When one medium of art tries to relate to another medium of art by attempting to understand and delve deeper into the other’s form and essence, this technique is called ‘ekphrasis’. Malayalis are familiar with ekphrasis in the illustrations of Randaamoozham by Artist Namboothiri or A.S. Nair’s sketches for the Malayalam translation of V.S. Khandekar’s Yayati .
In yet another interesting episode of ekphrasis in Malayalam artist, Bhagyanath C. attempted a series of drawings of K.R. Meera’s Arachar , the novel which received immense critical appreciation and went on to win the coveted Vayalar Award. These illustrations had accompanied the novel when it was serialised in a Malayalam weekly. However the exhibition of the drawings at Kanakakkunnu Palace in connection with the DC Books International Book Fair drew large crowds owing both to its own creative flair as also the critical acclaim received by Arachar .
Bhagyanath’s sketches/drawings/illustrations, in seeking to capture the essence of Meera’s novel defy classification, and at least some of them exceed the boundaries of pictorial art in creating new archetypes of death and new landscapes of terror surrounding modern life. Thus the fantasy born in fiction is elevated to new levels of delirium and nightmare in the pictures. The novel set in Kolkata and narrating a hang woman’s tale offers a sharp and precise rendering of space which for Bhagyanath spills into an amorphous canvas where the borderlines between death and life blur. The drumbeats of death in the novel translate into the pulse of life in the amniotic sac and the throbbing of a heart on fire in the sketches.
The transformation of the themes and motifs in the novel into uncanny and primitive images of the human unconscious generates the feeling that art can often reveal truths more profound than what the artist imagines. However he is careful not to draw any of the main characters of the novel, yet ever so gently evoking their inner demons and carefully adding up to the atmosphere of doom. The monstrous experiences of surveillance and suppression so intrinsic to women’s existence in the novel, the concreteness of the noose to female condition, the goat as an extended symbol of the woman as a scapegoat of circumstances, are all beautifully evoked.
Meera feels that it is indeed the first time in the history of women writing in Malayalam that a woman author has received so rare an honour where another artist pushes the boundaries of her art by paying tribute to it through his own artistic medium. She says that each of the images in fact competes with her words, clamouring to excel them and go beyond their limitations.
The artist’s fine feminist sensibility adds that extra dimension to women’s writing, in the process toppling received notions that a man cannot think like a woman or vice versa. That it is possible for a man to traverse the landscapes of a woman’s mind, to understand its metaphors, to reflect upon the reality and complexity of its difference is what these sketches illustrate.
The lyrical subversiveness of the original work resonates in the sketches too. In finding a visual vocabulary for the novel’s trenchant critique of a media saturated, patriarchal and de-humanised culture of commodification, the artist has proved to be eminently successful. This art while so inextricably linked to the world of the novel can nevertheless stand up on its own right. Not seduced by the lure of colour, they bear testimony to the stark black and whiteness of women’s lives, at the same time capturing the evocative abstractedness of their dreams and fears. It’s a man’s artistic tribute to a woman’s creative genius.
