Hurrah for Homunculi. It is such a gorgeous volume it makes you wonder: has Indian sculpture come of age, or has Indian publishing? The volume celebrates the work of K.S. Radhakrishnan, a sculptor who inhabits many worlds with a certain sense of belonging and brings to each one of them his particular sensibility. The cover itself is a triumph. It highlights two characters that recur through Radhakrishnan’s work in many different forms, as a primal man-woman pair, who appear sometimes together, but just as often separately, and whom he has named Musui-Maiya in a moment of tenderness that is so intense that they could be embody the very “Rasa” of love. They could be dancers. They could be, perish the thought at once, the latest pair of Bollywood stars. Equally, he has managed to convey the same sense of ecstatic engagement that the stone-starred lovers at Khajuraho display when the woman lifts her face up to receive the salutary kiss. The most dramatic of his creations involve many midget figures who mill around oblivious, but still gazed upon by a large figure in their midst. It’s a metaphor, we are told for the great souls that walk in our midst. They could equally be the homunculi of the Third World who wait for the longed for gaze of the Western eye to transform them into super-human beings! It’s difficult not to think every once in a while, faced with the constant reminders of Radhakrishnan’s “goodness” as a human being, his deep identification with the oppressed that much of this has to do with good packaging. For all that is said about him, the sculptor himself seems not to be present. This is particularly apparent in a very fatuous sounding essay in the middle portion of the book by Jerry Lincoln Prillaman, who first met Radhakrishnan when he was a cultural attache at the US embassy at New Delhi, and whose wife Genevieve and he are now the most enthusiastic of collaborators, providing a marvelous base for Radhakrishnan’s work at their farmhouse in a village in France. Radhakrishnan who appears quite often in a winsome manner — the Aishwarya of Indian sculpture? — in the midst of his works seems more than happy in being cast in the role of the artist as shaman from ye olde land of Kerala. Are we being particularly vile to suggest that even a modest essay from the artist himself might have been an interesting addition to the volume? For to turn the argument completely on its head, the fact of course is that his work speaks volumes. A battery of photographers has been used to convey all the very different nuances and setting in which his work may be seen. It’s a visual tour de force. The pieces of his work that are silhouetted against the magnificence of the Western skyline in the plenitude of pure air, pure sky, well kept earth seem to sing with the abandon of an artist who has found his voice. It matters that there is a special audience who can listen. Maybe we too can be that special audience.
