Traversing the Landscapes of the Mind
“Among Indian painters today, Ram Kumar is perhaps the only one who lacks imitators and followers. This is because both his themes and method are simple. Their simplicity and sincerity make imitation practically impossible.”
Though these lines were written in 1955 by the renowned art critic Richard Bartholomew, describing Ram Kumar’s work at the time, they remain just as relevant today. Over the six decades he has dedicated to his craft, searching for a singular visual vocabulary, Kumar’s paintings consistently exude sincerity and integrity. In his unassuming and gentle manner, he has carved out a unique place for himself in the canon of modern Indian painting.
Born in 1924 in Simla, surrounded by the lush Himalayan foothills, Kumar moved to the plains to pursue further education. Although he earned a Master’s degree in Economics from St. Stephen’s College in Delhi, a chance visit to an art exhibition changed his life forever. Captivated by what he saw, he enrolled at the Sharda Ukil School of Art and studied under the artist Sailoz Mookherjea. Despite taking a full-time job at a bank, he quit in 1948 to dedicate himself entirely to art. He even persuaded his father to buy him a one-way ticket to Paris, then considered the heart of the art world.
In Paris, Kumar had the privilege of studying under the artists Fernand Léger and André Lhote. Léger, a key figure in the Cubist movement spearheaded by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, introduced a revolutionary approach to representing reality. This movement involved deconstructing the outer world into fragmented planes. Léger developed his own unique style called “tubism,” depicting the human body as a mass of tubes or cylinders. While some of these influences naturally seeped into the works of the impressionable young Ram Kumar, he managed to develop a distinct visual style that stood apart from Léger’s.
Europe was still recovering from the horrors of World War II, gradually repairing its social and economic fabric. Kumar was drawn to the pacifist movement and even joined the French Communist Party. Here, he met poets, writers, and philosophers like Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon, and Roger Garaudy. Although he didn’t become a committed communist, he developed a deep interest in the human condition, which influenced his figurative works in the 1950s. Titles like “Death of a Worker,” “Torture of Work,” “Starvation,” and “Beggars” reflect his preoccupations during that time.
Ram Kumar also witnessed the traumatic partition of the Subcontinent as India sought independence from British rule. He was deeply affected by the communal violence between Hindus and Muslims as the nation-states of Pakistan and India were formed. Thousands of refugees poured into Delhi after being displaced from their homes across the border. Kumar encountered many of them in Karol Bagh, the locality in Delhi where he lived, as they painfully rebuilt their lives. Additionally, several members of the artist group, Delhi Shilpi Chakra, to which Kumar belonged, had moved from Lahore to Delhi in the aftermath of Partition. In cathartic gestures, they too expressed their first-hand experiences of trauma and suffering. In line with the group’s motto, “Art illuminates life,” its manifesto declared, “The group recognises that art as an activity must not be divorced from life; that the art of a nation must express the soul of its people and align with the process of progress. The group acknowledges that artists have come together to work diligently towards the advancement of art and, through art, contribute to the development of a vibrant national culture and a brighter future for the country.”
Unsurprisingly, Kumar’s protagonists, particularly those from the 1956 period, are solemn-faced men and women with large, droopy eyes. They appear as if the weight of the world has been placed on their shoulders. Dressed in western wear, the men seem ill at ease in their suits. The colour palette is sombre, dominated by browns and blacks, echoing not only the colours of the desolate landscape but also mirroring an inner melancholy and despair. Despite being grouped together, these silent figures come across as alienated from each other and their surroundings.
Cubist influences from his time in Paris are evident in early works like “Workers Family” and in the depiction of houses and winding hill roads in paintings such as “Sad Town” (1956). The elongated figures also evoke the works of Paris-based artist Amadeo Modigliani.
Many of Kumar’s small paintings created in the 1950s are shrouded in darkness. Colour appears to have leeched out, with blacks, whites, and greys predominating. It seems the artist was intent on exploring black in all its shades, nuances, and complexities, as a musician would a note on their instrument. However, not just colour, even the people appear to have vanished from these works. Instead, we have barely discernible architectural forms emerging from the gloom – a bridge, a temple dome, or perhaps even a cluster of houses. Bartholomew, a close friend of Kumar’s and an expert on his work, refers to this period as the Sanjauli period (1957-59). He describes the next phase, where the dramatis personae have melted into thin air, as the Sanjauli – early Benaras period. In neither case was the divorce from reality total.
However, the melancholic sentiment isn’t confined to his early works. It resurfaces in his 1975 painting, depicting two figures: one seated and the other standing. The seated figure appears lost in a reverie, perhaps even enveloped in pain, while the standing figure seems to be offering comfort. Again, mood is conveyed through colour. The black, brown, and grey strokes accentuate the feeling of quiet despair.
In contrast, the figurative works created more recently in 2012 and 2014 suggest a lifting of the pall of gloom that characterised his early years. While the figures don’t exhibit any signs of joy or revelry, the deep despair evident in his earlier works seems to have given way to a feeling of quiet contemplation. The elongated Modigliani-like faces remain, and the men and women, though physically close, still appear distant, having withdrawn into their own shells and inner worlds. Unlike his early works, Kumar has dispensed with detailing his protagonists’ facial features. Instead, dabs of paint serve as downcast eyes and mouths, giving these works a childlike-naiveté, save for the more sophisticated use of colour and textures.
In keeping with his style, Kumar’s men and women dominate the foreground, with fractured slabs of colour serving as the background. There are no markers of location, no indication of where the figures are situated. Only the brushstrokes in varying shades of blue in one of the works suggest they are outdoors, under the infinite canopy of the sky.
Ram Kumar wasn’t alone in his move towards a more abstract visual language in the late 1950s. M.F. Husain had already broken up his images, creating a new pictorial vocabulary. Like Ram Kumar, Gaitonde and Bendre also attempted partial abstraction in their works during the late 1950s. Apart from them, other painters such as Biren De, K.G. Subramanyan, and Sankho Chaudhuri adopted abstraction either partially or wholly.
Tracing the evolution of major Indian painters, Richard Bartholomew made an insightful observation: while all Indian painters were figurative in style in 1947, by the early 1960s, a majority had turned to abstraction. Besides Ram Kumar, other notable figures who embraced abstraction included Mohan Samant, V.S. Gaitonde, Krishen Khanna, Syed Haidar Raza, Kanwal Krishna, Satish Gujral, Avinash Chandra, and Krishna Reddy.
Bartholomew delved into the reasons behind this metamorphosis, suggesting that for these artists, the figure functioned as a symbol. However, having exhausted its possibilities, they no longer felt the need for symbolic expressionism. This holds true for Ram Kumar as well, who would banish figures from his works for several decades.
Though affiliated with the Shilpi Chakra, Kumar was also close friends with members of the Progressive Artists’ Group, including Raza and Husain. A trip to Varanasi with Husain in the winter of 1960 would significantly impact his work. Initially, Kumar had wanted to experience the city firsthand and sketch it. However, his associations with Varanasi, formed from reading Sarat Chandra’s novels as a schoolboy in Simla, were of the river Ganga, old age, widows, and death. Upon arriving at dusk, the deserted streets gave him the impression of a ghostly city inhabited only by the dead and haunted by their souls.
Kumar spent the remaining days wandering around the ghats, observing the sea of humanity swirling around him. He was struck by the pain and suffering etched on their faces. The Manikarnika Ghat, where the dead were cremated, particularly captivated him. There, he witnessed the stark juxtaposition of death and life. The wails of relatives mingled with the smoke of funeral pyres on the banks of the silently flowing Ganga, leaving an indelible impression on his imagination. He was equally entranced by the warren of streets thronged by pilgrims from across the country, the temples, palaces, ramshackle old houses, and boats anchored to the ghats. Reflecting on his encounter with the city, he remarked, “Every sight was like a new composition, a life artistically organised to be interpreted in colours. It wasn’t merely the outward appearances that fascinated me, but they were vibrant with an inner life of their own, very deep and profound. This experience left an everlasting impression on my artistic sensibility. I felt a new visual language emerging from the depth of it all.”
Kumar’s works after his trip to Varanasi clearly demonstrate this new visual vocabulary. Despite the bustling crowds on its streets and ghats, the human figure is surprisingly absent. The artist seems to have shifted his focus from human figures to architectural forms, with man-made structures now representing man himself. The temple city’s haphazard skyline also suits Kumar’s Cubist influences. The numerous temple domes and spires, the maze-like streets, and the countless steps leading to the river naturally lend themselves to fracturing and multiple perspectives, from the bird’s-eye view to low-angle shots. Squares and triangles of dull, muted colours convey the impression of human settlements competing for every square inch of space, while the only open expanses are the river and the sky.
These early Benaras paintings, rendered in thick impasto, have a greyish, muddy pallor. Kumar’s deft use of colour creates a sense of a dark and dank city swathed in river mists and smoke. This Benaras, as Kumar depicts it, is not a city of joy, but rather one of the dead and the dying.
However, Kumar’s interest extended beyond the cityscape. He would often retreat to the mountains, either to Sanjauli in the Simla hills or to Ranikhet in the Kumaon. In a letter to his friend, the artist Raza, written from Dakley in Ranikhet in 1961, Kumar described his experience: “I joined Sripat two months ago in this remote corner of the Himalayas, where nothing but the eternal silence of the mountains echoes day and night. It is an ideal place for work, free from distractions except nature – that heavenly sunlight with shimmering snow visible from the window of my room.” The hills provided Kumar with a balm for the soul, offering splendid isolation far removed from the teeming ghats of Benaras. If Kashi offered one kind of spirituality, then the mountains provided another – a chance to withdraw and meditate.
The greyish mist that enveloped the temple city apparently seeped into the landscape as well. It was as if the artist couldn’t quite shake off its oppressive weight, forcing a gradual process. He continued to oscillate between expressionism and abstraction, mirroring his shifting focus between the city and the landscape. Writing about this period in his work, Bartholomew noted that the years 1960-64 were a predominantly grey time, the sternest and most austere of his career. Ram even ventured into shades of black using the encaustic process. Greys derived from blues and browns highlighted the facets of textures, drifts, engulfed landforms, isthmus shapes, and the overarching theme of the fecund yet desolate landscape. It’s clear that the writer in Ram Kumar influenced the painter in him, and the artist, in turn, shaped the literary self. These austere landscapes evoke T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, which left a lasting impression on him, as evident in the title of one of his paintings.
Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
The sullenness of the landscapes would give way to a more cheerful palette after a visit to Kashmir in the mid-1960s. Pinks and mauves were inserted into Kumar’s paintings, lending them a quiet lyricism. These semi-representational works offered glimpses of houses, waterways, and streets. His creative fires were also stoked by his many travels, including trips to the US on the J.D. Rockefeller III Fund Travelling Fellowship and the mountainous terrains of Machu Picchu and Ladakh.
However, soon even architectural elements would be phased out as if Kumar no longer needed them as props. Instead, he would look to nature for inspiration, transforming his contemplation of the landscape into an irregular patchwork quilt of colour. There was no longer any attempt to portray a realistic representation of what he observed; instead, the outer landscape transformed into the inner mindscape, which in turn manifested itself on canvas and paper. The moods and sensations evoked by his meditation on the outer world played out as colours and textures.
In his unique style of planar abstraction, slabs of colour show jagged edges and lines are more subservient to the planes. Top-angle views offer large, sweeping vistas that accentuate the movement of these horizontal bars.
The variegated colours of these irregular planes suggest tracts of sea and sand, rocky mountains, flat fields, barren, parched earth, and fecund vegetation. It is left to colour and brush strokes to transmit the moods and sensations conveyed by these various topographical elements. Perhaps they even represent the unseen but perceived elements in the phenomenal world—the warm sunshine, a cooling breeze, the dampness of mists, or hot, gusty winds. Ochres, rusts, yellows, greens, mauves, and ultramarine blues are orchestrated together to produce complex colour symphonies that induce alternate feelings of both movement and stillness.
At the end of the 1980s and the early 1990s, architectural forms subtly seep into Ram Kumar’s works. His sketches of cities once again capture and reveal his spontaneous reactions to their architectural peculiarities. Familiar forms like domes and pillars are resurrected, and cityscapes gradually emerge. Surprisingly, elements from the landscape, such as trees, intrude into the labyrinth of streets, offering relief with their vibrant flashes of green. Varanasi reappears, but it’s a Varanasi different from his depictions three decades ago. It’s no longer the grey, muck-encrusted town that spoke of the anguish of the people crowding its streets or of an ancient civilisation with its dilapidated homes sinking into the mud. Instead, the bright skies and waters of the Ganga reclaim their space, reclaiming their blueness after being relegated to the outer recesses or edged out of the frame in Kumar’s earlier works. The all-too-familiar visual syntax that Ram Kumar has meticulously developed over the decades remains present in his drawings, oils, and acrylics—the complex, multiple angles and perspectives, and the haphazard, lopsided buildings jostling for space—but the feeling of gloom and doom no longer haunts these paintings. A brightening of the palette, with lighter shades of browns and greys on the houses, once again demonstrates the power of colour in projecting mood and sentiment.
In the past two decades, representational forms have also made an appearance in Kumar’s landscapes, disrupting their abstract vistas. While some lie embedded within his colour fields and require slow, painstaking excavation, others, such as depictions of trees with their slender trunks and canopies of leaves, stand out. Do these semi-abstracts signal a gradual return of the real? Will other banished protagonists perhaps stage a re-appearance, this time shedding their mantle of despair and embracing a celebration of life? After six decades, Ram Kumar continues to keep us guessing about how the landscapes of his mind will unfold.