Imagine a tree, a pot and a youthful girl from the Bhil tribes of Rajasthan. The tree is flowering with lush leaves and the young girl every bit seductive in her odhini and skirt/or sari. At the corner of this fine rendition is a small round-bottomed earthen pot, and we find a man with a luscious moustache and thick mop of hair curled up in a crouched pose.
Interesting how the tree and the sensuous girl both are large and central to the watercolours. The earthen pot is small and quaint. The man in the transparent pot is a self-portrait of 81-year-old master of Indian art Achuthan Ramachandran. In an age of selfies, this obsession has been going on for the last five decades. His show at Delhi’s Vadehra Art Gallery comes up after his vacation in the USA where he was cooped up in the snow-laden winter. The exhibition is open till May 31.
This maestro, who is known to be a compulsive drawing and sketching artist, sat and dreamt of the forests of Rajasthan that had been his leitmotif for so many years. And as he journeyed into his idyllic moods of myth-making, his jewel-toned colours of sienna, emerald green and amber yellows bathed in the snow flakes of winter and became subtle shades of limp lavenders and azure blues that spoke of softening springs.
Ramachandran’s poem images at the gallery have a soothing effect on art lovers. The trees are rich and resonant with bees, butterflies, dragonflies, beehives, chameleons and several other creatures from the forests and suddenly these are softened monochromes. Flowers tumble out of the branches. Everything is in balance.
“Nature for me is what I have seen in forests,” Ramachandran says. “I have studied nature and derived my own intrinsic style. I have always felt beauty is inherent. It does not lie in aping modern ways. I also believe that man and nature must live in harmony.”
Ramachandran is a lover of both botanical pursuits and a zoological perceptionist. His precision and technical fluency is that of Italian art masters, its almost as if his earthen pot poems are like Devnagiri scripts woven into the rural idyll.
“My visual memory has always been strong,” he says. “My teacher Ram Kinkar Baij told me to go out and draw from nature. It became an addiction. I carry a sketchbook and a pen with me always.” His use of pen and ink, pencil and watercolour in varying combinations on paper speak of the perfection of the Chinese art masters. “Just as a blind man comprehends his world through touch, I comprehend my world through drawing,” he says.
The watercolours have a simplicity that is deceptive. Each work is a reflection of Indian culture. The jewellery on the young women, their perfection of attire, the way their drapes fall in careless but sensuous folds, the detailing of the printed skirts or odhinis, everything points to a meticulous study and perfection. Ramachandran has been an advocate of the importance of developing “a visual culture, which should become an integral part of our inherent culture.” Over the years his works that have been akin to murals are a result of his observations of people in their natural surroundings so as to portray them in their naturality with nature. After creating numberless works of a lotus pond in Udaipur, and giving us a choreography of the Bhils and Lohars of Rajasthan, this show has no ponds.
Ramachandran’s self-portraits in the pots are satiric stance on the ‘male gaze’ which he believes is what keeps the art world going. A voracious reader and lover of Dostoyevsky, his own writings have given him the abacus of a devout scholar. His life has been lived in lines and his sketches born of a ritual steeped in discipline. Look closer at the youthful maidens, they are despondent, forlorn, lost in the spaces of their own yearnings.
There is a melancholia within the beauty of existence. “Yes,” he says and falls into sagely silence. Twenty years ago one evening in winter at his home, he spoke of how he loved Dostoyevsky’s writings, how they haunted him. These Bhil women have that signature of despair, a solitary angst that embraces them as they face and live against the injustices of society and the world. For this genius among Indian artists, it looks as if life has slowed down and the light has settled into a twilight zone that prefers the contours of dawn and dusk as the insects hover around his frames and settle close to the earthen pot poems. The earthen pot series are a treat for tired eyes.