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Lot 55

 

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Recalling the first time that he read about the holy city of Benares in the novels of Sarat Chandra as a schoolboy, Ram Kumar once reflected, “At that time, I had never dreamt that it would become so significant to me both as an artist as well as a human being, that its shadow will linger on for such a long time.” (Artist quoted in Sham Lal, Nirmal Verma, Richard Bartholomew et al, “1960s”, Gagan Gilled., Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, New... Recalling the first time that he read about the holy city of Benares in the novels of Sarat Chandra as a schoolboy, Ram Kumar once reflected, “At that time, I had never dreamt that it would become so significant to me both as an artist as well as a human being, that its shadow will linger on for such a long time.” (Artist quoted in Sham Lal, Nirmal Verma, Richard Bartholomew et al, “1960s”, Gagan Gilled., Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 1996, p. 89) Decades later, in 1960, he travelled to the holy city in the dead of winter, drawn by a desire to absorb its “depth and intensity” and interpret it through his art. (Gilled., p. 89) As he wandered its bylanes and ghats, the old dilapidated homes and temples crammed up against each other, the thronging crowds, and the city’s inherent contradictions- between death and rebirth, grief and celebration-intrigued him. These experiences lingered in his mind and he repeatedly returned to Benares as a subject, exploring its archetypal presence and paradoxes in his work for the next four decades.

Painted in 1997, the present lot marks a period when architectural forms and recognisable elements from the landscape, such as trees, began to reappear in Kumar’s work, following nearly three decades of planar abstraction. While the painting retains familiar visual elements characteristic of his Benares works-including aerial viewpoints, distorted perspectives with multiple angles, and lopsided buildings crowded together-it introduces a new lightness when compared to Kumar’s more sombre interpretations of the city from the 1960s. Writer and curator Meera Menezes writes, “Varanasi reappears but it is [...] not the grey, much- encrusted town, which spoke of the anguish of the people crowding its streets or of an ancient civilization with its dilapidated homes sinking into the mud. Instead, the bright skies and waters of the Ganga reclaim the space, as they do their blueness, after being relegated to the outer recesses or edged out of the frame in Kumar’s early works [...] the feeling of gloom and doom no longer haunts these paintings. A brightening of the palette with the use of lighter shades of browns and greys on the houses once again amply demonstrates the power of colour in projecting mood and sentiment.” (Meera Menezes, “Traversing the Landscapes of the Mind”, Ram Kumar: Traversing the Landscapes of the Mind, Mumbai: Saffronart, 2016, p. 13)

Critic Ranjit Hoskote interprets Kumar’s movement between Benares cityscapes and mountain or desert landscapes as a metaphor for his inner journey, oscillating between the duty and ritual bound householder (grihastha) and the peripatetic renouncer (sanyasin) who seeks spiritual truths in nature. (Ranjit Hoskote, “The Poet of the Visionary Landscape”, Gagan Gilled., Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 1996, p. 40) Even with familiar landscape elements works like the present lot represent his personal experience of the city rather than offering a literal portrayal. Describing these paintings, fellow artist Jagdish Swaminathan once remarked, “Ram Kumar’s Benares landscapes lift one out of the toil of the moment into the timeless worlds of formless memories. What he paints now is not what the eye sees in the ancient city, it is rather the response of the soul to the visual impacts. In these canvases he resurrects the images which have distilled into the sub-conscious, acquiring an authenticity and incorruptibility not of immediate experience.” (Jagdish Swaminathan quoted in Sham Lal, Nirmal Verma, Richard Bartholomew et al, “The Banaras Years”, Gagan Gilled., Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 1996, p. 73)

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