Saffron Dress Code and Indian/Malayali Youth

Saffron colour in India is often seen as a part of renunciation, an age old concept of leaving materialistic world in order to sublimate life, attain wisdom and ultimately deliverance from the entanglements of life. With the demolition of Babri Masjid, this colour however has come to be seen as a part of the Hindutva ideology. The transition of the Hindu religion to the ideology of Hindutva takes place when the fundamental principles of Hinduism are pushed aside for aggressively bringing out a violent nationalism in the lines of religion and hatred for other religions. There is a symbiotic relationship with the perpetrators of Hindutva and the dominant right wing political ideology; one results into the other and they mutually support for the perpetuation of political as well as religious ideologies. With this transition, the calm and collected faces of the Hindu Gods and Goddesses are replaced with the divinities that have ferocious faces, muscled bodies and too many weapons of mass or selective destruction. Now we have a set of avenging gods and goddesses. In the political scenario we see the leaders are welcomed by giving the replicas of the weapons like tridents, clubs, bows and swords. Unfortunately, the colour saffron remains a backdrop of all these events. 

The saffron, soft brown, orange and kavi (an Indian variation of saffron with a muddy effect) are the variation of the same colour. Depending on the situation the meanings of these colours change. In the national flag of India, we see the saffron colour at the top layer. It connotes tolerance, courage and strength. While the middle layer white and the lower level green have universal meanings like ‘purity’ and ‘fertility’ respectively, saffron does not have any such universal meanings. It is entirely an Indian colour. It has more to do with the kind of saffron or Kavi worn by the Indian mendicants and sages. There is an indirect connotation that India is predominantly a Hindu nation because the meanings attributed to saffron colour or kavi (courage, strength and tolerance) are not seen elsewhere in the world. In the global scenario, orange colour has got the meaning of being ‘distinct’ or distinctively seen. But this meaning is not exclusive to orange colour. It is applicable to green, yellow and red too. That’s why these colours are universally used in traffic regulations. 

In Indian psyche, saffron has got a lot of authority and respectability. When someone leaves the worldly pleasures, possessions and the very desire to possess anything, in the Indian context he or she prefers to wear saffron clothes. There is a vast history to it. Before we go into that history, it is pertinent to understand the relevance of this colour or the meanings that it has gained over a period of time. We have seen it in the rallies of all the right wing parties including the ruling BJP. Leaders like Sakhshi Maharaj, Uma Bharati, Swadhi Prachi, Adityanath, Baba Ramdev and so on wear saffron clothes when they appear in the public domain. The founder leader of Shiv Sena in Maharashtra, late Bal Thakaray used to wear silk saffron robes to assert his political as well as spiritual authority over the Marathi populace. At times, even our Prime Minister Mr.Narendra Modi appears in public meetings wearing semi saffron shirts, which are specially designed for him. This indirectly and subconsciously establishes the fact that political authority has got the same sacrificial authority and right of the spiritual sages and monks who have sacrificed their worldly lives for a life beyond. What Khadi was for Congress is today saffron is for the right wing forces.

It is not necessary that all those people who wear Khadi (a coarse cotton cloth believed to be hand spun) are automatically Congress members. If so do we have to believe that all those who wear saffron or kavi are right wing or Hindutva people? If ‘yes’ is the answer, then we will have to believe that most of the youngsters in Kerala are right wing or Hindutva followers. It is true that in Kerala the number of youngsters who wear saffron dhotis, tie ritual bands around the wrists and wear sandal paste marks on the foreheads (all underlining their membership/belongingness to the Hindu religion) is on the increase. But we cannot make a blanket assumption that all of them belong to the Hindutva fold. Anybody who lives in Kerala or has travelled to Kerala knows it for sure that youngsters of such religious markings are not often seen in the temple premises or such religious places but in the auto rickshaw stands and market junction, the places that are considered to be liberal political and socio-cultural discursive spaces in Kerala. This extends to the other controlled public spaces like barber shops, teashops, reading rooms, tailoring shops, evening addas, clubs, junctions and so on. The youngsters (and old people too) who gather in these places belong to different religions, castes and political denominations. Wearing these religious marks, they without any qualms or ideological differences share gossip, news, spicy jokes and above all hottest video clips via whatsapp. These are the same people in Kerala who despite having all the so called Hindutva marks on them, go to the local restaurants and relish ‘beef and parotta’ without feeling any guilt as their counterparts would in the northern parts of our country.

If we analyze further, this dress code gravitates to the temple premises when there are some festivals that enhance the youthful energies at various levels. It is not always religions, I should say. In Kerala most of the temple festivals are related to the harvest that happens by the month of March. The months that follow before Monsoon, that means the months of April and May are full of festivals in Kerala. During these festival days, the youngsters go to these temples wearing these religious marks but that does not mean that all of them have hardcore Hindutva ideology. I have seen the local communist party offices open every day by some party workers after lighting a lamp or incense sticks. It is not necessary that they do it before the photographs of the gods. But one could miss the photographs of Karl Marx, Engels, EMS Namboothirippadu, P.Krishna Pillai and so on not far from the invisible altar. There are two types of dhotis in Kerala; white and colourful ones. The latter is called Kaili or lungi or pesa. White dhotis are always worn by people who have a stable income or are generally rich. It exudes some kind of social dignity. An average Malayali boy establishes his social dignity and maturity by wearing a white dhoti. He has to practice how to wear it folded right up to the knee but not by obscenely flaunting the thighs. Also he has to learn (to prove his social worth) to ride a cycle without folding a white dhoti. These cultural trappings are extremely important to a Kerala youngster. The second category of dhoti, which is kaili is not gender specific. It could be worn by both men and women. There used to be kailis only with horizontal and vertical lines. Gulf returnees brought liberally designed lungis with big flowers blooming at odd places. With the folding of a lungi and the measures of thighs exposed could determine the cultural upbringing of a youth in Kerala. 

It was in this socio-cultural landscape, K.J.Yesudas, the well known singer came with his set of Ayyappa devotional songs. He had established his music studio in Trivandrum called Tharangini and it was pertinent for him to churn out devotional songs of various kinds depending on the season to satisfy the audio culture of the god fearing Malayalis. One of the songs that became a huge hit went like this: ‘River Ganges takes birth in Himalayas while the River Pamap takes birth in Sabarimala’. The second stanza of the same song goes like this: ‘Devotees wear saffron and go to Varanasi and they wear black when they go to Sabarimala’. Sabarimala being the most famous pilgrim centres in Kerala and Lord Ayyappa, the residing deity of this forest temple, most of the people irrespective of religion went to this place wearing whatever clothes they wanted. It was not necessary that one should wear black clothes when they went to Sabarimala. Devotees from Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu chose to wear black because their preference black had a lot of do with the anti-Brahminical stance of the Dravidian parties. Also legends said that Lord Ayyappa was a Buddhist deity who was later got co-opted by the Brahminical Hinduism. The Dravidian lineage of Lord Ayyappa must be a reason for the devotees’ choice of black clothes, though it was not underlined till 1980s. Famous actor Amitabh Bacchan visited Sabarimal after his life threatening accident, wearing black. So many celebrities started visiting the place followed by this famous visit of the super star. We should also see the possibility of black becoming an official dress of Sabarimal thanks to the arrival of the colour television in 1980s, with them beaming the visuals from the temple to thousands of households in Kerala, which influenced the visual thinking of the devotees.

There was a time in Kerala when people asked anybody who grew beard or wore saffron clothes whether they were going for pilgrimage or had renounced the world. Beard and saffron clothes, as I mentioned elsewhere, are still etched in the minds of the Indian people as part and parcel of detachment from the worldly affairs. However, with the recent release of the movie titled ‘Premam’ (Love), and also with the heroes in this move wearing black clothes, white dhotis and sporting thick beards have brought in a new situation in Kerala that nobody any longer asks someone about their worldly detachment upon seeing a beard or black or saffron dhoti. Initially the saffron coloured dhoti was worn by the people who used to work in and around the temples. With a new market opening for the coloured lungis, youngsters started wearing multi coloured lungis. They predominantly chose to wear saffron lungis because it gave some nascent sense of authority and piety. Without being a hardcore Hindu (Hindutva ideologue), one could get an ‘identity’ which is at once confirming and rebelling, in the social sphere. It was something similar to the Kerala women ‘virally’ choosing to wear a gown called ‘nightie’ as their ‘power dressing’. Availability, affordability and convenience were the reasons that made women to choose this cloth. Same was the case with the saffron dhotis. The design was/is simple and is convenient to do any kind of daily chores. The advantage of both the nighties and saffron lungies is this that both of them remain or look ‘clean’ despite the layers of grime, soot and dirt collected on them. Even if someone sees that it is dirty, one could easily pass it off as a part of the daily grind. 

Many centuries before India became today’s India, our sages had worn saffron clothes. They too understood the fact that it remained clean despite the gathering of dust and dirt. They could wash it on the river banks and dry it in the field winds. A pair of saffron clothes could take them to the whole of the world if they wanted to do so. Gandhiji in a sense emulated this saintly way of clothing when he joined India’s independence struggle. The sages need not have thought about the ‘beauty’ of their clothes as they wandered along the hills, valleys, jungles, hamlets, towns and cities. Even if they had worn white clothes initially, as they went along and as these clothes gathered dust they automatically understood that they dusty and muddy colour would make it less ‘dirty’. They started using plants, petals, roots and stones to make dyes to colour their clothes into saffron. As the Hindu religion evolved mainly because of the sagacious interventions in terms of making codes and rules for the society, and general philosophies for life, the colour saffron came to have the meanings of detachment and wisdom. When Hinduism moved towards the four tier system of caste oppression and when it became more and more oppressively ritualistic, Buddha, the enlightened, quarreled with it and established a new order. He too, however chose to wear saffron clothes. 

Hardcore Buddhist followers as well as Buddhist monks these days wear different variants of saffron colour and also colours like orange, yellow, brown, white and so on. In fact Buddha had chosen saffron/kavi as his robe. The reason for this choice was not really a ‘Hindu’ one. In those days, saffron was the robe given to the people like outcastes, orphans, criminals, diseased people with contagious illnesses, insane people and so on so that they could be identified within the mainstream society and be kept at bay. Buddha in his rebellious way of approaching things adopted the robes of the outcastes as his own dress as well as for his own congregation. The meaning of saffron/kavi that Buddha saw or rather prevalent in those days was ‘something which was not pure’. This could be interpreted as something ‘dirty’, ‘bad’, ‘not good looking’, ‘not in style’ and ‘for wiping things clean including excrement’. What for the mainstream society was not good and clean was good and clean for Buddha. He chose this because a Buddhist monk could be identified from a distance itself. He was in fact declaring his allegiance with the outcastes of the society by choosing their dress code. However, as the ironical twists of history that always happen, Buddhism became a predominant religion in India and in South East Asia. With this Buddha’s saffron robe also got respectability. It is another historical irony that it was another saffron wearer who defeated Buddhism by arguing well for Hinduism and united it from the four corners of India, Adi Shankara. Another irony of it was that he was from Kerala. Slowly, the robes of the dispossessed became the garments of the authorities. To this we could see the slow entry of saffron and saffron silk. 

In the 21^st century, the century of naked globalization and imperialism sans adequate resistance, saffron/Kavi got new meanings. When the Iraqi revolutionaries who were the collaborators and followers of Saddam Hussein’s regime were arrested by the United States of America, they were taken to the infamous detention centre at Guantanamo Bay near Cuba and were forced to wear saffron/Orange jumpsuits. The meaning of the colour of social outcasts was once again brought to it in Guantanamo Bay prisons. That’s why it is said that when the ISIS captures white journalists and soldiers, before beheading them on camera, they are forced to wear orange jumpsuits; a sort of revenge using the cryptic symbolism of the orange/saffron/kavi colour. Most of the geniuses of the last century also had seen the potential of the saffron/kavi colour. Sree Narayana Guru, the late 19^th century and early 20^th century social reformer, poet and philosopher in Kerala chose to wear white and later yellow instead of saffron because he knew that the extreme sense of Brahminical Hinduism was being attributed to the saffron colour then itself. Gandhiji could have opted for saffron but he preferred to go for home spun cotton’s white because he knew that the choice of saffron would have terribly polarized the country along religious lines. The move was already on in Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s sort of Hinduism within the Congress fold. Rabindranath Tagore was called Gurudev and had all the possibilities of being seen in saffron but he resisted using saffron at all. Instead he used exotic clothes to design his own robes that reflected his position in the universe as an Eastern mystic. Dr.B.R.Ambedkar resisted the onslaught of Brahminical Hinduism by making a sartorial revolution within the Mahar community by preferring to be seen in blue three piece suits. He would later convert to Buddhism. But there too he did not choose saffron. I wish the alternative meaning of saffron/Kavi once again came back to our discourse so that we could actively resist the aggressive posture of saffron in the public domain of India. 

Post script: I have opted saffron/kavi khadi dhotis into my daily wear. I am still negotiating whether I should wear it outside or not. 

(Images are taken from the internet for Illustrative purposes only)

Damsels of the Forty Second Pillar

(the Damsels of Avignon by Picasso)

Every day I pass by these metro rail pillars. When I reach Pillar number 42 I slow down.

Oh, I forgot to tell you about myself. I am Ramlal Sharma. Nice to meet you. I am forty two years old and that’s why I am so fond of this pillar. You may ask whether I was in love with the pillar number 41 last year or not. Not really, because this metro line became operational this year only. Till recently these pillars were inconspicuous behind the large blue metal boards that marked out metro work along the road.

When you hear my name, Ramlal Sharma and when I talk about slowing down at the pillar number 42, you may have already made a mental picture of me. A successful and happy gentleman in his car, with a tie around his neck, a pair of goggles to give shade to his eyes and a glowing Bluetooth ear phone fitted just behind his left ear.

I too imagine myself like that. I wish I was that. But things are a little bit different here in my case.

I go to my work place in Gurgaon by my rickety cycle. This cycle was given to me by a cycle workshop person for a sum of Rs.250/- a couple of years back. Before I got the cycle I used to travel by buses, often ticketless. I travelled ticketless not because of the thrill that it gave me but I really did not have much money for bus tickets.

Tell me can you survive in this city with three thousand rupees? I have a wife and three children. The rent is Rs.1200/-. As poor people we are always in need of money. Borrowing has broken our back. My children do not go to school regularly and whenever they go to the local government school the teachers ask them to get text books and uniforms. What to do? Shamed by everyday questioning by the teachers my kids have stopped going to school.

I am an office boy. A man of forty two remains a boy till his death because his earning gets him only that respect. If he is paid poorly he remains a boy always. They call me ‘chottu’ and some people give me a little bit respect by calling me Chottulal. That’s good enough. But many in my office call me ‘Sharma ji’. It sounds like an insult.

The lean tuft of hair hanging from the back of my scalp tells it to the world even if I want to hide it. I am Brahmin. May be that’s why I am proud and I do not want to send my wife to work as a housemaid. Back home, farming had ceased. Old memories were felt like shackles.

For sometime in the village I tried to be a temple priest. But as an illiterate Brahmin I could not convince the devotees that I was capable of mediating their issues with the God. And what to say, those who came to appease the God were also suffering like me. They wanted prosperity and I too wanted the same. I knew whenever I prayed for them, I prayed for myself.

When I came to Delhi years back, travelling with a low caste farmer from the same village as mine, huddled near the railway compartment’s latrine with my wife and my elder child who was then hardly two years old, without thinking much about the idea of ‘pollution’, the place was completely different.

I did not know what to do. We slept under bridges for many days before settling down in a slum. I started off as a helper to a tea maker and it was a sheer waste of time. All those rickshaw pullers and officer goers who came to drink tea and dry bread called me chottu. For some time I struggled with a rickshaw. My body was not fit for doing hard work. ‘Why don’t you join the metro work? I know a contractor,” someone said. But what I would do in a construction site? I couldn’t lift a brick.

I slow down at the 42^nd pillar every day and at times I get down and stare into the thickets. I am not alone. There are many like me who stand and stare into the thickets. It was curiosity that brought me to the pillar in the beginning because I had noticed a few men like me standing there and watching something. One day I mustered courage, got down from the cycle and stared into the wild shrubs growing all over. Then I saw them; the objects of their collective curiosity. Three women.

I do not know their age, their names and their whereabouts. I just know that they are three women. I have not even seen their faces. What I see is the movement of clothes; a sari, a churidar, a pair of jeans? Do I see full red lips, inviting smiles and winking? Do I hear muffled moans?

There is a thrill in standing here and looking at them. They are sex workers. Nobody needs to tell me what they are doing there. Their clients came from the other side, jumping over the ledge, away from public eyes. But from this side, we could see movements. May be that was enough for me and people like me.

Policemen come and pester us. They shoo us away. So I have found out a way for not attracting the keepers of law and order. I put my cycle on stand and take out my sacred thread and pull up it to my ear. That’s how we keep pollution away while peeing. It is a safe stance and I could stand for a long time like that and see what’s going on inside the thickets.

During one of the initial days of this voyeurism, I had asked one fellow voyeur about the details. He did not tell me much. But he looked at me with some strange enthusiasm and said, “They say, hand job fifty, blowjob hundred and a full fuck hundred and fifty.”

I slow down there every day and pretend to pee. What do I want? I just can’t tell myself that I want a blowjob because I have never experienced it. In fact what is sex for people like me? We make love as if we were doing something wrong, in hurry and in shame. I am sure there are people who prowl in the slums to see couples making love. Fearing them we had made love in darkness. Each time we did it, for her and for me it was like smothering each other to death. To make love is easy in a shanty but to hold the noise is the real struggle.

A hundred rupees. Then I can have what I want. But I can never have it because each time I take a hundred rupees note out and day dream sitting inside the fuming hole of a kitchenette in the office suddenly I remember everything. The sad faces of my parents in some distant village. I have started forgetting them. The fields where I had worked as a guard. The temple where I was a part time priest. The face of my wife. I feel how the plumpness of her body parts has squeezed itself out in the years to make her a living skeleton whose very look evokes no other response than revulsion. The faces of the children.

I slow down every day there at the forty second pillar and look at the movements of clothes and faces inside the thickets. It has become a ritual. I feel like peeing when I reach here.

I do not know whether I will love the 43^rd pillar or not by my next birthday. But definitely I will stop by the 42^nd pillar. 

Mobile Phone Re-charge

(pics for representative purpose only)

This is the story of a boy whose name is Munna. I hardly know him but I know his name because I have heard his friends calling him by that name. 

I live in South Delhi. As you know the south side of any city is rich in any part of the world. But that does not mean that South Delhi is full of ‘only rich’ people. You could say it is ‘for rich people only’. Even if it is only for them, the rich people have a problem; they cannot live without poor people around. There are two reasons for this.

I heard Munna telling his friends one day: “Rich people want poor people around them because only the presence of poor people gives them the feeling of richness. What is the point in being rich in a place where only rich people live? They need some poor people around so that they could feel important. Haven’t you seen my father jumping up and saluting the ‘malik’ when he comes out of the ‘kothi’? Malik does not acknowledge my papa’s salute. But I am sure internally he must be feeling very good.”

I was really impressed by Munna’s clarity of perception. I have been a pen pusher in a newspaper desk for almost two decades and till that day when I heard him speak to his friends, I never thought in those lines. Now you must be curious what reason Munna has next for rich people wanting poor people around.

“Who will carry their filth?” Munna asks his friends. “Who will hoard those abuses they spit here and there randomly? Do you what my mother told me the other day? She gets abused for doing her job well and if she does not do her job well then too she gets abused. So poor people like my mother have developed a new technique. Make sure that everything is done in such a way that they look perfect, yet not perfect. She cleans bibiji’s and her college going son’s underpants in the same bucket. Then she curses under her breath while doing it.”

“How do you know all this?” questions one of the urchins.

“I overhear mother telling all these to Papa at night,” Munna says in a boastful voice.

“Then you must be seeing your Papa mounting your mother,” says a wily one with an intention to provoke Munna.

“Oh, mother fucker, you must be helping them in that too,” Munna retorts. All the children laugh.

I am not particularly offended when kids in the streets talk in such a filthy language, especially when they are around filth. I live between the posh colony and the slum behind it. It is almost a no man’s land of lower middle class tenements in which I have a one room set, which they call one BHK, means one Bed room, Hall, Kitchen. In my case, I could simply say I have something that could sound like that for a South Delhi address but the truth is there is no different ones; one room makes all these three things; bedroom, hall and kitchen. The bathroom-toilet facilities are on a share basis. Early bird relieves itself without tension. In such places unfortunately there are a no late birds. There is no problem in believing in an adage. But there is a problem when everyone lives it to the dot.

Munna and his friends do not have a problem. One misshapen plastic bottle and some dirty water in it is enough for a royal morning ablution. All the male folk in the slums could squat inside the ridge area which should have been a beautiful public park had it not been deliberately maintained as a dumping pit, and share their life which generally they feel is in the download slide. Those constipated Richie riches would salivate if they see the variety of turds ejected by those scrawny bums. One or two splashes from the bottle, a day’s job is done.

“Do you know why our shit is not the problem but their filth is?” one day Munna asks this question to his bewildered friends. I am a witness; a passerby, a rubber necked enthusiast for scandal. But I am impressed by that eleven year old boy’s intelligence and I wonder from where he gets these questions.

As nobody answers Munna answers himself, “We shit and the suvars, pigs come and eat them up. But the filth that these rich people produce, my God, that is not eaten by anybody. Yes, cows eat and die. They feed cows but rotten rotis. The fight is now between cows and us. Cows also want plastic and we also want. Cows get a temporary fill and a long term illness, we get a some money from the junk shop. But look at the filth here. None is produced by us. We are filth sorters, they are the real filth creators.”

“Why then,” the other urchin pitches in, “they roll their glasses up, cover their noses with fresh hand kerchief, put on goggles and jump to the other side when they pass by it?”

Munna laughs, “You are a stupid, Murda. Who will claim leftover food, used plates and their own shit?”

They all laugh.

“I have always tried to see what lies in their homes, just to see how this much filth is created by these people?” Munna ruminates.

“Ask your Papa and Mummy, they work there, don’t they?” Murda says.

“Papa does not get beyond the gate, and Mummy does not get beyond kitchen,” says Munna. “Both these places bring filth out but I want to know where exactly it is created?”

“If it is not in the kitchen, it must be in the bedroom,” says the wily one.

“If not in the bedroom, will it be in the hall?” asks Murda.

“Can there be a place within those reflecting window panes and gloomy doors and menacing gates other than kitchen, bedroom and hall, a third place where they create so much of filth,” Munna looks at his friends. They all wear the thinking cap.

Such perspective on life, such clarity on thought and such forthrightness of expression, I just cannot believe it.

I think about Munna and his future. What would become of him? Will he become a gatekeeper like his Papa and marry another girl whose future is already written as a housemaid? Will he become a gangster or a local goon protected by some local politician? Or a politician himself?

The best future I can conjure up for him is the role of a politician, compassionate, visionary and pragmatic. Munna could become one. I smile unto myself.

Next day I see him again. This time I see him washing a truck parked just next to the dump yard which grows into the road like a living organism at night and recoils back in the day when the Municipality cleaners come with their shovels and push carts often surrounded by crows, cows, official rag pickers and rag pickers for fun like Munna and Murda.

Munna asks for ten rupees from the sleepy truck driver and he wins in the bargain. He gets a ten rupees note from the dirty driver who has just thrown a squishy condom out of his cabin at the wily one. He picks it up, smells and throws it back into the cabin. The driver does not seem to notice it. He has already gone back to sleep.

“What will we buy?” asks Munna. They huddle together.

A cricket ball? An ice-cream? A cricket bat? A football? A pair of sneakers? A plate of puri and subzi? Three bananas? Three eggs?

Suddenly they find that nothing could come in that ten rupee note.

“What about a top up card?” Munna says gleefully.

“Of what?” Murda asks.

“Of Airtel,” says the wily one dispassionately.

“Do we have a mobile phone for that?” asks Murda.

“Why don’t we snatch it from him?” Munna points to some distance.

Suddenly I see his finger coming to my direction and the boys taking to their heels.

I run to the nearest Metro station. To my office and to my good for nothing life. 

Born before Time ‘Raja’ Ravi Varma: Piramal Art’s Tribute to Raja Ravi Varma

(The new Ravi Varma book by the Piramal Art Foundation, Mumbai)

In Indian modern art history, Raja Ravi Varma stands more as a problem than a solution. Today his works command very high prices and even the most commercial of his artistic productions, the oleographs and the products that came out in the market several decades after his death too have become precious artifacts generating not only values for themselves but also new avenues of art historical interpretations, anthropological enquiries and aesthetic comparisons. Modern art history in India, often envisioned as a linear stream of events with individual and collective milestones coming up along the path, illuminated by erudition and darkened by deliberate obfuscation of truths regarding art production and consumption, still finds it difficult to accommodate Raja Ravi Varma as the pioneer of Indian modernism in art. In the art historical narratives produced even today play the dilemma safely by saying that Ravi Varma was a pioneer in employing western naturalism in Indian ethos but not really the father of Indian modernism. By pushing both Ravi Varma and his detractors of Bengal School in early 20^th century into the common category of ‘pre-modernism’, some historians have conveniently put the cap (Mother of Indian Modern Art) on to Amrita Shergill without explaining clearly how she was not using early 20^th century western modernism in Indian ethos. The only safe route for this people is that western naturalism unfortunately is not equated with western modernism. So by virtue of style and technique Ravi Varma remains technically pre-modern than theoretically and practically modern.

A condemned Ravi Varma is as problematic as a lauded Ravi Varma. Without dealing with a ‘mythical’ Ravi Varma, the real Ravi Varma cannot be logically located within the modern art history. There are several texts both in Malayalam and English that talk about Ravi Varma as a painter, a visionary and above all a human being. Interestingly, except for a few foreign researchers, most of the Indian chroniclers and historiographers, despite their depth of research and erudition, have sprinkled a fair amount of suppositions and attributions on to the biography of Ravi Varma so that today he stands like an enigma for a contemporary scholar. When a contemporary scholar tries to crack the Ravi Varma myth, he/she too, quite ironically tends to generate his/her ‘imaginaries’ about Ravi Varma. To see him and his works based on his own milieu of the second half of the 19^th century and emerging nationalist ideas and ideals of that time, one has to have tremendous amount of detachment both from the critique of Ravi Varma by the Bengal School and also from the historians who have applauded him for being the first ‘popular’ painter in India. Ravi Varma was not only popular but also populist. He had all the intentions to make his works popular.

 (an oleograph portrait of Ravi Varma)

A new book about Raja Ravi Varma becomes all the more important and interesting because it is always curious to know what the contemporary scholars are thinking about the master artist. Piramal Art Foundation has brought out an interesting collection of essays and images in a book titled ‘Pages of a Mind- Raja Ravi Varma- Life and Expressions’. This books has come out as a catalogue (though it is more than a catalogue) during the exhibition early this year with the same name that has featured original paintings by Ravi Varma, his brother C.Raja Raja Varma, photographic prints based on Ravi Varma’s works, oleographs, embellished oleographs, advertising materials that used Ravi Varma imageries and the painted porcelains statuettes made out of the artist’s images. The temporality of the exhibition however is overcome by this book edited by Vaishnavi Ramanathan of the Piramal Foundation. The book has six interesting essays namely, Raja Ravi Varma: Life and Expressions by Farah Siddiqui, The Painters, The Printer and a Diary by Dr.Erwin Neumayer and Dr.Christine Schelberger, Ravi Varma and his Patrons by Vaishnavi Ramanathan, From Maharajas to the Masses: Ravi Varma, the Maker of Multiples by Lina Vincent Sunish, Idealizing the Real, Realizing the Ideal : Jewellery in the Paintings of Raja Ravi Varma by Dr.Usha R.Balakrishnan and Culturing Indian Cinema and Interdisciplinary Advents by H.A.Anil Kumar. The book also has an ‘image’ section where all the exhibits are presented with verifiable provenance.

Before I delve more into the nuances of the essays, I should say that many of the images presented in the book are not afore seen (at least I have not seen them before) and each time my eyes hovered over them, I start thinking about the kind of silent role reversal that Ravi Varma had brought into his profession of making royal and secular portraits, besides making large scale paintings based on mythological subjects, commissioned by the kings and rich patrons. Ravi Varma did not paint ordinary women; he painted the likeness of the women of the patron’s family. Otherwise Ravi Varma painted goddesses. (He also painted men and gods but that’s a different point). The role reversal happened in the case of portraying women as well as female characters. He made sacred into profane and profane into sacred without much public hue and cry. Royal women were ‘sacred’ members of the family and were not supposed to be seen outside. But their portraits, though made for familial registration only, would come out of the palace premises and would be subjected to the public gaze, exactly the way the profane women are looked at. Almost at the same time, Ravi Varma created goddesses out of the ‘profane’ women (professional models) who went into the palaces and drawing rooms, assuming the quality of sacred, respectable and adorable women (of the palaces). There are no conclusive evidences to substantiate my views and I am not sure whether Ravi Varma himself was aware of this role reversal done by him. Whether he knew it or not, it remains as a (art) historical irony.

 (a portrait by Raja Ravi Varma)

However, while reading an essay written by Vaishnavi Ramanathan, I came across her quoting G.Arunima from her text where she said, “G.Arunima writing on the portraiture in Ravi Varma’s works speaks of the erasure of the notion of portraiture as a form that confers a specific identity, since in Ravi Varma’s portraits there is minimal suggestion of personality.”  Ramanathan goes on to say the following: “However it can be argued that by erasing the specificity of the sitter, he opened up the image, offering a space for the viewer to locate himself/herself. (……) In other cases, it was the space of the sitter where the viewer could aspire towards the status and virtues that the sitter symbolized.” (I seriously doubt any sitter would aspire to be a part of the portrait or the portrait itself. This is a forced reading, I should say). Ramanathan’s whole point is to say this: “Ravi Varma painted for people.” What happens here is that Ramanathan repeats and unqualified statement of G.Arunima and goes by the thread of that argument. Anybody who likes to look at a portrait painting, he/she would definitely appreciate the ‘personality’ of the ‘sitter’ created by Ravi Varma. His portraits are not open ended as the writer says. They are definite and conclusive personality portraits that emphasis the ‘difference’ of the sitter from the viewer.

The distance created between the subjects that Ravi Varma chose to paint and the people who lapped it up including both the royal patrons and later the masses who bought his oleographs is one pivotal point that many historians have overlooked. This distance, gap, even we could say the rupture, is what makes Ravi Varma’s paintings more enigmatic and alluring. When he exhibited ten works commissioned by the Baroda King in Mumbai and Madras people queued up to see the works and those were the talk of the town. (Had it been the selfie days we would have had innumerable visual registrations for the events). In the west it is called block buster exhibitions. Such exhibitions are the dynamics of a particular historical time and developed out of personality cult. People queue up to see blockbuster exhibitions (or they make them blockbusters by queuing up patiently) because they are in awe of the artist and the works of art. It is not the inter-changeability that the viewers see with the works of art. I have never heard a visitor in the Louvre Museum telling that he wished to be the sitter for Mona Lisa! Ravi Varma maintained the mystique of being a painter that too a very popular one. The more popular you are, the more your personal details are in the public domain, your physical absence always makes you mystical and Ravi Varma knew how it should have been maintained.

 (an oleograph based on Ravi Varma's painting)

There are two things that demystify Ravi Varma; the photographic reference visuals that Ravi Varma used for creating his secular as well as divine paintings and the diary entries of his younger brother, manager, studio assistant and fellow painter, Raja Raja Varma. Though these evidences have been out there for public scrutiny for long thanks to our special interest in protecting the Ravi Varma myths, these are not often addressed. Thankfully, this book has an essay titled ‘The Printer and a Diary’ by Dr.Erwin Neumayer and Dr.Christine Schelberger, which has all the details to demystify Ravi Varma. The photographic evidences that they give from their book do not make us condescend Ravi Varma but to appreciate him as someone who knew the world had moved fast and decided to move along with it. He arranged models and photographers in his studio and took the desired pose of the model from all the angles so that he could make any alterations if needed. The advent of mirror and lens was the prime reason for the development of perspective and illusionism in western paintings. The arrival of camera and printable images changed the very way of making paintings. However, photography was not seen as a creative medium; it was treated as a mechanical mode of registration and taking a photographic reference for making a painting was looked down upon as the lack of skill or genius of the artist. This must be one reason why Ravi Varma kept his photographic references as a highly guarded secret. The dairy entries by his brother register the artist’s frustrations as well as calculations, bringing the artist from his ‘divine’ position to a clever creative person who knew the value of his ‘product’.

I have found a small discrepancy in the book as the contradictory historical information clashes with each other in two different essays. Vaishnavi Ramanathan says that we should see the ‘Raja’ in ‘Ravi Varma alongside his thematic preferences.’ According to the writer, “By reinterpreting divinity, imaging them as flesh and blood entities, doubly for his own artistic desire and on behalf of his patrons one may say that Ravi Varma was in a way reaffirming the divine status of himself and his royal patrons.” We all are trained to call Ravi Varma with a prefix Raja only because he too was born in a royal household. It has been taken for granted. However, in the first essay written by Farah Siddiqui titled ‘Raja Ravi Varma- Life and Expressions’, she digs out a different historical evidence. She writes: “In 1904, the Viceroy, on behalf of the King Emperor bestowed upon Raja Ravi Varma the Kaiser –I –Hind Gold Medal. At this time Varma’s name was mentioned as “Raja Ravi Varma” for the first time, raising objections from Maharajah Moolam Thirunal of Travancore. Thereafter, he was always referred to as ‘Raja Ravi Varma’. The artist passed away in 1906. He hardly lived for two years after getting the status ‘Raja’. If that is the truth how Ramanathan’s suggestion regarding the reiteration of the divinity of Ravi Varma by the prefix ‘Raja’ would become an acceptable fact, as the statement almost suggests that the prefix ‘Raja’ was always there?

 (a painted porcelain inspired by Damayanti by Ravi Varma)

The essay by Dr.Usha R Balakrishnan sheds a lot of light on Ravi Varma’s study on the ornaments that he discerningly painted on various subjects depending on their secular and mythical relevance. H.A.Anil Kumar’s article on Ravi Varma’s impact on Indian cinema is a densely packed essay of observations and suggestions. Lina Vincent Sunish, in her article ‘Maker of Multiples’ traces the history of Ravi Varma as an entrepreneur who produced millions of oleographs. Though a good amount of research has gone into it, her thorough adherence to a conventional research essay style repulses the reader a bit. The aspect that she could have developed the point, ‘the defining point of 19^th century Indian renaissance is Hindu civilization’ as stated by Geeta Kapur further in order to take the stress from ‘Hindu Civilization’ to ‘Hindu Nationalism’. The attempts that Lina makes peters out as she takes the research line of Patricia Oberoi, Kajri Jain and Sucharita Sarkar. If it was an attempt to define the growing nationalistic tendencies in today’s socio-cultural and political scenario in India and its comparison with the then emergent (Hindu) nationalistic milieu and Ravi Varma’s non-commitment to both, the essay would have been much more interesting.

 (an advertisement inspired by Ravi Varma- All images are from the book. Poor image quality regretted)

I grew up in a village where most of the Hindu houses had the Ravi Varma oleographs. In my grandmother’s home there was a big oleograph that showed the image of a baby Krishna stealing butter from a pot. I used to get into this small household temple that smelled camphor, incense sticks, flowers, sacred ash and sandal paste whenever I could escape the watchful eyes of the elders and used to keep on looking at this bubbly baby boy with shiny large eyes, curly hairs and a peacock feather fitted above the forehead. That baby boy looked more like a cherub than a boy like me. I used to wonder why the gods were not looking like the people around me. As I grew up, I understood that Ravi Varma also had a colonial view on nobility and sophistication. It was his birth, upbringing and training. He subverted this colonial view indirectly by transforming ‘public’ women into private goddesses. However, in his pan Indian imagination as we see in the galaxy of women, he did not paint a woman who looked like a typical woman who worked in his home or in the fields. Ravi Varma had made exclusions; histories written about him also have made exclusions. We do come across court painters like Alagiri Naidu and Ramaswamy Naickar as Ravi Varma’s contemporaries. They were court painters. But we do not see any other individual painters from outside the court. Blame it on patronage. But immediately after Ravi Varma’s death, we see in Travancore, so many individual artists painting in Ravi Varma style, most of them trained by Ravi Varma’s son and his disciples. Till a couple of decades back we could come across Ravi Varma school painters in Trivandrum. However, most of them are excluded from art history. I strongly believe that Ravi Varma’s history will become scientific history only when the histories of his contemporaries and successors are also included in the narratives. Otherwise we will have to depend on a lot of legends and myths, just to satisfy our own lack of interest. This book is a worth reading one and definitely a collectible.   

‘Do Your Art in Hindi not in Urdu’- Cultural Censors Tell Artists in Delhi

(The Tweet in Urdu, as a part of the Thomas Ellis' 'Dilli I love you' Project)

Yesterday Prime Minister Modi was thankful to the people of India for choosing the BJP in Assam and helping to make a ‘Congress Free’ India. Amit Shah, the President of the BJP exuded confidence that the Hindu consolidation was already happening for the general elections slated to take place in 2019. Prime Minister reiterated that the ‘ideology’ of the present government has gone down well with the people of this country. Definitely, the mandate of yesterday was not for the BJP though the vote share has increased and there are reasons for both Mr.Modi and Mr.Shah to imagine this increase in vote share is for their developmental agenda. Despite this optimism and public posture of goodness of the top leaders, the fringe elements of the Hindutva party seem to have not got the ‘right’ message. They are still on a rampage to iron out cultural and aesthetical differences by intimidating and threatening artists. The latest incident has just taken place a few hours back in East Delhi’s Shahdra area.

 (The vandalized street art in Shahdra)

Two Spanish artists and an Indian artist were painting a wall that belonged to the Delhi Jal Board (Delhi Water Authority) in Shahdra as a part of the much talked about ‘Dilli I love You’ project by the French Television journalist and film maker, Thomas Ellis. While at it, they were stopped and abused by a mob of around hundred people who claimed themselves as the protectors of Hindu religion. The artists were taken to the police station and were released once the Aam Aadmi Party leader and Law Minister in the Delhi Cabinet, Kapil Misra intervened on their behalf. According to one of the artists, Akhlaq Ahmed, the ‘incident was shocking’ because the intention of the artists was to spread the message of love. What provoked the crowd, which was deliberately gathered through phone calls and whatsapp messages, was the language in which the artists were trying to put the message across. The language that they chose to write was ‘Urdu’.

 (One could see the Urdu line over painted)

‘Delhi had fallen down once but it got up and regained its dignity. This city is unparalleled’ is the rough translation of the Urdu ‘tweet’ that the artists painted against the backdrop of Delhi’s Lotus Temple. “What provoked them was the language,” says Akhlaq. They were demanding to change it into Hindi. “They were just abusing the foreign artists and I requested them to abuse me and spare them as they don’t understand Hindi expletives,” says a soft spoken Akhlaq. “They turned to me and started patronizing me. They said that I was an Indian and I should have stopped them from using Urdu,” Akhlaq says. The crowd grew within minutes and they forcefully over painted the Urdu writing and literally white washed the tweet. “They were liberally throwing colors on the wall and spoiling what we had done.” In the meanwhile someone dialed 100 and Police came and took the artists to the station.

 (permission granted certificate by the Delhi Jal Board for the street art project)

A lover of Delhi, Ellis initiated this project earlier this year and his idea is to capture the lives and times of Delhi, its people’s narratives, faces, life styles through various mediums including street art. Forty walls were chosen and Akhlaq Ahmed, celebrated young street artist was selected to lead the team of artists including the visiting foreign artists. Their idea is to paint forty ‘tweet messages’ on Delhi’s prominent walls. “The permission was already given in official writing. We showed it to the mob. But they were determined to spoil our work,” says Akhlaq. The police were however polite to the artists, perhaps because of the political intervention by the Minister himself. “The policemen offered us cold drinks and insisted that we should lunch with them, which we refused,” Akhlaq smiles. May be in the larger scheme of things, this incident is a passable one, but the implications are too strong to neglect. Monopolizing and steamrolling of culture starts with censorship by the violent mobs unchecked by the law and order systems. Systemic ruining of culture takes place first in streets and it may not take much time to reach the gates of our Museums and other cultural establishments. We need to be aware and alert on this. 

A Silent Documenting Revolution in Thiruvannamalai: Abul Azad, the Photographer

(Abul Azad, photographer. Picture courtesy TSL Nadar)

Summer winds get caught by the crowns of tall palm trees that line the flat landscape of Palakkadu (Palghat), one of the northern districts of Kerala. On the north eastern edge of this place Malayalam mixes with Tamil, the ancient language of philosophy, literature and music. These palm trees run backwards during the day turn into illusionary palaces at night where beautiful vampires allure men, take them on the top of these trees, enjoy their virility, then like spiders eat them up leaving only nails and hairs for the kith and kin to collect. The land is as real as a myth or vice versa. Sultans had come here looking for establishing kingdoms and leaving Muslim barons behind who started living amicably, intermingling with the local populace. Vedic and musical Brahmin streets never despised the Ravutars (Muslim Barons) who came by Arabian horses, like northern winds. Like the Brahmins, they too spoke in a Tamil mixed with Malayalam or vice versa. In Palakkad, everyone was a magical being. Some created music, some created literature, some others made wonderful cartoons and yet another lot created images.

(from War Widows series by Abul Azad)

Abul Azad, one of the most important photography artists in our times thought that he was one of the descendants of the Ravutars who came on horseback to Kerala via Palakkadu, in those good old days. He still believes so. Moving from Mattanchery, Kochi to Thiruvannamalai in Tamil Nadu in 2010 was a sort of going back to the roots. Azad speaks Tamil fluently and even many years before he started living in Thiruvannamalai, especially while living in Delhi as a PTI photographer, Azad still spoke Tamil, as if he was trying to remember the language of his ancestors. In fact, as a photography artist, then, Azad was a man of no languages. As he did not have any language of his own, he could speak the language that was presently given to him or rather in a language he found himself to be in. Hence, he spoke in Hindi when he was among the local populace in the northern parts of India. He spoke in English and laughed in Malayalam and mocked in Tamil when he was among his peer group. When he went to Paris to do a residency program in 1996-97 period he was rumored to have spoken in French. I still wonder in which language had he spoken to the djinns and malaks when he was caught within the Hazrat Bal shrine in Srinagar in 1993, photographing the actions of Indian army and the resistance of the Kashmir rebels.

 (from War Widow series by Abul Azad)

Two decades back when Abul Azad showed his independent works to many including me, they all thought that his works were a bit ambitious therefore unconvincing. He was not showing the ‘Raghu Rai School’ of photography. Nor was he making his images in the mode of Kishore Parikh. His photographs were different and disturbing at once. Ram Rahman, in his typical style of black humor and understatement was documenting the underbelly of the North Indian politics and also he was keen on capturing the chance homo-erotic manifestations in the conservative North India’s public domain. With some kind of passion (unlike that of Pablo Bartholomew), both Ram Rahman and Abul Azad were documenting the last patches of an elegant secularism that stemmed from the heartlands of Uttar Pradesh and Delhi. Abul Azad was doing something more; he was making a private body of images that defied the image quality as well as surface quality of the generic documentary photographs. There were too many deliberate interpolations and deliberate erasures. The image was almost non-existent in his works; in its place there appeared graffiti like scratches and scars, consciously inflicted on them as if the artist was doing some sort of self flagellation.

 (Photo by Abul Azad)

The starkness of the underlying images was either provoking questions or utter disappointment among the viewers and friends. Azad was nonchalant and was not explaining them away. He was just showing the images those were scarred and scratched. One day he showed a series of post card size prints and photographic prints of Indian gods and goddesses, pasted upside down on the walls of his two room set flat in Mayur Vihar Phase III. A shudder passed through the spines of all those who saw them. The reason was simple; our political climate had already changed. The socio-political discourse had already been in a new path after the Post-Mandal years of late 1980s and the historical and unfortunate year 1992, when the Babri Masjid was demolished on the 6^th December. Azad was still trying to be a normal press photographer. But something had changed in him. A staunch secularist, he faced the double bind of his name; Azad was at once a Hindu name that connoted revolutionaries like Chandrasekhar Azad and a Muslim name in the southern part of India. His friend Ram Rahman, by virtue of his birth had problematized his religious existence via his parents’ deliberate choice of his name. Here was Abul Kalam Azad, definitely the name coming from the famous Muslim leader of Indian Independence, carrying a name, which is obviously Islamic yet ringing a bit of Hindu in it. Azad was a secularist; neither a Muslim nor a Hindu. If Din Ilahi was there, Azad would have been one in the pack. Otherwise, he remains more like a Sufi, who leans more towards the asceticism and liberalism of Hindu religion than being a Muslim.

(photo by Abul Azad)

Azad’s works of 1990s, however were disturbing for he was documenting the ugly side of Indian politics and religions though an unprecedented image repertoire. None would have exhibited those works in the controversial decade of 1990s. There were incidents in Delhi in which works were brought down from shows and at times even the show itself was pulled down. M.F.Husain was being haunted and hunted down. Galleries and curators were playing it safe. The only organization that stood the pressure was SAHMAT in Delhi and they were making periodical efforts to showcase counter images and counter voices. Yet, Azad’s works were not shown in Delhi even in these venues. It was a time to say good bye to a safe job and a safe life. Azad left Delhi towards the new millennium and settled down in Mattanchery, Kochi, where he was instrumental in developing a style of photography, which I once called the ‘Mattanchery School of Photography’. The years went on and Azad was photographing the locale, the immediate and the self in different image complexes. He photographed the political graffiti of Kerala, without any pretensions of being theoretical or political. He captured the images of local tea shops and toddy shops and much before the new gen films in Kerala started narrating stories from the point of view of ‘insignificant people’, Azad was already narrating the life of Kerala through the perception of the ‘insignificant people’. Poignantly and pointedly, Azad was documenting himself by creating visual diaries. Even a toy or a pebble became a narrative point of Azad.

 (Photo by Abul Azad)

In ‘Ishka’ Gallery, Kochi, Azad exhibited a series of large scale photographs sometime in 2007. Joseph Chakola, a photographer, print maker, musician and artist based in Kochi was behind the initiative and Chakola was ready to take the risk of exhibiting Azad’s works. Those works showed a series of images of cows and their locations, as if they were direct print of tinted negatives. Azad was very perceptive though many did not know the implications of those images then. Years later we saw how cow became a defining factor in the development of new nationalism in the changed political discourse of our country. Azad could see it coming and portrayal of cows in their various manifestations was a silent cry and a strong critique about the emerging political scenario. Even if these works were shown in Delhi or any other part of the cow belt of that time, none would have taken objection because these images were not really showing any agitated state of mind of the artist. The iconizing of the cows was subtle and infused with irony and black humor.

 (Photo by Abul Azad)

Turning his attention to the mother goddess worship in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, Azad started taking ‘feminist rituals’ within the subaltern Hindu contexts as his point of departure. A series titled ‘Black Mothers’ came out of this engagement. Interestingly, as Azad does not make any claim about his theoretical or political leaning based on his images or interests, these works are not taken by the literary inclined feminist theoreticians for further studies but I am sure that is going to happen in the coming years. At the same time, Azad also started doing chromo-lomography, an old low end technique of photography which produced something similar to the instagram photograph. In fact Azad started posting lomographic images much before instagram came as a photographic app in the social media. Subverting the idea of making images using high end technology, Azad uses basic photographic equipments to make his stunning images.

 (Photo by Abul Azad)

Koovagam is a place of worship in Tamil Nadu where in the month of April every year, transgenders from all over India (especially from South India) gather and become the brides of their God, Iravan. In this fifteen to twenty day ritual, these transgenders become brides of God and then become the widows of the same god. Then they are free to choose their partners and within a religious context they hold the pride parade without attracting much of the urban middle class theoretical paraphernalia. Azad who is interested in the lives of the subaltern people as well as those of the people with different sexual orientations, has been documenting the lives of the transgenders in Koovagam for the last few years. The images that we see in this series ‘War Wedding Widows, Sex, Desire, Love and Erotica’ (2016), these transgenders are captured with a lot of sensitivity without compromising their identity for male or female chauvinistic gaze. Azad uses two methods to click their images. He uses a traditional box camera and a white backdrop so that he could get these people to pose for him, which they happily oblige. In the second method, he clicks their pictures in their natural locales; including their public bath. As Azad has been a regular visitor to the festival, most of the transgenders are not offended by his presence. Without much praises to accompany, Azad does this ‘making of image’ as a very devoted ritual every year.

 (Photo by Abul Azad)

A silent revolution has been going on for the last two years in Thiruvannamalai. Azad, supported by his daughter Dr.Mahima Azad and his partner Tulsi Suvarna Laxmi, has been documenting the day to day history of Thiruvannamalai in an ambitious photographic project that runs for 365 days in a year. With no funding agencies to support, Azad has been taking the help of the friends and local people, and a lot of enthusiastic young photography artists and doing this for the last two years. He set up an organization named ‘Ekaloka Trust for Photography’ (ETP) and the documenting of Thiruvannamalai and its fourteen kilometer Girivalam has already been done by different set of artists, in residency programs. In 2015, Azad initiated a project called ‘Mathilakam Rekhakal’ in order to document the ancient port cities in Tindys, Calicut and Muziris. He periodically posts the progress of ETP works in the social media and Tulsi does all the administrative works including the co-ordination of international photography projects. ETP has already done a Indo-Polish collaborative work as well as a Photography junket with a visiting Russian photographer.

 (Photo by Abul Azad)

Azad rides around Thiruvannamalai on his TVS 50 motor cycle. The whole town of Thiruvannamalai knows him and for many he is ‘anna’ and for many others he is ‘photo swamy’. Azad gives free photography lessons for all who are interested. His students include high profile city people to street urchins. What ETP needs today is support; financial and material support. The huge archive that has been growing in the small premises of ETP should be supported by both the national and international funding agencies. Azad does not belong to any group or faction. As a photography artist, what he makes is not an image worth looking at, but the possible positioning of the subject forcefully in the given context. His trained eyes and hands do not need deliberations to see what is relevant and what is irrelevant. The huge archive of his own works also needs support.  Abul Azad is a Ravutar turned Sufi Swamy with a camera around his neck. He speaks in Tamil exactly the way his ancestors used to speak to people. But I believe, Azad does not speak in any language. He speaks the language of images. He is a laughing photographer who could perhaps speak all the known and unknown languages in the world. 

The Dream Collector: Gopikrishna, the Artist of Travancore

(Gopikrishna in his studio)

Through the large windows, the foliages and tree top freshly washed by the mid summer rains that shred the crystal blue sky into thousands of shining shards I see three medium sized owls, sleeping calmly. The artist smiles at me. “Look, what do they need?” I keep silence. I want the artist to speak. He continues, “They just need a place to sit and sleep. At night they fly away to hunt. They come back in the morning. At times they look at me turning their necks in impossible angles.” I strain my eyes at them. As if responding to a cue they open their eyes in unison and look at me. ‘It’s eerie,’ I think but do not say a thing. I know Gopikrishna, the artist and when he speaks of the owls, he is not just putting up an act. The trees out there, the greenery, the foliage, the creepers and vines that adorn the self designed studio-cum-residence of Gopikrishna are carefully cultivated by the artist himself, patiently and steadily. His works, often qualified randomly as ‘surreal’ or ‘Brueghel-esque’ have a lot of trees and foliages in them though most of them seem animated by their ‘unnatural’ extensions into creatures and species that are seen perhaps only in the imaginations of George Louis Borges.

 (A recent painting by Gopikrishna)

Born in Sreekaryam, a suburban town near Trivandrum city in 1965, Gopikrishna has always been a devotee of the ‘remaining patches of nature’ in and around Trivandrum city. Ask any friend of Gopikrishna about his personal traits as an artist or an art student many years back, they would all say one thing: Gopikrishna was a loner and he remains the same. There is a reason for the loneliness of this artist. This loneliness was a choice when he was a student in the Trivandrum Fine Arts College in early 1980s. The students then were an agitated lot. Each student who joined the college then was fresh and normal like any other teenager. But within a month into the course they all started turning into some different beings, always talking about revolution through art and the social purposes of art. For Gopikrishna, seeing the metamorphosis of his fellow students perhaps was the initiation into the world of magical transformations of beings, which has been manifesting in his works for the last three decades incessantly.

 (a painting in Gopikrishna's studio)

Gopikrishna’s works have a protagonist or a few protagonists in them, all in many ways, resonating with the characteristic traits of the artist himself, at least in the looks. They are all loners even when they are engaged in apparently absurd group activities. The early dissociation of his individual self from the collective ideological process(ing) of art during the student days comes to take many forms in this dissonant metabolism that we seen in Gopikrishna’s paintings. Loner as he was, instead of making art through collective discussions and for a common end, Gopikrishna looked for the fast fading green patches in and around the city. Pedaling through the asphalt laid paths under the blazing sun, with his drawing equipments in tow, Gopikrishna went to these places, sitting there alone, captured the varying moods of nature, hundreds of birds visiting the tree tops, bees humming around and the insects and frogs trotting here and there. Drawing them was a pleasure, which took him to the ultimate sense of ‘losing’ it (the ego) and the meditative experience that he experienced from these weekend sessions was much more alluring than the socially ‘responsible’ art that brewed within the crucibles of library, canteen and classrooms of the Trivandrum Fine Arts College. Gopikrishna did not discount his friends’ art but he was simply not interested.

 (A painting by Gopikrishna)

A.Ramachandran, senior artist, who gushes praises for Gopikrishna does it for the right reasons. As a nature lover (as a rightful descendant of the doyens like Benode Behari Mukherjee, Ram Kinkar Baij and K.G.Subramnyan) Ramachandran has always painted directly from the nature. While Ramachandran devoted himself in developing a naturalism that is peculiar to the mural traditions of India, by adding a lot of realism to it, Gopikrishna chose a different path of developing his realism as perceived by his inner eyes. In his words, “I do not have any explanations for the incidents that take place in my works. But they are from there. They happen exactly the way they are seen in the paintings. I cannot force them to be different.”  Hence, Gopikrishna’s early exercises in drawing directly from nature could be called the internalization process of the external world and the alchemy of aesthetics that occurred in him during those days must have created a different world of reality for him, which one of the early judges of his works commented upon as ‘painful paintings’.

 (a painting by Gopikrishna)

This comment, ‘painful paintings’ came in the year 1995, when Gopikrisha was finishing his MFA in Painting at the illustrious Delhi College of Art. After passing out in 1988 from Trivandrum Gopikrishna had spent almost six years at home, painting from a fairly large attic studio created for him by his father. Then he thought of continuing his studies. During the annual display, one of the campus combers came from a reputed gallery in Delhi and looked at the works of both Gopikrisha and Aji VN, who too was a student there then. The gallerist looked at their works for a long time, which gave them goose pimples. They thought that they were going to be picked up and raised to the level of professional artists by offering shows or commissioning works. Nothing happened; he moved on and selected one of the students whose works both Gopikrishna and Aji thought ‘not up to the mark’. Later, they asked the chosen one about the secret behind his works. He did not say much but simply commented, “You have done painful paintings. They need happy paintings.”

(a recent painting by Gopikrishna)

Looking around, I understand that Gopikrishna has not learnt a lesson from that boy artist who was selected by the gallerist in 1995. Sometimes being adamant and learning no lessons pay better than making adjustments with one’s won soul. Both Gopikrishna and Aji held on what was closer to them tightly. We do not hear much about the other artist but we do hear about these two artists even if it took more than a decade for recognition to come. In Delhi too the image of Gopikrishna being a loner followed him. But the artist has a different take on that. “Most of them who knew me or tried to know me missed one point. There is not a single place in Delhi and its surroundings where I hadn’t cycled around. I used to go to all the green patches, parks and the ruins of Delhi. Sitting there I experienced the histories and stories that made Delhi. I was not alone because the spirits that made Delhi were with me. And I kept on drawing and painting them.”

(a painting by Sreedharan Nair, Gopikrishna's father)

Here we think of Gopikrishna as a child prodigy. “I have never been one,” Gopikrishna asserts. He started taking art seriously only when his father suggested that he could be an artist. The suggestion was not vague or casual for it came from an artist himself. Sreedharan Nair, Gopikrishna’s father was an artist himself. Born in 1920, Sreedharan Nair was closely related to the Travancore Royal family and also got trained under the Raja Ravi Varma ‘school’ of painting along with the then masters like Devaraja Aiyar, Govindan Asari and OV Velu Asari. They all painted in the Ravi Varma style, taking inspiration from the already established themes and also from the secular as well as mythological narratives. The palette more or less remained that of Ravi Varma. Sreedharan Nair was slightly different from these artists. Nair studied the Western Renaissance art closely and also was keen in copying several western masters including Michael Angelo, Da Vinci and Raphael. Besides, Nair collected a lot of Oleographs came out of the Ravi Varma Press, and took a special interest in developing a painterly style based on the oleograph representations than the Ravi Varma paintings themselves. When Nair told his son to study art, he knew that his son could even if Gopikrishna had not shown any interest in pursuing art as a career.

 (a painting by Sreedharan Nair, Gopikrishna's father)

A strangeness came to Gopikrishna’s mind when he was too young to understand the ways of the world. One day he was told that his mother was dead. Orphaned at an early age, with a young sibling and a father trying to negotiate his financial problems, Gopikrishna found himself in a peculiar island of loneliness. Nair, who wanted to be a professional artist, finally had to take up a job in the Transport Department. Gopikrishna was trying to tell something to the world though he did not know which medium would help him to express himself. And when he started working on paper with pencils, the initial formations were just doodles. Then he found images and themes evolving out of those doodles. It was a Tagore moment for Gopikrishna and he was seventeen years old. When Nair told him that he could join the Trivandrum Fine Arts College, Gopikrishna knew that if he did, he could as he had already seen images coming out of his lines convincingly, exactly the way Tagore might have found the images while making doodles, smudges and erasures.

 (work by Gopikrishna)

The evolution of an artist could be traced by the stylistic developments that his works show over a period of time. However, it is not necessary that one should see the same kind of style in the formative years of an artist and later. In the case of Gopikrishna, the ‘surreal’ feel of his works was always there from the very early drawings to now. He says that this persisted because the style or thematic was not forced. It happened in him and his job was to get it out on paper or canvas. That does not mean that the artist is a weirdo. If he should, then most of the artists in this world should be weird creatures giving birth to non-existing worlds and creatures. The normative ideologies do not have any place in the scheme of Gopikrishna. As I mentioned elsewhere, Gopikrishna did not like to involve in any of the group activities in the college and preferred to work from a dingy little room in the men’s hostel which was kindly given to him by a fellow student, as Gopikrishna was a day scholar. Painting from the dark hostel room did not fill darkness into his works. The predominant yellow in his works connotes not only the affinity for the ethereal but also for the sun; openness and freedom.

 (a work by Gopikrishna)

The centrality of figures, the multiplicity of limbs and heads, and the liberal habitation of beasts and eerie birds speak a lot about the aesthetics of Gopikrishna. The careful cannibalism of the oleograph structures, images and aesthetics created by Raja Ravi Varma seems to be the basic foundation for the feverish imagination of Gopikrishna. The beautiful gods and goddesses with multiple limbs, heads and other attributes, consorted by female entities or beastly or avian entities, flanked by heavenly flying beings and the encryption of benevolence and good omen that populate the oleographs, transform into different male, female, beastly and avian imageries and create a new ensemble of actions and happenings at times, taking them to the lowly stations of life and at times to the royal existence of the feudal lords. There are the glimpses of divinity and monstrosity in the same frame. The embellishments of the conventional oleographs are cannibalized to create a new ornamentation that allures and repels the viewer at the same time. Along with the lowly and royal lives, one could see the emblems and symbols of colonial presence, and the struggles of the erstwhile royalty in the face of extinction.

 (Gopikrishna in studio)

Remove your shoes just outside the steps that lead to the veranda from the granite paved courtyard. You get the feeling of entering into a museum. The drawing room is a high ceilinged spacious atrium which has antique furniture running along the walls. Each item there has a touch of history and suddenly you realize that you have seen all of them in one or the other fashion in the works of Gopikrishna. The cherry red tiled floors reflect the white washed walls on which the artist has displayed many number of original oleographs collected from various sources, including that of his father and the original works done by his father. This home does not look like a museum of innocence, but it is more like a museum of memories (which museums definitely are), more like a museum of pain or a museum of dreams. But the home itself does not carry the memories of pain though the energy flutters with the softness of a smile or a pair of butterfly wings. Gopikrishna’s wife, Indira welcomes you with a smile with the room lights up. Gopikrishna’s son is Anantha Padmanabhan, who is a Integrated Psychology MA student at the Hyderabad Univeristy and daughter Sumitra is a tenth standard student in Trivandrum.

(a corner in Gopikrishna's study)

Gopikrishna collects all what he could from the city of his life. He is full of Travancore history. And Travancore history is full of coups, conspiracies, abdication, love, revenge, chivalry, loyalty, magic, horror and war. C.V.Raman Pillai, the most eminent author of historical novels had caught the history of Travancore in all its moods in his famous works such as ‘Marthandavarma’, ‘Dharma Raja’ and ‘Rama Raja Bahadur’. The coups and conspiracies that made and broke the modern Travancore also tell us the history of its resistance as well as subjection to the colonial forces. Trivandrum developed a cultural character of pleasing and connivance by extending the royal activities into the lives of the common people. Gopikrishna intrigued by these conspiracies that still make and break the city, creates his paintings which seem to resonate with the stories from the history of Travancore. Raman Pillai was a creative genius who said he could imagine a sea of fire and still write about it. He made this statement almost in the same of Turner. Enamored by the narrative skills and the linguistic variations shown by Pillai in his works, Gopikrishna also seems to say that he can imagine a sea of not only fire but also life and the life beyond. As a true devotee to the master history teller, he got his children named after the characters in C.V.Raman Pillai’s novels.

(an early family portrait by Gopikrishna)

The old wall clock which is wound everyday by Gopikrishna himself strikes twelve times. The disinterested, detached, grave and matter of fact ringing brings in the memory of Travancore within the four walls. We climb the stairs to the first floor where his sprawling studio is set up. Along the hallway that leads to the studio and along the sides of the stairs framed oleographs and the ‘much maligned monsters’ of Indian gods and goddesses ogle at you. The studio has all what a studio needs. Through the large windows southern wind wafts in. The table tops and cupboards are filled with antiques that he has been collecting ever since. The chairs are woven with cane; a skill that is fast fading due to lack of demand. Gopikrishna believes that a good life means getting the nature back into life which include the old skills of making and using things from the surroundings. “I collect all these because I just want to live with their naturalness,” says Gopikrishna. From the walls, his protagonists turn around and look at me. To understand his paintings it is necessary to know a bit of local history; or at least the history that goes beyond a hundred good years. Who said history is dead? Let’s us forget him. But I know who has said, the regional is the new global. It was said by K.G.Subramanyan, a decade back. If so, Gopikrishna is a global artist without using sawed off cadavers, pickled fish or prosthetic largesse or shiny surfaces.

 (a family moment, Gopikrishna with wife Indira)

From the comfort of a low chair, sipping the sugarless tea that Indira has brought along with a few pieces of ripe mango and a local delicacy called ‘Ilayappam’, I listen to the stories of Gopikrishna and the making of Gopikrishna. After his graduation in 1988, Gopikrishna went on painting at his attic studio, which his father had prepared for him. Nobody bought any work and nobody even cared to look at his works. As the young artists do even today, Gopikrishna also did send his portfolios to many galleries in Mumbai and Delhi, which came back with not even a note of thanks. Aubrey Menon, an Indo-Anglian writer and a decaled gay writer was living in Trivandrum in those days with his friend Graham Hall. Both Gopikrishna and Pradeep Puthoor were regular visitors to their home for ‘spirited’ discussions on art and literature. Aubrey Menon liked the works of these two artists and it was Menon who wrote about them first in the then famous Illustrated Weekly of India. Gopikrishna shows me the Olivetti portable typewriter of Aubrey Menon, who had gifted to the artist many years later. It sits pretty on an antique stool, like the tools that have created monuments in granite.

 (Gopikrishna with Aubrey Menon's Olivetti portable typewriter)

In the year 2000, Gopikrishna did a solo exhibition titled ‘Gates to Decivilization’ at the Durbar Art Gallery, Kochi. Anoop Scaria of Kashi Art Gallery happened to see this show and was hugely impressed. Anoop was the first one to give a sponsored solo at his Kashi Café Art Gallery in 2002 and 2004. By that time Indian art market had boomed. Solos followed in Delhi’s Palette Art Gallery and in Mumbai’s Art Musings. Gopikrishna, the recluse artist, however remains the same after his market success. “Market has not changed the pace of my working. I do not do commission works. Whatever sales happened so far has happened either through solo or through group shows. I cannot do works based on demands. I do not make calls or pick up calls for selling my art. I am an ordinary householder, cleaning my house and studio everyday with my wife, purchasing vegetables, tending plants and trees, looking at nature and listening to any kind of music.” Gopikrishnan does not affect anything and I could see it. The energy in the studio is meditative and one could spend hours together looking at his works here or looking at the number of mangos hanging from the tree at a hand’s distance over his terrace.

 (a work by Gopikrishna)

The more one looks at the works of Gopikrishna the more one gets to feel a sense of crime and punishment. Gopikrishna, though is not guilt ridden or remorseful like a Dostoevsky-ian character, his works seem to be an outcry for justice. At the same time, the bestial presence reverses the logic of the human world. There is a bit of madness in these works. The metaphor here is ‘vishamam’; the syncopation of two disparate images, narratives or incidents. The repetition of such disparities, Gopikrishna creates a world where justice is delivered even through the cruelest of the ways. The impossibility of transformations is presented as the easiest formations. Pain is tinged with an erotic pleasure as a release or cathartic effect. Fertility and eroticism together tries to overcome the difficulties of barrenness using the images of fish, snake and sprouts. In Gopikrishna’s works, if anything is mocked or lampooned, it is the human beings because according to the artist, human beings are the greatest errors in the earth. The errors are to be erased either through correctional methods or through pure allowance of the grotesque.

 (portrait of young Gopikrishna by NL Balakrishnan, photographer and actor)

In the district of Trastevere in Rome in central Italy, sometime in November 2015 Gopikrishna stood in front of a Raphael’s mural depicting Psyche and the Triumph of Galatea. In Villa Farnesina, Raphael had created one of the most beautiful and intriguing paintings in the world. It was Gopikrishna’s first trip to Europe; a trip lasted four months, aided by the scholarship instituted by a friend, Gopikrishna traveled in Italy and France. He visited most of the iconic art works that have been celebrated in art history. “I had a book at home which my father had collected. In childhood I used to look at them every weekend. In this visit I was standing in front of them, in real. This was a moment…” This was a moment that brought the mental image of Gopikrishna as a person and artist together. That was a moment of apotheosis for him. The artist in him and the person in him became one and the same. “The conflicts, if at all there were any, all had gone in that one moment,” says Gopikrishna says. He walks me into the other two rooms of his studio; one has a high cot, from one of those royal houses. The other has got an easy chair. And on the cupboard there is a small portrait of Gopikrishna as a young child, taken by the ace photographer N.L.Balakrishnan, who was a friend of his father.

 (JohnyML with Gopikrishna in his studio)

The owls are still there. They are three. “This three is something very important for me. Look at that drawing, a three headed man. There in the painting you see a three headed bird. I have not yet figured out what this three means to me,” Gopikrishna says. I tell him about the triads of religions; Brahma, Vishnu, Maheshwara, Father, son and Holy Ghost, the Three Times- past, present, future, the three heads, the three eyes, the three weapons. Gopikrishna looks at me and smiles. “Owls do not need language,” he says.  Yes, they just need a place to sleep. Gopikrishna feels that as a human being it is his duty to provide home for nature and its creatures. That’s how an artist worth of his salt thinks.