-time drills at Santiniketan. Yet, those contours and colours carried a subtle synthesis of the many art schools that impacted Ramachandran all his life. Last weekend, on February 10, he died aged 89.

The end came in the 60th year of Ramachandran’s life in the national capital. An offer in 1964 to teach at Jamia Millia Islamia took him out of the Santhal lands in the east. Two decades later, as if reviving his Visva-Bharati days, Ramachandran got close with another tribal community, this time along the Aravallis. Into the mid-1980s, as Delhi slowly returned to normal after the rampage, the artist fell in love with the Bhils around Udaipur of rain-scarce Mewar. The sun-tanned figures in dhoti-pagri or ghagra-choli along the desert hamlets lit Ramachandran’s imagination no end.

Come 1988 and Ramachandran did a painting that triggered a famed series. They weren’t of humans, but of nature: lotus ponds. Minute details of the aquatic ecosystem across seasons in day and night found shiny, surreal depictions. They totalled 40 large paintings. The semi-barren Girwa tehsil caught his fancy more than his lush-green state down the country. Why? “Kerala’s thick vegetation makes it tough to make sense of its topography,” the artist would reply with mock-seriousness, rewinding his pre-teen days in part-hilly Attingal, 20 miles north of Thiruvananthapuram. It was in Rabindranath Tagore’s varsity that Ramachandran met his future wife: art student Tan Yuan Chameli of Chinese descent.

Not that his interactions with the Bhils never produced a painting of the indigenous people. Their women were particularly his muses; in fact, the artist made a set of eight haloed heroines early this decade amid the Covid-time lockdown. With his zany sense of humour, Ramachandran named them ‘Subaltern Ashtanayikas’. The title was sourced from the two-millennium-old Natyashastra treatise, where dramaturge Bharata essays eight mental states of women in love — from flashy to distraught to jilted. “Mine is a pun on the original,” Ramachandran would shrug. “I simply reworked eight sketches of the Bhil women I met in the 2010s.”

The most-celebrated, ‘Yayati’ (1986), completed in two years and initially criticised for revivalism, got its title from the eponymous protagonist who comes as a relatively minor character in the ‘Mahabharata’. Known for his libidinal energy, Yayati appears late in the sequence of the paintings measuring 60×8 feet overall. “Women in contrast have a larger and longer presence,” notes scholar R Siva Kumar. “In retrospect, an undercurrent of eroticism preceded the colossal ‘Yayati’ with its three thematic segments. The decisive impulse, though, came in 1983 during a stay in the Northeast. On sketching Manipuri women, Ramachandran found his art responding to the visual charms of their body in unprecedented ways.” The figures in ‘Yayati’ were inspired by Uttar Pradesh’s Gadia Lohar nomads, who stayed near Ramachandran’s Yamuna bank residence briefly with their “colourful costumes and strange conduct”.

For all his admiration for the visual cultures across the West, Ramachandran believed India never required modern art. “We anyway had no realistic paintings. Our traditional expressions with geometric shapes and natural colours had a two-dimensional quality that nullified the need for a rebellion against photographic images.” A European fusion in the paintings of the illustrious Ravi Varma (1848-1906), from Kilimanoor near Ramachandran’s townlet, was a result of his time; “else the highly-talented Raja could have made art of contemporary significance”, according to the Padma Bhushan awardee, who has done illustrations for 50 children’s books — pepped initially by the funny manners of his toddler son.

As a teenager, Ramachandran used to sing at Thiruvananthapuram Akashvani: “Raga-based, semi-classical.” After doing MA in Malayalam, he left for rustic Bengal, pursuing art under stalwarts Ramkinkar Baij, Nandalal Bose and Benodebehari Mukherjee. “There is one thing, though, you learn by yourself: the point where you must finish a painting.”