Ram Kumar died as he had lived, quietly, with little fanfare. For a large part of his life, he drew attention to himself inadvertently, as an informal member of the Progressive Group of artists. In the seven decades of his practice as an artist, there are no grand gestures in the manner of M.F Husain, little of the societal ease of his Shimla confrere Krishen Khanna, no shadow of the dark brooding crisis of Tyeb Mehta, or any of the explosive virility claimed with such machismo by Francis Newton Souza. Could the viewer then be blamed for mistaking one Ram Kumar painting for another, of seeing a seamless continuity in seven decades of painting? Or were the peaks and troughs of artistic endeavour contained in every work, much like a continuing existential debate? My engagement with Ram Kumar came about as a critic reviewing his shows over the years, but also as a curator during the 25th anniversary of Vadehra Art Gallery in 2013, with whom he had a long association. I made the trip to his home in Bharti Artists Colony in the trans Yamuna area with Sonia Bellaney of Vadehra Art Gallery. Like his friend Krishen Khanna, Ram Kumar worked in the basement of his house, the natural light coming in narrowly through a skylight. From the 1960s to the 1980s, Ram Kumar revealed himself in his letters to Krishen Khanna, complaining of his dislike for Delhi, and lingering memory of the mountains. He wrote of a summer spent alone, working in Delhi, “One is capable of doing very hard work every day when one decides to do it almost eight to nine hours without any compulsion or exhaustion – I never felt the heat – 44.5 degrees. Man has tremendous capacity to bear hardships if he has the willpower.” Here in his studio, stacks of his paintings stood at rigid angles to the ground. The artist himself occupied a modest space in the room, using for his neatly laid brushes a wooden desk that he had bought from Husain for a hundred rupees in the 1960s. Unlike the younger generation of artists, there were no assistants to incrementally enhance the production of work. Yet what emerged from this haven of quietude for the Vadehra show was blinding in its beauty – eight works on paper, which he had done two decades ago but had never been seen, the jagged aquamarine blue colliding with shafts of black and white to create an electrifying effect. Long considered a master of the abstract landscape, Ram Kumar appears to have drawn sustenance from early influences. Born in Shimla and deeply influenced by the mountains, like his fellow artists Jagdish Swaminathan (1928-1994) and Krishen Khanna (b. 1924), he trained initially in economics at St. Stephen’s College, started out as a banker and then attended evening classes at the Sarada Ukil School. Travelling to Paris in 1951, he studied under Andre Lhote and became a member of the Communist Party in France. On his return, his engagements were two fold, but both located in a broad existential crisis. His younger brother Nirmal Varma had blazed a trail as the forbear of the Nayi Kahani movement. Here Ram Kumar wrote of the recognisable and the familiar, the quotidian lives of the middle class, and became a distinguished writer of the Hindi short story. In contrast, his paintings elevate our contemplation of human existence to a metaphysical level, through purported landscapes that speak to the eye but also address an unsettled, enquiring spirit.In his letters to Krishen Khanna, Ram Kumar had complained of his dislike for Delhi, and lingering memory of the mountains. Credit: Manish Gera BaswaniWhile Bombay and Bengal cinema came to critique the state of the nation by the mid-1950s, through filmmakers Guru Dutt, Raj Kapoor, Satyajit Ray and Bimal Roy, Ram Kumar had arrived at a condition of despair in the early 1950s. On his return from France, a country hobbled by the Second World War, Ram Kumar in his writing and painting was concerned with an erosion of values, loneliness, and isolation. The fractured realism of paintings like Sad Town (1956) communicated alienation in a framework that is psychological and contemporary. His paintings of this period of lonely figures bore the credo of the Nayi Kahani movement of which Bhisham Sahni had said “is not the presentation of any “slice of life”, it must present that which is meaningful, has value and significance….. The New Story is centred round man and is committed to man.” Yet by the early 1960s, Ram Kumar was willing to occlude man, the persistent subject of his writing, from his painting. Much has been read into his 1960 visit to Benaras with Husain, a friend who valued the gravitas and integrity of Ram Kumar. The city clearly held a fascination because it exceeded the potential of the landscape. There is much in the Benaras paintings that we recognise latterly as embedded in his artistic vision. The artist’s view is as if from Ram Nagar, the opposite, secular, even unholy face of the ghats. Looking on to the haloed grounds between the Varuna and Assi, Kumar saw the river and its dark movements of the night but also the twinkling illumination of sandhya worship, conical temples and mound like mosques. What order and angular symmetry Mondrian had conferred on New York, Ram Kumar scrambled, compressed and fractured to create a condensed vision of Varanasi. Benaras is a subject that Indian artists Husain, Manu Parekh, and others have returned to. After visiting Benaras the world’s oldest surviving religious city, Ram Kumar was to exorcise the city in varying ways – of its dense habitation, creating tight spaces, a fading decrepitude, interwoven and interdependent, like the labyrinths of the mind. Nearly 30 years ago, Ram Kumar was to write: “When one is young and beginning one’s work is dominated by content, by ideas – but as one grows older, one turns to the language of painting itself. I have grown detached – I want to find the same peace that the mystics found.” (1991) From the 1970s and till the end of his life, Ram Kumar was to paint the landscape, his energetic expressionistic strokes creating a field of grandeur and contemplation. At no point was the landscape more or less than itself, evoking the infinity of the sky, glacial jagged peaks and valleys drawn from childhood memory or recent travels, views of distant tree trunks or the occasional cluster of huts. If we the viewers can inhabit art, then Ram Kumar offered us a place of refuge and pause. Perforce, one would be, like him, alone in this journey, and continually compelled to press onward. For, no matter how challenging the landscape, it is one that conferred dignity, and an affirmation of our humanity. Gayatri Sinha is the editor of the Critical Collective, a site on the arts. This article first appeared on criticalcollective.in.
