Synoptic View of Kerala Art
The general art boom in India has boosted up the production and publication of art historical books in most of the regional languages. As these books are written in regional languages, their reach is limited. However, the arguments and historical evidences placed in these have a seeping in effect. Those historians who could cut across the language barriers and write in languages that are commonly understood (English, for the time being), absorb what is discussed in these books and incorporate it in their writings, often with due acknowledgement, so that these arguments could become a part of the mainstream discourse of contemporary Indian art. This seeping in effect is quite postmodernist in nature as it disallows the ‘master historian’ from making sweeping statements about a region and its production of visual culture. These books, though they are published by the mainstream publishing houses, in a ‘national’ sense are subaltern articulations that vie for a place in the mainstream discourse as well as that subvert the ‘ideological’ views on the marginal.
Kavitha Balakrishnan’s new book on the art of modern Kerala is an attempt to trace the routes through which the art of modern Kerala progressed and almost conquered the Indian art scene with so much of participation and production. Ravi Varma is either a stumbling block or a huge welcoming entrance for any art historian. Kavitha problematizes the case of Ravi Varma and argues that Ravi Varma’s popularity does not lie in excelling the western oil painting technique, giving material/visual form to Hindu pantheon and proliferating art through oleograph prints alone. Considering the socio-cultural realities of Ravi Varma’s times in Kerala and elsewhere, she says that the reasons for the popularity of his works should be traced in the ‘bodies’ of women that he made available to a ‘common public’ who could not access such bodies freely thanks to caste and class reasons. She analyses the works of Ravi Varma to show how he selected his themes and situations with ideologically directed eyes so that he could place women with their bodies in various stages of disrobing/robbing.
Taking cue from the popular theatre backdrop painting, photography, illustrations and cartoons, Kavitha points out how after Ravi Varma the art of Kerala was subordinated to the predominant production of literature and theatre. The general visual aesthetics of Kerala was an ideologically crafted mode of perception, in which the visuals became just an extension to the literature. The author says how the artists who got training under the illustrious artist K.C.S.Panicker brought in a positive change in Kerala’s visual art through their aggressive illustrations. Kavitha deals with another stalwart in Kerala, Madhava Menon, who stood against the ‘onslaught’ of modernism and worked with oriental aesthetics.
Kavitha’s attention turns not only to the artists who tried their best to establish an aesthetic sensibility amongst the Kerala public but also she analyses how in turn these artists were represented in other popular narratives including novels and films. She extensively deals with the tradition of magazine illustration and the contemporary artists’ involvement with this genre. By the end of the second part, she shows a tendency to rush through those decades and events that eventually paved the way for the art boom in Kerala. In this rush, she forgets minute details and commits some factual errors.
Apart from this rush, what makes this otherwise worthy book slightly imbalanced is the author’s romance with the history of illustration in Kerala. This topic being her research focus for almost five years, she naturally follows the calling of her passion and gives an elaborate narrative on that history. This imbalance makes the reader feel that the art of modern Kerala evolved from the magazine illustration. There is an attempt from the author’s part to look at the Kerala diaspora art and the position of women artists in Kerala. Had the author been a bit more patient in research and perceptive, these areas could have become the strong point of the book. The rush of the author is palpable and she needs to really work on this for a better art historical production.
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