105273 surendran bk

S U R E N D R A N N A I R

I T I N E R A N T M Y T H O L O G I E S

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SAKSHI GALLERY • SYNERGY ART FOUNDATION LTD.

Tanna House, 11A Nathalal Park Marg, Colaba, Mumbai 400 001. Tel: +91 22 6610 3424

[email protected] • www.sakshigallery.com

ISBN: 81-901999-7-8

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SURENDRAN NAIR

S A K S H I G A L L E R Y

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To the memory of my father who died so young... when I

was too young to remember, and for not even leaving a single image

so that I may depend on others’ memories; and to Valyettan for

introducing me to the world “outside” and for all those intense

arguments; and to Onakkoor Radhakrishnan for the umpteen

stimulating conversations on literature, art and politics.


Sakshi Gallery � Synergy Art Foundation Ltd Tanna House, 11-A, Nathalal Parekh Marg, Colaba, Mumbai 400001

Tel: +91 (0)22 6610 3424. Fax: +91 (0)22 6610 6867 [email protected] � www.sakshigallery.comDesign: Bina Sarkar Ellias, Gallerie Publishers. Scanning: Reproscan, Mumbai. Printing: Pragati Art Printers, Hyderabad


The Openness of Secrecy Ranjit HoskotePages 8-20

CuckoonebulopolisPages 24-93

Fall of Icarus: Sense & Censorship in Contemporary Indian Art C.S. JayaramPages 90-93

Corollory MythologiesPages 96-137

The Labyrinth of Eternal DelightsPages 140-159

Early WorksPages 162-169

The Age of Innocence: Chai Laris & Swasbuckling Swaggers Rekha RodwittiyaPages 172-175

Early Works [Drawings]Pages 176-219

C o n t e n t s

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FABULAR EXPERIMENTS

Surendran Nair’s paintings are elaborate pictorial fictions, expressive claims

on our attention that alternate between soliloquy and conversation.

Delighting in the condition of paradox, these paintings assume various

forms: they come at us as puzzling riddles and private jokes, mumbled

asides and deafening proclamations, knife-edged critiques and tender

parodies, baroque satires and impish elegies. The figure of the colossus has

fascinated the artist for a considerable period. In some manifestations, the

body of the Cosmic Man has been punched through with niches bearing a

multitude of symbols signifying political parties and religious factions. In other avatars, the colossus can

no longer stride the earth; for the planet has been transmogrified into one vast consumerist society, and

he is weighed down by plastic shopping bags. At other points in his career, Nair has followed the

destiny of a winged actor standing on a column of grand symbolic importance, rehearsing the part of

Icarus; he has also documented the circus of roles played by a versatile chimera that is part man, part

dragon and part megaphone.

Nair composes his paintings around protagonists and predicaments recruited from diverse image-archives:

from Greek myth and Indic iconography; from heraldry and the idiom of pamphleteers and

poster-makers; from the memory of his student days in Trivandrum and Baroda; from the turbulent

political history of postcolonial India. The whimsicality of Nair’s art (the dimension of it that tends to

captivate first-time viewers, and is sometimes erroneously described as its ‘surrealism’) is eminently

deceptive. If these paintings are fraught with intimate meanings drawn from the artist’s deepest obsessions,

literary preoccupations or inherited past, they also resonate with political meanings that ripple out from

the secluded space of the studio into the demagogic tumult of the public sphere.

Nair’s high-spirited fabular experiments and allegorical inventions --- or, in his own vivid and telling

phrase, his ‘corollary mythologies’ --- are not intended to divert us from the urgencies of the

actual. On the contrary, they offer us an enriched, a heightened and inescapeable version of the actual,

shorn of official propaganda and populist anodyne. His mythologies are corollary because they follow

The Openness of Secrecy: Soliloquy and


7

logically from the theorems of established wisdom, but as critical responses. The actor playing the role

of the doomed hero whose wings will fail him is placed atop the Ashoka column, which is surmounted

by the four-lion capital that is the Indian nation-state’s official symbol. This painting was exhibited at

the National Gallery of Modern Art during the reign of a government led by Hindu-majoritarian forces

that menaced the Republic’s inclusive and secular character: it provoked a controversy and was taken

down. The many-stamped colossus is the universe reduced to the squabbling of mobilisations based on

the expediencies of identitarian politics, on ethnic or religious imaginaries that have become as real as

concrete. Nair does not turn away from the monsters that roar in the arena of the Now, calling the true

witness down to combat and possible slaughter.

For these reasons, Nair regards painting as no less interactive a medium than the

installation or the digital interface: a coded yet inviting communication around

which artist and viewer choreograph a productive dialogue. The act of painting

is, for Nair, an offering of metaphors to his viewers: metaphors from which they

can gauge the curve of the artist’s imagination while also staging their own

imaginative departures. Accordingly, the emphasis shifts between the artistic

imagination and the viewerly one, from one painting to another. The artist

indicates that some of his works are programmed in a relatively open-ended

fashion; they function as scripts, around which viewers can improvise their

own performances: some of Nair’s paintings dedicated to the figure of the actor, such as ‘I beg

your pardon: the scorpion act II --- an actor meditating on a character of an imaginary play

(Cuckoonebulopolis, 2002)’, function in this manner. Other paintings in his oeuvre operate at a

different threshold of entry; they present themselves as improvisation-resistant challenges and

demand to be decoded by viewers: Nair’s baroque-seeming allegories of Cloud-Cuckoo-Land and

Utopia in his ‘Cuckoonebulopolis’ works, such as ‘Mephistopheles… otherwise, the quaquaversal prolix

(Cuckoonebulopolis)’ (2003), as well as his series titled ‘The Labyrinth of Eternal Delight’ (1996-2000)

are of this order.

“I like to think of the painting as a paatra, a vessel,” says the artist. The Sanskrit word means both

R a n j i t H o s k o t e

nd Conversation in the Art of Surendran Nair


8

vessel and role: a receptacle into which a subtly flavoured curry, homage to the tongue-prickling

variety of herbs and spices, may be poured; but also the emotional dispositions, the psychic shifts, the

range of moods and motives that make up a character to be played. And such a lovingly blended

compound can scarcely be expected to yield itself up easily or immediately: the connoisseur, whether

gourmand, actor or viewer, must be prepared to probe, to accept and to relish its intricacies.

The model of theatre, especially as distilled in the twinned glory and anxiety of being an actor, is

central to Nair’s art. As a child and teenager growing up in a Kerala village, he would accompany his

friends to night-long performances of the stylised Kathakali theatre, a form that is descended from the

classical Sanskrit drama. His fascination with the ceremonial of theatre is manifest: we see it in his

evocation of the ritual of making up and presenting oneself in a persona, literally the mask of another

personality; in the gestures of self-transformation that his characters perform, allowing for passage from

one shape or identity to another; and in the ensemble action of animated visual image and stimulating

text that characterises his paintings.

For Nair’s paintings are either partly made up of, or rely quite strongly on, the word. And the word is

protean here, multiform and quicksilver: it appears as the witty or lyric phrase; the passage engraved,

as though in stone. It manifests itself as the annotation to the image, which does not describe the image

but amplifies it, working in tandem with it to modulate our awareness of the painting and its

(dis)contents. The word, in Nair’s art, is the voice that seeks out its listeners, pampering them with

delusions of pleasure that are quickly withdrawn and replaced by barbed revelations. Through his choice

of a pictoriality shot through with words, Nair situates his practice midway between those of the writer

and the visual artist. “In Malayalam, you write your painting, instead of painting it,” he observes. “The

word is chitram-ezhuthu, which refers to writing, inscribing a picture.”

Not only the written word, but the word made vocal as enunciation or noise

features as a vibrant presence in Nair’s art. I think, for instance, of the word

‘quaquaversal’, which occurs in the title of one of Nair’s most magnificent paintings,

alluded to above. The painting centres on various shock-fused binaries contending

for verbal and imagistic power: scripture and nonsense verse vying for inscriptive

control; violent king and contemplative sage haunting the same levitating body;

brutal weapon superimposed on sacred mudra in the same downward-pointing

hand gesture; wide-eyed victim trapped inside an actor in polychrome mask and

diabolical arrow-tipped tail. ‘Quaquaversal’ refers, in geological parlance, to a

formation that slopes downwards in all directions equally. This could imply a general decline, an

impartial movement towards apocalypse on all fronts; but the sound of the word is most delicious, fruit


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of a dictionary-hunt, utterly reminiscent of a parliament of quacking, squawking birds, an onomatopoeic

self-joke that the artist appears to have enacted on his fascination with Aristophanes’ play, ‘The Birds’,

in which the eponymous creatures, unhappy both with men and gods, establish a Utopia between heaven

and earth, and control all communication between these realms. The triumph of the intermediate that

shuttles at will between extremes of choice or location is integral to Nair’s art.

The felicitous and even seamless interplay between image and phrase in Nair’s art could well be an

outcome of his involvement as a fellow traveller in student politics in the mid-1970s. He belonged to

the first batch of the newly founded College of Fine Arts, Trivandrum: a group of eager and idealistic

students who came to campus and found that there were virtually no teachers, no source of guidance

or direction. Forced to find ways of teaching themselves, they sustained themselves by spending hours

in the library; by joining film clubs where they were exposed to international cinema as well as India’s

emergent parallel cinema; by engaging with the traditional performing arts of Kathakali and

Koodiyattam; and, most dramatically, by expressing solidarity with the current movements of political

protest, including the Naxalite upsurge. Dissatisfaction with campus conditions peaked in a students’

agitation at the College of Fine Arts, which galvanised the energies of the student body into

poster-making, demonstrations and a hunger strike. Nair joined the hunger strike; he also made a few

posters to help those of his friends, who were closely involved with the agitation.

The events related to the strike gained gravity from having taken place against the larger backdrop of

the Emergency (1975-1977), India’s only experience of authoritarian rule. Towards the end of June 1975,

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi responded to widespread political unrest by suspending civil

freedoms and instituting a police state that lasted 19 months. Since the media were subject to stringent

censorship during this period, posters, graffiti and the underground mimeograph press were the only

modes by which opposition to the repressive State could be expressed. Many artists and art students in

Kerala, active on the Left of the political spectrum, contributed to the anti-Emergency resistance by

painting political posters and graffiti in the streets. The communicative possibilities of protest in such a

volatile atmosphere offered Nair a vital lesson. He saw that the distinction conventionally made between

visual image and text was irrelevant. Both were quotations, equally vital as instruments of provocation:

they could be twinned into a means of seizing the attention, activating a response.

Nair traces his artistic choices further back yet, to his voracious reading as a schoolboy: a habit that

long antedates his earliest encounter with painting. Nair remains immersed in, and his art informed by,

some of these early literary encounters. Since Communism has long dominated the politics of his

home state, Kerala, Russian literature was plentifully available in Malayalam and English translation; Nair

read Gogol and Dostoevsky, and was particularly attracted to the economy of detail with which the


10

latter portrayed the inner life of his characters, and the “traumas that he put them through”.

Nair responded strongly, also, to Malayalam writers; especially to Vaikom Mohammed Basheer, VKN and

Paul Zacharia. He prizes Basheer, who is in love with his characters, for his lack of malice; he enjoys

VKN’s anarchic, playful and occasionally insulting approach, his understanding of a decadent feudal

social system; he savours Zacharia’s playing up of the satirical element as a rupture opens up between

static convention and the unpredictability of social situations. And indeed, Nair’s paintings, when treated

as an ensemble, do suggest an anthology of stories or a sequence of poems: his oeuvre of images develops

into a library of elliptical texts, his figures and tableaux hinting at implied or embedded narratives.

PERSONAE AS SYMBOLS

The act of bearing witness, of articulating a narrative about the relationships and structures that constitute

one’s lifeworld, can never be neutral. It is based on a particular decision to speak for a perceived truth,

and against a perceived abortion of that truth. It is based on a commitment to a specific version of

reality that has passed the test of value, and against the grand deceptions that threaten to eclipse it. For

a figurative-allegorical painter like Nair, it is vital to establish precisely how he can implicate himself in

his testimony to the Now.

This mandate of self-implication is linked to the key formal problem that a figurative-allegorical painter

must face: that of investing the figure with a local habitation and a name, in Shakespeare’s phrase: ‘local’,

not in the limited sense of a particular region, but in the sense of being connected to a locus, whether

in class, history or in myth, or in a particular texture of relationships. Does a figure in such an art as

Nair’s represent an aspect of the Self, or any one of many Others? Or does it mark a scale of emotional

investments that includes Self-contents and Other-contents, and the linkages of perception and sharing

that bind them together?

Nair populates his paintings with a cast of enigmatic figures that meld the authorial viewpoint with

strange, unsettling, sublime or tragic alterities. His dramatis personae include the swan-man, a centaur

compounded from a horse and a man in a lungi, and the human-animal-machine composite mentioned

in the opening paragraph of this essay. These figures act as symbols that the artist uses to investigate a

range of situations. They do not remain stable and unchanging across his paintings; the roles they play

are re-defined by the logic of the various situations in which they participate. Nair assigns different

valencies and changing orientations to his symbols, as he shifts them from one story to another. And yet,

these are not merely empty vessels, bland and vacant of meaning in themselves. They are connected by

a shared though by no means stable behavioural logic that, following Wittgenstein, we may describe as

a ‘family resemblance’. With this behavioural logic, Nair’s symbols modify, unpredictably, the contexts


11

that they inhabit. With their mercurial ability to switch valency and orientation, they subvert the

recognition reflexes that come to attend any symbolism, diminishing its efficacy. This, indeed, is what

gives Nair’s enigmatic figures the magical and ever-renewed significance-making power of the symbol.

The swan-man, who appears in a recent painting called ‘The Melancholy of the Twelfth Man’, is an

oblique self-image on which the artist has mapped an identification with such marginal persons as

members of minorities who possess nominal citizenship of the Republic but do not enjoy any real

citizenship rights in an increasingly majoritarian-dominant public sphere. Some hybrids are dynamised

by the miscegenation that has brought them forth; others merely stand for intermediate, indefinite states

of being. I suggest that the swan-man is not a masterfully dual personality so much as he is a figure

trapped in mid-transformation --- seemingly neither fully here nor quite there. Indeed, he puts me in

mind of Nietzsche’s chilling description of human beings as “hybrids of plants and of ghosts.”

Nair tends to agree. “In my therianthropic forms, I didn’t want to use the

single composite figure as a classical resolution,” he reflects. “I wanted to

keep the human half and the bird half separate, not fused.” The artist sees

the swan-man as a “twelfth man”, the stand-by in a cricket team.

Someone with no active role, often a passive spectator like the others

sitting in the stands --- except that he is costumed to play, all padded up

and gloved, awaiting the remote possibility of the glorious moment when

he might be called in to substitute for a player who has been taken off

the field hurt. An actor always waiting in the wings, script memorised,

hoping that someone will call him on stage. “The twelfth man is neither an insider nor an outsider,

his is a precarious position,” observes Nair. “He is the first casualty, the figure who is handed over to

ambiguity by his name. If the match goes well, he is forgotten and no one misses him, but if the match

is going badly, he is invoked.”

Nair’s twelfth man is a figure trapped between the opposite possibilities of ‘What if?’ and ‘If only’.

Someone very like many millions of the Republic of India’s denizens, who are technically citizens by

reason of birth and residence, but who are unable to exercise the prerogatives of citizenship because of

the constraints imposed by oppressive social structures and a callous political order.

The figure ‘78/6’, which appears in this painting, could signify a disastrous cricket score: a mere 78 runs

scored with six batsmen out. The match has been thrown away, and the metaphorical theatre of the

painting implies that the contest is being fought over the nation. The figure is also the numerical

equivalent of the characters that spell ‘Allah’; but the holy name of God has been broken by a stroke,


12

symbolising the sense of embattlement and assault experienced by the Muslim community, whether in

India or in West Asia. ‘The Melancholy of the Twelfth Man’ is a title consciously Chirico-esque in its

emphasis; Nair’s protagonists are often isolated, lost or uncertain, and his paintings are charged with a

characteristic pittura metafisica plangency in which are fused melancholia, isolation, mystery and an

aching nostalgia for the infinite.

In other works, such as the 2003 work titled ‘Priapus at his wits’ end (Cuckoonebulopolis)’, the artist

points up the swan-man’s phallic aspect: the man stands erect and exasperated, his hands on his hips,

while his swan twin remains in mid-peck, his long neck and beak pointing to the ground. In more

recent works, Nair posits the kinnari, the female celestial musician, as a bearer of the artist-persona: it

may be argued that this gender shift allows the artist to voice another idiom of vulnerability, another

translation of suffering into exquisite grace; or at least, into gracefulness. With each figure, Nair sets up

yet another signification in his multiple, ongoing portraiture of the creative self and its alterities. His

viewers must trace his moves from one image to the next, as readers would their favourite author’s

passages from text to text.

LANGUAGE, VIOLENCE, POETRY

We may focus now on the intriguing chimera that Nair assembles from a male body, a dragon tail

and a megaphone mouth. This figure is repeated in a number of variations, each set in its own

comic-strip-style frame, playing a different role and negotiating a different context, in the space of a

single painting. Apart from the comic-strip format, Nair also re-configures a Buddhist model in this

painting: he references the Mahayana mural composition of a thousand Buddhas; although supposedly

identical, each Buddha is distinctive and individuated in presentation. This study in repetition without

replication is enchantingly titled ‘The Garden of Forking Paths: Of Expenditures and Receipts, or Gulu

Guggulu Guggulu Gulu Gulu’. Borges, Ionesco, quantum theory and the doctrine of karma blur together

in this title, which echoes the Theatre of the Absurd in its boisterous knocking-around of language

and the reality it claims to represent. Somewhere along our sonorous recital of this title, the civilised

pretence of communication breaks down into an onomatopoeic stand-in for white-noise blather, or

pretend tribe-speak satirised by generations of the politically incorrect, or the prattle of infants.

And sometimes, a language cannot be heard or understood, especially if it is spoken by the weak and

marginal to the powerful. Consider, for instance, ‘Et in Ayodhya Ego’, a painting that insistently activates

our political imagination. This mysterious painting marks the convergence of several concerns for Nair.

The setting is that of a monument set up in draft, as it were; its hybrid architecture combines Mughal

and Rajput elements, as well as the kitsch aesthetic of official art in postcolonial India. The figure

memorialised here is Nair’s swan-man, appearing paradoxically light and balletic in this rendition as the


13

picture of a sculpture. He occupies, in a just slightly off-hand and off-centre fashion, the lotus pedestal

on which a departed leader or semi-legendary hero may stand in a town square anywhere in India.

The swan-man appears here in another avatar, another valency. He is not the melancholic twelfth man

but the subject of homage, who --- by his synergy with other factors in the painting --- ironises that

homage. At one level, in its stance and tenor, this painting satirises the tendency, in Indian public

culture, to glorify figures far beyond their natural desserts. At another level, it serves as a vehicle by

which Nair disclaims a public culture from which he wishes to unsubscribe, disinherits himself from a

history to which he does not wish to become an heir.

We have noted that, in Nair’s private mythology, the symbol is modified by, and modifies, the elements

that surround it (parenthetically, the artist’s strategy may be compared with the analysis of an art-work’s

affective capabilities in classical Sanskrit aesthetics, where the dominant bhava or emotion of an

art-work is deemed to affect, and be affected by, its subsidiary emotions, whether supportive, sanchari,

or fugitive, vyabhichari). In ‘Et in Ayodhya Ego’, the swan-man could be the oddball, the marginal

stranger who is sometimes propelled centre-stage by fortuities and radically transformed circumstances.

In this avatar, he seems to symbolise, with his hieroglyphic speech, Everyman estranged from the

political process, an individual who has been derogated in actuality but remains a fossil symbol of the

Republic, in whose name the polity functions. But the polity has been forever tainted by the violence

of Ayodhya, the schismatic assault on the Indian nation’s composite character.

As its title demonstrates, this painting holds a significance beyond the merely

satirical. The title alludes to Poussin’s masterwork, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’, as well

as to one of postcolonial India’s worst political catastrophes, the destruction of

the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992, by Hindu right-wing militants.

The speaker of the line engraved on the monument in Poussin’s painting is

Death, who emphasises that he is never absent, not even in the most ideal life,

the life of the pastoral idyll. To those who regarded the barbarism of Ayodhya

as a triumph, the painting could sound a warning: triumph, like everything else,

is subject to dissolution. To those who blame Ayodhya on a particular set of political actors, it could be

saying: But I, and you, and all of us were there too, and we did nothing. Nair is a political artist, but his

addresses are subtle and sophisticated; he has no use for the style of the hectoring sloganeer.

Instead, he explores the power of open secrecy, of a significance that is relayed through the devices of sly

anecdote and coded allegory; his paradox is veined with the special opposition between visibility and

impenetrability. “When something you want to express is too personal, too intimate, it finds ways of


14

relating itself to other things,” says Nair. “So I keep the image as a theatrical prop and connect it with

things around it.” It is through such pretexts and correlates that we work our way to the core of Nair’s

image-constructs. Nair cherishes an artist’s ability to produce allegorical scenarios that assort well with

everyday circumstances while yet preserving their special inner cogency and propulsive logic. He finds

this, for instance, in the murderer’s tale in Kurosawa’s ‘Rashomon’, which also dramatises for him the

question of lyricism, one of his favoured temptations. “Lyricism is the ability to evoke something

horrible in a moving way that takes you outside of yourself,” he suggests.

Discussing Aristophanes, to whose plays he often returns as a take-off point

for his paintings --- especially ‘The Birds’, in his ‘chapterisation’ of events in

‘Cuckoonebulopolis’ or Cloud-Cuckoo-Land --- the artist points out that

the Greek master’s immediate political concerns are too historically distant

for him to grasp; what he responds most strongly to, is the quality of

Aristophanes’ imagination, especially his ability to use humour as an

instrument against the tyranny of the age and place. Humour, after all, is a

form of code, indeed, a play with code. Nair celebrates such a play with code

in the festival that is ‘The Labyrinth of Eternal Delight’, a series of 42

hand-coloured etchings that he made between 1996 and 2000, a period during which the

Hindu-majoritarian forces were perfecting a politics of agitationalism, platformed on the violent

mobilisation of mass resentment and the well-publicised deployment of a neo-Hindu iconography.

In ‘The Labyrinth of Eternal Delight’, play becomes critique: Nair tunes up the ludic so that meanings

drift away from the brackets crafted to contain them; emphases shift so that allegories go awry; familiar

icons dip beneath radar range of commonsense; and no symbol can be held down by the weight of

convention and dogma. Here, Nair loops Bosch, Borges and Homer together with the ‘Katha-Sarita-

Sagar’ (The Ocean of the River of Stories), the ‘Alf Laila wa Laila’ (The Arabian Nights), and a

variegation of other archives --- to generate an encyclopaedia of ambivalent symbols, hermetic gestures,

aphoristic hints and chimeras, all rejoicing in the openness of secrecy.

As we speak of Nair’s exemplars in classical Greek drama and Japanese

cinema, ancient Indic literature and modern Latin American fiction,

we realise how closely language and distortion, beauty and violence,

terror and poetry are braided together in Nair’s art; how they coexist in

the space and duration of the same work. Look once and you find

a specific nuance in Nair’s mise en scene; look again and you find its

opposite, encrypted into the same meticulously detailed surface. Nair smiles: “I find this possibility

of the double take fascinating.”


15

ORIGIN MYTHS

The most perverse and pervasive of modernity’s anxieties is the anxiety of origin. As communities break

up, individuals find themselves atomised and exiled from histories of belonging; as the traditional

continuities become increasingly difficult to imagine and maintain, groups tend to mobilise around

identities that have been concocted, origins that have been improvised and shorn of all supposed

impurities, drastically simplified and weapon-grade narratives that are designed and launched on the fly.

Such are the fictions that exercise the political imagination of many millions of Indians today. Volatile,

aggressive, exclusivist in their tenor, these fictions are invariably disseminated and enforced by violent

and intolerant methods.

Since the early 1990s, India has suffered the breakdown of its early postcolonial belief in a secular,

inclusive, identity-neutral space of nationality, where entitlements and opportunities would be available,

at least theoretically, to every citizen irrespective of his or her ethnicity, religion or regional affiliation.

In place of this belief, there have sprung up several mutually antagonistic claims to sectarian

identity: some, like the genocidal Hindutva upsurge, based on majoritarianism; others, such as the

Other Backward Castes movement, premised on the self-assertiveness of newly powerful middle castes

claiming a history of disadvantage.

What imaginative claims can the artist assert against such juggernaut fictions, which are backed by the

force of numbers and the will to power: fictions that amount to origin myths, foundational accounts for the

various groups contending for State power and social ascendancy in the churning of globalisation-era

India? Can the artist propose pictorial fictions that are as expressively rich as they are critically powerful,

and can work against the stupor --- or obedience-inducing drugs of demagogues? Can the artist’s corollary

mythologies compete against mass-scale manipulators? These are, after all, an individual’s productions: by

definition, they are episodic, tactical and guerrilla-like. Can they prod the Indian political

imagination into vigilance?

Nair is preoccupied with the absent narrative, the erased glyph, the resurrected tale that is alluded to

rather than announced in its entirety. Equally, he is preoccupied with the manner in which powerful

fictions can move the minds of millions of people: as artist and as citizen, he has watched as spurious

gospels of historical wrong-doing and necessary vengeance have turned, by repetition, into incontestable

histories, myths that sustain hatred and destroy harmony. He has often asked himself how he can retrieve

lost, often deliberately suppressed aspects of a shared history at a time when influential sectarian

distortionists have claimed the privilege of interpreting the past. He has wondered how he can, even

while opposing Hindu majoritarianism and refusing to subscribe to the pieties of popular devotionalism,

pay homage to Hindu sacred art and recast Hindu iconography for his own purposes.


16

Wrestling with these questions, he has kept the door of versionality open, in defiance of the absolutists,

insisting on the validity of his fictive accounts of plausible pasts and possible futures, his subversive

approaches to myth and history. Unlike the copyist or translator of archaic texts, Nair adopts a poetics

of lila, of play, of sport among appearances and realities; in the open-ended lexicon of images that he

compiles as he goes along, the inherited and the innovated are difficult to tell apart as they mutate and

develop varied connections with one another, like the fragments of coloured glass in a kaleidoscope.

This crucial move permits him to address the problem, at once deeply personal and overwhelmingly

political, of deploying the traditional and the sacred in a secular setting. “I was never religious, but I

always loved the artistic works of the religious imagination,” he says. But how can he articulate this

interest when politicised religiosity has penetrated our society and begun to define our polity? This

dilemma is rooted in Nair’s experience of the mythic legitimisation of violence by the Hindu Right

between 1992 and 2004, and its periodic expression in the destruction of the Babri Masjid, the

communitarian violence in Bombay, the attacks on the Christian minority and the State-sponsored

pogrom enacted against the Muslim minority in Gujarat. Living and working in Baroda, Gujarat, as

he does, Nair has witnessed this carefully plotted insanity from close quarters. This experience has

sensitised him to the complexities of belonging, even if nominally, to a religious group; and to the

responsibility of employing imagery that originates in a religious context or a sacred vocabulary, against

those who misuse it.

Nair’s use of the Vishva-rupa or Cosmic Form as a recurrent image, for instance, recovers the primordial

Prajapati, Father of Creation, from whose dismembered limbs the world is created in Vedic myth, as well

as the Vaishnava colossus of Mahavishnu as the World. It also retrieves other monumental conceptions of

the embodied Divine, including the Jaina Tirthankara figure and the Vairochana Buddha of Mahayana

Buddhism. Nair is extremely interested in the Buddhist and Jaina past of South India: a past that has

been sought to be erased by Hindu nationalist propaganda. In the suppression of this past lies buried the

historical record of Hindu intolerance and brutality, the destruction of shrines and monasteries, the

annexation of the physical and psychological space of targeted communities.

While the historian’s duty is to correct widespread misperceptions by setting the record straight with an

abundance of previously unrevealed detail, the artist approaches the same problem differently: by

shocking the complacencies of the viewer-citizen, by shattering the structure of generalisations that

commonly passes for a world-picture. Nair’s project is that of retrieving the sacred through idiosyncratic

narrative --- he uses the iconic in a double-edged manner, as both homage and critique; thus, he dodges

Indology and anthropology as well as the pathologies of nativism and hyper-nationalism. “From the

classical, I take the sense of the icon, its monumentality,” he says. “But I meld it with the gigantic kitsch


17

cut-outs of leaders that we find in South Indian public culture. The artist, for me, must act as the

vidhushaka of the Sanskrit theatre, who plays various roles and also the buffoon.”

Despite having been deeply attracted to myth since he was a child, Nair could not, for a long time, give

himself the permission to use its resources in his art. Religious culture was viewed with suspicion in the

Left-dominated ethos of the art school campus, both in Trivandrum and in Baroda. Meanwhile,

the ‘tradition vs. modernism’ debate had collapsed into a ritualised and uncritical reiteration of slogans.

Based largely, in the South, on KCS Panicker and his Madras School’s arguments in favour of an

evolving tradition as the source-ground for identity, the terms of this debate had become fossilised;

worse, it had not been revised to cope with the ideological question of the religious content of

traditional form.

Many artists of Nair’s generation had abandoned its sterile premises by the late 1980s, and by the

mid-1990s, the debate itself began to fade away, taking with it the exhausted paradigms of East vs. West

and indigenism vs. cosmopolitanism. A variant of the debate has manifested itself again in the early 21st

century, although the fixity of an essentialist identity has been replaced by the flexibility of a chosen

position. The terms of the debate have also been sensibly rephrased to take account of consumerism, the

religious Right, neo-tribalism and globalisation, all of which have impacted the consciousness more or

less simultaneously during this period of cataclysmic economic and social change in India.

Nair has set a relatively recent work, ‘The Parable of the Swine’, in the imperial tent of Shah Jehan: an

ornate, bejewelled and baroque version of the austere yurt that his Turki and Mongol ancestors would

have set up on the Asian steppelands. A boar stands inside it. It could be Varaha, the sublime god Vishnu

in his world-saving avatar as the Cosmic Boar. But from the viewpoint of Islamic hygiene, the animal

could simply represent an unclean pig, whose presence violates the camp of the Defender of the Faith.

‘The Parable of the Swine’ demands that the viewer politicise himself --- not by taking one side or another

in the game of brutalising illusions that is communitarian politics, but by seeing sharply through the

manipulations of rival ideologies, by retaining the right to shuttle among contradictory explanations.

WAGERS ON COMMUNICATION

Nair also retains the right to invoke utterly private sources of significance in his images, even if the

viewer can have no access to them: this is a dimension of privacy that informs, but cannot be inferred

from, the image as publicly viewed, and adds to the ‘open secrecy’ that I have proposed as a key feature

of Nair’s art. His images can sometimes refer back to events and people who lie concealed in his

memory. The Vishva-rupa may be anchored in iconography and public culture, but he also has an

affinity with the art-school model who the artist remembers from Trivandrum: a madman who claimed to


18

be a royal, and who sat for life class with chits bearing public complaint and critique pinned to his shirt.

The colossus punched through with viewing squares is also based on an eccentric judge in Kerala who,

on finding his judicial robes too constricting in summer, cut squares in them to allow for ventilation.

And certain personae from other periods in Nair’s work refer back to the untouchable portrayed in

Ketan Mehta’s cinematic cult classic, ‘Bhavni Bhavai’, and played by Mohan Gokhale, with his spittoon

and broom dragging behind him like a tail: a man, as the artist puts it, who is “forced to erase his own

imprints” (interestingly, this figure has also influenced a sculpture-installation by Nair’s contemporary

from Kerala, the sculptor N.N. Rimzon).

Emerging from the screening where he first saw ‘Bhavni Bhavai’, Nair stopped at a roadside stall for a

cup of tea; his eye fell on one of those individuals who are allowed unrestricted rights of passage in an

Indian street, part madman, part holy fool, part actor. A bahurupiya, a man of many forms who cannot

be caged in the coldly legalistic description of ‘impersonator’. This particular bahurupiya figure was

trying to make a living by begging, costuming himself as Hanuman, the wise monkey-god who is the

divine hero Sri Rama’s counsellor in the epic ‘Ramayana’. In Nair’s imagination, the figure of the

untouchable erasing his own imprints became superimposed on this Hanuman impersonator with his

tail dragging in the street. An intuitive connection was made: “The image talked to me,” the artist says.

This amalgam of marginal, holy, destitute, self-transforming person sparked off Nair’s fascination with

the actor figure: it became the prototype for his logic of symbolic signification, based as it is on the

shape-shifter who is no empty vessel.

In Nair’s games of meaning, we play with origins and improvisations. And we realise that we are

hedged in by impossibility conditions. Indeed, Nair is a connoisseur of impossibilities. He bewilders the

viewer with long and unpronounceable names that you cannot get your tongue around. With places

like Cloud-Cuckoo-Land and Utopia, which have never existed except in the mind. With people who

could never be, yet might be around the corner, walking towards you --- the bird-woman, the

self-appointed umpire on the cricket field, the naked actor waiting to be robed in a script. “My

personae are the feelers I send out to society,” suggests the artist. This private universe of constantly

unfolding stories is held within a single mind; all the same, it is a setting that prepares itself for big events

that are likely to explode.

In the process of writing this essay, I have accumulated various anecdotes from Nair’s childhood and

adolescence; some of these seemed, at first, to be beautiful asides or oblique illuminations. On

reflection, however, I have come to suspect that some of these anecdotes have a critical bearing on his

subsequent development as an artist, on his relationship to lost originals and the transmutation of sacred

tradition into the secularised contemporary. There is much to be gleaned from this domain of the


19

intensely personal, which is meticulously concealed beneath the witty titles, the impossible tableaux,

the quixotic characters and the idiosyncrasies of phrase and image. I will confine myself here to two

stories: symmetrically enough, one concerns his father, the other his mother.

Nair was only two years old when his father died, and he has no memory of him. No photograph of his

father exists. The only concrete association of memory that the artist had with his father was through

the ceremony of the shraddha, an annual homage intended to maintain a connection across worlds with

the spirits of one’s ancestors. Nair performed this anniversary ceremony every year until he was 25.

The future artist was fascinated by the grammar of the ritual as a child, and the manner in which it

developed an arrangement of elements; by the poetry behind the ritual; by the stylised manner in which

the Divine and the ancestral presences are addressed and invited to accept the offerings of the living.

Nair views the ritual as a “way of measuring the distance at which one stands from the Divine”, an

apposite explanation in Kerala society, whose feudal and sumptuary social structure was articulated in

public space, for centuries, through an etiquette based on precisely calibrated distances --- down to the

number of steps --- that the members of various castes mutually maintained among them.

More intimately, as Nair observes: “So long as there is no image, I can go on imagining my father as

I wish --- he becomes mythic material.” This ability to imagine a progenitor, a precursor, a predecessor,

has become amplified in Nair’s image-making practice: it becomes metaphorical of a tradition as

inheritance and ancestry, to be re-imagined for the present. Like many liberals of Hindu background,

Nair opposes politicised religiosity but insists that a private meditation on myth, rite and icon remains

possible to him, untainted by majoritarianism. “Such rites are important to me,” he says. “Thinking

about them, I recover part of my identity.”

And when Nair wished to go to Baroda to study art, his mother defused his elder brother’s financial

anxieties by asking the family to cut down a “huge mango tree” to pay for his expenses. The tree, which

stood in the sarpa-kavu, the sacred snake sanctuary of the family home, was Nair’s economic mainstay

in Baroda. An engagement with the elements of experience that are irreducible to conventional reason

--- with the mystical and transcendental, the sacred --- is inscribed into Nair’s very beginnings as an artist.

More proximately, the origins of Nair’s recent body of work lie in the series of graphics and paintings

that he executed during 1993-1996, as he emerged from a period when he had been subject to

external pressure as well as inner conflict. In the late 1980s, he had faced criticism from fellow artists

on the nature of his painterliness; such debates are typical of the intensity and idealism with which

university life can be led at its best, but while they can stimulate the individual to greater rigour and

accomplishment, these debates can also damage a self that is reticent, unprepared for combat, or simply


20

vulnerable. In an atmosphere where everyone is attempting to find an individuated voice and evolve a

distinctive language, some students hold doctrinaire positions, while others maintain a wary silence;

some students are natural gurus, others born outsiders.

As a student, Nair was questioned on what was perceived as his dependence on the literary; it was

also said that his paintings lacked ‘body’, that his preference for thin coats of paint and the value of

translucence was inappropriate to the supposed inner logic of the medium. When Nair went to England

on a residency in the early 1990s, the confusion followed him. For four years, the artist says, he “lost his

imagery”. Gradually, he emerged from this crisis: as a joke aimed at those who claimed his work had

no ‘body’, he took the human figure as his focus, involving it in small actions, bizarre occasions and

improbable guises.

If Nair works on a near-monumental scale today, this present work is rooted in the opposite: in the

miniature scale of a suite of prints, which he thought exactly right for the play of word, image and

association that he wished to externalise. The paintings that he embarked on, working on small pieces

of paper, proved cathartic: the series, which grew into a quasi-anthological work called ‘Multiple

Images’, included anecdotes, puns and jokes, even “stupid jokes”, as the artist concedes. These were

notations to the self that were eventually shared with others; announcements that the artist would no

longer be bound by the limited notions of painterliness or art-making that others wished to impose on him.

In these initiatives, Nair tried out the possibilities of resonance that would soon distinguish his art. Then

as now, Nair has treated his paintings as wagers on communication; which is why they vary, necessarily,

between soliloquy and conversation. The artist, like the writer, does not always know who he is addressing;

or indeed, if there is anyone out there to be addressed. The audience for the arts is uncertain, fluid,

fluctuating. Its subjectivity, conditioned by prevailing cultural prejudices or shifts in political persuasion,

may not always lead it to an empathetic engagement with the art that it views. And so, hyperbolic

and transitive and ludic as it is, Surendran Nair’s is an art that must pass in and out of phases of

being-with-oneself and being-with-others, the solitude of the studio and the sociality of the exhibition.

The voice is always in utterance, the image always in play. Sometimes, and in good seasons many times,

they find the sustenance of the receptive ear and the passionate eye.

Bombay, December 2005-September 2006


“Lyricism is the ability to evoke something horrible in a moving way that takes yououtside of yourself.” —–Surendran Nair


...............


C uckoonebulopolis

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24

CUCKOONEBULOPOLIS

Since the end of 1999 I have been doing a series of works collectively called: ‘Cuckoonebulopolis’, based

on a rather loose idea of a utopia.However, these works are not meant to be arguments for or against

utopias. The idea here is like a backdrop, a theatrical device, to sharpen the contours of my images

whilst at play and to accentuate the tenor of whatever they address. Initially it was meant only to be a

light-hearted and humorous affair, a play on the ironic possibilities of its corollary: the nebulous city of

cuckoos. But once I got into the thick of things, I felt that some of the themes and images demanded

an approach altogether different. Gradually the images and themes became quite complicated and I had

to re-organise them into different sections or chapters, according to the kind of imagery that they deal with.

To some extent, this particular series, I would like to imagine, is an attempt at reflecting on the

possibilities and the difficulties of imagining something secular. Some of these works are, in that sense,

(personal) responses to some of the problems that we are entrenched in. For instance, I was thinking,

suppose my mother asks me to accompany her to a temple or some other religious site, what would

I do? Of course I will have to go with her and I will. But the problem is, by doing that, am I

inadvertently participating, sharing and perpetuating the bigotries of a community that is inconsiderate

to others openly without any qualms, and betraying ‘others’? I do like going to such places, not for

religious but for other reasons. I do like looking at those fabulous images begotten by the religious

imagination of our ancestors.

As students, I think, we cherished those images; the sheer poetry that lies beneath the imagery and the

unity of its formal qualities are something to regard and savour. But now, all of a sudden, you find it

difficult to look at it with the kind of aesthetic pleasure or innocence that had once been possible. One

cannot wish away its associations or more precisely the appropriation of those symbols and images by a

group of belligerent species who regard them as exclusive (and are hell bent on brutalizing every vestige of

what Danilo Kis calls as ‘aesthetic democracy’). They are for everybody, for the world, for humanity.

Suddenly you find yourself rendered a pauper, cheated out of an inheritance that is so rich, so diverse;

and you are being brandished at furiously with the fraudulent will or testament that privileges them

absolutely and forbids any reading other than theirs. What would you do then?


25Horn, OK! Please! Cuckoonebulopolis, 2007. Oil paint and silk-screened text on canvas. 180 x 120 cm


26 Doctrine of the Forest. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2007. Charcoal, colour pencil, dry pastel & water colour. 152 x 101 cm

Sharabheswari Devi—–Nickname:Vyaleemukhi; Nedumthoon House,Chuttambalam P. O. AmbalameduEast, Eranakulam Dist.; of extremelyfair complexion, aged 27, divorcedfrom Prahladapuram Narasimhan, atrader of old traditional architecturalfragments, mainly very elaboratelydecorated wooden pillars, suffersfrom an uncontrollable temper,especially at dusk and dawn orwhenever he crosses thresholds.Though Naatyashri ‘Thandavam’Shivaraman Nair, a Kathakaliartiste, recently proposed to her,she is not yet sure whether toaccept it, since she is aware of thefact that, without doubt, he is temperamentally quite vagarious,or to return Varunanankutty’samorous glances.


27Doctrine of the Forest. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2007. Charcoal, colour pencil & water colour. 152 x 101 cm

Actors (3): Varunankutty Kashyapan Nair, IlaneerthoppuHouse, Dvadas’aadithyapuram P.O., ThanneermukkamSouth, Aalappuzha dist.; fair enough complexion, Aged21, unmarried; madly in love with Vyaleemukhi.


28 Doctrine of the Forest. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2007. Charcoal, colour pencil & dry pastel. 101 x 152 cm

Actors (2): Vishnuvahanan Pillai, Palazhi House,Paalkkulam P.O. Thiruvananthapuram Dist.; of darkcomplexion, aged 41, married and has 2 sons: Naran (15)wants to do higher studies on reptiles and particularlysnakes, and Narayanan (12) is a budding ornithologist.


29Doctrine of the Forest. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2007. Charcoal, colour pencil, dry pastel & water colour. 101 x 152 cm

Actors (1): Durgadevi Amma, Kailasam Kunnu House,Mahisha Vayal P.O. Thrisshivaperur Dist; of fair complexion, unmarried, aged 22, basically a vegetarian,but was recently introduced to non-vegetarianism by hercolleagues on one of the tours and has started a liking forit and has become quite partial towards things bovine.


30 Doctrine of the Forest: An Actor at Play. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2007. Oil on canvas. 180 x 120 cm


31


32


33Left: Pernoctation I. The Wounded Majesty, or The Anatomy of Fate. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2006. Oil on canvas. 300 x150 cm

Above: Regarding Kinnari. An Actor Performing in an Imaginary Play. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2006. Oil on canvas. 180 x 134.5 cm


34 Further Adventures of Zeus: Nemesis’ Whispering Shudder – The Doctrine of the Fore


35e Doctrine of the Forest. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2006/7. Oil on canvas. 150 x 210 cm


36

NARCISSUS AND ECHO

Arguably, Narcissus was among all narcissists, the least narcissistic. He thought he was falling in love with

some water spirit or some other such kind; but certainly not himself. Ovid states quite clearly in the

'Metamorphoses,' that initially Narcissus did not understand who he was looking at; nevertheless was

inflamed by whatever he saw. Narcissus implores at the reflection in the water: “come to me no matter

who you are.”

Moreover, reflections are not the same, however similar they may look. Never the same. When

Ameinius, one of the many dejected suitors, in total frustration cried out to the heavens to intervene

and punish Narcissus by making him fall in love with himself, only wanted him to go through the same

kind of despair he himself and several others of both the sexes had gone through; that is not to be able

to possess the object of their desire. Nothing more. Besides, it is not at all crucial to the story that he

should have known that it was his own reflection he was looking at and falling in love with. The Gods

were not very keen that he understood something from it! No morals, nothing! What made him

acknowledge later that it indeed was his own reflection, may probably have something to do with the

authorial enthusiasm; the author who has the privilege of knowing fully well the course of how the

story evolves?

At the same time, let us not cast any doubt upon the claim that Narcissus had never seen himself,

not even partially, although his proximity to water bodies is too apparent to ignore: his father was the

river-god Cephisus and his mother, the beautiful [water] nymph Liriope, and he was begotten when

Cephisus ravished her within the tentacles of his winding streams. He was a vain child, for sure, who

might have had formed some idea of his own beauty through his suitors’ eyes, but without an object to

compare, devoid of a referent. Then that fatal day at the Donacon spring in Thespia, “as clear as silver,”

he saw what he was looking for, the beauty that rivalled what he imagined himself to be; totally

enchanted, without being able to take his eyes off.

Right: The Curse of Narcissus and Echo. The Bad Behavior of Singularities. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2004-05. Oil on canvas. 180 x 75 cm


42Above: Diatropism. The Bad Behavior of Singularities. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2004-05. Oil on canvas, 90 x 70 cm

Right: Hopscotch [Revised version]. The Bad Behavior of Singularities. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2005. Oil on canvas. 180 x 180 cm 38

Consider also what Tiresias, the blind oracle, had to say: that he will have a long life, “only if never he

comes to know himself.” Isn’t it true, to know is to understand the subtleties of things, to be able to

‘reflect’ and differentiate? A quality that was, perhaps, not to Narcissus’ avail in the first place.

By the time she had come across and fallen madly in love with Narcissus, Echo had already lost her

speech, her language and almost her voice. She could initiate no conversation, but repeat what others had

already said. How could a chatterbox like her, someone who always delighted in using her ‘tongue’ in ex-

cess, though not necessarily always judiciously, and was punished just for that; thus reduced to deflect a

few syllables of what had already been uttered by someone else, be able to make her own desires felt? Es-

pecially, if the utterances are not quite favourable to what she would have liked them to be.

The only recourse for her then would be to manoeuvre the meagre resources available at her disposal,

something that is already there in utterance, something that is already explicit, maybe by altering its in-

tonations, thus its meaning- be subtle, rely on irony; to make it as her own.

But her corporeality is a hindrance to achieve her objective: to make him fall in love with her, since Nar-

cissus had already seen her and was not at all enamoured by her appearance. In such a condition, it seems

only appropriate that she be prepared to forfeit her corporeality and pass over completely to the realm

of the intangible, discard her body altogether: be formless, discarnate herself. So that she may assume her

form once again and reveal herself one last time, hopefully with a better result, by reflecting that which is

already there, Narcissus’ own image, as her own, like a cross dresser, masquerading.

The reflection Narcissus saw may not have necessarily been that of his own, but could have been that of

Echo in her new avatar: the spatial manifestation, an adroit allusion, or the sub-aqueous insinuation of her

incorporeal existence.

GateFolds_Suren:Layout 1 11/19/08 2:45 PM Page 1

41

Left: Vertigo. The Bad Behaviour of Singularities. Cuck-oonebulopolis, 2004-05. Oil on canvas. 180 x 75 cm

Right: Uxoriality of Kinnari, The Better Half of my Ux-orious Swan-Friday. The Bad Behavior of Singularities. Cuck-oonebulopolis, 2005. Oil on canvas. 180 x 105 cm


43

Reflections of Shri. Narahamsam whilst preparing himself for an elaborate ablution at Kotiteertham

The Labyrinth of Brahma’s Solitude

A Blistering Barnacle Nalacharitham Dummi-urge

Adventures of Zeus


44

MY FATHER IS A DEAD FATHER

ET IN AYODHYA EGO

Here lies a pretty swan, whose father, the adjutant swan, a silly old ‘quackalorum’, an eyas but an epicure among carrion eaters had sickened and died (for him)… and His corpse… he could find noplace to inter it… days had elapsed… he couldn’t afford to defer it…quite desperate… in a sublimemoment of epiphanic delirium, he decided to bury him deep in his own pretty little head.

––an epitaph from the Headbury* garden of remembrance

*Headquarters of Ostrchshire, one of the suburbs of Cuckoonebulopolis


45Et in Ayodhya Ego… if not, The Stygian Oath of Abjuration. The Bad Behavior of Singularities. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2005. Oil on canvas. 210 x 120 cm


46Left: Quadratrix. The Bad Behavior of Singularities. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2004-05.Oil on canvas. 90 x 70 cm

Right: Amelioration of the Cretinized. The Bad Behavior of Singularities. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2005. Oil on canvas. 90 x 70 cm


47Inner Voice, The Bad Behavior of Singularities. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2004-05. Oil on canvas. 90 x 70 cm


48 Study for My Uxorious Swan-Friday. The Bad Behavior of Singularities. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2004-05. Oil on canvas. 90 x 70 cm


49Priapus at his Wits End. The Bad Behavior of Singularities

Cuckoonebulopolis, 2003. Oil on canvas. 180 x 150 cm


50Melancholy of the 12th Man. The Bad Behavior of Singularities. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2002

Oil on canvas. 180 x 320 cm


56 Untitled. Darwaza Kholo. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2004. Water colour & ink on paper. 76 x 57 cm


55Left: Untitled. Darwaza Kholo. Cuckoonebulopolis. Water colour on paper, 2004. 76 x 57 cm

Above: Untitled. Darwaza Kholo. Cuckoonebulopolis. Water colour on paper, 2004. 101 x 67 cm


57Untitled. Darwaza Kholo. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2004. Water colour & ink on paper. 67 x 101 cm


58 Untitled. Darwaza Kholo. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2004. Water colour on paper. 56 x 76 cm


59Untitled. Darwaza Kholo. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2004. Water colour on paper. 101 x 67 cm


60Left: Untitled. Darwaza Kholo. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2004. Water colour on paper. 76 x 56 cm

Right: Untitled. Darwaza Kholo. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2004. Water colour & ink on paper. 76 x 56 cm



62 Cuckoonebulopolis, 1999. Water colour on paper. 76 x 57 cm


63Portrait of an Evandalist. The Doctrine of the Forest. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2002. Water colour on paper. 77 x 56 cm


64Above: Shhhh... Annus Mirabilis. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2003. Water colour and ink on paper. 56 x 38 cm

Right: Mephistopheles… Otherwise, the Quaquaversal Prolix. The Doctrine of the Forest. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2003. Oil on canvas. 210 x 120 cm


65



67

Left: Regarding Roots: Study for a Solemn Free-Radical Act; An Actor Performing in an Imaginary Play. Epiphany. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2005. Oil on canvas, 180 x 150 cm . Above: I Beg Your Pardon: The Scorpion Act II; An actor meditating on a character of an imaginary play.

Annus Mirabilis. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2003. Oil on canvas. 180 x 120 cm


68 Right: thINNER Voice. Elysium. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2003. Oil on canvas, 210 x 105 cm


98 Trainees at the School for Necromancy. Corollary Mythologies, 1998/99. Acrylic & oil on canvas. 240 x 100 cms each 86

a. No wonder he struts, this cock of the walk, as a prince with a gait magisterialb. The Piltdown horse-man

a.b. Portrait of Goebbles as a young orator

a. Humble as I am, like an armband of coarse twill, how I crave a thousand years of life.b. I too am a painter

I am an amulet, if you empty me I shall be of no use to you. If you learn how to refill me; I shall be of use to youagain. But beware, the fact that the amulet does not serve you, does not mean that, it does not serve others.

a. Brekkekkekkex croax croax, ‘ts our song, we’ll not forsake it, Never! As long as throat can take it, crying loudly, through the day and….night, Brekkekkekkex croax croax…………… Brekkekkekkex croax croax Be silent!Attend! Let no one offend by his presence, our ritual dances, Whose taste is impure, nor knows the lure of the word;the art that entrances, Brekkekkekkex croax croax….’ts our song, we’ll not forsake it, Never! Brekkekkekkex croaxcroax…………………Brekkekkekkex croax croaxb. An old tiger listens to his roar echo in the abyss of his underbelly

a. b. Oracle at Delphi

a. The officient of sacrifices in ceremonial dress approached the pig’s pen and spoke these words: why does it repelyou to be lead to your death?! I shall fatten you for three months. As for myself, for ten days I shall mortify myself, and three days I shall fast. Mats of white straw will then be laid down for you, and your limbs will beplaced on engraved vessels.What more do you want?!!b. A long monologue

tonight i am coming to visit you in your dream, and none will see and question me. Be sure to leave your door unlocked

Sarcophillus harissii. (Harass me, and find yourself in perfect registration within your own sarcophagus)

a. The Upanishads demand that the destruction takes place at the moment of maximum awareness. In the Bhagavad-Gita, Arjuna receives the revelation from Krishna, just as he was preparing to kill his relatives in the field of battle.b. General Dyer before a grand jury of Lord Hunter, James Mill, Lord Macaulay, Monnier Williams, John Ruskin, andKing George

a. Two score less three, I can remember well, Within the volume of which time, I have seen Hours dreadful and thingsstrange; But that sore night Hath trifled former knowings!

b. A predator’s short, but, precise lament after Kalinga

a. KAMIKAZE. CAPRICIOUS CONDUCTER.APOCOLOCYNTOSIS.HOMAEOSTASIS. LAMARKIST’S GYROSCOPE. RING MASTER BREAK-AN-EGGX CROAX HOAX.CRITICAL POSTURING. A PREHENSILE TAILED CREATURE. INNER VOICE. NAPOLEAN DOWNTOWNb. ‘Numenclator’

a. Caesar, morituri te salutant!

b. Proposal for a new emblem for the N.G.M.A.

The Garden of Forking Paths: Expenditures and Receipts, or Gulu Guggulu Guggulu Gulu Gulu. The Doctrine of the Forest. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2001Oil on canvas. 180 x 240 cm


97The Blooming of Birnam Woods. Corollary Mythologies, 2000. Oil on canvas. 180 x 180 cm 88Teporality: Study for an epic scale installation of 330 million cloud forms (of variable size), on poles (of variable length), motorized for animation, on a stretch of 786 sq. miles of bar-

ren plain, on an April day, when the sky is clear, between 11a.m and 3 p.m. Annus Mirabilis. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2000. Oil on canvas. 180 x 120 cm


75

of the Heavenly Shepherds

GEMINI: The man born under Gemini shall havemany wounds. He shall lead an open and reason-able life, he shall receive much money, he will goin unknown places, and he will not bide in theplace of his nativity. His first wife shall not livelong, but he shall marry strange women. He shallbe bitten of a dog; he shall have a mark of iron orfire. He shall pass the sea, and live an hundred yearsand ten months.The woman shall come to honour: but she shall be aggrieved of a false crime. She ought to bewedded at fourteen years, if she shall be chaste andendure all peril: she shall live seventy years andhonour God.As well man as woman shall augment and assemblegoods for their successors: but scantly shall theyuse their own goods, they shall be so avaricious.

The P.T.O.T.H. Shepherd. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2002. Gemini. Watercolour on paper. 36 x 26 cm


76

CANCER: The man born under Cancer shall beavaricious. He shall love women, be merry, humble, good, wise and well-renowned: but heshall have damage by envy, and strife and discordamong neighbours. He shall have often great fearon the water: he shall find hidden money, andlabour sore for his wife. At thirty-three years heshall pass the sea: and shall live seventy years afternature.The woman shall be furious, incontinent, soonangry and soon pleased. She shall be nimble, serviceable, wise, joyous, but shall suffer many perils by water: if any person do her a service, sheshall recompense them well. She shall be labouringuntil thirty years, and then have rest. She ought tobe married at fourteen years, and shall have manysons. She shall live seventy years.As well the man as the woman shall have good fortune, and victory over their enemies.

The P.T.O.T.H. Shepherds. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2002. Cancer. Watercolour on paper. 36 x 26 cm


77

LEO: The man born under Leo shall be hardy, heshall speak openly, and be merciful: but he shall be arrogant in words. At thirty years he shall bedamaged, but shall eschew that peril: he shall havegoods by temporal services, and as much as he loseth he shall win. He will go often on pilgrimages,and suffer pain of sight. He shall fall from on high;at thirty-six years he shall be bitten of a dog, andshall live ninety-four years after nature.The woman shall be a great liar, fair, well-spoken,pleasant, merciful, and may not suffer to see menweep. Her first husband shall not live long, but sheshall live to get great riches, and shall have childrenof three men. She shall live seventy-eight yearsafter nature.

VIRGO: The man born under Virgo shall be a goodhouseholder, ingenious and solicitous to his work,shamefast and of a great courage: but he will soonbe angry. Scarcely shall he be a while with hiswife. He shall be in peril by water; he shall have awound with iron, and shall live seventy years afternature.The woman shall be shamefast, ingenious andpainstaking. She ought to be wed at twelve years,but she shall not be long with her first husband.Her life shall be sometime in peril: she shall havedolour at ten years, and if she escape shall live seventy years. She shall bring forth virtuous fruit,and everything shall favour her.Man and woman both shall suffer many temptations:they shall delight to live in charity, but shall suffermuch, wheresoever it be.

Above: The P.T.O.T.H. Shepherds. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2002. Leo. Watercolour on paper. 36 x 26 cmBelow: The P.T.O.T.H. Shepherds. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2002. Virgo. Watercolour on paper. 36 x 26 cm


78

CAPRICORN: The man born under Capricornshall be iracundious and a fornicator: a liar, andalways labouring. He shall be a governor of beastswith four feet. He shall suffer much sorrow in hisyouth, but shall leave many goods and riches. Heshall have great peril at sixteen years. He shall berich by women, and shall be a great conductor ofmaidens: he shall live seventy years and fourmonths after nature.The woman shall be honest and fearful, and havechildren of three men: she will do many pilgrim-ages in her youth, and after have great wit. Sheshall have great goods, but pain in her eyes, andshall be at her best estate at thirty years: she shalllive seventy years after nature.

AQUARIUS: The man born under Aquarius shall belonely and ireful; he shall have silver at thirty-twoyears; he shall win wherever he goeth, or he shallbe sore sick. He shall have fear on the water andafterwards have good fortune, and shall go intodiverse countries. He shall live to be seventy-fiveyears after nature.The woman shall be delicious, and have manynoises for her children; she shall be in great perilat twenty-four years, and thereafter in felicity. Sheshall have damage by beasts with four feet: andshall live seventy-seven years after nature.

Above: The P.T.O.T.H. Shepherds. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2002. Capricorn. 36 x 26 cmBelow: The P.T.O.T.H. Shepherds. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2002. Aquarius. 36 x 26 cm


79

PISCES: The man born under Pisces shall be agreat goer, a fornicator, a mocker and covetous: hewill say one thing and do another. He shall trust inhis sapience, he shall have good fortune: he shall be defender of widows and orphans. He shall befearful on water: he shall soon pass all adversitiesand live seventy-two years after nature.The woman shall be delicious, familiar in jests,pleasant of courage, fervent, a great drinker. Sheshall have sickness of her eyes and be sorrowful byshame, needlessly. Her husband will leave her andshall have much trouble with strangers. She shalltravel much, have pain in her stomach, and liveseventy-seven years.

Above: The P.T.O.T.H. Shepherds. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2002. Pisces. 36 x 26 cm


80

LIBRA: The man born under Libra shall be rightmightily praised and honoured in the service ofCaptains. He shall go in unknown places. He shallkeep well his own, if he make not revelation indrink. He will not keep his promise. He will bemarried, but go from his wife. He shall beenriched by women, but experience evil fortune,though many shall ask counsel of him. He shalllive seventy years after nature.The woman shall be amiable and of great courage,and shall go in places unknown. She shall bedebonair and merry, rejoiced by her husband. Ifshe be not wedded at thirteen, she shall not bechaste. After thirty years old she shall prosper thebetter and have great praise. She shall live sixtyyears after nature.

The P.T.O.T.H. Shepherds. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2002. Libra. 36 x 26 cm


81

SCORPIO: The man born under Scorpio shall havegood fortune. He shall be a great fornicator, andthe first wife he shall have in marriage shallbecome too religious. He shall suffer pain in hisprivy members at fifteen years old. He shall behardy as a lion: he shall be merry, and love goodcompany of merry folk. He shall be in danger ofenemies at twenty-four years, and if he escape heshall live eighty-four years.The woman shall be amiable and fair: she will notbe long with her first husband, and afterward shallenjoy with another by her good and true service.She shall suffer pain in her stomach and wounds inher shoulders, and ought to fear her later days,which shall be doubtful by reason of venom. Sheshall live seventy years after nature.

SAGITTARIUS: The man born under Sagittariusshall have mercy on every man he sees. He shall gofar to desert places unknown and dangerous, and shall return with great gains: he shall see hisfortune increase from day to day. At twenty-twoyears he shall have some peril, but he shall live seventy two years and eight months after nature.The woman shall love to labour: she may not seeone weep en years, and shall have pain in her eyesat fourteen: she shall be called the mother of sons,and shall live seventy-two years after nature.Both man and woman shall be inconstant in deeds;but of good conscience, merciful, and better toothers than themselves.

The P.T.O.T.H. Shepherds. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2002. Saggitarius. 26 x 36 cm

The P.T.O.T.H. Shepherds. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2002. Scorpio. 36 x 26 cm


82Tonight I am Coming to Visit You in Your Dream and none Will See and Question Me; Be Sure to Leave Your Door Unlocked. (for Mary Magdalene,

M.K. Gandhi, Majnu and Rekha),Cuckoonebulopolis, 2002. Oil on canvas. 180 x 120 cm


100Trainees at the School for Necromancy. Corollary Mythologies, 1998/99. Acrylic & oil on canvas. 240 x 100 cms each The Speaking Tree. Corollary Mythologies, 1998/99. Oil on canvas. 240 x 180 cm


102 The Last Unicorn II. Corollary Mythologies, 1998. Acrylic & oil on canvas. 120 x 90 cm 83


89Untitled. Elysium. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2003. Oil on canvas. 210 x 105 cm


90

F a l l o f I c a r u s : S e n s e a n d C e n s o r s h

An Actor Rehearsing the Interior Monologue of Icarus. Annus Mirabilis. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2000. Oil on canvas. 210 x 180 cm


91

The context of this paper is the controversy created by the last minute rejection of Surendran

Nair’s painting, ‘An Actor Rehearsing the Interior Monologue of Icarus’, from a group exhibition at the

National Gallery of Modern Art [NGMA] in 2000. The exhibition was jointly organized by two agencies,

Vis-à-vis and Art Inc, and the proposal was accepted by the Advisory Committee. But at the last

moment, the Director of the National Gallery and the Cultural Secretary asked for the removal of the

‘Icarus’ painting from the show on the ground of “irreverence towards a national symbol”.

The painting depicts an Actor in the role of Icarus, perching on top of the Ashoka Pillar. On a

lower level, close to the ground, a flock of flamingoes fly. At the foot of the pillar is an entrance through

which stairs are visible.

As Kavita Singh observes in her article on the incident [“Newsletter from Delhi”, Marg

Magazine. Vol. 52, No.2, 2000], the act of the authorities had no legal sanction. The constitutional code

only restricts the use of the national f1ag and the national anthem.

This act of censorship not only raises the issue of free expression, but also compels an

investigation into the ways in which an archaeological monument becomes a ‘national symbol’.

Postcolonial theory posits nation as a construct. As Sudipta Kaviraj remarks, nation “is not an object of

discovery but of invention” [“The Imaginary Institution of India”, Subaltern Studies VII, p. I]. “It was

historically instituted by the nationalist imagination of the 19th century” [ibid]. Kaviraj reminds us of

the need “to speak about the contingency of its origins against the enormous and weighty mythology

that has accumulated on its name” [ibid]. In order to cover up this vulnerable modernity, India requires ‘the

delusion of an eternal existence’. Indian antiquity, in this sense, is a pretext, at best a mediated memory,

a ‘social capital’, as Ernest Renan says, “upon which one bases a national idea” [quoted by Ania Loomba,

Colonialism/Post Colonialism, 195-96]. Just as nations are created by forging certain bonds, they are also

created by fracturing others. Nations are created “not merely by invoking and remembering certain

versions of the past, but by making sure that others are forgotten or repressed” [Loomba, 2002]. It is the

operation of this logic that makes the Asoka pillar a national symbol while obliterating certain other

monuments as an invading structure.

As a national symbol, the Asoka pillar forbids any but legal representation. Surendran Nair not

only violates the monument’s authoritarian immunity from references, but also subverts the representation

by the conscious collocation of myth. In the Greek myth, Icarus is a youth who aspires for the Sun.

o r s h i p i n C o n t e m p o r a r y I n d i a n A r tC . S . J a y a r a m


92

Death is the reward for transgressing the law of the father. Breugal’s visionary rendering of the fall

recaptures the Homeric theme of suffering and loneliness. What makes the painting more remarkable is

the corol1ary theme of human indifference to fellow suffering. The individual tragedy is played out

against collective indifference, a point Auden’s ekphrastic poem on the painting makes clear.

Joyce’s reference to the myth accesses its subversive content through the labyrinth/sky binary,

but mutes its transgressive edge by foregrounding the theme of the search for father, which exemplifies

the patriarchal nostalgia of modernism.

Surendran Nair’s painting problematizes this nostalgia through the baroque positioning of the

Icarus Actor atop the phallic pillar. Pillars of Asoka were erected to disseminate the four-fold Dharma.

The four lions on the capital that face the four cardinal directions symbolize the global aspirations of

the mission. The pillar thus signifies law, the power of the State, the monumental solidity of tradition,

while the ordered flight of the flamingoes connotes conformity. ln contrast, the gaze of the rehearsing

Actor is towards the vanishing point. His interior monologue has no explicit text. He is an empty

signifier, a void, that invites a plurality of viewerly texts. In alleging transgression, the civil authority of

the State is thus creating its own paranoiac text.

The situation betrays an essential paradox concerning the National Gallery of Modern Art. As

‘national’, it is an agency of the State, and its purview is conservative. At the same time, its province is

‘modern’, “often provocative and irreverent” [Kavita Singh. 75-76]. In this sense, the Gallery enacts what

Geeta Kapur calls a ‘double discourse’, of the ‘national’ and the ‘modern’, in the form of a confusing

conflation [“National/Modern: Preliminaries”, When was Modernism, 294].

The alternative Geeta Kapur offers is to conflict the notions of ‘tradition’ and modernity,

‘nationhood’ and ‘selfhood’ through a “critical debonding”. Surendran Nair’s Corollary Mythologies play

off, in the words of the artist himself, the themes of ‘belonging and dissent’. They contest, as Chaitanya

Sambrani observes, the fixity of icons which form part of the ‘Indian national imaginary’ [Surendran

Nair: Of Iconicity and Truth, 54]. ‘His corpus of icons and motifs comprise a visual index of nationhood and

tradition’ [ibid]. Though they function within the political economy of faith, they are also ‘sites for

conflict’; they are ‘disputed locations’ [ibid]. In the Cuckoonebulopolis series

to which the ‘Icarus’ painting belongs, myths are employed to

explore “the possibilities and difficulties of imagining something

secular”. Cuckoonebulopolis is an Aristophanian utopia, an avian

abode built by birds as an escape from Athens. Through a collocation

of the ‘nebulous’ and the ‘labyrinthine’, these paintings

carry on the themes articulated in the ‘Icarus’ painting. The one titled

Temporality: Study for an Epic Scale Installation of 330 Million Cloud

Forms’(of variable size), on Poles (of variable length), Motorized for

Rehearsing Icarus, 2000. Annus Mirabilis. Oil on canvas. 91.5 x 76 cm


93

Animation, on a stretch of 786 sq. Miles of Barren plain, on an April Day, when the Sky is Clear, between 11AM

and 3 PM, which was in fact Surendran Nair’s immediate response to the act of censorship, collocates the

‘moral’ and the ‘legal’, thereby invoking an equation between the public domain and the law-enforcing

State. He continues this humorous retaliatory gesture in the heavily intertextual The Garden of Forking

Paths: of Expenditures and Receipts or Gulu Guggulu Guggulu Gulu Gulu, which plays upon the subtle

variations of the same image in 15 equal frames. The literary subtexts, ranging from the Upanishads and

Delphian Oracles to telescoped coinages, create a mock-heroic mise-en-scene. The final frame carries a

proposal for a new emblem for the National Gallery of Modern Art, while the text for the eleventh

frame is “Sarcophillus Harissii” [“Harass me and find yourself in perfect registration within your own

sarcophagus”], Latin name for the Tasmanian Devil.

Censorship in the form of harassment operates in two ways. On the one hand, State intervention

is invoked, involving legal machinery; on the other, it assumes the form of communal vandalism. In

Surendran Nair’s case, neither law nor communal violence was invoked. It was “the subtle grammar of

power that played itself out in the form of exclusionary threats”. All law, according to Upendra Baxi, is,

in its deep structure, ‘colonial’, and is an agent for the ‘illegalities of the dominant’ [“Law in Subaltern

Studies”, Subaltern Studies VII, 249].

A more realistic approach to the complex question of censorship may be found in Shanta

Gokhale who concludes her discussion on the subject with the observation that questions of censorship

should initiate discussion on the problems of negotiating the artist’s position in society. [“Drawing the

Line: Censorship and the Arts”, Art India. Vol. 1, issue 4, pg.26]. As a disciplinary act, it should also invoke

discussion on the degree of accommodation of dissent in a democracy. It should serve as an occasion to

think about the possibility of creating a public sphere in which art works can circulate among the

public, unmanipulated by political and religious obscurantists.

[Paper presented at the National Seminar, “Texts and Contexts: Literature and Culture in

Post-colonial India”, held at The School of Letters, M.G. University, Dec. 4-5, 2002.]

Dangerous Delusions: The Scorpion Act; An actor resting in-between performance of an imaginary play. The Doctrine of the Forest. Cuckoonebulopolis, 1999Oil on canvas. 60 x 180 cm


................


C orollar y Mythologies

...............................................................................................................................................................................................................


96

COROLLARY MYTHOLOGIES

If at all I were to conceptualise the last few years [1995-2000] of my work in a single

phrase, it seems, ‘Corollary Mythologies’ would be appropriate.

‘Corollary Mythologies’ are, in a way, about belonging and dissent. In that sense,

I imagine my works to have political undertones – however subtle that it may be – which are

informed by history, mythology, real and imaginary events, art history, notions of identity and

its relationship with tradition and modernity, language and sexuality, religious and other

faiths, etc. Without emphasizing any one of these in particular, I tend to address these issues

simultaneously. Sometimes rendered sentimentally, literally, cryptically or otherwise,

metaphorically oblique, they are both detached and reflective; at times with a mischievous gaze,

sometimes making innocent jokes, and at other times being ironical and quizzical as well.


70Parable of the Swine. Epiphany. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2000

Oil on canvas. 180 x 240 cm 172

The King of Chou was seated with the

Prince of Fan. At a certain point, the courtiers of

the King of Chou declared that the principality

of Fan had been utterly lost. The Prince of Fan said

to the King of Chou, ‘the ruin of my principality

is not enough to destroy its existence.’ If the ruin

of Fan was not enough to destroy its existence,

then the existence of Chou would not be enough

to preserve Chou. Looking at things from this per-

spective, we clearly see that the principality of Fan

could not declare that it has been ruined any more

than the kingdom of Chou could call itself safe.


ARIES: He that is born in Aries shall be of goodwit and neither rich nor poor. He shall be soonangry and soon pleased. He shall have damage byhis neighbours; he shall have power over dead folks’goods. He shall be a liar, and unsteadfast of courage,and will take vengeance on his enemies. Untothirty-four years he shall be a fornicator, and wedded at thirty-five: and if he be not, he shallnot be chaste. He shall have great sickness at twenty-two years, and if he escapes he shall live sev-enty-five years after nature.The woman that is born in this time shall be ireful, and suffer great wrongs from day to day. She shall lose her husband and recover a better. She shall be sick at five years and in danger attwenty-five, and if she escape, she shall be in doubtuntil forty-three years, but afterwards prosper.

TAURUS: He that is born under Taurus shall bestrong, hardy, and full of strife. In his youth he willdespise every person and be ireful: he shall go onpilgrimage and live among strangers. He shall berich by women, and yet shall experience manypains by women. He shall be grieved by sicknessand venom at twenty-three, and in peril of water atthirty-three: and shall live eighty-five years andthree months.The woman shall be effectual, labouring and a greatliar. She shall have many husbands and many chil-dren. She shall be at her best estate at sixteen years:but then sickly, and if she escape shall live seventy-five years. She ought to bear rings and preciousstones about her.As well man as woman shall be likened to the bullthat laboureth the land: but when the seed is sown,he hath but the straw to his part. They shall keepwell their own and be reputed unkind.

The P.T.O.T.H. Shepherds. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2002. Aries.Watercolour on paper. 36 x 26 cm

The P.T.O.T.H. Shepherds. Cuckoonebulopolis, 2002. Taurus. Watercolour on paper. 36 x 26 cm

The Precision Theatre of

6974


103The Last Unicorn. Corollary Mythologies, 1997. Oil on canvas. 120 x 90 cm


104 Forty Winks II. Corollary Mythologies, 1997. Oil on canvas. 180 x 120 cm


105Burnt Earth Yield Strange Fruits: The Speaking Tree. Corollary Mythologies, 1997. Oil on canvas. 180 x 120 cm



107Left: Untitled. Corollory Mythologies, 1996, Charcoal, acrylic & watercolour on paper. Approx. 150 x 112 cm

Above: An Anamorphic Diagram of a Collection of Strange Wounds, 1995. Acrylic & oil on canvas. 180 x 120 cm


108 Right: Auto Da Fè. Corollory Mythologies, 1995. Oil on canvas. 240 x 180 cm




111Left: Cosmic Mythology. Corollary Mythologies, 1997. Acrylic & oil on canvas. 240 x 180 cm

Above: Man with Plastic Bags. Corollary Mythologies, 1997. Acrylic & oil on canvas. 120 x 90 cm


112 Right: Pyasa (for Guru Dutt). Corollary Mythologies, 1998. Oil on canvas. Approx. 120 x 90 cm



114 Mortal Wounds. Corollary Mythologies, 1998. Oil on canvas. 120 x 90 cm


115Self portrait as an ostrich, whilst it rains incessantly. Corollary Mythologies, 1998. Oil on canvas. 120 x 90 cm


116 Ekasthani: A Bride for Polyphemus. Corollary Mythologies, 1998. Oil on canvas. Approx. 120 x 90 cm


117Gandhari. Corollary Mythologies, 1998. Oil on canvas. 120 x 90 cm


118 Apocolocyntosis: The Ostrich Act II, 1994. Acrylic, charcoal & feathers on paper. 56 x 76 cm


119Apocolocyntosis: The Ostrich Act III, 1995. Acrylic & oil on canvas. 240 x 180 cm


120 Family Values. Corollary Mythologies, 1998. Oil on canvas. 180 x 210 cm


121The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Corollary Mythologies, 1998. Oil on canvas. 180 x 120 cm


122 Wounds. Corollary Mythologies, 1998. Oil on canvas board. Each 45 cms diameter


123


124Left: Untitled. Corollary Mythologies, 1996. Water Colour on paper. Approx. 160 x 112 cm

Right: Untitled: For Rekha. Corollary Mythologies, 1996. Water colour on paper. Approx. 158 x 112 cm




127Left: Forty Winks III. Corollary Mythologies, 1997. Water colour on paper. 76 x 56 cm

Above: Some Reflections about Sacred Cows, or the Birth of Minotaur. Corollary Mythologies, 1998. Watercolour on paper. 56 x 76 cm


128 Design for a Calendar. Corollary Mythologies, 1996. Water colour on paper. 159 x 118 cm


129Kausalya. Corollary Mythologies, 1998. Water colour on paper. 76 x 57 cm


130Above: The Mortal Wound of Chiron, the Centaur. Corollary Mythologies, 1998. Water colour on paper. 57 x 77 cm

Right: Centaur Play. Corollary Mythologies, 1997. Water colour on paper. 65 x 50 cm



132 Forty Winks. Corollary Mythologies, 1997. Water colour on paper. 165 x 114 cm


133Chiron, the Centaur. Corollary Mythologies, 1998. Water colour on paper. 28 x 37 cm


134 Monkey, 1998. Water colour on paper. 28 x 37 cm


135Buffalo into Rooster, 2000. Watercolour on paper. 76 x 57 cm


136


137Labyrinth. Prolapsus of Prolixity. Wound. A Trademark. Melancholy of the Minotaur. Corollary Mythologies, 1997. Painted aluminum cast. 10 x 20 x 4.5 cm each


...............


............................................................................................................................... ...........................................................T he Labyrinth of Eternal Delights


140 Right: The Labyrinth, 1996. Etching, Monotype & 100’s of 1000’s. 102 x 70 cm



142 For Those Who Run Too Fast. The Labyrinth of Eternal Delight, 1996.Etching on shoulder pad. 11.5 x 14 cm

Goose Pimples. The Labyrinth of Eternal Delight, 1996. Etching on shoulder pad. 11.5 x 14 cm

Untitled. The Labyrinth of Eternal Delight, 1996. Etching on shoulder pad. 11.5 x 14 cm

Above: Monument for a Perpetual Optimist. The Labyrinth of Eternal Delight, 1996. Etching on shoulder pad. 11.5 x 14 cm

The Road to Lumbini. The Labyrinth of Eternal Delight, 1996. Etching on shoulder pad. 11.5 x 14 cm

Mercury. The Labyrinth of Eternal Delight, 1996. Etching on shoulder pad. 11.5 x 14 cm

The Mythology of Civilisation. The Labyrinth of Eternal Delight, 1996.Etching on shoulder pad. 11.5 x 14 cm

Marriage of Fire & Water (After an old Illustration). The Labyrinth of EternalDelight, 1996. Etching on shoulder pad. 11.5 x 14 cm


143Parole. The Labyrinth of Eternal Delight, 1996. Etching on shoulder pad. 11.5 x 14 cm


144

Titles are an important

element in my work. Sometimes it

becomes quite elaborate and at

other times I use visuals itself as

titles, instead of words. There is a

constant play between images and

words in order to create surprising

associations and meanings. For me,

these are not just titles; I do believe

that they go beyond their basic

‘referential’ function.

Right: The Garden of Eternal Delights, 1996. Water colour, charcoal & shoulder pads on paper. Approx. 160 x 112 cm



146 The Labyrinth of Eternal Delight, 1996. Hand coloured etching. 28 x 37 cm


147After a Malayalam Proverb. The Labyrinth of Eternal Delight, 1996. Hand coloured etching. 28 x 37 cm


148 Aristophanes Crossing Styx to Bring Back Euripedes from Hades to Write Some More Tragedies. The Labyrinth of Eternal Delight, 1996. Hand coloured etching. 28 x 37 cm


149Monument for a Perpetual Pessimist. The Labyrinth of Eternal Delight, 1996. Hand coloured etching. 28 x 37 cm


150 A Giant Static Spinning Wheel for Gandhi (To be built in salt). The Labyrinth of Eternal Delight, 1996. Hand coloured etching. 28 x 37 cm


151Prometheus Dreaming. The Labyrinth of Eternal Delight, 1997. Hand coloured etching. 37 x 28 cm


152 The Marriage of Man Ray to Duchamp. The Labyrinth of Eternal Delight, 1997. Hand coloured etching. 28 x 37 cm


153A Sentimental Dialogue, or Two Lovers at Vadodara. The Labyrinth of Eternal Delight, 1996. Hand coloured etching. 28 x 37 cm


154 Ariadne conversing with Schehrazade (for Rekha). The Labyrinth of Eternal Delight, 1997. Hand coloured etching. 28 x 37 cm


155Pictorial Title. The Labyrinth of Eternal Delight, 1996. Hand coloured etching. 28 x 37 cm


156


157Left: Apocolocyntosis. The Labyrinth of Eternal Delight, 1997. Hand coloured etching. 37 x 28 cmAbove: Pictorial Title. The Labyrinth of Eternal Delight, 1996. Hand coloured etching. 37 x 28 cm


158 Goulipuranam, Otherwise the Garden of Eternal Delight. The Labyrinth of Eternal Delight, 1996. Hand coloured etching. 28 x 37 cm


159Cover design for an imaginary book called –‘The Art of Necromancy’. The Labyrinth of Eternal Delight, 1997. Hand coloured etching. 37 x 28 cm


...............


E arly Works

.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................


162

Above: Akathu Kathi, Purathu Bhakthi (After a Malayalam proverb), 1995.Acrylic & oil on canvas. 64 x 50 cm. Right: The Magic Square, 1995.

Surendran Nair & Mithun Rodwittiya. Acrylic & oil on canvas. 150 x 150 cm



164 Above: Untitled, 1994. Acrylic on canvas. 180 x 120 cm. Right: The Merman and the Sea of Loneliness (Homage to an old friend), 1991. Oil on canvas. Approx. 45 x 32 cm



166 The Journey, 1992. Acrylic & oil on canvas. Approx. 152 x 147 cm


167Goulipuranam, otherwise The Garden of Eternal Delight, 1994. Oil on canvas. 152 x 152 cm


168 1. Sleeping River, 1985. Lithograph. 56 x 76 cm. 2. The Disabused One, 1984. Lithograph. 56 x 76 cm. 3. The Pig, 1985. Lithograph. 56 x 76 cm


169About Growing Wings, 1985. Lithograph. 56 x 76 cm


................


E arly Works: Drawings

............................................................................................................................... ............................................................................


172

Before the Deluge:The Romance of Innoc en

For many of us artists, it has been the ethos of the times we have grown up in which has influenced

us, and despite the interventions of other influences, we desire to retain the connection with

those early moorings of idealism, where the pledge of commitment to the involvement with art

is untainted. Surendran has had the privilege of the initiation of his art practice at the

Trivandrum College of Fine Arts, where besides the chronicled history of change and resistance

to the academic pedagogy of which he and his friends were part of, there existed other

territories of interactions that were crucial in defining directions, and formulating both the

individual as well as the collective consciousness of those young artists from Kerala. Precious to

this becomes the romance of the engagement with the collective that is the hallmark of the 70s,

for those who were inspired by Marxism. The idea of the commune was the bedrock upon

which the heroism of comradeship was cemented between these friends and colleagues, and

where the fervour of anarchy was celebrated in the flush of youthful exuberance.

Surendran’s life as a college student started in the classrooms of a botany course of a Bachelor

of Science program where he spent most of the time doodling and drawing the people around

him. It was his brother Manmadhan who suggested he apply to an art college, and so three

months later, on December 29, 1975, he joined the Trivandrum College of Fine Arts. In a

college, where the student strength was predominantly male, Surendran’s classmates and close

friends became N.N. Mohandas and his brother N.N. Rimzon, K.V. Sasikumar, Jeevan Thomas,

Ashokan Poduval, Rajasekharan Nair, K.M. Madhusoodhanan, K.P. Krisnakumaran and Alex

Mathew, to name a few. With many of these young boys coming from a traditional and

sheltered upbringing, the shift away from home brought with it an intellectual freedom that

they could explore without excuse or apology. It is certainly more than coincidence or mere

skill that delivered the precocious abilities that these young art students exhibited in their works

from their very first year at the art school. Keenly political and with a thirst to consume cinema

and literature which became important factors that fuelled their creativity, along with art magazines,

that literally brought the international art world into their provincial abode, their aesthetic

enquiries were bounced off one another with a fierce determination to shrug off the conventions

within contemporary Indian art that they thought to be both imposing and redundant.

Mohandas & Sasi


173

oc ence, Chai Laris & Swashbuckling SwaggersR e k h a R o d w i t t i y a

Every art school has stylistic features by which it becomes identified. These trends display

formal, theoretical and ideological preoccupations prevalent at the times in which the works

are done, despite the expansiveness of a structured syllabus that governs teaching at these

institutions. The Trivandrum College of Art showcases this tendency in the works of these students

from the 70s and 80s in the competent draughtsmanship that their work exemplified. What

is interesting to note, however, is that it is the initiatives taken by these young art students

themselves, as a quest to counter what they felt to be outdated norms within the exercises given

to them by their teachers, that led to the articulation of drawing establishing itself as a major

form of expression for them. It could very well have been the extension of sketching that they

indulged in with obsessive rigour that, in fact, provided the potency for this to emerge as a

major linguistic medium. Whatever the catalyst, this group of young artists has left a legacy of

difference within their regional history, that otherwise had academic issues of aesthetic focus

during those years, along with the Madras School’s revivalist inclinations.

Much has already been written about the politics that these young artists embraced, and which

has impacted each of their lives in ways that are undeniable. However, entrenched into these

personal histories are other layers of influence which are as vital in their contribution to the

formation of their artistic attitudes. These are gleaned from anecdotes that are often humorous,

yet poignant, and which they carry till today as valued memories of their past; acting as

reminders to the gallantry of heroism that they all flirted with, and which lent them the tinges

of notoriety that became part of the packaged presentation of this group’s image of itself.

The interdependency of their lives became one another’s anchors for survival, as it helped in

creating an alternative paradigm of learning that refuted the conventions of teaching offered by

the Trivandrum College of Art at that time, and they sanctioned the validity of their choices by

shutting all else out, other than the prescriptions of their own dictates. As an artist, Surendran

continues to carry forth this inherited methodology, which reflects in his self-absorption with

his art practice in the privacy of his studio, obliterating all other distractions, keeping constant

the need to perceive and filter all observations through the prism of intellectual enquiries that

mapped a pattern for renegotiations, many years ago, with cultural histories and politics.

Krishna Kumar & Rajashekharan


174

As these child-men postured under the tome of others’ ideas that shadowed their own

imaginative terrain, they continuously came to cross roads of conflict that forced them into

more pertinent arguments of relevance to their immediate realities. Experimentations with

language occurred, and still-lives and landscapes made for typical subjects in the pursuit of

learning on campus. However, it was in drawing the portraits of one another in the spaces

of intimacy, putting aside stereotypical academic expectations, that made this genre actually

become an area of special interest for these young boys. With A.P. Santanraj as their teacher

and with his bohemian lifestyle and madness of energy percolating into their lives, his

influences can be clearly seen in the linear quality of these artists’ drawings.

All of these young friends lived on paltry allowances that could never stretch to the end of any

month of any calendar, and so the strategies of ‘survival’ were ingenious, and quite hilarious,

in many instances. The saying ‘all for one and one for all’ could quite easily be the motto by

which they lived, and it is this absolute commitment of belief to the commune of brotherhood

which created the platform of an implicit trust to exist, where learning about art, as a logical

progression within this shared existence, also became fused into this territory of loyalties.

Each supported the other by the investment of making the other’s experiences their own, and

forging a united vision that dreamt about a future for art that would be revolutionized by their

interventions. The zealous dreams of fertile young minds no doubt, yet disquietingly prophetic

in the heralding of the Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors Association, that was founded in

1987 by some of these young artists, in later years.

Chai laris and toddy shops were the frequent haunts of Surendran and his friends, and where their

drawings filled every available space –– from cigarette packet sleeves to scraps of paper napkins –– and

where conversations, fecund with rhetoric, thickened the air as much as the acrid smoke of cheap

cigarettes. Borrowed heroes are often necessary crutches for our own dramas to come alive, and it

was the works of writers, like Dostoevsky, and artists, like Pablo Picasso and Toulouse Lautrec, that

fuelled the fires of these young men’s imaginations. The visual language of the Expressionists through

the works of artists like Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele also became yet another trampoline of

discovery that Surendran and his colleagues found, to facilitate their own stylistic assimilations. The

devastation of a war-torn society positioned the sharp and cutting commentary of the political

subject in George Grosz’s drawings and prints, which triggered the passions of a conscience against

authoritarianism, to be worn unabashedly by future artists, especially those who dreamed of cultural

revolutions through their art.

Most of the early works done by Surendran are studies of his friends and the models that the

Jeevan & Alex Mathew


175

college provided for the life study classes. These human portraits are not mere chronicles of

the likeness of the other, but become territories that bespeak of the dialogues that prevailed at

that time and fashioned the mental landscapes of those posed subjects. Often tender and

compassionate, these drawings are compelling because they allude to deeper wells of human

bonding, than is otherwise ever revealed through the paraded masquerade of maverick

idiosyncratic stories of that era, and thereby speak of an exquisite innocence that can only exist

in the adolescence of our lives.

Though the exposure they chose for themselves was more towards Western art, I do believe that

the local cultural sensibilities of Kerala, such as the theatre and dance forms of Kathakali and

Theyyam, or the murals of Mattancheri, also cast their influences on these young art students.

For the rituals of religious practice and festivals celebrated in the region were intertwined in their

lives, through their connections with family, and till today, many of these witnessed practices,

inherited from those days of living in his family home, are renegotiated by Surendran in his work.

However, he examines them for what they evoke in the present context of the appropriation of

religion by political factions, rather than identifying with the beliefs implicit in them.

Many artists preserve their works from their college days. Most times, it stems from sentimentality

rather than for any other reason, and this too has been with Surendran too. When he came to

Baroda to seek admission in 1983, he brought his portfolio of works for the interview at the art

college. This was then added to, from the three years spent in the printmaking department of the

M.S. University, and then relegated to the confines of a cupboard for safe keeping, as personal

memorabilia often are. This portfolio re-emerged once again in 2005 when Surendran shifted

into his new studio at Sama in Baroda; where he carefully rearranged these works in the drawers

of a wooden cabinet, and in doing so I was able to look at them after a period of a decade or

more. Besides the personal reminiscence that they possess, these works also embody a stylistic

language that historically has significance, both to the artist’s own development as a painter,

as well as being instructive of the history of the Trivandrum College of Art, that was his first

learning ground.

History is often viewed as being an anthology of profound and remarkable occurrences, but in

truth, it is the sequence of time and all its tiny instances that make for the value of heritage.

This small and personal collection of Surendran’s early work, if viewed from within this

paradigm of perception, suggests the potential of this corollary.

Baroda, 2006

Ashokan & Rimzon



177Left: Shankaran-chettan, 1976. Charcoal on newsprint. 40 x 33 cm

Above 1: K.V. Sasikumar, 1981. Pen & ink on tissue paper. 20 x 20 cm. Above 2: Sasi Looking into the Void, 1982. Oil on paper. 45 x 50 cm


178 Left: Salim, 1983. Pen on Charminar cigarette packet. 13 x 8 cm. Right: Ranjith, 1982. Oil on paper. 38 x 25 cm


179Vijayashekharan, 1982. Indian ink on paper. 25 x 19 cm



181Left: Ramachandra Malusari, the Watchman, 1985. Indian ink on paper. 56 x 37 cm. Above 1: Pradeep, 1982. Indian ink on paper. 22 x 14 cm

Above 2: Bliss in this World to what Avail? (Appakkeralavarma), 1982. Pencil on paper. 66 x 41 cm. Above 3: Karunakaran, 1982. Crayon on paper. 56.5 x 38 cm


182 Mohandas, 1982. Indian ink on paper. 38 x 25 cm


183Rimzon, 1981. Pen & ink on tissue paper. 23 x 23 cm



185Left: Heat Energy, 1982. Pen on paper. 22 x 15 cm. Right: Jeevan Thomas,1982. Indian ink on paper. 24 x 30 cm


186 Anita (Dube), 1985. Indian ink on paper. 56 x 38 cm


187Bela, 1986. Indian ink on paper. 56 x 38 cm


188 Chandran Sleeping, 1981. Pencil on p


189ing, 1981. Pencil on paper. 28 x 18 cm


190 Prabhakaran, 1985. Etching & aquatint. 28 x 19 cm


191Madhu(soodhanan), 1983. Etching & aquatint. 28 x 19 cm



193Left: Rekha with a Mosquito, 1985. Lithograph. 59 x 46 cm. Above: Payyannur Muhammad Ashokkhan, 1982. Pen on card. 17 x 12 ccm



195Left: Vattappara Ramachandran, 1982. Pencil & Wash on paper. 31x 26 cm. Above: Luncheon Drumming: Ashokan with an Empty Kerosene Can, 1982. Pen on paper. 28 x 27 cm


196 Above: (Mao) Vijayan, 1982. Pen on paper. 24 x 18.5 cm. Right: Habib, 1986. Indian ink on paper. 56 x 38 cm




199Left: (Gulikan) Vijayan, 1981. Pencil on paper. 38 x 22.5 cm. Above: The Garden Bench, 1983. Pen on paper. 23 x 28 cm


200 Above: Raghu, 1982. Indian ink on paper. 25 x 19 cm. Right: (Pappan) Rajashekharan, 1982. Ink on paper. 24 x 18 cm



202 Venu Sleeping, 1981. Pencil on p


203ng, 1981. Pencil on paper. 29 x 23 cm


204 Raji, 1983. Pen on paper. 27 x 19 cm


205Rekha Drawing her Drawing, 1987. Indian ink on paper. 76 x 57 cm


206 Room No. 47: Mohandas Dozing; Babukutty Reading, 1983. Pen on paper. 14 x 22 cm


207Abhimanue, 1983. Pen on paper. 8 x 7.5 cm


208 Above: Gopan and the Spider, 1982. Indian ink on paper. 29 x 23 cm. Right: Soman, 1981. Pencil on paper. 28 x 18 cm



210Above 1: Mithun, 1988. Dry pastel on paper. 37 x 28 cm. Above 2: Chakki, 1986. Monoprint on paper. 56 x 37 cm

Right: Devaki, my Mother, 1983. Indian ink on paper. 33 x 22.5 cm




213Left: Paoulose, 1981. Oil pastels on paper. 36 x 28 cm. Above: Mohandas Reading, 1982. Ink on paper. 40 x 30 cm


214 Above: Life Study, 1982. Pen on paper. 63 x 41 cm. Right: Ajithan, 1982. Oil on oil sketching paper. 37 x 27 cm




217Left: Mohandas, 1982. Oil pastels on paper. 38 x 20 cm

Above 1: Ashokan (Poduval), 1982. Oil & pencil on oil sketching paper. 53 x 36 cm. Above 2: Krishna Kumar, 1982. Oil on oil sketching paper. 53 x 36 cm


218Above: Jayan, 1982. Oil on oil sketching paper. 53 x 36 cm

Right: Sasi Sleeping [Even Palakkar Feels Sleepy],1982. Oil on oil sketching paper. 37 x 28 cm



220

1956: Born Onakoor, Kerala.1981: Diploma (Painting) College of Fine Arts,Trivandrum, Kerala.1982: B.F.A. (Painting) College of Fine Arts, Trivandrum,Kerala.1986: Post Diploma (Print Making) Faculty of Fine Arts,M.S. University of Baroda.

SOLO EXHIBITIONS1986: GRAPHIC PRINTS. Kerala Lalit Kala Akademi,Ernakulam.1989: LANDSCAPES & OTHER DRAWINGS. Vithi, Baroda.1989: DRAWINGS, GRAPHICS & PAINTINGS. CMC ArtsGallery, New Delhi.1990: PAINTINGS & DRAWINGS. Gallery 7, Mumbai.1995: PAINTINGS & DRAWINGS. Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai.1996: THE LABYRINTH OF ETERNAL DELIGHT.Cambelltown City Bicentennial Art Gallery, Sydney &Casula Power House.1997: THE LABYRINTH OF ETERNAL DELIGHT. NazarGallery, Baroda.Atelier 2221, New Delhi.1998: COROLLARY MYTHOLOGIES. Sakshi Gallery,Mumbai.2005: BAD BEHAVIOUR OF SINGULARITIES. SakshiGallery, Mumbai.2006: BAD BEHAVIOUR OF SINGULARITIES. Lalit Kala.Academy, Delhi, presented by Sakshi Gallery.2008: PERNOCTATION & EARLY DRAWINGS. SakshiGallery - Mumbai.2009: PERNOCTATION & EARLY DRAWINGS presented bySakshi Gallery at Darbar Hall, Cochin.

GRouP SHOWS

1986: TWO PERSONS SHOW WITH N.N. RIMZON. Gallery 7, Mumbai.1987: INDIA IN SWITZERLAND EXHIBITION OF WORKS

ON PAPER at the Centre Genevois De GravureContemporain, Geneva.1991: NEST FOR SPARROW. Artists Centre, Mumbai.1991-92: IMAGES AND WORDS. A travelling exhibitionorganised by SAHMAT for communal harmony.1992: JOURNEY WITHIN LANDSCAPES. Sakshi Gallery(Jehangir Art Gallery), Mumbai.1993: POSTCARDS FOR GANDHI. Organised by SAHMAT in six different cities.1997: 6TH BIENALLE OF CONTEMPORARY ART. BharatBhavan, Bhopal.

SURENDRAN NAIR

Above, Below &, Right: For the nationalists and other birds. A 3-piece site specificcartoon sculpture, 1997. Size variable. Printed aluminium casts, belts and feathers.


1998: THE NEW SOUTH. Delphina Studio Gallery,London.1996-97: FIRE & LIFE. Faculty of Fine Art Gallery,Baroda, & Chemould Art Gallery, Bombay and MonashUniversity Gallery, Melbourne Exhibition of Worksmade during The Exchange Residency Project organisedby Asia Link with Jon Cattapan in India and Australia.1997: GIFT FOR INDIA. Organised by SAHMAT to celebrate 50 years of Independence. Delhi & Mumbai.INDIAN CONTEMPORARY ART - POST INDEPENDENCE,N.G.M.A., New Delhi. Organised by Vadehra Gallery.9TH TRIENNALE - INDIA, Rabindra Bhawan, New DelhiKHOJ. British Council Gallery, New Delhi.REDISCOVERING THE ROOTS: Lima, Peru. Curated byLaxma Gaud.1998: FOUR PERSONS SHOW. Nature Morte, New DelhiCRYPTOGRAMS. Lakeeren, Mumbai.THE SEARCH WITHIN. Indo Austrian Exhibition, PerneggMonastry & Salzburg, Austria and N.G.M.A, New Delhi& Mumbai.1999: 1ST TRIENNALE OF ASIAN ART. Fukuoka, Japan3RD ASIA PACIFIC TRIENNALE, Queens Land Art Gallery,Australia.IMAGINED SPACES. Two person show with Rekha.Rodwittiya at the Noosa City Council Art Gallery inQueensland Australia. The show traveled for one year toimportant art centres around Australia.2000: SPIN. Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai.FAMILY RESEMBLENCES. Curated by R. Hoskote, BirlaAcademy, Mumbai.COMBINE - VOICES OF THE CENTURY. Visa-vis & Art Inc,New Delhi.EXILE & LONGING. Lakeeren, Mumbai.CELEBRATION OF THE HUMAN IMAGE. Habitat, NewDelhi.2001: Palette 2001. Habitat, New Delhi.HOME & THE WORLD. India Centre of Art & Culture,New York, Curated by Karin Lewis-Miller.2002: KAPITAL & KARMA: RECENT POSITIONS IN INDIAN

ART. Kunsthalle Wien, Austria-Curated by AngelicaFritz, Michael Worgotter & Ranjit Hoskote.New Indian Art: Home-Street-Shrine-Bazaar-Museum.Manchester Art Gallery. Curated by Gulam MohammedSheikh.CREATIVE SPACE. Sakshi Gallery, India Habitat Centre,New Delhi.2003: UNDER THE SKIN OF SIMULATION, The Fine Art

Resource, Berlin.HIGHLIGHTS. Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai.THE TREE FROM THE SEED. Contemporary Art FromIndia, Henie Onstad Center, Oslo, Norway.2004: EDGE OF DESIRE. The Art Gallery Of WesternAustralia, Perth, Australia.2007: INAGURAL SHOW, Sakshi Gallery New Space,Colaba, Mumbai.SH. CONTEMPORARY, Shanghai, China.ART MIAMI, Miami, U.S.A.ART SINGAPORE, Singapore.INDIGENIUS, An Exhibition of Indian ContemporaryART, SOKA Contemporary Space, Taipei.2007-08: HORN PLEASE - Naratives in ContemporaryIndian Art, Kunnst Museum, Bern, Switzerland. Curatedby Bernhard Fibicher & Suman Gopinath.2008: ART TAIPEI, Taipei.

WORKSHOPS

1985: WOODCUT WORKSHOP organised by URJA,Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda.1986: IPCL ALL INDIA PRINTMAKERS’ WORKSHOP,Baroda.1987: INDIA IN SWITZERLAND. A workshop of drawing,lithography and drypoint at the Centre Genevois DeGravure Contemporian, Geneva.1988: Attended a Painting and Drawing camp organised byRekha Rodwittiya for Lakhanpal Ltd., at Goa.1994: Attended a Seminar and workshop on Printmakingat the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University of Baroda.1999: An International workshop organised by Khoj,Modi Nagar.

RESIDENCIES

1992: Artist in Residence. Ruskin School of Drawingand Fine Arts, Oxford, on a Charles Wallace grant.1995: Artist in the Community, U.W.S. Macarthur andCasula Power House, Sydney, Australia.1996-97: FIRE & LIFE. An Indo-Australian Exchange Residency withJon Cattapan, hosted in Baroda, Indiaand Melbourne, Australia.1997: Two month residency by theNoosa City Council Gallery withRekha Rodwittiya.2004: Civittella Ranieri Centre.Umbertide, Perugia, Italy.


222

COLLECTIONS:

Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan

Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia

Casula Powerhouse, Sydney, Australia

National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, India

Kerala Lalithakala Akademy, Thrissur, India

and many private collections in India and abroad


223

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Mukesh Bhatt and Vilas for screen printing.Malavika Rajnarayan for cataloguing my documentation.Kamlesh Patel and Anish Shaikh for their tireless attendance and service.

PHOTO CREDITS

Jyoti Bhatt, Himanshu Pahad, Nilesh ChaudaPrakash Rao and Raju Solanki

TEXT ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For ‘ET in Ayodhya Ego… if not, the Stygian Oath of Abjuration’:Nicholas PoussinJuan Rulfo, ‘Pedro Paromar;’ an altered version of what Carlos Fuentes recalled during an interview

with Debra A. CastilloAristophanes, ‘Birds’, (Interpolated)

For The Precision Theatre of the Heavenly Shepherds: The Kalendar of Shepheardes, 1604 (The perpetualAlmanack of Folklore, by Charles Kightly)

For the painting: ‘The Garden of Forking Paths: Expenditures and Receipts, or Gulu Guggulu Guggulu Gulu Gulu’* Brahadaaranyaka Upanishad* Aristophanes, ‘Birds’* Attributed to Kalidasa* Anonymous Japanese poem, ancient period* Correggio* Mundaka Upanishad* Milorad Pavic, ‘The last love in Constantinople’* Aristophanes, ‘Frogs’. (arrangement mine)* Poet Tholan, (Kottarathil Sankunni, ‘Eithihyamaala’)* Chuang Tzu, (Roberto Calasso, ‘The Ruin of Kasch’)* Anonymous Japanese poem, ancient period* Roberto Calasso, ‘The Ruin of Kasch’* Mahabharata* Shakespeare, ‘Macbeth’, (Modified)* Gladiators address of Caesar* Kottarathil Sankunni, ‘Eithihyamaala’, (on Kakkasseri Bhattathiri)

For the painting: ‘Parable of the Swine’* Chuang Tzu, (Roberto Calasso, ‘The Ruin of Kasch’)

For the painting: ‘Mephistopheles... otherwise, the Quaquaversal Prolix’* Poet Tholan, (Kottarathil Sankunni, ‘Eithihyamaala’)


224

My love and thanks to Amma, for her unconditional

belief and support, as always. Chettan, for his guidance in

introducing me to the Trivandrum College of Fine Arts.

Rekha, without whom nothing would have been possible,

and especially for insisting that I show my early drawings

and for curating the presentation of it. Mithun, for his

exuberance and love. And to Geetha Mehra and the entire

Sakshi Team.





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