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Allegories for Humanity

The Guild, US opens the solo show of A.Ramachandran’s watercolours and drawings on 5th December 2007. The show is accompanied by a book written on the artist by Ella Datta. During this occasion JohnyML goes through his oeuvre and finds out the humanitarian values that lead A.Ramachandran in his artistic career.

A.Ramachandran

Allegories elevate simple beings into the realm of a symbolic order. The allegorical narratives that often reveal the truth of life through identifiable stories draw their energy from collective memories and from the shared sense of myths and epics. In these, grand narratives are deconstructed through the introduction of multiple perspectives and minor characters get their voice heard through hitherto unimaginable articulations. Their stand in-ness quality, though considered as a minor literary technique by now, has been a potential tool for the visual artists who take interest in sequential and freeze frame/condensed narrative techniques. Visual art, mainly painting and sculpture more often than not resorts to allegorical techniques despite their fallen grace as a literary form and it would not be wrong to say that any kind of visual art has a covert sense of allegorization ingrained in them.

A. Ramachandran’s works in total are a celebration of allegorical narratives. The organic world that we see predominantly in his works emblematizes the general human saga, freed from the shackles of temporality and immediacy. The realities of our quotidian lives are awashed with the sheen of allegorical myths and the philosophical outlook of the artist comes to the fore than his critique or comment on the immediate. These philosophical, humanistic allegories celebrate life while reminding the viewer/reader of the trap doors of death, pestilence and the eventual annihilation as seen in the paintings of the masters like Rembrandt and Jan Van Eyke. The celebration is always underlined by its counter thesis. Or in other words, life’s celebration becomes important only when it is contrasted with a sense of waning, disintegration and death.

This constant dialogue between life and death in Ramachandran’s works has the magnificent visual flourish of Ingmer Bergman’s ‘Seventh Seal’ in which the warrior engages himself in a game of dice with the embodied form of death. This does not mean that Ramachandran has always shunned making political commentaries or committed himself to the cause of ‘political progression’. Like any other young painter in India, he too had his share in ‘expressionism’. His expressionist works were allegorical commentaries on the socio-political situation of India during 1970s, when the left wing radicals decided to implement ‘total revolution’ through ultra methods. The mainstream political leadership of the country had then suppressed these risings using iron hand. Ramachandran ironically commented on this particular situation, where revolution eating its own children, a la Goya, through his pivotal work of the time, Kali Puja.

Perhaps, Ramachandran’s philosophical shift to the nature and truth of life stems from his vigorous indulgence with the politically agitated milieu of the country during 1970s. Where does one go from revolution and its self-defeating idealism? Can an artist work along with the mainstream political power and its ogress like agenda? How far he can visually express his radical thinking and political critique especially in a situation where the democratically elected government at once preaches social revolution and curbs the radical proliferation and implementation of it? An intellectual seeks the medium of allegories only when he is made aware of the inescapable clutches of power and his innate desire to shrug off and resist its very holding. He, then goes on to find out the essence of humanity, in order to declare and hoodwink his affiliation with political radicalism, in its purest philosophical terms, in which he assures himself and his viewer that the mighty hands of death/power cannot kill the spirit and joy of life.

This is an optimistic philosophy and optimism is the product of darker times in politics and history. Whatever an artist does in the negative times, while symbolically express his reaction to the negative forces that surround him, is an expression of his hope and this hope is inscribed in the most condensed narratives. Like the people who are forced to live in concentration camps and jails inscribe their feelings on whatever available for keeping their spirit from sinking into negativism, Ramachandran is also seen shifting into an available mode of inscription, that is allegorization of life. For a jail bird, if he does not belong to any special category, there are two easily available mediums for/of inscription; the wall of the jail and his own body. Inscription on the wall and the body then becomes a performative act rather than an aesthetic rendition, which is often hailed as the field of subconscious. This performative act is a very conscious one where the wall/body is turned into an icon in itself, a totem pole, where individual myths are projected and reflected.

Ramachandran chooses the scale of murals/walls in his philosophically inclined allegorical works and brings ‘body’ (human body in particular and the body of the organic world in general) as an icon. A body endowed with the powers of organic growth and also endowed with the capabilities of sensitive response is the icon in Ramachandran’s paintings since Yayati. The artist detaches his sense of body from the immediate political body, which is inscribed with the tensions of nation, ideology and palpable narration. His body is a body which is romanticized in the folklores and myths, enduring in suffering, neutral in inscriptions, marginalized in the mainstream discourse and emblematic of a worker’s body. This body is growing and decaying at the same time and also it has desire to resist the disintegration. The body iconified by Ramachandran does not yield to the powers of death and decay. On the contrary, it demands life/youth as seen in the allegory of Yayati. This body is an agitated and revolting body, which understands the ‘progression’ of life into death and decay. In its radical demand to youthfulness, Ramachandran envisions a country which still has the capacity to desire revolution and growth against suppression and mortification of human faculties.

The romanticized body of the worker/s that we see in Ramachandran’s works, as historical evidences tell us, is derived from his interaction with the Rajasthan gypsies amongst whom the artist spends a lot of time in every year, as a part of his research and sketching. However, this information is not too necessary for reading his works as the emblematic of death defying political bodies and as the containers of suitable allegories. The idealized body, the desiring body and the revolting body in his paintings get individuality, if not as named characters but as recurring types. Interestingly, both the male and female bodies are invested with this power to desire and revolt. No woman in Ramachandran’s paintings opens her body for the much maligned ‘male gaze’. They gaze back at the viewer, in their rustic arrogance and simplicity. The curves of their tribhanga postures while endowing with sexual power, declare their own control over it. They are not just available for anyone. They retain their allegorical sense of attachment and detachment with the viewers and the male folk depicted within the paintings.

Anyone, who is familiar with Ramachandran’s oeuvre can feel that in the iconifying of women characters the artist holds a power of imperial gaze and makes them divine individuals, sidestepping their mundane tribulations and depoliticize their bodies for consumption not only of the viewer but also of the males within the picture frame. This could be a perverse view as their apparent deification is not about making them sexually available ‘devis’ but is about investing their bodies with a power that is not groomed and sophisticated. They celebrate their sexuality with confidence and are aware of its mortal nature. In this sense each woman in Ramachandran’s works embodies the power of life and death, she reflects about death not through the agency of sin but through the agency of submission, which the rustic woman in his works always seems to resist.

Within in this celebration of life and revolt, Ramachandran assumes the role of a quirky chronicler in the forms of motley creatures, a technique, which is quite suitable to allegorical purpose. In his various incarnations (in a series even he refers to the ten incarnations of Lord Vishnu), the artist does not appear as medium of the voiceless or as an agency of revolt. By just being there as a part of their larger world, his small but significant posture with an evident hagiographic detailing that undoubtedly places the artist within the allegorical narratives, functions as a connecting link between the allegorical world and the world in which the artist lives. In this way, his philosophical outlook gets an anchor in the real world of politics and history. And interestingly, many of these creatures are portrayed as ‘blind’ creatures having no gaze of their own.

Blindness again is an allegorical device, as far as Ramachandran is concerned. World literature of epics and myths has told us that the blind people are real ‘seers’; they are the people with a ‘vision’ who can see the beyond. This blindness of self then becomes an allegorical tool for the artist to tell the viewer that it is not a romantic world that he wants to portray, but what lies beyond it or what it could convey beyond its romantic and allegorical allusions. The artist’s blindness (metaphorically and in a sense physically) becomes a field of many visions where each viewer can invest his/her ‘eyes’. The interspersed narratives are disentangled by a blind seer through multiple visual readings thereby rendering his works more of a physical manifestation of the impalpable than simple narratives of a romantic world.

The recent works of Ramachandran include a lot of portraits of his protagonists. Generally in popular narratives (which Ramachandran’s works have become now in the cultural imagination of India) we see living characters becoming types with loaded symbolic attributions. In the portrait series of Ramachandran, one could see how the artist makes a deliberate attempt to de-type his protagonists. They are living human beings with their daily tribulations at hand to deal with. There is no effort from the artist’s part to deify them, as he had done in his 1980s works. They shed their allegorical garb and appear as real people, with those visual notations in the background to suggest their former affiliation as ‘characters’ in Ramachandran’s works. These works are the artist’s philosophical tribute to the people through which he talked to a world, which had rendered the artist devoid of easy means of articulation. These works remind the viewer of a grand presentation of the cast and crew for the audience appraisal after a magnificent theatrical performance. Once they have come before the audience, not as characters but as real ‘actors’ with their connotative paraphernalia, it could mean the end of a show. But also it suggests that they would come in different guises once again, in the visual ensembles that Ramachandran would create in the days to come.