In 1989 Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote one of his grand
novels, ‘The Major in his Labyrinth’ based on the life of the ageing conqueror
Simon Boliviar who spends his time in a hammock, fighting torturous mosquitos
in the hot and humid weather of Bogota. In 2004, the great Columbian novelist
who had lived on this earth to ‘tell a tale’ came out with another masterpiece,
this time in lesser length and was titled, ‘Memories of My Melancholic Whores’.
It tells the story of a 90 year old retired journalist who seeks sex and
finally falls in love with the young prostitute who comes to give him pleasure.
The world Marquez is populated with ageing patriarchs, generals, autocrats in
absolute solitude, sinners, prostitutes and saints; all of them invariably go
through the Proust-ian moments of recollections, sometimes exquisitely poetic,
at times staggeringly surrealist and at other times unnervingly raw. When I
stand in front of the latest suite of twenty one watercolor drawings of the
veteran artist, A.Ramachandran, I cannot help but thinking about Gabriel Garcia
Marquez. Both these veterans perhaps did not go around the world (as many do to
gain new experience and themes); they looked at the same place, exactly the way
Orhan Pamuk does in his novels, with renewed and ever-renewing eyes and saw
what was beautiful and evolving there. Marquez had his Columbia and
Ramachandran has his Udaipur.
(Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
In his autobiography, ‘Living to Tell a Tale’, Marquez
recounts how the mundane newspaper reports that he was handling on a daily
basis as a political journalist, supplied him with the most bizarre and surreal
to make his meanderings through the history of conquests and colonialism that
made and broke and then again made the Latin American countries, their politics
and the socio-cultural ethos. He could not have been anything but a story
teller. Ramachandran, at the age of eighty one, still remains a story teller,
the way Marquez was. Years ago, when Ramachandran was a young man looking for the
verdant beauty of nature which was not there in Delhi, which he had chosen as a
karma bhoomi, place of work in 1964 after his education in the sylvan
Santiniketan. He lived in history and his story has been evolving through the
rich narrative and symbolic visual traditions of India which were not away from
the ‘gruha’ or ‘vastu’, architecture of the human habitat. He considers himself
as the Vastupurusha, the god of the abode and the supreme creator. Like his
understanding of art as something that is not separated from the living and
lived realities of human beings, he makes his symbolic presence felt in every
painting and drawing that he has been doing since late 1990s. Perhaps, Marquez
was realizing the old Patriarch in him through the creation of several generals
and retired journalists.
(From the Earthen Pot series by A.Ramachandran)
If such comparison between two patriarchs from two different
geographical locations, using different mediums of expression is possible (I
simply would like to overlook the fact that Marquez is dead and gone) obviously
it calls for the reference of Magical Realism that Marquez’s works are
generally connected to. Ramachandran is a naturalist and less a realist though
his naturalism is really magical. Marquez deifies ordinary people through
exemplary acts and exceptional narrative styles. The repetitive nature of
Marquez’s novels, which is recognizable to the English reading public through
the translations of Edith Grossman, his official translator, however does not
diminish the effect of magical twists and turns that render each reader a child
who despite knowing the fact that the magician would pull out a rabbit or a
dove from his hat, willingly suspends disbelief in order to gleefully enjoy the
narratives of Marquez. So is the case of Ramachandran. There is a repetitive nature
to his works; from his magnum opus of the yester years ‘Yayati’ (1984-86) to
the latest suite of watercolors one could see this, exactly the way a musician
would elaborate his raga with slightly different inflexions here and there, for
many number of years without putting the ‘rasikas’ into boredom. Repetition for
both Marquez and Ramachandran is a way to assert their belief in life and life’s
forces and its magical revelations. May be in the most mundane, suddenly one
could see a divinity coming up.
Yes, it happens both in Marquez and Ramachandran. Look at the
‘The Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane’ included in the collection ‘Strange
Pilgrims’. Marquez sees a beautiful woman who just passes by in an airport
lobby. He is enamored by her beauty. His mind is preoccupied with the thoughts
about her. To his surprise, she turns out to be his co-passenger in the next
seat. She comes and orders the airhostess to wake her up before the landing and
sleeps off. She gets up before landing, put a little make up on her face and
once the plane lands she walks out as if nothing has happened. In fact nothing
had happened. It was only the narrator’s feverish imagination that had made his
travel miserable and exciting for him at once. In Ramachandran’s paintings and
drawings, we encounter such women. Art historians have time and again said that
these women are from the Lohar and Bhil community, a kind of nomadic community
living in Udaipur whom Ramachandran has taken into his pictorial scheme as
models. But they transform in the encounters in the exhibition halls where they
appear as Draupadis, Gandharis and many other mythological women. This magical
metamorphosis makes Ramachandran’s works as alluring as his brush-man-ship and
Marquez’s pen-man-ship.
Sometimes when you read the stories of Marquez you shiver in
an unknown and inexplicable feeling or fear. It is just like opening a coffin
of a friend or a relative after twenty years or so after his death and seeing
the body intact and luminous. Should you be afraid of that body? Shouldn’t you
be happy that he/she still remains the same as you had left him/her years back?
Is there some kind of saintly touch in that person that made his body intact? I
feel the same shiver going through my spine when I stand before the latest
suite of twenty one watercolors by A.Ramachandran. Titled ‘Earthen Pot: Image
Poems-2016’ this body of the works shows how an eighty year old artist still
carry the flame of creativity and above all the drive of Eros within him. But
ironically, there is some sense of deception that Ramachandran has used in
order to hoodwink the ‘inappropriate’ drive of desire in him. We have seen
Ramachandran taking different forms of creatures (crickets, bugs, bees, turtles
and so on) and witness or partaking in the action of his paintings. At times he
even holds a mirror to the heroines of his paintings in the shape of a satyr. The
male witnessing here is not voyeurism but active expression of desire or a sort
of watchfulness; a patriarch’s perennial urge to keep his flock together. But,
ironically, the Ramachandran incarnate is like foetus curled up in an earthen
pot, absolutely oblivious of the things that going on around him.
Ella Dutta, art critic and a longtime friend of Ramachandran
has done her best to write a catalogue as beautiful as possible and quite
befitting to the works that she is writing about. But Dutta’s awkwardness is
visible in each line as she tries to interpret Ramachandran’s foetus position
as the eternal dream of the creator whose dream itself is the creation. In way,
she is not too far from the perspective that I have developed through comparing
Ramachadran with the literary giant, Marquez. In his story titled ‘I Sell My
Dreams’ Marquez narrates a woman who dreams calamities, catastrophes and
celebrations alike and still survives in the high society. Ramachandran as
foetus takes that godly power of dreaming things around him. And what does he
dream? In his eternal creative dreams, he conjures up fertility symbols like
flowering trees, waiting woman for her beloved and various images of birds,
bees, insects and so on as the agents of the changing ‘ritus’, seasons. She
refers, invariably the Ragamala paintings and the Barah Maha paintings and
poems which Ramachandran also uses as one his various inspirations. Dutta
attributes the centralized flowering tree as a phallic symbol, which is not a
bad allusion though. She also pitches her arguments on three pivotal imageries
as said before, such as waiting women, trees in bloom and the sleeping
Ramachandran as foetus. The recurring image of a chameleon climbing the tree is
read as the presence of a dangerous predator.
Keeping all respect for a senior critic like Ella Dutta, I
would like to make a different reading to this new suite of Ramachandran’s
watercolor drawings. Dutta speaks of a pervading melancholy in these paintings;
yes, it could be caused by the absence of the lover. But I would say it is also
a wistful waiting all wet. It is not simply melancholy but a love prank, which
amounts to irritation. While looking at the drawings on the walls of the
Vaderah Art Gallery, I was continuously singing the song, ‘Ambva ki chayya
mein, mangal gaaye, barkha ki rutu aaye, jhoola julaye’ (Under the canopy of
the mango tree, let us sing some auspicious songs while swinging as here comes
the Rainy season) in the voice of the vivacious Shubha Mudgal, singing the same
in raag Khamaj and Deepchand taal. I had listened to this song more than a
decade ago and it came to me as absolutely evoked by the drawings. The ‘ritu’,
seasonal aspect is there; but it is not the season of rains. Outside I could
see sunlight weaving fiery threads everywhere entangling the human beings like
insects fallen to a spider’s web. Here, the women in the watercolors are also
entangled in a desire and which is not realized corporeally but the artist has
given enough suggestions that he intends a prolonged session of love making and
the offer still lingers in each metaphor and symbol he uses in these pictures.
The sleep that he is having inside the pot (a mortal mother’s womb) is
deceptive. He sees it all.
A closer look reveals that the central image of the trees
which are in full bloom is nothing but a displaced metaphor or a surrogate female
body (unlike the phallic image that Ella Dutta contends). How do you make love
to your beloved? You touch her/him with the tips of fingers, you touch her/him
with the tip of your tongue, you peck at the lips, cheeks, chin, ear lobes,
nape and the back, while your hands move all over his/her curves, the
undulating landscape of corporeal passion, bodies in heat. Nothing is closed
then; every pore of the body is opened. Everything is filled with the juices
that are heard of otherwise. Every imaginations that you knew never existed in
you comes out into full view and play. You torture each other eking out the
best pain and pleasure in the world. You gag and bound, you turn into an
animal, and fly like a bird. You move like a lightning without heeding to the
aching joints and ligaments. And now look at the works of Ramachandran. A wood
pecker is pecking the bark of the tree. And you know a wood pecker does not
peck softly. And in all forms and all shapes it pecks. Look at the insects that
crawl all over the petals and stamens exactly the fingers of the lovers move.
Look at the buds, don’t they look like the throbbing tips of the male organs?
Look at the flowers that are partly open, do I need to tell you how they look
like? There is a chameleon in every painting. In the symbolism of Indian
traditional art and astrology, chameleon is a creature that has the power to
move slow, patiently and covertly, till it gets its prey or pleasure. And the
phallic way that Ramachandran has painted them making their hold on to the bark
of the tree as good as a slow but steady embrace of the lover.
Ramachandran sleeps because he has allowed the Eros of his
mind to come out and play. The life force is all the more pronounced and here
is a rasa leela in twenty one frames. He prefers to call it Earthen Pot- Image
Poems. I would call it Earthen Pot: Erotic Poems. Also I would say,
Ramachandran has come out with the best erotic drawings of the century, which
without even once showing human genitals and other pleasure points have
achieved the heightened sense of erotic impact. The women in the drawings
remain pristine and longing; perhaps that’s what the patriarchs want. They find
love in these women who have desire but do not have worldly ways to express
them. Ramachandran gives them the chance to experience the best erotic pleasure
ever without losing their modesty or dignity; and even not staking his six
decades long artistic career. These most subtle and wonderfully aesthetical drawings
give a new dimension to Indian erotic art. As a partriarch, Ramachandran sleeps
on as if nothing affects him. Yes, it is his dream and in his dream he could
conjure up everything that he wants. The satyr in his earlier works and the
creatures are left to do what they are supposed to do. They no longer carry the
head of Ramachandran, who is watchful and guarded. Now they have their head but
their heart is controlled by the artist who sleeps the sleep of creation. Or
perhaps, it is tiredness also. The age factor is realized when he paints the
snails moving painfully slow near his pot/pod/shell/womb. He does not want to
subject these women to any kind of fantasies. But fantasies are made up of the
same materials used for making dreams and desire. They will wait and that
eternal wait is like the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ by John Keats. They remain
eternally beautiful and desiring and Ramachandran would remain in his eternal
deception as a sleeper. Let’s wait for him to wake up again and recount the
stories of his melancholic whores.
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