KOCHI: A muse or Musui was waiting down the road, as it were, that K S Radhakrishnan, took one day in Santiniketan in the ’70s. “As I passed him on the road, he smiled and asked for bread,” recalls the 67-year-old sculptor. “Musui’s smile stopped me with its expression of innocence, it was just one human being smiling at another… What I mean is he wasn’t begging for bread, simply asking if I had one. That smile of his got inside my system and I’ve carried it around all my life,” he says during a meeting at Bikaner House, where the first-ever retrospective of five decades of his work, ‘On The Open Road’, is being held.
The imprint of that encounter has yielded hundreds of sculptures, sketches and public-art installations — from Delhi to Calicut to Panaji. A tall, fluted figure, Musui is seen walking, gambolling or being airborne; as rickshaw-puller, Jesus or imp; solo or with his female companion, Maiya, the latter, a figure out of the sculptor’s imagination. Like God, from the rib of Musui he created Maiya, points out Professor R Siva Kumar, who has curated the exhibition.
But it is only in the ’90s, two decades after he met Musui and after a commission in Delhi, that the impression the Adivasi boy had made on Radhakrishnan, who had left his home at Kuzhimattom in Kottayam as a boy of 18, began to take shape. After that, Musui never really left his head. Or his studio.
“I was doing a sculpture for a travel house on the concept of travel. A hand-pulled rickshaw came to mind, so I brought one from Kolkata and cast it in bronze…. I was thinking who should pull it. I was in Delhi on a fellowship then. Musui’s ‘head’, which I had taken off the figure study I had made in Santiniketan, was with me in my studio.… I almost sought his permission ‘will you pull the rickshaw for me’? I think he smiled back. For me, it was about Musui travelling with his memories,” says the sculptor.
Musui in the crowd
Musui is, indeed, the early chapters, the middle, or basically the story Radhakrishnan has never stopped telling. “Will I ever get tired of him? Yes, when I get tired of myself,” says the artist.
Musui could also be interpreted as his alter ego. He is the face, centre and periphery of Radhakrishnan’s most recent sculpture titled ‘The Crowd’. The sculptor says crowds “scare” him so he made one he would not be scared of. The installation is of a moving crowd — made up of more than 50 Musuis and Maiyas—or rather of people on the move, who are not focusing on one thing. However, while not a crowd, or a mob, this is not a group either. “There is space in between so anyone who wants to come in, can. This is a 50-figure installation, if you walk in, you can be the 51st,” says the artist with a smile. The figure of Maiya is also playfully rendered. At another corner of the exhibition, she stands, imagined by the sculptor as a Visva-Bharati postgraduate, with two shiuli flowers in her hand.
It’s a couple
Radhakrishnan also points to similarities in stance between other sculptures at the exhibition. For example, in ‘The Ramp’ (2004), in which Musui is imagined as the saint Ramkrishna, there are little figures at its foot; many of them have one of their legs raised —symbolic of an aspiration to reach a higher platform emotionally, spiritually. The saint, though now elevated, is imagined here as one who has risen from among them.
“In ‘The Crowd’, the figures move in the direction they want,” he adds. Radhakrishnan’s work thus seems to come out of an awareness of a collective or a group that can or may form, but would rather dissolve. Musui’s completeness has instead been imagined in his ‘other half’. As he puts it: “I saw Musui and Maiya as different halves that I put together. It’s one for the other, they hold each other’s hand.”
A master of bronze
Juhi Saklani, writer and editor for several books produced by the Musui Art Foundation, also points to his singular use of bronze. “He is a sculptor who periodically makes the biggest bronze installations while being able to give the alloy alight weightless feeling,” she says.
“Bronze as a sculptural medium usually evokes big and solid pieces. But in the Human Boxes series, for instance, I found it exciting and liberating to break that paradigm of bronze sculpting and work with seemingly weightless pieces to create insubstantial presences like smoke or aroma. These are works of instinct and feeling, not of planning or calculation. My childhood consisted of these little things: the idli pot, the table fan…,” says the artist. This is one of his signature works; they include details of the lives of migrants, who lived on land around his studio. His Boat series is also in bronze.
“Boats, a recurring motif, keep appearing in my sculptures, as both Kerala and Bengal are coastal areas,” says the artist. He has also worked with a mix of paper pulp and bronze—often in the same artwork. “Pulp is malleable and soft, and a little hardness comes in when bronze goes into it—you see there is no limit to what you can experience or change in it. The exploring space in your mind never exhausts itself,” he says. The exhibition by Gallerie Nvya is on at Bikaner House, India Gate, till December 14.