A. Ramachandran (1935-2024) is a modern Indian artist who carved out a unique trajectory. As a postgraduate in Malayalam Literature, he was influenced by the Progressive writers in Kerala before he turned to art professionally. A chance encounter with a monumental sculpture by Ramkinkar Baij, a fellow traveller of the Progressives, in a book that led him to travel to faraway Santiniketan to study art under the master. Ramachandran moved to Delhi after completing his studies and, like the Progressives, spent the first two decades of his career mapping the predicament of marginalised people in the capital of newly Independent India. During this period, influenced by Mexican muralists, he painted large, expressive, angry, hard-hitting works that were frequently scathingly satirical.
However, unsettled by the violence that broke out following the assassination of the Indian prime minister in 1984, Ramachandran decided, like Auden, that art “makes nothing happen.” Disillusioned by the failure of the modernist ideas of rationality and progress and the growing social apathy towards the suffering of others, he decided to start anew.
During this period, in the Bhil villages in Rajasthan, which he visited on sketching trips, Ramachandran came across a prelapsarian world where people lived humble lives in harmony with one another amid pristine nature. This experience encouraged him to return to the legacy of Santiniketan, where he had spent a few rewarding years honing his skills amongst artists who lived in close contact with nature, and used lessons learned from East Asian art to create a more enchanted world.
In a similar spirit, Ramachandran now turned to Asia's artistic traditions, breathed new life into its many formats, imagery, and language, and created an art that nurtured intimacy with nature at multiple levels. And, marked by keen observation, visual allure, sheer enchantment and playful humour, he produced paintings, sculptures, watercolours, and drawings that enabled him to dream and hope, even if he couldn’t heal. This exhibition offers a synoptic glimpse into Ramachandran’s long, lone and fascinating journey across the two phases of his career.
- R. Siva Kumar
