Ram Kumar: Going across the bhavsagar in Banaras

He was born the same year as my father. Both had a strong Simla connect. While my father was not born there, but came to live there around the partition, the artist Ram Kumar was born there and their paths crossed many a times in the small hill town and then in Delhi in the days of the Coffee House – which was more than just a place for coffee. It was a place that nurtured the intellectuals from that era. And intellectuals they both were.

The calling for art was so strong that Ram Kumar went to Paris to study painting under Andre Lhote and Fernard Leger in the 50s.

My own association with him was limited to a few very formal interviews that I conducted and I must confess that artist Ram Kumar was perhaps the only person I was unable to draw out to talk. He answered in monosyllables and unlike his writer brother Nirmal Verma, not given to embellishing his stories with pretty stitches. The only excuse I have is that was a naturally reticent person. It is also my theory that when there is lots to be shared and said and some of it has been said, one tends to turn inwards and able to share with only a few people.

In my mind he will always remain the artist who painted hauntingly beautiful images of Banaras in various lights. What imagery, what a thought process, what an abstraction – even as an artist I can only admire his genre and the perfection of aesthetics that he brought to his work. 

It was passing of sorts where the city dissolves into the landscape. His handling the profound imagery from Banaras takes on hues where it is at the same time philosophical and regular but never mundane or boring. I had one of his prints of Banaras on my office wall for the longest ever. Many years later when I saw that painting in actuality in the collection of the 

Lalit Kala Akademi, it was a very moving experience for me. I told him that and he smiled benignly like my father would when very moved or amused.  

For a person who studied Economics at St. Stephen’s College, art was far removed. But the calling for art was so strong that Ram Kumar went to Paris to study painting under Andre Lhote and Fernard Leger in the 50s.  There were many hardships that he entailed living there as a poor fledgling artist in Europe, but it was an experience that had a huge impact on his work for life. Like many of his contemporaries he was among the first generation of post-colonial Indian artists, including the Progressive Group and others including F N Souza, M F Husain, Paritosh Sen, Jehangir Sabavala, Krishen Khanna, S H Raza and Akbar Padamsee – he combined a desire to be international with the need to belong to the homeland despite all the influences. The quest for a viable ‘Indian’ aesthetic that bore a dynamic relationship to an Indian identity was an ongoing one.

While there is a vacillation of blissful expression and almost gloomy uncommunicativeness in his work, the final result indicates a decisive schism of prominence in the context of Indian culture. Between samsaric or the worldly there is physical involvement in the world of events, and nirvana, the ascetic end of desire. Ram Kumar turned inward, choosing an internal exile of the spirit. This pulling out afforded him the space in which to reflect which eventually found expression on his canvas. It was as if he was translating the earth in the idiom of the surveyor’s map. And yet this was pepperedwith romanticism of sorts where he delights in the physicality of the view, its capacity for moodiness and unstable beauty and makes it his own idiom – undoubtedly.  

He was fortunate enough to experience the lows and highs of the art world and lived long enough to see the leela of the world play out its cyclic machinations and when the boatman came for him to take him across the bhavsagar – he was ready. But then he had been ready for a long time like the proverbial lotus…  

Dr Alka Raghuvanshi is an art writer, curator and artist and can be contacted on alkaraghuvanshi@yahoo.com