ডাকবাংলা

How important is material and making to an artist, more specifically to sculptors, to whom physicality involved in producing sculptural pieces marks the beginning and end of the process of sculptural production? 

Material renders the character of the composition and texture is manifestation of the entire process. Any practice that holds matter forms a context through these tangible elements, while turning the process into essentially an intellectual statement. Ramkinkar Baij, the father of modern Indian sculpture is the epitome of such integration. This integration becomes complex to the extent of turning it almost organic in nature.

Though pre-independence artistic initiations during the first half of the 20th century at Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan clearly reflected nuances of early Indian Modernism primarily based on an identiterian, nationalist agenda, the practice of Rankinkar Baij remained eclectic in nature. He was also firmly rooted in his being and the locale. His connections with indigenous artistic formats on one hand and a cultivated sense of art history on the other constituted his artistic practice. Though essentially representational (figurative) in character, the practice led to abstract formats (especially in case of the Harvester) later. An insider’s insight of the artist into human struggle at the lower strata of rural India impacted his artistic orientation. It was so vital that it laid the path of artistic directions in the coming decades. It looks like a constant search of people at the grassroots. This depiction is often marked with a unique simultaneity of a sense of ‘one among them’ and an outsider’s gaze involving empathy. They become celebratory when approached with a restless energy to bring to its completion so fast that they retain the freshness of their momentary experiences.

Almost all the monumental sculptures of Ramkinkar Baij at the Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan campus throb with a dynamism often marked with formal brutality. This results in some sort of a topographic ruggedness, quintessential to the nature of land in the district of Birbhum. Art historian R. Siva Kumar, while writing on the drawings of Parched Land (khoai) by Binode Behari Mukherjee wrote that the artist in this work, “moved from landscape to land.’’ The sculptures of Ramkinkar too with their material, rendering, form and thereby surface are reminiscent of the land, both physically and culturally, the artist and the people he has looked for all his life, belong to.  

In the light of the above discussion let me take this opportunity to bring two figures of the Yaksha-Yakshi at the gate of the Reserve Bank of India, New Delhi. In 1955 the Government of India invited Ramkinkar Baij to make sculptures for the Reserve Bank of India building in New Delhi. These two colossal figures were a major shift from his early works in terms of the material. The earlier works were in concrete whereas these two were in stone. Though not formally, but in terms of the material and thereby textures, the works looked a little different from the oeuvre of Ramkinkar’s sculptures. As a practitioner I have always wondered what artistic sense the sculptures would make if the textures of the sculptures by Alberto Giacometti, the early 20^th century Swiss sculptor appear different from what they are known for. It is only a hypothetical question to address the issue here. The otherwise tremendous vital forms here are marked with a cubist approach combined with a sense of primitivism that enhances formal vigour.

One gets an idea of this vigour in several more times when confronts with the maquettes Ramkinkar produced as studies for the sculptures between 1954 to 1959. On one hand these are studies of ancient, classical visual register of the sub-continent and an exploration of the archaic language on the other hand. Looking into the areas of compatibilities between these schools and artistic languages, the artist based his modelling wherein the vitality of the figures emerged on to the surface of the figures from the core. The tremendousness of an archaic animation brought about stark presence in form and spirit to the final figures while translating from the dynamic maquettes. The entire body of the maquettes is a sculptural revelation that stands with an unparalleled raw appeal, quintessentially that of Ramkinkar Baij.

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