Creative artists have often staked their claim on tracts of land. This piece of territory, half-real, half-imagined, becomes a vehicle of expression of the artists innermost psyche. Cezanne had his Mont Sainte Victoire, Thomas Hardy had his Dorset, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay his forested plateaus on the Bengal-Bihar border. The writer or the artist picks out details of life in a particular locale, highlights them, and endows them with a new dimension of reality. Some of them even mythicise the place and colour them with their own dreams and perceptions.
A Ramachandran is one such artist who has found his own "paradisiac state" in the swathe of tribal belt around Udaipur, Rajasthan. The area gripped his imagination and became an expression of an imagined country replete with the burgeoning vitality of bounteous nature. Ramachandran did not find the urge to seek out any other locale after visiting the area in the early Seventies.
He invested his personal place with its own mythology. It is that sacred space for him where all creation takes place. Mircea Eliade, the noted scholar on myths, calls such a place, "a primordial state", a state of creative wholeness where all manifestations of life have their full play.