Prolific, passionate and filled with rhythm, A Ramachandran Nair’s Lotus Pond at Vadehras is the stuff of dreams and the reverie of reality, says Uma Nair
A Ramachandran's Lotus Pond Meditations are mythically bound and metaphorically timeless. But there are touches of the fantastical. In a number of paintings, time has dried up and also lent its erosive contexts into the shadows of the lotus leaves that don't always match up to the flowers from which they have ostensibly been cast.
The light is either glowing in surreal splendour or it is bleached and in ochre aura — as you come to the role of sandhya (sunset) in the artist's way of seeing. It seems as if Ramachandran has recast the lotus pond in the dim lit recesses of the Indian sandhya to give us a twilight sheen that is full of the magic of caprice of the sunset of one's own life. The lotus pond for Ramachandran is representative of both creation and cosmic renewal. It also personifies longevity as the arid flowers sometimes wilting seem rooted in the mud. Whether in full bloom of the magical monsoon or in withering despair the lotus pond is an iconic subject for this maestro who studied at Shantiniketan under the stalwart Ram Kinkar Baij and later became one of Jamia Milia Islamia’s greatest Professors.
Tone and tenor
At Vadehras the lotus pond studies are an Arcadian dream sequence. They are equivocal in tone and tenor. They could also symbolize detachment after the suffusion of a floating passion. In this waterbody of contemplation Ramachandran's works, these two worlds — the real and the imaginary, the mythic and the real — begin to mesh. One has the sense of looking at something real through the lens of imagination, ripe old age and the sensorial experience of eight decades of living. Obviously, the lotus pond is the metaphor for nature's perfection in the samsara (universe).
Realist at heart
In an interview with me five years ago at Vadehras he said, “I am a realist at heart. The images in my works convey ideas of different planes and views. I am concerned with the pictorial idiom, what should be a new language. I am not a modernist and I don't need to look at Jasper Johns or anyone in the West to find my idiom. Mine is the language of tradition. I use an extraordinary variety of colours to reflect an equivalent sensual and tactile experience. The lotus as it moves its petals towards the sun or away from the sun becomes my artistic ferment.”
Elements born of the soil
The magic of this show lies, in the conventions of the genre as much as in Ramachandran's presentation of the lotus pond in all its fleeting splendour. In the opportunity that the show affords simply to look, to contemplate the physical aspect of the world in its most basic forms, Ramachandran brings us lotuses who are born of the soil and live with the elements — the dust, wind, rain, sand and sun. It is Ramachandran's immortal embrace of the genre, his skilful participation in this worthy and essentially sensual tradition of classical Indian art that brings an oasis of creation that echoes the vitality and vibration of the mythical looking glass in the lotus pond. What emerges is the caprice of the divinities born of the womb of stillness. The lotus pond exemplifies not just the measure of one of nature's waterfronts, it is also the harbinger of truth and harmony, it is pure reality — born of a metaphysical domain encrusted in the Lotus Pond Lila which has fed the artist’s vision for so many decades.