At three in the morning, when Thiruvananthapuram is still to wake up, Narayana Bhattathiri sits down with a brush and a sheet of paper, and ruminates on the alphabet. Then his brush thickens with ink, tapers and curves as Malayalam syllables become lines, shapes and forms. They look like writing, but cannot be read. “I made up for it by waking up at three am every day and creating whatever I wanted,” says Bhattathiri, 67, master calligrapher and director of the World Calligraphy Association.
His understanding of calligraphy comes from distilled perception: a letter can exist beyond language. “We think of calligraphy as art through letters. While it is known as the art of beautiful handwriting, as we move deeper into its magic, we can see the letters turning into art. My calligraphy is not meant to be read. It is to express what I feel through an image.” This philosophy is at the heart of the International Calligraphy Festival of Kerala (ICFK), which Bhattathiri has founded to bring together calligraphers from across the world.
Bhattathiri’s inspiration came from the world’s ignorance: calligraphy was barely recognised as an art form in Kerala. When he was a student, he took up lettering jobs to earn a few rupees. “I had a problem asking for money from my family. So, calligraphy came in handy.”
His work led him to a regional newspaper, where he worked as its first ‘calligrapher’, and later moved to the TNIE group’s Malayalam Vaarika. “The work offered me a steady income, but it put my art on hold,” he says. His solution was to create before dawn.
At the entrance of his studio in Vazhuthacaud, a board carries the Malayalam syllables ‘ka cha ta tha pa’, familiar to generations of Malayali children. Go upstairs, and the same language becomes less literal—large compositions in which brushstrokes, colours and letters merge into abstract forms.
In 2017, Bhattathiri, the first Indian to win an Excellence Award at South Korea’s Jikji Festival, found that the award made him realise how little visibility Indian calligraphy internationally has. He began collecting works by Indian calligraphers and presenting them at Jikji; eventually filling an entire floor with it exclusively. Despite international recognition, he has not deviated from routine. He often draws inspiration from Malayalam poetry, but separates the visual form of the words from their meaning. “Many people who visit my gallery sometimes don’t know Malayalam. They only enjoy the sweeping form of the letters,” he says.
Bhattathiri believes that calligraphy does not demand an artistic pedigree as much as it demands time. “It is yet to have genuine practitioners,” he says. “People want to paint right from day one. But for strokes to become art, put much love with sincere effort.”