Veteran artist A Ramachandran passes away in Delhi

Born in Attingal, Kerala, it was a chance encounter with Ramkinkar Baij’s iconic sculpture Santhal Family (1938) that took the postgraduate in Malayalam literature to Santinketan on a scholarship to study Kerala’s mural art. Well-versed with the writings of authors such as Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, Saadat Hasan Manto, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, the disquietude of their words was to influence his imagery, as did his teachers such as Benode Behari Mukherjee and Baij, who emphasised on free expression.

Exposed to the “miseries of life” upon his arrival at the Sealdah Station (Kolkata), which was teeming with people post-Partition, Ramachandran’s early imagery reflected pain and misery. If in Kali Puja (1972) the terrorising figures responded to the Naxal movement, End of Yadavas (1973) warned of an apocalyptic future. His version of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, in 1968, had headless men around a table with their hands raised and an emaciated Christ under the table.

The incentive of a regular stipend offered by Delhi’s Kumar Art Gallery in the ’60s brought him to the Capital But Ramachandran was unfazed in continuing his pursuits rooted in tradition and society. The artist-pedagogue who joined Jamia Milia Islamia in 1965 played a pivotal role in working towards the establishment of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Jamia with artist-colleague Paramjit Singh. He also inspired several youngsters to dream through children’s books that he illustrated using traditional art forms with his wife Chameli. “As kids, we grew up surrounded by nature, grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins. I listened to stories from my grandmother, played near the river, climbed trees, and collected flowers for festivals — these experiences influenced my sensibilities. Children growing up in nuclear families don’t have these experiences. When Chameli and I started designing books, we took the role of a grandparent for our children,” he stated in an interview with The Indian Express in 2023.

His 2005 book Painted Abode of Gods: Mural Traditions of Kerala, meanwhile, is considered among the most comprehensive efforts to document Kerala mural tradition.

The violence that he encountered in Delhi in the ’80s during the anti-Sikh riots might have prompted him to paint more lyrical imagery, but the decision was met with abundant criticism from within the art world. “I was accused of taking modern Indian art 200 years backward. It was as if I had done a criminal act. My works were described as decorative, and people said my colours were gaudy and cheap. I was suddenly an outcast and was rarely invited for exhibitions,” recalled Ramachandran in the 2023 interview, one of his last public conversations.

Over time, however, his protagonists shared his fame, as the Lohars of Jamia Nagar in New Delhi and the Bhil tribes of Rajasthan, who visited multiple times during the year, also became familiar to the art world. “To an urban society, this may be an attempt to find utopia but looking at the lives of people and nature has taught me things that I could not have learned through mere reading of art history,” stated Ramachandran.