Art and the Malayalam alphabet

Calligrapher Artist Bhattathiri has given a new visual vocabulary to the Malayalam alphabet. He has won this year’s Jikji Prize for Calligraphy awarded by Cheongju Cultural Centre, Seoul

December 14, 2017 03:42 pm | Updated 03:42 pm IST - Thiruvananthapuram

 Artist Bhattathiri

Artist Bhattathiri

The letters of the alphabet took a long time to evolve, and to get standardised into their present forms, shapes and figurations. In Malayalam too, the artists’ romance with the alphabet has a long history; the flourishes and flights of hand writing can be found in palm leaf manuscripts, scrolls and metal plates.

In the first decades after the advent of print, it found early forms and shapes in early stone types, metal and wooden block prints. With the spread of printing machines and moving types it blossomed in more vibrant and complex ways, triggering synergies between writers, typesetters and artists. The spread of literacy spurred the love and admiration for the word.

For long, written, painted and printed words have been an ubiquitous presence in Kerala; its public spaces are inundated with words; there are graffiti on all the walls, posters and billboards on pillars and posts stare at us from all around.

The pre-digital, analog era witnessed an array of word artists such as Gopalan, A.S. Nair, V.M. Balan, Namboodiri, C.N. Karunakaran, Vasupradeep, Rajendran, P.K. Rajan, C.J. Thomas, and Sankarankutty whose work gave character and identity to the magazines, and in some cases, even to the writers.

But the digital era, despite the possibilities it offers, saw a shrinkage in font variety and typeface design. The intimate and visceral connection that an earlier generation of word artists had with language and the alphabet seems to give way to pre-designed and serialised designs and given tool kits.

Artists such as Narayana Bhattathiri, better known as Artist Bhattathiri, were exceptions to this. He began his art practice and honed his skills in the analog era, but easily found his lines and strokes in the digital medium also. The switch from pencil/brush to mouse was seamless in his case.

During the last four decades, Bhattathiri has painted and drawn thousands of titles, designed text layouts of various magazines, brochures, books, posters, advertisements, film titles.... His illustrations in Malayalam magazines were noted for their visual flourish and flights of imagination.

 A calligraphy work by Artist Bhattathiri

A calligraphy work by Artist Bhattathiri

In the process he brought to the Malayalam alphabet art a new vigour and endless innovation. By working his way through the contours and margins, the twists and turns, the dots and vowels of the Malayalam alphabet, he recreates the awe and wonder of that primal encounter between meaning and word, the abstract signification and the concrete form and shape of the alphabet.

His art practice is one that works with, through and around the tense and the arbitrary but deeply resonant relationship between the word and its meaning, the alphabet and its sound.

If one browses through the thousands of word designs created by Bhattathiri, one will be astounded by their variety. His designs approach and negotiate with the alphabet in a profound manner; the alphabet and words are not mere potential objects of ‘beauty’ or pre-defined functionality for him; instead his art intensely engages with the meanings, sign values, sound, genre (story, novel, film), and space (magazine, book, paper, poster...); these factors decide the size, shape, strokes, texture, and medium of his art work.

Looking at his works, one feels the word forms emerging out of meanings, movements, sound, affects, emotions, bhava and rasa associated with them. He uses the alphabet styles of various languages and cultures – their shape, size, flow, serifs, ascenders, descenders, stems, finials, apex, brackets, leaps and loops, to adopt, coax and caress them into the Malayalam alphabet.

 A calligraphy work by Artist Bhattathiri

A calligraphy work by Artist Bhattathiri

As a result, one can find in his work traces of postures, slants, flows and joints of Chinese, Arabic, Sanskrit, and Hindi; they are employed to animate words to resonate with their cultural/linguistic roots and to make them converse with Malayalam.

Likewise, his ambigrams are ‘alphabetic flights of imagination’, they are complex and fascinating creations that combine meaning and form in inimitably playful ways.

Unlike English, which has an evolved and definite design history with manuals and style books founded on definite features and rules about ascender and descender, ‘x’ height and serifs, the size, flow, contours and shape of the Malayalam alphabet follow a totally different trajectory, and so, calls for a distinct alphabet aesthetic.

It has its dots and vowels, curls and crescents, rounded formations and varying heights, with combined letters to boot.

Instead of being limited by this, Bhattathiri exults in this veritable complexity that gives him boundless freedom to improvise and innovate.

He is one artist in contemporary times who has taken up this challenge and has enriched Malayalam font/type face/title design. Bhattathiri’s words and letters speak in tune with the trajectories of the denotations and connotations and illuminate their semiotic and symbolic energies.

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