By a bountiful twist of fate, selected works of late artist T.R.P. Mookiah (1934-2009) have arrived to live in DakshinaChitra, on exhibit till November end. Founder, Deborah Thiagarajan says, “The family wanted their entire collection to be housed in one museum. They donated 27 paintings and 38 sculptures.” In the crafted tradition, these are lively idiomatic expressions. A bull sits on a pedestal with his tail swinging out threatening to whack me if I do not circle it at a safe distance. Conservationists have mended some broken clay figurines and restoration work continues.
Mookiah’s paintings are splendid up front. Reproductions cannot capture their essence. There is a rustic vigour in native scenes, odd perspectives stoking a catchy dynamic. Village crowds mill about women stirring pongal in earthen pots , waiting with bated breath for the rice to froth and boil over. Mookiah’s microcosms bring alive a characteristic peculiar to India — the bonding of people and energy of crowds. They counter my city-wise wariness of mobs. Indians as a race do not mind hustling. In fact, most find comfort in coming closer. I gravitate willingly to Mookiah’s sculptures. From the living traditions of our land, he honed curious aggregates, where creatures, people and things fuse into marvellous forms. Women in a group turning this way and that are melded, men at a roadside anxiously wait in companionship like fingers of a hand askance: the separateness of things dissolve and humans bond without the weight of bondage.
My delightful feeling of discovery recalls when, years ago, I stumbled on Helen Cordero (1915–1994), a Cochiti Pueblo potter of New Mexico, who revived figurative clay sculpture. In the 1960s, Helen started making dolls at the late age of 45. Finding a manageable medium in clay, Helen first recreated her grandfather — a great storyteller who attracted lots of children. She made an open-mouthed larger central figure with children clambering all over eagerly, everyone joined together.
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Barbara Babcock’s essay about Helen’s folk art, ‘At Home, No Womens are Storytellers’ takes its title from her creative struggle. Clay, tradition, rituals and people power formed Helen’s art as it did Mookiah’s, amazingly at the same time on the other side of the earth. She became famous for her Storyteller Dolls, bringing multiple characters and expressions into one piece, as if different bodies are all attached.
The human body that we tend to see as a separate entity actually exists in community. What we see as our individual identity is essentially a reflection of others’ opinions, desires, expressions and ideations. We would not exist but for the fact that all others do, simultaneously. Creation myths, including ours, talk of this, forms separating from what was once a formless unity. “The Man has a thousand heads, a thousand eyes, a thousand feet…” begins the Rig Veda about the sacrifice of the primeval man Purusha to create the world. Often in cosmogonic myths, men are fashioned from clay: in Southern Australia, Pund-jel made two clay images of men. In the Polynesian myth, Father Sky cohabits with Mother Earth. Their “Children Gods” separate them forcefully to garner space — then, they make humans out of red clay.
Mookiah used terracotta and bronze, materials that gave him freedom to shape with immediacy. Emerging an artist in the late 1960s, he was called “Bull Mookiah” for his realistic renditions of
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The ecstatic emotional drama of native scenes orchestrates every event portrayed. Musicians play, knocking elbows, legs melting into each other, the sound of their drums and cymbals all but frozen for the sculpture. Mookiah was foremost a shaper of collective identity. Rightfully, his family wished his private collection not be scattered but to rest under one canopy.