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“As a boy in Attingal, I loved diving into the warm waters of the lotus pond…” - A RAMACHANDRAN

A Ramachandran was born in 1935 in the picturesque village of Attingal in verdant South Kerala. “Dense and ancient serpent groves, placid ponds with water lilies, bamboo clumps and wild plants and bushes punctuated the large tracks of cultivated land... Growing up here meant allowing nature to etch deep images on one’s mind.” (R Siva... “As a boy in Attingal, I loved diving into the warm waters of the lotus pond…” - A RAMACHANDRAN

A Ramachandran was born in 1935 in the picturesque village of Attingal in verdant South Kerala. “Dense and ancient serpent groves, placid ponds with water lilies, bamboo clumps and wild plants and bushes punctuated the large tracks of cultivated land... Growing up here meant allowing nature to etch deep images on one’s mind.” (R Siva Kumar, A Ramachandran: A Retrospective, Volume 1, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2003, p. 31) He began his art training at the Leelavilas Painting School, a British academy, and favoured the wash-like technique popularised by Abanindranath Tagore. Inspired by a reproduction of Ramkinkar Baij’s Santhal Family, he moved to Shantiniketan in 1957 to engage with the Indian art community. There, Baij and Benode Behari Mukherjee became influential mentors, guiding his artistic exploration and deepening his connection to Indian history and tradition.

Ramachandran’s works in the 1950s and 1960s demonstrate a powerful political awareness, conveyed through compositions featuring headless and distorted figures that symbolised violence. However, the events of 1984, including the anti-Sikh riots and the assassination of Indira Gandhi, prompted a shift in his artistic approach. “The sight of such extreme human misery made him determined not to sublimate such raw experience of agony into art.” (Ella Datta, The Art of A Ramachandran, New Delhi: Lustre Press, 2000) He moved away from portraying agony in a detached manner and instead focused on contemplative depictions of the natural world. “Anyone viewing Ramachandran’s career would readily notice a rupture, with Yayati marking the definitive break, which splits it into two distinct halves. It can be read as a movement from darkness to light, a shift from a dystopian to a Utopian vision of the world… So the rupture should have been caused by a blend of emotion and rethinking, a rethinking about the relation between art and life, and about modernism and one’s cultural antecedents.” (R Siva Kumar, A Ramachandran: A Retrospective, Critical Collective, online)

Although nature had an overarching impact, “The growing presence and importance of nature in Ramachandran’s post-Yayati oeuvre [mural, 1984-86] is particularly noteworthy because nature is conspicuously absent from his early work.” (R Siva Kumar, A Ramachandran: A Retrospective, Volume 2, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2003, p. 140) The artist developed a fascination for lotus ponds during his annual journeys to Rajasthan, specifically around Udaipur, which began in the 1970s. In 1985, he crafted ceramic pieces that were among his earliest representations of lotus ponds. The subject gradually evolved into a profound and meaningful focal point of his artistic exploration.

Much like the present lot, Ramachandran’s representations of the lotus pond were informed by a specific aerial viewpoint, seen from the same distance at an oblique angle. The objects are brought to the fore through radiant colour and opaque renderings while the receding space is treated as flat and uniform. This style speaks of the various influences and references from history that inform Ramachandran’s language. His compositions have diverse affinities, such as Japanese screens in the vibrant use of colours, and the buoyant depiction and symbolism that reflect the murals of Ajanta and Sittannavasal caves, Kerala murals, and Jal Vihar pichwais. The lotus also features in several works by the artist’s mentors at Santiniketan such as the mural by Nandalal Bose, based on the lotus scrolls he had seen at Ajanta; Mukherjee’s calligraphic pictures of lotuses inspired by Far Eastern art; and Baij’s watercolours.

In 1997 with a set of watercolours called Mansarovar, Ramachandran began incorporating a harmonised play of water, lotus plants, dragonflies, flowers, buds, butterflies, and bugs. “By giving the insects a human association and the males his own visage in these paintings he brings to surface the metaphorical underpinnings of his representations of the lotus pond.” (Kumar, p. 164) Ramachandran’s belief in the spirit of nature as an embodiment of the resurgence of life is pronounced in these vital images of the lotus pond.

In the present lot, Autobiography of an Insect in the Lotus Pond, 2000, the artist “is not only one of the many species of insects but also an insect of myriad moods and arrays that grows merrier and more colourful as he moves through the lotus leaves to the upper echelons of the lotus pond. This is also a painting notable for its decorative and colouristic splendour. In it the whole pond and in effect the whole painting is turned into a dense arrangement of lotus leaves, an undulating surface defined by a few saturated colours, and their sharp edges. And the yellow veins accentuating the structure of each leaf, painted in an unmodulated intense blue, add a quality of preciousness to the whole image.” (Kumar, pp. 165-167)

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