Cholamandal’s new gallery Golden Oriole opened with an exhibition in January by the masters of the Madras Movement. By serendipity or purpose, K. Ramanujam’s ink drawing is displayed next to KCS Paniker’s oil and brush. Ramanujam’s elaborate ink-wash has domes and palatial buildings with seashell textures resembling Kublai Khan’s ‘Xanadu’. Here, a village goddess reigns. In Paniker’s painting, a man holding a long blade gazes at a sawn head on the ground. “He drew that when he saw two men sawing a tree,” explains senior artist Gopinath. It leaves me with a sensation that a man has cut off his own head and is staring at it, fallen. Yet, it was Ramanujam who looked at death in the face, and took his life at 33 years.
Unable to communicate and learning impaired, but brilliant in his artistry, young Ramanujam was an enigma. His father brought him to Paniker at the College of Arts and Crafts. Paniker took him in gladly. The human spirit can survive in the most difficult circumstances if it has the slimmest lifeline. For his entire time at the College, Ramanujam painted and drew. After his studies, people bought his paintings, recognising their worth, but the young man himself did not understand money. Once again, from the wayside, Paniker and others brought him to be part of Cholamandal. Gopinath recounts Paniker’s poignant response, “What will happen to the artist? To someone like Ramanujam? Where will he go?” Ramanujam epitomised the artist’s dilemma. In a sense, from this search, Cholamandal was born. S. Nandagopal recounts that his father, Paniker, allowed Ramanujam to talk even if he was the last man listening. He translated Ramanujam’s thoughts with care, words annotating drawings.
Gopinath describes, “Ramanujam used a certain ink called Sulekha. After he made the drawing, he would wash for effect.” When the ink became unavailable, Ramanujam discontinued the wash, as substitutes did not give the desired result. The painter’s experiences, both the known and the unconscious, are processed and realised on each canvas. From crisis comes painting. Ramanujam’s drawings are ludicrously fabulous, resolving his inner darkness by dwelling in fantasy. Genius loitered in his altered mental states, trapped in the body of the creative man, wanting to leap into the world he painted. Like Hitchcock’s cameo in every film that he made, Ramanujam appeared in his paintings with his hat on. “It was him,” says Gopinath. He is underwater with fish, riding a chariot or perched on a crescent moon conversing with some fantastical being. Influential artist James Ensor (1860-1949) too entered his paintings wearing a hat. “Ramanujam identified with Ensor and he donned his hat and the moustache!” says C. Douglas.
Childlike and innocent, Ramanujam would be filled with awe at tales others told. “He liked to play chess and he was good, but he wanted to win every game he played. That was a problem,” says Gopinath, reminiscing with a laugh. Ramanujam’s life could well have belonged to a Hitchcock plot combining the intrigue of the human psyche with unusual coincidences. “The last painting Ramanujam made was a man in a dog’s body,” says Gopinath, adding, “No one knows this other story. The morning Ramanujam consumed poison and died, the dog in our compound went missing.” They searched for the dog everywhere and much later he was found, dead in the casuarina groves. Uncannily, the year Ramanujam died, 1973, Paniker painted ‘Dog’, a haunting image of a dog and crow. The dog associates with faith, companionship and death as with Yudhisthira in the Mahabharata. The crow symbolises the spirits of our forefathers.
French artist Jean Dubuffet saw the art of those on the edge as very pure expressions, characterised by a naïve approach merging with fantasy, terming it ‘Art Brut’. Douglas elaborates, “Rilke talks about the ‘other side’. As children, we are more inward-looking, until an age, and then we are turned increasingly to become outward-looking. Ramanujam was always there. Yet, his visual language and its grammar were powerful. It was not the drawing of a child.” In his The Secret of the Veda, Aurobindo interprets Sarama the hound as direct intuition. Ramanujam’s expressions channel this kind of raw energy, captivating us to intuit and make a leap.
Chennai Canvas links art to design and culture through an inside look at the city.
The writer has degrees from NID and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is passionate about unravelling art through dialogue and writing.
