Evolution of Ramachandran’s People
This is a custom made book. Published on the occasion of the veteran artist, A.Ramachandran’s solo show at the Guild Gallery, New York, (December 2007) this book adds to the A.Ramachandran lore so far produced by several art historians and writers. The artist himself has written about his art practice on several other occasions, which usually provides sufficient resource materials for the other writers. With the literature built around his life and practice, Ramachandran is one of the Indian modern artists whose career is historically placed and contextually analyzed. Ella Datta picks and chooses from the available written and visual materials, and generates a few observations on the development of human forms in Ramachandran’s works.
The book has three small chapters, namely Face to Face, Face to Face with the Self and Face to Face with Tribals. The titles are self revealing. In the first chapter Ella Datta problematizes the formation of human figures in Ramachandran’s oeuvre and tries to eke out answers from the artist’s writings. This chapter shows the author’s craftsmanship in culling out relevant portions from the artist’s first person narratives published elsewhere, including the hefty volume written by R.Sivakumar and published by the NGMA and Vadehra Gallery. Ella Datta raises a few questions and in the virtual field of an imagined face to face Ramachandran answers to those questions; how he got attracted to human forms, how his childhood memories and experiences helped him to gather an idea about the artistic depiction of flora and fauna etc.
The second chapter, ‘Face to Face with the Self’ is a short narrative on the self portraits that Ramachandran would like to include in most of his paintings. The author traces the origin of Ramachandran’s self portraiture in his monumental works done during the 1980s, including ‘Yayati’. She attributes metaphorical and symbolic values to these self portraits. The third chapter ‘Face to Face with Tribals’ is a crisp elucidation of Ramachandran’s interest in the depiction of tribal people in his works. The author makes a formal analysis of these tribal figures and explains how the artist made them his iconic characters since 1980s.
This book serves the purpose of a catalogue, a short monograph and a tributary volume in one go. And the major drawback of this book is that it aspires to be all these three things at the same time. Ella Datta is a respectable writer with a lot of experience in the field of Indian modern art. With all due respect to the author I would say that this book does not give any new insight about Ramachandran’s art. May be for an audience that wants to know the ‘crux’ of Ramachandran just by flipping through the pages, it is a good book. But for those who have gone through all what has already been written about the artist, this book brings nothing but disappointment.
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