Published in The Art&Deal Magazine as cover story for Art and Society
I encountered this painting during the Museum Collection exhibition at the Art Konsult Gallery. A little known work hardly documented and never really discussed as a Ramkinker Baij masterpiece. There is an universal ambiguity regarding the title of the work because around the time ( 1970’s) it was not fashionable in Indian art to leave major work “untitled “ as a title. An initial inquiry suggested that this work belong to the famine series and was attributed to 1973. This naming and dating created a zone of confusion for me as I was unable to locate a series called famine in Ramkinker’s oeuvre .If at all one can identify famine series within Ramkinkar’s body of work it would be a series of water color done in the 1940’s. there is almost no evidence of him having done significant oil on canvas work around that time. The famine in the painting itself seemed to be limited to the figure of old skeletal man with a begging bowl and the child whereas all other figures especially one of the lady carrying bowl in hand seemed extremely healthy and instead of the classical famine iconography of dying animals we see two healthy cows ploughing the field in the background.
The painting belongs to the renowned collector Dr. Mahesh Chandra and discussions with him reveal that there was an allusion to the artist’s mother in this work. This info led me to a psycho-analytical reading of the work drawing reference from a few painting s of Ramkinker Baij which depict child on a mother’s lap. However here the mother is young and the child is uncared for, old and starving. It made me think that the mother in the painting could possibly be ‘mother India’. The woman seems to be looking elsewhere, as if in a rush. Eyes firmly fixed towards the far away horizon. Was it a reference to Mother India’s neglect for its poor? An early critique of how the nation was more interested in the rich getting its resources at the cost of the poor? Though Ramkinker had very well known and well laid out socialist ideology this reading seems a little far fetched. Then it also seemed quite plausible when one looked at the landscape in background where the trees almost mimic factories. Ramkinker brings back his early experiments with cubism to hint at a ghost industrial landscape. This rendering of the landscape led me to believe for a while that indeed this painting could be a subaltern critique of the nation as a mother. This reading also gained prominence in me as clearly there was no famine in Bengal in 1970’s.
However, from my knowledge of Ramkinker’s biography there was no reason to assume that he had that kind of a psycho-traumatic relation with his mother or the country and it was still not making sense to me. It is at this point that I called up Mr. Pranabranjan Roy, one of the most important knowledge archive about post-independence modernism in Bengal. In my conversation with Pranab da I learned that Ramkinkar had personally narrated this story behind this painting to him, and it was actually a reference to an incident that he heard from his mother in form of a story. When Ramkinkar was very young and his father would be working in fields, his mother would carry food for him every afternoon. On one mundane summer afternoon while going to the field his mother encountered an old starving man and he was begging her to give some food. His mother thinking that the food was meant for the artist’s father in her moment of duty ignored the old man and went to feed her husband lunch. While returning back, the dutiful wife saw that the old man had died. This story never stopped haunting the artist and a few years before he died he painted it on canvas. This story which Ramkinkar narrated to Pranabranjan Roy for a moment seems to be end of a journey which the painting took me through. It’s been a few days since that conversation and all my earlier observations came back to my mind, not as ex observation which have been negated or proved wrong in light of new Knowledge but as my observations which I was seeing in a new light. There are no wrong or right interpretations of a painting. This painting being located in a particular story does not take away the fact that a rural landscape has been rendered in the manner of an industrial one. It does not negate the fact that the resource are going to the people who have at the cost of have-nots. It does not negate the fact that it’s a story of a mother momentarily for getting whom she should taking care of. However there is a detailing that one cannot ignore. Even with a faraway look, her eyes fixed to horizon, and in a rush the “mother” is still aghast. Her face is wide open and her dilemma is still captured.
It was quite interesting to first hear of and then physically see that the ‘canvas’ is actually three canvasses stitched together. It took me by complete surprise and at a point even led to question the dating of the canvas. In the 70’s RK was quite well known, old and respected, he had retired as a professor/ head of dept. from Shantiniketan. Though falling ill he was doing large public commissions. Surely he was not poor to procure a canvass of his desired size. Then my conversation with PR revealed that the dating of 70 authentic. It was at that appointed that it dawned to me that I might be using the contemporary notions of art as a commodity on this work of art by Ramkinker. May be this is not important. May be it was more important to think of not wasting any canvas. Shantiniketan artists of his time were known to create masterpieces on scrape piece of paper and just throw them or give them away. An instinct which we may never understand because we come from a society that if a particular art piece is not recognized in Capital terms then it almost loses’ its reason to exist.
by Rahul Bhattacharya on Tuesday, 31 May 2011 at 16:07
