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Lot 73

 

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“It is an art of silence. The artist has renounced even the pleasure of colour. He calls for the same kind of abnegation from the onlooker. How many can understand the artist’s silence in the face of the great mystery that baffles him like everyone else?”

Ram Kumar set out on a life-changing journey to Benares with his friend and fellow artist M F Husain in 1960, though he couldn’t have anticipated the profound impact it would have... “It is an art of silence. The artist has renounced even the pleasure of colour. He calls for the same kind of abnegation from the onlooker. How many can understand the artist’s silence in the face of the great mystery that baffles him like everyone else?”

Ram Kumar set out on a life-changing journey to Benares with his friend and fellow artist M F Husain in 1960, though he couldn’t have anticipated the profound impact it would have on him at the time. “It looked like a haunted place and still remains the same [...] Sitting on the steps of Manikarnika Ghat, watching dead bodies, some brought from distant villages in boats, waiting for their turn for liberation, I almost felt the disappearing boundary line between life and death. The temples of death, the smoke rising from funeral pyres, the wailing of the relatives of the dead, and the river Ganga flowing slowly without a sound-I could not remain a silent observer,” he later recalled. (Artist quoted in “1960s”, Gagan Gil ed., Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 1996, p. 89)

This visit marked a turning point in Kumar’s artistic trajectory. While the stillness and melancholy of his earlier work remained, he abandoned the solitary, anguished figures that populated his paintings during the 1950s in favour of abstracted landscapes and cityscapes where architectural elements lingered as ghostly echoes. These subjects would eventually come to define his oeuvre. Writer and critic Ranjit Hoskote notes, “By banishing the figure from his kingdom of shadows, Ram Kumar was able to emphasize the nullification of humanity, and to deploy architecture and landscape as metaphors articulating cultural and psychological fragmentation, the bondage of an imposed destiny that strangled the will to liberation and self-knowledge.” (Ranjit Hoskote, “The Poet of the Visionary Landscape”, Gagan Gill ed., Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 1996, p. 37)

Despite the dense network of crowded streets and bustling ghats that define Benares, Kumar’s early interpretations of the city are strikingly cold and desolate. Paintings like the present lot, which he produced in the years following this trip, utilise a predominantly grey palette and are among his most austere. Writer Meera Menezes observes, “...rendered in thick impasto (they) have a greyish, muddy pallor to them. The dextrous use of colour conveys the feeling of a dark and dank city swaddled in river mists and smoke. This Benaras as Kumar paints it is no city of joy, this is a city of the dead and the dying.” (Meera Menezes, “Traversing the Landscapes of the Mind”, Ram Kumar: Traversing the Landscapes of the Mind, Mumbai: Saffronart, 2016, pp. 11-12)

Much like the ancient, holy city itself, which has stood on the banks of the Ganga for hundreds of years, time appears to stand still in Kumar’s spectral landscapes. As critic Geeta Kapur remarks, “Ram Kumar’s Benares appears like a mirage of a city, a bleak apparition seen in the early hours of dawn or at dusk, just before nightfall, a sort of subliminal city; a grey and brown ensemble of dilapidated forms rather than a site of human habitation [...] What he was interested in depicting was not the jostling crowds at the ghats; not the hubbub of rites; not the hope, or frenzy, or anticipated bliss of the people; but the silent waiting that underlay it all.” (Geeta Kapur, “Ram Kumar: City - Exile”, Contemporary Indian Artists, New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House Pvt. Ltd, 1978, p. 75)

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