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Breadth of lifescapes
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In tracing the art of noted painter Ram Kumar, one is looking at a heroic generation of Indian artists. Apocalypse and renewal, nostalgia and hope are the themes of his idiom, says RANJIT HOSKOTE.
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Untitled, 2001, acrylic on canvas ... changes in form and nature
THE distinguished painter Ram Kumar belongs to that heroic generation of Indian artists who became active during the late 1940s. In tracing their art, we also trace the graph of India's unfolding national modernity — with the entire freight of intellectual and spiritual crisis, the change in aesthetic and stylistic preoccupations that this implies. As we address a suite of recent works by the artist, which is being exhibited in Mumbai, New Delhi, San Francisco and New York this summer by Saffronart and the Pundole Art Gallery, we find that these paintings, executed in the early 21st Century, bear all the traces of their five-decade-long journey to this moment.
Ram Kumar's painterly development could be conceived of as a pilgrimage, given the orderliness with which its stages have succeeded one another. And yet, through the decades, this pilgrimage has been broken at several, and sometimes surprising, way stations of experiment. Having been drafted into the circle of artists who gathered at meetings of the Silpi Chakra association in New Delhi in the late 1940s, the 1924-born Ram Kumar left for Paris in the following decade, to study art formally. He found himself in a Europe that had not yet recovered from the economic and psychological cataclysm of World War II, and to this environment he brought a consciousness equally traumatised by the circumstances under which the Indian subcontinent had won its independence from British colonial rule in 1947.
That independence had been achieved at the cost of the subcontinent's partition into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. The communitarian riots and pogroms that attended these events, and the two-way diaspora of refugees between the new nation-states, were to scar the subcontinent's subsequent history (many of Ram Kumar's colleagues at Silpi Chakra were refugees who had sought shelter in Delhi during this tumultuous period). The artist took this knowledge of suffering with him to Paris, where he became acutely aware, also, of the constraints that the bourgeois-capitalist order can place on the individual subjectivity. He became a member of the French Communist Party, coming into contact with such notable radicals as Louis Aragon and Roger Garaudy, Paul Eluard and Fernand Leger. He spent most of that decade, the first decade of India's independence, in Europe: both as painter and as writer of fiction, he meditated on the varieties of suffering that he had encountered.
Ram Kumar may have enlisted under the Communist banner, but he was impelled by humanist compassion rather than by ideological fervour; eventually, he would move away from all formal political affiliations. Even at this time, he drew upon a diverse, and not necessarily Party-sanctioned, range of artistic exemplars, including Courbet, Rouault, Kathe Kollwitz and Edward Hopper; he dedicated himself to an intense and stylised idiom of figuration imbued with the spirit of tragic modernism, an elegiac iconography of depression and victimhood.
To this period belong his Modigliani-like figures packed into a darkened picture-womb, the bewildered clerks, terrorised workers and emaciated doll-women trapped in the semi-urbanised industrial city. Rendered through a semi-Cubist discipline, these fugitives are trapped in a hostile environment, and in their own divided selves. The paintings of this period offer evidence of Ram Kumar's scepticism with regard both to bourgeois European society and the social formation that had begun to take shape in India.
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Over the late 1950s, Ram Kumar shifted away from these melancholy evocations, and towards landscapes in which he explored the archetypal presence of Varanasi, Hinduism's most sacred city: a site of acute polarities, a place at once of dying and rebirth, grief and celebration. In Varanasi, where religion and corruption flourish interwoven, where the zones of faith and torment intersect, he found a potent symbol by which to denote human suffering under the tyranny of putrefying social customs.
During this phase, the artist abandoned figuration altogether. By banishing the figure from his kingdom of shadows, the artist was able to emphasise the nullification of humanity, and to deploy architecture and landscape as metaphors articulating cultural and psychological fragmentation, the bondage of an imposed destiny that strangled the will to liberation and self-knowledge. Ram Kumar addressed himself to the formal aberrations of mismatched planes, jamming the horizontal perspective against top views inspired by site-mapping and aerial photography, and locking the muddy, impasto-built riverbank constructions into a Cubist geometrical analysis. Gradually, the architecture drained away from his canvasses: society itself passed from his concerns, until, during the late 1960s, his paintings assumed the character of abstractionist hymns to nature.
In these works, the landscape became its own architecture. Ram Kumar began to commemorate vast, epic images: the whirling onslaught of the storm, the descent of ragged forests along the courses of swollen rivers, the bronze echoes of the sun roaring above the cliffs, an eclipse falling like the shadow of a great bird over honeycombed ruins, glaciers and fault lines. The paintings of this third and continuing phase, elaborated in the artist's hallmark palette of ochre, ultramarine, sienna and viridian, carry a sharp whiff of pine from the Shivaliks, the Himalayan foothills. We sense, in them, the aura of Shimla, where the artist spent his childhood, and of Andretta, the village in the Kangra valley to which he retreats periodically, to replenish himself.
Apocalypse and renewal, nostalgia and hope are the themes of Ram Kumar's idiom: these rhapsodies point to a transcendence.
The world is at a slant in these paintings, askew, all slope. Everything seems about to change its form and nature: the soaring wedge of the mountain, the tumescent fork of the watershed, the streaming avalanche, the floodburst. Entropy, the long descent into nocturnal winter, reigns over this unruly climate; and yet spring, its indomitable opposite, refuses to be quelled and explodes in tan and sienna, green and azure. Ram Kumar's paintings reiterate the Heraclitean dictum that all things are in flux: they resonate with the cadences of a universe that continually brings its precipitates to birth, only to subject them to decay, dissolving them in history's acid current.
Ram Kumar embodies the drift and flux of this Heraclitean universe in a structure hinged together from a succession of collapses and seizures, stresses and strains. His landscapes are orchestrated as a dynamic equilibrium of floating planes, triggered weights and directional vectors. We respond to these meditative frames precisely because they have moved from the perceptual to the conceptual, from semblance to structure.
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Architecture, long abandoned, returned to occupy Ram Kumar's canvasses in 1992. In the Varanasi series of 30 years before, it had symbolised the degradation and inertia, the simultaneous religiosity and appalling callousness of a ramshackle civilisation.
Ram Kumar's early-1990s conception of the dwelling was no longer the house of the widows rising through the Gangetic murk, or the tin-roofed shack of the shantytown. It was no place of the living, but the serene tomb, its dome a stillness sunbroken by voices. Ram Kumar's meditations on the tomb, informed by his fondness for Delhi's Lodhi and Mughal crypts, prompt an unease: they force upon us an awareness of the absolute nature of death, while also countering that fate with a final, elegant gesture of the affirmation of presence.
During the mid-1990s, the city that Ram Kumar invoked was a composite city of the imagination: it was a spectral Varanasi, but the domes, gables and arches that loom through the fog evoke the ghosts of other cities, sinking into marshy lagoons or cresting deltas of brackish discontent: Delhi, Byzantium, Rome, Alexandria, Venice, Moscow and Baghdad. In his oils, acrylics and drawings of those years, Ram Kumar embraced the city at the very moment when it is about to be overwhelmed by catastrophe.
In his most recent works, the artist negotiates, afresh, the counterpoint between city and landscape, home and world, that has long exercised him.
The city, shored up from silt, vulnerable to the river's sullen tides and periodic floods, would appear to symbolise the life of the grihasta, the householder trammelled by duties, circumscribed by ritual, susceptible to anxiety. The landscape, on the other hand, with its drifts of ice and sand, its hills misting into the horizon, suggests the open breadth of the cosmos, where the sanyasin, the renouncer, may wander at will.
If Ram Kumar's art has been a journey from city to landscape, from the grihasta's social obligations to the sanyasin's peripatetic freedom, it has also been an art of looking back, an art of reminiscence. Do we see evidence, in Ram Kumar's most recent work, of a reconciliation between householder and renouncer, city and landscape?
In the paintings that he has executed since the late 1990s, the architecture of the tomb has been replaced by the architecture of the temple-town built by the river.
This is surely a Varanasi idealised as tirtha, the ford that signifies a place of pilgrimage in Indic culture: the point where settlement meets openness, and the pilgrim self makes the crossing from locality to cosmos, the earthly to the transcendent, time to eternity.
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