The oldest gallery of Chennai, Artworld is celebrating its 49th anniversary with art of the Madras Movement. I am absorbed in P. Perumal’s paintings when the conversation turns to canvases. In those days, the resources to make a good frame and stretch a canvas were hard to come by. Even paper sometimes was hard to afford. It means so much to a painter to have a blank canvas. This is where it all begins, where the first stroke will change the canvas forever. Those who found a good stretcher held on to it and this was true even years later. “We could stretch the canvas on the same frame again and again,” says Asma Menon who learnt from Perumal. “Why throw away a good thing?”
I am bowled over by the raw power of Perumal’s characterisation. There are people everywhere, stick-like figures sparingly clothed, staring at us sometimes, as village folk do who they see townspeople. Sometimes they are dancing with drums and elsewhere they are waiting with baskets and bundles, perhaps for a bus or lorry to give them a ride. I make notes about bullfights, blood and men. The figures have a way of tearing themselves out of the canvas, just as coloured paper gets jagged white edges when torn off by hand.
When Sarala’s father Soli Daruwala started Sarala’s Art Gallery in 1965, hardly anyone bought modern art. Traditional Indian painting was attractive to the people of Madras, not the modern idiom. It was something they could not relate to. In the last 15 years, galleries are seeing a dramatic change in sales of contemporary art. Art is now blooming like never before. However, living a bare-threads existence, the artists of 1950s Madras struggled hard, balancing acts being breadwinner and artist. Often, they were pushed to the outskirts. It could never have been in the city. I learn that Perumal used to cycle everywhere.
Perumal’s version is slightly different. He says he was happy and he always sold his paintings. “How else do you think I survived?” His first sale was to an Italian. Then a German or American. The National Gallery of Modern Art, the Madras Museum… everyone has his paintings. He tells me his thozhil paid off, the Tamil word for profession that resounds with toil. “But you cycled everywhere?” I ask and Perumal laughs, remembering. “Yes, a beat up cycle. There were no buses to wait for or scooters.” He cycled to the Adyar burial ground and to the LIC building. He made sketches, stored impressions mentally, came back and painted. About his student days at the Government College of Arts and Crafts in the 1950s he tells me, “I was sitting at a model, painting, when suddenly I felt someone tapping my back. I turned. It was the principal, Roy Chowdhury. As a student I’d seen him working at the Triumph of Labour Statue — the one at Marina Beach. Find your own path, he said, and you will do well. I stuck to that advice. I found my own expression. I paint so even a child can understand.”
Economy of form reveals itself in Perumal’s paintings: a sparse landscape; a family travelling with a cow or goat and a sniffing dog in tow; figures outstretched under the sky, taking a nap. I tarry over a painting of two women carrying baskets of fish. A woman hands over a big fish to the other, an inexplicable exchange. When K.C.S Paniker began Cholamandal in 1966, he tried to convince Perumal to buy a plot. “I was married by then so it would not have worked for me. I moved to North Madras.”
By 1977, Cholamandal had community washrooms and a canteen. They would put mats out to sleep near Gopinath’s hut. From the banyan tree, the seafront was visible.
Like the painter needs an empty canvas, we need empty minds to receive new ideas, to imagine.
Perumal always flowered. Some of us are picking the blooms up late, that is all.
(Chennai Canvas links art to design and culture through an inside look at the city)
