Accidental Blogger

From time to time I write about artists, writers and other interesting personalities I come across in real life either by chance or by design. In late 2008 I presented Mimi Radhakrishnan and her work on our blog. After all the depressing news from Tucson and Pakistan that we have been discussing here for a while, this may be a good time to introduce the other half of the creative couple, the accomplished sculptor and Mimi's husband, K.S. Radhakrishnan. (Be sure to check out the excellent website)

I have met Radhakrishnan and although we did talk about his art, I did not actually "interview" him as I did Mimi. In fact, I saw samples of Radha's sculpture for the first time when I was  in the basement of their home to see Mimi's paintings. The following piece is an excerpt from a lengthier profile of the artist written by my sister Mandira Mitra for another publication.

As a young boy growing up in a village in Kerala, K.S Radhakrishnan, the noted Indian sculptor, came across a piece on Shantiniketan in a school textbook in Malayalam. It evoked in his mind a vision of another village in far away Bengal where art and education were being pursued in a non-commercial manner, a place that was described as an ashram. A seed of curiosity about the place was planted in the young boy’s mind but he continued to pursue his studies in Kerala right up to college. During his college days he learnt more about Tagore and his university and when he decided to study art he chose to go to Shantiniketan. For young Radhakrishnan, it was a journey from one village to another and he was quite oblivious of the geographical distance between the two.  In his mind an intimacy already existed between the place he started from and where he was going.

In 1974, Radhakrishnan interviewed at Kala Bhavan, the art school in Shantiniketan; he was confident that he would be admitted.  The admission test included still life drawing and a creative composition. When the results were announced, Radhakrishnan’s name was not on the list of successful candidates. Disappointed, as he walked out of the office building, a person emerged from the building waving a sheet of paper in each hand. Pointing to them, he asked Radhakrishnan if they were his. As it happened, they were. The stranger informed the aspiring student that he would in fact be admitted in the Fine Arts course at Kala Bhavan. The person was none other than Professor Somnath Hore  a noted artist and sculptor. To this day Radhakrishnan recalls the image of Hore walking out with his arms extended, as a Jesus like figure coming to rescue his artistic future.

Radhakrishnan had reached his destination but his journey continued. At the time, Shantiniketan had no formal boundary; it was an open space with no defined beginning or end to the university campus which was a continuum interspersed with various institutes, villages and rural market places. The atmosphere was relaxed and very informal.   Everyone sat on the floor whether in class or in the common grounds. The presence of a large number of girls on campus was also a new experience. (In Shantiniketan fifty percent of the seats were reserved for female students.) During meals in the general kitchen students from different disciplines interacted with each other. For Radhakrishnan, the experience of Shantiniketan as a whole was far more overwhelming than being just a student of Kala Bhavan.

Kala Bhavan was a very well known art institute and it offered an integrated five year program for a bachelor’s degree. In the first two years the students were exposed to painting, sculpture, graphics and craft. When time came to choose a specialization Radhakrishnan chose sculpture. Though he enjoyed painting, Radhakrishnan opted for sculpture. He was drawn towards three dimensional objects that can be moved around and touched. As he took up sculpting he was fascinated by the tactile experience of the art form as opposed to the subtlety of painting. He realized that as a tool of artistic expression, he preferred the hammer to the brush. The department of sculpture at the time was a vibrant place due to the presence of the legendary artist and sculptor Ramkinkar Baij who had taken up residence in Shantiniketan after his retirement. Radhakrishnan recalls that it was Baij who introduced sculpture as a discipline in Kala Bhavan. He considers himself fortunate to have studied with Baij, a master who had a habit of striding into the class room unannounced and inspire students with his creative energy and dynamic personality. During his student days, due to the lack of resources at the university, Radhakrishnan worked mainly with clay and concrete. On completing his BFA and MFA degrees he moved to Delhi in 1981 where he now lives with his wife Mimi who was one of the ten girls in his class in Kala Bhavan.

One central and recurring theme of Radhakrishnan’s later works have been the figures of Musui and his female counterpart Maiyya. Prof Siva Kumar, the renowned art historian has described the relationship between Musui and Radhakrishnan where the artist imagined and gave different shapes to the body of a young Santhal boy. Siva Kumar writes:

“He (Radhakrishnan) chanced upon Musui when he turned up one day to pose for the class. The generous smile of this skin-headed young Santhal, sublimely innocent and ridiculously silly at the same time, captivated Radhakrishnan and he followed up the initial studies with a life size study of Musui in the nude. When he finished his studies and moved to Delhi, the sculpture being too large and heavy and more in the nature of an academic study, he sawed off the head and carried it with him. There the smiling head of Musui remained on his studio shelf gathering dust like a forgotten trophy from an earlier campaign, but for all this apparent neglect it also kept breathing and subliminally growing somewhere within him like an old dream the meaning of which still remained to be known. The head freed from the body seemed to reveal the spirit of Musui better.”

For Radhakrishnan leaving Shantiniketan was as important as reaching it. The creative path since leaving Kala Bhavan has been productive but also, challenging.  He continues to go back to Shantiniketan to renew, recharge and retrospect. Currently, Radhakrishnan is engaged in putting together a collection of works of Ram Kinkar Baij for a book to be published by the Government of India and also for an exhibition to be held in the National Gallery of Modern Art in connection with the birth centenary of the artist.