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In this essay written on the forthcoming solo show of Anil Kumar Janardhanan at the Palette Art Gallery, New Delhi, JohnyML writes about the evolution of his imageries.

Travelers carry the myths of the lands that they have passed and crossed. Architectural ensembles that qualify the lands as traditional, historical, rural, urban and so on become in more than one way personal memorials for the traveler. A sense of nostalgia tinged with fatigue and pleasure frames these architectural memories. It is not necessary that the traveler treads on the same path or cross the same land again. But in each of his memory visitations, these architectures come alive as mnemonic codes that would relate the person with history. Anil Kumar Janardhanan’s latest paintings encode his journeys; both the physical and the spiritual/intellectual.

Whichever narrative strategies that a historiographer takes, he cannot escape from the crude and sophisticated architectural encodings. Positing Anil Kumar Janardhanan and his works in the field of a visual historiography of a journey would be a bit fallacious. However, the images that rule the pictorial surfaces of his canvases are derived from the innumerable journeys that he has undertaken during the past twenty years. These paintings perhaps narrate a single story, where the fear of an imminent deluge gets transformed into a transcendental shudder, with assorted images like snakes, kites, sinking architectures, flag posts, gothic architectural edifices etc.

When the Italian traveler Marco Polo came back to the court, the King asked him to narrate the stories about the cities that he had seen. Marco Polo narrated several stories. The king became curious as Marco Polo was not talking about his own and favorite city of Venice. Eventually the king asked him why he restrained himself from narrating the beauty of Venice. Marco Polo is said to have answered: “My Lord, whenever I talk about a city, I talk about nothing but Venice.”

Marco Polo must have been trying to realize a Venice in every city that he visited. Or else, he must have been seeing Venice as the embodiment of all cities in the world. Anil Kumar Janardhanan’s painterly narratives also vibe well with the essence of the Marco Polo story. Whenever Anil Kumar paints a city, he paints his temple town, Varkala Janardhana Swami Temple in south-west coast of Kerala. However strong the wanderlust be, Anil Janardhanan’s sensibilities are shaped by his early childhood memories of the temple town. “I have painted Benaras and Venice in my works. But every time I paint, I paint them as the temple town in Varkala,” Anil says.

Seven paintings, some quite ambitious in scale but some quite moderate, done during the last one year of his sojourn in Mumbai, mark the departure from his earlier works where he predominantly concentrated on painting the flora and fauna in sylvan landscapes. Serenity of blue and green dominated his canvases at that time. However, there is a major shift in the new works. Without debarring the blues and greens from the pictorial format, Anil has given them a new role; a role that facilitates the feelings of awe and eeriness. The soothing character of his works has given way to a more challenging and engaging set of imageries.

As aforementioned, architectural ensembles have an overwhelming presence in these works. These architectural forms oscillate between the feel of Gothic edifices, colonial and syncopated structures, temple towns and shanty towns. They look like phantom cities. Luminous colours light up these edifices. In one of the paintings, in the middle of small houses suddenly the viewer finds the glowing body of Jesus Christ or a saintly figure. As if from nowhere a green pool appears behind these houses and one finds three people playing with snakes in the water. A mask like female face fills up a door and stares at the viewer. These disjointed symbols are united only by the peculiar mood created by the architectural surroundings. These paintings as a whole destabilize the narrative possibilities on the one hand and on the other they open up vast areas for psychoanalytical interpretations.

Snake is one of the symbols that the psychoanalysts have ever fascinated with. Snake stands for power, wisdom and empowerment, or procreation, longevity, rebirth and immortality, and also of death and disease, sin, lecherous temptation and cunning duplicity. ‘Intertwined snakes in the golden caduceus signed medical healing in ancient Greece and Rome, while snakes shot up as Medusa’s hair framing a face so ugly and malevolent that anyone looking at it turned to stone. According to some authors the snake is the animal form that appears most often in myth, legends and folklore. The shape and movement of the snake resonates with the experience of and the fantasies connected with the penis and thus come to represent it in an unconscious symbolic equation of the snake with the phallus. That it can shed and change its skin and renew its youth, emerging with an increase in size and strength may have influenced its presence in a number of African snake cults concerning resurrection and fecundity, while in the case of India the phallic Hindu god Siva is also known and represented as King of Serpents.’

In Anil Janardhanan’s works snakes come from the mythology of self. In a very poetic work by him one could see a crocodile grinning while coming up for air from the middle of a green pool. Crocodiles, snakes, birds and masks replace human presence or they make a self attribution of animated-ness that implies the erstwhile presence of human images in these works. One cannot say for sure whether the artist anticipates a deluge or he looks at the scenario after a cathartic flood. The sense of ambiguity that prevails over these works makes them rather appealing.

Water, especially pools with green surfaces, is recalled from the artist’s childhood memory. He recounts a story that his grandparents had told him. One day the ocean came forward (an unrecorded Tsunami?) and swallowed the edifices of the Varkala Temple. Only the flag post and the roofs stood above the level of water. And over the flag post, a garudan (eagle, the mighty messenger and vehicle of God) flew and roosted. Anil has recaptured this myth in one of his paintings.